He sat forward.
“Let’s begin with that first night, shall we?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Where you struck me after I obviously had the temerity to ask you if you were a virgin. Do you want to know why I asked you?”
“Not especially.” She glanced out the window as if she was interested at her half-reflected face against the trees there. Beyond its stark whiteness, her chin set as she best knew it, she’d watch the leaves falling like endless colored rain, brown, orange-washed, crisp red.
Not if the horses dragged her around and around the driveway for the duration of December, January too, was she going back into Chessington. And, over her dead body was she going to discuss that night. The reasons why she’d been what she was. The things she kept to herself. It was bad enough she’d shown him these scars.
“I think you’ll find that my wants are surprisingly simple. Anyway, you put me out. So I don’t want to hear anything, except the coach wheels trundling along the road to Barwych, sometime today. Thank you.”
He gave an exasperated sigh. “Hell’s teeth, take your nose out the window, will you?”
“Just because I can doesn’t mean I will, Lord Hawley.”
“Devorlane.”
Had he said he was the Lord God come down from heaven to while away a weary hour driving around and around the Chessington driveway in a coach, no greater rod of surprise could have raked her scalp. Or might weren’t she counting the red falling leaves, separately from the brown. One, two, three.
“Devorlane, please, or Devorlane, thank you, makes no soddin' difference to me, Lord Hawley. If you don’t stop this coach now, I shall jump. Then you can be in trouble for kidnap. Causing severe bodily injury too. That is my final word on the matter.”
“A trifle dramatic. Twenty-seven is hardly the age to carry on as if you were seventeen, Miss Armstrong, so why don’t you drop this?”
No. Twenty-seven was sensible enough to know however this ended, it could only be badly.
She wasn’t a moth to the hungry glitter in his eyes but she had given far more than she’d ever given any man and not just her virginity. She’d given him Matthew, beatings, scars. Now she had these papers there was nothing for her here. Nothing he could say would change that.
“Says the man who has a behavior age of ten.”
“Listen to me. There’s something I need to say. About this. About all of this. About me. About you. The other night. Everything.”
“Very well. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She grasped the other handle. He lunged across her, grabbing her hand.
“Christ, just what is so awful about us starting this again? Would you tell me that? What exactly are you so damned afraid of that you won’t step back into Chessington with me?”
***
Taking her place on the satin upholstered chair Devorlane Hawley had pulled out from the small supper table for her, Cass hoped her expression was both neutral as a basin of tepid water and completely befitting someone who had spent the afternoon quietly cloistered in the library as opposed to someone who had been forcibly restrained from leaping from a moving coach and nearly fracturing her skull.
Dining with the devil required a certain length of spoon, after all. She wouldn’t want it looking as if such behavior was anything less than normal.
Opening her napkin, she set it on her lap. Why was she so afraid to step back into Chessington with him? In a few words? She wasn’t. She’d just been a little fraught.
“Thank you so much, Lord Hawley, I am perfectly comfortable.”
Well, she was. And if she wasn’t, the only body it would be over was her own dead one. He reached across her and uncorked the champagne. As the bubbles fizzed she offered the glass her coolest stare. Opening her napkin was one thing. Drinking from this tainted cup another.
“Is the wine not to your taste?” He set the bottle back in the silver ice-bucket on the mahogany sideboard.
“If it’s not are you going to pour it down my soddin' throat, pray tell?”
He sat down in the chair opposite, instantly adjusting his trouser knees. “I think you’ll find I’m not going to do anything, except enjoy this supper.”
“That’s a change. I’m surprised you’re not going to call out Carson and drive me around and around the driveway. Or worse.”
His gaze flicked her. “Don’t give me ideas.”
She shrugged, flicking her own gaze over her crystal glass. Waterford, with a slight chip to the base. “The wine is fine, I suppose. But the company now—such a shame, don’t you think, something can’t be soddin' done about that? But there … ”
When her revulsion for being owned frothed like a stormy current beneath her skin, flowing in her veins instead of blood, why had she come back in here when the choice was hers? Because he needed her help? Because she’d retreated to somewhere she needed extricating from being unable to extricate herself?
