Lady Violet Attends a Wedding, page 2
“St. Sevier, who changed me out of my wet clothes?”
Porcelain and silver clanked and tinkled. “I regret to inform you that I cut your clothing away, the better to get you out of your stays as quickly as possible. Getting you to breathe on your own became imperative. Miss Hewitt said the dress was ruined, in any case.”
Hugh was a physician and a handsome, socially sought-after man. He’d doubtless seen the female anatomy in all its parts, but I was still mortified that he’d seen me, and when I had been at less than my best. Then the import of his words hit me, another branch careening downstream in the current of my thoughts.
Breathe on my own. “I almost died, didn’t I?”
“You were not breathing when I dragged you from the water. You’d been under for a time, and at first, I thought you dead. My own strength was insufficient to pull you from the river, but your coachman added his efforts, and we managed.”
Hugh’s accent was nearly unintelligible.
“Might you build up the fire a bit?” I asked. “I’m a touch chilly. And another sip of tea wouldn’t go amiss either.”
I did not particularly want the tea, but I wanted the touch of Hugh’s warm hands wrapped around my own. I kept that sentiment to myself and turned the talk to my other family members. If Hugh was to share the household with them over the next fortnight, then forewarned would be forearmed.
Felix’s intended, Miss Katherine Engle, was not previously known to me, but after enduring the first few hours of my morning in her company, I wished Katie—she insisted I call her Katie—and I had never met. Hugh had ordered that my bandages remain in place for at least twenty-four hours, and thus I could not see Katie.
She possessed a relentlessly cheerful voice and a nervous touch. Without seeing her, I knew she would have a perfect complexion, an earnest gaze, and an uncertain smile.
I was confined to my room and thus trapped with endless verses of Wordsworth’s bucolic maunderings, rendered in Katie’s too-joyous, too-sincere voice. She sounded young and hopelessly smitten with Felix.
“Don’t you agree he’s just the most handsome fellow ever?” she said when we’d finally come to the end of some dolorous verse about Lucy, who never more will be. “When I’m with dear Felix, I feel lovely. I feel lovely inside, and I feel that I am lovely. I shouldn’t say that, but it’s the truth, Lady Violet.”
Would that Katie were capable of a little dissembling. “Doubtless, Felix reciprocates those tender sentiments.”
“Do you think so? I hope he does. My mama said not to worry if Felix loves me more than I love him, but I rather think it’s the other way ’round. Nobody could love a fellow more than I do my dear Felix.”
I felt queasy, and not because I’d taken a blow to the head. Once upon a time, I’d probably been prone to the same anxious rhapsodizing where my late husband was concerned. Katie was doubtless trying to convince herself she’d made a sound choice of spouse. I could not offer any reassurances, having managed only a temporary and mediocre joy in my own union.
“Katie, might we attempt a slow promenade up and down the corridor?”
“What would Monsieur say? I would not want to disobey doctor’s orders, my lady.”
Monsieur had flitted by my sitting room after breakfast, allowed that I might be permitted to leave my bed, and then scampered off before Katie had finished gushing about the wonders of Paris in September. Dear Felix had agreed to take her there on a post-wedding journey.
As I sat in the reading chair near the hearth, I toyed with suggesting an elopement, but I could hear both wind and rain yet lashing the windows. The roads would be in a worse state than ever, and I dreaded the notion that my sibling and his bride might end up in the river as I had.
My brothers had also stopped by after breakfast, Mitchell, Viscount Ellersby, first among them. He was a combination of genuine decency and insufferable conceit, such as many titular heirs were. The insufferable conceit made itself known as soon as he’d established that my injuries were trivial. I was admonished again to recover swiftly so as not to detract from the attention due the bride.
“Not the done thing, Vi, to overshadow a bride.”
I endured a kiss to my cheek, and then he mercifully took himself off to draft some parliamentary bill, or to remind the Almighty that excessive rain had been known to obliterate entire societies.
