No one had thought this strange, nor had they been surprised to have Geoffrey as their guest. He had sat beside Father at the table, in the spot reserved for the most honored guests, and Serena had sat beside him, making sure his glass was always filled with wine and the best dishes were presented to him first. The sun had been warm and the air fragrant with the flowers in the garden. Everyone had talked and laughed with the freedom she remembered from her childhood, and none of the stiff manners and false politeness that she’d been forced to learn since she’d come to London. Geoffrey had been accepted as part of their family, which had made Serena extraordinarily happy. He belonged at Sundara Manōra; he belonged with her. When he leaned forward to kiss her at the table, she’d smiled, and leaned toward him.
And then she’d awakened, alone in her chilly bedchamber with a gray London dawn just beginning to show beyond the curtains. There had been tears on her cheeks, but this time they’d been from joy, not fear. With a muffled cry of disappointment, she’d tried to steal back into the dream by closing her eyes, tried to will herself back into its spell, even as the dream had already slipped irrevocably beyond her reach.
“Permit yourself a short rest before you have Martha dress you for dinner, Serena,” Aunt Morley was saying, concern in her voice. “You’ve seemed out of sorts to me all day. Perhaps we should send our regrets to Lady Ralston for this evening. You’re not feverish, are you?”
She reached forward to lay her hand on Serena’s brow.
“I’m perfectly well, Aunt,” Serena protested, drawing back, “and there’s no reason we can’t go out this evening.”
Aunt Morley sighed. “Very well,” she said reluctantly. “I only pray you’ll tell me if you truly are unwell.”
“I promise I will,” Serena said, giving her aunt’s hand a fond, if guilty, squeeze. She’d never doubted that Aunt Morley cared very much for her. She hated knowing that her aunt would be wounded to the quick if she ever learned—which she must never, ever do—what Serena had just done with Geoffrey.
One more secret, she thought, one more deception layered on all the others she carried inside her….
Her aunt smiled in return, fortunately unaware of Serena’s thoughts.
“I pray you’ll feel sufficiently well to attend Lady Ralston tonight,” she said. “There should be a good-sized company there. Perhaps you’ll even see that charming Lord Millbury again.”
Serena blushed. Her aunt was supposed to have seen her talking to Lord Millbury last night only as a diversion from Geoffrey, but the plan had worked a bit too well. Her aunt had become captivated by the possibility of the earl as Serena’s new suitor, and nothing Serena said to dissuade her had had the slightest effect.
“Lord Millbury is a very nice gentleman, Aunt,” she said yet again, “but I do not believe he has any further interest in me, or I in him.”
Aunt Morley smiled. “I understand entirely if you wish to keep your interest to yourself, Serena,” she said coyly. “But know that his lordship would make a pretty match for you, and one that would please your grandfather. The Earls of Millbury are of quite ancient lineage, you know. Entirely different from those Fitzroys.”
“The Earls of Millbury are of no more consequence to me than the Dukes of Breconridge,” Serena said as firmly as she could. “I wish you would understand, Aunt Morley.”
But her aunt chose to hear only part of what she’d said. “I am glad to hear you say that, Serena. Your grandfather can be overbearing at times, but he was entirely right to object to Lord Geoffrey. As charming as that young gentleman is, I heard something today that paints him in much less gallant light. Were you aware that last night he went off from the rout for nearly an hour with some unsavory lady or another?”
“Oh, Aunt,” Serena said uneasily, knowing well enough who that “unsavory lady” might be. “You are always cautioning me against repeating empty tattle, and now you are doing the same.”
“It wasn’t empty tattle,” Aunt Morley said soundly. “It was noted by several of the guests, plain as the day. The only question was the identity of the lady with which he was dallying. Some said it was Lady Pencroft, while others were certain it was that dreadful Mrs. Tate. Either way you are better without him, Serena. You made a fortuitous escape.”
“I’m sure,” Serena murmured, hoping that a lack of interest would make her aunt move to another topic.
