Barbara Metzger (13 page)

He was much too kind to let suffer through the rest of the night thinking that his silly bride didn’t like his touch. She’d liked it very well indeed. Tomorrow’s talk would be embarrassing for both of them, having to discuss bedroom matters in the harsh glare of day. ’Twould be far better to get the explanations over with tonight, while darkness could hide her blushes. And while she still had the courage.

Senta reached for the candle by her bedside and struck the flint. She tossed back the covers, put one foot out into the cold air—and there he was. Not Lord Maitland, but the see-through shade.

She was
not
going to scream, Senta told herself, stuffing her hand in her mouth to make positive. She’d disturbed the servants once this night, she was sure. Heaven only knew what they were already thinking, or how she was to face them in the morning. By comparison, facing this…this spirit had to be easier. Senta took her hand out of her mouth, put her chilled foot back under the covers, and studied her visitor as it—no, definitely he—slept in the nearby chair. The seat’s upholstery stripes wavered through his outline.

His long legs were casually stretched in front of him, tightly encased in the gold unmentionables. Heavy dark hair had fallen onto his forehead, giving him a much younger look. He had high cheekbones, a perfect nose, thick eyelashes, and a mouth a Greek sculptor would have cried for. He was, in fact, quite, quite beautiful, like a fallen angel. Asleep, he seemed too innocent to be any minion of Hell, though. Besides, Senta was still alive and unharmed. Therefore he had to be a mere ghost, which was not to say a gently bred female liked to find that her new home was haunted, but a peripatetic predecessor was preferable to a demon. Senta couldn’t
begin to imagine from which century this Maitland ancestor hailed. And she’d made a careful study of the portrait gallery this past month. Most of the gentlemen were sandy-haired, like her husband. None of them remotely resembled her somnolent specter. Furthermore, Senta firmly believed that the Morville clan, dead or alive, was too mannerly to cut up a lady’s peace.

“Sir?” she called softly, determined to direct this lost soul on his way.

He came awake with a start, blinked, and brushed the hair out of his eyes. He noticed Senta sitting up in her bed, the candlelight reflected off her ivory skin through the lacy gown she wore. One side of his mouth curled up in a smile. Definitely no angel, Senta thought, pulling the bedcovers up.

“Sorry ’bout that, ma’am.” He shook his head. “Sorry ’bout the whole thing.”

So he did have some manners. Maybe he was a Maitland ancestor after all. Senta couldn’t place the accent. The long sideburns were somewhat in the military mode, though, and there had been a lot of Morville officers. “Who…?” she began. “What…?”

Now he scratched his head. “Don’t rightly know, ma’am. I just kind of show up places. Sometimes I remember bits and pieces of stuff. Other times something sounds familiar, but I can’t quite put my finger on it”

“Surely you know your own name.”

He curled his lip again. This time it looked more like a sneer than a smile. “You’d come as far as I have, you’d be all shook up, too.”

He cocked his head, as if hearing distant music instead of Senta’s correction: “All shaken up.”

He said, “I’ve been racking my brains all night.”

“Could you be a Lord Maitland?’

“Maitland? No, that doesn’t sound right. It’s more like a turnip. Parsnip?”

“Your name is a vegetable?” Senta pinched herself under the covers. Unfortunately, it hurt. She was awake.

“Uh, maybe it would help if we discovered
what
you are. You know, ghost? Guardian angel?” She had to add, “Devil?”

“You mean a ghoul? Like me?”

“I,” she corrected automatically. “A ghoul such as I.”

He stood up, looking confused. “No, ma’am, I’m no bogeyman. I’m a legend. That’s it, a legend that never dies.”

“A legend? Like King Arthur?” Now Senta dredged her mind. Parsnip? Parsley? Sage? “I know! You must be Father Time. You know, t-h-y-m-e.”

“No, that don’t sound right either.”

She thought some more. “Saint George? How about Parcival? That sounds somewhat alike. Could you be Sir Parcival who went after the Holy Grail?” She’d always thought the story was fiction, but she supposed such a hero could take on a life of his own, more or less.

