Jane finally stepped forward, worry about Ron outweighing any feelings of embarrassment she had at being caught in dishabille in her dressing room with her husband’s best friend. “How is Ron? Were you able to settle him?”
“Salt!” Sir Antony suddenly blurted out in the silence.
“Do get up, Tony,” the Earl responded flatly, coming further into the room as Sir Antony scrambled to his feet and set his wig to rights then stood to attention like a naughty schoolboy. He addressed his wife. “Ron was sleeping peacefully when I left him tucked up in bed just a little after sunrise. I promised that if he is very much better this afternoon, he and Merry can stay the night in the nursery. They are both looking forward to seeing Caro.”
“What? Ron was ill again?” Sir Antony blurted out. “Egad! That’s two nights in a row! No wonder you look fagged to death.” He glanced from Salt to Jane and back again, all embarrassment at being caught trespassing in the most private of the Countess’s rooms extinguished with his concern for his nephew. “Salt, you really must put a stop to Diana’s nonsense, or I will. If you don’t believe what I told you in the carriage about your happiness and—”
“I believe you.”
“—Diana’s petty jealous anger and Ron’s illness—Oh! You do?”
“Yes. I merely had to have the blindfold removed to see what’s been going on, for which I thank you—and my wife.”
Jane touched the Earl’s embroidered upturned cuff. “You have taken the matter in hand?”
“Yes,” he responded but said no more because he was not to be diverted from his displeasure at Sir Antony’s trespass. His gaze flickered from his wife’s state of undress to the broken dish and saucer by the chaise longue and then fixed on his best friend. That he chose to deliver Sir Antony a short, sharp dressing down in the French tongue signaled to Jane that he was not only furious but had no wish to sully her ears with his derogatory vitriol. The contrition on Sir Antony’s face confirmed her suspicions.
“You have the damned idiocy, no, ill-mannered selfishness, to invade these private rooms unshaven and still in your ball costume and I am no longer left wondering why the latest filth circulating drawing rooms has it that you are tupping my wife?”
“Salt, I—”
The Earl raised an imperious hand. “Je ne veux pas t’écouter.”
“But—Parbleu! You must listen to what I have to say! It isn’t what you think! I was only—”
“You are not privy to my thoughts. Va-t-en!”
Sir Antony bravely drew himself up and looked the Earl between the eyes. It was an unnerving and unpleasant experience for a young man who worshipped his mentor. He openly eyeballed him nonetheless. “The reason I came uninvited and unwanted here is because I needed—”
“Your needs are supremely unimportant to me at this moment,” Salt interrupted, and continued in English, a glance at Jane to see if she was attending. “If you think I don’t know you got yourself pickled last night all because of Caro’s absurd announcement and, feeling sorry for yourself, came here seeking my wife’s sympathy for your pathetic behavior, then it is you who have gruel for brains. You will go to Arlington Street, get yourself together, change into something befitting a man who has aspirations to strut the diplomatic stage in St. Petersburg, and be back here in my bookroom within the hour to meet with Count Vorontsov. His Excellency has condescendingly permitted you an hour of his precious time. Now get out and allow me a moment’s peace with her ladyship.”
“He really was in a dreadful state of anxiety,” Jane said in defense of Sir Antony when left alone with the Earl.
“That’s no excuse for his ungentlemanly conduct,” he said, a pointed stare at her free-flowing hair, brown-eyed gaze dipping to her breasts and fixing on her bare toes. His eyes came back up to her flushed face. “When I am not here, her ladyship’s maid should be with her at all times. I had presumed Willis had given the Countess the lecture on what rooms of her apartments are public and those that are strictly private, off-limits to everyone except her husband. I won’t have my wife the subject of servant gossip.”
“And what about me, my lord?” Jane asked, chin up.
Salt frowned. “I am talking about you.”
