Midnight Marriage: A Georgian Historical Romance (Roxton Series) (15 page)

Deb tried to pull her hands free but he would not let go.

“You know not the first thing about me or him, for that matter, to pass judgment on either of us! That you have the audacity to tell me to my face… Stop this carriage at once!” When he grinned and ignored her plea to have the carriage pull over she said, “You are a fiend and a brute! After such an appalling roasting I’ve no intention of telling you anything!”

“No? I can wait it out. Thomas has his orders. He will keep on driving until the horses give out if need be, or I give the order to pull up. And I wouldn’t be concerned with Jack’s welfare. There’s a basket of foodstuffs under the box. He, at least, won’t go hungry.”

“You won’t coerce me in this way,” she stated, but did not sound particularly convincing because she was trying very hard not to laugh. “There is nothing to tell. I say and do the most shocking things to relieve a natural boredom—nothing more.”

Julian folded his arms, black curls back against the velvet upholstery, and closed his eyes. “You may wake me when you feel ready for confidences.”

Five minutes passed. Deb pretended to enjoy the countryside and Julian kept his word, only once opening an eye to take a peek at his hostage, quick to close it when she glanced his way. The road was beginning to climb and the horses slowed, but there was no sign of an inn or a farmhouse and Jack was happily biting into an apple.

“Why should I unburden myself on you when I am certain you must have as many secrets to tell?” Deb demanded. “I don’t know the first thing about you.” When this was greeted with continued silence, she let out a great breath of exasperation, shifted on the seat, and turned to view the deep woods that now lined both sides of the winding road. She could see that he was going to be stubborn so she had to offer him something if only to get him to be pleasant enough to take her home again. She was surprised when it was he who broke the long silence between them.

“Have you fallen in love, Miss Cavendish?”

At this Deb’s throat constricted and her cheeks burned. Her gaze flew up to his face and then she looked away just as swiftly, wanting to refute the question, yet unable to do so because it was true. She had fallen in love, inexplicably and without good reason, with him, but she could not bring herself to say so. She felt foolish, not knowing how he felt, whether he returned her regard, and if he cared enough for her to flout convention and disregard Sir Gerald’s opposition and society’s censure to elope with her.

“Miss Cavendish,” he said firmly, “are you in love with Robert Thesiger?”

“Robert Thesiger?” Deb was so taken aback that her color deepened at such a blunt suggestion. “Why would you think me in love with Mr. Thesiger?”

“I saw you together at the Assembly Ball.”

Deb put up her chin. “I hardly think that dancing the minuet with a gentleman constitutes a love match, do you, sir?”

“Yet, his display just now on horseback… He was most insistent that you speak with him…?”

At this, Deb looked down at her gloved hands, embarrassed. “I cannot return Mr. Thesiger’s regard. And he is a most persistent gentleman.” She peered up at Julian through her lashes. “But you asked if I am in love with him, and the answer is no, I am not.”

“I am relieved to hear you say so. I have no wish to come between a love match.”

“Mr. Thesiger and I are friends. Just because I am not in love with him does not mean I do not champion his friendship. I refuse to be prejudiced by his questionable parentage.”

“My dear girl, let me assure you that his motives are far more questionable than his parentage,” Julian drawled and sprung down from the carriage, for it had come to stand in a narrow wooded lane.

He assisted Deb to firm ground and turned away before she could respond, to watch Jack run off up the path that led into the wood, Nero at his boot heels. A word to his driver, and he escorted Deb along the same path, a basket in one hand, and in the other, of all things to bring on a drive, a cricket bat! She soon knew why. Up ahead, through a break in the forest, was a clearing. Beyond the clearing, the river, and across the water, undulating farming land. Over the first rise, a curl of smoke drifted up into the darkening clouds.

Jack was busy collecting sticks for the stumps of a wicket he had marked out, while Nero devoted himself to ferreting out possible rabbit holes on the edge of the clearing. A blanket spread out, the basket deposited, the cricket ball found in amongst the foodstuffs, and Julian turned to Deb with a small bow.

“If you will be so kind as to do the honors with the contents of the basket I shall endeavor to entertain your nephew; part of the bargain I’m afraid.”

Deb frowned as she took off her bonnet. “You’re not going to play at cricket in your condition, surely? It cannot be many weeks since you were stitched up.”

