A Fresh Perspective, A Regency Romance (6 page)

“Your pulse is racing!”

“Yours would too,” she said tartly, cheeks pink, “if you had been grabbed from behind like that. Do you mean to make me furious, Reed?”

“No.” He opened his arms to her. “Kiss and make up?”

Her color deepened. “You treat me like a child.”

“You’re right,” he sighed. “I do apologize, though I wish at times we might still be children.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Can you forgive me?”

She took a moment to consider. “Not unless you promise to join us at the Lakes.”

He smiled wryly. “You tempt me, Megan, indeed you do, but to make a promise I may not be able to keep would be childish indeed.”

Chapter Six

T
wo days after Megan left, Reed was ready to race after her without a word to anyone. It was not the numbers swimming in his head and before his eyes, endless rows of sums explaining where his father’s fortune came from and how it was spent, that tested his patience. He did quite well with numbers. That there appeared to be so much money squandered with so little to show for it, no more than made his head whirl.

Silence could no longer drive him from the keep either, though it had driven him as a child. Reed had learned to live with silence, to enjoy it for its meditative quality, to treasure the way he could focus his attention on whatever pleased him. He was focused today on the ordinance maps of Great Britain with which he had covered one wall of his study--absorbing work--absorbing enough he forgot for a while that Megan was gone.

There were a great many flags to be added. The landscape had changed in any number of ways while he had been gone. He had a stack of clipped newspaper articles to prove it. More riverways had been cut into canals. These he marked with wavy blue lines. Roadways, tollways and post roads he marked with fat black lines. New industry, and there was a great deal of it popping up in the Northern Districts, was red-flagged. Mines meant more flags: black for coal, gray for silver and green for copper. Shale and graphite quarries were marked with two shades of blue. So much change in so little time! So many blots on the land. He could not spend an afternoon with his maps without feeling disheartened. It was not an acre of new flags that so discouraged him this afternoon, though it did cross his mind that perhaps he ought to visit the Lakes while there was still some hope of viewing them in some semblance of pristine beauty.

It was, in the end, his mother’s practice of chords and scales on the pianoforte downstairs routed him from the keep, armed with the ledgers, a sketchbook and several pencils. Music did not bother him. It was the anticipated silence that would follow this music lesson that prompted his hasty exit.

His mother had enjoyed a growing list of doting music masters, dancing masters, voice instructors and language teachers--all male, most of them young, foreign and handsome. Each were favored by Lady Talcott’s undivided attention and affections for about as long as the latest lap dog. Each one taught Lady Talcott something new that caught her fancy, that required long hours of practice behind closed doors--hours in which everyone, even Reed, had been denied access.

Lady Talcott knew the waltz better than anyone else in the district. She played the harpsichord, the dulcimer and now the pianoforte. She could paint, after a fashion, cut silhouettes like a master, knew a modicum of French, German, Latin, Italian, Dutch and a smattering of the Scandinavian tongues. She sang like a lark. Among her talents numbered all things considered
de rigueur
for any woman of high social standing.

As a boy, Reed had discovered the real reason for his mother’s many companions. It was in London, where they had lived for his early years in the company of his father, that Mr. Moffit had stopped him from rushing in to rescue his mother from suspected ill when she had cried out under the hand of a certain French harpsichord instructor who came twice weekly.

“You must not go in,” Moffit ordered.

“But mama cries out.” He had dared question his tutor’s wisdom.

“It is to Monsieur La Prelle she calls. It is but part of the music lesson.”

“That cannot be. The music has stopped.”

“There is more than one way to make music, my boy.”

Moffit’s innuendo had sailed right over Reed’s head. It met with keener understanding from his father, who had chanced to walk in behind them at the beginning of their conversation. Striding roughly past them, he flung open the door to the music room. A startled gasp met his entry. Looking in, Reed could see that his mother’s music instruction was being conducted on the fainting couch tucked into the corner of the room behind the harpsichord, and that it in some way involved his mother sitting in Monsieur La Prelle’s lap.

