Love in Disguise (The Love Trilogy, #1)

by Edith Layton

  Love in Disguise

  By Edith Layton

  Copyright 2019 by Estate of Edith Felber

  Cover Copyright 2019 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1987.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Edith Layton and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The Duke’s Wager

  The Disdainful Marquis

  The Mysterious Heir

  Red Jack’s Daughter

  Lord of Dishonor

  Peaches and the Queen

  False Angel

  The Indian Maiden

  Lady of Spirit

  The Wedding

  A True Lady

  Bound by Love

  The Fire Flower

  A Love for All Seasons

  www.untreedreads.com

  Love in Disguise

  Edith Layton

  …For what is courtship, but disguise?

  True hearts may have dissembling eyes…

  —Thomas Campion, “Never Love Unless You Can”

  1

  The safest way to arrive in London this night would be to arrange to be born there. For a thin, chill, freezing rain glazed the surfaces of the roads so that the teams of horses had to tread like ballerinas to keep their balance and the coaches swayed in their wake, slewing wildly at every misstep, and shaking almost as violently as their terrified passengers did. A trip that ought to have been accomplished in hours now looked as though it might take the night to complete, or else be over at any moment, if completion were to occur with a spill into a ditch. Or so the inside passengers on the Brighton Thunder moaned to each other as they clung to their shifting seats.

  The outside riders on their lofty rocking seats were taking the hazardous journey far differently. Half of them were whooping and shouting with every wild swing of their lurching ride, because they were just as drunk as the cliché said such young lords were supposed to be. From their elevated outlook they found every danger entrancing, their youth and their condition making death and injury as unreal as the state they were in. The wind carried their gleeful cries away into the night. But since the other four hapless passengers who shared the carriage roof with them were there for economy’s, not audacity’s, sake, they wished the driving wind would carry the young merrymakers away along with their shouts.

  The lead horses mistook a turn in the road and the coach made a long slide to the left, just grazing a milestone, causing the inside passengers to shriek, as a young lord on the coach top rose and brandished his flask to the night and shouted, “They’re off!!” to the winds. He stood there swaying and giggling as the coach shuddered to a halt, its drag pan finally catching in a jagged rut, and the horses came to a steaming stand, trembling, at the road’s edge. Then a hard hand came down on the young reveler, and even in his drunken state he saw such rage in the face that glared down at him that he swallowed hard, and under pressure of that heavy hand, as his legs turned to jelly, he sank unresisting to his seat.

  “Not another word, you young idiot,” a furious voice growled. “There’s nothing funny in these proud beasts working their great hearts out. A broken leg’s death for them, and their deaths would be more than the little inconvenience yours might be for your family when I tumble you from your seat—as I will, my word on it—if you stand up once more this night.”

  And the proud young lord, who’d been taught all his privileged life that everyone on earth was inferior to him except for his father and his king, sat very quietly and obediently. Because it had been the coachman who ordered him to, and drunk as he was, the young gentleman knew the rules. The coachman was a law unto himself, and the absolute king of the road.

  The sleet continued to hiss down as the coachman conferred with the guard. Then he climbed down and tried the surface of the road with his booted toe and scooped up some of the nubbly bits of sleet that began to bounce off the sheer ice that lay beneath, so as to assess its weight and texture in his gloved palm. He lifted his face to the racing clouds, and when a jagged bit of cloud tore off from the face of the bone-white moon, his eyes were as cold and colorless as the sleet which stung his own ivory face.

  “The wind’s rising,” he said when he took up the reins again. And as he nudged the wheelers so that they might inch up on the leaders to get the coach on its way again, he added for the topside passengers who’d leaned close to hear him, “And the temperature’s dropping. It’s a skating pond now. Snowdrifts can be forded, my cattle can swim floods, but they’re not mountain goats. And we’re not the Royal Mail either, gentlemen. We’re not sworn to get to London, dead or alive, on schedule. So we’ll be inning tonight instead of just changing horses, courtesy of the company. We’ll stop at the Silver Swan, not a league ahead, not far from Blindley Heath and Gibbet Hill. Yes, a charming location for an overnight stay,” he said on a grin that was nonetheless as grim as his voice, “but better than the grave, I believe. I apologize,” he added in a most nonapologetic voice as the four horses inched their way down the treacherous road again, “for the delay, but the Thunder will not be rolling on tonight.”

  And gifted with a quip that was as good as any they’d heard, and quotable at a dozen merry occasions as well, his sporting young gentlemen passengers sat back, content to get to the Silver Swan alive, even if it meant not having a tale of their derring-do on the Brighton Road to regale their friends with out of this night’s business.

