A Sister's Secret (4 page)

‘Two hundred guineas and expenses amount to a fee as worthy as you could command from anyone.’ Caroline was on her mettle, determined to be in control of the relationship, the man himself and all events. ‘Such a sum would set you up in a small business and enable you to earn an honest living.’

‘Ye gods,’ said the shocked captain, ‘a small business? An honest living? Marm, am I to endure boredom?’

‘If you prefer to continue with your dubious practices, Captain Burnside, that is your affair. But very well, since you will be up against a dangerous man in Cumberland, I will raise the fee to two hundred and fifty, and not a cent more.’

‘I’m touched, marm. Done, then. Two fifty and expenses.’

‘However,’ said Caroline, straight of back and firm of bosom, ‘you will be paid only if you succeed. Half if you succeed with one or the other, the whole if you succeed with both. But nothing, sir, if you fail altogether, for you will have proclaimed your gifts dishonestly.’

‘H’m,’ said Captain Burnside, and smiled. ‘I see I’m to serve a critical patron.’

‘You are, sir, be in no doubt of that,’ she said. ‘Well?’

‘Your servant, marm.’

‘Cumberland will be here Friday evening for supper.’

‘Egad, d’you say so?’ Captain Burnside looked intrigued. ‘Do I take it, marm, that you’re on intimate terms with him, that you too find the devil has his own kind of appeal?’

An angry flush suffused her. ‘How dare you draw such an inference, how dare you? Be very clear, sir, that I detest Cumberland. But that is not to say I spend my time quarrelling with him. I know him well, and he knows me just as well. I am civil to him, and he is always himself.’ She looked up as the door opened. She simulated a welcoming smile, showing teeth that were moistly white and even between her parted lips. ‘Annabelle, how nice that you are back from shopping at this moment, for you are in time to meet an old friend of mine, Captain Charles Burnside.’

Captain Burnside came to his feet. Lady Caroline’s sister advanced, smiling.

Miss Annabelle Howard of Charleston, South Carolina, was in essence a pretty young lady. Her face was round and pretty, her eyes round and blue, her mouth soft and kissable. Her looped-up gown of sky blue showed pretty ankles clad in pale yellow silk hose. Such hose was held in place above the knees by tied silk garters. She wore buckled blue shoes and a white tulle cap from which a tiny silk scarf hung over the back of her fair hair. She looked younger than her age. She was almost twenty-one. Vivacious light shone in her eyes, which were apt to sparkle at the slightest arousal of excitement or merriment. Her complexion was delicately creamy, her bosom plump. Her waist could not have been higher. It was a mere fraction below her bosom.

She had wanted to come to London as soon as the family heard Caroline was not returning to Charleston after the death of Lord Clarence Percival, for that told Annabelle of her sister’s acquired preference for London and her country estate in Sussex. But there was the problem of Martin Appleby, to whom she had been engaged since she was eighteen. Martin was an undemanding young gentleman of old Colonial stock; he was also handsome
and God-fearing. But when pressed to name the wedding date, Annabelle demurred and procrastinated, having gradually come to feel that, while Martin was a good man, he was not much fun. She felt she preferred him as a friend, not as a prospective husband, and so the engagement lingered on.

Her parents worried a little. Caroline, her sister, had married in haste at eighteen and repented almost before the ink was dry on the certificate. She herself at twenty was neither married nor repenting of marriage. With so many beautiful girls in Charleston, all fluttering their eyes at prospective beaux, Mr and Mrs Howard felt Annabelle would soon be too old to be taken to the altar, even by good-natured Martin Appleby. In the climate of the Deep South, girls bloomed far in advance of New England’s young ladies, and by sixteen they were sweet peaches ripe and ready for wedlock.

Six months before her twenty-first birthday, Annabelle broke the engagement, protesting she did not truly love Martin. Her mother was shocked, but her sympathetic father let her weep tears on his shoulder and agreed with her suggestion that she quit Charleston for a while and visit Caroline in England.

