The Regency Season: Scandalous Awakening
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‘We was doing our duty, ma’am.’
‘I will stop saying thank you, since it seems to trouble you, but I’ll ask Cook to send plenty of the food left from feeding his lordship’s guests to the servants’ hall for dinner. You and your men need good food and some cheer on such a night.’
‘My thanks, ma’am, we’ll settle the beasts and see we’re clean and tidy before we comes in.’
‘See that you do,’ Chloe said and led Verity into the house.
She could afford time away from her duties; Oakham would supervise the dining room while Cook organised the footmen behind the scenes with dire threats of retribution if they dropped even a teaspoon of her food.
‘I should scold you for telling your teachers I need you here when I wanted to spare you this, my love, but I’m far too pleased to see you for that,’ she said as she urged Verity upstairs, guessing she’d slept very little since the day Chloe made that sad trip to Bath to tell her daughter Lady Virginia was dead. ‘But now you are here you must go straight to bed,’
‘Oh, Mama, why? I’m not in the least bit tired.’
‘I can see that, but I suppose you will just have to humour me, now you have got your way in everything else,’ Chloe said with a wry smile.
How hard it was not to spoil this wilful, clever little conundrum of hers and how right Virginia had been to insist Verity went to Miss Thibett’s very good school. Her daughter needed to learn the self-discipline and all the other disciplines that Miss Thibett considered made up a well-rounded human being who happened to have been born female. Chloe and her sister had never had a governess, let alone gone to school, and look where that lack of any learning but what they happened to light on in their maternal grandfather’s long-neglected library landed them.
Verity’s room was in the nursery wing the late Lord and Lady Farenze had built in hope of a family of their own, then used for other people’s children, such as Verity and Lord Mantaigne and the current master of the house and his half-brother when they were boys. Chloe had been sleeping within call of Lady Virginia’s room and she didn’t want to move back and risk Verity hearing the terrifying nightmares that were plaguing her again.
When Verity was a baby her night terrors had returned again and again and Chloe had been glad to be up here where nobody else could hear. Her daughter would no longer sleep through any screams and shouts Chloe let out though and she wished there was a way of stopping them. She suppressed a weary sigh at the very thought of trying to relax and pretend all was well on the eve of Virginia’s funeral with Viscount Farenze sleeping under the same roof.
‘I’m still in the Triangle room; you will remember where I am if you wake up and want me, won’t you, love?’ she asked as she helped Verity undress.
‘Very well, Mama, but I won’t,’ her child said as she held up her arms to accept her nightgown being slipped over her head as if she was much younger than the self-sufficient young lady she was now. ‘I’m so glad to be home I know I shall sleep well tonight. Can I really eat supper in bed?’
‘I’ll be hurt if you don’t, I had to coax the cook to make it for you and she is very busy,’ Chloe said.
She undid the plaits constraining Verity’s unruly golden hair and brushed it as gently as she could while her daughter tried to do justice to the chicken soup, dainty sandwich and apple flummery brought up by the shy little scullery maid.
‘There, I think that’s all the knots out at last,’ Chloe murmured as she began to re-plait it into a thick tail in a ritual that reminded her poignantly of doing so for her sister at Verity’s age.
‘I do love you, Mama,’ Verity assured her with sleepy seriousness. ‘I shall always miss Lady Virginia, but you’re my mother and I won’t let you leave me,’ she said so seriously Chloe knew she was feeling the loss of her best and oldest friend in this world even more deeply than a mother had to hope she would.
‘I can’t imagine anything nicer than being with you as long as you need me and becoming a sad charge on you when I am old and grey and a little bit disgraceful, love,’ she said with a deliberately comical grimace. ‘For now it’s time you went to sleep and I made sure all is ready when the family and guests retire as well.’
‘Goodnight then, Mama,’ Verity murmured sleepily as Chloe pulled the covers up and checked the nightlight was safe.
‘Goodnight, my darling,’ Chloe said softly and Verity fell fast asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
Taking the tray and her own candle, Chloe allowed herself a long look at her sleeping child before returning to her duties. This was what her life was truly about. Verity’s arrival was a timely reminder why she was housekeeper at Farenze Lodge and would be one somewhere else for as long as Verity needed her to be. She refused to consider the day her daughter left school to a world where a young lady with a mother who worked for a living might find her a liability. By then she might be able to afford the cottage by the sea she’d promised herself when even housekeepers with daughters to raise alone needed dreams to distract them from harsh reality.