“Up the stairs with you, Master Talcott. Quickly now.” Mr. Moffit had jerked Reed roughly away from the interesting scene.

“What were they doing?” he asked, as he was dragged by his ear to the stairway. 

“Playing at a game you will know all too soon, young man. Up to your room with you. Make haste.” Moffit made sure he was moving smartly up the stairs before he turned toward the servant’s quarters, which were sure to be abuzz that the master had come in so unexpectedly.

Reed never made it all the way up the stairs, stopped by his father’s shout.

“Out of my house!”

The music master stumbled out of the door red-faced and disarrayed, waistcoat buttoned lop-sided and neck cloth undone.

Heated words were quite shocking to Reed. Rarely were his parents to be seen together. When they were, so polite had their exchanges been, that Reed assumed them a happy couple. He was, of course, mistaken.

“You, too, harlot. Be gone from my house.”

“You mistake me, sir. . .” His mother’s voice had floated up the stairwell, cool, collected and scathing. “You mistake me, sir, for the common company you more commonly keep. So taken have you been with a certain young songbird of late, that I did but seek to educate myself in the ways of music that prove attractive to you.”

Songbird?
Reed had been intrigued. He had no idea that his father cared for birds.

His father, face an unusual purple hue, strode from the music room. “How dare you, madame!” His voice had thundered in the stairwell. “How dare you bring this scoundrel, whose dubious services I have paid for, into our house, that our son might learn such tawdry behavior.”

His mother maintained her cool composure. “There has been nothing in the least dubious about Monsieur La Prelle’s instruction or intention. The man’s teaching technique might easily be labeled cocksure. As to exposing our son to the ways of the world, would you have me believe that he may learn such behavior only from his father? You would have to be here to teach him anything. As you are never here, rest assured he has not been influenced by his sire in one way or the other, unless it is to understand that your presence is not required either as a husband or a father.”

“Am I even sire, then, of the brat you would have me leave my name and inheritance to? I begin to wonder, madame.”

The brat, Reed had realized, flushing with shame, was himself.

“How I would love to spit truth in your face and say he is not, but you did your duty by me at least once, my lord. Reed is your issue. You do him and yourself disservice in classing him equal to the many seeds you may have spilled in other men’s fields.”

His father had looked up then. He had seen Reed standing on the landing above--listening--face flushed, eyes wide with shock.

“Damn!” he thundered, whirling on his heel to make for the door.

“We are not finished.” His mother had begun to sound anything but collected.

“You are wrong, madame.” His father’s voice had been taut with suppressed rage. “We are finished, my lady, completely and irrevocably. I am off to sow more seeds, my dear, in fairer fields. You will, of course, remove your well-ploughed acreage from my house before I return.”

The sound of the door, slamming in his wake, resounded throughout the house.

More doors had slammed as his mother, in a tight-lipped fit of rage, bundled up their belongings. They had raced away that very night to Talcott Keep, the most remote of his father’s holdings. Reed’s contact with his father, from that day forward, had consisted of no more than an occasional glimpse. Far from his father’s sensitive ears, Lady Talcott’s music lessons had immediately resumed, with a thundering kind of vigor.

In time, Reed came to understand the full extent of those lessons. He did not care to remain in Talcott Keep while they were under way.

He went wandering. Out of habit, he went to all of the places he was used to going with the Nutmeg for company. In an elemental way he could not recall experiencing so vividly since his childhood, he felt lonely. Megan’s vehement insistence that she meant to marry, that things between them must be changed by her going away, made more of an impression now than when she had spoken. He had lost something. Unaware, he had let her slip away.

He found himself unable to draw--impatient with the Claude glass and clumsy with his charcoal. He kept sketching faces. The portraits were Megan’s. Without her there to offer his eyes a model, his renderings were sadly lacking in the truth of what he was missing.