“No. You are talking at me, as if I am someone quite removed from this poor creature that is gossiped about by servants. Although… I don’t know what the servants could possibly find to gossip about the Countess of Salt Hendon that would outshine the Earl’s performance last night. He makes love to his wife in his carriage, carries her indoors, both of them practically naked, and in full view of his lordship’s butler, under-butler and a handful of footmen. Not to mention being caught out in this morally depraved state of undress by a young lady yet to make her come out. No, I fail to see what the servants could possibly find to gossip about her, when his lordship has provided a surfeit of servant gossip about them both.”
This forced a tired laugh from him and he drew her into his embrace and kissed her forehead.
“Touché, my lady. I can always rely on you to bring the planets back into alignment. But I’m still annoyed at Tony,” he added seriously. “I may consider him family, but only I am permitted the arousing sight of you in undress with your hair down your back.”
Jane blushed and dropped her chin. “Is that what you said to him in French?” she asked shyly. “Poor Tony was in such a state over Caroline’s teasing pronouncement that she is engaged to Captain Beresford.”
He sighed his annoyance and took Sir Antony’s place on the chaise longue, avoiding the broken tea dish and saucer, and drew Jane to sit beside him. “I really do wonder at Tony’s ability to withstand the rigors of diplomatic life abroad if he can’t put two coherent sentences together in my company when I’m displeased with him. I’m told he’s a very competent and astute politician, and I do trust his judgment, but…”
“It’s that pedestal,” she replied, snuggling up to him. “You need to let him see that you can climb down off it from time to time. When you’re displeased you could intimidate the Sun King. And your nostrils quivered.”
“Did they?” Salt laughed with genuine good humor. “Poor Tony. But if he thinks, after all these years, I don’t know he is wig over toes in love with Caro, then he truly does have gruel between his ears!”
“What are you going to do about it?”
Salt smiled slyly and stifled a yawn. “What any good parent worth his coin would do. Let him sweat it out for as long as it takes him to get up the courage to approach me. Besides, I want Caro to have a Season and receive at least a dozen inappropriate marriage proposals before she settles on Tony.”
“How cruel, but how utterly fatherly of you!”
He looked down at her hand in his and played with her fingers, saying quietly, “You have a hundred questions for me about Caro, don’t you?”
A hundred questions Jane certainly had. But there was only one question concerning the Lady Caroline Sinclair that was uppermost in her mind. As always she took the direct approach.
“Whose child is she, Magnus?”
FIFTEEN
JANE’S QUESTION elicited an embarrassed laugh, but the Earl was not smiling.
“As always, Lady Salt, you are woefully frank.”
“There is no other way of asking, is there?”
“God help me when Caro has her come out,” he responded, continuing to avoid the question. “I’m dreading that day’s arrival. She’ll have ten suitors on her hook by the end of the first week.”
“Your apprehension is only natural. Any parent of a girl of marriageable age must feel the same way,” she answered matter-of-factly, ignoring his equivocation for the time being. “Parents want their daughters to travel down the right path to matrimony, to find an eligible gentleman of the same social standing. But such eligibility does not necessarily mean a happy marriage, does it? Those parents who truly care for their daughter’s happiness give equal weight to the suitability of the husband, as well as to his eligibility, don’t t
hey?”
“Yes. I want Caro to make a suitable match, but equally I want her to be happy,” he answered quietly, still playing with her fingers. He looked into her eyes. “Not an aspiration your father had for you, was it?”
Jane smiled ruefully, face hot with embarrassment for a father for whom she had been a sad disappointment.
“True. My personal happiness was never a consideration for Sir Felix. But in those few moments I spent in your sister’s company, it is evident your relationship with Caroline is very different from the one I had with my father,” she continued, determined not to be diverted from her original question. “I would never have dared call my father glum chops in that playful way, in any way. Nor would he have responded by chasing me up the stairs in an equally playful manner.” Her brow furrowed. “I don’t understand why I see the resemblance between Caroline and the Allenbys when others do not, but perhaps it is because I have lived amongst them for most of my life. Caroline and my stepmother could be mistaken for mother and daughter.”
Salt let go of her hand. “Caro is nothing like Rachel!”
Jane smiled.