* * *
‘I wished to thank you, Lord Farenze,’ the cool voice he’d been doing his best not to hear in his head all evening informed Luke when he sought a few moments’ peace and quiet in the library after dinner.
‘Did you? I doubt it,’ he replied dourly.
‘You believe me so ill mannered I wouldn’t say a simple “thank you” that you ordered my daughter to be fetched from school tonight?’ Chloe Wheaton asked and surely that wasn’t hurt in her necessarily soft tones as they murmured in the corridor where anyone might overhear them?
‘I wasn’t casting aspersions on your manners, but on your pride, madam,’ he said shortly, secretly shocked he was being so disagreeable yet not quite able to stop himself being so somehow.
‘You believe housekeepers are not entitled to that commodity, my lord?’
‘I believe you have a superfluity of it, entitled or not.’
‘How revolutionary of me,’ she said blandly and turned to go, presumably before she said something she regretted.
‘Stop, I’m sorry. That was ill-mannered of me and now I owe you another apology,’ he said and grasped her hand to stop her leaving then felt as if he’d been struck down by lightning from the mere feel of her bare wrist under his hand.
‘You owe me nothing,’ she said stiffly and glared at him before wrenching her hand away then stalking off as if she could imagine nothing more repulsive.
He entered the study he still considered the domain of his predecessor and glared moodily into the fire. Just when he had been feeling calmer and altogether more able to resist the charms of women who clearly didn’t like him, she loomed out of the semi-darkness to throw him into turmoil. It wasn’t as if it cost him anything to order Virginia’s coachman to fetch the housekeeper’s daughter. Her manners were better than his today and he only just muffled an impatient groan when someone else loomed out of the shadows to disturb his evening.
‘What is it, man?’ he demanded as he met his own coachman’s sharp gaze.
‘Just thought you ought to know, m’lord,’ the man said stoically.
‘Know what?’
‘I drove the carriage to Bath and back.’
Luke cursed as he would never dream of doing in front of a lady and felt no better. ‘What the devil for? I ordered Binns out, as you drove here from Northumberland.’
‘He don’t see well in the dark,’ Josiah admitted uncomfortably and Luke wondered if the old coachman could see much at all. Josiah wasn’t a man to betray any man’s secrets lightly, though, and Luke sensed there was more to come.
‘It’s high time I pensioned him off, he must be nigh seventy,’ he said anyway.
‘Likely a bit more if you ask me, but that ain’t what I came to tell you.’
‘What was it then? That you’re a disobedient ruffian who should be abed rather than dashing about the countryside? The head groom could have gone, man, he’s no top sawyer, but even he could keep Lady Virginia’s ancient team up to their bridles.’
‘I knew it would be black dark long before they could stumble home, so I ordered the bays harnessed instead. I couldn’t have Miss Verity careering about the country with a whipster holding the reins.’
Luke struggled to be fair. Chloe would hate him if her precious child was involved in a carriage accident because he had an urge to please her and he deserved censure for not thinking his impulsive scheme out better, not Josiah.
‘You did the right thing,’ he conceded reluctantly. ‘I should have told you to wait until morning for all the difference it will make.’
‘The little wench was that happy to know she wasn’t forgotten I’d go twice as far in the dark to see her face light up when she realised I was there to fetch her home.’
Since he was about to evict her from that home, Luke felt the goad of his own weakness bite. ‘Then what did you want to say?’ he asked brusquely.
‘That we was followed back,’ Josiah told him with a straight look that told his master there was no point saying he might have imagined it.
‘Who by and why the devil would anyone trail you home?’
‘Don’t know, m’lord, all I cared about was if he had a gun and if we was about to be held up.’
‘Why didn’t you inform the authorities in Bath?’
‘Because he wasn’t nowhere in sight when I got there. Nearly caught us up about a mile this side of Bath, then stayed on our tail all the way back.’
‘Why didn’t you challenge him then?’