It didn’t. “No, we do not need the likes of Lord Geoffrey in our family,” she continued. “I don’t like to speak ill of the deceased, but your poor father was something of a rake in his youth as well, and too often ruled by illicit animal passions. Pursuing actresses and low strumpets, carousing about the town, wasting his money on buying them wine and cheap baubles—it was all a source of great unhappiness for everyone, particularly your grandfather.”
Serena went very still. Aunt Morley had never spoken so freely about her father, or faulted him in any way.
“I did not intend to shock you, Serena,” her aunt continued, noticing Serena’s silence. “I only meant to show how a young gentleman’s folly can cause grief and suffering to his family. Fortunately your father was able to put his immoral behavior behind him in the East Indies, and become a sober Christian gentleman. His hard work transformed him into a responsible husband and father, and a son your grandfather could be proud of. To be sure, he was disappointed when he learned your father had resigned his commission, but to become a diplomatic liaison for one of those foreign courts instead was quite the honor. I can only hope that for the sake of His Grace, Lord Geoffrey will one day become as respectable and accomplished as your poor father.”
Serena didn’t answer, her heart racing. This was more about her father’s life than her aunt had ever shared with her, and most of it was wrong. What had he written back to his family in England? Was deception a part of his life as well?
He had never been a sober Christian gentleman, not the way it was defined here in England. He had not worked hard, not that she had seen: he had been endlessly charming, but he’d also been cunning and resourceful. His much-vaunted physical courage included daring to the point of recklessness. He had never been a diplomat, yet he had made himself a favorite with the princes of their region because he had been willing to sell them the European weapons that they craved, guns and muskets that other Englishmen would not. Most of all he had been lucky; he’d said that himself. She thought of Father and the beautiful, lissome concubines that slipped in and out of his bed, of the troupes of nautch girls he’d hire for entertainment, of how her own mother would have been one of the “low strumpets” that so disgusted her aunt.
Perhaps in her heart Serena was one herself.
She thought again of how brazenly she’d kissed Geoffrey last night, and today as well. She’d practically leaped into his embrace, and when he’d caressed her breast as he’d kissed her, she’d given herself freely to desire. And she liked it, at least with Geoffrey. She liked it very much, so much that the memory alone was enough to make her breath quicken.
Illicit animal passions. That’s what Aunt Morley was calling it, and making it sound like the heights (or depths) of tawdry wickedness. Serena had heard variations of this before, of course. Any well-bred young English lady would.
Yet on the other side of the world, where she’d been born, there’d been no sin to pleasure, and no disgrace to it, either. It hadn’t been illicit at all at Sundara Manōra. She’d learned that from the other women around her, as well as from her father’s example. Pleasure had always been considered a part of love, a rare joy to be embraced and shared.
But where did she belong now? Should she obey the strict morality of Aunt Morley, or let herself develop this newfound taste for pleasure, a taste that she must have inherited from her parents?
Troubled, Serena did not go directly to her rooms when she and Aunt Morley returned home, but instead headed to the upstairs back parlor. There, in a place of prominence over the fireplace, hung the house’s only portrait of her fathe
r. Serena had never cared for the painting, and had avoided it as much as was possible, not wanting the image to cloud her memories of her father.
The portrait had been painted shortly before he had left to take his commission with the East India Company, when he was nineteen, and about the same age when he’d been the rakehell about town that Aunt Morley had described. He was expected to return to London after he’d put in a respectable amount of time with the Company. Instead he had resigned his commission, turned his back on the British community at Calcutta, and retreated into Hyderabad to make his fortune his own way.
Serena curtseyed to the portrait, then stared up at it, trying to find any real resemblance between this handsome, haughty young man and her ever-fainter memory of her father. In the painting, he was close to her own age, tall and lean and dressed in the Company’s uniform: polished black boots, cream-colored breeches and waistcoat, a close-fitting red coat bright with gold braid and gleaming gold buttons, and his sword slung low around his hips. His hair was tightly curled on the sides with a clubbed queue, and in one hand he held the reins to the horse that stood beside him. He was the very picture of an imperious young officer, English to the tips of the fawn-colored gloves he grasped in his hand.
