by Edith Layton
“And after that,” he said, “there shall be an Austrian countess, then an impoverished French lady, and then an avaricious Spanish courtesan, I believe. I shall see to it that I loose my foolish heart to a legion of unworthy ladies over the next decade, so that I may be understood in my continuing absence.”
“Oh Robin,” Julia said, forgetting her own sorrow at the sadness she saw reflected in his face, “I am so sorry.”
“Oh don’t be,” he said with surprise, looking closely at her, “for I’m happy enough in my life, Julia. I’ve Edwin and the vicar and my other friends. I’ve made the best decision for myself, don’t fret for me,” he continued smiling at her brightly.
“Blue,” he said suddenly, with reproof, “blue, Julia? When you know how I prefer you in pink?”
She was confused until she realized that he was smiling again and looking at her frock, which was a light azure with a darker blue overskirt.
“But it is not me you’re dressing for now, is it?” he asked, and then went on in a low voice before she could reply, “Yes. I did you a very good turn that night. I may sometimes regret all that I have given up, but then, I can never regret all that I have brought about. Julia,” he said abruptly, bending to kiss her cheek and whispering rapidly, “be a good girl now, and take care of yourself, and make forgiving a habit, and you will be a very happy girl—ah, you are right—woman. Good-bye, love.” Then, releasing her hands that he had caught up in his, he bowed and turned back to Nicholas, who had stood watching them.
“I won’t wait for the sails to go up and wave until you’re a dot in the distance, that sort of farewell is maudlin. Good-bye, Old Nick,” he said, putting his hand upon his uncle’s shoulder.
“Good-bye, Robin Goodfellow,” the baron said, putting his hand over his nephew’s.
Then Robin gave them both a brilliant smile that went no further than his lips, and he clapped his hands together, bowed, and turned away. He was gone and out of sight even before the echo of his handclap had faded in their ears.
When the last sight of Robin hurrying down the wharf had vanished, Nicholas turned and looked at Julia. He was frowning as he reached into his jacket’s inner pocket. “Blast,” he muttered, “this jacket may be everything that causes Makepiece’s heart to flutter, but it’s damned inconvenient just the same. Comfort’s been sacrificed for line, and I glitter in the sunlight as though I were all in spangles. Yes, I am wearing it today, or else the fellow would have driven me mad. I decided that if I had to put the thing on, it might as well be while I was still on foreign soil. I don’t know when I shall return, and there is every possibility that I’ll be lucky enough to be too stout and gouty to fit into it when I next visit these shores.”
As he continued to take papers from his inner pocket, Julia noticed that he was indeed looking even more elegant this morning than usual. The jacket that he complained of was a trifle excessive in its cloth and cut, having a rich and shining silver thread prominent among the blue ones, and it fit his trim form as though it had been put on with an artist’s brush rather than a valet’s assistance. But although it may have been a trifle dandyish for its wearer’s taste’s, Julia thought it so dashing that she could only nod her head in reply to him.
“Ah, here it is,” he sighed at last. And then, looking at Julia very soberly, he gave her two envelopes. “This one,” he said as he handed her the first, which had her name upon it in spidery handwriting, “is a glowing reference from my friend, the fictitious Lady Cunningham. Lady Preston, my friends, and my family will all swear to her existence. It could probably net you employment with the Queen, it’s such a high recommendation. No, actually, I’ll go so far as to say that if royalty were a position filled by merit, it would make you Queen. It’s really very impressive,” he said more seriously.
Then he handed her the second envelope and said hurriedly, “That is a bank check for your wages. It’s a goodly sum, but never enough, I know. There is no way I can pay you to recompense you for the discomfort, fear, and brutishness of your experiences, but at least the money is a substantial sum.”
As he stood and gazed down at her with a worried, anxious frown, she found her wits enough to protest as she handed the envelope back to him, “But there’s no need to pay me for what transpired. It’s as I told Robin, there can be no blame attached to him for what occurred.”
He smiled wryly before he said softly, “No, Julia, you have it the wrong way around. It is the wages for your experiences at my hands that you are being paid for.”
“Ah,” she said, and was all she could say. Because to refuse his money would be to declare her feelings for him, and to accept it was to accept the truth she had struggled against all night and all morning: that she had been in his employ, and that her only chance for a future with him would be to continue in his employ.
Without attempting to open them to so much as to glance at their contents, she sought to fold the thick envelopes double so that she could stuff them into her reticule, and her struggles to do so fortunately kept her from raising her eyes to his as she murmured, “Thank you, so kind.”
“Then you are satisfied? We are even at last?” he asked, as she managed to pull the strings of her purse tightly about the edges of the envelopes.
“Yes, yes,” she replied, wondering distractedly if she ought to make her good-byes to him now. She would board the boat soon and then she might not see him again until they landed. Even then she would speedily hire a coach to take her home and so this might be the last chance for private speech with him.
