Surrender to Sin (32 page)

The Duke suddenly sank down in the seat, emitting a long animal moan. “Oh, God, Julie, I’m sorry!”

“So you should be,” she said icily. “I shall never forgive you. Never!”

“Damn and blast, I
knew
I recognized those Cumberlands! Look here, Annabel—Abigail—I’ll just have to buy the bloody thing back from your father.”

Juliet laughed bitterly. “Do you expect me to believe that
her father
bought this carriage? You gave it to her! Admit it! You gave it to her just to hurt me. Well done, Ginger!”

“Oh, Miss Wayborn!” said Abigail. “Is this—was this meant to be
your
carriage? I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“I suppose you’re his mistress!” she said. “Well, there’s no accounting for taste!”

“You take that back!” said Abigail. “My father bought me this carriage.”

“It’s true, Julie. Colfax sent it to me, but I sent it back.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean he can turn around and sell it to someone else,” said Juliet.

“That is exactly what it means!” Abigail argued. “A great deal of work went into this carriage, Miss Wayborn, though you do not realize it. Every part of it was custom-made, down to the tassels on the curtains. Is Mr. Colfax to get nothing for his hard work, just because the two of you are bickering like…like Oberon and Titania?”

“Look here, Julie,” said the Duke, “I’ll buy it back from the man. If you stop a moment at Auckland House, Abigail, I can write you a note on my bank for fourteen hundred pounds.”

“Is that what you were going to pay for it?” exclaimed Abigail. “Oh, well done, Papa!” she murmured. “He got it for seven hundred.”

“Seven hundred?” The Duke scowled. “Why, that bloody thief, Colfax! He was charging me twice that!”

“Well, it
was
a custom order,” said Abigail. “Not everyone wants an enormous coach and four with blue doors and silver wheels…and seats that fold down into beds.”

“Julie! Do the seats fold down into beds?”

“I thought it would be convenient for our long trips to Auckland in the winter,” Juliet said primly. “You snore when you sleep sitting up.”

“And, of course,” Abigail went on hastily, “the crest on the doors had to be painted over. I think Mr. Colfax was grateful that anyone bought it.”

“I shall buy it back,” said the Duke. “It was meant for you, Julie, and you shall have it. I apologize for the misunderstanding. I’ll give you a bank note, Abigail.”

“You will have to speak to my father, your grace,” Abigail demurred. “
I
can’t engage to sell it to you. It was a gift. I’m sure you understand. Besides, I’m going to need it tonight, if I’m to go to the theater. I should be more than happy to…to collect Miss Wayborn and bring her to the theater with me.”

“How very good of you, Cousin Abigail,” Juliet drawled. “How
kind
of you to offer to take me to the theater in my very own carriage.”

“I beg your pardon, Miss Wayborn, but it is
my
carriage. Bought and paid for.”

“On second thought,
do
come and collect me,” said she. “It will be nice to have such a big roomy carriage. We can bring some of the actors with us to the Carlton House Ball.”

Abigail cringed in horror. “Actors? In my nice clean carriage?”

The Duke was incensed. “Rourke? Rourke in my carriage? I don’t think so, my girl!”

Juliet shrugged. “Why not?”

“So you can show him how the seats fold down?” he roared.

Juliet’s eyes flashed angrily. “Perhaps I will!” she snapped.

“Do it!” he said. “And I shall drop this carriage on your head!”

“I hate you!”

“Berkeley Square!” cried Abigail, looking out the window just as the carriage drew up to the shining marble facade of the Duke’s town house.

The Duke jumped out and viciously kicked his hat across the road. His face was very white. “I’ll see you tonight, Abigail. If you happen to have any nice juicy garbage hanging about you in Kensington, bring it along!”

“Park Lane,” Abigail told the footman. “
Quickly!
”

“I cannot make you out at all, little Abigail,” said Juliet, leaning back in her seat as the carriage jogged westward to Park Lane. “Either you are a spineless little fool or you’re an artful little she-devil. Did your father really buy this carriage? Who
is
your father, anyway? Not Sir William Smith of Brazil, I’m sure. I see from this receipt that you are called Miss Ritchie. I never saw that name in DeBrett’s, but I think I saw it on the bottle in your room.”

Abigail’s head ached and her nerves were badly frayed. “Miss Wayborn,” she said coldly, “did you happen to have ordered a dining table and chairs from Mr. Duckett in Jermyn Street? Ebony, with gold and ivory inlay?”

“Why does one ask?”

“No reason,” Abigail said sweetly.

“You nasty little thief!” Juliet snarled. “What else have you taken from me?”

Abigail drew herself up. “You
did
tell me, did you not, that I should go to London, and take what I could get?”

