And that felt the bloody awful-est of all.
“I was a perishing prig to her,” Trevor said. “Tried to excuse a lie as gentlemanly consideration.”
“You meant well.” Jerome picked up the overturned glass from the carpet and shook the brandy dregs into his mouth. “Jeanette is too arrogant by half, Tav. You really need to remind her of her place. She’ll thank you for it.”
The last person to hand Trevor that advice had been a bullying house party cheat by the name of Chastain. He had decamped for Tuscany, last Trevor had heard, a horde of creditors on his heels, and not even his new wife was sorry to see him go.
“Jeanette was right,” Trevor said, “and I did not apologize.”
“Did she apologize?” Jerome asked, rising to return the glass to the mantel.
“I am a gentleman, and I was in the wrong.”
“So you’ll crawl home, stopping only to steal a placatory bouquet of daffodils from the garden? Promise to be a good boy, cross your heart, and never ever keep a few little things to yourself in the name of dignity and privacy? Will Jeanette interview your mistresses for you? Or will you remain as pure as Yorkshire snow, lest you disappoint Saint Jeanette?”
Coming here had most assuredly been a mistake. “You are drinking on an empty stomach, aren’t you?”
“P’raps I am. There’s a loaf of bread around here somewhere. I haven’t been down to the kitchen to check. I sacked Timmons, you know.”
“You did mention that. Wait here.” Trevor found bread and butter in the downstairs kitchen, put together a tea tray, and brought it up to Jerome’s study.
Jerome was nodding off in his chair, his dressing gown gaping open to reveal a pale chest. A trick of the afternoon sun turned him into an aging roué, rather than a scion from a titled house, but he snapped awake, grinned, and the illusion was dispelled.
“You found buried treasure. Bless you, my child.”
Trevor used his foot to push a hassock before Jerome’s chair. “Manna from heaven and all that. When does Uncle Beardsley send out your next payment?”
“Soon, though it’s never enough. God, I hate tea.” He slurped from a steaming cup nonetheless. “You will think me quite daft, but I really am considering taking a wife.”
Trevor paused between emptying the second and the third trays of ashes into the dustbin. “I can’t imagine why. You’d give up all this for companionship, cleanliness, regular meals, and wifely comforts. Perhaps you suffered a blow to the head.”
“The place is a bit squalid on purpose, Tav. I want to see if the new valet is up to my weight, so to speak.”
“The place is a disgrace. Timmons has been gone for at least a week, your larder is empty, and you are reduced to drinking the desperation rations. Timmons left because you could not afford to pay him, and your next allowance isn’t due for at least a fortnight.”
“Forgive me,” Jerome said, setting down his tea cup. “I wasn’t aware that I’d been assigned a nanny. How do you prefer to be addressed, Miss… Miss Vincent?”
Trevor put the stack of papers he’d gathered up beside the dustbin. “You’ll never attach a wife with that attitude. Jaunt down to Tavistock Hall for a repairing lease if you’re pockets to let. I’ll come with you, and we can enjoy the fresh country air.”
“Mama will jaunt down on our coattails, hauling Hera and Diana with her. You will be engaged within a fortnight. I believe I shall court Jeanette.”
This again. “That is drink talking.” Trevor found the second slipper peeking out from under the sofa, rolled up the wrinkled cravats, and draped the smoking jacket over the back of the wing chair. He cracked open a window and set his own half-full brandy glass on the mantel, where Jerome would doubtless find it.
Jerome scrubbed a hand over his face and eyed the glass. “One of us has to marry, Tav. And Jeanette isn’t that hard to look on. I could doubtless succeed with her where the old marquess failed, too. I’d certainly give it a good go anyway.”
“Generous of you, though I suspect Jeanette would laugh any proposal from you to scorn. She did not have an easy time of it with my father, and there’s no earthly reason why she should remarry.”
“Of course there’s an earthly reason.” Jerome wiggled his eyebrows, clearly unaware of the distasteful picture he made, disheveled, unbathed, unshaven, and not quite sober.
