Fairchild Regency Romance

by Jaima Fixsen

  She hated Saltash for that, for his letters with their thick ink strokes and lavish spacing of words. She hated staring up from the stage into the jowls of his box, where he sat with his thinning hair and his great gold watch. She hated his elegant Mayfair mansion and his castle up north, though she’d never seen it. The husband of her mother’s older sister could have made things easier for them. He hadn’t.

  When her mother died and Laura was tasked with burying her alone, she faltered. The loss she’d expected, but not the bludgeoning grief. She marked the passing with a notice in the Gazette.

  Marguerite Leonie Edouard Lecroy-Duplessis, Comtesse D’Aiguines, of France and lately of London, died in her home on January 5, 1812.

  Laura didn’t know if any of her mother’s former friends would see it, but she wanted a record, some way the world could know it had lost a courageous lady. Nine days later she had a visit from Saltash.

  “I was sorry to read about your mother,” he said, filling up the door. Laura left her hand on the latch to bar his way.

  “Thank you, Your Grace. Please excuse me.” Before she could shut it he caught the edge of the door.

  “May I come in?”

  It had the form of a question, at least. Laura gave way and brought him into the little parlor looking over the street. She sat on the ottoman, releasing her clenched fists. She wanted to vomit—just days ago she’d found the letters he’d sent her mother. It seemed Maman had asked, once or twice, for help and sometimes asked after the duchess, her sister. Saltash’s letters were all the same. The duchess wasn’t well enough to write. He didn’t feel obliged to send her children to school, offer them a home, or buy her son a commission in the army. One thing he offered year after year; to a family struggling to buy coal it was an insult. Laura burned with it.

  “I’m surprised you knew where to find us,” she said.

  “The newspaper office told me.” His fingers played against the arm of his chair as he inventoried the room. Small house, small rooms, small windows…little sketches on the walls. He took note of the books from Hookham’s library stacked on the fireplace and the shawl—Laura’s last gift to her mother, hardly worn—draped across the round table.

  “Is your brother home?”

  “He last wrote from Gibraltar. He’s in the navy.”

  Saltash nodded, pleased. “He’s been keeping you? Good. But you’ll need a new home. Can’t live on your own now.”

  “Jack doesn’t keep me. Or my mother,” Laura said, before he could go any further. Her pulse beat in her ears like a troop of parading soldiers. “I kept him the first few years and paid his tuition at Edinburgh. He’s a physician now, did you know?”

  “You supported him? You couldn’t—”

  Laura smiled. It was revenge—of a sort. “You could have but did not so I took care of them the best way I knew how. Don’t you recognize me?” she asked, for bafflement still clouded him. The words didn’t sound like hers, they came so fast and brittle and sharp. It felt like falling—once begun, you couldn’t stop. “You’ve seen me at least once each of the past six years. My aunt was with you last time. I remember she applauded.” Laura remembered too, how ill the duchess looked, clapping genteelly, her bird-claw hands too thin for her gloves. She waited, containing her furious breathing and the urge to hurl something, watching the puzzle play across his face.

  Drawing herself up, she continued. “All London knows me. I’m Gemma Holyrood.”

  For a minute he didn’t speak. “But…the breeches…the rumors…”

  “You took no interest in us, Your Grace. You forfeited the right to say anything. I thank you for your condolences on behalf of my mother and wish you good day.” Laura rose from her chair, her rigid back ordering him to leave.

  He stayed in place, still sputtering. “Gemma Holyrood? You cannot continue. What of our family’s reputation? Your aunt, your cousin Eugenie?”

  “Believe me, I have as little desire for our names to be connected as you do.” Her skin crawled just having him in her rooms, and she couldn’t trust herself not to scream the insults she longed to pour into his unfeeling ears. Ignoring the tremor in her fingers she reached for the bell. Peter, who’d likely been hovering just behind the closed door, answered before her fingers released the handle. “His Grace is leaving. Will you escort him from the house?”

  “You will leave the stage,” Saltash said, rising.

  “Forgive me for disappointing you, but I will not. Peter?”

