Trenton: Lord Of Loss
Page 18
He buried his face against her shoulder and set up a slow, maddeningly controlled rhythm.
“I want to, I want to have the resolve to keep my hands to myself, to keep you safe, to respect your well-being enough not to embroil you in the mess my life has become.”
“Please, don’t.” She clung to him and drew him tightly into her body. “Please don’t have the resolve, Trenton Lindsey. I need you to not have it, not now, and not in the foreseeable future.”
He didn’t reply, not with words, but he loved her, slowly, generously, thoroughly, and then he left her sleeping peacefully in her fairy-tale bed, while he rode away on his destrier.
***
Ellie didn’t find the note Trenton had left her until she’d dressed the next morning. It helped, but not much.
Dear Lady,
We’ll talk further. Please remain safe.
Amherst
Not exactly pink clouds and unicorns but some promise of further dealings.
He was a terror between the sheets, Trenton Lindsey was. He could read her body like a book, giving her exactly what she needed before she’d even formed awareness of her own longings. How on earth, how on God’s green and growing earth, had his wife not been happy with him?
“Callers, my lady,” Mr. Wright intoned.
“Plural?” Ellie’s hand strayed to her hair, which was in need of a thorough trim and unruly as a result.
“Ladies Heathgate, Greymoor, and Amery.”
The local equivalent of royalty. “Gracious. Will the family parlor do, Wright, or shall we put on airs?”
“The family parlor has the freshest flowers, milady. I’ll have Missus send up a tray.”
She greeted her guests after shoving a few more pins in her hair, but really, nobody warned a lady that pregnancy changed even her hair.
“Ellie.” Lady Greymoor—Astrid, and that after only one visit—held out gloved hands. “I’ve brought reinforcements.” She rattled off introductions to Lady Heathgate and Lady Amery. “Because Felicity is my sister and Gwen my cousin-by-marriage, I can lend them to you on a family-at-large basis.”
Whatever that meant. “You can?”
Lady Heathgate, a redhead with a flawless complexion, sent her younger sister an indulgent look. “She can, and I will offer you our official condolences on the loss of your husband. A young man’s death is a tragedy on general principles, but you look to be bearing up.”
Ellie met eyes of an unusual topaz color and thought of the lady’s mastiff of a husband. “I’m faring well, thank you. Probably better than I should be.”
“That’s because you’re to have a child,” Lady Amery said, her smile charitable. She too sported red hair, as well as a statuesque build. “I understand from my cousins you also have the raising of your husband’s daughter, Miss Coriander.”
“Andy,” Ellie said, slightly taken aback to have Dane’s bastard brought into the conversation so blatantly.
Lady Heathgate’s smile remained in place. “Perhaps we can take our tea in the nursery, then. Gwen has a daughter of about seven years, and Rose is always amenable to new acquaintances, provided they’re horse mad, if not horses.”
“Andy qualifies as pony mad,” Ellie said. Lady Greymoor had already taken her arm and was leading her to the door.
“We’ve much to discuss,” the petite blonde said. “Have you chosen names yet, and where is Dane’s cousin when you’re in a delicate condition and in need of cosseting, and do you need help with the baby’s clothes? We’ve all piles and scads of them, and the little dears outgrow everything they don’t stain into oblivion…”
The ladies stayed far longer than courtesy required, and when they left, Ellie and Andy had an invitation to tea the next day with Lady Amery and her daughter, Rose.
Andy aimed a puzzled look at her step-mama when they’d waved their guests good-bye.
“I thought we were in mourning. Minty says that’s like when bad weather keeps everybody indoors but you have to wear the right colors.”
“It’s been more than four months. Your papa would not have wanted you confined to the house, and this Rose is in need of friends.”
“Why do you say that?”
“No sisters,” Ellie said as they ascended the steps to the front terrace. “I know how that feels, and so do you.”
“Maybe I’ll have a sister at Christmas.”
A beat of silence went by as Ellie took a seat on the top step, and Andy sat beside her. “I should have told you sooner. How did you know?”
“I heard Lord Amherst talking to Mrs. Wright before he left yesterday. He went on and on about peppermint tea and putting your feet up, and chocolates, and pillows for your knees and back, and keeping the windows open so your delicate digestion isn’t upset by stale air. He made it sound like you’re a princess, Mama. Do you feel like a princess?”
“A little.” A lot, when Trenton Lindsey was on hand.
“He said you’re not to leave the house alone, not even to garden, and we must take the best care of you.”
“I’m to have a baby, but you’re to become a big sister, so we should be taking care of you as well.”
In a way that Ellie hadn’t appreciated before, she saw that children created vulnerability. Andy was precious, and anybody intending harm to Ellie could attain that goal by hurting Andy.
While Trenton had three small children.
Andy dashed for the door while Ellie made more decorous use of the steps. “Does this mean I can have a pony?”
“You had a chance to visit a pony at Crossbridge. You hardly paid Zephyr any attention at all, Coriander.”
“Papa hardly paid me any attention, but you’re always telling me he loved me.”
“He did.” To the extent Dane had loved any human female. “You don’t like Mr. Spencer, do you?”
