The Ardent Lady Amelia

by Laura Matthews

  “Derbyshire.”

  Trudy had expected a little more information than that, but she was undaunted. “And you still have a home there, do you?”

  “To the best of my knowledge.”

  If he had said it with a twinkle in his eyes, Amelia might have warmed to him, but no, his face and those unnerving black eyes were as politely cool as ever. Trudy persisted. “Have you family there?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, then they’re here with you in London,” Trudy surmised in the face of his unwillingness to be more forthcoming.

  “No.”

  Which left her knowing precisely nothing. He might have family (a wife) who weren’t either in Derbyshire or in London, or he might have no family (a wife) at all.

  “Do you plan a long stay in London?”

  “I haven’t any idea, as yet.”

  “Have you a house here?”

  “Yes.”

  “In South Street,” Peter offered, to propitiate her bursting curiosity.

  Trudy sat back a little in her chair, nodding as though satisfied. “There are some acceptable houses in South Street. For myself, I like the squares, but not everyone can live on one of them. South Street has the advantage of being so close to the park,” she added kindly.

  “There is that.”

  “Do you ride?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Verwood stood at his ease, never shifting his eyes from Trudy to any other member of the small group. He looked as though he were prepared to withstand her inquisitive assault for hours, unperturbed. Amelia refused to join the questioning, or even to make some inoffensive remark.

  From where she sat she could observe the rugged strength of his sun-browned face, the broad set of his shoulders. Definitely a military man, she decided. Probably wounded, accounting for the limp. A few years in the army could have roughed his polish, though she personally doubted that he’d ever had any. She’d seldom run into a man with less-agreeable manners, though one couldn’t exactly fault him for impoliteness. She didn’t observe brusqueness very often in her circles. Perhaps that’s why she’d never seen him before.

  “The Candovers are from Derbyshire,” Aunt Trudy remarked. “I imagine you know them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, splendid. Then we’ll probably see you at their ball next week.”

  Verwood’s eyes for the first time left Trudy’s to swing questioningly at Peter, who shrugged and said, “My sister and aunt aren’t planning on leaving town after all.”

  “I should think not!” Trudy cried. “In the middle of the season! I never heard anything so totty-headed. This is precisely the perfect time to be in London.” She smiled graciously at Verwood. “So we’ll no doubt see you at the Candovers’ next week.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Peter had had quite enough of the cross-examination, and felt a little more had been revealed than he could have wished. “I hope you’ll excuse us, Aunt Trudy, but Lord Verwood has called on a business matter and I shouldn’t like to keep him longer than necessary.

  “Why, of course, dear boy. I wouldn’t think of intruding on such a subject. You might take him into the library.”

  Amelia grinned at her brother’s exasperation, but he merely pursed his lips in response. Lord Verwood followed him to the door before turning to bid the ladies a pleasant evening.

  “Rather a strange man,” Trudy confided when they’d gone.

  Amelia continued to stare at the closed door. “Very strange indeed,” she agreed.

  Chapter 2

  There was a toasty fire burning in her room when Lady Amelia arrived there an hour later. Her brother was still closeted with Lord Verwood, and Aunt Trudy had agreed an early night would be good for them. Sundays were invariably enervating, with very little activity outside the house after church.

  Lady Amelia couldn’t very well stroll about the area with Trudy, since Trudy never strolled. And she didn’t like to take a footman away from the house because most of the servants had the day off. Occasionally there was a ride in the park, if Peter was free, but he’d been away all day today, only returning in the evening.

  She felt restless from the lack of exercise and paced up and down her room. The air was still too chilly to open a window and let in a refreshing breeze. If the Shiptons had been able to join them for a quiet dinner, the day wouldn’t have passed so slowly, but Clarissa had contracted some trifling illness and refused to stir so far as the three houses that separated their two domiciles. It was one of Clarissa’s few faults, this over-enthusiasm for pampering herself with any slight indisposition, and Amelia tried to take it in her stride. There were times, however, when it proved the greatest nuisance. One’s friends should be more considerate, she thought ruefully.

  The absence of entertainment was not, of course, the only thing she had on her mind. Peter’s odd pronouncements, and his odd friend, were far more pressing to her at the moment than a small disappointment of company. Whether she acknowledged it to him or not, she did rather fancy herself useful in gathering information, and she had no intention of giving up her quietly adventurous life. There were things she heard that he wasn’t likely to hear, things that might have, and indeed on occasion had had, some bearing on England’s struggles with the French. Granted, she had uncovered no nefarious plots which would have undone her country, but she had been able to obtain tidbits of information that had proved useful.

  The way in which she obtained this information was not precisely as simple as she’d let on to Peter. But then, he wouldn’t have approved of her slightly unorthodox methods, so it was better he didn’t know. True, inevitably the gentlemen in question were decidedly foxed when they let their tongues run away with them, but they needed a little encouragement in the right direction. After all, they were more inclined to spout amorous bits of nonsense than details of renewed French preparations for an invasion.