His brows were furrowed. “It sounds close. You know, like a name on the tip of your tongue. I think what happened is my memory got left somewhere else, and just hasn’t caught up yet. Hell, sometimes I feel as though if I could just remember a few more details, I could go on home.”

Senta made a silent toast to that. But her visitor was obviously distressed, so she asked, “Why don’t we just call you Sir Parcival for now?”

“I don’t know about that Holy Grail stuff, and the ‘sir’ don’t sound right either.”

“Then you aren’t a knight?” she asked in disappointment

“Not even a Pip.”

Senta bit her lip. With all those jewels, he was certainly of the upper classes. “Then are you an earl? A duke?”

He raised his perfect chin. “Ma’am, I’m the King.”

Senta was fairly certain no King of England ever looked like this. “King of what country?”

“More like rock, ma’am.”

“You’re the King of Gibraltar?” Senta didn’t think there was such a thing. Then again, history had never been her favorite study. “Did you actually sit on a throne?”

He put his head in his hands. “Don’t ask.”

She took a deep breath. Here it was, her wedding night, and she was entertaining a ghost, and a crazy one, to boot. Well, the mad King of England thought he was the palace cook or some such, so Senta supposed her ghost—legend—could be as balmy as he wanted. If he just left. “Ah, besides seeking your lost memory, was there some particular reason you arrived here?”

He looked around. “Reason?”

“You know, like vengeance, or to right an old wrong.” Senta thought back over ghost stories she used to hear at school. “If you weren’t buried properly, or didn’t receive last rites. A mission.”

“I don’t rightly recall, ma’am. I suppose I’m here to make things right for you.”

“Nothing was
wrong
for me until you got here!”

“Didn’t look that way to me.”

“You were watching?” Senta gasped. Thank goodness he couldn’t see her flaming cheeks.

He shrugged. “Nothing much else to do. You were a-lying there like a sacrificial virgin. And what about this forced marriage and some other guy? You got someone else’s bun in the oven, sister?”

“That’s Senta. And what do you mean, someone else’s—Oh.” She figured it out. “Of course not. And my marriage was no such thing. It wasn’t even an arranged match, like that of many of my friends.”

“Arranged?”

“You know, where the parents decide to join two estates or two fortunes. The brides have to hope their fathers make the right choices for them.”

“The fathers get to choose? Hmm.”

“Yes, but mine wasn’t that way at all. Lord Maitland even asked me if it was all right to ask my papa for permission to pay his addresses. He thought I might be pushed into accepting him, once he made his formal offer. But I wanted to marry Viscount Maitland, very much.”

“He don’t seem to know that.”

Senta chewed on her thumbnail, which she hadn’t done in ages. “No, he thinks it was a marriage of convenience, I suppose.” Sir Parcival, for want of a better name, was looking more confused than ever. Senta didn’t know why she was telling her troubles to a transparent Bedlamite, but she continued anyway: “A marriage of convenience is when a titled gentleman, for instance, marries a girl with no family connections, but a large dowry. He gets the money; she gets the title.”

Sir Parcival’s lip curled. “We don’t call that convenience; we call it commerce. They don’t have to love each other at all?”

“They don’t even have to like each other. There are many matches in the
ton
like that, where both partners go their separate ways. I’d never have a marriage like that.”

“But your bridegroom would?”

Senta chewed on her fingernail some more. “He started attending debutante balls and Almack’s for the first time in memory, and everyone said it was because he needed an heir after his younger brother’s death. He is two and thirty, you see. It was time to start his nursery.”

“So he wanted a broodmare. What was he offering as stud fee?”

Senta ignored the vulgarity. It was all too true that any unattached female would have tossed her bonnet over the viscount’s windmill. She sighed. “He has everything. Wealth, title, lands, influence, looks, intelligence, honor. He could have had any woman he wished.”

“But he chose you.”

