Persistent Earl : Signet Regency Romance (9781101578841)

by Eastwood, Gail

  A small collection of other people had already been seated in the gallery when she had arrived, but she was certain that none had taken any notice of her. She was dismayed to discover, however, that she had not been the only latecomer. She realized that she must have been so preoccupied with her own thoughts and emotions that she had not noticed two gentlemen who had taken seats behind her. She would have to walk directly past them to make her escape.

  The two were young and fashionably dressed, she noted, regarding them indirectly through her veil. Friends of Stephen? No, she doubted such would be here. But they were far too young to have been involved in affairs of her father-in-law, which left only one other possibility—that they were friends of Richard. In that case, she thought it unlikely that they would know her, even without the veil.

  With an effort, Phoebe placed a shaky hand on the rail in front of her and got up. She kept her head down and walked straight past the two men, holding her breath. She saw the astonishment in their faces as she passed them and carefully started down the stairs. She prayed her legs would support her.

  As she gained the bottom, she began to feel steadier. She had made a dreadful mistake in coming, but she would be all right once she got outside, she was certain. When she saw a knot of people gathered under the church’s portico, however, she hesitated, sick with dismay. They would be scandalized that anyone would leave in the middle of a memorial service. The town would be buzzing with speculation later as the gossips tried to identify her.

  As she stood there, she heard the clatter of feet descending the stairs behind her. One of the young men she had passed in the gallery stopped beside her.

  “Are you ill?” he asked softly. “Can I assist you?”

  “No, thank you,” she managed to respond. It sounded like a croak to her own ears, and the fellow continued to stand there regarding her as if he had not heard. She shook her head. His presence left her no choice but to proceed on her way, out through the people in the portico and to the hired cab she prayed would still be waiting at the curb.

  There was no other way to do it but boldly and quickly. As she pushed her way through the small crowd, her head bowed, she noticed Sir Charles Mortimer, who had always been so kind to her, among those she startled. Would he guess who she was? When she at last reached the safety of the hackney, she discovered clutched in her hand a spring of rosemary that someone must have thrust at her as she went by. She inhaled its scent, blinking back tears. Rosemary, for remembrance. How dearly she wished she could forget!

  ***

  Up in the gallery, the young man who had approached her returned to his seat.

  “Think that was her?” his companion asked.

  “Who could say for certain? But the very fact that she was so concealed makes me guess that it was. Who else could it be? She seemed very shaken.”

  “Who else would have chosen to sit in the gallery? Or to leave in mid-service? Her small size was right. And her figure.” A snicker followed. “Nice little number, eh? I doubt the old man could have managed a ladybird on the side like her.”

  “No, this was definitely a lady. I think it had to be her. She was styled an Incomparable during the season when Brodfield’s brother snatched her up. No one else ever stood much of a chance with her. Well, at least we can report that she’s in London. That’s more than we knew before.”

  ***

  Major John Allen Jameson, Earl of Devenham, lay in a bed at the Clarendon Hotel listening to the low murmur of voices somewhere near him. He had not needed a doctor to tell him he was too ill to travel. He had known it from the way the room refused to stay still and from his own tendency to drift into sleep at the most unpredictable moments. The sweat that poured off his body, soaking the bed linens, was not merely due to London’s excruciating summer heat. The damned saber cut in his upper thigh had opened again during the journey to London, proving that through all the wretched weeks he had stayed in Brussels fighting fever and infection, the wound had never healed properly.

  Devenham let out a ragged breath that almost qualified as a sigh. He supposed he should be grateful that he was fighting infection again instead of Boney’s army, but he was not. He hated being sick. He would have preferred to face another charge by Napoleon’s Imperial Guards than lie helplessly in bed, dependent upon other people. He tried to shift his position and was rewarded with a fresh onslaught of pain radiating from just below his right hip. “Blast and confound it!” he exclaimed softly.

  The earl’s manservant, Mullins, and the doctor who had been speaking with him both turned toward Devenham, but their conversation did not halt. The doctor shook his head.

  “He is in no condition to leave his bed at all, but even a hotel as fine as the Clarendon is no place for a sick man. Has there been any reply yet to the notes he sent out?”

  Mullins’s reply was cut off by another oath from the bed. “As far as I know, I am neither dead nor deaf,” the earl said. “There is no need to discuss me in the third person as if I had already been called to the hereafter.”

  “You need to rest, my lord. Mullins can inform me—”

  “I can inform you of anything you need to know. Mullins has his own duties to attend to.” Devenham missed the knowing look that passed between his servant and the doctor.

  Precisely at that moment, a knock sounded on the door.

  “Note for his lordship,” announced the liveried footman Mullins admitted.

  The doctor tipped the young man, who was looking about with interest, and hustled him quickly out of the room again. “No need to encourage the curious,” he said to the earl. “The gossip mills are full enough of you as it is.”

  “Hm. A lot of nonsense about Waterloo, I expect. All rubbish.” Devenham was so weak, he struggled to break the seal on the letter. “I would rather be dead than be this helpless,” he groaned. “I am quite serious.”