The father she’d known had not looked like this at all. True, he’d been older by then, and his young man’s lean frame had broadened considerably, but he had also abandoned English fashions and customs. Instead he habitually wore a long, narrow moustache and covered his hair with a turban, and in place of a stiff English coat he preferred a flowing, pleated jama over loose striped trousers, with embroidered silk slippers on his feet and jeweled necklaces around his neck. He’d looked much more like a Hindi Mughal than an English gentleman, which was exactly how he’d wished it.
The way she remembered Father best were the times when he sat in his favorite rosewood chair and she’d perch on his knee. His clothes were scented with the fragrance of the tobacco in his hookah, and he’d laugh uproariously over silly things, like trying to teach a parakeet to talk. When she’d been taken to Calcutta, she’d overheard her father described by the English officers as ruthless, brash, and unscrupulous, a man too much at ease with native ways to be trusted. What she remembered, however, were Father’s great love for her and her sister, his boundless good humor, and how much he had laughed.
And that, really, was the greatest difference between the young Lord Thomas Carew in the portrait and the father she’d loved. Lord Thomas looked guarded and arrogant, even angry, while Father had been happy. He’d claimed he lived his life without regrets, and Serena believed it, for she had been happy at Sundara Manōra, too. Father had kept more than his share of secrets in his life, but she realized now that she might have discovered the most important one. He had dared to turn his back on everything that he had been and everything that was expected of him, and had instead found happiness five thousand miles away from where he’d been born.
She could hear the servants in the passage, going from room to room to draw the curtains for the evening. She’d have to leave this parlor soon if she didn’t want to be caught in here, and she gazed up at the portrait one last time, striving to consider the painted face with fresh eyes. She was often told she looked much like Father, but she’d never seen it herself in the mirror.
Perhaps her real inheritance from him was not in the shape of her nose or the arch of her brows. It wasn’t in the jewels and gold he’d sent back to England, or even in the taste for pleasure she’d discovered with Geoffrey. No, the most important thing Father had left her was the willingness to risk everything for happiness.
He’d given her permission.
“Should I send for the physician, my dear?” Aunt Morley stood by Serena’s bed, her hands folded at her waist and her brow drawn with concern. She was already dressed for church, a large plumed hat on her head and her prayer book in her hand. “Perhaps it would be the wisest course if you are in such pain.”
“Thank you, no, Aunt, it’s not so serious as that,” Serena said as wanly as she could. “When I waken with a headache like this, the only cure is to lie abed and let it pass. You know I’ve had them before.”
“What I know is that I hate to see you suffer like this,” Aunt Morley said. “But if you are certain you do not feel well enough to dress and join your grandfather and me for services, then it can’t be helped.”
“I’ll be better by supper,” Serena said, pressing her palm to her forehead. “I always am.”
“Yes, but this morning you are not,” her aunt said, tucking her prayer book into her pocket. “Your grandfather can get along well enough without me. I’ll stay home today, here with you. There’s nothing worse than suffering alone.”
“No!” exclaimed Serena, remembering just in time that she was supposed to be ill, and making her voice again feeble and weak. “That is, I shall be perfectly fine by myself. I know you wish to go with Grandfather. Today’s sermon is being given by Dr. Bracegirdle, isn’t it? Visiting from Winchester? He’s a special favorite of yours.”
“He is,” admitted her aunt. “Dr. Bracegirdle can take the most common of scripture verses and find an entirely new and salient meaning in it. And his voice! Gracious, if the man hadn’t a calling, he could have been an actor in Drury Lane with that voice.”
“Then you must go hear him,” Serena insisted. “I would not want you to miss his sermon and be disappointed on my account. I’ll be perfectly fine here. Most likely all I shall do is sleep.”
It was clear that her aunt was hesitating. “I suppose I could ask Martha to sit with you.”
