Lord of Secrets (6 page)

Charlie’s usually amiable face assumed lines of unaccustomed sternness. “I wish you would listen to yourself. He’s not some shy little boy who needs a smile and a pat on the head. He’s a haughty, stiff-necked devil, accountable to no one. It’s past time you gave up on the man and let him be. Anyone else would have done it long ago.”

Charlie didn’t often lose his temper with her. Her shoulders drooped. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was making a cake of myself.”

Fortunately, Charlie was too softhearted to stay cross with her for long. “Now, I didn’t say that. I know you mean well. It’s just that you give people more credit than they deserve.”

“Like Lord Deal.” She hadn’t meant to embarrass Charlie, especially in front of the other passengers. But she couldn’t have been mistaken about Lord Deal’s kindness those two times they’d talked together, could she? She was certain he’d been genuinely concerned about her. Or was that only wishful thinking?

Charlie put an arm around her shoulders. “I wasn’t trying to scold you, or imply you’d done anything improper. I understand what you were about. You simply thought the fellow needed rescuing.”

Rosalie nodded glumly, even if Charlie had it wrong. Why would she think she could rescue Lord Deal, when she couldn’t even rescue herself? Only a week remained until the
Neptune’s
Fancy
was due to reach Liverpool. She was torn between wishing the voyage over and dreading the changes she’d face once they arrived in England and news of her father’s death became public. Uncle Roger would assume Papa’s dignities, and her aunt Whitwell would become mistress of Beckford Park, as well as the town house in Mayfair. If the two of them took her in, her reputation was bound to suffer. And she’d be nothing more than a superfluous relation, a spinster hanger-on, an unwanted dependent in the very house in which she’d been born. If she were lucky, she might be able to find work in one of the few genteel occupations open to young ladies, or carve out a role for herself as a sort of quasi-governess to her aunt’s little boy. Neither prospect promised much permanence or security.

Then there was the alternative, that Mrs. Howard would hire her as a companion. For the past week the older woman had been going back and forth on the idea, one day seemingly pleased with the notion, the next day convinced Rosalie’s gaucherie was bound to outweigh her usefulness. Rosalie knew very little about Mrs. Howard’s life in New York. She wasn’t sure how she would fit in, or where in the social spectrum she would fall between family and servant.

Those were her only alternatives, at least for the present—living with Uncle Roger or working for Mrs. Howard on the other side of the ocean. Strictly speaking, there was nothing solitary about either life, yet both options left her feeling very much alone.

Perhaps that was why she felt so drawn to Lord Deal. He had no one, and he seemed to prefer it that way—to prefer it despite abundant evidence that he took a personal interest in the people around him.

Rosalie wished she knew his secret.

* * *

The problem with secrets, the really comfortless thing about them, was that they never went away.

David lay in his berth, staring up at the blue glimmer of the sea reflected on the planking above him. For years now, he’d been choosing his every word with care, imagining the looks of condemnation he would meet with if, by some false step, he inadvertently revealed too much about himself. One day he would be an old man, gray and stooped, and he would still be covering his tracks, still wondering if others could sense his guilt, still shaping his life to hide what he really was.

Not that he ever lied outright. He’d made a promise to himself on the day he attained his majority that he would never utter another falsehood again. Still, dissembling had become a habit with him—showing the world one face, while knowing his true nature to be different. It had gone on so long, he wasn’t sure whether he possessed the ability to be completely himself anymore.

That was why it made more sense to live alone—no evasions, no complications, no one to lie to or betray. He’d grown accustomed to spending his evenings alone in an armchair with a book, his spaniel dozing at his feet.

Except Burr was dead now. He kept forgetting that.

No, he wasn’t meant for company and warm domestic life, and he couldn’t allow his attraction to Miss Whitwell to get out of hand. Even if she did have shining eyes and porcelain skin and the kind of sweet, uncertain smile that made him want to kiss her until her lips were swollen from kissing, those were only body parts. Every woman in the world had eyes and skin and lips. And her laugh, infectious and musical—that was more than a body part, perhaps, but what kind of simpleton imagined himself in love with a special laugh?

Better to keep his distance. Just because he thought about her and felt responsible for her and was acutely conscious of her every second they were in the same room...well, that was no reason to forget how foolhardy it would be to let down his guard. He had more than twenty years of secrets to protect.

Twenty
years
. He sighed, remembering the first conscious deception he’d practiced on his uncle Frederick. It had been only a small falsehood, but then, he’d been barely ten years old.

“What’s wrong with you, Deal?” his uncle had asked him as they sat down to dinner, only a month or so after his father’s suicide.

David was still unused to answering to his new title, and he looked up from his plate with a distracted air. “Wrong with me, sir?”

