by Nancy Butler
“I still can’t credit that,” she said.
“Neither can I now, looking back. It was my grandfather’s doing I suspect. My mother’s father was a rector in Cornwall—we used to summer there. He was a great, barrel-chested fellow, with more kindness and forbearance than any man I’ve met before or since. My brother and I believed that Grandfather Kipling was really Father Christmas without his red coat; sometimes I still believe it.”
“Is he still alive—your grandfather?”
Bryce shook his head. “No, they’re all gone. Mama and Grandad. And Kip. They had such high expectations for me to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps. And I had a few expectations of my own. But all I came away with, after my unfortunate experience at Cambridge, was the conviction that the Church forgives us least, when we are most human… Not a very Christian sentiment, I’m afraid.”
“But true, I think.”
His gaze slid over her. “You agree?”
“If I may quote the illustrious Lord Troy, ‘Ring out the new gods who have served our souls so ill, and raise up once more the temples, on Zeus’s mouldering hill.’ ”
“ ‘Olympian Twilight,’ wasn’t it? I recall reading it last year.” He sighed and then grinned. “The boy does have his moments. So tell me, does that make you a pagan, Lady J?”
“Mmm, I’m somewhere betwixt and between. Troy is all pagan, however, in spite of his gentlemanly trappings. I think he was disappointed that your Bacchus Club offered only pleasures of the flesh—he was expecting some ancient Greek or Roman rituals, at the very least.”
Bryce shook his head wonderingly. “You are the only woman I know, Jemima, who is rash enough to sit in Beecham Bryce’s library—in your night rail, no less—and discuss the Bacchus Club as though it were a literary society. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were the one who was casting out lures.”
Her amused chuckle surprised him. “And you are the only man I know—excepting my brother—who would not think me shockingly improper for even acknowledging that such a place as Bacchus exists. It’s very liberating, not having to mind everything I say when I am with you.” She smiled up at him. “But we have wandered off the subject—we were talking about your father’s illness.”
Bryce shifted in his chair. “He’s gone off to Barbados—under duress, I might add. His doctors claim that sometime in the tropics will cure him. But he refused to go until I promised to come here and look after the place while he was away.”
“Then you have made things up with him?”
He looked down at his clenched hands. “Not so you would notice. There is too much discord between us—one selfless act on my part hasn’t made a dent in it. After I’d disgraced myself at Cambridge, he rewrote his will and left everything to Kip. And now…now God only knows who will inherit Bryce Prospect.”
“Then it truly is a selfless thing you are doing.” she said quietly. “Overseeing a property that should have come to you and with no hope of reward. I wonder that you even made the offer.”
Bryce’s eyes met hers, and he was unaware of the dull pain that lay close beneath the bright surface. “I couldn’t let him stay here and die, Jem.”
“No,” she whispered hoarsely. The pain he guarded so carefully colored his tone, even if she hadn’t already seen it in his eyes. Not only were the doors of society closed to him, she realized, but the doors to his family home, as well. And by a man he claimed no allegiance to, but whose death he would do his best to prevent.
Jemima stared into the candle flame as she spoke. “Bryce, remember yesterday, when you told me you found me surprising? I think I must return the compliment.” She looked up at him. “You are not at all what I expected.”
“I must be losing my touch,” he said. “You should be cowering in a corner by now, at the very least.”
She answered with more honesty than she intended. “I tend not to cower. Fleeing is more my style.”
Bryce sat back in his chair. He was afraid if he leaned too close he would be tempted to touch her, and if he did that, he couldn’t answer for his actions. She looked so damned tempting, but vulnerable, too vulnerable, with her wide eyes and her elegant brow marred by a tiny frown.
“I tend to dislike women who flee,” he said lightly. “Pursuit is just too wearying.” His voice dropped a notch. “But then there are some women who are well worth the chase.”