Suddenly, and rather unconvincingly, Juliet seemed overcome by the swaying of the carriage. As they arrived in Park Lane, she stood up in the carriage, then sank back into her seat with her handkerchief pressed to her mouth as the servants scrambled to open the door. Abigail privately thought her a terrible actress, but she said solicitously, “You are unwell, Miss Wayborn. Do let my servants summon your servants.”

Juliet opened her eyes. “No, indeed. I’m quite well now. This frigate of a carriage makes one a bit seasick, that’s all.”

“Perhaps you should stay at home and rest this evening,” Abigail kindly suggested.

“No, I must go to the theater,” Juliet said crossly. “People will think me a cowardy custard if I don’t go. You
will
come and collect me, won’t you, Cousin Abigail?” she went on, half-pleading, half-commanding. “It’s so dreadfully important that I arrive in a proper carriage.”

“But if it makes you seasick—” Abigail began.

“As you can see I am quite recovered,” Juliet snapped. “And we
have
got a truce, haven’t we? You would not break your word, when my poor brother has such faith in your honesty?”

“No, indeed,” Abigail mumbled reluctantly.

Fully recovered, Juliet fairly bounced down the steps. “I wouldn’t really let actors sit in the carriage, you know,” she said gaily. “Why, it’s brand new!”

The servant closed the door, and Abigail slipped down in her seat, blowing out her cheeks in a massive sigh of relief. “What a horrid creature!” she said aloud. As the carriage turned onto Kensington Road, she opened the miniature bar Juliet had so thoughtfully instructed Mr. Colfax to set into the door, and poured herself a long nourishing
quaich
of Ritchie’s single malt.

She felt, somehow, that she had earned it.

Cary was checking his watch with such frequency and such irritation that he almost missed Mr. Waller leaving his office accompanied by a prosperous looking man in plain, dark clothes. A passing Runner, chancing to remark, “Aughternoon, Mr. Waller,” caused him to look up. “Look here, Waller,” Cary called out irritably, jumping to his feet in the crowded anteroom. “I’ve been waiting for you nearly two hours.”

Mr. Waller’s eyes widened in surprise. “Why, here is Mr. Wayborn now. What a fortuitous concourse of atoms, as the poet says.”

“I’ll say it’s fortuitous,” Cary snapped. “Half of London’s atoms have gone ahead of me! There’s not even anything to read while one waits, not even the
Gazette
.”

“Well, it’s not a circulating library, Mr. Wayborn, sir,” Mr. Waller pointed out.

“Quite.” Cary was at the point of urging Mr. Waller back into his office when the Runner’s companion suddenly addressed him.

“Mr. Wayborn,” he said, his tone both deferential and businesslike. “This is a matter of some delicacy and no little embarrassment for me. I’m sure you understand.”

Cary studied the other man. Being of middle height, weight, and coloring, he had virtually no outstanding characteristics. All the same, Cary was certain he had never met the man in his life. “Who the devil are you?”

The man blushed rosily. “I beg your pardon, sir! Forgive me; we have never met. I’m Mr. Leighton.” He seemed a little puzzled that his name meant nothing to Cary. “I’m an attorney,” he elaborated. “My mother-in-law stayed in your house when she was lately in Hertfordshire. Mrs. Urania Spurgeon?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Cary. “Mr. Leighton. How do you do, sir? Forgive me. My thoughts were a thousand miles away. I did not immediately recognize the name. Mrs. Spurgeon is well, I trust?”

Mr. Leighton winced. “She’s never exactly in the best of health, sir. I’d say she is as well as can be expected. But the household is in an uproar, you see.”

“I see,” said Cary, though he really didn’t. He was afraid that Mr. Leighton might turn out to be one of those people who take great pleasure in laying all their troubles at the feet of the nearest gentleman. “Well, if there is anything I can do…” he murmured vaguely.

“But sir! It is
I
who may be of some assistance to
you
.”

Mr. Waller was more specific. “Mr. Leighton has recovered some of your stolen property, Mr. Wayborn, sir. Shall we step into my office?”

Abigail found her father in the banquet hall of their Kensington house. The elaborate grandeur of the ebony table and chairs was perhaps out of step with the neoclassical mural on the walls that depicted rosy cupids playing various musical instruments while Venus and Mars picnicked at the foot of Mount Olympus, but, since there had never been a banquet held here, and there probably never would be, Abigail was content to indulge her father in his colliding tastes.

Red Ritchie was engaged in directing the work of a young draftsman whose task it was to meticulously draw each and every new object that came into the house; Red insisted upon thoroughly up-to-date inventories of all his possessions.

Red welcomed his daughter’s interruption. “Abby, love! What did you buy? Higgins will draw it for you, won’t you, Higgins?”

“Only a book,” said Abigail. “But I think I might have a buyer for the new coach, Papa.”