“That sniffing sound you just made.” His uncle wore a disapproving scowl. “And your nose is red. I hope you’re not going to turn into one of those pale, sickly types always suffering from catarrh.”

“No, sir. Perhaps I’m coming down with the grippe.”

“Good, because there’s nothing more irritating than chronic catarrh, all that sniffing and throat-clearing all the time. I knew a fellow at Oxford once who was always sniffing, and I couldn’t abide his company for more than five minutes at a time.”

David agreed that such mannerisms were indeed unfortunate, and carefully refrained from further comment. He was afraid his uncle would realize that, not a quarter of an hour before, he’d been crying, and for a selfish and rather mercenary reason. He’d lost his father’s watch, the one he’d been entrusted with on the day of the funeral, the one bearing an enamel miniature of his mother on the case. On top of the shocks and alterations of the past month, discovering he’d lost this most treasured possession had seemed the final straw, and he’d given way to a childish bout of tears.

His aunt Celeste had been passing by his rooms on her way to dinner, and she must have heard his quiet sniffling. Stepping into his room, she’d closed the door carefully behind her. “What’s wrong, David?”

He dragged a sleeve across his eyes. “Nothing, Aunt Celeste.”

She regarded him from the doorway, wearing a faint, indulgent smile. “Poor David. Always feeling everything so strongly.”

His face went rigid with embarrassment. It wasn’t the Linney way to feel things. Tears and temper might be overlooked in lesser mortals, but not in one of England’s greatest families. Stories were still told of his ancestors’ legendary stoicism—of the medieval Linney who, despite an arrow in his neck, had engaged in hand-to-hand combat from sunup to sundown rather than give ground on the snowy fields of Towton, of the Royalist leader who’d died under torture rather than reveal the names of his fellow anti-Cromwell conspirators. It was how a Linney was supposed to live, and how one was supposed to die.

Aunt Celeste came to sit beside him on his bed, eyeing him in her sympathetic way. “There’s no harm in crying around
me
, David, but you mustn’t let anyone else see you this way. Especially your uncle Frederick. He wouldn’t like it, I’m afraid. You’re in his charge now, and he means to raise you to be worthy of your position.”

Mortified, David dashed away a last betraying tear with the heel of his hand. “I know.”

“It still hurts him that your father gave in to his demons the way he did. You must show him you’re made of stronger stuff.”

“Yes. I will.” David’s voice was raspy.

His aunt smiled. “Good. I know you want to make him proud—though you need never pretend around me. Remember that. Whatever you may think or feel or do, whatever mistakes you might make, you can trust me. Do you believe that?”

“Yes, Aunt Celeste.”

“Then you needn’t worry I mean to tell your uncle about this.” She’d patted his knee, then risen and gone on down to dinner, pulling the door closed softly behind her.

David had watched her go, feeling simultaneously cleansed and burdened by his tears. On the one hand, it had felt good to let his composure slip for a few minutes, to ease the coil of loss and bewilderment that had been tightening inside him since the moment his father had pulled the trigger. On the other hand, he was ashamed he’d been caught crying. He knew the duty he owed his name and title. And his uncle and aunt had made great sacrifices for his sake, giving up their old lives in London to come to Lyningthorp and assume his guardianship. He wanted to be worthy of that sacrifice.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy to be worthy. From that day on, he had lied to his uncle Frederick nearly every time they spoke.

Chapter Four

Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.

—
William Shakespeare

Doing his best not to be too obvious about the direction of his gaze, David watched as Miss Whitwell followed Mrs. Howard from the dining saloon.

Others were more open in their admiration. Colonel Grandy, the retired army officer sitting on his right, sighed theatrically and turned to Mr. McLeish, the wine merchant. “There goes the only sight worth looking at on this whole blighted ship.”

“Fetching little thing, isn’t she?”

“A bit too young for me, I acknowledge,” the colonel said, “but it does no harm to look.”

David pushed the remains of his dinner about on his plate. A bit too young, indeed. He knew Grandy wasn’t talking about Mrs. Howard, and the man was fifty if he was a day.

“Lovely girl—sweet as a violet,” McLeish said. “It’s a shame about her father.”

The colonel gave a sage nod. “A tragedy. One day he’s entertaining the entire company with his stories, and the next he’s food for the fishes. Ah, well. ‘Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow,’ as some wise man once said.”

Not for the first time, David wished he could be deaf to the conversation around him. It nagged at him, the way the two men were discussing Miss Whitwell and her loss as if they had some proprietary stake in her.

The colonel shot a wary glance to where young Charles Templeton sat at the other end of the table. He dropped his voice to a confidential murmur. “I feel for the girl. I knew Roger Whitwell—the new Lord Whitwell, that is—at Cambridge. He was sent down for drunkenness in chapel. To speak frankly, I never imagined he would outlive his brother. I’d have wagered that if the drink didn’t finish him off first, some jealous husband or father would put a bullet through his heart.”