“Now who needs spectacles of comprehension, my lord? I was not referring to my stepmother’s lax morals or her need to have her beauty constantly praised. You may think me quite depraved for thinking so, but it is my belief that had my father not been a-a drunk and been more attentive to his wife’s needs… For all her vanity and silliness, my stepmother did love my father…” She paused and swallowed and bravely went on under his unblinking gaze. “If he’d paid more attention to her in the bedchamber I doubt she’d have gone elsewhere.”
“My dear Lady Salt,” the Earl said with mock indignation. “You shock me. When did you reach this most startling conclusion?”
Jane lowered her gaze. “Since our wedding night,” she confessed. “I enjoy making love with you because you have made it enjoyable for me.” She smiled up at him from under her long lashes, saying demurely, “You know full well you have thoroughly ruined me, my lord.”
Salt’s eyebrows drew sharply over the bridge of his long thin nose, Jane’s compliment evoking an echo of her words that first night together as man and wife. Words he now realized he in his guilt had totally misconstrued. His face grew hot. “Ruined? Spoiled. Indulged. That’s what you mean,” he said gruffly, shame making him sound harsh.
“Yes. Yes, of course,” she replied with a start, wondering why he was suddenly ill at ease by her honest confession about his prowess as a lover. She impulsively kissed his cheek. “It was a compliment, silly. Now tell me about Caroline—”
“Jane, I—”
“—and her connection to the Allenbys.”
“No one sees what you see because it is too fantastical to be believed. The Allenbys and the Sinclairs have not spoken or socialized these past eighteen years, despite living on neighboring estates. Yet, Caro’s resemblance to the Allenbys is strong enough that Tony, who met your stepmother on only one occasion, asked me if he had met her before. Who could have foreseen at her birth that she would take after the Allenbys in form and the Sinclairs in coloring?”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“No. It doesn’t. Do you want to hazard a guess?”
Jane shook her mane of hair. “No, because the answer I give might be the right one and I don’t want it to be true. And because it is a sordid tale, and not one either family is proud to own, is it? Caroline’s true birth has been concealed to protect her, perhaps her parents, too, and thus she has been presented to the world as your sister.”
The Earl smiled crookedly and pulled a lock of his wife’s hair. “Not too wide of the mark, my clever girl.”
“Jacob Allenby had two female relatives,” she said, mind ticking over with possibilities and arithmetical equations. “There was Rachel, my stepmother, Jacob Allenby’s sister, but given Caroline is almost eighteen and eighteen years ago Rachel was already married to my father, there would be no need for her to give up a child had she been unfaithful because she could have easily passed it off as belonging to her husband. And then there was Jacob Allenby’s only daughter Abby—Abigail—but she died of consumption when just fifteen years old…” Jane frowned and softly bit her lower lip in thought. “Unless your father was a complete reprobate, I cannot imagine he seduced Abigail…”
“My father was a proud, cold man but a reprobate he was not. He married late in life to a young wife, which was not exceptional amongst his peers, but he was devoted to my mother, which was unusual. Ah, here is your morning chocolate, my lady.”
Jane’s maid came through from the dressing room carrying a tray which had upon it a brandy for his lordship and a mug of hot chocolate and a couple of dry biscuits on a plate for her ladyship. She silently placed the tray on the table by the sofa, bobbed a curtsey, quickly scooped up the smashed pieces of tea dish and saucer and scurried away.
Salt gratefully savored his brandy, a questioning eyebrow lifted at Jane as she nibbled on a dry biscuit.
“If this is how you sustain yourself, you will fade away. If you’re hungry, what you need is a good wedge of venison pie or big bowl of pea soup. Not a few crumbs on a plate.”
