Regina Scott (10 page)

“He was a respected conchologist who corresponded with some of the most noted naturalists of our day.” Meredee trailed her hand along the rough stone. “And a beloved father.”

He bent down to examine the inscription. “Your father, to be exact.”

Meredee nodded as he straightened. “He wanted to be buried in Scarborough. He considered it his home. I suppose I do too.”

“He didn’t have a house here?”

“Not a permanent one, no. We stayed in inns or, like you, rented a place. He wasn’t particular, as long as we were close to the sea and he could further his seashell collection. Now it’s mine to care for.”

His gaze ventured out to sea again. “A worthy inheritance for someone with an interest in science. My father left Phoebe a considerable sum instead. She will come into it when she marries or reaches her majority. Sometimes I fear that fact influences those who choose to befriend her.”

Meredee glanced around for the girl and saw with relief that she was standing next to the carriage, arms crossed eloquently over her chest. “Your sister is so pretty and animated, I doubt anyone looks first to her income.”

“And I have nightmares about it,” he replied. But he, too, glanced around. “I had something in particular I wished to discuss with you, but it seems we will have to wait. I believe your stepmother has something rather urgent on her mind.”

While they had talked, the crowds had thinned until only a few carriages remained in the lane. Her stepmother was a small shadow in front of the church, waving wildly.

“I believe,” Meredee said, “that our cart from the inn is ready to depart. I should go.”

He caught her hand and held it close. “Ride home with me instead.”

He could not know the tremors his touch caused. Yet a part of her longed to spend time with him. She doubted she’d ever get enough of the admiration she saw in his eyes. But she knew she’d never survive a ride home with Mrs. Price and Lady Phoebe both trying to get her attention to discuss Algernon’s strange behavior—behavior she still could not mention to Chase.

“I wouldn’t want to take you out of your way,” she said, pulling back from him. “Perhaps I will see you and Lady Phoebe at the spa tomorrow.”

“Count on it,” he said. She felt his gaze follow her all the way back to the cart.

M
eredee finally caught up with her stepbrother after dinner that day. The inn served an Ordinary—a generous meal at two in the afternoon in the private parlor—but Algernon hadn’t joined her and his mother and the other guests. Meredee sat where she could keep an eye on the common room outside the open door and sighted him passing just as the innkeeper brought out the final course of stewed apricots and ices. Excusing herself, and earning a frown from her stepmother, she slipped out.

She thought perhaps he’d look haggard from keeping his secrets, but his grin was as bright as ever.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. “You admit you intend to marry Lady Phoebe despite her brother’s wishes and then take yourself off without further explanation!”

“Hush!” he cautioned, eyes wide. He took a step
closer and lowered his voice. “This is no place to discuss personal issues. Upstairs.”

With a glance over her shoulder to make sure her stepmother was still spooning up her strawberry ice, Meredee hurried after him.

He led her to the sitting room beside their bedchambers. The space was painted a sunny yellow, made brighter by the light from the wide, dark wood-framed windows across the far wall. Her stepmother had immediately made herself at home; her lace-making pillow sat on the little half-moon table against the left wall, her cashmere shawl draped the padded seat under the window and her cloak was puddled on one of the spindle-backed chairs that crouched here and there as if begging for guests.

Algernon shut the door. “I meant what I said yesterday. I intend to marry Lady Phoebe as soon as she’ll have me.”

“Lady Phoebe isn’t the one you have to convince. She’s only nineteen. You need her brother’s permission.”

He grimaced and set about pacing the polished wood floor. Meredee sank onto the chair closest to the table and watched. He looked a bit like a stork in his butter-yellow pantaloons and paler yellow coat.

“I’ll never get Allyndale’s permission,” Algernon declared. “He doesn’t trust me.”

“And why should he?” Meredee rubbed her hands along the pink of her skirt. “Sneaking around
behind his back like this. I saw you at services this morning, sir.”

Her stepbrother paused to eye her. “Whose side are you on?”

She had asked herself the same question. She had agreed to learn Chase’s intentions when she thought Algernon was in danger. Now she had to wonder who was the greater danger—Chase or Algernon. “I remain your devoted sister,” she told him, “but I am disappointed in you.”

Algernon sighed and pulled out the spindle-backed chair next to hers to seat himself. “Please don’t say that. I haven’t done anything to shame you.”

“Perhaps not, but look what you’re doing to the girl you say you love. You are forcing her to choose between you and her family.”

“I’m not forcing her!” Algernon leapt to his feet again. “Her brother is the one putting her in this untenable position. Am I such a miserable excuse for a man that he’d refuse to allow me to court her properly?”

“Only you can answer that,” Meredee murmured.

