Cherished

by Elizabeth Thornton

  Cherished

  Elizabeth Thornton

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1993 by Mary George

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition January 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-566-7

  Also by Elizabeth Thornton

  The Devereux Trilogy

  Tender the Storm

  Velvet Is the Night

  Cherished

  Bluestocking Bride

  Fallen Angel

  Highland Fire

  The Passionate Prude

  Scarlet Angel

  A Virtuous Lady

  The Worldly Widow

  This one is for all my American friends. And especially for Orysia Earhart and Linda Hill

  To Ron Clay, who always has just the right book to help me with my research, whether battles, uniforms, regiments, fur trade, Ron knows it all.

  Prologue

  As ever, the orchards and flower gardens in Kent that summer were among the first to bloom in the whole of England. Emily walked the ancient cloisters and flagstoned paths of Rivard Abbey, absorbing far more than the profusion of sights and sounds around her. She felt awakened, as if the color and scent of that particular summer pulsed with her own heartbeat, promising she knew not what.

  She was lost in contemplation when he came upon her at the water fountain, a young girl poised on the threshold of womanhood. Her looks were as patrician as her lineage, pristine pure and as fair as his were dark. He said her name softly and she lifted her head, shading her eyes with one hand against the glare.

  For a moment, she did not recognize him. She saw only a young gentleman in his mid-twenties who seemed out of place in her flower garden. He was too arrogantly male, too arrogantly uncultivated.

  “Your guardian told me that I would find you here,” he said.

  The smile on her face froze.

  To give herself a moment to recover from the shock of seeing him again, she plucked a crimson blossom from one of the rhododendron bushes that screened the fountain from the house. “Leon,” she said, and had the presence of mind to offer him her hand.

  Unexpectedly, he pressed a kiss to her wrist and the heat of his lips seared a path along her arm, clear through her chest to her throat, choking off her next breath.

  The man’s charm was potent. Emily had never doubted it. What was mystifying was why he should be turning that charm upon her. She and Leon Devereux had been at daggers drawn since he was a leggy schoolboy and she was a grubby hoyden in pinafores. They disliked each other intensely. The last time they had been alone together, he had dunked her in the pond.

  Striving for a natural tone, and remembering both her manners and the fact that she was now a young lady of fashion, she said, “When did you arrive in England, Leon? Aunt Zoë said nothing to me. Was she expecting you?”

  He answered her cordially, as though there had never been anything between them but amity and goodwill. He had wanted to surprise everyone, he told her. No, he had not told his sister that he was coming. He wouldn’t have missed Emily’s birthday ball for the world.

  “Don’t gape, brat,” he said, touching one finger to her open mouth. “It’s not becoming in a young lady of your advanced years.” His eyes made a slow sweep, taking inventory, and he grinned. “Your figure has filled out quite nicely, though I am not sure that I approve the way you have dressed your hair. It suited you long.”

  She checked the impulse to grind her teeth together and smiled tightly. Now this was more like the Leon Devereux she knew. From beneath her brows, she slanted him a sidelong glance. “You haven’t changed a bit,” she told him.

  He laughed, and patted her consolingly on the cheek. “Do you know, your eyes change color when you are in a temper? They are glowing like amethysts now.”

  The words to put him in his place were slow in coming. She was out of practice—two years out of practice to be exact, two years since Leon Devereux had relieved her of his hateful presence to make his way in the world under the wing of a married sister and her husband who lived in New York. She huffed and puffed and made do for the present by throwing him a glare shot with invective.

  Leon didn’t catch it. His eyes were wandering over the fields and orchards, taking in the setting. There were no acres of manicured lawns as graced other great English houses. Rivard was formerly a monastery. The gardens and farm were very much as they had been in the monks’ day. Only the interior of the main building had been substantially altered, and that was not evident from the outside.

  “When I thought of you,” he said, “I pictured you here. An English rose in an English country garden. Safe. Cloistered. Inviolate.”

  His odd changes of mood were confusing her. If Leon had given her a passing thought in the last two years, she would be astonished. Without lowering her guard, she said carefully, “How long do you plan to stay, Leon?”

  His eyes narrowed to slits but he responded pleasantly enough. “Not very long. New York is my home now. There is some unfinished business I must attend to here in England, then I shall be on my way.”

  With perfect sincerity, she was able to say, “I hope your business is concluded satisfactorily before long.”

  “I’ll just wager you do,” he said, and dazzled her with a slow, lazy grin.

  She was still blinking rapidly to dispel the effects of it when Leon made another lightning shift in mood. “Tell me what you have been doing since I was last here,” he said.

  As they conversed, he had been directing her steps along the flagstoned paths, halting from time to time to admire a bank of honeysuckle or a particularly fine bed of early roses. When they came to a stone bench, he indicated that he wished her to be seated. He remained standing.

  “You have been away at school, I believe.”

