Lords of Honor-The Collection

by Christi Caldwell

  Poppy’s heart thumped in her chest. The loudest thing in a suddenly still room. What her sister presented…what she proposed represented not only an ability for Poppy to remain in London, not being run off like the Tidemores’ latest scandal to be hidden, but seeing to the artistic design. There she’d select and set the aesthetic, influencing the artwork that would remain. A mark left by her.

  In the end, it was Jonathan who broke the silence. “If Poppy would like—”

  “Surely you are not seriously considering this as an option, Jonathan,” their mother squawked.

  “I would” Poppy said quickly. “I would like very much to join Penny.”

  Their mother slapped the kerchief down. “Absolutely not. Why…why…anything can go wrong with Poppy there, Jonathan.” As if Poppy weren’t present before them, the dowager countess lowered her voice to a scandalized whisper. “Anything.”

  Poppy bristled. “I resent that.”

  When her mother and brother glanced over with like expressions, she folded her arms defensively at her chest. “What?”

  Clearing her throat, Penelope slid between Poppy and the two most disapproving of the Tidemore lot. “I personally vow that no scandal shall befall Poppy as long as she resides with me.”

  “No further scandal,” Jonathan said tiredly, and then he leveled a sharp look at Poppy. “It is decided then. Poppy will reside at the Paradise.”

  Poppy repressed a smile.

  Why, it would seem her ruination hadn’t been so very terrible, after all.

  Chapter 3

  In making the decision to hand over the title of Earl of Maxwell without a fight, and losing all the properties and wealth that went with that respected title, Tristan Poplar, now the Baron Bolingbroke, came to appreciate that his ruin had been far worse than he’d anticipated.

  Seated in the middle of the empty ballroom floor, with his youngest sister in a like repose across from him, Tristan took another long swig of brandy from his flask.

  Except…

  He lingered his gaze on the letters etched with the gleaming silver. TP Earl of Maxwell.

  Turning the article over in his hands, he studied it, the value and quality previously unappreciated. Now, however, the silver represented wealth and prestige. Was the damned thing even his? Purchased with funds belonging to another man, the answer was decidedly…no.

  Tristan took another drink.

  “It is not all bad,” Claire murmured.

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “Well…there is…or…and…”

  As if on cue, a wail went up from somewhere outside the ballroom, followed by their mother’s diatribe, which came muffled and broken. “…you cannot…that does not belong to…put it in the pile with the other…”

  She released a sigh. “Yes, Yes. Well, it is certainly not good. I’ll allow you that.” Claire plucked the flask from his hand and took an impressive swallow.

  Yes, it was dire indeed when not even his eternal optimist of a sister could find a single bit of light in the entirely dark situation. He narrowed his eyes. A sister who had entirely too much ease downing liquor. “Where did you learn to drink spirits?”

  Claire wiped the back of her hand over her mouth, and then handed back Tristan’s—nay, the new Lord Maxwell’s—flask. “Oh, hush. I’m twenty-two, a woman grown. There are far greater things to worry about than my drinking habits.”

  And oddly, that proved true.

  The Poplar name had been eviscerated and—with the late baron responsible for stealing not only a child but that boy’s rightful place in the world—rightfully so.

  The previously inherited Maxwell title that had brought greater riches than ten other titles of the peerage combined—had reverted back to its correct owner.

  Tristan had instead taken over the title of Baron Bolingbroke; a more apt title for him, there wasn’t. The reverted title that brought no wealth and, certainly now, no respect.

  As such, there was only one thing a family could do when faced with such a change of circumstances and the destruction of one’s previously respectable standing in society—flee.

  Brightening, Claire picked her head up. “I’ve never been to the wilds of Devon. So, there is that.”

  “The optimist.” Tristan leaned over and ruffled the top of her curls.

  She swatted at his hand. “You are the one who’s always been the optimist.”

