Unmasking the Hero, page 9
“What a charming idea,” she said, sipping the fresh coffee. “But I cannot alter my day plans as well.” It was a Sunday, and her plans were few, but he could not know that, although he might guess.
“Of course, you cannot,” he murmured. “Perhaps another day.”
“Perhaps,” she said carelessly. “Oh, I have decided on a historical masquerade for our party, just to make it more amusing.”
“What an excellent idea. How will you decorate the ballroom?”
“I have not yet decided. As a medieval garden, perhaps, with a large mural of a castle on one wall. If Lord Tamar is still in town, I might engage his help with that.”
“You must do as you see fit. I leave the matter in your capable hands.”
“I shall endeavor not to disappoint. And I shall be ready to join you for dinner. For now, take yourself off, my lord. I need to dress.”
He met her gaze as though wondering whether or not to resist her blatant dismissal. A faint smile curved his lips. Then, with perfect grace, he rose and strolled away. “Until this evening.”
It came as something of a shock to realize he smiled a little like Rudolf, that from behind, he moved a little like him, too. Lowering to think that she was probably attracted to the stranger simply because of his physical similarities to her faithless husband.
*
With little expectation of being received by her parents at this hour, when she arrived at their somewhat crumbling townhouse, she took herself to the schoolroom, where both Hope and Miss Fenchurch, the governess, greeted her with enthusiasm. Since it was Sunday, they were not at lessons but indulging in separate pastimes in each other’s company. Miss Fenchurch was reading. Hope was daubing discontentedly at an easel.
Hope was lonely. Her face lit up as Grace walked in, no doubt in partial relief to be distracted from the not-terribly-inspired watercolor she was working on. It was a view from the schoolroom but seemed largely gray, like the day’s weather.
“Perhaps a splash of color?” Grace suggested. “There are flowers down there, after all.”
Hope giggled and prepared to add the flowers.
Grace walked with Miss Fenchurch to her chair by the empty fireplace. “I have been meaning to pick your brains over a poem. I only have a couple of lines, and I can’t think where they come from.”
“I might know them, unless the poem is very new. Tell me.”
From memory, Grace quoted the lines from Rudolf’s note. Something else she had failed to ask him about.
“Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life, thou mightst him yet recover.”
Miss Fenchurch blinked rapidly. “Michael Drayton. Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part. A sad little poem about lost love. Drayton was a contemporary of Shakespeare, which might explain why he is so overlooked.”
“Ah, thank you. I shall look it up at home.”
In fact, since she was roped into attending church with her mother, partaking of luncheon afterward, and then taking a walk in the park with Hope, she had no time to read poetry until after she had dressed for dinner with the prime minister. She then went down to the library and raked among the poetry books until, in an old volume of Elizabethan sonnets, she found the poem she was looking for.
She read it through several times, trying to relate it to what she knew about Rudolf and about her relationship with him, which, when he had given her the note, had amounted to even less than it did now. A dance, a harmless flirtation, an attraction strong enough for him to engineer another meeting by stealing her bracelet. If she could believe him on that score. But there had been no time for such regrets as described in the poem. Or perhaps he meant her to be curious and discover the earlier lines, which showed only carelessness and bravado—kiss and part with no regrets.
But that made no sense either.
How could she prevent the death of love for a man she had only just met?
The answer, more worryingly, was that she did know him. That the first ball at Maida Gardens was not their first encounter. Had she simply failed to recognize him?
Could he be an admirer she had barely noticed? She was acquainted with a few foreign diplomats, some young or young-ish, and all very personable. And there were always informally visiting dignitaries, noblemen, and princes from overseas. Could one of them be her mysterious Rudolf? And could he have known all along that she was the Countess of Wenning?
“There you are.”
At the sound of her husband’s voice, she shut the book with a snap. At least she managed not to jump visibly.
“Are we ready to depart?” she asked, replacing the book on the shelf.
“If you are.”
“Of course.” She rose and looked at him for the first time since he had entered.
He had always been a handsome man, had always sent her heart and stomach into summersaults. She didn’t know if he still did because she was too agitated about Rudolf’s identity—and perhaps by her own guilt.
How odd, she thought irrelevantly, that I should feel guilty about allowing another man to kiss me, while I don’t feel the slightest guilt about pretending a much more intimate love affair with him.
As her gaze flickered over her husband’s perfect evening dress, from his cropped hair to his black silk knee-breeches, and back to the plain diamond pin winking in his elegantly arranged cravat, she realized he was doing much the same to her.
“Will I do?” she inquired, spreading her skirts in a mocking curtsey.
“Rather more than that. You will make me the envy of every gentleman present.”
“Of course, that was my intention.”
A frown flickered on his brow and vanished. “You are right. That was a stupid and even demeaning thing to say. I am supposed to be a seasoned diplomat, and yet before you, I am reduced to a babbling schoolboy. What I mean is, you are particularly beautiful in a distinctive and charming way, and your gown is perfect for the occasion.”
“Much better,” she approved, walking toward the door. “What is a wife for but to practice on?”