He took a deep breath. “I assure you, the thought of marriage makes any man take a good look at himself. I may not have a title, but I’m a decent catch.” He ticked off the reasons on his fingers. “I’m from a respectable family; I have a reputation for paying my debts on time; I have a decent income.” His grin slipped out. “And I have an exceptional sense of fashion.”

Exceptional
was the only word for it. Meredee shook her head. “Then why does Lord Allyndale refuse you?”

He threw up his hands. “Because he is a bully and a lout! He insists on controlling every moment of his sister’s life, and he will not give her up.”

“You mistake him,” Meredee insisted. “He loves his sister deeply; I’m sure of it. He’s simply trying to protect her.”

“From me?” Algernon drew himself up as if affronted. “I just want to marry the chit!”

“Marriage!” his mother cried as she threw open the door and hurried inside. “What’s this of marriage?”

Algernon slumped, crumpling his coat and his cravat in the process. “Oh, hello, Mother. Please shut the door before the entire inn hears you.”

“Why?” she demanded, but she did as he bid. “They already hear you.”

“I certainly hope not,” Algernon said, but Meredee noticed that he had quieted his voice.

Mrs. Price picked up her gray skirts and took the chair he had vacated. “What’s this about marriage?” she repeated, gaze darting between him and Meredee.

Meredee waited for her stepbrother to speak, but he appeared to be contemplating the curve of one of the filigreed buttons on his gold-shot waistcoat. When the silence stretched, she sighed and turned to her stepmother.

“Algernon and Lady Phoebe are in love and wish to marry,” she explained.

Mrs. Price stared at her son. “Is this true?”

Algernon nodded, meeting her gaze at last. “Yes, Mother. But Lord Allyndale has refused us permission.”

Mrs. Price straightened. “The arrogance! You’re a tremendous catch! You’re handsome and clever and well-heeled, and you come from excellent family.”

Algernon cast Meredee a look as if to say he’d told her so.

“I believe Lord Allyndale may be looking for more for his sister,” she said.

“More?” Mrs. Price looked bewildered. “What more is there?”

Depth of character? Maturity? A willingness to put aside one’s needs for another? All of which she feared her stepbrother and Lady Phoebe lacked. But she could not tell him that, especially with her stepmother in the room, without sounding judgmental and ungrateful.

“Perhaps if Algernon were to speak to Lord Allyndale again,” Meredee ventured instead. “Explain how much he loves Lady Phoebe.”

“He might listen,” Mrs. Price agreed. “You do have a way with words, dearest.”

“Not when it comes to Phoebe’s brother,” Algernon insisted. “Frankly, I’d like to carry her off to Scotland to marry. I had it all planned—east to Thirsk,
north to Middlesborough, then across to Penrith and up to Gretna Green. I’m certain we could survive any scandal from it. But we could use that dowry of hers.” He grinned again. “Phoebe enjoys shopping nearly as much as I do.”

Chills ran through Meredee. “Algernon, you are not out for her inheritance?”

“For shame!” Mrs. Price wagged her finger at Meredee. “How can you say such a thing to your brother! After all he’s done for you!”

Algernon cocked his head. “Is this jealousy speaking, Meredee? You have neither inheritance nor suitor, so you begrudge Lady Phoebe both?”

Meredee rose on shaky legs. “No! Of course not! But Lord Allyndale is not the monster you painted him. If he’s refused you, it’s because he has reason.”

Mrs. Priced sucked in a breath. “I never thought I’d see the day when a daughter of mine would turn her back on her own family for a near stranger.”

“You,” Meredee said, gaze blurring with tears, “are not my mother, as you say to total strangers at the least provocation. You asked me to act as your servant and your spy, and to my sorrow I agreed. But this sneaking around is wrong, and I will be a party to it no longer.” She ducked her head to keep them from seeing her tears and hurried for her room.

Once inside, she leaned against the door. Algernon couldn’t be right. Oh, some part of her longed for an independence, an ability to make choices now
denied her. But she didn’t begrudge Lady Phoebe those choices. That wasn’t why she protested. Love that tore families apart could not be right.

Could not be love.

Certainly there were feuding families who refused their children the right to wed. Look at Romeo and Juliet, and how badly their romance had ended. Surely she was right to caution Algernon against such a course. They were family, and family looked out for each other.

She pushed away from the door and went to kneel before her bed. Lifting the quilt away from the floor, she pulled out the specially designed leather box her father had left her. The black leather was scuffed in places from its travels, and she felt another twinge of guilt when she saw the film of dust on top. Working the brass catches, she lifted the top compartment to fold out first one side and then the other.