Well, it wasn’t to be nice as he was being, had been since, that was for sure.
In other words? Why not come back in here after the little contretemps she’d got in out there in the coach? Show him all was calm, all was bright.
But if he thought she was going to be happy about it he had another think coming. A large one. No. That would be shiny bright, to quote Ruby. And if he thought she was getting back into bed with him, that would be even shinier. Not when the wine glass was so interesting. Maybe worth a few bob more than she’d thought too.
“Alas, the terrible crosses one bears in life,” he said.
“Really? Are you speaking for yourself, being Christ soddin' Almighty now?”
“May I remind you though, it was your choice to come back in here?”
“You know, you speak as if I had one.”
“We all have choices.”
She tucked a stray tendril of hair behind her ear. “The belief of those allowed the luxury is always mighty to behold, my lord.”
“Hang it all, are you going to sit there all night like this, making a thing of the fact you chose to come back in here of your own free will?”
How rattled were the mighty getting.
“Came? Not exactly because I wanted to, please do let me assure you of that. But I’m sure it shouldn’t be hard if you want to find someone more entertaining. Isn’t it the season for Mummers after all?”
He flung his napkin on the table and rose. “On that you must forgive me, seeing as it’s ten years since I saw an English Christmas.”
She reached for the wine glass and let the bubbles fizz on her palate as he crossed the rug in the direction of the fire Etti had lit to remove the chill from the room.
“And whose fault is that, for pursuing a bellicose career, my lord? Rattling your little saber, making the world an unsafe place for us all to live?”
He cursed as he knelt down and selected a log from the basket. His leg of course. Right now if there was an effigy of the ungrateful bastard she’d sat up half the night nursing, she’d stick pins in it right there to make sure it hurt some more. Then she’d go to bed and sleep the sleep of the just, if not the dead.
That little triangular section of chest where his cravat had loosened, the darkened hollows along his sensuous mouth, and as ever, despite the careful combing of his sable hair, those little stray ends that seemed to defy whatever attempt he made to slick them, were going to work no magic on her here.
And nothing he said, or did, would change that.
He dusted his palms clean. “Have you found anything yet?”
“Find anything? How you, or anyone else, quite expects me to find anything in that pile of old rubbish you gave me is beyond even my capabilities to know, or understand. But rest assured when I do you’ll be the first to know.”
“You’re sure, are you, the old man was your father?”
“Old man?” Cass stared harder at the glass. At her fork and knife too. “If you’re meaning Lord Armstrong—”
“Aren’t you?”
“He was my father, Lord Hawley. I just don’t know I’m that happy calling him old, if you don’t mind that is. He is still something precious to me.”
“Did I ever tell you I’m twenty-seven, Ardent was thirty when he died, and Tilly is thirty-two?”
“Goodness.” With no difficulty Cass failed to prevent her attention from wandering from the fork to the silver sauce boat—slightly tarnished, nice engraving, three guineas, depending on where it was sold. She tucked another tendril of hair behind her ear. “We are spilling a tray load of beans tonight—”
“A change from stealing them.”
“But if you were going to save the most interesting facts about you all, that I should never have guessed, till last—“
“Not exactly. But Tilly, being oldest, remembers other Armstrongs at Barwych.”
“She—”
“She told me so this afternoon when you were in the library. One of these childhood things. You know how a stray memory can just come back.”
Her throat dried. Her gaze froze on the sauce boat. Other Armstrongs? Would he tell her about them? After she’d been rude as … well, rude as a word Ruby used a lot. Probably not.
Besides, he could be telling piggy pies. It made sense though, didn’t it, of this business that Lord Armstrong had never married. Yet here she was. Maybe she couldn’t find anything because he wasn’t her father? Maybe she should be looking at his brothers, or sisters?