“He’s… I thought he was Papa’s friend,” Andy said, pulling a droopy bloom from the daisies in a crystal bowl on the sideboard. “But they weren’t truly friends. Papa killed his horse.”
The child wandered the front hall, her unwillingness to meet Ellie’s gaze suggesting Dane’s death still did not entirely make sense to his daughter.
“Mr. Spencer had to put his own horse down, but it was because of your papa’s fall and the bad footing, not because your father wished the horse ill.”
“He might have wished Mr. Spencer ill,” Andy said, frowning at the flowers. “This arrangement doesn’t smell very good.”
Daisies typically didn’t. “The water needs to be changed. It’s not too terribly hot yet today. Would you like to do some baking with me in the summer kitchen?”
Andy’s expression brightened. “Baking biscuits?”
“Lady Heathgate left me a recipe for muffins. She says they make the whole house smell good.”
“The summer kitchen isn’t the house. Let’s bake anyway, for it’s Minty’s day for preparations. We’ll bring her some muffins, and she’ll be in a good mood.”
Either the prospect of baking cheered Andy inordinately, or the topic of Dane’s death and Mr. Spencer’s role in it was so troubling, Andy would look forward even to a sweltering morning spent in Ellie’s company.
***
“I don’t know when I’ve seen you looking so happy and at peace.” Trent observed to his sister as they strolled around the sprawling beauty of Belle Maison’s gardens.
Leah was tall and had the same dark coloring as her brothers, but her smile had grown brilliant since her marriage to Nicholas Haddonfield, Earl of Bellefonte. “My husband dotes on me, and Emily’s letters are giddy with the pleasure of being Lady Warne’s fashionable project. I worry about my brothers, though.”
The three siblings were as bonded by worry as by affection, the hallmark of Wilton’s patrimony.
“Suppose it’s only fair you worry about us. We’ve spent some time worrying about you. But this… You chose well, Leah. Bellefonte’s estate clearly prospers, and he doesn’t take his blessings for granted.”
And here, he’d thought Bellefonte’s and Heathgate’s inquisitions had been uncomfortable.
“Not grieving, exactly.” Thirty yards away, the Earl of Greymoor grinned up at Nick, his smile conspiratorial. Greymoor had invited himself along on the journey, ostensibly to talk horses with Nick. In reality, Trent suspected the man’s brother had put him up to some informal bodyguarding.
Or governessing a bereaved viscount.
Or snooping.
Trent ambled along with his sister, though Nick caught sight of them and had to blow Leah a kiss Trent pretended not to see. “How bad was Paula?”
“She loved her children.” Leah spoke with assurance, and hadn’t given the answer Trent had anticipated.
“Did she? When Ford came along, I had to wonder if she loved him or simply enjoyed showing him off.” The way she’d initially enjoyed showing off her new husband—on her good days.
“Paula adored Ford. Not many titled women will put their children to their own breast, sew all their clothes, or spend hours reading to them when they’re too little to even recognize the words. Ford and Michael still love to be read to.”
“I’d forgotten that. She sang to them, too.” A low contralto with an inborn strain of melancholy that nonetheless soothed a child to sleep.
“She also painted the pictures for the nursery wing,” Leah added. “She loved her children.”
“But?”
Trent had the odd wish that Ellie had known Paula, for Ellie’s assessment would be even more insightful than Leah’s.
“But Paula’s candle was short, in important regards,” Leah said, gently. “She should have been in a convent somewhere, raising orphans, maybe. She became particularly… eccentric after Lanie was born. She did not understand you, that much was obvious.”
Nor had Trent understood her, which probably summarized half the petty marital tragedies on the planet. “Did she have a lover?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Sea monsters and dragons lurked at the edge of the discussion, or thorny roses.
“When one’s wife was unreceptive to marital advances but desperately desired children, one wondered if there might have been someone else, such that the lady needed her husband’s occasional visits to her bed to obscure the truth.”
“She never alluded to another,” Leah said slowly. “Never asked me to lie for her, never showed up somewhere I wasn’t expecting her, or came later than we’d planned. She once said something odd, though.”
Paula had said many odd things, made wild plans, then murmured despairingly, as if the fall of a leaf could presage a French invasion, or a blooming flower ensure the royal succession.
“What did she say?” Nicholas and Greymoor were arguing, loudly, good-naturedly. The horses in the adjoining fields took note, then went back to the grazing.
“Paula said she would never feel good enough to be your wife.” Leah fell silent as Nick paused in his debate to wave to her from across the lawns. “The look on her face when she said it was so…sad, so hopeless. Heartbroken.”
“Heartbroken. That summarized my late wife, but I can’t for the life of me comprehend why.”
Leah waved back at her spouse. “Sometimes there isn’t a why, not even when you need one most.”
Trent bade his sister farewell on that inconclusive note and joined the company of the fools at the stables.
“A word with you, Nicholas?” Trent asked as Greymoor led both Ford and Michael off to make their farewells to Nick’s mare, Buttercup.
Nick patted the rump of a passing plough horse. “You may have more than a word. Greymoor will tarry in the stables until Yuletide if we allow him to.”
