by Louise Allen
‘Might we have a word, my lord?’ Tess enquired with a sweet, false smile. ‘Upstairs?’
He held the door for her and followed her stiff back along to the study. Tess did not wait for him to get behind the barrier of his desk and sit down before she attacked. ‘No, Dorcas White does not have references. A man who forces himself on a servant and then tells his wife that the slut flaunted herself at him when he’d had a few drinks, that she’d been asking for it, is not someone who writes a reference for his victim.’
‘Are you certain?’ Even as he said it he felt ashamed of himself. Those thin, desperate hands, those wounded eyes, the way she had held her child… No, that was not some little hussy who had taken advantage of Tess’s good nature. ‘Yes, of course you are, and I can see you are right,’ he said before the angry rebuttal was out of her mouth. ‘What does she need for the child? Buy it for her, whatever it is.’
If he had been looking for a reward, which he hadn’t, he told himself, he would have got it in the smile that transformed Tess’s face.
‘Who is the father?’ He suppressed his own answering smile. This was not a laughing matter.
‘I have no idea. I didn’t ask her. Why?’
‘Because he needs dealing with,’ Alex said, startling himself. What was he, some knight errant, dispensing justice for wronged damsels? ‘Still, I suppose you’ll never get the name out of her and I don’t want her worried that the swine will find out where she is.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ Tess said and clutched his hand. ‘Thank you for understanding. I knew you were Sir Lancelot really, however much you grumbled about Noel and things.’
Her hand was small and warm and strong in his and he closed his fingers around it, even as he said, in tones of loathing, ‘Sir Lancelot? Do I look like some confounded idiot clanking around in armour? And besides, he was a decidedly dubious type—making love to his king’s wife like that.’
‘I thought when you hit that sailor that you were a storybook knight and then you were grumpy with me so I changed my mind. But it is all a front, the grumpiness, isn’t it?’ Her eyes were dancing; it seemed she was as amused by her nonsense as he was.
His meek little nun was teasing him, he realised, and this time could not suppress the answering smile. Alarm bells were ringing even as he lifted her hand and pressed the back of it against his cheek, her pulse rioting under his fingers. Charm and sweetness. You cannot let yourself enjoy them, not for your sake and definitely not for hers.
‘Yes,’ Alex agreed. ‘It is all a front, but behind it is not your preux chevalier, there’s a real, live, flawed man with many masks and many, many faults.’ He moved her hand so he could nip lightly at her fingertips in warning and felt, more than heard, her shuddering indrawn breath. ‘A man who is hypocrite enough to despise the father of the child down there and yet who cannot forget the feel of your mouth under his, your body in his arms.’
Tess became still, her eyes wide and questioning. She’s an innocent, he told himself. Even if she can deal with illegitimate children and speak frankly about what has happened to Dorcas. She needs warning, scaring a little, even.
He loosened his grip on her fingers and her hand slid up to cup his cheek. She was not wary, not at all alarmed by him. The touch was not sexual, not even sensual. It was intended, he realised with something like shock, to comfort. When was the last time anyone had touched him like that?
‘You are very hard on yourself, aren’t you, Alex?’ Tess murmured. ‘You aren’t a saint, you certainly aren’t a monk, so why do you expect it of yourself?’
‘I am a gentleman,’ he said, his voice harsher than he’d intended. ‘The least I can do is try to behave like one around decent women.’
‘You are trying. Very hard, I think.’ She cocked her head to one side with that questioning look he was learning to beware of. ‘I may be a virgin, and that may have been my first kiss, but I am quite capable of recognising sensual attraction when I experience it. There is something between us, isn’t there?’
Alex found himself incapable of answering her as she wrestled so honestly with things no young lady was supposed to think about, let alone articulate.
‘I am quite capable of saying no, at least, I am when I haven’t been hit on the head and frightened half out of my wits,’ Tess said decisively. She lowered her hand and stepped away. ‘We got carried away, we both did. But the onus should not be all on you to be prudent.’
