A Valentine Wedding (14 page)

He would always be fond of Lucy, always take responsibility for his son’s welfare. Emma had thrown the example of the duke of Clarence at him that afternoon, and while Alasdair could hardly be said to be the devoted father of ten children by a woman with whom he’d lived as husband for some twelve years, there were perhaps parallels. The duke was always proposing to rich eligible ladies, but none had yet succumbed, even for the title of royal duchess. Mrs. Jordan and ten Fitzclarences would always be a factor in whatever marriage the duke contracted.

But would Emma now be threatened by Alasdair’s past with Lucy, by his gangly son who wanted to be a farmer? Would that cozy little cottage in Chiswick fill her with revulsion?

She was no prude. Far from it. But when Henry Ossington had dripped his malice into her ear, she had reacted as violently as if she’d been told her fiancé was a depraved and murderous Bluebeard. She hadn’t given Alasdair the opportunity to explain, had
merely left London and gone to Italy the night before the wedding, leaving him almost literally at the altar. It had been left to Ned to tell him why—and left to the jilted bridegroom to offer an explanation to wedding guests and a world agog.

His lips were set as he drew up in the mews at the back of his lodgings. However much it could be said that he had wronged Emma, Emma had certainly had her revenge. His humiliation had been profound.

“Look into stabling for Lady Emma’s horses, Jemmy.”

“Aye, sir.” Jemmy was untroubled by the curtness of the instruction and went to unharness the team.

“Oh, and there’s something else I want you to do first thing in the morning,” Alasdair said, and told the intrigued tiger what he wanted done.

Alasdair walked around to his front door. He glanced up at the windows of the floor above his own. They were dark. Where was Paul Denis? Paying court to Emma at some soiree?

He would have to develop a plan of campaign, but he was feeling too dispirited tonight for intelligent thought.

He awoke in a much clearer frame of mind and was at breakfast when Jemmy was shown in. “Lady Emma and Mrs. Witherspoon’s gone out in the barouche, sir. I watched ’em go.”

Early for Emma, Alasdair reflected. It was barely ten o’clock. He rose from the table. “I’ll not need you again this morning.”

“I’ll be about arranging stables for Lady Emma’s cattle, then.” Jemmy tugged a forelock and disappeared.

Alasdair called for his valet as he went into his bedchamber, throwing off his brocade dressing gown. Ten minutes later, he was walking quickly to Mount Street. The street was quiet; a nursemaid shepherded a trio of children, one of whom was bowling a hoop that narrowly missed running up against Alasdair’s immaculate beige pantaloons. He brushed aside the nursemaid’s apologies. The careless child, an unprepossessing boy with a runny nose, was staring at him rudely. Alasdair regarded him through his eyeglass until the child dropped his eyes.

Alasdair walked on. As he turned up the steps of Emma’s house, he noticed a rather hunched, elderly looking man in a heavy greatcoat on the far side of the street. He appeared to be looking up at the house, but when Alasdair caught his eye, he turned and shuffled off, coughing into a handkerchief, the rasping hack sounding painful.

Harris answered his knock with the expected information that Lady Emma was from home.

“I’ll leave her a note, Harris.” Alasdair walked into the hall. “I’ll write it in the salon. I know my way … no need to show me up.” He gave a pleasant nod and strode up the stairs.

The salon was deserted, although a small fire burned in the grate. Alasdair stood in the middle of the room and examined the bookshelves set into two alcoves on either side of the fireplace. Emma’s library was extensive, augmented now by Ned’s books.

Would she perhaps have kept a posthumous memento of her brother in one of his own books? It would be very like Emma. Either that or she might have put it in a book that her brother had given her. There had never been anything random about her many and varied hiding places.

He had known brother and sister so well that he recognized the volumes that came into both categories and began a systematic search through them. If he was disturbed by one of the servants, they wouldn’t think it particularly strange of him to be looking at the books. His place in the Grantley family was too well established for anything he did to cause particular comment.

But no one disturbed him for a while, and he had opened, leafed through, and shaken out two dozen books before Harris opened the door and brought in a decanter of madeira.

“I thought you might like some refreshment, sir. Seeing as how we don’t know when Lady Emma will be returning.”

“Thank you, Harris.” Still holding the book he’d been examining, Alasdair accepted a glass of wine. Harris had drawn the conclusion that the visitor had decided to await Lady Emma’s return. There could be no other explanation for his protracted stay in the house.

He sipped his wine and glanced idly out of the window. The man in the greatcoat had returned and was still standing on the opposite side of the street, looking up at the house.

“Have you noticed that man there before, Harris?”

Harris looked out of the window. “No, sir. Should I run him off?”

“Unless he has legitimate business outside the house.”

Harris went off and Alasdair watched curiously as a footman ran across the street and accosted the man. The exchange was a short one and the greatcoated individual turned and wandered off down the street.

Alasdair ran his fingertips over his mouth, deep in
thought. Why would someone be watching Emma’s house? Some protective guard set by Charles Lester? Or was it more sinister? The mysterious someone else who was looking for the missing paper, for instance?

But then again, it could have been a totally innocent passerby with an interest in Georgian architecture, of which the house was a fine specimen. Alasdair returned to the bookshelves.

Half an hour later, he had turned nothing up and he had examined all the volumes he recognized as having some connection with Ned. Where else to look, apart from Emma’s bedchamber and dressing room? To enter those rooms, he would need a much more elaborate strategy. But for now, there was the music room. Ned had not been a musician himself, but he had given Emma many gifts related to music. She could well have hidden something among her sheet music, or in the pianoforte bench, or in her music case.