  And one couldn’t just come out and ask if they happened to know anything about Napoleon’s plans. It was necessary to have them in the proper mood, and then show a great deal of bravado about how Napoleon would never dare to attack the English on their own soil, to get a rise out of someone. Most of the men she’d gotten in the proper mood hadn’t known the first thing about a French invasion, or anything else, for that matter.

  Lady Amelia stopped in front of the looking glass above her dressing table and considered her reflection for a moment. Her hair was dressed simply for a quiet Sunday at home, with none of the elaborate curls and falls she allowed Bridget to arrange when she was going out for the evening. Still, the honey-colored tresses looked perfectly acceptable, pulled back softly and arranged in a knot on the crown of her head. She released the pins and returned them to the red lacquer box on the table, letting her hair escape down over her shoulders. Loose, it looked even softer, brushing gently against her rosy cheeks, curling toward the hollow of her throat.

  Her mother’s hair had been much the same color. Amelia dropped to the velvet-covered stool and picked up the framed miniature that always sat facing her on the table. There was no miniature of her father, but a three-quarter-length portrait of him in the gallery, a copy of the one at Margrave, beside a matching one of his wife.

  Amelia could see other resemblances between herself and her mother, but she had inherited her father’s determined chin and ruddy coloring. Lady Welsford had been delicate, in her person and in her health. Amelia might have looked more like her if she hadn’t been so tall and sturdy. The violet eyes were the same, and the finely molded lips, but the configuration of the face was wholly different. Instead of her mother’s fragile beauty, Amelia had a more robust, wholesome appearance, which was perhaps no less striking, but it would never call forth the same sort of protective response the world at large had felt for Lady Welsford.

  Only they hadn’t been able to protect her. Not in the end. Amelia set down the miniature and picked up a hairbrush, drawing it vigorously though her long hair again and again. Sometimes it took total concent
ration to blot out the memory of her last view of her mother and father, both waving quite cheerfully from the other carriage. She could remember her own anxiety as she allowed Peter to assist her back into their carriage for the hurried drive to Calais. He had assured her, over and over, that their parents would be close behind them and that there was no reason to suspect any problem just because they were out of sight.

  It was a frantic time, especially so for a seventeen-year-old girl who had expected a pleasure trip to Paris with her family, and ended up alone with her brother on the packet boat back to England. She had insisted that they wait for the earl and countess, but he had said, “They’ll get the next packet, Amelia. Father told me not to wait for them if they weren’t here on time.”

  There was so much commotion, so much tenseness among their fellow passengers, that Amelia could barely sit still during the rough passage. And then they had waited at an English inn for the next packet, which didn’t come. Hours and hours they waited, Peter going out frequently for any news he could glean, finally returning to tell her, “Napoleon has ordered the arrest of all British travelers in France. We were the last packet to make it out safely.”

  “But he can’t do that!” she had insisted, her cheeks flushed, tears welling in her eyes. “What will become of them?”

  “They’ll be all right,” he replied, squeezing her cold hands. “He wouldn’t dare treat them badly, Amelia. It’s just a gesture of revenge. The government will have them released within a few days. You can be sure of it.”

  Peter was wrong — not about the treatment, but about the release of their parents. The interned British travelers were still in France now, four years later. Most of them. Peter had worked diligently to have his parents freed, and had finally managed, because of their aristocratic standing, to purchase their freedom.

  But the actual exchange had come too late. Unaccustomed to the straitened living conditions, Lady Welsford had contracted an illness which had eventually killed her, with her husband, weakened from his grief and the long hours of caring for her, soon following. Their bodies were returned to England and buried in the family crypt at Margrave in the spring of 1804 on the day Amelia turned eighteen, almost nine months after her last sight of them.

  It had been possible for some of the interned British to escape, but at great struggling with their souls, for the French had exacted a vow from them not to escape, in return for decent living conditions. The earl had felt bound by his word, refusing the assistance Peter sent clandestinely before he arranged for a legal freedom. Amelia frequently wondered how her father must have felt when his wife died, the agony of knowing they might have been safely in England by then. Not that she blamed him. If he had given his word, he would keep it. She blamed Napoleon and the French for the whole tragic situation. And she went on blaming them, year after year, doing the only thing she could to help bring about the downfall of the savage who ruled that country.

  Her rage had calmed into a more manageable anger. When her worst fears were realized, she found a new strength in herself to cope with the grief, a new outlet through Peter’s work with the War Department for her burning desire to have some part in the effort to displace Napoleon. Her exasperation with her own government’s lack of wisdom in prosecuting the war was frequently as strong as her indignation with the French.

  But Peter, for all his elegance and sophistication, had learned a great deal during his attempts to secure his parents’ release, and he used his knowledge now to best effect. There was little chance, at this point, of an invasion. Those fears were gradually dying, but there were other rumors abroad which could prove beneficial to the cause, and Amelia had no intention of letting them pass her by without some effort to latch on to them.

  So this new attitude of Peter’s was upsetting. Not only was he trying to exclude her from some chance to be useful, he was threatening to banish her from life in London. Since their parents’ deaths, they had spent most of their time in the city, unable to tolerate for long the unhappy associations at Margrave. Two months in the summer and two in the winter were ordinarily the total of their year’s stay in Sussex.