‘Prudent?’ Alex found he had to move away from her. If it was a retreat, he didn’t care, and the big desk was a reassuringly solid barrier. ‘Naturally it is down to me to behave properly.’
‘If I was the sort of young woman who has a hope of marrying, then of course it is,’ she agreed. Tess perched on the arm of a chair and he wondered if, for all her calmness, her legs were a bit shaky. ‘But I’m not, am I? So I need to make decisions based on different criteria, such as, do I want to be your mistress? What would make us happiest, while it lasted?’
‘Tess, stop this! You cannot discuss being my mistress, and happiness is the last thing we should be considering.’
‘Is it?’ She frowned at him, her brow wrinkled. ‘But what is the point of a…liaison if it doesn’t make people happy? What is the point of life, come to that?’
‘Frankly? I do not know about the meaning of life. I just get on with living it as best I can. But a liaison? It is about sex on one side and financial gain on the other,’ Alex snapped. He drove his fingers through his hair and tried to get his feet back on solid ground. This was like finding oneself knee-deep in fast-flowing water when one thought all one was doing was having a stroll beside a stream. ‘It is commerce. It is not something you should even think about.’
Her expression seemed to indicate that she was thinking about it, very carefully, very seriously.
Alex fought the urge to run his finger around a neckcloth that seemed far too tight. He coped with sophisticated ladies, wanton widows, expensive high-fliers, all without turning a hair. Why the devil was he finding it hard to deal with one outspoken innocent? ‘Look, Tess, men and women find themselves physically attracted all the time. We have to deal with it like everyone else does. You just pretend it isn’t happening.’
She nodded. ‘I can see that is usually best. But this isn’t making you happy, is it?’
‘It is making me damnably confused, if you must know.’ Did she think he expected sexual favours as a payment for giving her shelter? Did she think that in return for shelter she had a duty to make him happy, whatever she meant by that? She certainly wasn’t casting out lures or flirting, although he doubted she knew how. ‘But that is beside the point. You are a lovely young woman, Tess. I would have to be a plank of wood not to be attracted to you.’
That made her smile, at least. ‘Thank you. It wasn’t that I had decided we should have an affaire, you understand. But I don’t want you feeling guilty all the time if things happen. I expect I will learn not to notice when we touch by accident, or when I meet your eyes and I seem to read things in them.’
She could read him like a book, he was sure, even if she didn’t understand some of the long words. ‘It will do me no harm to feel guilty occasionally.’ Alex made his tone lighter. ‘We’ll not speak of this again.’ Who do I think I am deceiving? ‘Now, about Dorcas—make certain she understand she’s safe here. I’m not going to throw her out if the baby cries. I won’t have her hiding it away for fear of that. A baby should be with its mother.’
‘Yes, of course. Thank you, I will reassure her.’ Tess stood up. ‘Thank you for letting me stay. I know it is disrupting things, even if we leave aside…you know. But I work hard and I’ll earn my keep, I promise.’
‘You don’t have to work at all.’ Alex put as much bored languor into his tone as he could. ‘You could stay in your room with Dorcas to chaperon you until Hannah is well again or we find you a post. As you are well aware, if I’d delivered you where you asked, on time, none of this would have occurred.’
Alex sat down took a deep breath and pulled his pile of correspondence towards him. Tess had been brought up to tackle issues head-on and without hypocrisy, it seemed. But hypocrisy was one of society’s main safeguards, and without it she was vulnerable. So was he. The widow who wanted to buy pictures was looking increasingly tempting. It was too long since he had been with a woman; that was all it was, this need to hold Tess, to take the pins from her hair, the clothes from her body, to lie down with her and…
*
She had shocked Alex, Tess realised. Seeing the baby had upset him for some reason, and it wasn’t the fact that little Daisy’s crying had annoyed him. He was angry with Dorcas’s employer, which was understandable, for any decent person would have been, but there was something else, something deeper in his reaction.