Being rude was stupid. If it meant being nice, she’d be nice. Nice? She’d be exemplary.
“You mean, a—a cousin, a brother perhaps?”
He shifted on the rug to avoid a shower of sparks. “Actually she said it was a tinker.”
“A what?”
Of course it wouldn’t be anything good if it was associated with her, but she’d not the slightest idea what a tinker was, only that whatever it was, Devorlane Hawley bent his head forward so she couldn’t see his face for his hair.
“A traveler.” He took up the poker and beat the burning log into submission. “Tilly said he hung about Barwych for a time because—how should I phrase this … ”
Why would he be troubled to wonder, when he hadn’t shrunk from divulging what he just had?
“He had a certain predilection for the ladies.”
What was that supposed to mean exactly? He couldn’t leave them alone? Keep his hands to himself? Or had he, like Devorlane Hawley, made outrageous demands? Demands, it shamed her to think she’d actually not just met—had enjoyed—to now be told… A traveler? She couldn’t be descended from a traveler. Certainly the breath rushing down her nose in that second said not. Was this some equally vile decision on the part of this impertinent bastard to humiliate her? Tilly too? The last thing she’d do was let him see it. She raised her chin.
“Maybe he did, Lord Hawley, but that does not mean he had anything to do with me.”
“I never said that he did. I just wondered—”
“You would know about such things yourself?”
He rose to his feet, brushing bark flakes from his otherwise immaculate trousers, as if it was all the most natural thing in the world. “Don’t you see, a predilection would suggest there being children—”
Oh, and now she was the living proof of that? Some tinker’s daughter? A man who liked women. Lots of them by the sounds of it. She supposed it could have been worse. She supposed he could have liked men, then she wouldn’t be here at all. Boiling hot fury flooded her face, she raised her chin higher. “You would.”
“And Tilly also remembers—”
“Whatever Tilly remembers she is wrong, Lord Hawley.”
Or just maybe he made up these vile insinuations? He was low enough to. She was not the child of some traveling tinker. How … how could she be? Sapphire, the greatest thief London had ever known.
Devorlane Hawley started toward her, his boots noiseless on the Turkish rug, his gait, vaguely ambling, something it never was. And his eyes? She withdrew her gaze from the measuring stare.
“She remembers old man Armstrong was taken with him because the name was—”
“Don’t call him that,” she snarled.
He stared as if she’d suddenly spouted two heads. Perhaps tinker’s daughters did? She didn’t know, not being one herself.
“The name was the same.”
His voice washed over her. Maybe the names were the same, but it didn’t mean a thing. No, she could think of only one thing. She must get out of here. There was not a single, solitary reason to stay.
“Tilly also remembers there being a squad of children—not just this man’s, no. Local children nobody wanted. Mrs. Penrith, the estate manager’s wife, looked after them till she died. The strange thing was, from what Tilly said—”
Leave? She went now. Calmly, with as much dignity as she could muster. Whatever the reason he said those things, said them as if he couldn’t stop, it didn’t mean her ears needed to listen to such blasphemous rubbish. Not when he didn’t give a crumb of thought to them hearing it, although ‘crumb of thought’ wasn’t the word that went through her head about what he didn’t give about it.
“Oh, Tilly said? And she’s sober enough a quarter of the time to remember her own name, let alone anybody else’s?”
She walked across the floor and opened the wardrobe. Her coat was there somewhere, and when she located it, when she dragged it from the hanger, untangled the neck of it rather, she’d put it on. Her belongings, fortunately, were still in her bag. No, he needn’t come up behind her like this so she was aware of him, short inches away. Of his shadow, of his scent. The hideous things he said.
“It was in the monk’s cell.”
