Ann set the water pitcher on the bedside table, gave Jeanette a final perusal, and opened the door.
Sycamore stood on the other side, his expression as serious as Jeanette had ever seen it.
“You are awake,” he said, sidling past Ann. “Ann, Monsieur is threatening to give notice if you don’t return to your post. I was about to sack him to stop his whining. In my present mood, that is not an idle threat.”
“Neither is Monsieur’s threat idle.” Ann sent Jeanette a you-see-what-I-have-to-contend-with smile, a little tired, a little resigned. “My lady, you should know that your brother was very worried about you. I heard him praying, importuning the Almighty to spare you, in French no less. I was”—she frowned at Sycamore—“touched.”
She sketched a curtsey and left, pulling the door closed in her wake.
Sycamore took the place on the bed at Jeanette’s hip. “You are still pale. How do you feel?”
“Like I have been trampled by a coach and four. Even my eyes ache.”
“You shed many tears, which is an effect of the poison. You might also recall sweating, salivating, and panting as well as loose bowels and stomach upheaval. Your head doubtless feels as if you consumed half a barrel of bad ale.”
“I would rather not recall any of it,” Jeanette said, though Sycamore’s words provoked nasty memories. “You saw all of that?”
Sycamore wore formal evening attire. That contrast, between the symptoms he recited and the elegance of his dress, reminded Jeanette of her first impression of him. Sycamore Dorning had depths. He had perspectives and experiences that made him as competent at the fast-paced game of hazard as he was at patiently coaxing confidences from a dowager duchess.
He was formidable in a way the late Marquess of Tavistock, for all his wealth and standing, never had been, but did Sycamore see himself in that light?
“I have observed all of those miseries before,” he said, taking Jeanette’s hand. “My father was a botanist, and because mushrooms can be deadly, he took a passing interest in them. Your symptoms were typical of those caused by a dose of Clitocybe rivulosa, Fool’s Funnel in the vernacular, which in moderation is an effective purge. The species has the audacity to grow among edible varieties, and thus Papa made sure we knew how to identify it.”
Holding Sycamore’s hand was good medicine. The unease in Jeanette’s belly receded and the pounding in her temples diminished, even as a different ache started up in her heart.
“Where does your household acquire its mushrooms this time of year, Jeanette?”
Of course, Sycamore would ask that. “Mushrooms are not yet in season, so I assume Cook had them sent up from the glass houses at the family seat. We get a weekly delivery of produce from Kent, as does Lord Beardsley’s household. The same wagon brings provisions for both Viola’s kitchen and my own. I am the only person at the town house who will eat a mushroom omelet, so we don’t need many.”
Sycamore kissed her knuckles. “The likelihood of a poisonous mushroom growing among a glass house crop is small, Jeanette, and the omelet I saw on your sideboard was barely more than one person would consume.”
“You are trying to make a point, or leaping to a conclusion.” A conclusion all but obvious to the casual observer, unfortunately.
“You ate little more than half of your omelet before I whisked you off to Richmond. Do you normally eat the whole thing?”
“Yes.”
Sycamore enfolded her hand in both of his. “The indications are you were poisoned. The question is, were you intended to consume a fatal dose, or was this a warning?”
Oh, it was a warning. Of that Jeanette was certain. Jerome’s brooding looks had been another warning, as had Viola’s call, as had the notes, and possibly even the beatings Tavistock had endured. If Jeanette ignored this warning, Orion’s business would be targeted next—perhaps it already had been—and even the Coventry was not safe.
That last thought made Jeannette ill all over again. Sycamore had worked so hard to build the club into the impressive venue it was, and he was so rightly proud of what he’d accomplished.
He kissed her knuckles and smoothed a hand over her brow. “The thought of you returning to Tavistock House is unbearable. Say you will marry me, Jeanette, and I’ll have a preacher and special license here by noon tomorrow.”
Sycamore had remained outwardly calm when Jeanette had asked to be taken straight back to Town. He’d remained calm as her body had done its best to reject the poison she’d ingested. He’d remained calm as the doctor had peered into Jeanette’s eyes and measured her pulse, and he’d maintained a façade of manners as preparations for an evening’s business had begun at the club.