He held it for her politely. “You don’t believe in my sincerity?”
“Don’t worry. I shan’t tell anyone.”
That reduced him to silence as she sailed past him, downstairs and across the entrance hall, where a footman opened the front door and bowed them down the steps to the waiting carriage. Wenning handed her in and climbed after her.
Annoyingly, he did not sit beside her but opposite, which made looking at each other more necessary. Deliberately, she turned her gaze toward the window.
“I have much ground to make up, do I not?” he said. “May I begin with an apology?”
“Begin what?” she asked flatly.
“Understanding. Reconciliation.”
Carefully, she drew her gaze away from the passing Mount Street houses and met his. “My lord, that ship sailed. To China, I believe. There is no more to say.”
“And if I think there is?”
She yawned delicately behind her gloved hand. “I make no promises to stay awake.”
He sat forward on his seat, a spark of something—annoyance or desperation?—in his otherwise carefully veiled expression. “The Grace I married would never refuse to listen, to discuss.”
“The Grace you married had a lot of lessons to learn. Fortunately, I am a quick learner. There is no need to coddle me or make a pet of me. Let us merely acknowledge that we both made a horrendous mistake. And let us not add the indignity of shallow pretense with each other. I shall do my duty as I always have.”
He sat back, the metaphorical veil well in place once more. “You would make a very cold marriage.”
She smiled. “My lord, you made the marriage cold. Let us move on. Who will I see at this dinner?”
A moment’s silence warned her he would not necessarily play her game. But the timing was on her side, and he replied, “Beyond Lord and Lady Liverpool, and the other members of our embassy and their wives, I cannot say.”
“I like Lady Liverpool,” Grace murmured. “Although she is a little serious for my tastes, she is very intelligent and compassionate.”
“Indeed,” Wenning agreed. If there was a shade of mockery in his response, she chose not to heed it.
Chapter Nine
The prime minister and his wife resided in Fife House, a large, opulent dwelling in Whitehall, where the river smells were stronger, but didn’t penetrate, fortunately to her ladyship’s drawing room or dining room.
The dinner turned out to be a larger affair than Grace expected. Lord and Lady Castlereagh, the foreign secretary and his wife, were also present, along with Prince and Princess Esterhazy and several other foreign ambassadors and diplomats. Among the British guests, Grace was glad to see again the wives of the other special embassy members. Lady Spalding and Mrs. Campbell had been very kind to her when she had first come to London. Aware that in the first instance, they acted from pity for the abandoned bride, she had refused to live in their pockets thereafter. But she nevertheless counted each lady a friend.
A couple of other rising stars of the foreign office were also present. So, if nothing else, the size of the party prevented her from having to deal with her husband’s disturbing presence. She could lose him easily and focus surreptitiously on the foreigners, searching for any who regarded her with more than civil interest, straining for the sound of a similar voice and accent to Rudolf’s.
Of course, her masked stranger could be a much more minor functionary and not worthy of invitation to dinner with the prime minister, although he had not struck her as minor in any way. By the time she went into dinner on the arm of an Austrian diplomat, Count Grattenburg, she had realized she could not even place Rudolf’s accent. His name sounded German or Austrian, though he did not speak like Count Grattenburg. He could have anglified it from Italian or Spanish, or Portuguese. But nobody she heard sounded quite like him.
She did try to pick Count Grattenburg’s brains by saying, “I met someone from your embassy in the park the other day. Charming man. Now, what was his name? Rudolf something?”
“I cannot think of a Rudolf,” Grattenburg said without interest.
Sadly, it was not a question she could ask again of anyone else, in case she was overheard. Instead, she turned to Mr. Campbell on her other side, who was clearly waiting for a moment to speak to her.
Campbell was not a handsome man, but he was attractive. Short and slight in build, he had laughing eyes, a quick smile, and a sort of restless charm. Grace warmed to him from the beginning, mostly because, unlike everyone else, he did not start the conversation by informing her how much she had missed her husband and how delighted she was to have him back.
“You cannot know how happy I am to meet you at last,” he said.
“That is true,” she replied, amused. “Nor can I imagine why.”
“Because I just spent two years living in your husband’s pocket and have been overwhelmed with curiosity to meet the lady who puts up with him.”
She smiled serenely. “I’ve never had to. You have my sympathies, sir.”
He grinned. “There were times when we all but came to blows, though fortunately before we had progressed beyond the shoving stage, we recalled that we were gentlemen and representatives of His Majesty. But—and you must not tell him this—I have been ever so slightly in awe of him since he dealt with those bandits.”
Grace stilled, then covered the moment by reaching for her wine glass. “Bandits?”
The story Campbell told then, and the ones he entertained her with during dessert, were undoubtedly a distraction. A tangled knot of confusion formed in her stomach, insistent, disturbing. And she had no time to devote to this conundrum, beset as she was by the more urgent need to discover Rudolf’s identity. And to that, she was no closer.