Yuletide, when Ellie would be delivered of her burden.
“You received my letter regarding the gunshot?”
Nick looped an arm across Trent’s shoulders, and walked with him out along the paddock fencing. “You’d yet to bring it up, so I wasn’t comfortable quizzing you.”
Such delicacy fooled Trent not at all.
“I’ve had some time to think,” Trent said, wondering what made a man as affectionate as Nick Haddonfield, and as likeable. “I told you I was with my neighbor, Lady Rammel, at the time of the incident.”
“About whom you’ve also been mightily reticent.”
“I questioned whether the bullet might have been meant for her,” Trent went on, ignoring Nick’s baiting.
“But?”
“But you stock a very fine cellar, and your nightcaps are particularly excellent.”
Nick dropped his arm. “You consumed those nightcaps in excellent company is all. I’m convivial and charming, according to your sister.”
Nick was much more than that, and Trent didn’t need Leah to provide the details. “The company was well enough. I’m reminded that I used to be very particular about my libation.” He had prided himself on a discriminating palate, because Wilton wouldn’t know aged whiskey from gin, or a Riesling from champagne.
“You’re not discriminating now?”
How to explain? “Now I’m trying to limit myself to wine or the occasional tankard of summer ale, but when I was in Town this spring, I was not limiting myself in any fashion.”
Nick took to studying a herd of yearlings playing stallion games in a grassy pasture beside the stables. “I never saw you drunk.”
“You probably never saw me sober, either,” Trent said wearily. “I vaguely recall at some point wondering when I’d started buying the cheaper selections.”
“Somebody was skimming your accounts. This can happen when the help gets to taking liberties.”
Little boy horses played at being courting swains, while Trent considered further evidence of a life gone badly awry—his life. “I don’t think the problem was skimming. I think somebody laced my drinks with laudanum or some other soporific.”
Nick paced off a few feet, then glared at him. “Bloody buggering hell, Trenton.”
“Hear me out.” Trent settled against a stile, because it appeared Greymoor would, indeed, entertain the children until Yuletide if need be.
Yuletide, the season of little water buffaloes.
“I’m not sure myself what I’m suggesting,” Trent said. “When Paula became particularly unreasonable, we’d spike her tea or posset or what have you with a little of the poppy. The household was in the habit, we kept a goodly supply on hand, and yet among my domestics, turnover was high.”
Nick paced in front of the stile. If he’d had a mane, tail and hooves, he would have been pawing and snorting. “Your business was probably known to other households in the area then, if your staff took other positions in the same neighborhood.”
“I can only assume so. I am ashamed to say I lost a firm grip of who was responsible for what among my staff.” Provided his glass had been kept full. No wonder Darius had become alarmed.
Nick scuffed a worn riding boot against the grass, the equivalent of equine pawing. “Dare told us you had no butler. It worried him, because you’d had the same one since you set up your town house.”
“Another graduate of Wilton’s school of impossible standards. I pensioned the butler not long ago.”
“Did your drinks start tasting better?”
Around him, Trent was aware of the summer morning—the building heat of the sun, the light riffle of the breeze over the grass, the swish of a horse tail in the paddock behind them, the scent of the stables upwind.
“You’re implying my staff was bribed to poison me.”
“Suggesting it.” Nick’s gaze went past Trent’s shoulder to the stables. “You were trying to reach the same conclusion yourself, but you hadn’t put your finger on the butler.”
Butlers figured prominently in Gothic novels, and never on the side of good.
“I still haven’t.” Trent pushed away from the stile and marched back toward t
he stable yard. “Neither can I rule him out. God above, if Dare hadn’t shanghaied me, I could have ended up with a pillow to my face, or gone up in blazes because I supposedly tripped with an oil lamp in my hand.”
“You’re speculating. What of your staff at Crossbridge? Are they loyal?”
“Yes. I came into that place when I was eighteen, and I’ve owned it for almost half my life. I hired most of the current staff, and when it came down to it, they were the ones who set Dare on me. Paula hired most of the town house staff, and fired them, and hired their replacements and so on.”
“She was difficult?”
Nick loved women, all women, and was being gallant, as usual. “You know she was. My sister’s entire life is an open book between you two, and that would include Leah’s crazy sister-by-marriage.”
“Not crazy. Troubled. Leah says she was troubled.”
“Mortally, and I thought I was the cause, but I’m beginning to wonder.”
“You’re also beginning to put off mourning, and that’s for the best. Your children were growing fretful.”
Nick swiped a sprig of meadow mint and tucked it between his teeth, the most bucolic rendition of a peer of the realm Trent had beheld—except for Glasclare adopting the same mannerism.
“I missed them,” Trent admitted as they approached the mounting block. “I didn’t even realize how much I missed them, and now I may be bringing them home to danger.”
Nick’s arm came down across his shoulders again. “It’s entirely possible your staff was lacing your drinks, but maybe it started as a way to get you to sleep when you were newly bereaved, and then it became a way to facilitate pinching your pennies. You can’t leap from suspecting they spiked your brandy to seeing murder most foul.”
Leah had married a spectacularly kind man. Trent resisted the urge to tell him so, for Nick was shy, too.