My middle brothers, Ajax and Hector, paid their call together, as was their habit. Being neither the heir nor the baby boy, they were permitted some latitude in life. They had completed university some years ago and were planning a grand tour in the interests of furthering their education in art and languages—or that was the stated agenda.
My father, I am certain, had plans for them in diplomatic service or government. Papa was a patient tactician who could afford to humor his sons while he chose appropriate opportunities for them.
I was not patient, not when it came to hours of forced inactivity.
“If Monsieur allowed that I could leave my bed,” I said to Katie, “he must have intended that I move about some. The maids can straighten up the room while we wander for a few minutes in the gallery.”
“The gallery is some distance, my lady. Are you sure you’re up to the exertion after your ordeal?”
I felt around for my shawl, which was draped over the back of my chair. “Remaining confined would be a greater ordeal than a short dunking in the stream was, I assure you.”
Particularly confined with both Katie and Mr. Wordsworth. Then too, I expected my father would put in an appearance, and while I loved my father, I was that most puzzling development in the Deerfield family, a daughter. No daughters had been born to the Earls of Derwent for three generations, and thus Papa had no notion how to go on with me.
Or so my mother had assured me when I’d first found the courage to broach the issue several years before putting up my hair. I rose from the chair, ignoring some genuine pain in my head, neck, and shoulders. The rest of me was merely stiff, which I attributed to long hours in the coach rather than to any injury.
“You’re certain you’re up to this, my lady?”
I would have smacked the poor child had I been able to see her. “I am certain. Onward, if you please.” I held out my arm like a fellow offering a lady escort.
Katie linked arms with me and guided me toward the door. “A moment, while I… now a few steps, my lady. Well done.”
“I am not elderly, Katie.”
“No, of course not, my lady. I did not mean to imply that you were, but a serious injury and a bad soaking can lead to lung fever or worse. Dear Felix would be wroth with me if I allowed anything untoward to happen to you. Now we’ll turn to the left. That’s this way.”
A bird fluttering onto my forearm would have exerted more force than Katie did. We minced along down the corridor, and I was struck by how clearly my nonvisual senses informed me of our progress. Scents of vanilla and tobacco marked where we passed Papa’s study. Ferns in the alcove outside the ladies’ parlor were another clue, the peaty scent of the soil making their location obvious. The lashing of the rain changed in intensity when we made a right turn at the end of the corridor, and footsteps echoing on the marble floor of the front foyer indicated when we’d passed the midpoint of the house.
“Not far to the gallery now,” Katie said as somebody arrived at the front door on the floor below us. Cool air wafted up from the foyer, as did soft voices. The butler’s restrained good cheer, then a man’s reply.
“My brother, Cantrell, is finally here,” Katie said, voice brimming with excitement. “I wasn’t sure he’d make it with the storm and all. I do wish we could greet him.”
“You go down,” I said. “I’ll wait here.” I wasn’t about to make anybody’s acquaintance in my nightgown, robe, and shawl, much less with my head swathed in bandages.
“Would you mind, my lady? Cantrell is the best brother in the world, and I am ever so glad to see him.”
“Away with you. I’ll bide here.”
Here was near the bannister that ran the length of the foyer on the upper floor. The butler was explaining to a footman which suite of rooms had been assigned to Mr. Engle. Sounds carried from below, as did a gust of rain-scented air.
And something else. Mr. Engle wore an interesting fragrance, roses with a hint of nutmeg, if the scent indeed came from him. I had not encountered that combination before, not on a man or a woman.
Having no vision was an odd experience. I was exceedingly glad the situation was temporary, for relying on Katie to dodder about my own home would soon drive me mad. I drew back a few steps from the balustrade lest her brother spy me lurking in my bandages like some specter from an amateur theatrical.
Katie positively squealed her delight at seeing her brother—“Oh, dear Canty, I have missed you so!”—and I began to wish I’d asked to be deposited in a chair before my escort had decamped.
