Daring Masquerade

by Mary Balogh

  Finally Barton took the course of playing the high-handed aristocrat, unwilling to communicate with a relative’s bastard offspring, unwilling to allow such a creature on his property. He was perfectly within his rights to command Nicholas to leave. His uncle should never have allowed the child onto his property in the first place. The new earl fully intended to take up residence at Barton Abbey and to take his son and daughter there. He could not allow them to be contaminated by contact with their less-than-respectable second cousin. It perhaps said something about the effectiveness of his self-discipline over the years that the earl almost genuinely forgot for a while that really there was nothing at all unrespectable about the birth of Nicholas Seyton, beyond the fact that he had been born little more than a month after the marriage of his parents.

  The Earl of Barton proceeded to give the order through his lawyer. He chose to take offense at Nicholas’ letter, which was impertinent, coming as it did after Barton had already informed him that he did not remember the slight incident involving his mother and his coming to England. Nicholas Seyton was to remove himself from the Abbey and the entire neighborhood if he did not wish to be prosecuted for making a nuisance of himself. The earl decided to try this bluff. He had no wish to find his cousin’s boy camped at his gate persistently demanding information about the past.

  He convinced himself he was quite safe. There was no likely way Nicholas or anyone else could discover the truth. The only possible detail that could go wrong was for that Frenchwoman to break her promise and decide to search for her son. But she had maintained her silence for almost five-and-twenty years. It was very possible that she was dead. It was certainly very improbable that she would break her vow at this late date.

  This was the way the Earl of Barton felt when he arrived at his new home. The park was even larger and the house more magnificent than he remembered them. And everything was as well-managed as it had ever been. Nicholas Seyton, he was assured, had taken himself off a week before. None of the servants had any idea where he had gone. Certainly no one had seen him since he left, taking with him only his personal possessions and the elderly valet of his uncle.

  All the other servants had remained at the Abbey. The earl even remembered a few of them, notably Dobson, the head gardener, who had been a mere assistant twenty years before, and Pickering, the porter, who must surely be too old to do his job efficiently. That feebleminded son of his was still alive too, the one that had used to follow Jonathan around like a faithful hound when they were boys. Clive had never considered that such a character at the main gate gave a good first impression of the Abbey to visitors. Perhaps he would dismiss the family and hire a new porter after he had established himself for a few weeks.

  The Earl of Barton felt secure. At least, he thought he felt secure. But after a mere day he discovered an uneasiness and restlessness in himself. Everything was so much the same as it had always been. It was hard to believe that twenty years had passed since he had been there last. He found himself quickly regressing to the way he had been during those four and a half years after he had brought Nicholas from France. He had always felt insecure during those years and haunted by his failure to find the marriage papers that Jonathan had assured him he had brought from France. It was absurd now to worry about those papers. It was downright lunacy to search for them again. If they had not surfaced in almost five-and-twenty years, they were either not in existence at all or they had been so well-hidden that they would never come to light.

  But search he did. He searched in his mind, going over again as he had a thousand times years ago all the possible places Jonathan could have chosen as a hiding place. And he searched in fact, going painstakingly through all his uncle’s papers. He cursed himself for a fool. If the marriage papers were among his uncle’s effects, then the fraud would have been exposed long ago. But he could not seem to stop himself. The day before his son and daughter were to arrive, he began to search the library. With several thousand volumes covering two walls of the long, high room from floor to ceiling, it was likely that the vast majority of the books had not been opened for well over twenty years. Had Jonathan been mad enough to choose one of them as a hiding place for his papers? It was very unlikely. Jonathan had always stayed as far away from books as he could. But the earl found, to his own irritation, that he was setting himself the task of taking down and searching each volume in the library.

  He longed for the arrival of his children. He congratulated himself on his earlier decision to arrange a house party for the following week. Perhaps when there was company at the house, he would forget about this ridiculous obsession of his.

  In the event, though, the arrival of Adam and Thelma added to his unease rather than lightened it. He would have been concerned enough at the kidnapping of his daughter’s companion even if the evidence had not been strong that Thelma herself was the intended victim. He would have been concerned enough about the presence of a highwayman in the vicinity of the Abbey even if the coast guard, hastily summoned that same night, had not assured him that such a criminal had not been heard of in Dorset for many years.

  As matters stood, a strange highwayman had suddenly appeared close to the Abbey and had attempted to kidnap the earl’s daughter. The man had apparently shown little interest in searching the Barton carriage and occupants for valuables. It did not take a great deal of intelligence to make the possible connection between the highwayman and the inquisitive and dissatisfied son of Barton’s cousin. It was not even any comfort to know that the highwayman did not fit the description of Nicholas Seyton as he remembered him. Nicholas as a child had had very dark hair.

  The earl’s new life was not going to be a peaceful one, he realized.