The sunlight from the window gleamed on the dozens of shells nestled in velvet-lined compartments. There was the red queen scallop from Cornwall. Each time she looked at it she thought about the time her father had taken her and her mother to that lonely coast and she’d seen the huge Atlantic for the first time, her tiny hand held safely in her mother’s.

Then there was the large razor clam, looking like it had been bronzed already, from the coast of Scotland. Her father had found the massive specimen while he and Mrs. Price were on their wedding journey. It was
the only shell in the collection that her stepmother was willing to praise.

In the center, a single compartment remained empty. The scrap of parchment tacked to the bottom read,
“tellina incarnata.”
Her father’s legacy, her life, could be told in these shells. Unfinished. Waiting.

She knew she should have tried harder to find the shell. She should have insisted that they return to Scarborough sooner. But a part of her was just as loath as her stepmother to visit the place again, to open herself to memories that sometimes proved painful. And how could she regret waiting until yesterday to hunt in the North Bay, when yesterday she’d spent the time with Chase?

How he’d grinned through the morning. She still could not believe he’d stayed at her side. A few of her friends had gone hunting with her and her father over the years. They’d never gone more than once, and they’d never stayed more than a few minutes before losing interest and finding better game.

But Chase had seemed sincerely pleased with the process. He’d asked questions about each shell they discovered, and twice she saw him pocket a particularly lovely specimen she knew her father had already collected. He never found excuses to head back to the shade of the trees; he never urged her to hurry. Until Lady Phoebe had disappeared, he’d seemed completely content.

They’d been poking around a tidal pool yesterday
when a thin stream of water had spurted up from the depths. He’d hopped back to save his boots, then peered closer.

“What was that?”

Meredee looked closer, too. Nestled in the little pool were any number of creatures and plants, from the golden flowers of sea mats to clumps of purple coralline algae. A spider crab hurried away from her gaze, as if he had important places to go. “I suspect those are your culprits, my lord.”

He gazed down at the cluster of translucent tubes clinging to the darker rocks. They seemed to sway in the breeze, and once in a while clear water shot from the openings.

“Amazing,” he said, as if he’d been the first to discover them. “What are these creatures? Have they been catalogued?”

Meredee smiled. “Oh, very likely. They are called sea squirts. They are scraped on a regular basis from pilings and wharves around the Empire.”

He chuckled at that. “Well, I still say they look like clever little fellows.”

“They are very clever. It takes very little for them to be content. They cling tenaciously to any little outcropping, be it wood or stone or metal, and collect their food from particles in the seawater.”

Was that what she’d become, she wondered now. A creature clinging blindly to a family who wanted nothing but to scrape her off?

It hadn’t always been this way. When her father had first told her he planned to marry again, to a widow with a nearly grown son, she’d been ecstatic. A family at last! For a time, they were a family. Algernon had always been up for a lark, ready to squire her about. Her father had thought the sun rose and set on him. Mrs. Price had been delighted to see Meredee dressed in the latest styles, to take her to balls and routs, to introduce Meredee to her acquaintances as her husband’s daughter. She’d listened at night when Meredee poured out her sorrows about a beau who hadn’t come up to scratch and, when Meredee had lost the one man she’d thought she might have married, her stepmother had cried along with her.

And then Meredee’s father had fallen ill, and everything had changed.

At first she’d served beside her stepmother because she wanted to be with her father. Then she’d served Mrs. Price because the woman had been even more distraught than Meredee at the loss of Mr. Price. What had started as an act of love had gradually become a duty and then a chore. Algernon and his mother were completely comfortable with the idea that Meredee was meant to serve.

And Meredee hadn’t argued. There was comfort in being needed, honor in being useful. She felt rather noble soothing tempers, aiding plans, encouraging dreams. Being helpful was the only reason anyone ever praised her. She’d never questioned that role,
until she met Chase Dearborn, Lord Allyndale. She’d packaged her heart in a neat little case, just like her father’s shells, safely hidden from the world. Chase had blown off the dust, opened the catches and looked deep inside. Would he see the beauty nestled there?

Lord, show me the way. I feel so lost.

The rap on her door brought her head up.

“Meredee?” Algernon’s voice sounded concerned. “Please let me in. We must talk.”

“No,” she said, closing the case. “We mustn’t. Let us merely say that we disagree. You will do as you see fit, and so will I.”

“But you won’t say anything, will you? You’ll keep this in the family?”

A tear slid down her cheek. Perhaps as long as she continued to serve she could at least pretend she had a family.

“Yes, Algernon,” she said. “Your secret is safe with me. But be careful. He isn’t a man to cross.”

“Perhaps you should remember that, too,” he murmured.

She needed no reminder. She’d backed herself into a corner with Chase, and she was fairly certain she’d spend the rest of the night worrying about it.