Mask of Nobility

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

He had made a mistake.

  Was the mistake striking out at a defenseless woman? Or was it greater than that? Was the mistake coming here in the first place?

  * * * * *

  The Hog & Bramble had been built in the last century and had never modernized. Stepping into the main tavern was to step into the time of tri-corners and muskets, wenches and highwaymen. Given the inn’s location by the river, on the other side from the heart of London, it catered to a rough clientele who valued their privacy. Many of the tables were tucked away in alcoves that could be made completely private by drawing curtains across.

  Cian made sure the curtain was drawn so that anyone passing would not glimpse the occupant. Not that he wanted to have his way with a wanton lass, which was why the curtains had been placed there originally. Eleanore, however, was a woman who glowed with elegance and refinement. In this place, she drew the eye. She would be remembered.

  Anyone who came after the runaway carriage would find it soon enough. Cian would have only moments after that. For now, though, they could steal a few precious moments together, uninterrupted.

  Cian ordered a brandy for each of them. It would help Eleanore settle her nerves.

  Cian’s nerves needed soothing, too. It didn’t help that Eleanore did not sit decorously on the other side of the table. Instead, she slid around the u-shaped bench, careless of the blue satin of her evening dress and settled herself close to his side. Cian could feel the heat of her against him.

  He shivered and drank.

  Eleanore put her hand on his wrist as he went to lift the glass a third time. It was a light touch, yet halted him as surely as an anchor.

  He looked at her.

  She touched his face. Her fingers curled over his jaw. “Kiss me,” she pleaded. “We have little time. We can talk all we want later, as we have all this last year. Please kiss me.”

  He shuddered. “We shouldn’t.”

  “We should not be corresponding as we have, either,” she reminded him. “Shall we stop? Should I burn your letters when they come, from now on?” Her jaw was fine and as steady as her gaze. Her slender throat was straight, her shoulders square. There was no pleading in her. She was too proud for that.

  Burn his letters? No! The silent cry was abject. Cian kissed her, instead.

  The fire leapt between them. Instant heat, vaporizing all thought, all good sense, all the building despair about the future.

  He had kissed many women in the past. Eleanore was different. Always, he expected to feel the iron core of her mind and the firmness of her soul that he had come to know through her letters. She was a rare woman, who knew her own mind and unbelievably, she wanted him, Cian Williams.

  He thought that when he touched her, he would sense that strength in her. Instead, he tasted warm softness. She was pliable silk against his hands and body, driving him onward.

  He lets his lips trail to her throat, down to her bare shoulders, where he lingered, stoking her flesh with his mouth, as she moaned against him and arched her back, inviting more exploration. Her hands moved in his hair, then dropped to his chest and slid beneath his jacket. The light touch scorched him wherever it roved and made the coil of tension in his belly tighten and harden.

  When his hand cupped the mound of her breast, she merely gasped and pressed herself into him.

  Cian closed his eyes and grew still, listening to the throb of his body and the rapid beat of his heart. Her ragged breath. Her soft sigh.

  He lifted his head and looked at her. “It would be too easy to let this progress to where we both know it is going.”

  She swallowed and nodded. “I want you. I know a lady isn’t supposed to want that, only I do. I ache with it, Cian. Only, I know I would hate myself and even you, a little, if we did.”

  He tightened his hands about her waist. “Marry me,” he said. “We can elope. Ireland—I have an estate there. Once we are married, no one can gainsay the binding, not even your father.”

  Her eyes glistened with tears she would not let fall. “I would dishonor the family. I would insult the prince. My father is a powerful man, Cian. He would make your life unbearable. You would be shunned by society.”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” Cian said roughly. “Nor do you.”

  “Only, it would put a stain on our marriage. No, Cian, don’t look at me in that way. Tell me you could…could take me, with a clear conscience, knowing what it cost you and your family?”

  Cian remained silent, seething.

  She put her hand on his arm. Heat. Softness. His heart thudded harder.

  “It isn’t just you my father will ruin,” Eleanore continued. “It is everyone dear to you. Even your Great Family is not beyond his reach. My father knows too many influential people. I’ve seen him do it, Cian. He is ruthless when he does not get his way.”

  “There must be a way we can be together,” Cian growled.

  “There is not. You have known that from when this began, or you would have confronted my father long ago.”

  He hung his head, breathing hard. She spoke nothing but the truth. They had been over and over this in their letters. Only, hearing her say it aloud in her beautiful, musical voice, made it hurt as if the wound was fresh.

  This time, Eleanore kissed him, pressing herself up against him with a soft moan. Her sound of need inflamed his already aching body. He was burning with wanting. They twined together, as close as two people could become in such a place, their bodies meshed, flesh stroking flesh.

  When Cian heard his name being called from the public room of the inn, he let her go and closed his eyes, trying to school his heart and contain himself. Anyone seeing him now would see the desperation surging through him.

  “Cian! Where are you?” A male voice, one he recognized.

  Cian opened his eyes. “Jack,” he told Eleanore. “At least it is my cousin and not your father who came after us.” He lifted his hand to the edge of the curtain.