  A glance at Peter’s tough face and calloused fists had the desired effect. Saltash went, trailing thunderheads. Alone at last, Laura slammed her fist against her leg and broke into tears. It didn’t help. Maman was gone. Crying, raging, even punishing her uncle wouldn’t change that, and one moment of vengeful vindication was hardly worth revealing her secret.

  A week later her landlord sold the house to the Duke of Saltash. It took Peter and a kind crew of stagehands all night, but they moved her to new lodgings before Saltash threw her out. They kept her new address amongst themselves. Undeterred, Saltash went to Mr. Rollins demanding he dismiss her. Laura answered with a sharp letter, asking Saltash how it would look if she went to the papers and revealed their relationship and his treatment of her family. She’d just finished a sold-out run of Twelfth Night and been congratulated by the Regent. Saltash didn’t bother Rollins again, but he took to scowling at her from his box, sneering when the rest of the theatre broke into applause, and talking during her speeches.

  Laura’s nerves were tempered and did not break. He could not stop her, not with puny weapons like these. She bowed to him, blew him kisses, smirked, and gave him a fine view of her breeches, infuriating him more. His face grew thin and gaunt, his eyes as he watched her burned like coals, but he never missed a performance. When the scandal sheets hinted that Miss Holyrood had captured the Duke of Saltash’s heart, she clipped it out and mailed it to him. He sent her back the dead starling.

  After that she moved in disguise outside the theatre, her whereabouts a closely kept secret. A stalemate but Laura felt she had the upper hand.

  Now in a stroke all was reversed. Saltash was right—no matter how she might laugh that Jack’s mask was only a ploy, the gossips wouldn’t relent, not with a story as bawdy as incest. It would destroy her career, but even worse it would wreck any chance of Jack’s. They’d have to emigrate to America where he could doctor out of a cabin in Kentucky.

  Quitting the stage would be hard enough, but to lose it all because of Saltash?—she’d rather move to Kentucky. Except that wouldn’t be fair to Jack. Nothing must touch him, but she couldn’t let Saltash win. Her mind spun, testing and discarding ideas. There had to be a way.

  Her real name? That wouldn’t change anything. Maybe if Jack married…but she had only days. Impossible to find her brother a wife in that short a time. Besides, even the best of brothers would balk at a solution as drastic as that. If only she hadn’t played along and let the world think he was her lover. The gambit had afforded useful protection from time to time, but now it had spooned her right into the dish. Unless…

  She could change the story. All she needed to do was give the audience somewhere else to look. You could make anything disappear if the action downstage was busy enough. Saltash could only threaten her with the speculation she’d created about Gemma Holyrood’s unknown paramour—it was hers to control. The world wanted to believe she had a lover? She could give them a better one. Someone elegant and disdainful, who played with society like he had it on a string.

  It wouldn’t be an easy game, but Rushford was the man for it. She would sweep into London and triumph on the stage and snap her fingers under the Duke of Saltash’s nose.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mad, bad, and dangerous to know

  She didn’t intend to approach Rushford with sweaty hair and a rumpled dress, but he found her before she could return to the house.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

/>   “Why do you care all of a sudden?” she asked, provoked by hurt she hadn’t let herself acknowledge. He’d avoided her for days.

  A bad start. She’d have to do better. Calming herself, Laura was putting together conciliatory words when he held up a folded paper between two fingers.

  “You left this on the breakfast table. It’s from the Duke of Saltash. How does he know who you really are?”

  He was angry, she realized, finally understanding the mask-like tightness of his face, the colorless skin. “Does your brother know about him?” Rushford demanded.

  Laura collapsed into disjointed laughter, wrapping her arms around her shoulders to keep herself together. It was too much. “You’re jealous!”

  “You owe me an explanation,” he said, though he didn’t say why. “What is Saltash to you exactly?”

  She didn’t like this face of his, stern, both judge and prosecutor. But she wanted him to help her—she couldn’t succeed without him—so he needed the straight truth. “Saltash is my uncle. He doesn’t like me onstage.”