“An unpleasant character, eh?” McLeish said.

David speared a mushroom with his fork and tried not to look interested.

“Genial enough in conversation, but a very loose fish. He and the girl’s father had a falling-out, years ago. If the gossip I heard is true, Roger Whitwell made a bit too free with his brother’s wife.”

McLeish’s square, weather-beaten face registered shock. “You mean before he married her, I hope.”

“No, after. She was a beauty—made her come-out the same year as my sister Emmy, and cast all the girls that year into the shade. Whitwell married her and brought her home, where his brother was cooling his heels, owing to that chapel business. The rumor was, Roger Whitwell cornered the poor girl on a staircase and tried to have his way with her.”

“Good Lord!”

“Whitwell threw him out, naturally, but that wasn’t the end of his wildness. He married a Covent Garden actress, and now he runs with Lord Allen’s set. He’s made himself unwelcome under more than one roof. Not five miles from my house in Hertfordshire, he got a sixteen-year-old chambermaid with child.”

David’s mouth went so dry he could hardly choke down the piece of chicken he was chewing. Miss Whitwell had insisted the new Lord Whitwell was not that bad. Instead the man was even worse than David had imagined.

Thank God she’d mentioned taking a position as paid companion to Mrs. Howard. It had sounded like a joyless proposition, but now...

David reached for his wineglass, his fingers curling tightly about the stem. If Roger Whitwell had attempted to violate his brother’s wife—his own sister-in-law—what would prevent him from taking similar liberties with his niece, a strikingly lovely girl still in the first blush of youth? What possible defense could Miss Whitwell have against such a man? Alone and trusting, she’d be at the mercy of—

But she wasn’t going to be. She was going to work for Mrs. Howard. Besides, David had no place in Miss Whitwell’s life, no authority to step in. He would never even have met the girl if he hadn’t taken the foolish notion into his head to go sailing halfway around the world. And for all he knew, the rumors about Roger Whitwell might be nothing but idle gossip. Whitwell could be entirely blameless of the charge Colonel Grandy had just laid at his door.

Or Grandy might not know the half of it.

David downed his wine, doing his best to shake off his worries. He was focusing on the direst possible scenario, when Miss Whitwell had already solved the problem of her future. She would be safe with Mrs. Howard. One look at that gorgon was bound to frighten off any man with the least hint of mischief on his mind. Of course, poor Miss Whitwell would probably face a lesser brand of misery, fetching and carrying for that woman. She’d be browbeaten and slighted. But at least she’d be out of harm’s way.

David pushed his plate aside and sat back with a frown. He had no business fretting over Miss Whitwell, no right to interfere in her life. They were nothing to each other.

Perhaps if he repeated the words to himself often enough, he might even come to believe them.

* * *

Mrs. Howard led the way as she and Rosalie approached their connecting cabins. “You’ll read to me again this evening, won’t you, Miss Whitwell? We can pick up where we left off with
Ivanhoe
.”

“If you like, ma’am.”

“Dear girl. Only I do hope you won’t read
every
word this time. It would go so much faster if you would only skip over the tedious, unimportant parts.”

“I’ll do my best.”

As they stopped before the door to her quarters, Mrs. Howard winced and pressed a hand to her side. “I told you that vinegar cure of yours wasn’t going to work. The old pain is back, though I’ve been watching my diet most scrupulously.”

Since they shared a dinner table, Rosalie knew very well Mrs. Howard hadn’t been watching her diet, unless perhaps
watching
meant observing the chicken velouté and potato croquettes as she lifted them to her mouth. But who could blame her? Rosalie’s father had been the same way. Passengers had so few pleasures to divert them on an ocean crossing.

They went in. Rosalie lit a candle as Mrs. Howard toed off her slippers and stretched out on her berth with a sigh of relaxation. It hadn’t taken Mrs. Howard long to put her stamp on her new quarters, the second of the connecting cabins that had formerly belonged to Lord Deal. Curling papers and rouge pots cluttered the dresser, and the odor of camphorated oil mingled with the omnipresent smells of sea air and damp. Her workbasket sat where she’d left it beside her unmade berth, ribbons and lace spilling out onto the floor. Rosalie wondered what the marquess, always so spartan and immaculate, would think if he could see his former cabin now.