‘Because he never got close enough to answer me, nor take a clean shot. I drove as fast as I dared and Miss Verity thought it was a great lark to go like the devil was on our tail.’
‘She’s well plucked?’
‘Game for any lark going if you ask me,’ Josiah agreed with a grin that told Luke to be glad Eve was five or six years older than Verity Wheaton, or they might set the countryside by the ears with misdeeds.
‘Do your best to keep an eye on her over the next few days for me then, Josh. I don’t like the idea of anyone wasting time in such a fashion and he’s more likely to have a grudge against me than a child from a Bath seminary, but it won’t hurt to make sure the girl’s kept safe. We’ve trouble enough without the girl tumbling into more.’
‘You think she’s like Miss Eve was at her age, m’lord?’
‘Very like from the sound of things. You know as well as I do what mischief a reckless girl can find if left to her own devices too often.’
‘Aye, well, girls will be girls,’ the coachman said with a reminiscent grin. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her when she’s out, or get young Seth to if I’m busy. When she’s in the house you’re far better placed to keep watch over her than me, my lord.’
Josiah’s tone was so bland Luke wondered if the old villain knew how much he needed to avoid the girl’s mother over the next few days. He truly hoped not.
‘Oakham will tell me if anyone breathes on her the wrong way,’ Luke informed his childhood ally in the hope he’d stop making bricks without straw.
‘Then we don’t need to worry ourselves, do we?’
‘I’d still like to know who our curious stranger is, though,’ Luke mused and at least it gave him a problem to consider for the rest of the evening, instead of wondering how he’d get through the next days and weeks without disaster befalling himself and Mrs Chloe Wheaton.
Chapter Six
When the household was settled at last, Chloe made her weary way to Lady Farenze’s bedchamber ready to take over the night vigil from Culdrose. She braced herself to try to appear as awake and cheerful as any of them could be tonight. She couldn’t let the elderly maid know she felt tired to the bone, even after her ill-advised nap this afternoon.
Especially not after that; she shuddered at the very idea of what she might have given away in those unguarded moments while she gazed into Lord Farenze’s hot grey eyes like a besotted schoolgirl. At the time a strange sort of exhilaration had buoyed her up, as if a wicked part of her was whispering she should stop fighting and give in to fiery attraction. Except he was a lord and she an upper servant and in a few weeks they would part, never to meet again.
The notion of such heady freedom stretching ahead of her made it an effort to set one foot in front of the other. The notion of all those empty years to come without even the occasional sight of him pressed down on her like a ton weight. She stopped outside the door to put on a suitably serene expression before she met Cully’s shrewd gaze, then walked in.
‘Oh, there you are, my dear. There’s no need for you to stay with her ladyship tonight,’ the elderly maid said with a nod to the other side of the bed where the new master of the house sat. ‘Master Luke won’t hear of anyone else keeping vigil.’
‘No, I won’t,’ he said in a flatly emotionless voice that told her there was no point arguing.
‘Quite right too,’ Cully said with an approving nod. ‘You need a good night’s sleep and no argument, Mrs Wheaton. If you spend one more day trying to fit a month’s worth of work into twenty-four hours, you’ll collapse. Your little miss is home now and we don’t want her more upset than she is already.’
‘Aye, go to bed,’ Lord Farenze barked from the most heavily shadowed corner of the room.
‘Very well,’ she said, knowing she couldn’t argue in front of Culdrose and turned to go before the temptation to do it anyway overtook her.
‘See she drinks one of your noxious potions and really does sleep, Cully,’ she heard Lord Farenze say when she’d almost shut the door behind her. ‘I wouldn’t put it past the confounded woman to steal in here if I fall asleep to take your place, so she can boast she sat by her employer day and night when she applies for her next post.’
As if she would be so mercenary. Arrogant, unfeeling wretch—he would never believe she had loved wonderful, complicated Lady Virginia Winterley very deeply. He was always on the lookout for a base motive, a different sin to visit on her, as if she might have sprouted horns and a tail when he wasn’t looking.
‘Now then, Master Luke, you’re being unjust. That girl loved her ladyship and would have done almost anything for her.’
‘Except go away,’ he raised his voice just enough to grumble so she couldn’t fail to hear him.