  Chapter 5

  Kate’s first day at Barton Abbey was one of mixed emotions. She was treated kindly by the family. She was expected to take her meals with them and was included in their conversations. The servants treated her with deference. Certainly she could not ask for more magnificent surroundings. The housekeeper took Lady Thelma and Lord Stoughton on a tour of the Abbey in which she was included. It was breathtakingly splendid, with the state apartments on the lower level as well as the library, and the main living apartments and bedchambers on the upper level. She looked forward to wandering around alone when she had the leisure. There was too much beauty to absorb on one conducted tour.

  She loved her own bedchamber, square and small in comparison with most of the other rooms she had seen, but light and cheerful with its chintz curtains and bed hangings, flowers and birds painted on a white background. The dressing room beyond it had a small but elegant Chippendale desk and chair as well as the usual furnishings. She had been assigned her own maid, a quiet, seemingly sensible girl named Audrey.

  All day long, though, she was constantly aware of the fact that she was amidst all this splendor only in the capacity of a glorified servant. She did not have the freedom of a member of the family or even of a guest. Even though she had had more than a month in London to get used to the idea, she realized that country life would make her more aware of her own essential lack of freedom.

  She loved the outdoors, and the park surrounding the Abbey was spacious and looked every bit as glorious as the building itself. The day was sunny and warm. She would have loved nothing more than a long walk across the lawns, through the shrubberies and flower gardens she could glimpse in the distance, and up the hillsides. Instead Lady Thelma chose to take only a half-hour stroll through the formal gardens immediately south of the house; and even then she complained of the heat and of the difficulty of walking easily on the piled gravel of the walks. The gardens were lovely, ablaze with the colors of numerous varieties of flowers, heavy with their perfumes, and cooled by the sight and sound at the northern end of a high fountain of water spouting from the mouths of three stone cherubs into a huge stone basin. But after two days of travel Kate wanted to walk, to stride, to draw in healthy lungfuls of fresh air.

  Most of the day they spent i
n Lady Thelma’s dressing room, really a misnomer, Kate decided. The room was large and comfortably furnished. “Sitting room” would have been a better description. Its new occupant busied herself with rearranging the room to her taste. Or rather, she busied Kate with the task. Kate found herself moving ornaments, repositioning cushions, sharpening quill pens, running to the library on two occasions to fetch books, which she guessed were to be used for decorative purposes only, and performing a dozen other trivial tasks.

  Altogether she found the day rather irksome. She liked her employer well enough, but she did find the girl rather insipid and somewhat plaintive in manner. Remaining cheerful in such an atmosphere took all Kate’s willpower. The best she could do for herself was to take refuge in her thoughts. And what more obvious topic for thought was there than Nicholas Seyton and the events of the evening before?

  Kate relived those events several times in her mind. She decided anew after a night’s sleep that she believed his story and that she wished to help him prove his legitimacy. Why she wished to become involved in a matter that was really none of her concern, she was not quite sure. She rather thought it must be because her energies needed an outlet. Life was going to be decidedly dull if it consisted wholly of being companion to Lady Thelma. It did not even offer her a chance to think for herself. All she had to do was follow the lead of her employer, do whatever that rather lethargic girl wished to do. It was not even worth thinking of fashions or new hairstyles. Her choice of clothes was between gray and brown garments. Her choice of hairstyle was nonexistent. There was only one way a lady could dress her hair in a bun at the back of her neck.

  So the prospect of being something of a spy was appealing. She was not sure what it was she was looking for, of course, and even the most innocent behavior could look suspicious to someone desperate for some excitement. Like Lord Barton shaking all his books in the library by the spine, for example. He had been doing that both times she entered the library to fetch books for Lady Thelma. Maybe it was just his eccentric way of freeing them all from years of dust. But she found herself entering wholeheartedly into the game. What if he were searching for something that concerned Nicholas? She supposed it was no game to Mr. Seyton, though. Now that she had seen something of Barton Abbey, she realized just how much he might have been defrauded of if his suspicions were true.

  Perhaps, although she tried to deny the idea to herself, Kate’s motive for becoming involved in the affairs of Nicholas Seyton had something to do with that kiss they had shared outside the Abbey wall the night before. She really had been intrigued by it. To Kate kissing had always been either a rather meaningless sign of affection shared by members of a family or a thoroughly distasteful prelude to even less-pleasant intimacies. She had hated being kissed by Giles. What followed, she had endured; it was the main part of her marriage duty, after all. And at least there was point to that. It was the way children were begotten, though that had never happened to her. But kissing was so thoroughly without practical purpose.

  But she had enjoyed kissing Nicholas Seyton, and after a day of relative boredom in her employment she had still not pinpointed what it was about his kiss that had pleased her. He had done much the same as Giles had ever done. He had opened his mouth over hers as Giles had done. The only difference was that Giles had never used his tongue—for which mercy she was truly thankful. Nicholas, of course, had not clutched her to him as if it were his ambition to crush every rib in her body, and he had not kissed her so hard that the inside of her mouth was cut against her teeth. But of course he could not have done that and let his tongue play over the flesh behind her lips the way he had.