  “Your condition is serious,” cautioned the doctor. “After your time in Brussels, I had not thought I would need to remind you not to exert yourself in any way. Would you allow me to read you the letter?”

  Devenham let the paper flutter from his fingers onto the blanket and closed his eyes in resignation. A moment later he was asleep.

  The doctor retrieved the note and quickly scanned the contents. “It is from Sir Edward and Lady Allington,” he told Mullins. “They have agreed to take him in.”

  Chapter Two

  Phoebe had received the news of the earl’s impending visit with deep misgivings. She had been shaken by her failure to get through Lord Tyneley’s memorial service, and she doubted her ability to cope with the emotional demands she knew nursing the earl would place on her. Engaged in her own struggle to restore balance in her life, the last thing she needed just now was to have dealings with a man—any man, let alone this one.

  Why had Edward asked this of her? She had felt too much in his debt to resist, yet she dreaded what lay ahead. She truly felt sympathy for Lord Devenham’s physical sufferings, but how would she handle being so close to a man again? Would not her feelings about Stephen rush back to torment her? Would the walls she had built around her heart protect her?

  “You would think it was the great Wellington himself who was coming,” she remarked with some asperity to Lizzie, the nursery maid, as they readied the children for an escape to Hyde Park on the morning after Lord Tyneley’s service. The entire house had been in an uproar since the early hours, the servants flitting about like a flock of jittery sparrows and Judith asking the same questions about their preparations over and over. Edward was anxious and grumpy, and the children were so excited and curious about the “true war hero” who was coming to stay with them, Phoebe thought it best to get them out of the house altogether.

  The earl’s notoriety was great enough that even she had heard of him. She did not think they had ever crossed paths in the days when she ha
d circulated socially, but the doings of such a man were always grist for the gossip mills and reached even the Allingtons’ dinner table. His recent return from overseas had been heralded in the newspapers, and stories of his battlefield heroics were circulating freely amid speculation over what level of promotion he would receive and which ladies of the ton would next catch his eye. Phoebe’s heart sank every time she thought of the unwelcome attention that his removal to the Allington home was bound to attract.

  Just as she fastened the last button on little William’s jacket, she heard the gentle patter of rain against the windowpanes and went to investigate. She had viewed the overcast skies simply as relief from the previous day’s heat.

  “Oh, dear, perhaps it won’t last,” she said, but she noticed the sky had darkened. The words had no sooner left her mouth than the water began to come down in torrents. At the same precise moment, she saw a closed landau, a barouche, and a baggage wagon come to a stop in the street far below at the front of the house. Major Lord Devenham had arrived.

  It would be just now, Phoebe thought, lumping the earl and the rain together in her annoyance and frustration. The earl’s visit seemed ill omened, definitely. Ill omened and ill timed.

  The pounding of the knocker echoed through the house, and the sound of an answering hubbub downstairs at the front door quickly tipped the children as to what was going on. Phoebe cast a despairing eye over them, shaking her head. Dorrie’s dark curls and the heads of her three brothers in varying shades of brown and russet were quite literally bobbing up and down with excitement.

  “I suppose it would be too cruel to make you stay in the schoolroom,” Phoebe said with a sigh. It was obvious that Lizzie, too, had been infected by the children’s enthusiasm, although she was making a visible, valiant effort to suppress the fact. Most of the time it was hard to remember that the young servant girl was only a few years older than Dorrie.

  “All right, if you promise to be very, very quiet and as invisible as ghosts, you may sit on the stairs up above the second floor landing, where you can see but you won’t be in the way,” Phoebe said soberly. “Promise?”

  “Promise,” came the reply from Dorrie, David, and Thomas.

  Six-year-old William did not join in the reply. “Aunt Phoebe, are there really any ghosts?”

  “I’ve certainly never seen or heard one, William.” She bent to give him a reassuring hug. “But that’s how quiet I want you to be—so nobody knows you are there. Can you do that?”

  The little boy nodded, clutching the ball he had planned to take to the park. “After this, are we still going to the park?”

  “No, love, not in the rain. We’ll find a game to play instead.”

  Phoebe straightened and, patting the child affectionately on the head, led the little group from the schoolroom to the top of the stairs. There they settled themselves to watch when the proceedings below should come into view.

  Above all things, Phoebe wished to keep out of the way. She knew she would be called when she was needed. Few people were aware that she was a resident in this house, and she hoped to keep things that way for as long as possible. Certainly, Lord Devenham’s presence here would not be secret for long. The neighbors were probably already buzzing about the string of carriages in the street outside. The last thing she wanted was to become a new subject of gossip, with her name linked to the earl’s.

  The commotion in the entry hall was quite evident to the small party gathered on the stairs even though they had no view of it. The stamping of wet feet, the harried voices, the thumpings, bumpings, and oft-repeated opening and closing of the door suggested a household upheaval of major proportions.

  “It sounds like an entire regiment has arrived,” whispered eight-year-old Thomas. The mixture of awe and wistfulness in his tone showed clearly how much he wished it were so.

  “What could be taking them so long?”

