The Scandal Before Christmas (9 page)

“If I may suggest instead the glasshouse, mistress? A bit of air without going out into the night? I’ll get your cloak for you, shall I, and show you the way?”

The long glasshouse stood just off the far northwest corner of the house, and was reached by a small and frigid covered passageway. Pinky shambled ahead with a lantern.

“Holds the heat of the day for some time after the sunset, the glasshouse does, even on such a raw night. We’ll be having snow, you mark me, mistress. Be out of the wind here, you will. I’ll be done my business in a moment, and you can enjoy yourself in peace.”

He left the lantern, and swayed off to a corner, but the full silver moon cast enough light for her to take in her surroundings. The tables were covered with wooden flats full of a variety of different growing things, and in the middle of the space was an old stone well, as well as a modern hand pump. The slate-paved glasshouse must have been built around them. What a marvelous convenience to provide water for the plants and keep the well itself from freezing.

“Brilliant.”

“Oh, aye. That was the cap’n’s idea, mistress, to keep the old well here, and add the pump, when we built the place. ‘Build it around the water, we will, Pinky,’ he said.”

He was draping some sort of heavy holland cover very carefully over some bushes in a deep boxed planter.

At her inquisitive look, he explained. “Raspberries, mistress. So’s we’ll have fruit. Important for the cap’n’s health with him still at sea. But techy they are, with the cold, the raspberries, so’s I like to wrap them up, and warp them down with a tarpaulin or two. But my old bones tell me we’re in for a cold spell, so needs must cover them all. At least for the night.” He gestured to a neatly folded stack of the tarpaulins under one of the tables. “But you make yourself to home. I’ll be done in a moment or two here, and leave you in peace to yourself.”

“You needn’t hurry on my account.” She heard the words—so antithetical to her former feelings—come out of her mouth with something of astonishment. But Pinky seemed to be a font of interesting information about his master. “How long have you known the captain—rather, Lieutenant Worth? I take it you sailed together?”

“Aye, mistress. Back in oh-six, that were, and him just a wee young gentleman. I took care ‘o him, all those years ago, seeing that he got spice and eggs and fish, and he’s been good enough to see to me, all these years now, and give me honest work.”

“That’s very good of him.”

“The best. They all were, him and the other young gentlemen. But he’s the best.”

Anne could hear the gratitude and esteem in the old sailor’s voice, and it brought a warm feeling welling in her chest. Lieutenant Worth, it seemed, was a man worth trusting—a man of steadfast loyalty and honor, as well as a handsome rogue. And a particularly marvelous kisser.

His task done, Pinky touched his forelock and shambled away, and Anne made a lovely slow promenade of the place, looking indoors and out. She wiped the film of condensation off the panes and peered out through the darkness. Beyond, across the lawn a line of arthritic apples trees made up a small orchard, reaching beseeching arms up into the night sky. There were brown, frost-covered borders with their shrubs hunched down against the weather.

But she could see more. She could see into next spring, when the ground thawed and the borders greened and bloomed, and the wood below would be full of bluebells. It would be peaceful. And she would be blissfully alone.

But would she be happy?

The better question was, would she
let
herself be happy?

Chapter Nine

Pinky, God bless him, still seemed able to scent the wind. “I’ve got the colonel and his lady above. And I let
himself
”—Pinky’s disapproving emphasis reinforced exactly what he thought of Ian’s father—“back into the drawing room until you’re ready to see him.”

“Right.” Ian took a deep, deep breath into his lungs. Pity he couldn’t inhale patience. “Time to beard the lion.”

“Aye, sir. But if you’d just—” Pinky had somehow retrieved Ian’s dress uniform coat, and was easing away his evening coat over his shoulders. “For the authority of the senior service, sir.”

“Well put, Pinky. Just the thing.” Ian squared his shoulders. “Show the bastard in.”

A more imperious, colder man than his father had yet to be born. His usual manner was enough to quench the warmth of the fire. And so it did this day. The viscount stalked in and seated himself behind Ian’s desk as if he owned the place.

Which he did not.

“Well.” His father gave him a full helping of his scorn. “At least I know you’ve done your damned duty on her. Have you gotten the chit with child?”