Jemima threw her head up, fighting back the urge to let his words affect her. A foolish inner voice insisted that he was speaking of her—that it was she who was worthy of his attentions. Her eyes drifted to Rajah, snarling down at her from the wall. Another skilled, silken predator, she thought, caught for all time in that fearsome pose.
She spoke into the silence that had enveloped them. “And how do you go on here, now that you have the running of the place?”
He made a sour face. “I have discovered that I am not cut out to be a farmer. My first week here, we lost six sheep to bloat. The second week, my father’s favorite hunter colicked and I was up all night walking him. He recovered, but I’m not sure that I have. And now I’ve been here a month, and the cows are sick, my tenants have the grippe, and there are infernal beetles in the woodwork.” He looked to see her reaction and was not reassured. “Oh, go right ahead, Lady J, and laugh at my woes.”
She had put one hand over her mouth to stifle her giggles. “Sorry,” she said, trying to regain her composure. “It’s just that you seem so utterly on top of everything. But I can see that it’s quite a change from London. All you had to worry about there were jealous husbands and presumptuous young upstarts looking to dethrone you as the king of libertines.”
“Quite true,” he said dryly. “Living in London is a piece of cake compared to running Bryce Prospect. I’m still furious at my brother for abandoning me—he’d have made a much better job of things.”
“You must miss him dreadfully,” she said in a low voice.
Bryce’s tone grew clipped. “We rarely saw each other in recent years…he spent most of his time at sea. But, yes, I do miss him. He was a…a bright light in a bleak world.”
Jemima sat without speaking for a moment, digesting his words. She’d had a close enough call last night, when she thought Terry had been killed, to know how such a loss would feel. Bereft didn’t begin to describe it.
Her hand slid onto the arm of his chair, finding his hand, warm against the leather of the armrest. She wrapped her fingers around it. “I’m so sorry, Bryce,” she said.
He leaned forward, disregarding the warning voice that prompted him to keep back, and laid his free hand on her hair. The loose waves were like strands of raw silk beneath his palm.
“Jemima,” he sighed as his eyes probed hers with a curious entreaty.
She rose up at his unspoken bidding, until she was kneeling against the padded arm of the chair. Seduction now seemed the farthest thing from his mind, and yet he wanted so badly to take her in his arms. He yearned to hold her, even for the space of a few heartbeats. And he had an inkling that she might even understand and not flee from him in dismay.
He let his hand drift down from her hair, settling it on the nape of her neck. And then he slowly drew her forward. Her eyes were brimming with uncertainty, but still held no hint of fear as she gazed up at him.
But then he recalled who he was, a man who did not deserve comforting, especially not at the hands of a creature who put everyone else’s needs before her own. She was in far more need of comforting than a sorry sinner like himself. But the only sort of comfort he knew how to offer a woman would do little to raise Jemima’s spirits. It would more likely send her into an abrupt decline.
Bryce shifted back from her as he drew his hands away and placed them again upon the arms of his chair. His eyes hooded over and he drawled, “Best not get too close to the fire, pet.”
Jemima sat back on her heels, jarred by the sudden change in him, the relaxed approachability now cloaked by wry detachment. She’d barely begun to examine the ra
mpant stirrings that his touch aroused in her when he had pulled back. “W-what?” she stammered in confusion.
In answer he reached down to where her robe was billowing perilously close to the tilted candle. He smoothed the fabric away from the fire, letting his fingers linger for an instant on her calf.
“Don’t want my guests going up in flames,” he said with an attempt at humor.
“Oh!” She twisted her skirt behind her as she scrambled to her feet. His whispering touch on her leg had sent a shiver of apprehension through her and she was suddenly afraid. “I’d better go up now.”
“Yes,” he said, still watching her with guarded eyes. “I think that would be for the best.”
She took up the candle. “Aren’t you coming?”
“No, not yet. Take the candle… I can find my way in the dark.”
I just bet you can, a little voice piped inside her head.