He hurried from the salon and down the stairs. A footman emerged from a door at the end of the hall leading to the servants’ quarters. He hurried toward the front door, thinking that Lord Alasdair was taking his leave.

Alasdair waved him away, saying that he had left something in the music room on his previous visit, and entered the room at the rear of the house. There he stood and took stock, trying to think where to look first. Emma was not the tidiest of mortals, and since she would allow no one to touch anything to do with her music, the room was littered with piled sheet music, books, score sheets, notebooks filled with her own notations and compositions.

He went through the piles of music, her music case, the contents of the piano bench, careful to leave everything
just as he’d found it. The porcelain candlesticks had been a present from Ned, he remembered. Graceful, delicate delftware, exquisitely painted. He took out the candles and ran his finger around the socket. It was just the sort of place Emma would choose; but not on this occasion.

He set the candles back into their holders. His eye drifted to the French doors into the walled garden. He stiffened, moved swiftly to the door. There had been a flicker of movement to the side of the garden, human movement, he would lay odds. And yet there was no one there, nothing to see but winter-bare trees and sad looking shrubs.

Alasdair raised the latch and pushed the door open. He stepped out onto the paved terrace that ran the width of the music room. He stood still, gazing around, ears cocked for the slightest sound. All he heard was the chatter of a squirrel in the beech tree that stood against the wall at the side of the garden facing the service passageway that ran between this house and its neighbor. His eye roved the garden, and then he saw it. The indentation of a footprint in the flowerbed against the wall by the beech tree.

He strode across the grass and stared down at the print. It was a man’s foot. Just one. Alasdair glanced up into the tree. One foot in the ground while the other reached up for that large knothole a quarter of the way up the trunk. A hand on the branch above, and an agile man would be up the tree and over the wall in a flash.

Just who was snooping around the garden? And did it have any connection with the man at the front? He certainly hadn’t looked agile enough for wall vaulting and tree climbing. But he’d been huddled in
a greatcoat. There was no telling what had been beneath the voluminous garment.

There was a gate set into the rear wall. Examination showed it to be bolted and padlocked, with no evidence of tampering.

Disturbed and thoughtful, Alasdair returned to the music room, latching the door carefully behind him and shooting the bolt at the top. Interest in Ned’s document was heating up. But speed was of the essence. The paper had to be stolen before Wellington began his spring campaign in Portugal if its contents were to be any good to Napoleon.

He glanced once more around the room, then went to the door. “Harris, tell Lady Emma I was here,” he said casually as he crossed the hall. “I thought I’d left a glove behind in the music room, but it seems not. I’ll be sending Lady Emma information about stabling for her horses … if you could just tell her.”

Harris seemed perfectly satisfied with this and bowed Lord Alasdair from the house.

Alasdair ran lightly down the steps to the street. His expression was still troubled as he walked toward Audley Street. He was about to turn the corner when he caught sight of a tilbury bowling down Mount Street from the direction of Park Street. It drew up outside Emma’s house.

Alasdair paused out of sight at the corner and watched. Emma and Paul Denis appeared to be having a lively conversation. She was laughing, animated, her face, framed in a black sable hood, aglow with the cold air. Her companion had a hand resting on her arm. He too was laughing, pointing up at the house.

Alasdair’s mouth took a grim turn. They seemed to be on the best of terms in a dangerously short time.
And just where were Maria and the barouche? Abandoned for more lively companionship presumably.

“Oh, no, my friends, this really will not do,” he murmured. He continued grimly on his way.

Neither Emma nor Paul had been aware of the watcher. Emma was in the best of spirits. She and Maria had come upon Paul Denis driving his tilbury down Bond Street, and Emma had instantly accepted his offer to drive his horses. Maria had been left in the barouche to continue alone on their errand to Col-burn’s Lending Library, and Emma had taken advantage of her new escort to go to the carriage makers in Longacre and purchase her curricle.

“I don’t know whether I would have had the courage to purchase a racing curricle without some serious encouragement,” she said with a chuckle. “There are bound to be some raised eyebrows. It’s so very dashing.”

“Your trustee will have no objections?” Paul raised a thin black eyebrow.

“Good God, no,” Emma said. “Alasdair is never one to abide by convention himself. Besides,” she added, “it doesn’t concern him. He has control of my fortune, but of nothing else.”

Paul heard the underlying note beneath this seemingly airy speech. Lady Emma was still not in charity with her trustee. Whatever the estrangement, it suited him very well. He wanted no interference from her friends and relations in his present scheme. The Witherspoon chaperone could be easily dealt with. She seemed under Emma’s thumb anyway. But Lord Alasdair struck him as a man of very definite opinions and somewhat dominant character. To have such a man as an overinvolved trustee would prove meddlesome.

He laid a hand on her arm, smiling down at her. “Permit me to say, madame, that I find you entrancing.”

Emma was used to compliments, and generally mistrustful of them. Alasdair never flattered her. He never needed to. However, Paul Denis’s admiration was a promising sign. She returned his smile, saying, “You put me to the blush, sir.”

“And how prettily too.”

Emma had an absurd desire to laugh. She was quite certain she wasn’t blushing in the least. She squashed incipient mirth vigorously.

“Tell me, where is your chamber?” Paul said, looking up at the house. “Is it in the front?”

“Up there.” She pointed to the windows above the door. “The three central windows. Why do you wish to know?”

He looked a little flustered and self-conscious. “Forgive my foolishness. But if I walk down the street at night, I shall be able to look up and imagine you there.”

This time Emma did laugh. It was irresistible. She went into a peal of merriment. “Mr. Denis, you must know that it’s no good paying me compliments, particularly absurd ones. I have the most inconvenient sense of the ridiculous.”

“Was it ridiculous?” Paul asked mournfully.