Jane Feather - [V Series]

by Violet

  In the drawing room Lucy was struggling to recover her equanimity as she took the hostess’s place behind the teacups. “Do you drink tea after dinner in Spain?”

  “Not in general.” Tamsyn regarded Lucy thoughtfully. It seemed to her that Julian’s sister was in need of a little sisterly guidance. The question was: how to dispense it without giving too much away?

  Lucy poured tea. “We always put the milk in afterward,” she offered a shade stiffly.

  “Why is that?”

  “So that one can adjust the strength,” Lucy said. “You can’t tell if you put the milk in first.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Tamsyn agreed, taking a seat on the sofa beside Lucy. “I must remember that. Tell me about your husband.”

  “Why would you want to know about him?” Two spots of color burned on Lucy’s cheeks as she handed Tamsyn a cup.

  Tamsyn took a sip and decided that now was not the moment for tea. “Because I think you need some help,” she said candidly, discarding her teacup. “After only ten months of marriage a man should still be sleeping in his wife’s bed. And if you’re not careful, that husband of yours is going to start some serious wandering.”

  “Oh, how could you say such a scandalous thing?” Lucy clapped her hands to her flaming cheeks. “What could you possibly know about such things?”

  “I’m Spanish,” Tamsyn said vaguely. “We’re perhaps a little more open about these matters.” She rose to her feet and went to the decanters on the sideboard. She’d have to slide carefully around her cover if she was to help Lucy, but their earlier conversation combined with an evening in the company of Gareth Fortescue had made it very clear to her that young Lucy needed some help.

  She poured herself a glass of wine, sympathetically regarding the girl’s flushed and bemused indignation. “Do you care for your husband, Lucy?”

  “Of course I do!” Tears sparked in the china-blue eyes. “And he cares for me.”

  “Yes, of course he does.” Tamsyn sat down again, cradling her wineglass. “But he’s older than you, and a deal more experienced. Do you enjoy being in bed with him?”

  Lucy stared at her, dumbfounded.

  Tamsyn nodded. “You were a virgin, of course. And I don’t suppose he thought to discover what pleased you. Men like that often don’t.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Lucy was struggling for words, unable to believe she was really hearing this. “I don’t want to talk about this … it’s horrible … it’s not decent.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Lucy. If you don’t talk about it, how will you ever learn to make love? And if you don’t learn, then you won’t learn to enjoy it, and neither will your husband. And then you really will be in a pretty pickle.” She drank her wine with a matter-of-fact nod. “Cecile was always telling me about the prudishness of the English and how women weren’t expected to know anything about pleasuring.… In fact, when she was a girl, it was considered quite shocking for a woman to enjoy coupling.”

  “Cecile?” Lucy said faintly.

  “My mother. She would have talked to you just as I am, Lucy, so please don’t be offended.”

  Lucy stared at this extraordinary girl who was regarding her with an air of confident authority that made her feel like a patient with a physician.

  Before she could gather her wits, however, Julian and Gareth strolled into the drawing room.

  “Lucy has been explaining to me the correct way to pour tea in the drawing room,” Tamsyn said. “May I pour for the gentlemen, Lucy?”

  Lucy moved away from the tea tray, aware that Tamsyn had noticed her hands were not quite steady. When Julian suggested she play, she went to the pianoforte reluctantly. Her head was so full of what she’d heard that her fingers were all thumbs, and after two muddled and discordant attempts at a folk song, Gareth said with a degree of brutality, “Oh, for God’s sake, Lucy. Spare our ears. It sounds like a tribe of cats on the prowl.”

  Lucy dropped the lid of the instrument with a bang. “I beg your pardon.” She got up and returned to the sofa. “I’m sure you’d prefer to hear Tamsyn play. I’m sure she counts it among her many accomplishments.”

  “I don’t play the pianoforte, only the guitar,” Tamsyn said readily, ignoring Lucy’s petulant tone. She’d shocked the girl and would renew her tutorial in the morning, when Lucy had had a chance to absorb what she’d heard.

  “How exotic,” Lucy murmured.