She stopped before the door. “Tomorrow, if you like,” she said in her most matter-of-fact voice, “I could ride out with you. I still remember some things about living on an estate—maybe I can help with the cows. And we can bring food to the tenants who are ill. Though for the life of me, Bryce, I haven’t a clue of what to do about beetles in the woodwork.”
“Go to bed, Lady J,” he said without turning his head. “Tomorrow will take care of itself.”
Chapter Five
Bryce sat in the dark for a long while after Jemima left. He was still not sleepy, and in addition to that, he was now also feeling strangely depressed. His intended seduction of Jemima Vale was not following any recognizable pattern and it had him baffled. She had him baffled.
Unlike many of his brethren, Bryce had little interest in virgins. He saw no point in purposely seeking out untried women—they were new wine, unappealing to a man who craved the subtle taste of more seasoned vintages. And yet he hungered for Jemima, for a woman whose body may have been unawakened, but whose mind and spirit were richly alive.
But she was a study in contrasts that left him, for the first time in many years, unsure of how to proceed. At times she bantered with him like a carefree boy, and at others she held him off with a firm, maidenly disdain. It occurred to him that her role as traveling companion to Troy, leaving her at once experienced in life but inexperienced in matters of the heart, accounted for her perplexing duality.
Whatever its cause, that intriguing combination of blasé worldliness and guarded naiveté lent spice to his encounters with her. But he was damned if he knew how to appeal to both sides of her nature. He did not count her worldly enough to play the game he had in mind, nor was she so naive that he could cozen her into his bed with pretty promises of devotion. It was a complete stalemate.
There was one way that he knew he could entrap her—he could make her feel sorry for him. She had all but cast herself into his lap just now when she thought he needed consoling. But that was a scoundrel’s trick, playing upon a woman’s sympathy. And if he couldn’t have Jemima’s passion, he certainly didn’t want her pity.
Bryce rose and lit one of the candles that sat upon the mantel. He needed a glass of brandy. Badly. As he lifted the decanter from the side table, something shifted in his brain. He set the decanter down again with a dull clunk and then crouched beside the table and studied the amber liquid. Last night, after he’d poured a healthy tot of brandy for Jemima, he had noticed that the level was even with the top row of crystal florets that were carved into the decanter’s side. Now the level was fully three fingers below that mark.
Someone had been making inroads into his father’s best French cognac.
Troy had been closeted in the library all morning, but Bryce recalled that when he’d poured the poet a glass of claret just before lunch, Troy had remarked that he’d been longing for the hair of the dog. No, Troy wasn’t the culprit. The butler, Griggs, was a Methodist who drank nothing stronger than tea, and Bryce could hardly envision Mrs. Patch sneaking into the library to knock back a brandy or two. Especially since she had a store of cowslip wine laid by in her day room.
He stood up and shook his head, trying to clear away the whispering disquiet that had the hair at the back of his neck standing on end. His feelings of alarm, he told himself, were as groundless as Jemima’s fear of old Admiral Hastings.
Picking up the candle, he moved to the bookshelves, needing to find something that would distract him from his unease. His father possessed a starchy collection of books, to be sure, and there was little on the shelves to tempt him. He had a mind then to look through the collection of erotica he’d brought with him from London. If he couldn’t sleep, he’d at least be entertained.
The family Bible sat open and ponderous on its wooden stand before the window; Bryce crossed to it and slid one hand beneath it, relishing the fact that the key to his cache of profane literature lay beneath this sacred tome. He knelt before one of the lower library cabinets, unlocked it, and drew out a tooled leather box.
As boys, he and Kip had hidden all their less-savory reading matter in that cabinet—florid adventure stories, etchings of scantily clad women they had purchased from traveling peddlers, and the odd French novel. The great thing was that their father believed the key to the cabinet had been lost and had never, to Bryce’s knowledge, tried to have it forced open. Why should he, when he had a half-dozen cabinets in which to store his dry, dusty collection of sermons? The brothers had been tickled by their own temerity—hoarding such inflammatory literature virtually under their father’s pious nose. “Hide in plain sight,” Kip had said with a wink to his brother. Bryce shuddered to think how his father would react to this rather more adult contribution to that cabinet of secrets, as he sat cross-legged on the floor and began to sort through the contents of the box.