Trevor cracked a second window to get some cross ventilation. “Keep further thoughts of that nature to yourself, please. I have said my piece, and you deserve whatever fate Jeanette chooses for you.”
“She might have me,” Jerome said, his gaze going again to the brandy glass. “I can be persuasive. She’s not as impervious to argument as you think, Tav. She has vulnerabilities. Papa has intimated as much.”
As if threats to a lady were the basis for lasting connubial bliss? “She’s also not an idiot. I will see myself out. Let me know how you fare with the new valet.”
“Will do, but I don’t suppose before you go, you could spare a fellow a coin or two? Desperation rations and all that.”
Perhaps coming here had not been such a bad idea after all. This was what shared quarters at the Albany would mean, and Trevor would become a nanny in truth.
“All I have with me,” he said, putting half a dozen coins on the tea tray. “I’ll have Cook send over a basket, and you will share dinner with me at the club tomorrow.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Jerome said, pouring himself another cup of tea. “Until then.”
No thanks, no veiled acknowledgment of kindness, no apology for poor hospitality… And Jerome thought Jeanette would willingly marry herself to such as he?
Though Jeanette enjoyed a challenge, and given that Jerome had taken to pilfering glasses from the Coventry, he would provide her at least that. Trevor stopped in the foyer to put the potted fern outside on the steps, where the poor thing would at least have some sunlight and regular rainfall.
Then too, sitting in the out of doors rather than sitting in Jerome’s foyer, the struggling plant was less likely to be misused as a chamber pot.
Trevor was halfway home when he realized that in nearly thirty minutes of conversation, Jerome had never answered the question regarding whether the incident in the alley could have been meant for him.
Given the state of his finances, the answer was all but obvious.
“Of course we’re being followed,” Goddard said. “The streets are unsafe, and many would still put period to my existence, as miserable as it is. I am considered a traitor by half the officers in my former regiment. Just when I think they’ve found somebody else to gossip about, their aspersion circles back to me again.”
Even Sycamore, in the rarefied atmosphere of the club, had heard the occasional insulting snippet regarding Orion Goddard, but then, half-pay officers and former military were prodigiously accomplished grumblers.
“What harm can talk do you?”
Goddard slanted him a look. “Your beautiful club could be closed overnight if the right word were whispered in the ear of the right magistrate.”
A nightmare possibility Sycamore managed to ignore most of the time. “You are not running a questionable enterprise, that your fortunes can be destroyed by tattlers.” Sycamore hoped that was true, but many merchants relied on the coastal trade to import their goods from the Continent, thus putting money directly into the hands of smugglers and their families rather than tithing to the exciseman.
“My business is entirely legal,” Goddard replied, “but I earn my coin by selling my family’s champagne here in London. This, among other failings, apparently makes my loyalties suspect.”
Sycamore surveyed the shady alley behind them. The boy who’d been shuffling along in their wake was nowhere to be seen.
“A half-grown boy in unmatched boots isn’t a likely assassin, Goddard, and ending your life while I stroll along at your side on a Sunday afternoon hardly demonstrates the sort of discretion such a task calls for.”
Goddard gave two sh
ort, shrill whistles. “A half-grown boy can be a more effective assassin for being unexpected. Theodoric has turned over a new leaf, though. He is a purveyor of safety rather than mayhem these days, or so he claims.”
A rustling in the branches above was Sycamore’s warning to step back. An instant later, the boy dropped to the ground before him, as silently as a cat.
“Everything all right, guv?” the lad asked, eyeing Sycamore as a stern nanny regards a habitually naughty charge who has yet to begin the day’s round of offenses.
The lad was not quite the genuine article. His boots were unmatched, true, but they fit, they were neatly laced, and they were sturdy enough. His clothing was wrinkled past all hope, though clean. His hands were also clean—a sure sign of some security in life, for soap and water to wash with were in short supply on the street. Then too, the lad was skinny but not gaunt.
Somebody fed him regularly, and that somebody was apparently Colonel Sir Orion Goddard.