  “Not where I come from,” Tamsyn responded. “It’s considered a minor accomplishment.”

  “Like other things, I imagine.”

  “Possibly.”

  Julian frowned as Lucy’s barbed comments flew and Tamsyn batted them gently back without any sign of hostility. But Lucy was radiating antagonism.

  Gareth cleared his throat. “Think I’ll take a stroll down to the village before bed. I daresay I’ll see you all in the morning.” He bent over Lucy and pecked her cheek. “Good night, my dear. Don’t stay up late, now. You’ve had a long journey.”

  Lucy’s cheeks paled, and then the pallor was driven away by a crimson tide. Her eyes darted involuntarily toward Tamsyn, who studiously avoided meeting her gaze.

  The door closed behind Gareth, and Lucy stood up hastily. “I do find that I’m very tired. If you’ll both excuse me, I think I’ll go to bed.” Tears were heavy in her voice, and she dashed an arm across her eyes as she went to the door.

  “Bastard!” Julian swore as she left. “I’m damned if I’ll permit him to go whoring in the village while my sister lies weeping upstairs.”

  “Yes, very insensitive of him,” Tamsyn agreed. “But if you drag him back, he’ll sulk. He’s that type.”

  Julian regarded her with a frown, noticing the wineglass she still held. “Why have you been dipping deep this evening? I thought it didn’t agree with you.”

  “Oh, it agrees with me, all right,” she said lazily, running a hand through her hair, her eyes narrowing seductively as she drew her knees beneath her in the big armchair. “But it tends to make me rather uninhibited, and it stimulates my imagination. Shall we go upstairs, since your guests have disappeared?”

  The prospect of a more than usually uninhibited and imaginative Tamsyn was heady indeed. Her violet eyes were luring him, the slight body curled in the chair radiated sensual invitation. A wicked, exotic invitation. And there would never be another woman like her.

  “Forgive me,” he said abruptly. “I’ve some work to do in my book room.”

  The rejection was so unexpected that Tamsyn stared stunned as the door closed behind him. Tears burned behind her eyes and she blinked them away angrily. She’d been offering an overture all evening, and he’d seemed to accept the end of their quarrel. But now to turn from her so coldly …

  But she wouldn’t be defeated. Her mouth took a stubborn turn.

  Chapter Nineteen

  GARETH STROLLED BACK TO TREGARTHAN UNDER THE moon, dolefully contemplating the lack of entertainment to be found in a small Cornish fishing village. The taverns in Fowey offered a sad dearth of eager young wenches ready to dally with a well-heeled member of the Quality, although the landlady at the Ship had winked at him and allowed him a discreet fondle of her ripe bosom, leaning over his table as she served his tankard of gin and water. Unfortunately, her husband had appeared on the scene, genial enough on the surface but with a pair of massive forearms that rivaled the giant Gabriel’s, with whom he’d been drinking in a dark corner of the taproom.

  Extraordinary-looking man, the Scotsman. Some kind of bodyguard apparently, all very rum. In fact, Gareth decided with a discreet belch, it was a rum business whichever way you looked at it: Julian, far from his beloved battlefields, playing guardian to an unknown Spanish chit. Of course, if the Duke of Wellington had commanded it, that would explain it. A great stickler for his duty, was Julian.

  Deciding to take the cross-country route, Gareth swung himself over a stile, catching the toe of his boot in the top rung and almost plummeting headlong. Cursing under hi
s breath, he regained his balance and continued across the field.

  The Penhallan twins had been in the tavern, drinking by themselves in a corner. He’d exchanged a nod with them, but they didn’t move in his circles in London, so he hadn’t felt a need to do more than that. There was something deuced smoky about those two … always had been. There was bad blood in the Penhallans, everyone said.

  Gareth lurched through a gap in a bramble hedge and paused. Behind and below him the lights of Fowey were all but extinguished, just a lantern swinging on the quay in case anyone decided to row across the river from Polruan at dead of night. Ahead, there seemed only an expanse of field and cliff top. He could hear the breakers on the shore way below at the base of the cliff. Damnation, surely he wasn’t lost? He should have stuck to the lanes. He looked up at the star-filled sky, peered into the distance, caught a glimmer of light through a stand of trees ahead, and decided it must be the gatehouse of Tregarthan.