Within seconds the hair on his neck was standing upright again. Three books were missing from his collection—a racy two-volume account of an unnamed gentleman’s journey through the world of Eros, and a rare and valuable book of Japanese woodcuts. That one in particular was Bryce’s favorite.
He tapped his fingers against the edge of the open box, wracking his brain to make some sense of things. The missing brandy and the stolen books…one of them he could blame on the servants, but not both. Someone had come into his library, after he’d left last night, and helped himself to the best that Bryce Prospect had to offer. As though he were entitled to it. And aside from the elderly gentleman now en route to Barbados, there had only been one other person with such an entitlement.
His father’s parting words drifted into Bryce’s disordered brain. “Don’t grieve overmuch for your brother,” he had said gruffly. “Men lost at sea oftentimes return home again…years later, by some accounts.”
Bryce thought at the time that his father had become a bit addled from the medicines he was taking. Still, it had been a strange thing to say. But no stranger than the old man’s warning that Bryce was to look the other way if anything involving smugglers came to light on the estate, which had immediately followed his obscure comment about Kip’s death.
Bryce had wondered then what his father had embroiled himself in, and he now had an inkling that his mention of Kip and smugglers, practically in the same breath, was no coincidence. There was only one other person who knew where the key to the cabinet was hidden. There was one other person, excepting his father, who knew that the library could be reached from a secret stairway that led up from the cellar. A cellar with a broken window that he and Kip had been sneaking in and out of since they were breeched.
Bryce carried his candle to the wall opposite the fireplace and pressed down on one of the wooden spindles that topped the wainscotting. The panel slid open noiselessly. He stepped into the narrow space. The dust beneath his feet looked like it had been disturbed recently, but that could have been the work of mice. Well, large mice, perhaps. There was a scuffed place near the top of the stairs that looked suspiciously like a bootprint.
Bryce returned to the library and poured himself a very large brandy. H
e raised it in salute to the glass-eyed elephant that hung opposite the secret panel. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Tusker, if he’d been here? You wouldn’t keep something like that to yourself.”
But the beast said nothing, looking blindly out from the wall with its trunk raised as if in silent greeting to Kip’s ghost. Bryce muttered an oath, knocked back the brandy, and went off to seek his bed.
* * *
Jemima was deep in conference with Mrs. Patch, when her host came into the housekeeper’s day room the next morning.
“There,” Jemima said, pointing to a page in the Country Lady’s Book of Housekeeping Hints, which Mrs. Patch had obligingly pulled down from a high shelf. “A recipe for curing milk fever.”
“That book is fifty years old if it’s a day,” Bryce remarked as he crossed the room.
“Old remedies are sometimes the best,” his housekeeper pointed out tartly. “You’ve done everything the farrier suggested and nothing has worked. It couldn’t hurt to try this. Here, sir, come and see.”
Bryce shot Jemima a look of unveiled skepticism as he craned over Mrs. Patch’s shoulder. “What does it call for?” he muttered. “Eye of newt, toe of bat?”
“A tisane of withies and nettles,” Jemima pronounced.
He rolled his eyes. “The cure is worse than the disease, eh? Very well, we will set the imperial poet to gather nettles—that should furnish him with some interesting inspiration.”
“And,” Jemima added, “your cook has promised to make up baskets of calves’ foot jelly and chicken broth for the ailing farmers. Mrs. Patch is contributing her own special blend of chamomile tea, which she guarantees will speed their recovery.”
“And what of the death-watch beetles? Is there a remedy for that plaguey nuisance in your book ?”
“Turpentine,” Jemima said a bit smugly. “If there’s any to be found in the house.”
“I believe I can lay my hands on a tin or two. Do we pour it into the walls, do you think? The smell alone should make short work of my unwelcome house guests.”