  Slowly at first, then with growing confidence when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to pounce on her and hold her up to ridicule, she began to relate some of the events of the previous two years. There was very little to tell. She had made a few friends at school and had been granted a fair number of awards on graduation day. What she did not tell him was that she would have traded all her prizes for one-tenth of her sister’s popularity. Sara did not have an academic bent but she was the most sought-after girl in school. Emily told him nothing of this because Leon had once accused her of being jealous of her younger sister.

  She ended by saying, “Sara will be so disappointed that she is not here to welcome you. When school was over, she went off to visit some friends, but she will be here by the end of the week in time for my birthday ball.”

  He had no comment to make on this, and after a long silence, he said, “And what of the future, Emily? What does that hold for you?”

  She shrugged faintly. “A season in London. Balls. Parties. That sort of thing.”

  She did not elaborate because she could not believe that Leon Devereux was interested in such things. His life was far more exciting than hers. He was a fur trader, and in little over two years, with only a modest investment of capital, he had made himself a rich man.

  “Tell me about America and Canada,” she said. “I hear from Aunt Zoë that you have done remarkably well for
yourself. Are you still with your sister Claire and her family?”

  “Do you mean remarkably well for a French refugee who arrived in England as a boy with little more than the clothes on his back?”

  With those fierce words, the mood was shattered and Emily would have started to her feet if Leon had not pressed her back.

  “No, no, I don’t mean to quarrel with you. That slipped out before I was aware of it.” When she stopped struggling, he released her. “Yes, you might say I have done remarkably well for myself. I had help, of course, from two very generous brothers-in-law. I am no longer the poor relation, depending on the charity of others. I don’t have to answer to anyone, Emily.”

  “No one ever thought of you as the poor relation,” she said, but very quietly so as not to provoke that unpredictable temper.

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps I was too sensitive. Your uncle paid for my schooling, the clothes on my back, the roof over my head. He made me an allowance. I had no money of my own. How else should I feel? Do you wonder that I was forever getting into scrapes? I was wild. I admit it. But perhaps I had reason to be.”

  He stopped abruptly and walked a few paces away from her before retracing his steps. He was unsmiling. “Sometimes I forget that your experience is limited. You are only a girl of sixteen. I was just about your age when I first came to England, and my life has been vastly different from yours.”

  She was well aware of it. Ten years before, Leon had arrived in England in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Though she was not clear on some of the details, she knew that her guardian, Uncle Rolfe, had practically rescued his wife’s brother from the jaws of the guillotine.

  “I don’t think I have ever heard you speak of France,” she said, voicing the stray thought that had crossed her mind.

  “And you never shall,” he answered brusquely. “That chapter of my life is closed.”

  The man was impossible. He didn’t know how to conduct a polite conversation. Half the time she was on tenterhooks, not knowing what was expected of her. Rising gracefully, she offered an inane excuse about having promised Nurse that she would lend a hand in the nursery. She was sure that he would be as relieved as she to bring their conversation to a close. Duty was served and they were now free to follow their own inclinations.

  He surprised her by taking her firmly by the elbow. “Lead on. It’s time I became reacquainted with my English nephews.”

  But when they reached the nursery, Emily’s embarrassment was acute when it was revealed that Nurse and her young charges had gone off on a picnic for the day.

  Leon’s dark eyes danced merrily and for the first time ever in Emily’s memory, they laughed together without rancor.

  Over the next few days, Emily found that Leon occupied her thoughts. She didn’t know what to make of him. It seemed that she could not turn around but she was falling over him. There was a time when he would have turned on his heel and made off in the opposite direction if he had seen her coming. In two years, he had changed radically, and all for the better. The man really did possess a few redeeming virtues—when he wanted to. Sometimes it was hard to remember that he was once that horrid boy who had been the bane of her existence.

  Emily acknowledged that she had been a difficult child, not shy, really, but quiet and, in some respects, withdrawn. These characteristics might have been overcome in time if a series of catastrophic events had not overtaken her. Before she was seven, in quick succession, she and her younger sister Sara had lost their father, their mother, and a stepfather who doted on his stepdaughters.

  Their father’s brother, Uncle Rolfe, was their guardian, and though affectionate in a casual way, he was a bachelor and away a good deal of the time, leaving them in the care of others. When their guardian married Zoë Devereux and brought her to Rivard, a salutary influence was introduced.

  By and large, before the advent of Aunt Zoë, the adults who had charge of Ladies Emily and Sara treated them with kid gloves. They were sorry for the two gray-eyed angelic looking infants who had been left orphans at so tender an age. They rarely corrected them. They meant well, but this proved a disastrous course. The girls were spoiled, willful, incorrigible. Aunt Zoë did her best. By this time, however, they were used to going their own way. On the surface, they were all demure obedience. Behind Aunt Zoë’s back, little had changed, except that now they knew the difference between right and wrong.