  “Yes,” he said wistfully. Even in Boney’s war, he’d seen a way out. He’d clung to hope, and fought back the demons of war that haunted him still, with memories of the friendships he’d forged, and the soldiers who’d gone on to live happy lives because of his actions in battle. “You are correct on that score.”

  She winked. “I usually am.”

  Of course, all that optimism had come before. Before all had been lost and his honor left in tatters about him.

  A delicate hand settled on his arm, bringing his attention over to his youngest sister. Her usually teasing features were set in a somber sketch better suited to a stranger, and the blade of guilt low in his stomach twisted all the more. “You’ve always spoken so fondly of the wilds of Dartmoor,” she said almost hesitantly. “I thought it might be a grand adventure for all of us.” Claire lowered her voice an octave and, as she spoke, gestured with her palms. “Hundreds upon hundreds of remote moorlands. Hills so high to climb one might almost touch the sky.” She let her arms fall to her side. “Unless…all of that was a lie.”

  “It wasn’t a lie,” he said tiredly. The troubled glimmer in her eyes managed to break through his self-focus on their circumstances. “Thick layers of peat cover much of the land,” he murmured. “It’s topped with bright green moss. The bogs of Devon, they say, are a pixie’s playground…” Claire’s eyes went so wide, she was transformed in his mind to the small girl who’d sat in awed silence through his telling about Dartmoor. Only, she wasn’t a child. She was an unmarried woman whose reputation was in tatters through no fault of her own.

  Claire stared questioningly at him, and he forced himself to finish that whimsical telling.

  “And when one walks the hills in dark, with the moon shining down, one could almost believe the legends that said those creatures do, in fact, dance throughout the land.”

  She sighed, and dropped her chin atop her knees. “It sounds magnificent.”

  “It is,” he said automatically. It was. Or it would be…under other circumstances brought about than the Poplars running into hiding.

  Claire brightened. “Then, it should be just fine. A grand adventure that we will all embark on together.” Just like that, with her usual childlike enthusiasm restored, she spoke on in an excited rush. “I don’t remember much of it. All my memories largely came from what you shared.”

  “Yes, well, you were young when the Maxwell title passed on to Father.”

  All the air was sucked from the ballroom.

  Passed on.

  Passed on suggested a rightful claim to holdings and title. Claims which the Poplars hadn’t a right to.

  Swiping the flask up from the spot beside him, he took another long drink of the fine French spirits.

  Claire cleared her throat. “At the very least, I am elated at the prospect of rediscovering the land I was born to.”

  Their mother’s cries spilled into the ballroom once more. “See that they a-are s-sent to D-D-Dartmooooooor,” she wailed.

  Claire turned a tense-looking smile up. “Even if Mother is not excited.”

  No, their mother had always abhorred their ancestral holdings and craved an existence in the heart of London. Her wants, however, were secondary to the two younger sisters reliant upon Tristan. He ran a hand over his face. “I’m sorry, Claire.” Sorry for so damned much. He should have seen her married. But there’d been no reason to rush her into any match. Or so he’d thought. “Oomph,” Tristan grunted, and rubbed at his upper arm smarting from an unexpected punch. “What in blazes was that for?”

  “For being so�
�so glum.” She punched him again. “I’m not worried about my circumstances, Tristan.”

  Another shriek filled the corridors, and Tristan and Claire both winced. “You cannot simply…that is mine…do you hear me…?”

  “I think they heard her all the way in Dartmoor,” Tristan muttered.

  “She is going to struggle mightily with this,” his sister conceded, in more somber tones that he’d ever heard her use. “I for one don’t much care if some proper lords and ladies give us the cut direct. If a gentleman doesn’t wish to know me or marry me because of actions beyond my control? Well, then I’m quite better off without such a bounder in my life.”

  He smiled wistfully. “When did you grow up?”

  “Years ago,” she shot back, and then she scooted over so that they both faced the entrance of a ballroom that had once been filled with guests to greet them. No more. All that had come and now gone. “I’m fine and Faye will be fine and Mother, too.”