  *

  It was such a terrible night that the Swan was almost filled. The Brighton Fancy had been the last stagecoach through, at dusk, when the road had just started to freeze. Even now the drivers and passengers of the Dart and the Eagle and the Royal George sat snug within the taproom. Their ranks were swelled by the wealthier owners of various stalled private coaches who now dined and drank as they looked out the Swan’s windows to curse the weather, and paid handsomely to do so in comfort. The proprietor of the Silver Swan had a hundred tasks to occupy him as his inn filled, but it was his sense of hospitality, as well as gleeful greed, that caused him to remain near the door.

  “A filthy night,” he commiserated as he admitted another new guest.

  “Aye, a filthy night,” agreed the robust, well-set-up gentleman after he’d stepped from his own fine coach, delivering what might have been the password to gain admittance for that night, it was spoken so often.

  In a practiced single gesture, the landlord proffered the register and swept into a bow. But he had difficulty straightening up when he chanced to glance at the young female who’d come in on the gentleman’s arm, as she pushed back her hood and gazed about the inn. Hundreds of female visitors had graced the Swan, but still the landlord had s
een few so stunningly lovely. For her hood fell back to reveal a quantity of cornsilk hair so light and shining it seemed richer and more extravagant than the sable fur that had covered it, and her white skin was the sort only fairy-tale maidens were supposed to have. But there was nothing classical or cool about her fair good looks, not when such liveliness sparkled in those wide brown eyes, not with that saucy pouting mouth she had. Hers was such an expressive, beguiling face, in fact, the landlord thought, that it made a fellow hesitate for a moment before he tried not to gape at her lush form. She took his breath away, and it added to her charm that she didn’t seem to notice it.

  It wasn’t surprising to the landlord that the gentleman carefully signed her name separately on the register as “Miss Logan” to his own “Mr. Logan,” as it soon became obvious that they were brother and sister. For when the gentleman took off his high hat, it could be seen that his thinning fair hair was the exact match of hers in color, if not in wavy abundance, and both noses in profile tended to tip upward at the end of their insignificant lengths. And as soon as he’d done writing their names, she grinned, and teased him in the most sisterly fashion.

  “What a charming inn,” she exclaimed. “Just smell that dinner cooking! Mmm. Poor Charlie, it’s too bad, isn’t it, because you did say you promised Mary you’d see to slimming?”

  “Just so,” the heavyset gentleman answered comfortably, “I shall. I’ll watch my dinner carefully.”

  “Oh, Charlie,” she laughed, “what a bouncer! You’ll only watch to be sure it all gets on your fork! If I didn’t know better,” she added on a mock sigh, including the landlord in her conspiratorial smile, “I’d vow you scented roast in the wind a mile back and poured ice on the road yourself.”

  Before they’d done laughing, and even before the young woman’s very proper-looking maid staggered in muttering about her young lady catching her death on such a night, the landlord assigned them one of his last best private dining rooms and a pair of his finest bedchambers, for his experienced eye had noticed something else about the pair. The stylishly simple high-waisted gown that hinted, rather than boasted, of the lady’s shapely form, had immediately spoken up to him in accents as cultured as any he’d ever heard pronounced, and the gentleman’s tailoring had given him as many details as his bank statement could.

  No sooner had he seen them snug and safely away from the common herd than the door burst open admitting gusts of cold air and a horde of stamping, blowing, and laughing young men.

  “Filthy night,” the landlord dutifully informed the private coachload of dashing blades, and getting a strong whiff of alcohol as the gentlemen agreed with him in far more colorful terms, he recklessly consigned the lot of them to his paltriest private parlor when they requested superior accommodations, deciding to keep his best remaining private dining room and bedchambers against the arrival of some nob who’d appreciate them.

  But the night drew on, and though incoming stragglers reported that the wind was cutting keen and ice was hardening like a moneylender’s heart, no one entered the inn to lay claim to those last best chambers and his finest dining room. The landlord was brooding over lost opportunities, muttering “Filthy night” to a somewhat unsteady gentleman who’d just arrived, when an amused voice said in reply, overriding the gentleman’s slurred “Too right, damn filthy.”

  “Insalubrious, yes.”

  The landlord’s heart picked up even as his head did, and he looked up to try to find the gentleman who’d just unknowingly engaged the best dining room and bedchambers in the Silver Swan for himself and his three companions.

  The flustered dandy attempting to extricate himself from his scarf and greatcoat was, from his cut and style, a London smart, at least three bottles to the better already, the landlord judged, quickly gazing past him. His auburn-haired female companion, pretty as a picture and painted up just like one too, was likely earning her keep as she stood there fawning on him. Another young woman, with hair as bright as a buttercup’s and about as real as the possibility of one blooming on such a March night too, attempted an air of dignity. But dignity didn’t march with such a lavishly rouged face, or such a daringly low-cut gown, so it must have been put on even as the gown had been, to please her escort, who was obviously the one who’d just spoken and engaged their rooms. For she didn’t attempt, as her friend did with the other gentleman, to please him by wrapping herself around him. She might have been no better than she should be, the landlord realized, but she was no fool. This wasn’t the sort of gentleman who’d take kindly to such public displays, whatever his private pastimes with her involved. This gentleman was, as the innkeeper had instantly recognized, a patrician in every particular.

