Lord of Regrets (2 page)

Chapter Two

Five years later

Marcus stared at the gate to Templeton House. The wrought iron dated back to the seventeenth century. It was all that had remained of the house after the Great Fire, and had been moved to Golden Square when that land was developed and the current house built. Marcus nodded to the footman in gray serge who opened the gate for him, and then he walked up the carriage lane to the house. As he climbed the three shallow stone steps, another precisely dressed footman opened one of the great arched wooden doors.

Marcus was expected, but as usual, he was still made to wait a good ten minutes in the cold, dimly lit entryway, staring at the life-size portrait of his great-great-grandfather Templeton and seven spaniels.

His cousin Charlotte had once called Marcus’s house in Grosvenor Square a mausoleum. To Marcus, the house in which his grandfather lived contained far more the stuff of death. With only Lord Landsdowne in residence, the house mostly
was
a cold museum, right down to the yellow salon, which had become a shrine to Marcus’s late grandmother.

It was the library, however, to which the footman led Marcus. Two stories of leather-bound tomes and three tall, narrow swaths of draperies made the cavernous room appear even larger. Two fireplaces worked to heat the space.

In the middle of the room, in his Bath chair and wrapped in blankets, sat his formidable grandfather.

“Marcus.” One pale hand lifted into the air. The ring on his grandfather’s third finger winked in the firelight.

“You look well, my lord.”

His grandfather grimaced. “Well? How well am I to be when my bones are frozen?”

Marcus shrugged with a wry smile. He widened his stance, clasped his hands behind his back, bracing himself for the conversation.

“And you’ve dragged your mother and little Charlotte up here to London with you, in January, when no one, not a single heiress, has left her cozy holiday abode.”

“I haven’t come to London to pursue a wife, my lord. I’m here on business.”

His grandfather sneered. “You’d do better the other way. Think you can escape marrying, or worse, marry your cousin? You cannot take care of all my estates on that pittance you call earnings.”

“It’s hardly a pittance, Grandfather, but I do appreciate your concern for my well-being and happiness.”

“Thirty is coming soon.”

Marcus looked away, swallowing down the sudden nausea. Ironic that he had come up against the second codicil of his grandfather’s will: that he marry before his thirtieth birthday. While the man’s death was hardly imminent, his grandfather showed no signs of amending the ridiculous document, and thus Marcus had six short months to find a bride. Marcus had spent five years trying to find the one he wanted, and if he couldn’t get over her, he might lose the very fortune for which he had thrown Natasha away. Of course, fulfilling codicil two could hardly matter when he’d already gone against codicil one, had a child out of wedlock. This will was a farce. Would be proven a farce when Marcus inherited even after having broken its commandments.

His grandfather may have wanted to ensure that Marcus didn’t die an early death like his father. Only then, he’d have to contract syphilis, and that damned disease and his father’s promiscuity was the very reason the codicils in his grandfather’s will existed in the first place. He had brothers and sisters aplenty if one counted all the bastards with which his father had littered England. Seven that Marcus knew of.

And he, too, might have added to that lineage.

If the child lived
.

“The market isn’t safe. It is no different than gambling. You’re little better than your father.”

Marcus clenched his jaw, his patience gone. The manipulative old man managed to look frail and familiar.

“I don’t think you mean that,” Marcus said, biting back the stronger words he wished to say. He hated these interviews and hated more the thread of family loyalty that made him return even in the face of his grandfather’s disapproval. But Marcus also had come to view these meetings as miniature battles, as marks of his independence. The greater his grandfather’s ire, the greater Marcus’s success.

His grandfather jerked his chair, waving his hand toward the door forcefully.

“Go on and get out of here.”
There was the ire
. Marcus smiled, bowed, pivoted on his heel. As he walked to the door, he heard the
thud
of a cane on the carpet, the unmistakable efforts of his grandfather to stand. Despite himself, he turned, wondering if he should summon a servant. But instead he found the old man steady, pointing at him. “On Thursday, I expect you for dinner. I’m inviting Lord Langley and his daughter.”