  In the summer of 1796, Leon Devereux had breezed into their young lives and nothing was the same ever again…

  Emily was in the nursery, amusing her young cousin, Nurse having slipped away for a moment or two to fetch the laundry. The infant, who was named for her father, Edward, was enthralled with Emily’s long hair which, in those days, was practically pure platinum.

  “Lee!” said Edward, grabbing for her hair. “Lee!”

  Laughing, Emily removed her ribbons. She knew what came next. She and Edward had played this game time out of mind. She shook out her waist-length hair and dropped her head forward so that the infant could reach it. “Gently,” she said as Lord Edward grabbed a fistful of hair. “If you hurt me, we won’t do this again.”

  “Lee? Is that your name?”

  The voice from the threshold had Emily’s head whipping round. The darkly handsome youth who filled the doorway had the look of a Gypsy. He was a stranger to her. Fear leaped in her throat and her eyes dilated, darkening to amethyst. When the stranger advanced a step, Lord Edward gave a little cry and hid his face in Emily’s skirts. At fifteen months, Edward had a fear of strangers.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” said the youth. “I’m Leon Devereux, Zoë’s brother. You must be Lady Emily,” and in an undertone, grinning, he added, “Et comme je souhaite que tu aies dix ans de plus,” and he advanced into the room.

  There was an interval when neither of them said anything. Then Emily said, “What do you mean, you wish I was ten years older?”

  The youth flushed scarlet and scowled at the same instant. Before he could frame a reply, Sara’s voice came piping from the corridor. “Emily! Emily! What do you think? Leon is here. Aunt Zoë’s brother.” She burst into the room like a whirlwind and came to a sudden halt. “Oh!” she said.

  From that moment on, Emily was forgotten, as was Edward. Sara’s tongue was never still. A spate of questions spilled from her lips. And she insisted upon being taken up in her “cousin’s” arms to give him a kiss of welcome. She told him there were a score of things she wished to show him, and they had to be shown at once.

  Leon seemed to be captivated by Sara and he allowed the child to drag him from the room. At the door, he halted and turned back to Emily. “Why don’t we all go together?” he said.

  Emily had been given a task to do. She wasn’t going to disappoint Nurse. “Thank you, no,” she said simply.

  Shrugging, Leon left her to it.

  Within a week, Sara simply adored her cousin Leon. Emily was more cautious. She was prepared to like the boy, but while he lavished attention on Sara, for Emily he scarcely spared a glance. Soon, she told herself that she was completely indifferent to him. Before long, however, her indifference had changed to hearty dislike.

  It started from such small beginnings. Sara carried tales. She did not mean to be malicious or hurtful. If anything, she was piqued because Emily was not as bowled over by Leon as she herself was.

  It would always begin with the inevitable “Leon says.” Emily was becoming heartily sick of hearing those predictable words.

  “Leon says that you are too retiring by half. What does that mean, Emily?”

  Emily stiffened. “Did he say those words to you?”

  “No. To Aunt Zoë.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Oh, that you are full of your own conceit. What did he mean by it?”

  “I wish you would tell me how I may be retiring and full of my own conceit at the same time. It’s impossible!”

  “It’s what Leon says. Leon says that you give yourself airs.”
>
  “What does Aunt Zoë say?”

  “She says he’s wrong. She says that you’re a dreamer. But what does it mean, Emily?”

  “How should I know? Why don’t you ask your precious Leon? And while you are at it, you may tell him that Emily says Leon Devereux is a snake in the grass.”

  In her child’s way, she had tried to get back at him, playing tricks on him, calling him names, mimicking his far from perfect command of the English language. She came off the worse in every battle.

  Emily was never so glad as when the day arrived for Leon to go away to university. For a day or two, Sara was inconsolable. Before a week was out, however, their days followed the familiar pattern. Sara took to dogging Emily’s heels. They were the best of friends again.

  Leon returned for the holidays. It was as if he had never been away. The old antagonism flared to life.

  Emily’s aversion to Leon and vice versa became so much a commonplace as to be unremarkable. All members of the same family did not always get along, Aunt Zoë carefully pointed out when her husband would have meddled. Leon and Emily were civil to each other. It was wiser to let sleeping dogs lie.

  If Emily’s manner toward Leon was tepid at best, Sara’s was proprietary to a degree. Leon was her personal property. She brooked no rivals, not even her young cousin, Edward. When she surprised Leon kissing and fondling one of the downstairs maids in the pantry, her ire could not be contained. The girl must be dismissed at once.

  Leon was as much annoyed as he was embarrassed. He protested that it was a great to-do about nothing. Sara was practically in hysterics, Aunt Zoë was visibly upset, and Uncle Rolfe tried to make light of the whole affair. No harm was done, he said. Leon was a young man, and in spring—Well, never mind that now. The maids at Rivard, however, were a different matter. They were under his protection, Leon was sternly given to understand, and completely out-of-bounds.