Lily Lang (2 page)

“Uh,” he stammered, gesturing. “If you’ll come this way, Miss Thornwood. I beg your pardon. This is simply most unusual.”

“I’m sorry,” she said faintly. “I did not intend to cause such a fuss.”

“No trouble at all, miss,” he said.

She followed him out into a hall banked with tall windows looking out onto a park below. They were likely on the fourth and highest floor of the club. Continuing down the corridor, they came to a great pair of double doors. Mr. Harvey retrieved a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door.

“Just inside, miss,” he said, holding aside the heavy door for her.

Miranda crossed the threshold into a large, vaulted room, richly appointed with heavy curtains, thick carpets, and floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls, all crammed with books. She gazed at the endless rows of leather-bound volumes, and the weight of a thousand memories pressed against her.

“The bedroom is just through that door,” said Mr. Harvey from somewhere behind her. “The maids should be here with hot water soon. Do let them know if you should need anything else, Miss Thornwood.”

Miranda managed a nod. “Thank you, sir.”

“I’ll be in my office if you need me again, miss.”

She sensed his last curious glance. Then, closing the door of the suite behind him, he left her alone.

Jason Blakewell stood outside the door of his private office. His hands shook too badly to fit the key into the lock. With a supreme effort of will, he forced his fingers to cease their trembling and managed to let himself inside.

The fire had nearly died in the hearth, but he ignored the chill of the air and went directly to the sideboard. Retrieving a decanter of brandy, he poured himself a glass, but missed. Liquid splashed on his fingertips. He stared incredulously at the amber drops on the polished wood, then, with a deliberate motion, he picked up the glass and hurled it into the fireplace.

Brandy splashed onto the dying embers, and the flames burst to life again.

For a long while he paced about the shadowy room like a caged tiger, unable to form a coherent thought. He had been plunged into a private hell from which he could not escape. For ten years, he had assiduously avoided thinking about Miranda Thornwood, telling himself she meant nothing to him. But her lovely, treacherous face had never ceased haunting his dreams, sleeping and waking.

And now she was here. Here in the colossal club he had built with his blood and sweat and soul. Here in the massive monument to wealth and power he had constructed to prove to the world—to prove to her—he was worthy.

Tonight, standing on his doorstep, she had been wet and filthy, but nothing could disguise that narrow, delicate face, those fathomless eyes so black they seemed to reflect the midnight sky, so black they seemed to absorb all light. As they stood staring at each other in the rain, his heart had pounded with painful intensity, time had fallen away, and he had been twenty-one again, gazing into the eyes of the girl he loved from across a moonlit summer garden.

In that one endless moment, he had forgotten everything—her treachery, the long years separating them, even the wild, untrammeled hatred he had once felt for her, and that he now knew had never died at all. He had remembered only that he’d once loved her beyond reason, to the beggaring of his heart and his life.

Unable to move, unable to breathe, he had simply stared at her, the chaos of the streets around them fading away, and the gas lamps lining the footpath becoming distant glittering stars.

Then she had stepped forward, pushing back the hood over her masses of bone-straight hair, and he had seen her face clearly for the first time. The face that had haunted him, the face that he had loved, that he had hated, that he had worn like a talisman and a millstone in his heart for ten long years.

Now, he sank down onto an armchair and covered his eyes with his hands. He had succeeded beyond even the most fevered fantasies of revenge he’d constructed in the cesspool of the hulks he had survived for two long years. Every trapping of wealth and power surrounded him; he ate only the finest food and wore only the finest clothes; princes and potentates addressed him by name.

But the memory of the last time he had seen Miranda, when she had flung back the curtains of the tall windows at Thornwood Hall and the sky had burned scarlet outside above the hills of her father’s lands, still had the power to sear him.

For a long time he wrestled with the demons rising like phoenixes from the ashes of his past, as the fire died again in the hearth and the penumbra grew soft and nebulous. By the time the knock sounded on his door, he had gathered his composure.