“Oh, please, no! Just the thought of pea soup makes me green,” Jane pleaded. She warmed her hands about the mug of hot chocolate, unsure if the beverage would make her ill or not. She didn’t much feel like drinking milk. Another dish of black tea with a slice of lemon was what she craved. But the biscuits were welcome. Suddenly she was struck with the most awful thought. Looking at the Earl, she could barely speak. “Not-not Jacob Allenby and-and your mother…”
Again he laughed out loud. “You have the most refreshingly wicked thoughts, my darling!” He shook his head. “Most definitely not my mother.” He put aside the brandy, took the mug of chocolate from her hands and set it aside too, then possessed himself of both her hands. His gaze never left her blue eyes.
“Abigail Allenby was Caro’s mother. Abby, St. John and I were all just fifteen when Caro was conceived. Just children ourselves… Before the rift, before Caro’s conception, when St. John and I came home from Eton for the holidays, we would roam the countryside: St. John and myself, Abby and a couple of the younger village girls and boys, much like Robin Hood’s merry band. Tony was too young and Diana too Lady High-and-Mighty, even at that young age, to lower herself to muck about in haylofts and up trees. She teased St. John and me mercilessly about our preference for the company of tenant farmers’ brats and children from the local village. She was forever finding excuses to rat on us to my father. The Sinclairs and the Allenbys would not have mixed in the same social circles in London or Bath, or Bristol for that matter, but in the country, as you know, it is quite usual for county families high and low to socialize at local events, the hunt, fairs and the like.”
“Is-is that where Caroline was conceived—in a hayloft?”
His smile was grim. “And here was I wondering how best to tell you! I guess that’s where it happened. I don’t rightly know. The last time St. John and I saw Abby was just before we returned to Eton at Michaelmas. She must have been at least three perhaps four months pregnant then, but she didn’t say a word to us. At Christmastime, Father came up to London without my mother with the startling news I had a baby sister. St. John and I didn’t think anything of it, boys don’t, but then… My father thrashed me within an inch of my life for bringing the family name into disrepute. He never laid a hand on St. John. He never did.
“St. John was not the most robust of fellows. So I took the whipping for both of us. I didn’t mind. It was possibly worse for St. John because my father made him watch while I was flayed. I suppose Father expected a confession. Neither of us said a word because we didn’t know what we had done to enrage him. Well, I certainly had no idea then. Father left St. John to deal with my bruised and bloodied carcass and with the crude pronouncement that I could sow as many wild oats as I pleased with any whore that took my fancy, but be damned if he was going to shelt
er any more ill-begotten bastards.”
“And Abby? What of her? Did she die of consumption?”
Salt smiled crookedly and looked down at Jane’s soft hands in his.
“Abby turned to your stepmother, her aunt, for help when she realized she was pregnant. Jacob Allenby ordered Abby to say nothing about the child until a date had been set for the wedding.” Salt gave a huff of angry embarrassment. “Rachel and Jacob Allenby used Abby’s pregnancy and the threat of exposure to force my father to agree to a hasty marriage between us. They had no idea who they were dealing with. Father didn’t take kindly to threats. He threw Allenby out of his house and off his lands.”
“And Abby? What happened to Abby?”
“What do you think a toad like Jacob Allenby did with an unmarried daughter who was with child? Conscienceless prig disowned her! What use was she to him when the Earl of Salt Hendon refused to make an honorable woman of her by marrying her into his family? He cast her out of the family home to fend for herself. She, a gently bred young girl of fifteen with nowhere to turn! She went to her aunt, hoping she would take her in. Not your stepmother! Lady Despard also turned her back on the poor girl. Abby ended up on our doorstep. Against my father’s orders, my mother took her in and cared for her. Abby died three days after Caro’s birth. Needless to say it was my mother’s idea to make Caro my sister. I don’t know how she won over my father to her scheme, but she did.”
Jane dropped her gaze to their hands, to his long, tapered fingers with their perfectly manicured nails, and she knew she was crying. She could not stop. She was crying for Abby, and for Caroline because she had never known her real mother, and for herself, because she wished she had had someone as kind and as understanding as Salt’s mother to take her in and protect her and her unborn child when she had found herself pregnant four years ago. Never in her wildest imaginings did she think her father would have her unborn child destroyed.
Scandalous Brides Page 73