Retrieving Mrs. Howard’s copy of
Ivanhoe
from its place on her dresser, Rosalie perched on the bedside stool and opened to the page she’d marked. “Where were we? Oh, yes, Reginald Front-de-Boeuf was holding Isaac of York captive in a dungeon, threatening to roast him alive unless he paid a ransom of a thousand pounds.” She cleared her throat. “‘
Take all that you have asked,’ said he, ‘Sir Knight
—
take ten times more
—
reduce me to ruin and to beggary, if thou wilt
—
nay, pierce me with thy poniard, broil me on that furnace, but spare my daughter, deliver her in safety and honor!’
”

Mrs. Howard yawned. “I’ll miss your reading to me this way once we reach England, Miss Whitwell.”

She said it so lightly, Rosalie might not have caught the finality behind the words if she hadn’t been on tenterhooks for Mrs. Howard’s decision. She lowered the book to her lap. “But—do you mean to say you’ve made up your mind, then, about engaging me as your companion?”

Mrs. Howard gave Rosalie a thin, apologetic smile. “I’m afraid so. I know you had your heart set on it, my dear, but I just can’t justify taking you on when I have three daughters-in-law at home with prior claims on my attention.”

Rosalie regarded her in dismay. “But I thought you didn’t get on with your daughters-in-law.”

“And I don’t. Two are widgeons with scarcely a word to say for themselves, and the third is a brass-faced hussy. Not a one is good enough for my boys. But if I had no excuse to call on them or have them come to me, they would lose the benefit of my counsel, and then what kind of mother would I be to my sons?”

“Oh.” The single meaningless syllable was all Rosalie could manage in her disappointment. True, the decision meant she wouldn’t have to move to New York after all. She wouldn’t be working for Mrs. Howard, never knowing when or if she would see Charlie again. But it also meant she had no choice now but to throw herself on her uncle’s charity.

“And besides, dear, I don’t really need you.” Mrs. Howard’s voice took on a faintly lecturing tone. “We’re more egalitarian in America, you see. We’re not above asking servants to thread our needles and fetch our physics. Why, I have a maid who reads almost as well as you do.”

Rosalie didn’t know how to answer. She had the disquieting sense Mrs. Howard had been taking advantage of her. After all, Rosalie had nursed her through innumerable ailments, done her mending, read aloud to her and even lent the lady her gloves and jewelry. If not for Mrs. Howard, she might even have been with her father on the night he died. Rosalie gulped. Was she really so anxious to find a place that she was willing to let Mrs. Howard use her so ungratefully?

But Rosalie also had the depressing sense that she had no one to blame but herself if Mrs. Howard didn’t want her. Charlie had said that the older woman treated her like a servant, but it was worse than that. A maid’s wages were more economical than a companion’s salary—and, lacking any real distinctions or accomplishments of her own, Rosalie had nothing but companionship to offer. It seemed she didn’t fit in anywhere, being too wellborn to work as an actual servant but too ordinary to mix with Mrs. Howard and her friends.

Dully, she picked up the book and resumed her reading. “‘
As
thou
art
born
of
woman
,
spare
the
honor
of
a
helpless
maiden
—
She
is
the
image
of
my
deceased
Rachel
,
she
is
the
last
of
six
pledges
of
her
love
—
Will
you
deprive
a
widowed
husband
of
his
sole
remaining
comfort
?
’
” The words blurred on the page, and Rosalie’s voice cracked. She looked up. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Howard. I can’t read any more right now.”

Casting the book aside, Rosalie bolted from the cabin.

* * *

David strolled the deck, hoping to walk off a little of his restlessness. The sun was sinking, and the second dog watch, the last shift of crewmen before dark, were setting up the ship’s rigging for the night. As the men worked, tightening the slack lines and adjusting the sails, their distant shouts punctuated the soft lap of the waves.

David had just passed the companionway when a softer sound—a muffled sob—made him turn. Miss Whitwell was emerging from below. When she caught sight of him, she froze, then made to go back the way she’d come.

“No, wait.” Why did he call out to her? Was it simple curiosity about the sob he’d heard—or was it the odd lurch his heart had taken the moment he’d spotted her?

She paused in her retreat but didn’t come any closer.

“Please, tell me what’s wrong.” What was it she’d said to him on the night she’d urged him to join her at dinner? “I promise I don’t bite, Miss Whitwell.”

She threw him an uncertain glance but hesitantly came up the remaining steps to join him. Whatever the reason for her tears, she was doing her best to present the appearance of composure. She lifted her chin, blinking rapidly.

He had a disquieting vision of himself, ten years old and struggling with all his might not to cry in front of his uncle Frederick. “Whatever has you upset, perhaps I can help.”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do. Besides, it’s nothing so very calamitous. Mrs. Howard informed me she won’t be needing my services as her companion.”

An hour ago, David would have welcomed the news. Not have to wait hand and foot on that old harridan? Miss Whitwell should have been giddy with relief. But now that David knew more about the girl’s uncle, a chill went through him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”