Chloe flinched and wondered how he knew she couldn’t bring herself to leave when Lady Virginia breathed her last, before he got here. Bracing herself against the fact he wanted her gone, she made herself walk away noisily enough to let him know he could say whatever he liked and she didn’t care.
Back in her room, she wished it as many rooms as possible from where Lord Farenze was taking the last vigil at his great-aunt’s side. To be within call if her mistress needed her, Chloe was using an odd little bedchamber over the grand gallery that only unimportant guests were ever given, because the high ceiling of the room below meant the floor of this one was raised on a minor staircase with three other cramped chambers. It had been convenient to stay close to Lady Virginia’s lofty suite, until now. So why hadn’t she moved back to her modest room a floor up and at the back of the house as soon as Lord Farenze had set foot in Farenze Lodge? She hadn’t known Verity would be home then and marvelled at herself for being so foolish as to stay within shouting distance of the state rooms now.
It was too late to change even if Verity hadn’t arrived so much in need of a good night’s sleep, so she yawned and hoped for a dreamless sleep against the odds. She had more to disturb her than ever, but after a soft tap came on the door, Cully opened it a half-inch on her invitation to enter.
‘Are you decent, dear?’ she whispered.
‘Aye,’ Chloe admitted with a half-smile at herself in the dimly visible mirror that said it was as well nobody could see into her head. ‘Come in, Cully.’
‘His lordship says you’re to drink this down and I’m to stay until you do,’ her old friend told her sternly.
Chloe sniffed the fumes coming from the steaming mug she held out and caught a hint of camomile, a waft of cinnamon and some honey to sweeten it all and decided there was nothing in it to worry her, even if such a mild concoction was unlikely to make her sleep soundly tonight.
‘Very well,’ she said with a resigned shrug. She knew that resolute expression of Cully’s of old and didn’t feel like a battle to resist her at the moment.
‘I’ll sit here until you’re finished then go to bed myself. My lady is in safe hands and would be the first to tell us to get to bed and show some sense.’
‘I know, but you’re the last person I need to tell how hard it is to be sensible at a time like this,’ Chloe said with a sigh as she paused her drinking and earned a frown. ‘If I drink any faster, I’ll choke,’ she excused herself.
‘I suppose so, but his lordship is right. You look as if a strong gust of wind could blow you into next week.’
‘Kind of him,’ Chloe retorted ruefully.
‘He is a kind man, child, if only you would see it. You two bring out the worst in each another, but Master Luke was a good-hearted, gallant lad before that silly girl nagged and flouted him until he hardly knew which way was up any more.’
‘He’s hardly a lad now, or very gallant.’
‘No, he’s a man nowadays and a fine-looking one at that.’
Chloe distrusted the sly glance her old friend was shooting her. Cully knew her a little too well, after ten years of service in the same house. So, if the elderly ladies’ maid knew she was deeply attracted to her gallant lad, who else might have their suspicions she wouldn’t leave Farenze Lodge as heart-whole as a sober and respectable housekeeper should?
Chloe shook her head and carefully ignored that truth as she swallowed the last of Cully’s brew. She felt as if she was back in the nursery herself when Cully unpinned her tightly bound locks and gently combed them out, but the deft touch soothed her as the potion hadn’t yet managed to.
‘There, is that better?’ Cully asked as she brushed Chloe’s heavy locks into a burnished red-gold mass.
‘Aye,’ Chloe admitted with a long sigh. ‘You’re very good at your job, Cully,’ she murmured when she felt the silken thickness gathered into the elderly maid’s hand and separated into three as Cully began a loose plait.
‘And you have beautiful hair, Mrs Chloe,’ the maid told her with a hint of sternness in her voice. ‘A good many ladies would give their eye-teeth for such a colour and it’s so fine and thick they would be green with envy if they ever saw it. You shouldn’t screw it into such a tight knot. It’s not good for it and small wonder if you have the headache after going about with all those pins skewered into it all day.’
‘If I don’t, it keeps trying to escape.’
‘And a very good thing if it succeeded, if you ask me,’ she thought she heard Cully mumble under her breath, but looking up she found the older woman was looking back at her in the mirror with such a look of bland innocence she told herself she must have been mistaken. ‘There you are, you’re all ready for bed and make sure you stay there till you’re rested in the morning. Martha Lange’s quite capable of getting breakfast cooked without you there to tell her how to coddle an egg and that head housemaid you set such store by can set the maids to work for once.’