But inside, where a growing boy had watched his enormous family come unraveled year by year, where an adult male knew the metallic taste of terror, and where a fellow in love was nigh insane with the need to keep his beloved safe, Sycamore had panicked.
And he had planned.
The application for a special license had been lodged before sunset. Goddard’s minions had already set a watch at Sycamore’s expense on the Tavistock town house. Ash had been summoned to arrive at the Coventry in the next hour, and a quick note had been dashed off to the Duchess of Quimbey.
Jeanette’s hand in Sycamore’s was cool, her face pale. He had just proposed marriage to her, and she showed no reaction at all.
“You think the solution to my situation is marriage?” she asked, gaze on their joined hands. “I don’t see how that fixes anything.”
“Marriage to me gets you out of the Tavistock town house and away from the Vincent family. Marriage to me will keep you safe, Jeanette. We can be in a fast coach headed for Dorsetshire within the hour.”
“I don’t want to go to Dorsetshire.” She spoke slowly, and Sycamore realized he was blundering. The situation called for reason, for sweet reassurances, and more blasted calm.
“Your safety must be of paramount importance, Jeanette, and at Dorning Hall, the loyalty of everybody from the earl himself to the goose girl is beyond doubt.”
Jeanette withdrew her hand, and Sycamore’s panic escalated to blind determination.
“I have been safe enough at Tavistock House for nearly ten years, Sycamore. You are overreacting to what could easily have been a mistake. You said yourself that the bad mushrooms often grow in proximity to the good.”
“Jeanette, please do not turn up stubborn now.” Sycamore resisted the urge to go down on his knees beside the bed, lest he be dismissed as histrionic. “Bad mushrooms do not spring up beside the good in a hothouse or conservatory. You were poisoned, and you must marry me.”
She sent him a brooding look. “Must?”
Do not tell her what to do. Do not order this woman about. Every brother who’d ever taken up residence in Sycamore’s mental Greek chorus of critics and judges warned him to back away from the discussion and leave a reasonable woman to come to a reasonable conclusion.
And he mentally shouted them down. “What if you’d finished that omelet, Jeanette? The omelet prepared exclusively for you. I cannot allow you to totter out of here without any sort of plan to ensure you are safe.”
Still, she merely gazed at him, her vast reserves of self-possession apparently none the worse for her ordeal.
“We don’t know that an omelet had anything to do with it. I might have simply suffered a passing stomach ailment. Eggs go bad even without the addition of questionable mushrooms.”
“Not eggs brought in fresh from your own country estate, Jeanette. Please apply a scintilla of logic to the situation and realize that somebody has tried to harm you. The symptoms you suffered exactly describe the results of ingesting Fool’s Funnel. By your own admission, the Vincent family is after your money, and all I seek to do is keep you safe.”
She flipped back the covers and swung her feet over the side of the bed. Pale, slender, lovely feet, and the sight of them sent the last pretension to manners from Sycamore’s grasp.
“Jea
nette, don’t be foolish. You aren’t in any fit state to go anywhere, much less—”
She stood and put a hand on his chest, a gentle touch that filled Sycamore with a sense of implacable doom.
“You have no right, Sycamore, to keep me here. You are not in a position to allow anything where I am concerned. If you want a plan, then I will make it a point to eat nothing that Trevor hasn’t also partaken of. I should be going.”
“You cannot leave.” He managed, barely, not to seize her by the shoulders. “Jeanette, you are not safe.”
She eased around him and went behind the privacy screen. “I will be careful. I will hire some new footmen, loyal to me. I will pension off Peem and suggest Trevor do the same with his valet. I will, if necessary, retire to Tavistock Hall, and Jerome and Trevor can have the town house for their youthful bacchanals, and—”
“I cannot permit you to remove to Tavistock Hall.” Sycamore had nearly shouted. “If you remove to the Hall, then you can’t use young Tavistock as your personal taster, and besides, he’s out most evenings, and you can be poisoned at supper as easily as at breakfast. For the love of God, Jeanette, why won’t you marry me?”
