Lady Caro (9 page)

“So, if I were to marry Caro, you prefer to have me in my mistress’s bed rather than my wife’s,” Ashley said sharply. “While I have no wish to turn my wife into a brood mare, I must remind you that the reason I must marry is for an heir.”

“But once she has given you that...” Levisham broke off, asking abruptly, “Whom else on your father’s list would you prefer to marry?”

The question silenced the viscount, for the answer was clearly no one.

Levisham smiled shrewdly. “You see. And I promise you that Caro will never raise any objection to your mistress.”

“I think you are wrong about that, and that is why I cannot marry her.” Ashley had come to feel like a protective big brother to Caro. He was too fond of her to offer her a marriage that would hold no happiness for her.

“I know my daughter very well, and I assure you that she will not object. You said that if you found such a woman, you would marry her.”

Yes, Ashley had said that, but Caro deserved better. “I cannot—”

Levisham silenced him with a wave of his hand. “How can you be so cruel as to consign her to Tilford and Olive Kelsie? Do not give me your answer yet. Think about it for a few days.”

Chapter 10

It was a subdued, thoughtful Ashley who took Caro on her calls later that morning, but she seemed not to notice as she told him about the people they were to meet. He was surprised by how much she knew of the history and families, the pleasures and problems of her father’s tenants and retainers.

Ashley was struck by the genuine affection that the people they visited had for Caro, and by hers for them. He was struck, too, by how good she was with the children and the ill. There was a maturity about her in these moments that he had not seen before.

One of their stops was at the cottage of a tenant farmer whose five-year-old son was slowly recuperating from scarlet fever. Little more than skin and bones, he lay listlessly on a narrow straw bed in a corner of the cottage’s one room.

The abode was clean, its bare stone floor well swept and scrubbed, but sparsely furnished. A long trestle table of rough pine, flanked by two benches, took up the middle of the room. Ashley suspected that an old, much scarred pine chest against one wall held the family’s entire wardrobe. The wall across from it was dominated by a stone fireplace with cooking pots upon its brick hearth. A roughly woven curtain had been drawn around the corner opposite the boy’s pallet to hide his parents’ bed. The child’s blue eyes, still dull from his illness, lighted with joy at the sight of Caro. She had brought him a top, striped with green and yellow and red, to play with and a basket of delicacies from Bellhaven’s kitchen to tease his nonexistent appetite. She coaxed him into letting her feed him while she enthralled him with lively tales about knights. and dragons.

Ashley, who sat down on one of the benches at the rough trestle table, enjoyed Caro’s imaginative bent for storytelling as much as the boy did.

“A miracle it is, the way he eats for her,” the child’s appreciative mother told Ashley. “She has a way with little ones. A dear, kindhearted girl, she is.” The woman’s face darkened. “But there be those who would take advantage of her kindness.”

Ashley remembered what Levisham had said about Caro being the prey of frauds.

“Innocent little thing can never resist tears, and there be some who would cry to her, not from trouble but for gain!”

When Caro rose from the boy’s bedside to leave, he clutched at her hand until she promised that she would come back another day and tell him more stories.

Later, after Caro and Ashley were back in his curricle, she asked, “May I handle the ribbons?”

He turned them over to her, and she proved to be a natural and daring driver. Watching her, Ashley nodded approvingly. Another one of her unconventional, but very real, accomplishments.

Only once did she get into trouble, and that was not her fault. As they rounded a curve on a narrow stretch of road at a fast pace, they met a cart, piled high with corn, hogging the roadway.

Ashley grabbed the reins. It required all his skill to miss the vehicle and keep his own upright. He was forced to drive partially off the road, and Caro was thrown against him. Reflexively his arm shot around her to hold her protectively against him. When he again had the curricle under control, he looked down at her frightened face, which seemed all big gray eyes and provocatively opened lips.