“But I wanted
you
to have that carriage, Abby,” Red complained. “It was meant for a duchess. All right, Higgins, run along. That’s enough for the day.”

Abigail waited for the young man to depart. “The buyer is very motivated. He offered me fourteen hundred pounds. That’s twice what you paid, isn’t it?”

Red’s expression underwent a radical change. “Oh, well done, Abby!”

“I knew you’d be pleased. He’ll come and see you tomorrow, he said.”

“I wanted to get you something special for your birthday,” he said wistfully. “I may have to ask this fellow for more money. Do you think he would pay two thousand?”

“Almost certainly,” Abigail said, smiling. “He seems to want it very badly.”

“Then I might buy you a nice little phaeton for your birthday,” he said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. “You could drive me to the warehouse of a morning.”

Abigail felt a stab of guilt. Soon she would be leaving her father’s house forever. Then he would live alone in his enormous Kensington mansion where no one ever visited him, and she would be miles away in Hertfordshire. How could she possibly tell him that she was planning to abandon him for a feckless young wastrel who didn’t pay his bills? His practical Glaswegian soul would neither understand nor forgive.

“I suppose I could learn how to drive,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.

“Of course you could,” he said warmly. “Won’t you look smart in your new phaeton, Abby! Just like one of these aristocratic ladies.” Suddenly, he smacked his forehead with his open palm. “Wouldn’t that have been something, if I’d only thought of it sooner? I could have had a Roman chariot made for you! Then you might have arrived at Carlton House in style! I wonder,” he mused, “if I promised Colfax a fortune…He might have something on the lot that could be modified…”

“No, Papa,” Abigail said firmly. “Even if you could, I could never learn to drive in one evening. It would not be so stylish if I overturned!”

“You are right,” he agreed, chewing his lower lip. “I ought to have gotten you driving lessons before. But, you know, in your mother’s day, respectable young ladies never took up the reins for themselves. It’s quite a recent development.”

They went into the sitting room at the back of the house for their tea, which consisted of sandwiches and single malt, followed by hot, buttery scones. The tall French windows looked out onto the back garden, which had always been Abigail’s special project. It made her sad to think that her last view of it should be a winter view, with very little of spring’s promise in evidence.

“I shall be leaving for Carlton House in very short order, I’m afraid,” her father told her at the end of the meal. “I want everything to be perfect for His Highness. I wouldn’t put it past those idiots at the warehouse to misdirect the deliveries, break half the bottles, and drink the other half themselves! If all goes well, Abigail, and the Regent is pleased, we’ll have the royal mark on the bottle, see if we don’t. That will give us just the boost we need.”

“I’m sure His Highness will be pleased with everything,” said Abigail, frowning. “But…do you think we need a boost, Papa? Has there been a decline in revenue?”

He brushed crumbs from his waistcoat. “Naught for you to worry about, Abby.”

Abigail bit her lip. “I did hear you were threatening some delinquent accounts with debtor’s prison. That can’t be good for business. Gentlemen don’t respond as they should to such threats. Has custom fallen off so sharply that you are having to ask the gentlefolk to pay?”

Her father looked at her sharply. “Who’ve you been talking to?”

“No one,” she stammered. “It was just something I heard.”

He stood up angrily and shoved his chair to one side. “I couldn’t help it, Abby! I saw his name on the books. One of your hoity-toity cousins, by God. One of those high-and-mighty Wayborns! After the way they treated your poor mother, God rest her soul, I’ll be damned if I extend any credit to that race of hypocrites. Not a farthing! Oh, they took my money quick enough when I married Anne, then turned their backs on her as if she’d been a leper!”

“But those are the Derbyshire Wayborns,” Abigail said quickly. “Mr.
Cary
Wayborn is from Surrey. He’s nothing to do with Mama. It’s a completely different branch of the family.”

“Well, he’s an insolent young pup,” Red grumbled. “He wears an earring, for the love of God. What is he, a pirate? He wants a beating, if you ask me.”

“Papa!” she protested. “He’s my cousin, after all.”

“You don’t know him, Abby. He’s a worthless young man without a penny to bless himself with, and he wouldn’t know good scotch if he sat on it. He couldn’t pay his bill, so he returned an entire case of single malt, untouched! What sort of a man orders a case of good whisky and then doesn’t drink it?”

Abigail debated telling him that it was really her own scotch that Cary had returned, but she lacked courage. In any case, it would not improve her father’s opinion of the man she’d married. “He’s a gentleman, Papa. You know what they’re like about getting bills. And you sent him several, I believe, with red ink all over, as if he’d been an innkeeper or something.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” he said, swinging around to glare at her.

In a way Abigail was glad she had aroused his suspicions; it encouraged her to tell him what she might otherwise have been too cowardly to reveal. “Well, I have met him actually. We are distantly related, you know.”