“Come in,” he said.

The door swung open and Oliver Harvey stepped into the room, his curiosity nearly palpable. The little man had helped Jason escape the hulks eight years ago, and when Blakewell’s opened, Olly had jumped at the chance to manage its accounts. Jason had always trusted him with all his secrets save one.

“Miss Thornwood is settled in your suite,” said Olly. “I sent Harriet up from the kitchens to tend to her. Monsieur Leblanc isn’t pleased, but there isn’t anyone else.”

“Thank you,” said Jason.

Olly cleared his throat. “If I may be so bold as to inquire…”

He trailed off delicately.

“No,” said Jason, “you may not.”

Olly, not in the least intimidated, took a seat across from him. “This is the woman, then.”

Jason scowled at the man. “What the devil do you mean by that?”

“I always suspected there was a woman.” Olly looked vaguely apologetic. “There generally is.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jason.

“Well,” said Olly, “all that swooping about like the Prince of Darkness, despising women and refusing to fall in love.”

“I don’t swoop,” said Jason irritably. “And I certainly don’t despise women.”

He was, in point of fact, very fond of women. In the years since his escape from the hulks, he had known many beautiful women who desired him and wished to amuse him. Sally with her bright hair and laughing eyes, whose uncle had owned the tavern in which Jason had won his first thousand pounds… Isabella, the delicious little redheaded soprano who had sung “Papagena” and introduced him to the world of the demimonde where he had made his earliest fortune… Madeleine, the dancer he had installed in a small house in Mayfair, and who on parting had asked for and received a priceless diamond parure… Yes, there had been innumerable affairs in the last decade. It would be absurd to say he had never recovered from the events of ten years before. True, he had never fallen in love, but nor had any of his paramours. Everyone involved understood fully the subtle economics governing these transactions. Hearts were not a part of the equation.

Olly raised an eyebrow. “Very well,” he said. “You don’t despise women. Tell me about Miss Thornwood.”

“What is there to tell?” snapped Jason.

“To begin with,” said Olly, in the eminently reasonable tone generally reserved to address small and unreasonable children, “she is clearly a lady, and yet she has turned up here at Blakewell’s, looking for you.”

“I am acquainted with a great many ladies.”

“Yes, of course,” said Olly. He regarded his employer speculatively. “The Thornwood estate is in Hertfordshire, if I recollect correctly. Is that not where you grew up?”

“You know very well I’m from Hertfordshire,” said Jason. “Stop fishing and go away.”

Olly stiffened. “Very well, sir,” he said, a look of faint hurt in his face. “I’ll be in my office if you need me for anything else.”

The little man got to his feet. Jason watched him move across the room. Olly had nearly gained the door when Jason said abruptly, “You must think I’ve gone quite mad.”

The steward came to a halt in the doorway. “I would not dream of presuming such a thing.”

“It’s a deadly dull story,” said Jason. “Still, if you wish to hear it.” He shrugged.

Olly turned around. “I do.”

“Very well,” he said, leaning his head back against the armchair with ineffable weariness. He drew a breath and spoke aloud of Miranda Thornwood for the first time in ten years.

His father had been a footman at Thornwood, his mother a kitchen maid.

“They were both orphans, very young when they married, and very much in love,” said Jason, remembering the stories Mrs. Andrewes, the kindly housekeeper, used to tell him. “But they died of scarlet fever when I was a baby, so the servants at Thornwood, seeing as I had no other home or relations, agreed to raise me. They were very good to me, Olly. My childhood was not an unhappy one. I was a kitchen boy and then a stable boy and I probably would have become a footman, as I was six foot two by the time I was seventeen.”

“And very well-muscled in the calves,” said Oliver, sotto voce. “You wouldn’t have needed any padding in your livery breeches.”