“It has been three weeks, five days and several hours since we first met,” he said and was pleased when she blushed and looked anywhere but at him. “I am better mended than you realize and am quite capable of bowling a ball. But I won’t. I shall leave that treat for Jack. I shall merely bat and let Jack bowl me out. Excuse me. You will find a bottle of excellent burgundy and two goblets in the basket.”

Jack proved a tireless competitor and would not give up the game until he had bowled Julian out for a third time. Once he caught and bowled him, which sent Jack into such spasms of delight that it had Nero barking loud and long, thinking his young master in danger of losing his life. It took Deb much coaxing with a succulent slice of lamb before Nero forgot the danger and thought of his stomach. He trotted over to Deb, ears down and obeyed her command to be a good dog and eat his dinner without a fuss. For his obedience he received a pat on the flank. Julian and Jack soon followed, bat and ball let fall into the leaf litter beside the feast laid out on the blanket.

“Well done, Jack. That was a splendid catch,” said Deb with a smile. “Your father would’ve been proud. Otto played at school,” she explained to Julian, handing him a goblet of burgundy, the intervening interval of cricket serving to make her feel very much at ease again. “And before he went to the Continent, I spent Saturday afternoons at the village green watching him play at cricket with the local farmers’ sons.”

“Your aunt is beyond price, Jack. Plays a viola, tells me she is a crack shot with a pistol and, not only does she like the game of cricket, she understands it.” Julian bit into a slice of pie, a wink at his young friend. “Will you mind sharing her?”

Jack grinned. “I’ve seen Aunt Deb take the corner off a playing card at ten paces. Joseph made her as mad as hellfire once and she had him hold up the King of Diamonds in the back parlor and—”

“Jack! That will do!”

“And what, Jack?” Julian asked, passing the boy a wedge of venison and mushroom pie.

Jack ate hungrily of the pie but hesitated to give Julian an answer, but he received such an encouraging look from him that he couldn’t help a little family disloyalty. “The shot hit its mark all right, but it shattered the big looking glass over the fireplace. Alice was still picking up the shards two weeks later.”

“Thank you very much, John George Cavendish,” Deb said without heat. “You failed to add that the said looking glass had the most hideous frame imaginable. No one was sorry to see it go, except Sir Gerald.”

“Only because Uncle was forever sneaking into the back parlor to peer into that glass,” Jack confessed, adding for Julian’s benefit, “Uncle Gerald is always fixing his wig. But no amount of fixing is going to make a difference. He still looks like an egg fitted with a cozy!”

Deb opened her mouth to upbraid her nephew for such lack of respect but instead she giggled behind her hand. “He does look like an egg, doesn’t he? Oh dear! I shall never be able to view him the same way again! P-poor M-Mary.”

“Well, I don’t want to look like an egg,” Jack confided, falling back onto the blanket and staring up into a sky gathering clouds. “I’m going to wear my own hair—always. My friend Harry says his brother
and
his papa both wear their own hair.” He looked across at Deb. “Harry, well his name isn’t really Harry, it’s Lord Henri-Antoine, but he likes to be called Harry and he don’t like it to be known he speaks French better than he does Shakespeare’s English. Well, Harry says that his papa has always worn his own hair and he’s ancient. Harry says his papa wore his coronet in the processional at the coronation of King George the Second. I wouldn’t have believed it had any other fellow told me, but Harry never lies.”

“Perhaps Harry meant to say his grandpapa?” Deb suggested.

Jack sat up on an elbow. He selected a chunk of cheese from the platter put before him. “No, Aunt Deb. But he does look like a
grand
papa. He was dressed all in black velvet with silver lacings and his hair is white like fresh snow and he wears the largest emerald ring I’ve ever seen—”

“Snow-white hair and a large emerald ring,” Deb repeated, a sudden vivid remembrance in her mind’s eye of a dream she’d had as a child, of an ancient gentleman with bright black eyes, white hair, and on a long white finger a large square cut emerald that glinted in the firelight. He was someone very important but he was very sad. “He looked a hundred years old…” she murmured to herself.

“He came to school in the most magnificent coach and six,” Jack was saying, hardly drawing breath, such was his excitement to tell his aunt about Harry’s papa. “The horses were all black high-steppers and the coach was of black lacquer with gold leaf everywhere, and there were six outriders in scarlet and silver livery! It had us fellows at the windows when we should’ve been at our Latin, but who could think of grammar at such a time?”