  Eleanore slipped her fingers over his wrist and pulled his hand away. She looked at him. A simple look, yet the emotion in her eyes as she studied his face, her gaze moving over it, told him everything she would not say.

  “Cian…” she breathed.

  “Cian!” Jack shouted once more.

  “Up the corridor more, my lord,” the publican told him, his voice soft.

  Time had run out.

  Cian gripped the curtain once more.

  “They’ve scheduled my wedding,” Eleanore said.

  Each word was a nail into his heart. Cian hung his head. “When?” His lips wouldn’t work properly.

  “May next year.”

  “So soon…” He sighed. “You’re leaving for Skye even sooner.”

  “At the end of the month. Passage has already been booked on the Highland Queen. My father is anxious to go fishing with the laird.”

  “Letters from there will be uncertain…” He grimaced. “The world is separating us whether we wish it or no.”

  She pressed her hand over her heart. “The world cannot reach here.”

  The curtain was flung aside. “There you are,” Jack said, peeved. “What on earth did you think you were doing, jumping on a runaway carriage, Cian? You could have been killed. Then your mother would have killed me.”

  Eleanore’s gaze didn’t leave Cian’s face.

  Cian took a deep breath for courage, then turned to face Jack and the world that would not let them be.

  Chapter Six

  In the last year, Bronwen had learned from observation that running a very large estate was not a simple matter. Jasper left early in the morning and was often gone for most of the day, inspecting properties, coordinating laborers, settling tenant disputes, complaints and more.

  Even Lilly had been drawn into taking care of administrative responsibilities, although she did not tour with Jasper. Instead, she remained at the desk that had been installed in her morning room, dealing with correspondence and documents that Jasper simply did not have time to manage. />
  Jasper could hire an estate manager to take over both his and Lilly’s work and live the life of a gentleman, instead. It was how things were normally done. Bronwen had asked Jasper why he did not follow the custom, when the work was so onerous. His answer had been frank.

  “This estate has been mired in local feuds for generations precisely because the owner was absent and the management left it in indifferent hands. These Yorkshire men have begun to trust me.” He grimaced. “It has only taken five years,” he added. “They like knowing they’re speaking to the man who makes the real decisions. They like that their complaints are heard and fairly addressed. If I thrust an estate manager at them, they will feel as though I am throwing their trust back at them. I would never regain the ground I would lose.”

  Therefore, Jasper and Lilly continued to labor over the estate, putting their hearts and souls into the betterment of the land for the sake of the farmers whose lives and families depended upon their good management.

  Because the pair were busy during the day, Bronwen was rarely interrupted when she spent the day in the library. She could sit where and how she pleased, read any book she wanted and be perfectly happy doing it.

  The Northallerton library was no ordinary family library. It far outstripped her own family’s libraries, which were large, inclusive collections. Her parents’ library was considered to be the largest private library in London, with exceedingly rare documents that experts and scholars sometimes begged to study. Her parents liked to read widely. Bronwen could remember family meals where the only topic of conversation was a single point of logic or reason in a book they had read.

  When Bronwen was twelve, she had found Sadie in the library after one loudly debated supper, bent over the book in question.

  “You’re reading it, too?” Bronwen asked, astonished.

  Sadie tossed her thick blonde braid over her shoulder and pinned Bronwen with her blue eyes. “I want to understand what Mother and Father were arguing about. Don’t you?”

  “I suppose, yes,” Bronwen said. “Only, they were talking about sub…sub-you…”

  “Subjugation,” Sadie replied. “Slavery, in all its many forms.”

  “Isn’t that a subject for adults?” Bronwen asked, creeping closer to the book. Sadie was only three years older than her.

  “Why must it be only for adults?” Sadie demanded.

  Bronwen couldn’t find an answer. “It just seems…complicated.” There had been ideas and thoughts raised at dinner that had baffled her. That was not unusual, though. Not in the Davies household.

  “Because you didn’t read the book,” Sadie said.

  “Oh…” Bronwen leaned over the open book and looked at the script. “That’s why you’re reading it? Because you didn’t understand?”

  There was a flash of something in Sadie’s eyes. Then the corner of her mouth turned up. “I don’t like not knowing things.”

  “Is that what they were talking about? That page you’re on?” Bronwen asked.

  “The entire chapter,” Sadie corrected, turning back the pages to the beginning. Both of them read.

  Twenty minutes later, Rhys stepped into the library and paused at the door when he saw them both at the reading stand.

  Bronwen drew back, guilt spearing her.

  Her father crossed the room and picked up the whisky decanter and a glass. “Don’t smear the pages,” he said, his tone light. “There was treacle for desert and neither of you knows how to eat without using your fingers.”

  That was the first time Bronwen had found answers to something that had puzzled her within the covers of a book. Because her family’s library was so extensive, over the years she had found many more answers there. Most of them were far more explicit and on-point than the vague responses of her governess, who believed young ladies needed to know French, embroidery, protocol and regimental insignia and nothing else.

  Books had become Bronwen’s tools for negotiating the adult world.