And that moment when she had taken his hand had been…startling. She’d had no intention of flirting and she had no idea how to. She certainly hadn’t thought of trying to provoke him into kissing her again, but the energy that had flowed between their joined fingers still sparkled along her veins. It had seemed to her important to try to understand where they stood, to tell him how she felt. But that had been a mistake. He had not wanted that kind of honesty from her. And she couldn’t simply take his protection, his money, and do nothing in return. She expected to work for her living, and she owed it to Hannah to keep her from worrying about the household while she was ill.
When Tess got to her feet and went into the kitchen it was empty except for Dorcas, who was hemming handkerchiefs with the baby fast asleep in a makeshift crib by her side. She looked up. ‘Is he…is his lordship very angry?’
‘Not at all, just startled. He says we are to buy whatever Daisy needs and you are not to be afraid that he will be annoyed if he hears her crying.’ Tess sat down on the other side of the fireplace. ‘Lord Weybourn is simply not used to having women about the house, that is all.’
Chapter Ten
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come back to Half Moon Street? I could make up the room across the passage from mine, and now I have Dorcas with me we can nurse you easily.’
‘That is thoughtful of you, Tess.’ Hannah Semple groped for a handkerchief as she began to cough. ‘Oh, drat and blast this! We sound like a colony of seals I once saw on the coast.’ From the room opposite came the echo of the same sound. ‘But I’m better here in my own home with my things around me. And no one is very sick now, just laid low with this wretched chesty cough, so Mrs Green and her girls are managing to look after us easily enough.’
She curled her fingers around the cup of tea that Tess handed to her and sipped, her nose glowing pinkly though the steam. ‘Besides anything else, I’d drive Lord Weybourn mad with the coughing.’
‘He doesn’t seem to be disturbed by the baby.’ Tess poured herself a cup and settled back in the fireside chair. ‘And she cries a lot, bless her.’
‘I find it hard to imagine, Alex taking in a baby.’
‘You thought he would send her away? He wasn’t pleased, not at first, but that just was the surprise, I think.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean he would send them off into the night. But I’d have expected him to find her lodgings or something, not have them live in.’ Hannah sneezed, then sat regarding Tess over the top of the handkerchief. ‘You’ve turned his house upside down with your strays by the sound of it. I’m amazed he hasn’t reacted more strongly.’ She sat up against the pillows. ‘Has he had any visitors?’
‘No, he goes out a lot and there have been endless invitations, but there’ve been no callers. I don’t think he’s issuing invitations with me there.’
‘Perhaps that’s why he’s being so tolerant. After all, kittens and babies underfoot wouldn’t do much for his carefully maintained image.’
‘What image?’
‘Elegant, imperturbable, languid and cultivated. A fastidious pink of the ton on the surface. He’s a serious sportsman on the quiet, but unless you saw him after a hard round at Gentleman Jackson’s you’d be forgiven for not noticing.’
Tess laughed. ‘That’s just a mask. Underneath he’s funny and very kind. And the sparring explains the muscles.’
‘Hmm. You’ve noticed them, have you?’ Hannah gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘He’s thought about nothing but himself for ten years.’ Despite the thickness of her voice she sounded remarkably tart.
‘But he is kind.’
‘I didn’t say he wasn’t. He’s charming, he treats people well—and he organises his life so no one gets behind the mask or disturbs his well-ordered life.’
Tess kicked off her shoes and curled up in the chair. Outside the rain was threatening to turn into sleet and the wind howled in the chimney, making the flames dance and reminding them that December had most definitely arrived. Inside all was snug and comfortable, she had thought. Now Hannah was making her uneasy.
‘His mistresses must,’ she suggested with the sensation of jabbing her tongue against a sore tooth. ‘Get close, I mean.’
‘I very much doubt it. They can get inside those well-cut clothes, they can rumple his sheets—but lay bare the man underneath? No.’