  Phoebe turned to Dorrie to reply, but the words died on her lips. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the ball William had been so carefully guarding slip out of his grasp. In the suspended moment before she could react, she watched it bounce gently from the second step to the fourth and on down, in increasing arcs with increasing speed, off the wall and around the bend in the stairs. With a little cry, Phoebe leaped up and flew after it.

  She was not in time to stop its progress on the second floor landing. On the first floor landing the ball careened off the column supporting Edward’s prized statue of Aristotle, leaving the great statesman tottering as the bouncing projectile continued down the next flight of stairs. Close behind it, Phoebe entertained a horrible vision of the earl’s entourage meeting the flying missile head-on as they started up the steps at the bottom.

  Fortunately, she arrived there before they did. She chased the ball as it bounced off the base of the longcase clock in the passage and managed to capture it just in time to see the large form of a litterman bearing down on her. It was too late to retreat up the stairs. She hastily stepped back into the shallow recess beside the clock.

  The litter carrier was at the head of a sizable procession that stretched back toward the front of the house, leaving a mass of wet boot marks on the polished marble floor. Behind him was a second litterman of remarkably similar appearance and build. Both were shedding water from the shoulder capes attached to their coats, and they carried slung between them a litter with the blanket-draped form of another man, who could be none other than the earl.

  Beyond them, Phoebe could see what appeared to be a servant, a doctor, Edward, several of the Allington servants, and a number of porters bearing trunks and boxes. At the far end she saw Judith and Mrs. Hunnicutt, the housekeeper, wearing identical expressions of concern. Sir Edward’s butler, Maddocks, was making his way along this prodigious line, apparently attempting to reach the head to lead the way upstairs. The littermen stopped right in front of Phoebe, at the foot of the stairs.

  Phoebe tried to resist showing any interest in the earl. Viewing him in such a helpless state seemed somehow improper, equivalent to an act of voyeurism. It was a foolish notion, she knew, since she would be tending him in just such a helpless state for some time to come. But lying on the litter he seemed more exposed, more vulnerable, than he would be safely settled in a bed. She battled briefly with her curiosity, but the outcome was predictable.

  Devenham lay motionless on the litter, his eyes closed, his brown hair limp upon his pillow, dark where rain or sweat had made it wet. Phoebe bit her lip as she noted the earl’s pallor and stillness. Despite his obvious illness, he was more handsome than she had imagined, and she had already allowed that anyone with such a reputation as his would have to be uncommonly favored. There was a softness to his features, at least in repose, that she had not expected in a man of war. She had expected hard angles where she saw graceful, gentle lines. The flare of his nose and the prominence of his cheekbones were in perfect proportion to the smooth expanse of his brow and the curve of his jaw. She was horrified to find she was especially drawn to his mouth and the noticeable cleft in his chin.

  This is going to be even more difficult than I supposed, Phoebe thought distractedly, feeling the attraction uncurling deep inside her like a cat awakened from a nap. Hardening herself against it, she pulled her attention away from Devenham long enough to notice Maddocks taking his place ahead of the littermen.

  The two burly fellows shifted their grip on the litter and mounted the stairs after the servant. The jostling and change of angle must have disturbed the earl, for as the procession started up, his eyes flew open, and Phoebe saw they were an unforgettable shade of blue—the azure of a clear October sky. She wondered if he had any idea where he was.

  She thought for a moment he seemed to look at her. Then she could see no more as the next figures in the procession mounted the stairs in turn, blocking her view. Every person in the line would have to pass right by her. Some part
of her hoped, ostrich-like, that by ignoring them she could herself be ignored. It was exactly this sort of exposure she had wanted to avoid.

  “We will probably be needing you in another ten minutes,” Edward said as he passed, giving Phoebe a most curious look. No doubt he was surprised to see her there. She realized that she must indeed look peculiar, standing there staring with William’s ball still clutched to her chest.

  ***

  “Did you ever see anyone so handsome?” gushed Dorrie as soon as Phoebe rejoined her charges at the top of the stairs. “Did you manage a good look at him?”

  “He doesn’t look very old,” said Thomas with obvious disappointment.

  “He doesn’t look very well,” David observed with a ten-year-old’s superior attitude.

  “Will we get to see him again?” William asked.

  Phoebe handed William the errant ball and motioned the children back toward the schoolroom. “The earl is very ill indeed,” she told them. “I doubt you will be seeing much of him for a while.” When they voiced their disappointment, she reminded them that he had not come on a social call. “He is here because he is too ill to go to his own home, and you must not expect him to pay much mind to you, even when he is better.” She doubted such a rake would have patience for young children.

  “Remember, too, that I shall be spending part of my time helping with his care. You must promise to mind Lizzie and not get into mischief when I cannot be with you.”

  “He isn’t married, is he?”

  “Is he truly a major in the hussars?”

  “Do you think he might die?”

  “What are we going to play now?”

  Phoebe put her hands over her ears and shook her head. “Children! I shall be able to answer all of your questions much better if you’ll wait. I have to go down in just a few minutes. The doctor will have instructions for me, and I will probably learn a little more about Lord Devenham. And yes, William, you are all going to play a game now, with Lizzie. What shall it be? Hunt-the-button?”