Maybe Mrs. Penrith had, but that didn’t mean she was one of them. Why that was as ridiculous a notion as her feet springing wings so she could fly about this fine chamber. But the lies, the calumny, the cheap attempt by Tilly to hit her in the gut with this bag of rubbish, simply because she was here in this house as Devorlane Hawley’s mistress, was something else. A tinker’s daughter? Her? She did not think so. Why, her name was Armstrong. Wasn’t it? So she wouldn’t listen to this. She smoothed the coat collar.
“You, of course, would know how it is to have a predilection for women, Lord Hawley.”
He sighed deeply. Actually, with his jacket removed and his sleeves rolled up, and the firelight glowing on his face, he looked appallingly inviting. So much so the thought smarted, maybe that was why she thought so, because she was a tinker’s, and God knows what kind of woman’s, daughter? A hedgerow brat. Full of immoral yearnings. Thoughts. Needs. Temper. Fury.
“And you should be thankful, Miss Armstrong, that I take care of my women that way, rather than see another bastard child on the parish.”
“A bastard child?” Cass turned and set the hanger back on the rail. It was an awful lot better than jab it in his eye. “Is that what you think? What you are saying? That I am, Lord Hawley?”
“A few other things perhaps. Not that necessarily.”
And yet was it quite so clever, now that she’d taken the coat from the hanger, to put it on? The papers were downstairs and the papers were the key to this. The things that would prove beyond a shadow of a gray doubt she was of noble lineage, a cast out child, now in this situation because someone must have been jealous of her. Matthew too.
No. But she’d removed the coat from the wardrobe. She crossed to the bed. She did it largely in the hope something would occur. The thing was the business of the monk’s cell was unnerving. Also, it wasn’t good, those names being the same, no matter which way she looked at it.
Her throat tightened.
“Well.” Though it was difficult to set the coat down on the bed, she did. To remain here but get rid of him, as she was going to have to do, required a degree of calm. “I daresay it all depends on the definition of bastard,” she said.
“And yours doesn’t mean illegitimate children?”
“Oh, mine doesn’t mean anything. Pray don’t let me be the one to ca
st the first stone. That would be immoral of me.”
“That’s good to know because it strikes me that’s exactly what you’re doing. But fortunately I’m thick-skinned. I know exactly what I am, Miss Armstrong. Fooling myself has never been one of my faults.”
“And you are saying it is mine?” Pray God her chin’s defiant angle was unmistakable, especially now she must either put the coat on, or sit back at the table. “No, you will be the one to take that back when I prove who I—and Matthew, of course—really belonged to. Lord Armstrong may not have wished to acknowledge us, for whatever reason, it is true. I understand that. It does not make me a tinker’s daughter.”
“Whether you are or not, and I’m sorry this isn’t working quite the way you want, do you think that—”
“Why should I think when I’m not a tinker’s bastard? Well? I know my origins.”
“Well, I think too, Miss Armstrong. I think if you’re not going to take the coach back to Barwych now, as that coat there says you are, although, of course you can come back, and if you’re not going to be amenable to the supper I prepared for you—”
“You? Cook? That’s in the same realms as me being a tinker’s daughter.”
“Had prepared for you then.”
“Oh, don’t change the subject.”
“Or indeed, the information I gave you—”
“How can I be after you drove me around and around? Or indeed gave me that information?”
“If you don’t want to listen to anything I have to say on that subject—”
“Unless it greatly improves it?”
“—you can come to bed and keep the end of the bargain we agreed the other day. Now, which is it to be?”
Well. Of course. It was always going to come to that. And it meant she could stay. She just hoped he didn’t think that after last night’s yawn-inducing session, his bed was a delight.
She reached to unpin her hair.
“Fine. Just give me a moment won’t you?”
He swallowed his surprise. The most awkward creature he had ever had the damned misfortune to meet, saying fine? He bent his head and kissed her. She didn’t want him, but it would be his pleasure to make her. This hussy was full of it—indignation that was, although she was pretty full of something else as well. Something he recognized because he was too.
Loving Lady Lazuli (London Jewel Thieves Book 1) Page 18