  With renewed energy he strode on and was immensely relieved when he identified the stone gatehouse at the bottom of the drive. His fob watch told him it was barely eleven o’clock. In London the night would just be starting, and all he had to look forward to here was an early night listening to the sea and the owls.

  As he approached the house, a massive shadow fell across his path. His heart jumped into his throat, and he whirled to see the giant Gabriel behind him, holding a lantern. Gabriel grinned amiably. “I hope you enjoyed your evening. Good company these Cornish folk, I find.”

  Gareth was dumbfounded at being spoken to with such familiarity by a servant. “My good man—”

  “Och, aye, laddie, I’m no’ your man … good or otherwise,” Gabriel said with no diminution in his affability. “I’m no’ a servant, either. My job’s to look after the bairn as I see fit … just that. So to avoid any unpleasantness, I suggest you bear that in mind. I’ll be bidding you good night, now.” Gabriel turned toward the side of the house, then paused, glancing over his shoulder. “By the by, laddie. I’d not be paying too much attention to Jebediah’s woman, either, if I were you.” And he walked off around the house, whistling to himself, leaving Gareth staring in mute and indignant astonishment.

  Gabriel turned up his nose in the darkness. The colonel’s brother-in-law was a blockhead. Put a pistol in his hand, and he’d probably shoot his foot. Couldn’t hold his liquor, either. He turned into the stableyard and climbed the outside stairs at the side of the stable block to the whitewashed room he shared with Josefa. He preferred the privacy out here away from the house, and the room above the stables much more closely resembled the simple cottage rooms that he and Josefa were accustomed to.

  She greeted him softly as he ducked beneath the low lintel and entered the cheerful, tidy room. His woman had a talent for creating domestic comfort wherever they happened to fetch up, even in the most unlikely places. In fact, Gabriel often said she could make a home under a cactus. He flung himself onto a low chair, and Josefa bustled over to pull off his boots.

  “I came across those cousins of the bairn’s tonight,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt as Josefa poured him his nightly tankard of rum. The woman nodded, her eyes bright with understanding as she took his shirt and carefully folded it.

  “Right nasty-looking pair,” he went on, kicking off his britches, standing on one leg to pull off his sock. “They’ll bear watching.” He stood on the other leg to remove his other sock before pushing off his woolen drawers.

  Josefa gathered up his garments as they fell to the floor, folding them with loving care and placing them in a cedar chest. She didn’t say anything while he mused, imparting little snippets of information, more to clarify things in his own mind then to share his thoughts. But she heard and nodded, and he knew she was storing it all away, and if he ever needed advice or an opinion, she would give it sensibly, so long as it was solicited.

  He drained his tankard and with a groan of contentment fell onto the bed, the bed ropes creaking mightily under his weight. Josefa clambered in beside him, and he reached for her warm, soft, accommodating roundness, burying his head in the pillowy bosom. She made a little clucking sound of pleasure and wrapped her short arms around him as far as they would go, opening herself readily as he burrowed into her.

  “You’re a pearl, woman,” Gabriel muttered, and she smiled and stroked his back. “But those twins will definitely bear watching.”

  Gareth’s indignation was only exacerbated when he entered the house and saw that his new Hessians were caked with mud and gave off a pungent farmyard aroma. The hall was dimly lit with a thick wax candle on a table at the foot of the stairs, two carrying candles beside it. A light showed beneath the library door. Presumably St. Simon was still up and would claim the second candle. Presumably someone would also lock up. Or perhaps they didn’t bother in this neck of the woods.

  Gareth lit his candle and stomped up the stairs. Two candles in wall sconces lit the long corridor, and the house was very quiet. He found his way to the bedchamber at the end of the corridor and opened the door softly. The curtains were drawn around the bed, moonlight filtering through the thin summer curtains at the window.

  “Is that you, Gareth?” Lucy’s voice spoke nervously from the tented bed.