‘But…’ But I get to the real man sometimes. I can touch more than his skin. She almost said it, then realised how pathetic it would sound. I’m different. He lets me in. He trusts me. And Hannah, who has known Alex for most of their lives, will smile and be kind about my illusions. She might even think I’m developing a tendre for him. How humiliating.
‘Why does he need a mask?’ she said instead. ‘What is he hiding?’
Hannah laughed and set off a coughing fit. She waved Tess back to her chair when she reached for the water glass. ‘I’m all right. He isn’t hiding, he is creating. He has remade himself from scratch these past ten years.’
‘Ten? But he’s twenty-seven now. What happened when he was seventeen?’
‘He left home.’ Hannah frowned at a harmless print hanging over the fireplace. ‘For good, I mean. He’d been at university for one term. He came home for…he came home for a visit, and when he returned to Oxford he never went back to Tempeston again.’
‘But seventeen is very young.’ What had she been like at seventeen? Full of questions and uncertainties, her body no longer that of a girl, her emotions torn between a yearning to be back in the safety of childhood and an uneasy impatience to discover the world. What must it be like for a boy, out by himself in that big, dangerous world?
‘Yes, it is young,’ Hannah agreed. ‘But he had friends and anger and intelligence to keep him going.’
Anger. ‘What happened? What drove him away?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘As I said, it is not my story to tell. If Alex ever does tell you about that Christmas, then you will know you really have got under the mask, under his skin. If he trusts you with that, then he has entrusted you with his soul and everything fragile within that tough carapace he has built around himself.’
They sat in silence. Hannah seemingly worn out after her outburst, Tess unable to find words. So it had been Christmas. Was that why he was so cynical about the festival? Eventually she said, ‘But don’t his parents want to be reconciled with him?’
‘Have you ever wounded someone badly?’
Tess shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’
‘If you had, then perhaps you would understand. If you injure a person close to you so cruelly that your own conscience is riven, then sometimes you become angry with them for making you feel so guilty. His father did something inexcusable, something that resulted in a death, something that slashed Alex to the heart. Lord Moreland is a man who never found himself at fault, who has never been known to own a wrong or to apologise. I expect nothing has changed.’ She shrugged, a complicated heaving of blankets and shawls. ‘Therefore, if he is not at faul
t, then Alex must be. If he had hurt Alex, then Alex must have been to blame. Do you understand?’
‘I think so. How dreadful.’ The words were inadequate, but she could find no others. Tess reached out a hand to the fire for some warmth. ‘Could Alex not make the first move to reconcile?’
‘You know those horse-drawn tramways? There are iron or wooden rails and the horse can draw a heavy load quite easily along them?’ Hannah did not wait for an answer. ‘To move from that exact track would need huge effort and would most certainly overturn the cart, injure the horse, possibly kill the driver. Should the driver try to leave the tracks, drive a new path, risk that injury, just on the off chance it might work?’
The silence stretched on. Tess looked up and found Hannah’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow and deep. She had fallen asleep, worn out, perhaps by emotion.
Tess uncurled herself and put on her shoes, found her things and tiptoed out.
*
‘I don’t think Mrs Semple is well enough to come back to work, not this side of Christmas. I know it is almost three weeks away, but there is all the preparation to be thought of.’ Tess folded back the notebook she was using to keep lists of things to be done. Now a fresh page was headed Christmas?? and she had caught Alex just before William Bland, his secretary, arrived. She was determined to pin him down for some answers.
‘I thought she was not seriously ill.’ He stopped mending the end of his pen with a pocket knife and looked up. ‘I must send the doctor round again.’
‘She is getting better, but the infection seems to have settled on the lungs of all of the sufferers and they are worn out with coughing. She needs a holiday somewhere she can be looked after. What would she usually do at Christmas?’
‘Go back to her husband’s family in Kent. It’s a big family and she’s very fond of them.’ Alex squinted at the pen nib, then stuck it in the standish. ‘I could send her down early, in the coach with rugs and hot bricks and one of the men to escort her.’