“Who indeed,” Julian commented, and in a tone that did not encourage Jack to continue. He rummaged in the basket for a fruit knife to cut up an apple, slices of which he offered to Deb. “It will rain in the next hour…”

“Are you certain it was an emerald, Jack?” Deb asked quietly, unconsciously taking the apple slices Julian offered her from the knife’s edge.

The boy nodded. “It was a green stone. As green as your eyes, sir. Pardon, sir. That’s an emerald, isn’t it, Aunt Deb?”

Deb nodded, distracted, as she turned to look into Julian’s eyes. She knew they were green but she had not realized just how emerald green they truly were. They were beautiful eyes; eyes that reminded her of a sad boy in one of her dreams. She was on a swing and Otto was there with her. And then the boy was there, sobbing uncontrollably, and Otto was not. Nurse had told her it was just a bad dream brought on by the medicine she had been given, for some minor ailment she now could not remember, and to forget all about it…

“Are you sure this ancient gentleman came to collect Harry? That he wasn’t just visiting the school for some other purpose?” Deb persisted.

“Why this sudden fascination with white haired old men, Miss Cavendish?” Julian asked lightly. “Some men do wear their own hair, be it white, brown or black. Or perhaps we are confusing white hair with powdered hair or a wig?”

Jack shook his head and answered before his aunt could speak. “No, sir. It was his own hair. Harry told me his papa wears his own hair. And Harry’s papa came to the school because Harry had taken one of his turns.”

“Turns?” Deb prodded gently, an eye on Julian who was frowning, paused in mid-slice with knife and apple.

Jack was uncomfortable talking about his friend’s malady, only because he knew Harry hated to have it discussed. But he wanted to explain himself to his aunt and this gentleman who had been so kind to them. “Harry suffers with the falling sickness. He never knows when it’s going to happen. Sometimes he’ll get a terrible headache and then he just faints dead away. Just like that! He says he was born with it. And that’s why his papa came to school: to take him home after one of his attacks. He has his own physician and his mamma—”

“Dear me, Master Jack! Are you Lord Henri’s self-appointed confessor?” Julian interrupted coldly, getting up off the blanket and roughly brushing down his breeches. “What gives you the right to share such intimate details with us when they were obviously told you in the strictest confidence?”

“No, sir,” Jack answered quietly, coloring up as he scrambled to his feet. “I mean, yes, sir, he did tell me in confidence. It’s just that Harry is my best friend in the whole world.” When Julian turned to pick up the empty burgundy bottle Jack looked to his aunt, wondering what he had said to offend the gentleman.

Deb smiled kindly at her nephew. “Why don’t you take Nero for a run before we head back?” And as soon as he was out of earshot rounded on Julian full of angry embarrassment for Jack. “That was uncalled for, sir! Jack is a sensitive, caring boy. He wasn’t pouring scorn on Harry’s malady. Anyone with eyes could see poor Harry’s affliction affects him deeply. Why you should see it differently—”

“Your nephew has no right to speak on matters he knows nothing about: nor should they concern you!”

“Is that so?” she enunciated, shaking out her silk petticoats and snatching up her bonnet. “I know not the first thing about you, who are your family, your connections, indeed what you do with your time, apart from getting yourself involved in duels with the odds stacked against you, and yet I am expected to allow you to concern yourself in my affairs? Indeed, you expect me to give you a full and open account of my history, without the same courtesy being offered me in return—”

“If you loved me…”

“Loved you?” Deb stared at him. “
Loved
you?” she repeated in a whisper, the color draining from her cheeks. “How dare you presume…”

He smiled sheepishly. “Ah. I have overstepped the mark.” He bowed. “Forgive me for such overbearing presumption.”

“God, I wish I’d never set eyes on you!” she said savagely, the straw bonnet crushed in her hand. “Life was so much the simpler before I bandaged you up. I wish you’d never come back to Bath. Damn you! Don’t think I’ve spent my days pining. I haven’t. No! I won’t allow you to hold me,” she said, trying to push him off. “You presume that I have fallen in love with you just because…Oh! I can’t believe you had the effrontery to—to…”