  The library at Northallerton, though, was an idyllic escape. The estate had been established shortly after the English Civil War and various owners had been collecting books and manuscripts, treatises and literature, ever since. There were musty old hand-lettered volumes in the back shelves of the library that Bronwen suspected had not been read since the estate acquired them. The middle English had been a challenge to read, although Bronwen had swiftly learned to read it with the same ease she read modern English.

  The library was a huge room that rose through both floors of the house. A gallery ran around all four walls, with shelves climbing to the ceiling and ladders to reach the highest of them.

  There were reading desks, tables, comfortable chairs and lamps to ease the readers’ sojourn. Instead, Bronwen most often stood where she had discovered the current book. It was easier to sit where she was. Usually, upon the step ladder. Then the reshelving was a simple matter.

  The Northallerton library was a treasure trove, although the secret core of that treasure was the extended collection of medical texts.

  Somewhere in Northallerton’s history, an owner had been a doctor or interested in medicine. The rare compendiums, folios and monographs dealt with the most obscure medical knowledge. It was a folded leaflet tucked among those pages that had raised the theory that dock plants salved nettle stings because of the acid/base relationship.

  Agatha was a font of herbal lore and medicinal cures, yet her learning had been handed from mother to daughter, the science behind the knowledge absent. In the last year, Bronwen had learned many of the real explanations here in Jasper’s library.

  When the door to the library opened barely an hour after she had settled with a book, Bronwen looked up, surprised. She was rarely disturbed here. Even Warrick had learned she did not care for tea and refreshments when she was reading.

  Tor stepped through the door, looking around with a surprised expression.

  Bronwen’s heart sank. She had forgotten for a while that the man was in the house. Now he had broken her peace.

  Tor spotted her sitting on the stairs leading up to the gallery. “Ah…” He shut the door and moved into the room, threading through a pair of leather armchairs. “A riddle is answered.”

  “The riddle being ‘how can I best interrupt Bronwen?’” she asked, closing the book with a thud.

  His gaze met hers. There was no rancor there. Given how rude she had been to him the previous evening, the lack of animosity was a surprise. “The riddle was, ‘where did she learn about biological chemicals, when students of the Sorbonne must study for years to be granted access to such tomes?’”

  “I have studied for years.”

  He turned on his heel, taking in every inch of the large room. “I believe you.”

  “I suppose you’re one of those people who thinks women have no need of higher education?”

  “I suppose you’re one of those women who intends to study at the new ladies’ college at Cambridge, when it opens?”

  “Where I am told what I must read?” Bronwen shook her head. “They will not issue degrees to women even if they pass their examinations with higher marks than the men. Why would I bother with Cambridge when there is more knowledge here on these shelves?”

  Tor glanced about the room once more. He was dressed this morning in a dark frock coat and striped cravat. The cravat was pinned crookedly.

  Was this the first time he had ever pinned a cravat himself? Bronwen suspected that there were many tasks he must undertake that he had never done before.

  What would make a man like him suffer through the many petty irritations such a lack of experience would bring him? Why run away?

  His gaze came back to her. He glanced at the closed book on her knees. “I should leave you to your reading.”

  “Yes.”

  Yet, he did not move.

  Bronwen sighed and rested her forearms on the book and linked her fingers together, waiting.

  Tor came closer to the stairs. “I feel I should apo
logize for last evening.”

  “I accept your apology. Now…” She lifted the book.

  He stopped at the foot of the stairs. She was sitting on the fifth step, which put her head at his level. “We got off to a bad start,” he said.

  Bronwen shook her head. “We are not at the start of anything. You are a temporary guest in the house where I live and that is all. How we interact while you are here has no bearing on the long term. Be rude if you must. It is immaterial to me.”

  He examined her for a long, silent moment. Bronwen did not writhe under his gaze. Why should she? She felt no guilt for her plain speaking. She had been honest. It was not her fault if he found the truth unpalatable.

  “There is not a single curse in your speech,” he said, “yet I feel insulted. I cannot fathom why.”

  Bronwen linked her fingers together once more. “You feel insulted because I am utterly indifferent about you. I imagine indifference is a novelty to a man like you.”

  His gaze turned inward. “Yes, I suspect you are right. I have never met someone who cares so little about me.”

  “No?” she asked, her tone cool. “Or do they merely let you think they care?”

  “Disingenuity is a blight of the higher ranked life,” he admitted. He put his foot on the first step and bent closer. “Why do you not care?”

  Bronwen straightened up, putting distance between them. “Why do you care why I don’t care?”

  “I am curious.”

  “You seek more insults? One is not enough?”

  “There is a violence to your indifference…it is as though you are protesting too much. Shakespeare had that right.”

  “‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks,’” Bronwen quoted.

  “‘O, but she’ll keep her word,’” Tor replied, which was the next line. His smile was small. “Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark has lessons for everyone,” he added.

  “You like that I insult you every time we speak?”

  “We have only spoken twice,” he pointed out, for he had been absent at the breakfast table. “This moment is that second occasion. You have been honest, both times. Honest and direct.”