‘Yes, Miss Culdrose, ma’am,’ Chloe said with a mock salute and was brusquely told not to be impudent before Cully wished her a dignified goodnight and went off to spend a full night in her own bed for the first time in weeks as well.
* * *
At first it was the most wonderful dream. Chloe shifted under the smooth linen sheets to murmur approval in her sleep. Luke was here, kissing her and doing all the things she had longed for him to do all these years. She had sent him away and told him she could imagine nothing more humiliating than being his mistress all those years ago, but she’d lied. In her unchecked fantasy he was indeed Luke and not Lord Farenze and he kissed her as if the next beat of his heart depended on her kissing him back.
She writhed against her hot pillow and keened a protest as a dash of reality beat in and she knew the hands running over her excited curves in the heat of the night were her own and not the firm, male touch her body truly longed for, as if it had found its ideal long ago and had no intention of letting the idea of him go, ever.
She wanted him, wanted him here and now and in her bed, in her. Even in her deepest sleep, her cheeks flushed with even more heat at the very thought of such emphatic possession as she knew his would be. Then the part of her that longed for him all the time she was trying to forget took over and wrenched that spectre lover back into her bed. He followed her impatient hands with kisses, tracked merciless trails of slick heat over her sensitised skin, pressed questing fingertips into the places she most wanted them to explore and she gasped in pleasure, at last.
In her dreams he was hers as surely as she was his, so why wake up to cold reality? Her unconscious self conspired with her inner wanton to revel in their heat and closeness and her body tingled and writhed and strove for something more against the heavy bedclothes and the depths of the long night. He’s here! The words seemed to have been whispered, as if he truly was with her in every way there was between lovers. Doubt invaded even her imaginary idyll as soon as she felt they were not alone in this dream of fulfilment she had given herself, though.
Even as her phantom lover reared over her to feast his hungry mouth on her waiting lips and sink his mighty, roused body blissfully into her longing depths to complete them as lovers, she heard a voice from beyond the grave whisper, ‘No, no, don’t let him love you like that. Never love a man, Chloe. Look where love got me. Push him out of your heart, keep him out of your body and never, ever let yourself love him,’ it ended on a wail, as pain took a deeper hold and the pale ghost sliced a dead and icy hand down on dream Luke’s warm neck and he vanished like smoke on the wind.
Chloe’s dreams landed her back into a cold, windswept wreck of a house high on the moors where nobody went unless they had to and even then they came away crossing themselves as if they’d met the devil at the back door. She writhed against the cooling sheets in terrified protest as images flashed through her sleep like the torn black of mourning weeds, weathered to faded shreds of their midnight prime.
There was blood, so much blood, and Chloe began to whimper in her sleep. The unending awfulness of the time and tragedy of that forsaken place bit into her. However hard she tried to clean the gore up she couldn’t wash it away and into her terrifying dream flashed images of a fragile young woman laid out pale and cold on the narrow, mean bed as love leeched out of that wretched house and grief rolled in to replace it like the dense cloud hanging over the wintry moor.
Then she was back to the following December day, winds beating savage and remorseless on the tiny windows until even the stout shutters shivered and shifted against the threat of it as if they might break open. The younger Chloe wept and over the roar of the wind came the relentless slash of rain, beating on the narrow windows as if it wanted to drown every last breath of life in this place where only wind and rain should rule and people didn’t belong.
Now she desperately needed Luke and he wasn’t there. He faded and forsook her when she drifted back to a time when there was no Luke to tempt and tantalise her, only a howling and an empty stretch of pain inside that seemed to go on for ever. Then the storm softened and grew less with every breath and instead of tempest outside there was one within determined to give her no peace. A howl rose high and demanding as the child she’d done her best to forget refused to be comforted, or to sleep when there was no solace to be had here. The baby’s enraged cries beat louder and louder on her poor ears until they filled her whole world. Young Chloe wanted it to die, too, if that would make it stop. The woman she became wanted to shake the girl so she forgot her selfish woe and got on with the life that came out of all that pain.