“Greetings, Otter,” Goddard said. “My thanks for the escort. I will have dinner with Mr. Dorning and see myself home. You may take my horse if you’d prefer to ride back to the house.”
Otter shook his head. “Benny takes over from me at half past. I’ll mind the beast until then.” He swiveled a flint-hard gaze on Sycamore. “Benny takes any disrespect to the colonel hard.”
“I would be a poor host if I disrespected my guests,” Sycamore replied.
This earned him a snort. Otter took a few steps’ running start and was hidden within the oak’s branches in the time it took Sycamore to offer the lad a bow. Goddard tied the horse in the shade of the oak and once again loosened the girth.
“You have an honor guard,” Sycamore said, leading Goddard not to the carriage house—why give away a secret entrance when the likes of Otter and Benny would enjoy ferreting it out for themselves?—but through a stout gate into the little patch of potted plants and uneven flagstones that served as the Coventry’s back garden. The space was walled and had two benches, one each to catch morning and afternoon sunlight.
“Be still my lonely heart,” Goddard said, stopping to close his eyes and sniff the air. “That is roasting beef, with a touch of tarragon, basil, and black pepper.”
“All I smell is supper, and for once I do not hear my undercook cursing unreliable ovens.”
“All you smell is supper,” Goddard replied, “because you never spent weeks with your eyes bandaged, fretting that the senses of smell, hearing, and touch would have to replace eyesight as your means of navigating life safely.”
“Do those without sight have a more acute sense of taste?” Sycamore asked, opening the doorway to the Coventry’s back hallway.
“Yes, so I hope the flavor lives up to the scents, Dorning.”
That was probably supposed to be some sort of subtle warning, which Sycamore was too hungry to parse. He showed Goddard to the private dining room, let his guest use the washstand first, and poured them each a glass of claret.
“Does Jeanette know you were injured?” Sycamore asked after serving his guest a bowl of potato leek soup. He held out the plate of crumbled Stilton, and Goddard garnished his soup generously.
“Jeanette knows I was injured, she does not know the details. That’s our bargain. I know she was sacrificed on the marital altar to Tavistock’s ambitions, I do not know the particulars. Her suffering was doubtless greater than mine.”
“Why do you say that?” The soup was good—hot, flavorful, and rich—and Goddard’s expression upon taking a taste suggested he’d lucked into a bowl of ambrosia.
“You have to have known Nettie before Tavistock got his paws on her. She was everything good and sweet and dear, while our Papa’s finances were everything hopeless and rapidly worsening.” Goddard tore off a chunk of bread and dipped it into his soup. “If your cook ever goes missing, look for him in my kitchen.”
“This is the undercook’s effort, prepared at my particular request, and you make off with her at your peril. She wields a knife almost as enthusiastically as I do, and her sauces are the glory of the kitchen. Jeanette is still everything that is good and sweet and dear, but I gather you are saying Tavistock essentially bought her.”
Jeanette certainly saw it that way. Not that unusual an arrangement, if the lady had a title and the gentleman’s family had means, but Jeanette had had nothing but youth and apparent good health on her side of the ledger. Tavistock had doubtless held that against her.
That too.
“She was seventeen,” Goddard said. “As innocent as a dove. She knew only that Papa very much wanted the match, and the marquess was considered an exceptionally fine catch. Papa was a commoner, and debtors’ prison was a real possibility. We depended on income from our French holdings, and that money had disappeared. Revolution and war are ever so expensive, and the revenue owed an English family by its French cousins honestly became difficult to transfer.”
“While the Empress Josephine’s roses were guaranteed safe passage.”
“As were, thanks to the emperor’s decree, vessels of a scientific nature,” Goddard retorted. “But this brings us to Jeanette’s hard-earned state of freedom. You are not to trifle with her, Dorning.”
Sycamore dipped his bread into his soup and considered tactics. “Is she permitted to trifle with me?”
Goddard wrinkled an aquiline beak. “I want to say no, but who am I to tell my sister anything? She was sold into marital bondage so Papa could avoid prison and I could buy a commission. I did not care for how Tavistock looked at Jeanette, and yet I bought my colors with a shameful sense of relief.”