Their gazes met for an electric moment, and Ashley was nearly overcome by a temptation, as strong as it was surprising, to kiss her. But, remembering the revulsion that she had expressed to him the day they had met, he reluctantly quelled his urge and removed his arm from about her. It would not do to frighten her.

Until today Ashley had thought of Caro only as an entertaining child, but accompanying her on calls had given him a very different view of her. No longer did he doubt her father’s prediction that she would eventually make a man an excellent wife.
If she wished to marry him.
What irony that she wanted to wed no more than Ashley himself did. If he accepted her father’s proposal, would she even agree to marry him?

As the curricle came into sight of Bellhaven, Ashley said thoughtfully, “You are so good with children that I do not understand why you do not wish to wed and have your own.”

Pain flashed in the gray eyes for an instant before her delicate chin rose defiantly. “I am determined to remain a spinster and devote myself to Papa as Abigail Foster did. Not that her father was worthy of her! Indeed, I do not understand how she could have been so devoted to such a demanding, ungrateful curmudgeon!”

“I apprehend, elfin, that you did not like him.”

Caro’s gray eyes flashed angrily. “No, I did not! Instead of rewarding her for her devotion to him, he tipped her the double.”

Ashley’s brows rose questioningly. “How?”

“Abigail turned down several handsome offers to devote herself to him, and he promised to provide her with an independent income on his death so that she might set up her own household. Instead, when his will was read, it was found that he had placed her portion under her brother’s control until she marries, which, of course, she never will. Surely her father must have known how it would be for Abigail with her brother’s odious wife.”

“Her brother lives under the cat’s paw, does he?”

Caro nodded her head in vigorous assent. “He is very nearly as henpecked as my poor uncle was by Aunt Olive.”

“What did the odious wife do to Abigail?” Ashley asked, firmly holding his chestnuts to a trot.

“Had her packed off to Scotland to live with a cantankerous old aunt, whom Abigail has always cordially disliked.”

Ashley’s face tightened into a frown. An even worse fate would await Caro if she were not married before her father died. “So Abigail now finds herself in the very situation that she had sought to escape by not marrying.” His voice was suddenly brusque. “She might have wed a man who would have made her very happy. Remember her, elfin, when you would reject any thought of matrimony.”

She looked at him with puzzled eyes before she said briskly, “It does not signify, for no man is likely to want to marry me.”

When Olive Kelsie learned that Caro and Ashley had gone off together in his curricle, she flew into a pucker. It was beyond her comprehension that Ashley could have any interest in her plain, hoydenish niece, but if that were the case it would ruin her carefully laid plans for both her son and daughter.

Her unease grew when she learned that Ashley had been closeted with Levisham prior to departing with Caro. Indeed, Olive had not been so alarmed since she had feared that Levisham, after his son’s death, meant to offer for Abigail Foster. The thought that he might do so and breed another son, thereby cutting her darling Tilford out of his rightful inheritance, had been enough to reduce Mrs. Kelsie’s iron constitution to palpitations.

Even though Miss Foster’s opposition to matrimony was well known, Mrs. Kelsie had long suspected that Abigail harbored a secret
tendre
for Levisham, which had been her real reason for rejecting her suitors.

Determined to have this dangerous threat removed, Olive had convinced Miss Foster’s self-important sister-in-law that she would never be mistress of her new home while Abigail continued to reside there.

When Caro and Ashley returned, Olive, grimly determined to end this latest threat to her ambitions, immediately launched a concerted campaign to point out all of “dearest Caroline’s” defects to Ashley. Olive did not overlook the smallest detail, from her niece’s flyaway hair and her brown complexion to her scrawny figure and the scuffed toes on her half boots.

But despite Olive’s best—and frequently repeated—efforts, her aspersions did not have their desired effect on Ashley, whom she was beginning to find quite as vexing and unmanageable as her brother-in-law. Worse, since Vinson had begun lavishing attention on Caro, the other gentlemen in the party paid much more attention to her, too. Only Sanley and Plymtree, still nursing their grudges against her, ignored her in favor of Mrs. Kelsie’s daughters.