I sidled a few steps farther from the railing and was mentally reviewing possible places to find a seat—the ferny alcove? Papa’s study? my own room?—when another cool breeze wafted by me. The front door hadn’t opened again that I could hear, and neither did I detect any footfalls on the carpeted corridor. This breeze was scented with cedar and sandalwood, a combination that stirred vague, uneasy memories as it brought me a slight chill.
I was thus terrified out of my wits when a male voice growled at me from my right side.
“What the hell are you doing out of bed?”
“Lord Dunkeld,” I said, chin coming up, for the voice could belong to none other. “Why did nobody warn me that you’ve been allowed to run tame in these halls once again?”
“I’ll show you tame.” His Scottish accent gave the words the quality of an epithet, and the next thing I knew, I was swept up against a hard male chest and borne away, I knew not where.
Chapter Two
As Sebastian MacHeath, Marquess of Dunkeld, carried me through the house, I had an odd thought: If only he were being romantic. We progressed past the same scents I had recently noted—the ferns, Papa’s study, and into my own room.
We apparently surprised a maid, for Sebastian snapped, “Oot wi ye, now,” and somebody murmured, “Yes, my lord.”
His burr was only that much in evidence when he was in the grip of strong emotion, rather like St. Sevier’s French accent, but more fierce. As his lordship deposited me in the wing chair near my sitting room hearth, I imagined him pacing my carpet, deciding where to start his lecture. For a big man, he moved quietly, and he was prodigiously talented with a scold.
“Miss Engle had only left my side to greet her brother,” I said. “If you are preparing to remonstrate with me for wandering the house blindfolded, save your breath.”
“You were one step away from the top of the staircase, Violet. I will remonstrate with you, Miss Engle, and anybody else who thinks it acceptable to leave a woman without sight that close to a flight of steps. What have you done to yourself?”
The accusatory tone and the high-handedness, coupled with my aches and pains and the frustrations of not being able to see Sebastian, made me snappish.
“I had the great bad fortune to get dumped into the river when my coach slipped on the bridge at the gatehouse. I got knocked on the head by some flotsam, though I’ve no memory of it. St. Sevier and the coachman had to fish me out. I’m surprised you weren’t regaled with that tale at breakfast.”
“I’ve only just arrived. The roads are hopeless, and the farm lanes worse yet. Does your head hurt?”
Nobody else had asked me that. “Yes. How can you tell?”
“I can hear it in your voice.”
“Perhaps you can also hear in my voice that I’d like to be alone right now. Miss Engle’s charitable inclinations required her to spend the entire morning with the elderly and infirm, and I am not used to another’s company for long hours.”
“You are hardly elderly, and you won’t be infirm for long, but I’m not leaving a blind woman alone. You’ll knock over a lit candle or fall out the window.”
“I will not fall oot t’windae, you great lummox. Stop laughing at me.”
“How can you tell I’m laughing?”
“I can hear it in your voice.” I could hear that he was smiling, too, a rare sight that I regretted being unable to see. Sebastian and I had become friends when his Scottish grandfather had sent him as a boy to stay with distant relatives on the neighboring estate, the better to learn English ways and English diction. On school holidays and over long summers, he and I had been companions. As the years passed, he’d spent increasing time with my brothers, and I’d been relegated to the role of pestiferous younger sibling.
Then I’d put up my hair, and my days of tagging after my brothers had ended. Sebastian had not shunned my company, but by unspoken agreement, we’d behaved differently with each other when one of my brothers was present. We’d met alone by arrangement to undertake such significant business as reading away an afternoon on a picnic blanket or riding hellbent along the river on fine summer mornings.
“Shall I read to you?” Sebastian asked. “There’s a Bible on the sideboard.”
“You shall talk to me. How long will you be here?”
“Trying to get rid of me already, Violet?”