“And then what happened?”
Goddard put aside his empty bowl. With that casual gesture, his fiction of a jovial dinner guest was similarly set aside, revealing the same flint-hard, cold-as-the-grave gaze Otter had treated Sycamore to earlier.
“None of your damned business, Dorning. I am prepared to protect my privacy with my dueling pistols, if necessary.”
Sycamore lifted the lid over the roast and let the steam waft upward. Thanks to Goddard’s earlier effusions, he could detect the tarragon and basil in the roast’s scent.
“Spare me your histrionics. I have six brothers, all older than I, and they are bookended with a pair of sisters. You may breathe the flames of doom upon me all evening, but even I know that if you posit the challenge, I choose the weapons. When it comes to knives, you are unlikely to best me. Make yourself useful and pour us each another glass of that splendid wine.”
Sycamore carved off several slices of perfectly turned roast, set the dish of mashed potatoes by Goddard’s plate, and served himself a smaller portion of meat.
“Besides,” he went on, “Jeanette would take a dim view of us both if we descended into brawling. She loves you dearly.”
Goddard paused, a mound of mashed potatoes on a serving spoon over his plate. “She said that?”
“She makes it apparent. She worries for you, she misses you terribly, and she would do anything to see you happy, but she has concluded that all you want of her is respect for your much vaunted privacy. I believe she borrows your coach on occasion in part to ensure you yet dwell among the living.”
Goddard slapped the potatoes onto his plate. “I want her to be happy, and if she and I associate, that isn’t possible.”
“I marvel at how two siblings—only two—can so badly bollix up being a family. I thought a half dozen was the necessary complement for such crossed purposes, but perhaps the Goddards have a talent in this regard.”
“Shall you wear that glass of wine, Dorning? Seems a shame to waste such a fine vintage.”
That was standard sibling blather. “Jeanette is content by force of will, she is not happy. She is lonely, a condition with which I am acquainted, and no, I do not refer to those longings afflicting all in a state of randy bachelorhood. I mean loneliness, nobody to sit by the fire with on a cold night, nobody to bemoan an overly long sermon with, or recall how silly the old dog was in his puppyhood.
Nobody to grow sentimental with on certain anniversaries.”
Goddard stared at him as if he’d burst into a soprano aria. “You are smitten with her. This cannot end well, Dorning. Not for you, anyway.”
“Your sister is widowed after years of hard combat on the marital battlefield. She is weary of heart. When she thought she faced a renewed threat, she did not turn to the one man who ought to be looking out for her. She instead turned to me. That preempts all duels, arguments, fisticuffs, and snide repartee from you, sir. Jeanette asked me to teach her how to throw a knife, because your damned gang of rogues frightened her into thinking she was being followed.”
Goddard frowned, then cut into his steak. “My young friends are too skilled to be so obvious in their surveillance.”
Sycamore had suspected as much, which was no reassurance whatsoever. “But you admit setting them to the task?”
“I admit that my authority over the lads is dubious and fleeting. They might have taken some initiative of their own or—if they are involved—they might have noticed somebody else pursuing my coach when Jeanette borrowed it, and assigned themselves to further reconnaissance.”
“You don’t know what your feral boys have got up to?”
“Gentlemen at large do not take kindly to inquisitions.” Goddard chewed his steak. “This undercook of yours, is she yet unmarried?”
The question was a prevarication, or possibly an attempt at humor. “Talk to your minions, Goddard, and shake the truth from them if you must. Somebody is trying to hound Jeanette from Town just as the social whirl is resuming, and somebody is definitely having her followed, or they were. If you are not behind this mischief, who is?”
Goddard stared at the ceiling, then at the little pot of violets in the center of the table. “Tell me what you know, and withhold nothing.”
Sycamore’s steak grew cold while he reported almost everything that he knew to Goddard.
“Papa, I am not managing well,” Jerome said. “I am ashamed of myself, but particularly since Cousin Trevor has come to Town, my expenses have been significant.”
The Last True Gentleman: The True Gentlemen — Book 12 Page 20