  “And who else would it be?” He realized he sounded ungracious, but the reek from his boots was almost overpowering. He yanked them off against the andirons, picked them up, and deposited them gingerly outside the door for the boot boy.

  He undressed, put on his nightshirt, and took a step toward his dressing room. Then he paused. He was damned if he was going to be deprived of a decent bed when he didn’t have anything to feel guilty about … nothing to send him to the narrow daybed next door. He blew out his candle and pulled back the bed curtains. Lucy was curled on the far edge of the bed, a lace cap on her brown hair. He slid in beside her. Her sweet-smelling warmth filled the dark cavern of the bed. He reached out to touch her and felt her immediate recoil.

  Sighing, he rolled onto his side, facing away from her. He was no brute, and he hated it when she wept and shivered beneath him and he knew he was hurting her. Every now and again he forced both of them to go through the motions, because there must be a child of the union. Once he had an heir or two, then they could both let the whole miserable business slide.

  He closed his eyes and conjured up the image of Marjorie, her knowing hands, her lascivious little wriggles.

  Lucy lay wide-eyed in the darkness, trying not to weep, thinking of the shocking things Tamsyn had said. How dared she talk in that fashion? And how in the world did she know about such things … an unmarried girl?

  Julian heard Gareth’s return and waited until his footsteps had receded on the stairs; then he snuffed the candles and left the library. He locked and barred the front door, lit his own candle, extinguished the wax taper, and made his way up to bed, leaving the candles alight in the sconces in case anyone wandered abroad at night.

  His own apartments, consisting of bedchamber, dressing room, and private parlor, occupied the center of the house with a sweep of mullioned windows facing the lawns and the sea. On either side were the tower rooms. Opposite were a string of guest apartments, the largest being occupied by his sister and her husband.

  He let himself into his bedchamber, feeling restless and yet jaded. His sister’s marital problems depressed him, but that was not at the root of his dissatisfaction. Part of it was the acute discomfort of his own need aroused by the liquid light of inviting arousal in Tamsyn’s eyes, the catlike sensuality of her body in the chair. That was part of it, but it was also caused by distaste at his own roughness. He’d hurt her without a word of explanation and certainly without justification. She had done everything she could that evening to repair the breach between them, and then she had offered herself in her customary open, trusting fashion with no expectation of rejection. He’d seen the flash of shock, the glitter of tears in her eyes, before he’d turned from her, and he couldn’t rid himself of the image.

>   He closed the door of his bedchamber and then turned back to the room, holding his carrying candle high. For a crazy moment he thought he was seeing simply the figment of his imagination, and then he knew that of course he should have expected it. Tamsyn was not one to accept rejection, however hurt and vulnerable she might have looked.

  She sat naked on the window seat in the moonlight, chin cupped in her palm as she looked out over the silver-washed lawns to the horizon where black velvet sky met the midnight-blue line of the sea.

  And his pulse raced … his blood sang.

  “There you are,” she said cheerfully, as if they’d never had a cross word. “I was beginning to think you’d stay up over your work—if that’s what it was—all night.”

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” he demanded in a fierce whisper, fighting himself, fighting yet again the knowledge that there would never be another woman in his life like this one. He set his candle on the table. “I told you that for as long as my sister’s in the house, you may not come in here.”

  “You weren’t that specific,” Tamsyn said, uncurling herself from the window seat. “Besides, your sister’s tucked up in bed.” She slipped from the seat and came toward him. “Everyone’s asleep, milord colonel. Who could possibly know what goes on behind these doors?”

  “That is not the point,” he declared, shrugging out of his coat. “My sister is an innocent young girl. We know that doesn’t mean anything to you, but—”

  “Oh, please don’t start that again,” Tamsyn pleaded, so close to him now he could sense the warmth of her bare skin even through his shirt and the fine knit of his pantaloons. “Must we quarrel about it again?”

  Julian looked down at her helplessly. The liquescent eyes, the slight quiver of her soft mouth, the imploring voice, were totally unexpected. He thought he knew how to handle the fiery brigand, but he didn’t have the faintest idea how to deal with this manifestation.