“She needn’t do that,” Serena said, reminding herself again to keep the excitement from her voice and sound ill—but not too ill. Ah, she didn’t have the patience for intrigue like this! “She can occupy herself with other tasks in the servants’ hall. So long as she’s within hearing of the bell, then that will be sufficient.”
While Sundays were usually the day that servants were given to tend to their own affairs and amusements, Serena suspected that Martha would not mind staying in the near-empty house, as long as Parker, the second footman, was also at home. Her lady’s maid had confessed a special fondness for Parker, and while romances between servants were forbidden in the house, Serena had kept their secret—never dreaming that it might in time be a useful twin to her own.
Aunt Morley sighed, her prayer book once again in her hand. “There’s nothing I could do for you that Martha couldn’t as well,” she said slowly. “And it’s only for a few hours. We’ll be back in time for dinner.”
“Yes, Aunt.” Serena closed her eyes and rested her palm across her forehead. “Forgive me, I’m already feeling drowsy.”
“That’s for the best,” her aunt said, patting Serena on the arm. “You rest, and I’ll speak to Martha. Most likely your grandfather and I will be back when you wake.”
But as Serena lay in her bed, it wasn’t the return of her aunt and grandfather that concerned her most. It was their departure; or rather, their lack of one. Although the house was large, it was still possible for her to hear Grandpapa storming about in the front hall, unhappy with something or another about the carriage or the horses. His raging continued while the problem was corrected, for what seemed like an eternity to Serena, and with growing frustration she reached for her little enameled watch from the table beside the bed.
When she’d told Geoffrey to meet her at half-past nine, she’d thought she’d have plenty of time after her grandfather and aunt had left to dress herself, but it was already that, and she groaned with despair.
How long would Geoffrey wait at the gate for her? How long would he stand there before he’d think she’d changed her mind, and leave?
She slipped from the bed and went to peek through the curtains to the street before the front of the house. Finally her grandfather was climbing into the carriage, and the footmen were closing the door and climbing on the post behind. She watched the carriage draw away and roll slowly down the street befor
e she rushed to the window on the other side of the room. She craned her neck and pressed against the glass, trying to see if Geoffrey was there, but the angle wasn’t right, and she couldn’t open the window to lean out.
The clock on her mantelpiece chimed the quarter hour: 9:45. She didn’t dare take the time to dress herself; instead, she swiftly tied a yellow silk sultana over her night rail and thrust her bare feet into slippers. She paused before her looking glass long enough to pull the plaits from her hair and twist it into a loose knot, then quickly secure it in place with three hairpins. Martha would have fits if she knew her lady was going to receive anyone, let alone a gentleman, like this, in a dressing gown without stays, paint, or jewels, but she was already so late that it couldn’t be helped.
She opened her bedchamber door a crack to make sure no servants were in the hall. She hurried down the stairs and through the back hall, her slippered feet making no sound, and into the little back parlor that overlooked the garden.
Ordinarily she took breakfast here each morning with Grandfather and Aunt Morley. The table had already been cleared, the cloth drawn, the chairs set back along the wall, and the cushioned bench where her aunt liked to read tucked neatly beneath one of the windows. No one would likely return to this room for the rest of the day, but Serena had an important reason for coming here. All the keys to the house were kept by the butler, but because her aunt often liked to carry her tea into the garden, an extra set to both the garden door and the gardener’s gate were kept in a small box on the mantelpiece. These Serena now took from the box, and let herself outside.
The morning was clear and bright, with dew sparkling on every leaf, and she couldn’t help but feel her spirits soar with excitement and anticipation. The light silk of her sultana fluttered and slipped around her bare legs, and it was, she realized, the first time since she’d been in England that she’d been out-of-doors without stays, her body as uninhibited as when she’d been a girl. Perhaps not having time to dress properly had been kismet, too, and her exhilaration rose. She only hoped that Geoffrey would approve, and not be scandalized by her informality. She smiled; no, being male, he wouldn’t be, she was sure.
A Sinful Deception Page 13