  Rushford took a step back. Frowned. He didn’t believe her. Well, she would read him the letter. As she reached for it he spoke.

  “I should think he doesn’t! Very high in the instep, Saltash.” He still looked incredulous, but his voice was milder now. “I don’t understand. If he’s your uncle, why take to the stage in the first place?”

  “I needed thirty pounds. He wouldn’t give it to me.”

  Rushford barked—it wasn’t quite a laugh. “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true. I was six when my father died and they burned our chateau. My oldest brother and grandmother also went to the guillotine, but mother and Jack and I hid.”

  She wouldn’t speak of the months in a dark cellar, the nights they walked from one hiding place to another, the lies their protectors told to explain the bits of extra food smuggled to keep them alive. “Somehow she bribed our way out of France and we sailed to England with a cargo of Bordeaux wine. We arrived practically penniless.”

  “And Saltash did nothing?”

  “He said we were welcome to use his box at the theatre.” A kind invitation he renewed every year as they counted pennies and rationed food and coal. No wonder Maman had said nothing.

  Jasper flinched. Laura plucked a leaf from the hedge and tore it into tiny pieces, scattering them over the grass and the skirts of her gown.

  “So you took your revenge,” he said studying her. “Though she be but little, she is fierce.”

  Laura dismissed his Shakespeare. “I prefer formidable.”

  “No. Formidable,” Jasper said, giving it the French pronunciation. “You are wonderful, right enough.”

  Compliments were generally a good sign, but she wasn’t sure she could trust his when they were coupled with that sardonic eye. “Saltash’s daughter, my cousin, is coming out next Season. He wants me out of London. I don’t believe I shall oblige him, but I’m in a bit of a fix. He knows about Jack and unless I quit London he’s threatening to ruin things for him here.”

  “Letting slip that his sister is an actress?”

  Laura shook her head. “No, Saltash threatens to reveal our secret incest. It doesn’t matter that it’s not true. Once they print it, it might as well be.”

  He laughed. “Play with fire and you’ll get burned, Laura.”

  She sent him a look. “No one notices a pot burning in the midst of an explosion.” If she failed and Saltash spread his incest story, she’d respond by revealing that he was her uncle. He could try and paint her black, but she’d make sure he didn’t escape the spatters. Rumors of incest would ruin her and Jack, but if Saltash was squeamish about being connected to an actress, being known as the uncle of a debased one would give him a brain seizure. Victory, of a sort, but hard to enjoy after losing all she’d fought to achieve. You couldn’t gloat over that in Kentucky. Much better if she outplayed Saltash and for that she needed Jasper.

  “Explosions? Are you going to ignite one?” he asked.

  “We are.” Laura smiled. “How would you like to win that two hundred pounds?”

  *****

  She couldn’t be serious. Jasper glanced back at the house, wondering if he ought to run. They were in full sight of the windows. Good God. She already looked like she’d been tumbled in the grass. He took another step back.

  “I promised your brother,” he began.

  “Is that what happened? I suppose he made you promise not to take advantage of me.”

  Jasper didn’t contradict her. She sighed. “Really, I could do without Jack’s meddling. It needn’t trouble you. What I’m proposing is really the other way round.”

  “Is it?” Jasper swallowed, trying to bring his voice out of the register of a boy soprano. “What are you proposing exactly?”

  “Return with me to London. I’ll be your new mistress.”

  She might as well have thrown a cup of scalding tea over him. Recovering, Jasper tried again. “Impossible. I told you, I promised your brother—”

  “Why should he have any say? And why should you get to grow scruples at this hour?” She planted a finger on his chest. “What if I’d accepted you a month ago in London? Did you think of me as anyone’s sister then?”

  Jasper dropped his eyes to the damp grass.

  “Well?” she pushed, relentless.

  “The point is I do now,” he said. Impossible to explain that London was entirely about the chase. He wouldn’t have known what to do if he’d caught her. With the chances of winning her practically negligible it had seemed a safe enough game. She’d laugh if he told her his personal credo: no despoiling the innocent, no affairs, no mistresses. Anyone would laugh, but he remembered Fanny Prescott and what his father had done to her. And Sophy—it was none of her fault, but the world wasn’t kindly disposed to bastards. He’d promised himself long ago not to make any.