“Father, Anne is my wife, and—”

The Viscount Rainesford was interested in but one thing. “I will need to see the evidence that you are actually married, and she’s not some—”

“Sir.” Ian used the nonchalant, disobliging tone that so infuriated his father. “I will thank you to keep a civil tongue in your unmannerly head, or I shall be obliged to rip your throat out.”

“You wouldn’t dare—” His father’s laugh was nearly a sneer.

“Try me.” Ian called upon every ounce of
sang-froid
he’d acquired over the years, and calmly stared his father down. “I’ve been twelve years at sea, sir. Twelve. Death and destruction day in and day out. I’ve killed better men than you before breakfast.” Ian flicked at an imaginary speck on his chuff. “State your business, and then I’ll thank you to get out of my house.”

“Don’t you speak to me in that tone of voice. I’ll cut you off without so much as a farth—”

“Do it. For the love of God, do it.” Ian used his height to his advantage and looked down the length of his nose at his father. “But we both know you won’t.”

They both knew he couldn’t. Not while Ross was in such a state. For the first time in Ian’s life, he knew his father was both unable and unwilling to carry out his threats. And for a moment, the old man was actually taken aback. And then he tried to bluster his way out of his embarrassment—or at least what ought to have been embarrassment. The viscount had gotten his way for too long to have enough sense to know when to be mortified.

“Registry, settlements, and such. I’ll want to approve or amend them, as I see fit,” he insisted. “And you’ll have to give up this fool cottage, and come to Ciren Castle, of course, until we know it’s a boy.”

“Impossible.” Ian swallowed the hollow feeling in his stomach and asked the question sitting heavy in his gut. “How is my brother? How does he fare? Mother wrote that she had returned to Ciren to nurse him, but did not give any other news.”

The viscount dismissed his long-suffering wife’s care for their eldest son with an impatient gesture. “You will quit this navy business. It has served its usefulness to me, but now I need you at my side.”

“No, sir. I cannot.”

“Will not, is what you mean. But I’ll have obedience out of you yet.”

“Will not, indeed. Unless you bring me news that Ross is dead—which I pray every day and with every breath of my body is not true—I am pledged to return to my ship and my duty.”

“Your damn duty is to
me,
by God, not to the king or the Admiralty.”

Ian ignored his father’s sulky wrath, and asked again, though fear and dread were like acid in his throat. “Is Ross dead?”

“No.”

Devil take his father for the surly bitterness in his answer.

“Then you already have my answer. I return to my commission directly.”

“Then you’ll leave the girl with me, to take to Ciren.” His father narrowed his eyes, as if contemplating her. “And you’d best to get a brat on her, if you know what’s good for you. But knowing you, you’re hot enough for a piece of ars—”

“Enough.” Ian’s voice was as stealthy and sharp as a saber. “You are beyond insulting. You are disgusting. See yourself out.” The habit of respect alone kept him from bodily tossing the old man out.

His father ignored Ian’s order, and retreated into silence for as long as it was possible for him—a half a minute, no more. “Tell me about her. Where did you find her?”

As if she were breeding stock at a fair.

Ian felt the smoldering, slow-burning fuse of his temper ignite. “I will
not
discuss my wife with you.”

His father was too stubborn to realize his danger. “Damn you. Who is she? Who are her people? Surely you don’t expect me to change my will for some fortune-hunting bit of muslin without knowing—”

“Shut. Your. Mouth,” Ian roared. “She is the daughter of a former colleague—a King’s man—and is the future mother of your heir, as you would have it. And if you want a lick of influence over any future child, you’ll learn to mind your manners with the mother, and keep a goddamned civil tongue in your head.”

“So there is a child?”

Ian forced himself to cool the hot end of his temper by taking savage delight in his lies. He would not dignify his father’s insolence with a reply. “The fact remains that I shall not be going to Ciren Castle, nor shall my wife. This is her house, her home—deeded to her in the settlements—and we shall both stay here. The answer to any and all of your questions, is no.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” the Viscount Rainesford barked, and pounded the flat of his palm against the table, turning the full brunt of his wrathful insistence upon his recalcitrant son.

“No,” Ian repeated simply. “Again, no. So now you may go.” He crossed to the bell pull and tugged, hoping to God that the damn thing actually worked, and Pinky, not one of the Totts, was going to toddle in.