  Her promise was punctuated by another shriek. “Do not take that…I said…”

  “In time, she’ll be fine, then,” Claire amended.

  No. The baroness would not be. She’d forever mourn her lost title and connections and position as a leading society hostess. She’d weep over the matches her two unwed daughters would not make.

  And one day, his romantic sisters, who’d been set on love matches, would turn cynical at finding there were no honorable gents to overlook the crimes of a family.

  “Perhaps.” He forced himself to concede that assurance his sister likely didn’t even realize she sought.

  A pair of footsteps echoed outside the ballroom.

  They both looked up, as their butler—now Percival Northrop’s butler—entered. “The Marquess of St. Cyr,” the loyal servant, who looked one more utterance away from crying, announced Christian Villiers, one of Tristan’s only two friends in the world.

  “See, we haven’t been shut out by all the peerage.”

  Tristan gave her a look.

  Claire stuck her tongue out. “Boo, I despise this serious side of you.” Hopping up, she went and greeted St. Cyr. “Christian.”

  “Lady Claire.” The marquess dropped a deep bow.

  “No need for formalities, Christian,” Claire scolded, as she went on tiptoe and kissed the taller man’s cheek.

  “How is he?” Christian murmured.

  “Quite dreary,” Tristan’s imp of a sister said on a less than discreet whisper. “Perhaps you can help.”

  “I hear you,” Tristan snapped.

  “See?” Claire continued in those exaggerated hushed tones. “You’ve been warned,” she said as she departed; lifting her fingers in a waggle, she didn’t even bother to glance back.

  Without hesitation, St. Cyr came over and joined Tristan on the floor. But then, the both of them having slept on muddied battlefields with horse shite and soil their only mattress, they’d returned not much ones for formalities.

  “How are they?” his friend asked without preamble.

  “Claire and Faye are putting on a brave show,” Tristan said, not pretending to misunderstand the other man’s question. “And Mother…”

  “You cannot take the silver,” the baroness screeched. “That is miiiiiine. I brought that—”

  St. Cyr’s lips curved up in a wry grin.

  “As one would expect,” both men said together.

  The brief moment of levity faded as quick as it had come. Tristan had gotten his fellow soldiers out of entrapments which by all rights should have seen them all dead. He’d survived countless frontal assaults in the head of battle.

  But this…this was one situation he could not put to rights.

  “Where are they going?”

  “Off to Dartmoor,” Tristan answered quietly. What was to have been a fortnight given to them had been snatched away. Tristan had just hours to empty out what did belong to him, and leave. To give his fingers something to do, he picked up his flask once more. It was the wrong thing to do. Those etched letters within gleamed back at him, taunting. Mocking.

  “And what of you?”

  “I cannot leave,” Tristan replied. His friend would know him enough to gather what Tristan’s own family had yet to realize—he wasn’t going to Dartmoor. Not yet. Someday. Eventually. But not now. Now, there was too much to be done. Too much to set to rights. Or attempt to, anyway. “If I flee, it will only fuel the scandal and the world’s perception of my guilt.”

  “Nor should you flee. It will, however, do well for your mother to escape some of the…” St. Cyr’s face pulled. “Attention.”

  “Indeed,” Tristan said dryly. Though, it was more likely that being relegated to the moors of Devon would only increase his mother’s histrionics.

  “And what is the plan, then?”

  That was the rub of it. Tristan could look down a field of two hundred enemies, with only fifteen men at his side, and know the precise course of attack, but in this instance, it was all a murky haze of confusion still. “I don’t know.” He finally brought himself to make that humbling admission. “I, Tristan Poplar, have no bloody idea how to disentangle myself from this. A fortnight ago”—before the scandal had broken and been splashed across every last scandal sheet—“I could have made an advantageous match that would have helped my sisters. And now?” Lifting the stolen flask in a mock toast to his fallibility, Tristan allowed himself another drink, before passing it over to his friend. St. Cyr accepted the small silver scrap, and set it down without so much as a glance. “Now, my name isn’t even good enough to secure membership to White’s and Brooks’s.” His previous membership had been revoked. “Other gentlemen and ladies turned on their heels and marched to the opposite end of the street when I was near.”