She emerged from the privacy screen wearing her dress, and Sycamore wanted to tear it off her, the better to hold her hostage. The Marchioness of Tavistock would not be seen on London’s streets in her chemise.
“I like you,” Jeanette said. “I like you exceedingly, Sycamore, and I believe your motivation is honorable, but you cannot know—you cannot have any idea—how it chills me to hear you telling me what to do, accusing me of a want of logic, speaking to me in terms of allowing and permitting. I never wanted to remarry, and I have been honest about that.”
She was probably making a sort of female sense. All Sycamore knew was that the woman he loved was preparing to resume a life where she’d be vulnerable to harm.
“I married once to safeguard my father’s fortunes,” she said, taking the seat at the vanity, “and to give my brother a start in the military. I married because it was a spectacular match for a mere Goddard. I married because I hadn’t been allowed or permitted to dream of any other future. Now you demand that I marry again, because of some bad eggs.”
“Bad eggs, beatings in alleys, threatening notes, family desperate for money… How can you not see a pattern in those events, Jeanette?”
She coiled her braid at the nape of her neck and began shoving pins into the resulting bun. “I do see a pattern, and I will take steps to ensure that pattern doesn’t escalate, or affect innocent parties, but how can you fail to see a pattern in your dealings with me, Sycamore?”
He was losing her, possibly forever, and that was the only pattern he saw. “I care for you. I am protective of you. The two go hand in hand.”
“The marquess married me to secure his dynasty. He did not need a young wife—he had an heir and spare, of sorts—but he desired more security than that. Jerome wants to marry me, of all the daft notions, because he, too, has a need to safeguard the Vincent family fortunes. You seek to safeguard my person, a commendable goal compared to the others.”
More female logic, and all of it beyond Sycamore’s comprehension. “And my commendable goal makes me like your bleating, rutting marquess?”
Jeanette rose from the vanity, looking damnably tidy and serene. “What do I want, Sycamore?”
“To never again spend a day as you did today, sweating on the banks of the River Styx and so far gone in bodily misery that you didn’t particularly care if Charon invited you into his boat.”
Don’t leave me. Please, just don’t leave me.
“What an ambitious creature I must be that the sum of my longings is to avoid future occasions of food poisoning. I have desires and needs beyond that, for your information.”
Sycamore wanted to stand before the door and physically prevent her departure. “You admit you were poisoned.”
“I admit I probably ate the wrong kind of mushroom. Will you lend me your coach to see me home?”
She wasn’t asking him to see her home in person. “I do not understand why you are willing to return to a household where you are not safe, Jeanette. Please explain that to me.”
“If I was deliberately poisoned, then the malefactor won’t make another attempt using that means. I will send to the agencies for more footmen and maids tomorrow, Sycamore. I have the means. You must not worry.”
She kissed him on the cheek, and he caught her up in a hug. “All I will do is worry, Jeanette. Every waking and sleeping moment, I will worry. I will do nothing but worry.”
“Then throw your knives and know that I will be practicing with mine as well.”
In the part of Sycamore’s mind that always stood a little apart and kept vigil, he saw the irony: Jeanette was telling him what to do. He must not worry, he must throw his knives, he must pretend she had not become the most precious person in the world to him.
She was telling him what he could and could not do, how to feel and what to think, and he despised it.
Jeanette slept, as the expression went, like the dead, though she forced herself to put in an appearance at the breakfast table. Trevor was already seated at the head of the table, still in his evening attire.
He read the paper, a cup of tea at his elbow. Whether the difference was a few weeks of boxing at Jackson’s and fencing at Angelo’s, or a few nights at Sycamore’s side at the Coventry, Jeanette’s step-son was growing into his consequence.
On his smallest finger, he wore a signet ring that Jeanette had last seen on her late husband.
“Good morning,” she said, looking over the offerings on the sideboard. “Will you go for a hack after breakfast?” No small omelet in the blue-flowered dish, just the larger variety prepared for his lordship.