  Amelia was ready to spend more time there, but not now, when the season was in progress, bringing with it the best possible time for uncovering something of interest. If Peter had planned to go there himself, she would have been willing to go along as his hostess, she supposed, but he had no intention of going anywhere with her. His aim was apparently her exile.

  Amelia couldn’t conceive why her brother had so suddenly taken the perverse notion into his head that she was in some danger. She made a face at herself in the mirror and set the silver-backed hairbrush carefully on the mahogany dressing table. Lord Verwood certainly had not evinced the slightest interest in her honey-colored hair or her violet eyes or her aristocratic nose! Her brow puckered in thought. But he had shown some interest in the fact that she and her aunt weren’t going to be out of town. Now, why would he even think of such a thing? Peter had only brought it up this evening, for heaven’s sake. It was possible, barely, that Peter had mentioned his intention of sending his sister out of town to Lord Verwood on some previous occasion — but why? So far as Amelia knew, Peter was only recently acquainted with his lordship, who had not even been introduced to her until this evening. It seemed unlikely her name would have arisen in a discussion between the two men at all.

  The more Amelia thought about the matter, the more convinced she became that it was quite the other way around. For some reason which she could not begin to imagine, Lord Verwood had been the one to suggest to Peter that she be sent out of town. The concept held a ring of truth to her, though she couldn’t put her finger on any reason why it should. Verwood was an army man — she would have sworn to it. One became familiar with the mannerisms, with the stiff bearing, with the preoccupation such gentlemen exhibited.

  Amelia stood up and began to pace around the room again, taking no notice of anything but her thoughts.

  Several possibilities occurred to her. The first was that Lord Verwood was not what he proclaimed himself. That he was a villain intent on duping her brother in some way. Though this seemed unlikely, it had a certain appeal to her, since she felt decidedly offended with the gentleman. If he were the cause of this breach between her brother and herself, he might very well be up to no good.

  On the other hand, Peter was rather a shrewd judge of character, constantly on the lookout for imposters. Which didn’t necessarily make Lord Verwood an acceptable acquaintance. Peter might be using him for his own purposes.

  What seemed more likely was that the two of them were working together. That wouldn’t have surprised Amelia in the least. Peter never gave her much of a clue as to what he was up to. If there were some danger involved in his current work, he might want her out of town to be on the safe side. Well, it wasn’t likely she would leave town if Peter was in some kind of predicament! But knowing that, he might very well have schemed to get her to leave on her own account.

  Amelia’s head was beginning to whirl with the possibilities. The fire in the grate had burned low, casting a reddish glow in the dimly lit roam. From a distance she heard the closing of a door and guessed, from the dull thud, that it was the heavy oak front entry. She padded across to the window that overlooked the street and twitched back the draperies a few inches.

  A man stood on the stoop, carelessly adjusting the curly-brimmed beaver to an unfashionable angle before stuffing his hands in his pockets. Certainly not Peter! No gentleman with any pretensions to distinction distorted his coat with balled hands in his pockets, even when it was cold out and he didn’t have a pair of gloves with him.

  Surely Lord Verwood had worn a pair of gloves, even for a casual evening call on Peter. Actually, Amelia could see them hanging precariously from his pocket as he stepped down onto the pavement and stomped along Grosvenor Square, his limp less apparent from this height. What an odd sort of man he was! Not even a carriage waiting for him. Though South Street wasn’t t
hat far away, it was a particularly chilly evening. with the constant threat of rain clearly proclaimed in the heavy skies.

  Amelia dropped the draperies back into place when he had disappeared from sight. There seemed no time like the present, since she was fully awake and still fully clothed, to approach Peter with the mystery Lord Verwood presented. She could hear his familiar tread on the stairs and hastened to open her door. “Peter? I’d like to have a word with you before you go to bed,” she whispered across the echoing hall.

  Her voice had startled him, and the candleholder in his hand jerked slightly, illuminating a worried frown on his handsome features which he immediately dispersed with a brief smile. “Still up, Amelia? I thought you’d have been asleep hours ago.

  Leaving the door open, Amelia retreated into her room, waiting for him to follow. She took a seat in one of the two chairs at the far end used as a sitting area. Peter followed more slowly, lowering himself almost reluctantly onto the seat and placing the brass candleholder on the small oval table between them. The light it cast did not greatly brighten the large room which ran across half the house front. Peter looked tired in its feeble light.

  “Are you exhausted?” Amelia asked, concerned. “Did that ridiculous man upset you?”

  His head came up abruptly. “Ridiculous man? Do you mean Verwood?”

  “Who else? I’d have a care of him if I were you, Peter.”

  “I haven’t the first idea what you’re talking about. There’s nothing even faintly ridiculous about Verwood, for God’s sakes. Where did you get that idea?”

  Amelia smiled and shook her head. “Oh, you wouldn’t notice, Peter. He looks as though he raided someone’s wardrobe from ten years ago, and his manners could stand a great deal of improvement. Most of your friends are more amiable.”