Closing up the sketchbooks, he turned once more to the addition and subtraction of lines of figures: food, furniture, artwork, clothing and servants--figures for household expenses, for the upkeep of the animals, for his tour abroad. Figures kept his mind orderly, his feelings at bay. Sums must be done for the purchase of new things and the mending of old. Sums must be tallied for the property holdings. All of it was familiar, making and consuming amazing amounts of money over time. Reed’s eyelids had begun to droop when he came to an entry marked “Repairs for the road,” after which followed a string of dates and figures, none of which made any sense. He sat up, shook the fog from his head and stretched his back and neck muscles. What repairs?

He broached the topic with his mother later that afternoon. “I have been going over the ledgers.”

“Ledgers?”

“Yes, you may recall my mentioning them to you.”

“The ones your father saddled you with?”

“The very same.”

“What of them?”

“There are repairs mentioned. Sums of money spent. . .”

“Yes, yes?”

“Hundreds of pounds designated for repairs on the road.”

She fell silent.

“What road?” he pressed.

She sighed. “I used the monies elsewhere.”

“All of it? What for?”

She flung herself about petulantly. “This and that. Entertainments, Reed. Do not be tiresome and insist you do not understand. By claiming the money was for road improvements, I have been saved the humiliation of begging your father for funds he would not have given me otherwise.”

It dawned on Reed that he had seen no sums listed for music, dance or language instructors. “I see,” he said.

“Your father?” Her voice was sharp. “Does he list his own entertainments? Does he number them, or write them in by name? There must be a hundred and more lightskirts to his credit.”

Reed studied his shoes and held his tongue. His father did have accounts set up to pay leases on five separate residences in London, only one of which he lived in himself. There was a staggering amount tallied to Trinkets and Baubles, which covered God only knew what folly.

His mother paced the room. Tidbit, toenails tapping, skittered along in her wake. “This is really not your concern, Reed. I do not understand why your father troubles you with this kind of thing.”

“Perhaps because I have just gone begging him for more money to repair a road he has already, according to the records, sunk hundreds of pounds into,” Reed said reasonably. “I am, myself, concerned that our finances are not in better standing.”

Her voice lowered dangerously. Her eyes narrowed. “Do you dare to pass judgment on me?”

“I have given Mr. Moffit notice.”

He caught her off guard. “Given Moffit notice? What has he to do with anything?”

“If my preliminary figuring is correct, we can no longer afford the man--no longer afford, in fact, a great many things we have taken for granted.”

She set her chin, tossed her head and sailed from the room, declaring, “Things are never as bad as that.”

Wordless, Reed watched her go. Things were, he feared, far worse.

Chapter Seven

A
nxiety swiftly supplanted Lady Talcott’s initially professed confidence that there was nothing to concern her. Concern carried her up the stairs, any number of times, to ask Reed questions he could not yet answer.

“I must look at the books myself,” she said.

When the lists of sums were duly set before her, she eyed them through her lorgnette with a baffled look. “Explain what it is that I am examining,” was her command.

So insistent were her questions, so frequent her interruptions, Reed could not think straight, much less finish his figuring.

“I mean to go to the Lakes,” he informed her when he could no longer face her without gritting his teeth. “For a sennight. There. . .” in peace and quiet, he thought, “I shall finish figuring the books and return to tell you everything I know.”

“Well,” she huffed. “Our situation cannot be as bad as you would have me believe if you are inclined to dilly-dally about the countryside with Miss Breech, rather than see promptly to our affairs.”

She was mistaken. It was with every intention of setting to rights the Talcott finances that Reed arrived in Grasmere four days later, travel weary and no further along with his calculations. He found the cottage Megan had given him as address without any trouble. It looked cozy enough, but it was Augusta who offered warm welcome when the door was opened to him, not Megan, as he had hoped.

“Reed! How wonderful to see you. We did not expect you. Megan told us you were too busy to join us. I am so pleased you have changed your mind.” Her greeting seemed, Reed thought, overly fervent.