On the night before the guests were to leave Bellhaven, Olive, seeking to display Grace and Jane to their best advantage, had them entertain the guests with a musical presentation. Both young ladies had pretty voices that won vigorous applause from their audience.

As they ended their performance, Olive insisted that Caro sing for their guests. The contrast between her niece, whom Olive knew could not sing a note, and her own daughters would “surely give the audience a disgust of her.

Caro, whose lack of musical talent was a source of great embarrassment to her, turned as white as Ashley’s stock. She tried to decline, but her aunt persisted. She was soon joined in her urgings by the polite, unsuspecting guests.

At last, seeing no hope of escape, Caro reluctantly stood before the guests, her knees shaking so that she wondered whether they would continue to support her through the humiliating ordeal ahead of her.

The faces before her seemed to be receding in a black haze of panic, and Caro longed for Providence to send a bolt from above to strike her dead before she had to open her mouth.

But Providence did not hear her silent plea.

Suddenly Ashley was at her side, towering above her. “I have been seized by an irresistible urge to sing, too,” he said loudly. “Pray, Lady Caro, be so kind as to let me join you in a duet.”

“Of course,” she stammered.

With an understanding squeeze, he took her icy hand in his warm one, smiled encouragingly at her, and said under his breath so that only she could hear, “Sing softly, elfin, and I will carry you.”

She obeyed and he proceeded to drown her sour notes with his fine baritone. Slowly, the shaking in her knees subsided, and her hand, still held firmly in his comforting clasp, warmed. Blessed Providence had sent her a far happier alternative to a bolt of lightning.

When they finished, the applause for them was as warm as it had been for her cousins. Never had Caro felt such overwhelming gratitude to anyone as she did at that moment to Ashley.

He led her to a small settee, just large enough for the two of them. As Caro sat down, she saw that her aunt was looking as though she had just swallowed a toad.

Glancing up at Ashley’s smiling face, Caro thought with aching heart what a very, very lucky woman Lady Roxley was.

Chapter 11

Ashley, wandering in Bellhaven’s park, chose a path that meandered through a wood into a green glade brightened by colorful clumps of goldenrod, purple knapweed, and ox-eye daisies. He scarcely noticed the beauty about him or the yellow brimstone butterfly that fluttered in front of him, for he was contemplating the negative answer that he must soon give Levisham.

Most of the guests had already departed from Bellhaven; the others would be gone by the time Ashley returned to the house. He was impatient to return to London to begin his search for the one-eared man that Mercer Corte had seen with Henry. But Ashley would be the last to leave Bellhaven because he had been procrastinating about rejecting the marquess’s offer of Caro’s hand.

The viscount’s brows knitted in an unhappy frown. Although he liked Caro, she was clearly not the wife for him. He needed a cool, sophisticated lady of the first respectability, preferably a beauty, but if not that, at least a woman of great decorum who would serve as his charming chatelaine. It was what his father expected of him.

No, Ashley could not marry her.

The heat that had broken for a few days had returned with a vengeance. Ashley, feeling quite wilted from it, was irresistibly drawn toward the soothing sound of rushing water. It came from a stream that twisted sharply through this remote corner of the park, its water shaded from the merciless sun by a leafy green parasol of graceful willow branches.

When he reached the bank, he discovered that he was not alone. A slim, little figure that he recognized instantly as Caro was gliding expertly through the water. From the pile of clothing lying on a flat rock at the water’s edge, he suspected that she must be wearing nothing more than her shift.

Far more unsettling to Ashley was the sight of another figure partially concealed in the stripling birches and tall plants that grew in profusion along the water. Tilford Kelsie was watching Caro so intently that he had not noticed the newcomer. The cruelly lecherous look on Tilford’s face both shocked and revolted Ashley.