London, its colourful society, and the brilliance of its grand ballrooms, dazzled her, the more so when the bucks, the young and the mature, gave her so much attention. She was introduced to scions of the nobility, and she even met the Prince of Wales, lately growing portly. She was a trifle confused by his close scrutiny of her bosom and the florid nature of his compliments. She also met one of his brothers, the Duke of Cumberland, who was a different proposition altogether. He took her breath with his physical magnificence, with the spectacular width of his powerful shoulders, the defined muscularity of his
thighs, the sheer strength of every line of his face and his aura of indestructible majesty. His right eye was blind, palely blind, but his left was dark, glinting and malicious. He was neither suave of manner nor endearing of appearance. The cast of his features was devilish, and his looks were not improved by a facial scar, the legacy of a wound bravely borne at the battle of Tournai a few years ago. A German duchess of Mecklenburg was destined to become his wife. Various other women who found him strangely exciting had hopes, but none had advanced beyond the role of mistress.

He dressed impeccably. His coats paid tribute to his massive shoulders, and his skin-tight breeches boldly shaped his strong thighs, causing a lady’s eyes to linger and her breath to quicken. To some women he was, with his superb physique and dark wickedness, wholly a man, and his reputed kinship with the devil, written all over him, fascinated them and induced shivers.

He had nothing in common with his oldest brother, the effete Prince of Wales, called ‘Prinny’ by his intimates. Indeed, Cumberland had a great and regal disdain for the effete and all other lesser beings. Under the sensual, peering eyes of the Prince of Wales, Annabelle with her feminine prettiness had experienced a desire to retreat and hide. Under the bold, speculative eye of the Duke of Cumberland, she quickened with sweet excitement. She felt he should have been the heir to the throne, for he was surely made for kingship. Cumberland positively thought so himself.

Annabelle was a monarchist before she was a republican. A royal palace and the brilliance of a royal court had far more magic for her than the businesslike mansion of a president.

At her first meeting with Cumberland, he eyed her,
examined her, reflected on her nervous, fluttering curtsey and the unarguable appeal of her décolleté. Then he took her hand, caressed it and said, ‘So, you’re from the Americas, are ye?’ His German accent was deep and guttural. ‘Damned if ye ain’t the prettiest package that ever came out of them. Are ye acquainted with those radical upstarts, Washington and Jefferson?’

‘Sir – Your Highness – I declare!’ she breathed in nervous protest. ‘I vow myself unacquainted with either. Nor do I wish to be, for of all things I cannot show a polite face to men who were so unmannerly in their resentment of the King and his brave Redcoats.’

Cumberland laughed. ‘Ye gods, ye’ll not have witnessed their unmannerliness, sweet wench? Or will ye say ye did?’

‘Mercy, no! I was not yet born when it all began, and only a small child when the Redcoats departed. Sir, you do not see in me one so old as to have stood and watched that coarse Yankee, Sam Adams, at his brutal business of tarring and feathering the Loyalists, do you? Sir, I do declare myself not yet come of age.’

‘But ye’ve still come of sweet, plump prettiness,’ said Cumberland, and Annabelle blushed to her roots.

‘Plump, Your Highness?’ she gasped in dismay.

The sound eye gleamed, the strong teeth gleamed, and the smile was devious. Cumberland knew her for the sister of Caroline, Lady Clarence Percival, an established and unrivalled American beauty who had resisted his every advance, and he would not have been what he was if he had not seen the chance to win the elder by becoming a menace to the younger.

‘Plump?’ he said. ‘Aye, so ye are, my sweet, but only where ye should be. I vow it a delicious plumpness.’

Her blush deepened. Cumberland laughed again, richly, and there began for Annabelle a royal attentiveness
and pursuit that swept her off her feet, and had her enamoured all too soon of the man who some said coveted the throne, had no respect for his peers, little reverence for God and kept company with the devil. Certainly, he was intimidating in his towering majesty. Annabelle found him mesmerizing, and he found her a full-grown bloom of the American South who, remarkably, still owned the freshness of virginity. Because he seemed disposed to suggest assignments of a compromising nature, she declared her virginity to him, and begged him not to regard her lightly or carelessly.

His sound eye took on its wicked light. ‘By God, a virgin? Say ye so, sweet girl?’

‘Sir, I beg, do not embarrass me so. It is said and it is true.’

‘Damn me, ye must be the only one in London,’ he said, and laughed at her blushes. But there she was, a sweetness to be savoured at leisure, not bruised in haste. If her sister regarded the dalliance with angry frowns and worried glances, so much the better. Let her, Caroline, come into his arms and he would cease his pursuit of virginity. Meanwhile, he enjoyed the teasing manner of his pursuit, and Annabelle was forever suffering quivers of excitement in his presence. In the compulsiveness of infatuation, she acquired and exhibited gowns that were as revealingly arch as they were dangerously provocative. She could not help herself in her desire to catch the eye of a man whose royal arrogance and uncompromising masculinity made him such an excitement to her. Cumberland, studying the increasingly arch contours, remarked that if all the roses of the American South bloomed so fulsomely, then it was a lusher nursery than he had supposed.