However, she thought, as she rose with the other ladies to follow Lady Liverpool from the room and leave the gentlemen to their wine and brandy, the evening was not yet over.
Once suitably refreshed and fortified by a short gossip with Mrs. Campbell and Lady Spalding, she left them discreetly as they began comparing marital reunions, and made her way with some relief to the drawing room.
She chose an empty sofa, which left a place for her next foreign victim. She had already discarded the middle-aged, the short, the plump, and the fair. Of course, there was likely to be a long wait before the gentlemen joined them—they would get into long political discussions…
“Why, Miss Darblay!” a female voice exclaimed jocularly. “I had quite forgotten you were the Countess of Wenning now!”
Mrs. Fitzwalter, formerly Miss Irwin, who had once fancied herself as Countess of Wenning, and was now married instead to a rising politician, a junior minister in the foreign office. And who had won a public kiss on the cheek from Wenning in the park yesterday. Which was more than Grace had achieved. Or wanted, she assured herself hastily.
“I suppose our paths have not much crossed recently,” she said pleasantly.
“No indeed, your circles are much more fashionable than mine, which you would no doubt find merely worthy.”
“I would hardly presume to judge your friends,” Grace said.
“Funnily enough, my path crossed your husband’s more frequently. He will have told you I shared his outward voyage as far as Lisbon when I went on my wedding trip. And then, what a coincidence to run into him in Paris on his return journey!”
“Coincidence indeed,” Grace agreed, although she doubted it. The stab of hurt was angrier now. Phineas had told her, obliquely, of a woman Oliver had encountered early in the voyage who had, he said, provided a comforting ear. Loath as she was to imagine Mrs. Fitzwalter playing her husband false on their wedding trip, she also knew the woman was making some kind of point. Perhaps simply, You got the peer, but at least I got a wedding trip. Or perhaps, I got your husband, too.
She didn’t care anymore. Really, she didn’t. But he would know at least a taste of humiliation before she was done with him.
*
My God, she is lovely. The recognition hit the Earl of Wenning like a fresh blow as soon as he walked into the drawing room with Lord Castlereagh. Although she sat beside Maria Fitzwalter—a curious choice—her attention was on Spalding and on the Italian Prince di Ripoli.
She was naturally friendly, gave anyone who addressed her—apart from Wenning—her full attention. And she could hold her own in any conversation, as he had overheard at dinner, from bantering to politics and foreign affairs. She would make a perfect ambassador’s wife.
Of course, he could not walk over and claim his own wife. He could not even stare at her all evening, or it would set tongues wagging afresh, and she deserved better. She had always deserved better.
He knew he was responsible for the hard shell she had grown. But he knew, too, that the open, passionate girl who had first enchanted him was still in there, beneath that surface charm and the thin veneer of sophistication.
No, he didn’t deserve her. But he would still do his utmost to win her back. And those puppies, Grattenburg and di Ripoli, who seemed to fascinate her that evening, would not get near her.
“Thank you,” he said sincerely in the carriage going home, “for making the evening so pleasant.”
“It’s what I do,” she said lightly. “And why people invite me. We’d better have Lady Wenning, they say, realizing too late that they have invited a horrendous mix of people who will never get on. She might not make the party a raging success, but at least she will make it bearable.”
“I think you underestimate your talents. You would make a wonderful diplomat.”
“Like Princess Esterhazy? I am not so forceful.”
He smiled. “I think you are, in your own way. Do you want the carriage and my escort to go on to whatever party you missed to oblige me?”
“No, I believe I have had enough for one night. And Lord Tamar is coming early tomorrow morning to look at the ballroom—with a view to painting a medieval castle all along one wall.”
He inclined his head, as though happy either way. He could not—would not—browbeat her into his company. His deepest desire had become that she would want that company.
And certainly, she regarded him now with a hint of curiosity rather than the desperate wish to be free of him that had been paramount in earlier encounters. It emboldened him when they had stepped down from the carriage and entered Wenning House to suggest brandy in the library.
Rather to his surprise, she agreed and turned her feet at once in that direction.
“You have made the other rooms brighter, more comfortable, and perfect for guests,” he observed, picking up the decanter from the small side table between bookshelves. “But I find this one the most homely.”
She had just taken a seat in one of the armchairs and cast him a quick look he was at a loss to understand.
Walking over, he presented her with a glass of brandy and sat in the sofa opposite her. He raised his glass. “To home.”
She drank without comment, then abruptly rose. For a moment, he thought she was about to flee again and knew a moment of despair, but she merely walked between the tables to the window, glass in hand, and tuned back to face him.
“Mr. Campbell told me what you did,” she said abruptly. “Keeping everyone’s spirits high and bodies safe on your difficult land journey in the east.”
“Brigands are a problem everywhere,” he replied. “But none of them wish to be shot.”
“And yet you were. Mr. Campbell said the injury was serious.”
“Devil a bit. I was better in days.”
“And risked your life,” she added.
“More thoughtlessness than bravery, I assure you.”
“But why take that risk?” she demanded impatiently. “You had the world at your feet, still.”