Jason ignored his friend’s gibe, though he felt his mouth curve reluctantly. “Viscount Thornwood, however, was a harsh and cruel master. His wife had hated and feared him so much she absconded with a footman a year after presenting her lord with an heir. She died of fever after eloping with her lover to the West Indies.”

“I perceive Miss Thornwood and the current Lord Thornwood are the viscount’s progeny?”

“You perceive correctly. Lord Thornwood ignored them both for the most part, and they ran quite wild. But Miranda is nearly ten years older than her brother, and I was the only other child on the estate close to her age. I can’t remember a time when we weren’t friends and constant companions.”

Oliver’s kind, owlish face grew so sympathetic that Jason turned his head to gaze out the window at the damp, rain-drenched night.

“It was all very idyllic, as you can no doubt imagine. I taught her to ride and fish. She taught me to read and write. She even used to bring me books she had stolen from her father’s library.”

He broke off, trying not to remember, even as a thousand images from the past flickered through his mind, each one like the face of an upturned card in a falling deck. Miranda as a child, standing in her mother’s garden, her arms full of roses she had picked to brighten his tiny attic bedchamber. Miranda, thirteen years old, helping him and the gruff old Scottish coachman deliver a breech foal in the dead of winter. Miranda, holding out to him in her slender cupped hands the first wild strawberries of spring each year.

And then, unbidden, a final memory, one he had tried arduously to forget, and which now rose with perfect clarity in his mind—that still, solemn, golden afternoon ten years ago, when he had kissed her for the first time, in her mother’s rose garden beneath the effervescent light of a late summer sun.

“It was perhaps inevitable that as you grew older you should fall in love with her,” said Oliver quietly. “She is certainly a very beautiful woman, and if you had shared an emotional attachment since childhood—”

“It was not simply a childhood attachment, Olly,” Jason said. “It was an unbreakable bond, an indestructible connection, a linking of our very souls. Or so I believed. It all sounds very melodramatic now, doesn’t it? But I was twenty-one—and I was mad with love for her.” He gave a short, bitter laugh.

“It is not always wise to mock our younger selves, Jason,” said Oliver gently.

“We made plans together,” he said, hardly hearing what his friend had said. “We were going to elope to America. But at the last moment she suddenly realized what it would mean to be my wife. I suppose she’d never really stopped to consider the advantages her station in life gave her, and only as she was about to lose her wealth and her jewels and her fine gowns did she realize she could not live on love alone. But instead of informing me of her change of heart—I would have gone away, if she had asked, God knows I would have done anything for her—she confessed everything to her father.”

“Lord Thornwood was no doubt furious,” said Oliver thoughtfully. “Especially as his wife had run off with a footman.”

“He had me horsewhipped,” said Jason. “Then he informed the local magistrate I had stolen some silver from Thornwood. I hadn’t, of course, but the magistrate sentenced me to the hulks for ten years.” He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “The rest of the story you know.”

They were silent for a long moment. Finally, Oliver said, “She was very young, Jason—you were both very young—and she was no doubt terrified of leaving the only home and life she had ever known. Perhaps it is time to forgive her.”

Jason made no answer.

Miranda emerged from her bath wrapped in a Turkish towel to find a maid spreading a blue satin gown across the bedspread. In the flickering light of the beeswax candles, the material shone like water.

With a deep sense of foreboding, Miranda looked around for her own clothes and shoes.

“Where are my things?” she asked after the maid indicated her name was Harriet.

“I’m sorry, miss,” said Harriet, flushing as she hurried forward, “but Mr. Blakewell ordered me to burn it all. He didn’t think anything would be worth saving.”

Miranda closed her eyes. “And where did this dress come from?”

“He sent me to Madame Beaumont’s to fetch a gown for you,” said the maid. “This was the only one Madame had finished tonight, though there wasn’t time to alter it. The lady it was meant for won’t like it, but Mr. Blakewell gave Madame fifty extra pounds for it. Shall I help you dress, miss?”