  “And that’s supposed to finish it?” she demanded, incredulous. “One word carelessly thrown to my brother and it’s over? Very well. I’ll choose someone else. You may as well write your banker because you’re going to have to pay up.”

  Protheroe? She wouldn’t. “You mustn’t—Miss Edwards—”

  “No one will care about Jack—the man they think was my lover—once he’s replaced by someone else,” she explained. “They’ll be wondering instead how the new one stole me. And with he and I flaunting our love so flamboyantly about town…well, there won’t be any space in the newssheets for anything else.”

  It was true, every blithe word foretelling disaster. If Protheroe didn’t leap at chance to acquire her she’d have her pick of at least a dozen more. Jasper braced his hands on his head, forgetting it would muddle his artfully disarranged hair. She peered up at him and stepped closer. “Perhaps you are willing to reconsider?”

  Damn. He couldn’t let her go to anyone else. But he wasn’t going to break his word either. Nimble stepping, that’s what this needed. Hopefully he wouldn’t trip. “Seems I must.” He couldn’t see any other way he’d get a say in her behavior. Jasper squared his shoulders, hoping the motion would set the world in order again. No luck. She was still there, tapping her slippered toe on the gravel path.

  “Good. Rollins—he’s the theatre manager—needs me back in London.”

  It would be nice, since he wasn’t allowed a real say, to at least have the luxury of a little time. Without it there was a good chance they’d both roast for this. He could afford it. No one ever faulted the man. When things went wrong she’d take the brunt of it. Yet he’d promised not to harm her and in his book, that also meant not letting her be hurt by anyone else. “When would you like to depart?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “I need to rehearse.”

  The question was, for which stage? “I can’t leave before noon.” It would be a miracle if he managed his preparations by then. He felt exhausted already.

  “Do you always sleep so late?” She frowned.

  “You’ll find out I suppo
se,” he snapped. Not as practiced as she pretends, Jasper thought, noting the quick convulsion of her throat. Just as well, but it didn’t mean he had to be nice about it.

  She glared and drew herself up. “I certainly will. I’ll be ready tomorrow for twelve o’clock.”

  It was amazing that a person as disheveled as she could manage such an uppity flounce. Jasper watched her disappear into the house, frustrated that he knew no curse of sufficient potency to express his exasperation. He rubbed his forefinger along the bridge of his nose—it wouldn’t look nearly so well once it was broken.

  Better not wait. No hope for him if he didn’t speak to Jack before she did.

  “Edwards?”

  “Rushford?” The doctor untangled himself from his chair and laid aside his notes as Jasper entered the drawing room.

  “I’d like to speak to you, if I may.” Jasper pitched his voice low so he wouldn’t disturb Tom’s mother who nodded away in the other chair, a tatty-looking novel splayed on her knees.

  The two men tiptoed into the hall. “What is it?” Edwards asked.

  Jasper glanced nervously at the stairs, half expecting Laura to make an entrance. “Can we speak in my room? It’s more private there.”

  Edwards’ look turned disdainful. He folded his arms. “I can’t help you,” he said. “Mercury isn’t a cure.”

  “I haven’t got pox!” Jasper hissed. Heavens, there were plenty of perfectly acceptable reasons for wanting a private word with someone, though telling a man his sister had propositioned you—and you’d accepted—wasn’t one of them. There was just no good way to do this. Lord, how to even begin? Jasper only knew he was incapable of attempting it out here. “Just come. Please.”

  “All right,” Edwards said as he followed at Jasper’s elbow. “Usually though if someone wants a private word with me, it’s pox. Are you quite sure you’re well?”

  “Perfectly sure.” Face flaming, Jasper stalked at a carpet-devouring pace through the mile of corridor to his chamber, jabbing open the door, provoked into hitting something, even if it was only walnut wood. Did everyone think him such a frippery fellow?