Annabelle had all the demure mannerisms and fresh
looks of a girl no more than eighteen, despite being within reach of the age when she could be her own mistress. If at that age she yielded to a clandestine affair with Cumberland, she would be no less responsible than he. She would be unable to make any claim on him in law unless she had his written promise to marry her. Marry her? The thought of being the wife of a son of King George turned her dizzy.

In the library of her sister’s London house, her blue gown seemed to swim and float as she advanced towards Captain Burnside. She did not look at Caroline, for there were secrets in her eyes, secrets she could not wholly hide, and she knew Caroline could be discomfitingly observant. She smiled at the debonair visitor, who bowed.

‘Sir?’ she murmured, extending her hand.

‘Captain Burnside,’ said Caroline, ‘this is my sister, Annabelle Howard.’

The captain lifted Annabelle’s hand to his lips and returned her smile. ‘Faith, I’m enchanted,’ he said.

‘Oh, I surely do think the manners of English gentlemen the last word in gallantry,’ said Annabelle.

‘A pretty coating over our many imperfections,’ said the captain. In his slender length he was as tall as Cumberland, but without the duke’s bruising weight.

‘But, sir, a man without imperfections must be very dull,’ said Annabelle, electing still to avoid her sister’s eye.

‘What am I to make of myself, then?’ smiled the captain. ‘I’m not only sadly imperfect but also miserably dull.’

Annabelle laughed. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘by that you have just shown you are not dull at all. Might I ask if you are lunching with us?’

‘Alas, I’ve an appointment with my tailor, as your sister will confirm. I should have been on my way ten minutes ago. You’ll pardon me?’ He kissed her hand again,
lightly, bringing another smile to her face. Her lively eyes took in the suppleness of his physique, his close-fitting pantaloons shaping sinewy legs. How well English gentlemen dressed, she thought, how finely their tailored garments clasped their bodies.

‘You all must go before we’ve scarcely met?’ she said, needing the kind of company that would help her avoid Caroline’s suspicious eyes and difficult questions.

‘Oh, you will meet him again quite soon, I dare say,’ said Caroline, ‘for he is to be our guest in a few days.’

Annabelle’s eyes danced. A handsome man in the house would surely constitute an entertainment. ‘I declare myself delighted, sister,’ she said.

Captain Burnside made his bow to Caroline.

She said pointedly, ‘Yes, your tailor, of course, and do not forget you are expected here on Friday, in the afternoon.’

‘To be sure,’ he said, smiling in the fashion of an old friend, ‘and the prospect is all of pleasurable, as much so as the enjoyment of our reunion.’

He departed with a commendable ease of manner, leaving Annabelle a little disappointed that his tailor had prior claim on him at this moment, while Caroline wondered if his sudden going was related to the fact that he had fifty golden guineas tucked away on his dubious person.

‘I do declare, such a pleasant gentleman,’ said Annabelle, and turned to leave.

‘He’s an old friend who has been serving overseas,’ said Caroline. ‘I am pleased, however, that you met him before he left. A moment before you go, Annabelle.’

‘Tra-la-la,’ said Annabelle with simulated raillery, ‘you are going to confide in me concerning your old friend? The reunion was sweet?’

‘He is a friend,’ said Caroline stiffly, ‘nothing more.’

‘Oh? He is married, I dare say?’

‘No. He has been too active with his regiment to find time for marriage.’

‘Such a waste,’ sighed Annabelle, ‘when he’s so engaging and appealingly handsome.’

‘Do you think so?’ Caroline was aloof. ‘His looks are passable, perhaps, but one wishes for more than looks in a man. Now, what did you buy in the shops?’

‘Oh, I saw nothing that took my eye,’ said Annabelle airily.

‘Nothing? I thought you set on a new hat at least.’

‘I met Elvira.’

‘Lady Mornington?’ Caroline’s eyes held their searching look. Lady Mornington was a confidante of the Duke of Cumberland. ‘She took your mind off hats?’