For a moment Red observed his daughter as she sat twisting her hands together, unable to meet his gaze. “Met him? Met him how?”

“I stayed at his house in Hertfordshire,” she replied, trying to sound casual.

He stared at her. “What? Abby, I rented you a perfectly good house.”

“Yes, sir. You did. It was Mr. Wayborn’s house. Did Mr. Leighton not tell you?” she quickly added, hoping to deflect some of Red’s growing annoyance onto the attorney.

“He did not. He said it belonged to some clergyman friend of his, a Dr. Cary.”

“You must have misunderstood, Papa. Dr. Cary is Mr. Wayborn’s cousin, but he does not own the estate. It’s a very handsome and extensive property,” she went on, choosing details most likely to impress her father, “encompassing several rich farms and many beautiful, productive orchards. The house is the most charming example of a Tudor manor I have ever seen. It has been in Mr. Wayborn’s family for hundreds of years. He is very well-respected in that part of the country.”

Red grunted. “So he owns a bit of land, does he? I daresay it must be entailed, or he would sell it off to pursue a life of unfettered extravagance.”

“Indeed it is not entailed,” Abigail was happy to inform him. “It was left him outright by his grandmother. I believe it is something in the neighborhood of ten thousand acres. As you know, Hertfordshire is some of the richest farmland in all England.”

“If he’s so rich, why doesn’t he pay his bills?” Red demanded.

“You offended him, Papa,” she said gently.

Red snorted unpleasantly. “Did Mr. Weston offend him too? And Mr. Hoby? As far as I can tell, the only place the man’s paid up is Tattersall’s.”

Abigail suppressed a smile. Of course, Cary
would
pay for his beautiful horses, and let everything else go to the devil. “How would you know that, Papa?” she asked suddenly, as an unpleasant thought entered her mind.

“No one has ever returned so much as a thimbleful of my scotch,” he grumbled. “This arrogant pup returned an entire case! Naturally, I made it my business to buy up all his debts in London. You say I offended him. Well, he offended me! Nothing will content me until I see him in debtor’s prison.”

Abigail gasped. “Papa, you
can’t
!”

“No, I can’t,” he glumly agreed. “For they wouldn’t sell me his debts. Not a one of them from Jermyn Street to Bond. Not even your friend at Mr. Hatchard’s shop. They all seem to think he will make good one day.”

Abigail’s heart swelled with pride. “What does that tell you, Papa? They
know
Mr. Wayborn is a gentleman. No matter what he owes, they will not betray him.”

Red was unmoved. “What does it tell me?” he snarled. “He’s got you all fooled, that’s what it tells me. I had ample time to take Mr. Wayborn’s character when he returned my scotch. Very high-and-mighty he was in his purple coat, too! He said my Glaswegian swill wasn’t fit to be drunk by English gentlemen!”

“You should not have sent him all those bills, Papa,” she blurted without thinking.

“You take his side against mine?” Red bellowed, incensed by his daughter’s disloyalty. “You hardly know the man. Well, I may not be a fine gentleman like Mr. Wayborn, but I
am
your father, Abigail, in case you’ve forgotten. And I didn’t raise you to be a lady so’s you’d look down your nose at me.”

“I’m sorry, Papa,” she said quietly. “I’m not looking down my nose at you. It’s business. What you did was not good for business. No gentleman would ever tolerate such treatment from a tradesman. You could only succeed in provoking him. What is the first rule of business?”

Red looked away. “Never make a decision based on emotion.”

“I know you did it because of Mama, and I love you for that. But Mr. Cary Wayborn is not to blame for what the Derbyshire Wayborns did to Mama. And you can’t blame him for being angry with you when you went out of your way to offend him.”

Red made no reply.

“I also had an opportunity to take Mr. Wayborn’s character. I thought him very…gentlemanlike,” said Abigail, conveniently forgetting Cary’s frequent lapses in propriety when he was alone with her.

Red flung up his hands incredulously. “Gentlemanlike? God and Highlanders, child! The man’s got an earring. Oh, I daresay he makes a lovely lady’s lapdog. I daresay he knows how to make himself agreeable to women. Did he make himself agreeable to you?”

Abigail knew she was now on very dangerous ground. “He was a very attentive landlord and host,” she said cautiously. “He…dined with us occasionally.”

“Did he? I shall have to send him a bill for those dinners!” said Red. “Come to think of it, I had Leighton pay out half a year’s rent. As you are certainly not going back to that house, I shall demand a refund.”

“You don’t care about the money,” she accused him. “You’re just being vindictive.”

“If I didn’t know better, lass, I’d say you were smitten with him.”

“Papa, please.” Abigail’s face was red as fire.

“Great God!” he choked. “That’s it, isn’t it? The impertinent wretch has been making love to you! Mark my words, child. A man like that is only interested in one thing from a girl like you.”