“I think not,” Trevor said, putting the paper aside and rising. “How are you?”
Trevor’s plate held the detritus of ham, bacon, eggs, and toast, but Jeanette’s belly wasn’t up to such adventures. She set an empty plate at her place on the table.
“I am well, and you?” She was not well, but she was determined, which was nearly the same thing.
Trevor held her chair, not a courtesy he typically showed her. “Your digestion still troubles you.”
“Mr. Dorning has been telling tales.” Jeanette spread her table napkin on her lap and wondered if toast and butter could be poisoned. She’d left the Coventry barely able to walk unassisted, thinking only to find some peace and quiet in which to think.
In the light of a new day, her list was revealed to be inadequate. Peace and quiet were all well and good, but peace, quiet, and safety would have been better. Sycamore had been quite right about that.
But safety for her alone would not suffice.
“Mr. Dorning refused to leave your side,” Trevor said, “to hear the undercook tell it. He sent for a physician who was as knowledgeable as he was discreet, and no effort was spared to keep you comfortable.”
“Are you scolding me for eating some bad eggs, Trevor?”
Trevor set the teapot by her elbow. “No, Jeanette, I am not scolding you. I am simply curious as to what in blazes you think you’re doing here, at the self-same table where you consumed those bad eggs? Dorning knew precisely how you were poisoned, and a larger dose of the same plant has occasionally been fatal.”
“Do not take that tone with me, Trevor.”
“Do not engage in the sort of stubborn display of bravado that results in young men expiring in their beds from drinking too many bottles of spirits on a bet.”
Jeanette put two pieces of toast on her plate and made no move to add butter or jam. “You sound exactly like your father, and that is not a compliment. I merely ate breakfast, Trevor. That is not a stubborn display of bravado.”
“You threw Sycamore Dorning’s proposal back in his face.”
Abruptly, Jeanette felt miserable in a whole different way. Her head still hurt, and her belly was tentative, but now her heart joined in the sense of lead
en doom.
“He wasn’t proposing for the right reasons, Trevor. He was upset and flailing around for a means to bring the situation under control. Though I like Mr. Dorning, his behavior wasn’t that different from your papa’s, marrying solely to address a lack of heirs.”
She had tried that reasoning out on Sycamore, and he hadn’t been much impressed by it. Neither was Jeanette, but then, that was hardly her whole argument for leaving the Coventry—and him.
“Mr. Dorning deserves to marry a woman who can reciprocate his affections,” Jeanette said, pouring herself a cup of tea.
“You reciprocate his affections,” Trevor said, watching the teapot tremble in Jeanette’s hand. “He is wild for you.”
“Mr. Dorning is wild for a different woman every fortnight. That’s part of his charm.” Forgive me, Sycamore.
Trevor took the toast from her plate and applied butter, as a nanny might do for a charge in the nursery. “Either the poison affected your reasoning powers, or you are hatching up some machination which I cannot fathom. Dorning loves you. He would die for you, he would kill for you. He’d take a torch to the club he depends on for his livelihood and turn his back on all of Society for you.”
Precisely what Jeanette did not want. She stared at the cold, buttered toast on her plate. “You used to be such a sweet boy.”
Trevor sat back, his gaze holding nothing of that sweet boy. “Did you reject Dorning’s overture because you sought to guard me, Jeanette?”
The sweet boy had become a shrewd young man. “You are alone here, surrounded by aging staff of questionable loyalty. You can use an ally.”
Trevor rose—when had his height become so imposing?—and aimed at Jeanette the first contemptuous look she could recall him turning on anybody.
“Don’t protect me, Jeanette. I’m not yet of age, but neither am I the motherless child you took up for so many times with Papa. I heard you arguing with him, and I told myself I would never be like him—shouting and insulting a woman I was supposed to esteem. So I won’t shout and insult you, but neither will I stand idly by while you put your life at risk, supposedly for my sake. If you have any sense, you will send Dorning a note of apology and marry him by special license.”
The Last True Gentleman: The True Gentlemen — Book 12 Page 24