“Be damned to you. I’m not leaving until I—”

Pinky, bless his bright pink cheeks, appeared in no time, throwing open the door sharpish, though he looked out of breath with exertion. His face was practically glowing.

“Pinky, his lordship is leaving. Please be so good as to see him out,” Ian instructed.

His father remained seated, red-faced with ire. “Are you mad, or just insolent?” he bawled. “I’m not going anywhere in this weather. The horses are winded from the run down. Think of the cattle and the coachmen, out in this weather, if you can think of no one and nothing else.”

Ian had known that it had grown colder since the afternoon—he could feel the weather in his bones—but his father’s scathing set-down forced him to take a keener look out the windows. The barest beginnings of snow flurries were whirling through the damp, frigid air, and the December night was turning nasty.

In the corridor Pinky was now engaged in consultation with the coachman and two postilions, who were shaking their heads and frowning deeply in a manner not suited to put Ian’s mind at ease.

“Don’t like to risk my animals, sir.” The coachman appealed directly to Ian. “They’ve not even rested from the journey here. I can’t see them even making it so far as Ryde without any rest, and I don’t like the looks of this weather. Best stay put until the storm breaks.”

“No,” Ian insisted. “Send someone on to Ryde, to see if there’s a fresh team to be had there. Or—”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but we come through Ryde on our way here, and the ostler there was closing up. Only taking horses in, he said, as long as the inn could hold ’em, in this weather.”

Devil take him all the way to bloody hell.

Devil take him quickly. Gull Cottage was a large cottage, as cottages went, with six principle bedrooms, but it wasn’t so big that both his father and the Lesleys could pass each other unseen, and especially not unheard.

Ian looked at Pinky, who ruefully agreed. “Afraid he’s right, sir. Fearful blow it is out. Coming on hard to storm. Shouldn’t like to send any of these
landspeople
”—Pinky sniffed his compassionate opinion of the inferior species—“out in weather like that.”

“So be it. Show the viscount to a room for the night—he will leave on the morrow. Put him at as much a distance as possible from our other guests,” Ian said in a quiet aside to his man. “At all costs, keep them well away from one another.”

Ian left his father to Pinky’s capable ministrations, and retreated to his desk to write a long, imploring letter to his mother to please, for the love of God, keep him apprised of Ross’s condition. It was torture knowing that he could do nothing for his brother but stall their father, and keep the old bastard from acting before it was time, and pray that his brother would recover enough to resume his duties at some level. Ross was too young to suffer such a heartless fate.

Ian was still crouched around his scrawl of a letter, his fingers smeared with ink, when Pinky returned.

“Settled the viscount at the end of your wing,” he advised. “Opposite end of the house from the colonel and his missus.”

“Good man. Thank you, Pinky.” Ian signed off the letter and sanded it, and pushed back from the table. “God knows what I’m supposed to do next.”

“A bit of air, cap’n. Clear the head, it will. The glasshouse will do the trick, in this weather. It’s coming on to snow, you mark my words. You seal that up—wouldn’t want your father to be finding it, I’m sure—and go across, and I’ll have a cup of something hot and bracing along to you in a minute.”

“Something alcoholic, I hope you mean.”

“Aye, it’s thirsty work, sir. Thirsty work. You get along now.”

Ian did. He sealed the letter and, taking the advice to clear his head after such a day, headed toward the glasshouse through the bitterly cold passageway. The wind nearly pushed him across the slick slate floor, and he was about to curse Pinky for a fool and turn back, when the old tar bustled along humming a familiar Christmassy air—and come to think of it, Pinky’d been doing a powerful lot of bustling and humming that day—with two steaming mugs in his hand. Two.

“Pinky? What are you up to?”

“Sailing while the breeze is up, sir. Breezing up.” His words frosted in the air above his head as he shoved the mugs into Ian’s witless hands. “A Christmas nog, cap’n. For you to share.” He put his back to the glasshouse door. “In you go, sir. While the breeze is up.”

“It’s more than a breeze, Pinky,” Ian said, laughing into the teeth of the wind, which was picking up to a gale, because Pinky’s sailorly expression had nothing to do with the weather, and everything to do with the girl he hoped was within the glasshouse. But it was damn cold. “We’re likely to have more than just snow this night.”