Steady as an arrow that knows its course.

“I thought none of the heiresses were in London,” Marcus remarked dryly, taking care to shut the door behind him immediately after delivering the line.

He didn’t want to go home just yet. To sit with his mother across the table, eat soup and pheasant or whatever the meal would be that evening. Instead, he made his way to White’s, which he supposed was somewhat en route back to Grosvenor Square.

At the club, the conversation was of Napoleon, as it had been for years. He wasn’t friends with these men, though he knew them. There, at least, was Kirchfield, with whom he had gone to school and shared many a pleasant conversation. Marcus nodded and passed by the man, looking for a warm corner where he could have a drink.

He didn’t want to speak of Boney, of the constant back and forth of victories and losses. In his early youth, there had been summers abroad at his grandfather’s request, with the intent that he learn the diplomatic arts at the elbows of Britain’s finest. It had all seemed rather boring back then compared to the action on the field. In his last year at Eton, he’d enlisted as a private, attempting to pay his dues. Three months in, his grandfather had caught wind of it and hauled him back home from training.

There are many ways to serve one’s country
, his grandfather had said. Marcus had learned quickly that the only ways allowed were the ones that pleased the old man. He wondered sometimes if it were the chicken or the egg: had his grandfather’s demands made Marcus’s father rebel, or had Vincent Templeton’s actions triggered the earl’s controlling nature?

Of course, the whys hardly mattered, especially now that Marcus had almost freed himself from the constraints of his grandfather’s will. Between investing his annuities and quarterly allowance and actively engaging in his own successful soap business, Marcus’s coffers were filling up. Perhaps his product wasn’t quite as popular among the
ton
as Andrew Pears’s clear soap, but the use of rare flowers and fragrances had made Marcus’s soaps an exotic luxury and earned his products a sizable share of the market.

He preferred the citrus blend. However, the delicate fragrance was currently overshadowed by the more potent scent of the 1795 Glenturret whisky in his hand––a luxury that he could afford with no help from his grandfather. If at the end of these six months, Marcus returned to the family fold, so to speak, he would be doing so on his terms, out of his own volition and not his grandfather’s coercion.

Mostly. He would still have to marry someone to gain access to the unentailed family coffers, the wealth he had once thought necessary to keep the estates from poverty. On that point, the earl would not be swayed.

There was Kirchfield again, and another man with him. Marcus dragged himself from his thoughts to make the obligatory conversation. A round of drinks, of course.

Marcus finally stumbled into his house late, his fingers and cheeks numb from the cold. He brushed away the footman who would take his cape, not willing yet to give up its warmth. There were three letters on the salver, forwarded from the estate. He spread them across the silver plate idly, intending to look at them in the morning. Then his fingers thudded to a stop and he pulled up one letter.

The name on the back read Dunleavy.

Marcus had hired men to search for Natasha, had paid them well to scour the countryside––discreetly of course. He had only one man searching for her now; he’d called off the rest two years ago. Robert Dunleavy, however, still sent in his thin, weekly reports, and Marcus suspected that he was really paying for the man to drink his way around the country.

Dunleavy had sent his monthly report only the week before, and this additional letter was unusual. Marcus shrugged out of his cape, its weight suddenly unbearable, and handed it to the waiting footman. Then, his fingers tingling with pain as they thawed, he tore at the missive, striding to wall where the sconce shone a brighter light.

Lord Templeton,

I don’t wish to give you false hope, but I have found a woman who matches most of the particulars. Whose likeness is close to that of the miniature, whose accent is that of a woman who learned English at the feet of a foreigner, and who has a child of the age—a daughter.

A daughter!
Finally, the amorphous idea of a child began to take on a shape. He, she––a thousand times he had wondered even though he had known it to be foolishness. The first stirrings of––something––made him swallow hard.

This woman, who goes by the name Prothe, is known as a war widow, her husband dead in Salamanca. She came to live here in Little Parrington, a fishing village, three years ago. I was told she followed the drum before her husband’s death. They seem to live frugally, though well.