But again, it was as though he were privy to her thoughts, for he said gruffly, somewhat angrily, “I may not have a chance for private speech with you again for some time. No doubt your loyal chaperone and maidservant will close about you like bramble bushes did around the sleeping beauty when we are aboard ship. Then, when we arrive no doubt you’ll be all haste to be home. And then I’ll have to manufacture a thousand excuses to get to your home and visit with you, and I’ll have to endure suspicious looks from your family, or make ridiculous excuses for my presence to your new employers. It’s not easy for a gentleman to seek out the companionship of a governess or a companion, without he looks like a bounder, or she, like an adventuress,” he complained.
“So, as they’re having a bit of trouble lading that pianoforte, or whatever it is in that crate they’re unsuccessfully trying to drag aboard ship,” he said, glancing rapidly over his shoulder to the packet, where a team of sweating sailors were attempting to haul a huge packing case over the edge of the deck, “I’ll speak now as I find the time to do so. But I warn you, Julia, I will not forever hold my peace after that. I intend to make convincing you of my earnest my life’s ambition. I seize the moment now, but I promise I’ll continue to badger you—Lord,” he breathed in exasperation, “if I cannot even make a proposal to you without hectoring you again, how can I ever expect you to believe in my good intentions?”
“Oh no!” Julia cried out at once, raising one hand to her lips in her distress. “Pray, oh pray do not make me that offer again! For I’d like to part from you with good feeling and—”
“Julia,” he said, cutting off her speech by taking her shoulders in his hands and looking at her keenly, “you don’t understand. I do not make the same offer. You would be a dreadful mistress, believe me. Yes,” he said with a smile at last warming his features, “you would. Don’t even consider it as an occupation for a moment. You haven’t an ounce of guile, you’d never flatter, much less cuddle, when you didn’t feel like it, and you’d go up like a skyrocket if a fellow so much as looked at another female. No, a chap would be demented to want you as his mistress. But he’d have to be certifiable, or at least as mad as you thought me when we first met, if he didn’t want you for his wife. And I do, Julia, I do.”
“But you can’t,” she said, knowing even as she said so, that he did, for that bond of commonality they shared could not be so right in everything else and so wrong only in this. But she dared not b
elieve, because she had been so disastrously wrong when she had believed in love and in a loved one’s promises before. So she thought of all the reasonable reasons against their union, and as she thought them she spoke them as though they were some incantation she chanted to ward off disappointment and deceit again.
“I am a commoner without a penny piece,” she protested, closing her eyes against the hope she saw in his and shaking her head vigorously in denial with every word she uttered until slips of her golden hair blew free about her face, “and I have no reputation as well as no birth. I am known to have run off with your nephew in the past. And I have worked for my livelihood, and I am past the first blush of youth, and what would people say?”
“And I am leagues in love with you,” he replied, holding her shoulders tightly, as though he feared she would run from him, “and well you know it. As to the rest, everyone would congratulate me for winning such a bride, and pity Robin for falling out with you. As I do. Poor lad, perhaps I pity him even more for that than for anything else of his condition. And I would never marry for money, and none would expect it of me,” he went on, never taking his eyes from her, more serious than she could ever recall him being.
“And my family would approve, perhaps it is yours you ought worry about, for they might never trust one of my class again. In fact, my stepfather would be pleased beyond words,” he said, his lips now curling upward at the thought. “He’s a great believer in breeding humans as one would cattle, and would be thrilled at my bringing new blood into the family to ensure vigor and improve our unsteady line. As for your age, you are but a babe, and as for your working, it was an honorable alternative to your living on pity. Julia,” he said imploringly, “these all are as nothing, you know. I list them only to placate you. The answer should come from how you feel about me. Julia, do you care for me, as I do for you?”
He had been sensitive enough to her hard-learned caution that he did not demand she declare her love. She had only to agree with him. But habits of years cannot be unlearned in an hour, even with love as their tutor. Julia looked into his clear, knowing eyes and found that she could not at that moment, for her life, utter the truth: that he was her life.
He saw her indecision, her inability to respond at once. He began to speak again, but thought better of it, and with one swift motion, he pulled her to himself and kissed her long and hard.
The sailors aboard the packet almost lost their difficult cargo overboard as they spied the elegant gentleman and the beautiful blond lady on the edge of the dock lost in a fervent embrace beneath their very eyes. The French seamen were enchanted and declared the couple their countrymen, on the basis of the gentleman’s garb and the lady’s evident cooperation. Some of the English hearties protested that while the lady might be French, the gentleman’s decisive, no-nonsense manner marked him as one of theirs, and wagers were being laid on the matter before the couple parted.
But the pair were oblivious to all but each other, and when Nicholas drew back from Julia, he said on a shaken breath, “You do love me, I’d swear it. We are companion spirits. Can you not say it, Julia? Can you accept me and say that you will have me?”
Julia rested within his clasp and watched those lips that could say and do so many delicious things to her. And then, as though she wanted to be on record as having voiced every last objection before she embraced happiness as completely as she had embraced him, she said shyly, “Are you absolutely sure, Nicholas? Have you forgotten all the things you’ve done and said to me?”
She hadn’t considered her exact words, or even paid much attention to them. After all these weeks of doubt, she had only wished for the felicity of being asked just once more, to be fully certain of his meaning before she gave her answer. So she was surprised when he drew back from her, a look of bitter wrath crossing over his face.