  “You’ve never been one to care about society’s opinion,” his friend pointed out quietly.

  “It is not the point,” he gritted out, dragging a hand through his hair.

  “Then what is the point?” St. Cyr put forward, with no recrimination to that question.

  It was…a humbling experience for one who’d been the ton’s previously beloved rogue. “Now, I cannot find a person to so much as look me in the eye.”

  His friend gave him a look.

  “You and Blackthorne excluded,” Tristan said gruffly of his two friends, who’d stuck beside him through hell on earth. Restless, Tristan jumped to his feet and began to pace. “How can I care for my sisters? I’ve a name that is blackened. I’ve barely two coins to rub together.” He stopped abruptly, and when he spoke, did so on a whisper, lest his mother or sisters chose this moment to be marching by. “And a townhouse in London with damned holes in the roof and rotted floorboards and an infestation of rats.” He could not allow his mother and sisters to remain or return to a place infested with rodents. “Rats, St. Cyr. Rats.” Unable to meet the other man’s eyes, Tristan turned and faced the dais where orchestras had once played and the marble floor where couples had once twirled throughout.

  And they would again one day…just with another family residing here.

  His senses heightened since his days at war, an inherited skill that would never leave him, he registered his friend coming over. “Here,” St. Cyr said gruffly, handing over a folded sheet of paper.

  Accepting the page, Tristan stared quizzically down at it. “What is this?” he asked, skimming the contents.

  The Paradise Hotel…En suite…Duration of Stay—Indefinite.

  Tristan whipped his head up. “I don’t… What…?”

  “My wife has spoken to her sister, Penelope; they want you to have this…for as long as you require it. Until you find your feet again.”

  Penelope, now the Viscountess Chatham, along with her husband, had allowed Tristan rooms at the viscount’s latest properties. Emotion clogged his throat: shame, regret, and along with those emotions, appreciation. “I—”

  “Do not say you cannot take it,” his friend interrupted. “That is what we do…one helps where one is able.”

&nb
sp; Tristan’s fingers curled reflexively around the corners of the page, and it crunched noisily in the expansive ballroom. “I don’t know what to say,” he said hoarsely.

  St. Cyr slapped him hard on the back. “There’s nothing you need to say. It will work out,” he vowed, and started for the door. “Oh, there’s but one more thing,” he added; lifting a finger up, he turned back.

  Tristan stared at his friend expectantly.

  “My wife offered that on one condition…” Oh, bloody hell. What now? “She insists that you do not do anything so foolish as find yourself a wealthy heiress and marry for anything less than love.”

  And for the first time since his world had been turned, flipped upside down, Tristan managed a real laugh; until mirth shook his frame. “You may assure Lady Prudence that the last thing she need worry after is me making a match…with anyone.”

  St. Cyr clicked his heels together. “I’ll be sure and relay that to my wife.”

  After he’d gone, Tristan focused on the gift his friend had given him.

  A place to stay, payment free, with a pledge required of him.

  It was, however, a pledge that had been all too easy to give…not because Tristan was too proud to make an advantageous match. Because he wasn’t. Following his family’s ignominious fall from grace, he would do anything to secure his sisters’ future. The truth, however, remained that not a single lady in the whole of England would trade her family’s fortune and respectability for a connection to Tristan’s besmirched title.

  The best he could hope for was that in the near future some other scandal replaced his.

  Until then, his name was as good as ruined.

  Chapter 4

  It could always be worse.

  Not much worse, however.

  Standing in one of the vacant rooms of the Paradise Hotel, Poppy, with her hands on her hips, assessed the spacious and very dreary chambers. From the Griffin mahogany secretary and matching carved folio stand to the Dutch Neoclassical carved cabinet, the rooms evinced opulence…at the cost of space.