There is no sign of the fortune in jewels to which you referred. I await your direction.

Prothe.
There was nothing in the description to prove that this woman was Natasha. But surety thrummed through his veins and the iron box he had fastened around his heart sprang open.
She lived.

Clutching the letter in his hand, Marcus took the stairs two at a time. He swallowed the length of the hallway with his stride.

In his bedchamber, he yanked open the drawer of his dresser and pulled out one of the two final remnants of her existence in his life: a small, white square of lace-edged muslin, embroidered in white thread with an elaborate
N.

The smoky glass bottle that had once graced her bedroom table he had kept tightly stopped so none of the precious scent would evaporate into the air. Evaporate into the ether as she had. He picked it up. Rested his fingers on the stopper for one long, hesitant moment before he pulled it open. A drop of perfume hovered in the air and then fell to cloth. He raised his hands to his face––letter, handkerchief, and all––breathing in the bergamot fragrance she had preferred, and wept.

Chapter Three

Marcus eyed the tiny town that hugged the gently sloping hillside. Old Parrington lay like a cluster of well-organized barnacles on the coast of Norfolk. It was surrounded by farmlands, in the shadow of the Earl of Parrington’s country seat, and far from London. Impatient after three days of traveling across a frozen England, Marcus burned with the wonder of possibility.

Was Natasha really here?

His carriage rumbled across the winter-rutted road. The air, even with the glass of the windows closed, smelled pungent with the sea. As they came closer, the edifices grew larger and started to take shape. The wood rectangle that swung in the wind before the first building bore the sign of the Red Lion. Just as he thought to rap upon the side of the carriage and alert his man, the horses began to slow.

He forced himself away from the window and sat back against the seat. Shameful enough that his valet, Pell, bore witness to his agitation. The world, however, did not have to view such a display.

Marcus stepped out of the carriage and, holding his cape close against the wind, walked the ten steps to the inn door. It was an odd sort of building, more Dutch than English with its gables and tiled roof. Marcus had only a brief second to take in the carving of the wooden door before his groom, Phineas, was there opening it.

The interior of the inn was dark and welcoming. The common room of the posting house was empty, but he could hear loud conversation coming from what he presumed to be the taproom to the left.

It was not yet noon, but he’d been traveling for nearly five hours already, having left Norwich that morning. He was eager to stretch his legs, eat, and clear his head of the pounding ache that had settled in the back of his skull.

In the first days after she had disappeared, Natasha had been tracked from London to Exeter, to a shop where she had pawned some of the jewelry he had given her. Then the trail had been lost, every sign pointing to a departure from that city.

Of all the different phases of this five-year-long search, the last hours had been the hardest. Every inquisitive and fearful thought that he’d had in the last three days had repeated at a breakneck pace.

If it was indeed Natasha in this town, then she was now known as Mrs. Prothe. Had there ever truly been a Mr. Prothe? Had she married another man and let him give Marcus’s child his name? Dunleavy had not mentioned other children.

“Sir, welcome.” Marcus barely glanced at the man, yet another innkeeper, as he shrugged off his cape. He arranged for his room with the same indifference. These were the usual details, the menial tasks he needed to do away with so he could focus on the reason he was here. So he could find Natasha.

All of his instincts suspected that Prothe was a false front. The years, the dates, did not add up, unless she had convinced some dying soldier to give her his name.

In his fear, he had called her a whore all those years ago, but Marcus knew she was not. He had been her first lover.

Marcus hoped that he had been her last.

Would it matter if he hadn’t been? The thought stopped him yet again. For all these hundreds of days he had thought of her, longed for her, needed her. He’d been devastated by his own cowardice and by the loss of her. He had changed his life so that he’d never again have to be at the whim of his grandfather. Perhaps she had had another life entirely––midnight conversations with another man. Perhaps she even grieved for this Mr. Prothe more than she had felt for Marcus.