“So you still do not entirely trust me?” he asked bleakly. “It is because of how I treated you when we first met. You said then that you would never forgive that blow, and now I see it has indeed come back to haunt us. I had feared as much. When we are ninety-odd, Julia, and you grow cross with me, shall you still fling that blow back in my face as I delivered it to yours? Lord,” he said shaking his head sadly, “I wish there were some way to even the score so that the thing were as dead and gone as the tangle of lies which begot it. I would wish us to begin our life together with a clean slate. Is there no way that I can erase that insult from your heart and mind?”
A moment before, his angry reaction to her question had caused Julia to fear that her greed for reassurance had mined her future. But now she saw that his guilt might do the same. And now, suddenly, she saw how easily joy could still be snatched from her grasp. Then she knew that she was done with trusting the outcome of her life to the vagaries of fate, and that if she were to win happiness, she must seize it in her own hands. So she thought quickly even as she continued to lean her head against his shoulder, her two hands limp against his chest.
“Ah no, Nicholas,” she whispered at last, “I do not forget it. How can I when you cannot? But I shall not let it come between us. I promise. You will not need to erase it from my mind or my heart, my love.”
At her words, his eyes widened and then he gazed searchingly into her uplifted face. What he saw there, the radiant mixture of love and yearning and laughter, and something else, something delightful and roguish in her smile that he could not define, caused him to take in his breath with wonder.
Which was just as well in view of what happened next.
For in a moment the spellbound sailors saw the expensively styled gentleman plummet backward into the murky waters. What they had not seen was the beautiful lady’s two white and dovelike hands straighten themselves against the gentleman’s broad chest and deliver him a capable push when he was off guard, strong enough to topple him over the brink.
The sailors lowered ropes and grappling hooks immediately to save the gentleman, for no one of them wished to plunge into the bilge-encrusted waters unless they must. Then they noted that though he stayed afloat he seemed to be coughing and spluttering a great deal. A few brave seamen had resigned themselves to plunging into the noisome waters to assist him when they realized that he was not drowning so much as whooping with laughter.
When he had been safely pulled to the dock by ropes, and a servant who was clearly his valet had snatched a blanket from a surprised carriage horse to toss about his drenched shoulders, he continued to stagger with laughter. And then, when the sodden gentleman went up to the beautiful lady and laid his streaming arms about her shoulders and she did not even pull away despite the ruination of her fashionable gown, the English sailors fell to collecting their debts. For it was clear, the French sailors sighed, that no one of their countrywomen would allow such treatment to a frock of such high fashion, and certainly, no one of their men would lack so much savoir faire as to come, dripping and sputtering, to his love. The two were English, they concluded, and in the saying of their own tongue, drunk as a pair of lords.
“Wretch,” the baron breathed at last, when he could, gazing into Julia’s apprehensive eyes. “But thank you. Now, indeed, we are even. Now will you have me?”
“Now,” sighed Julia with content, snuggling close into his reeking, streaming clasp, “yes.”
October 1815
17
The wind outside the bedroom window was throwing itself against the panes with such force as to cause them to rattle in their casements. Makepiece sniffed. It wasn’t just the cold of the October day which made him deliver himself of such an ill-bred sound, although the chill of this autumn was enough to creep into any man’s bones. It was instead the thoughts of the increasingly difficult position he found himself in.
He could understand, not condone necessarily, but understand, he thought, for he was a fair-minded man, that a gentleman might not wish to take his valet with him on his honeymoon. So he hadn’t said a word on that head when he had been left behind at Greenbriar House after his master h
ad been married last month. But now that the Baron Stafford had returned he had been ordered to remove all of his master’s clothes and personal possessions from his own chamber and install them in the Queen Anne bedroom. For his master was, incredibly enough, going to share his bedroom quarters with his new bride!
It wasn’t done, Makepiece thought morosely. It was not at all the thing. It would be remarked upon by any visiting gentleman’s gentleman. But he continued to pack the remainder of his master’s clothes even as he rued his actions. For all in all, the baron was a fair employer and a pleasure to dress, since a valet’s efforts could not go unremarked when displayed upon such a fine figure of a man. And then, too, there was the lady Julia’s maidservant to consider. Celeste was a level-headed female and it would be difficult to continue an increasingly interesting relationship if he were to leave the baron’s employ.
Makepiece had been as full of sighs as a fireside bellows since he had begun his chores, but when he chanced to take a certain object from his master’s chest of drawers, he recoiled as though he had uncovered a cobra. So when the baron came into his one-time quarters to find a cape that had not yet been transferred to his new rooms, he saw his valet standing holding an object over a waste basket, an expression of deepest sorrow upon his face.
What ails the fellow now? the baron wondered. He knew his man had been very miffed at having been left behind for the past month. But he refused to explain to his valet that he had been delighted beyond words to discover that a fellow didn’t need clothes on his honeymoon, even at a fashionable spa. Or at least not when he was fortunate enough to be wedded to an adored and adoring, increasingly abandoned bride. Still, he had to say something to Makepiece now at any rate, since the fellow looked as though his heart were breaking.