  He was tall and slender, but firmly muscled and evenly proportioned, as his well-cut, closely fitting clothes revealed when he removed his many-caped greatcoat. His dark blue jacket was fitted over a richly embroidered muted peach waistcoat, which had gone on over blindingly white linen. Dun pantaloons fit flawlessly over long legs encased in high gleaming Hessian boots. But anyone with funds could dress as a gentleman. This fellow, the landlord thought with great pleasure as he bowed, could have played the part in rags.

  So when the gentleman was handed the register, and his host said, “If you’d be pleased to sign, your lordship,” he was surprised when the bosky gentleman muttered instead, “You do it, Warwick, damned if my hand ain’t frozen.”

  The landlord hadn’t even addressed the drunken fellow, and so he only proffered the register to the elegant gentleman again, and said more clearly, “Here you are, your lordship.”

  Only to hear him reply, “Certainly, I’ll sign, but my friend is quite right, landlord. It is Mister—Mr. Warwick Jones.”

  And so he signed it, though he styled his friend as “Baron” on the next line. But it made no matter to his host. He knew aristocracy when he saw it, titled or not.

  And in fact, the countenance before him was a complex one, that of a voluptuary and an aesthetic intermingled, the sort of face that came from discipline as well as breeding, where intellect had been trained to hold tight rein on strong passions. Soft, shining nut-brown hair was swept back from the thin, high-boned face. The nose was thin as well, but long and high and arched, over full lips that were either sensitive or sensual according to his mood, or the mood of the observer. The lean cheeks tapered inward from the prominent sweep of cheekbones, and his skin was clear and smooth, but of a pale and olive cast. He was clearly a young man, but still it had never been precisely a young face; age was incidental to it. Nor could it be termed a handsome face, not with such a nose dominating it, not with such contradictions in it, not, at least, until one saw, beneath the flyaway brows, the heavy-lidded long eyes, which turned down at their corners, open to bend a surprisingly brilliant sapphire gaze down upon the world. The centers of those large eyes were deepest blue, and the white surround showed all around them, and this was such an arresting feature that the viewer forgot to assess whether it was or wasn’t a handsome face when he was caught in that calm, intelligent regard.

  It was that quizzical look of appraisal that convinced the innkeeper. This was the easy grace of a man used to respect, command, and instant obedience. Overall, the last, most important touch was evident: he looked as though he knew the reactions he’d caused in his observer and was vastly amused rather than gratified by them. It was the amusement, of course, that set the seal on it. This was a Man of Consequence.

  Without a word, the landlord showed the quartet into his finest private dining room. A small fire had been laid in the enormous grate and it crackled merrily as they entered the room. But while his guests settled themselves, the landlord piled logs high until the fire thundered forth the warm welcome he wished he could express himself. Then, not even bothering to take their order, for he’d already decided to send his best to them, he wordlessly bowed his way out.

  For a moment the landlord stood in the long common hallway listening to the increasing sounds of merriment from t
he crowded taproom, knowing that all his private dining rooms were occupied, and in that one small moment he was a man who knew the precise meaning of contentment.

  And then a stableboy came dashing into the inn shouting for help, for he cried, “The Thunder’s comin’ up t’ drive! And she’s filled t’ the sky!”

  The stranded coachmen and their guards who’d been taking their ease in the taproom lumbered out at once to aid their brothers. The coachmen were all fine specimens of the breed: big, thick-shouldered, red-faced men with mighty barrel chests and great burgeoning bellies, fellows who swaggered the earth with a clear regard for their own importance, and it was they who reached the Thunder first to help hand down the outside riders into the courtyard of the Swan. They shepherded all the passengers into the inn, congratulating them for arriving whole after such a journey, as the coachman of the Thunder coaxed his exhausted teams into the stable.

  Only after all the passengers had left his care, after the coach was buffed and dried, and the horses untethered, rubbed down, and soothed, for they, poor creatures, had a short brutish life and deserved that courtesy at least, did the coachman of the Thunder finally allow himself to enter the Swan to thaw and seek his own comfort. The landlord saw him unlock his great Benjamin cape from around his shoulders and straighten as he eased it off, understanding his relief only when he saw the amount of encrusted sleet that had weighed it down. He went to help him find a place at the fire to dry it, but paused when he saw Nan, his steady serving wench, come out of the taproom, wipe her hands on her apron, and then run into the coachman’s arms with a great cry of joy.