He awaited Dunleavy, ordered a fish stew––clearly the inn had a skilled cook––and itched to leave. When his meal was finished and Dunleavy had not yet arrived, Marcus left Pell to unpack his bags and strolled along the high street.

The village was small. Past the cobblestoned high street were lanes of hard-packed earth and tufted grass. The high street itself wasn’t much to speak of. A blacksmith, a fish curer who also, proclaimed a sign, doubled as a shoemaker, a grocer, draper, joiner, and so on. Still feeling the edges of a headache, he stepped inside the apothecary.

Which doubled as a shoemaker as well.

The shopkeeper eyed Marcus’s polished Hessians with wary interest and then shuffled behind the counter to his potions and tinctures, clearly deciding that was the focus of Marcus’s business.

“How may I help you, sir?” he asked. “Need you tooth powder or oil of daffodils? Tobacco?”

“No.”

Had there been a Mr. Prothe? Perhaps in all these years that Marcus had dreamed of Natasha, she had been blessed with a peaceful mind. He tried to push the encroaching thoughts away, to remember why he had entered this sweltering place.

The door opened. A man entered, wet, his arm bloody. It was a ghastly, vivid sight, and Marcus averted his gaze from the injury.

“Here, Sawsbury,” the man said, “do what you can for me, will you?”

The apothecary looked apologetically at Marcus before rushing around the counter with a towel to stem the flow of blood that dripped like slow, noisy rain onto the floor.

The door opened again and a child entered, so bundled in her winter clothes that only long strands of blond hair and wind-pinkened cheeks were visible. It was fast becoming a circus in the small, overheated shop.

“Hello, Mr. Sawsbury.” The girl padded in, clapping her mitten-clad hands together. “Oh, Mr. Frisk, you’ve been hurt! Are you going to sew him up?”

The man she called Frisk grunted.

“No, Leona,” the apothecary said, as he mixed ingredients into a bowl. “He’ll be fine all wrapped up with a poultice against infection. Where’s your mother?”

“I’ll return later,” Marcus said unnecessarily. Whether from the heat or the blood, he was beginning to need air more than he desired the headache powder.

As he turned to leave, the girl stared at him. Her glass-green eyes dominated her little face as she said in a rather large whisper, “Who is he, Mr. Sawsbury?”

The door opened again, bringing with it another rush of cold air and the jangling of the little doorbells.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Sawsbury.”

Marcus heard her voice before he saw her face, but then she turned ever so slightly, and beneath the wide brim of her bonnet––

Her eyes widened––green eyes a shade darker than emerald––and her lips parted. She swayed toward him, just as he shifted his balance, ready to move, to take her in his arms, to––

“Leona!” The moment broke. Marcus had no more than stepped forward once before Natasha had swept the girl up into her arms, yanked the door open, and fled into the street.

Natasha.

He reached the door just as it closed and flung it open again. The wind had picked up, nearly blinding him as he stepped outside. He raised his arm to his forehead, searching. The street was empty except for shopkeepers perched with curiosity in the doorways of their stores.

It felt like five years earlier all over again.

“Curious way you have with women, sir.”

The apothecary stood in the doorway, wiping his hands on a blood-speckled cloth.

“Templeton,” Marcus bit out. He was hardly in the mood for this. “Viscount Templeton.”

The title did its job, and Mr. Sawsbury looked down. “Was there anything I could do for you, my lord?”

Marcus’s headache was gone. His very intentions were gone, too. In their place, a surging energy––the sort of nauseous excitement one felt in the wake of a brush with danger––thrummed through him. He had seen her. He knew unequivocally that she lived. That she lived here in Little Parrington.

The shopkeeper’s expression changed, the cast of suspicion slowly shadowing it. Marcus would find no assistance there. But Dunleavy would have Natasha’s direction. Marcus needed to find the man. He needed to collect himself.

He needed to hope that in the intervening time Natasha would not run.

“No,” he said flatly to the shopkeeper and then pivoted on his heel.