The viscount glanced again at Caro, who was cutting cleanly through the water with deft strokes. Silently, taking care to make no noise, he circled behind Caro’s cousin. The sight of an empty claret bottle lying at Tilford’s feet disgusted Ashley. He caught the shorter man from behind, jerked him around, and grabbed him by the lapels of his coat.

Tilford’s breath reeked of wine, and his eyes bulged with fear as he saw the lethal look on Vinson’s face. In a low, menacing voice, Ashley told him, “Get out of here immediately or I shall give you a beating that you will never forget. Then I shall go to the marquess.”

The fear on Tilford’s face told Ashley that he was a coward as well as a drunk. “I’ll go,” he whimpered.

“Don’t stop until you reach the house,” Ashley ordered, releasing him.

Tilford stumbled clumsily away, trampling viciously underfoot the teasel’s and the comfrey’s delicate clusters of flowers.

“Who’s there?” Caro’s frightened voice called from the water.

Ashley turned and strode down to the water’s edge. As he emerged from the screen of greenery, the alarm on her face, all that was visible above the water’s surface, gave way to what appeared to be chagrin, and she cried in a mortified tone, “Oh, Ashley, why must you always come upon me at the most awkward moments?”

“Why must you always put yourself in awkward situations?” he snapped, venting his anger at Tilford on her. “Are you lost to all sense of propriety?”

He saw in her big gray eyes the same flash of pain that he had seen when he had been so shocked upon learning her identity. This time, however, there was no brave little smile. Instead, she asked in a small, perplexed voice, “What has put you in such a tweak, Ashley? It is not like you.”

No, it was not like him, but he had no intention of standing on a riverbank and explaining some unpleasant facts of life to this naive infant. “Never mind,” he said curtly. “I’ll escort you back to the house.”

“But I cannot go now,” she protested.

“Why not?”

A red flush of embarrassment spread over her face. “I am wearing only my shift, and I ... I planned to dry myself in the sun. It is so remote here; I don’t see how you found it. No one ever comes here.”

No one except her lecherous cousin. Angrily, Ashley’s fingers went to his elegantly tied neckcloth and unwound the length of muslin. He dropped it on the rock beside her clothes. “Here, use this to dry yourself. I will go back up on the bank and turn my back until you are dressed.”

“Thank you, but I prefer to remain here,” she said politely.

“Caro,” he said in a furious voice, “I am not leaving without you. Do not strain my patience.”

She regarded him with puzzled, hurt eyes. “I do not understand why you are in such a pelter.”

The answer to that, he realized with sudden clarity, was far more complicated than she could have imagined. He had been resolved to reject her father’s proposition, but how could he live with himself if he damned the poor child to that wretched Tilford? This quandary sorely ruffled his temper, and again he vented it on Caro. “If you do not come out of the water,” he snapped at her, “I shall be obliged to come in and fetch you. Pray do not make me do that.”

She did not, and a short time later they were returning to the house, her wet shift wrapped in his equally wet neckcloth. He was thankful that the guests would be gone by the time they reached the house. Otherwise his missing neckcloth and Caro’s bedraggled appearance would have given rise to considerable gossip.

He studied her pixyish face. Although he had no wish to marry her, at least life with her would not be boring. But he did not love her. And, dammit, she deserved a man who would love her as she ought to be loved, who would cherish her as the only woman in his life. Ashley could not do that.

The memory of the brutish, lustful look on Tilford’s face as he watched Caro swimming rose up to haunt Ashley. She already found the idea of lovemaking repulsive. Her drunken cousin would confirm to her that her fear had been well founded. And her aunt would rule as mistress in Tilford’s house. Ashley knew exactly what sort of treatment poor Caro would receive at Olive’s hands.

This succession of unhappy thoughts left Vinson scowling and silent as they walked back to the house. In deference to his black mood, Caro grew very quiet, too.

As they neared the house, Ashley’s valet hurried toward them. When the sharp-eyed Swope failed to notice that his master’s neckcloth, upon which he had lavished so much attention that morning, was missing, Ashley knew that something had to be dreadfully wrong.