“I am trying to make polite conversation, my lord.” I was also wondering why my brother Felix hadn’t warned me that Sebastian would be among the wedding guests. Sebastian and I had been close, as the young were close, but then he’d bought his colors, gone off to war, and our paths had parted. I’d only recently learned that my own father had purchased Sebastian his commission, after denying Sebastian permission to court me.
Perhaps that revelation explained why Papa was avoiding me. If widowhood had taught me nothing else, I had learned that my family had to be kept on a close rein, or they would interfere with my freedom far more than my late husband ever had.
“If we’re to make polite conversation,” Sebastian said, “tell me about this Miss Engle. What sort of woman would marry the horse-mad fourth son of a pompous earl?”
“If earls are pompous, marquesses are insufferable.” My husband had not had a title, but as an earl’s daughter, I would always be able to claim the honorific of Lady Violet unless I happened to remarry a peer.
“Your injuries have made your usual sour disposition even worse.” Sebastian’s voice still held a hint of humor, and I was tempted to peek from beneath my bandages the better to assess his mood. I had missed him, too, or missed the half-fey, half-serious boy I had known years ago. The man he’d become was a more dour and complicated creature of only recent acquaintance. He’d avoided me until his need for a well-born wife meant our paths had crossed again in the tight circles of polite society.
“You try being blindfolded and forced to remain inactive,” I said. “I daresay even your disposition, which already surpasses disagreeable by a good two leagues, would grow yet still more unpleasant.”
“Two leagues, my lady?”
“I cannot read, I cannot play cards. I cannot sketch or do cutwork, I cannot stitch or embroider, I cannot work at my correspondence.” Though what a pointless litany I offered, not a meaningful or challenging task in the lot.
When last Sebastian and I had been under the same roof at the house party, we and St. Sevier had solved a series of thefts that might have otherwise landed an innocent man on the gallows. That endeavor had felt both meaningful and challenging.
“You can tell me about the other guests,” Sebastian said. “Shall I send for a tray?”
He was doubtless hungry if he’d only recently arrived. “Please. I need the fortification. As for the guests, Hugh St. Sevier escorted me down from Town. You know my brothers. The bride is Miss Katherine Engle. Her brother, Mr. Cantrell Engle, has just now arrived, and I haven’t met him. Her parents should be along tomorrow or the next day, as will my cousins Annamarie and Heloise.”
“Both of them?”
Was that dismay I heard in the marquess’s voice? “They aren’t yet married, and the bride should have some female company her own age.”
“Promise me you will not foster any silly notions on their parts.”
“Silly notions such as compromising you?” Anna and Helly had been out for four seasons and were growing desperate. Once upon a time, Annamarie had suffered a case of calf-love toward Sebastian, and she had been vocal about it. My brothers had teased Sebastian unmercifully, while I’d been left to hear Annamarie’s maiden attempts at billets-doux.
I’d dissuaded her from sending them, but only just.
“Compromising me,” the marquess said, rolling the r slightly in the manner of a put-upon Scot. “Putting frogs in my bed, serenading me at midnight, hiding my shaving kit, turning my horse loose. For that pair, any of the foregoing would be equally amusing.”
He took himself off to see to the tea. I could tell he’d left the room, though I knew not exactly how. His scent lingered—mostly cedar, a hint of damp wool, and leather—but I didn’t hear him return.
I sensed it.
“Food is on the way,” he said. “What do we know of Miss Engle’s family?”
“Ask Felix. He’s the one marrying into that family.” I had put off second mourning several months previously, but I had lost interest in Society gossip. Who had stood up once too often with whom, who was abruptly ruralizing for no apparent reason, whose debts of honor had reached dizzying heights… As a married woman, I’d had no use for gossip per se, but those topics had given me something to chat about with my husband.
Another lowering realization.
“Felix has a romantic streak,” Sebastian observed. “If he is smitten with the lady, she could claim a troupe of circus performers on her mother’s side or pirates on her father’s, and Felix would still have eyes only for her.”
My husband had had eyes for me—or for my settlements—also eyes for a succession of willing widows and expensive mistresses.