She smiled, and hugged that thought to herself. Lord Maitland had chosen her, with merely passable looks, undistinguished family, and average portion. And she was delighted. She’d wanted to dance and shout and sing, but there he was, so serious in Papa’s library, telling her that he would not announce any understanding yet, in case she changed her mind. In fact, he didn’t want her to decide until after the end of the fall Little Season. If she was still willing, she and her family could spend the Christmas holidays at his country property, to see if she might be happy there. He was no absentee landlord, he carefully warned her, and the place was somewhat of a moldery old pile sorely in need of a woman’s touch. He’d asked again on Christmas eve, and again she’d said yes, and he’d given her the family betrothal ring, finally.

“He must have thought I’d make him the most biddable wife.” Senta fumbled for a handkerchief so she could blow her nose. “And I meant to be, I swear. Now look at the mess I’ve made!” she wailed.

Sir Parcival was scowling. “You stop that blubbering, sister. I hate when women cry. Did you ever tell the man you loved him?”

She sniffed. “My name is Senta. And…and I don’t love him. I hardly know him. My parents approved, and he was everything kind.”

His lip curled again. “Sure, you don’t love him and I’m Prince Charming.”

Senta didn’t think so, not with that sneer. “How could I tell him such a thing? He’s so proper, he made sure we were never alone. But he should have known! When he asked if I wanted to wait till his year of mourning was up in the spring to have the wedding, so I could have a big affair at St. George’s, I said no. I told him I’d rather get married right now, right here at his home, before Mama and Papa left after New Year’s, rather than wait. That should have told him I wasn’t just
interested in all his grand connections. He should have known!”

Sir Parcival was up and pacing. “I reckon that’s my mission then, to tell him you love him.”

“You can’t do that! I’d die if he thought I loved him when he…he only wants a mother for his sons.”

“So what I have to do is get him to love you back, right, and make this a real marriage?” He moved toward the door.

Senta gave a watery laugh. “You? You don’t even know your own name, and he can’t see you. Oh, it’s all such a mess.” She started weeping again for her lost dreams.

“Doubts, huh? I’ve had a few.” Sir Parcival stepped through the closed door. Before he disappeared, he called back, “Little sis—Senta, don’t you do… Don’t you do that… Don’t you cry.”

Chapter Two

“Damn and blast,” the viscount muttered. “I knew it would never work!” Lord Maitland was in his library, in his undress, in despair. He poured himself another cognac from the cut-glass decanter on the cherrywood desk and tossed it down. “How could I ever expect a jewel like Senta to fall for a dry old stick like me?”

She was a diamond, his new bride, beautiful to look at, beautiful on the inside, too. When he first came up to Town in the fall, determined to find himself a wife and fulfil the responsibilities of the succession, Miss Senta Tarlowe caught Lee’s eye immediately. She was such a gay, spirited young thing, always smiling, pleased with whatever entertainment the day offered, from lavish balls to simple country picnics. She didn’t blush, simper, or bat her eyelashes, nor did she put on the airs and affectations so many of her peers wore in pretend sophistication.

Lee had watched her at various functions before even seeking an introduction. He noted how, as often as she was the center of a knot of admiring beaux, just so often she was like to be found in a gaggle of female companions, belles as well as wallflowers. Other times she seemed content to sit quietly with her parents.

Her
reputation was spotless. He’d made inquiries, as far as he could without seeming obvious. No one had the slightest ill to speak of Miss Tarlowe, except a few disappointed suitors who found her too particular in her notions. Maitland couldn’t fault her for that: getting legshackled was a serious enterprise. He’d allowed himself a year for the business.

It wouldn’t be the grandest match of the Season. The Tarlowes were solid country gentry, while the Maitlands were used to running the country. Nor would the gal bring any great riches or vast estates, which suited Lee to a cow’s thumb. He had more than he could do handling his own properties and investments. Any dowry Miss Tarlowe brought would only be settled on her children. His children.

For the first time since his brother Michael’s death, the idea of becoming a tenant for life grew more appealing. As he watched her swirl through the paces of a
contra danse
with some spotted youth, Lee was convinced Miss Tarlowe would make him an excellent wife.