  No, she really could not understand quite why she had not been disgusted by the experience. It amazed her to remember that she had even responded sufficiently to move her body against his. She had certainly never done any such thing with Giles. Of course there had never been any need. He had always crushed her against him as soon as he was feeling “that way,” as she had always described it to herself, and she had always known that she would not be released again until he had done “that” to her, as she had always described the next and culminating stage of his passion—always mercifully brief and equally mercifully infrequent after the first few months of their marriage. Perhaps that latter point explained the fact that she had never conceived.

  However it was, Kate felt a strong curiosity to discover if kissing Nicholas Seyton would be equally pleasurable a second time. In fact, the thought aroused quite a tingle in a part of her anatomy where she had no business feeling any tingles at all, considering her widowed status. She had certainly never felt such a naughty feeling either before or during her marriage. If she could only discover some evidence that could benefit him in his search, she would have an excuse to seek him out. Then perhaps he would kiss her again. She would probably be disappointed—she undoubtedly would. But at least she would have satisfied her curiosity.

  The earl’s somewhat peculiar behavior in the library did not seem quite excuse enough to sally forth in search of that cottage where she had been held captive the night before. But another event of the day certainly did. In fact, even if she had decided not to involve herself with Nicholas Seyton, even if she had found his kiss as nauseating as she had found Giles’s, she would still have felt it imperative to warn him that his identity was suspected and his arrest imminent.

  When Kate had arrived at the Abbey the night before, she had been taken straight to the earl’s cabinet, the office attached to his bedchamber, from which the old earl had conducted all his business. Lord Stoughton and Lady Thelma had been there too. All three had made much of Kate, listened to her story, and appeared to accept it.

  The following afternoon, however, Kate overheard part of a conversation between the earl and the captain of the coast guard, who had come to report on the search for the kidnapper. She had been sent downstairs by Lady Thelma to invite the earl to tea, and she stood politely in the great hall until Lord Barton should have time to turn to her.

  Lord Barton had just been explaining to the captain that Nicholas Seyton perhaps bore a grudge at being forced to move away from the Abbey and perhaps had something to do with the kidnapping, which had clearly been designed for Lady Thelma. The theory was at least worth looking into, the earl had added, before nodding a gracious dismissal to the man and turning to Kate to ask what he could do for her.

  Kate had decided before another hour had passed that she was going to have to seek out Mr. Seyton for herself. And quickly. The members of the coast guard doubtless knew what he looked like. He had lived in this house all his life. And he might be captured very easily if he did not know that he was being looked for. That blond hair was very distinctive. The foolish man should disguise it somehow.

  The problem was, how was she going to get to that cottage? She could find it right enough, she was sure. But how was she to get away from the Abbey? She could not just don a pair of walking shoes, grab a maid as chaperon, and announce to all and sundry that she would see them later. It was even less possible to saddle a horse and ride into the horizon. It would have to be done at night. By stealth. Truth to tell, the idea rather appealed to Kate. Should she tell anyone? The servants were all his friends, Nicholas had said. But what if she chose to confide in the very one who was not? Most rules had exceptions, life had taught her.

  She could confide in that rather lovable porter’s son who had lit her way to the house last evening, talking and giggling the whole way about “Master Nick” and “Master Jonathan,” who, the fellow was convinced, was going to come back one day. He would probably accompany her and make sure that she did not get lost. But then she would not be alone with Mr. Seyton, and it was very unlikely that he would kiss her in someone’s company. No, she would go alone.

  The evening was irksome. The earl chose to keep London hours even in this remote county of England. They dined at eight and then adjourned to the drawing room for tea. They seemed to sit an eternity over that before deciding to mo
ve to the adjoining music room, which was graced with a pianoforte as well as a spinet, a harp, and a violin. Lady Thelma had once been told in her father’s hearing that she had a sweet voice. Kate could not entirely disagree, but did the fond papa really have to insist on nine different songs to prove the point on this of all evenings?

  And certainly no one in his right senses could have ever told Lord Stoughton that he played sweetly on the violin. But he played it anyway. On any other occasion Kate might have amused herself by converting the violin in her imagination into a cat during a mating ritual, the neck its outstretched tail. On this occasion she was merely aware of the ormolu clock on the high marble mantelpiece ticking away the minutes. It was well after ten o’clock before a yawning Thelma announced that she was going to bed and her dutiful companion could rise to accompany her.

  Lady Thelma had never called on her services during the night. Even so, Kate found her heart thumping uncomfortably as she slipped down the servants’ stairs half an hour later and out through a door that she hoped would remain unbolted until her return. How she would explain a nocturnal outing if she were caught, she did not know. She would invent some story of insomnia, she supposed.

  Three and a half miles had seemed a short distance when it was covered on the back of a powerful horse the evening before. It seemed a very long way when one was on foot and not quite certain of the way at times. It took Kate well over an hour to reach the cottage, and then she was discouraged to discover that it was in darkness. But of course, it must be past midnight. Strangely, it was only then that the extreme awkwardness of the situation struck her. Until then she had seen only the excitement and intrigue of the visit. Now she realized its terrible impropriety.