Lord of Secrets (8 page)

“He must be.” Rosalie wished she could have thought of a more cogent reply, or at least one with a bit more spirit, but she hardly knew how to answer when everything Mrs. Howard said was true.

The older woman turned back to face her again. “If you were exceptionally accomplished or had dazzling connections, I might be able to see it, but...well.”

It was precisely the reaction Rosalie had dreaded. Mrs. Howard seemed to take it as a personal affront that Rosalie had refused to be Lady Whitwell for her friends in New York, but was now prepared to be the Marchioness of Deal for David.

Rosalie fidgeted with her skirts, wanting to offer some protest.
I
can
be
useful
to
him
.
I
can
look
after
him
and
make
him
comfortable
and
see
he
isn’t
alone
anymore
. But she didn’t think those arguments would count for much when Mrs. Howard considered her unfit even to serve as a paid companion.

“You’re a pretty child, but a man like that grows bored quickly.” Mrs. Howard pulled on her gloves—Rosalie’s gloves, the yellow kid Papa had given her as a birthday present in Florence. “I don’t know how you managed to convince him you were worth taking on, but I shudder to think what he’ll do when he realizes his mistake.” Fastening the buttons at her wrist, she glanced up to skewer Rosalie with a look. “I say these things not to hurt you, my dear, but just to open your eyes while there’s still time. Given that I agreed out of the kindness of my heart to be your chaperone, I should hate for anyone to blame me when this marriage ends up a miserable failure.”

* * *

David stepped off the
Neptune’s
Fancy
and back onto English soil on a bright June afternoon, certain he’d made a ghastly mistake.

There was a great deal to do before the wedding could take place—inform the staff at both Deal House and Lyningthorp that they could expect a new mistress, meet with his solicitors to draw up the marriage contracts, procure a license. He supposed he owed his heir presumptive, a second cousin he’d encountered only a handful of times in his life, the courtesy of a face-to-face call to break the news. In the meantime, his bride-to-be planned to stay with her aunt and uncle in the family’s London town house for the week or two necessary to complete the wedding arrangements. David had already extracted a promise from a befuddled Rosalie that she would take care never to be alone with the new Lord Whitwell.

But even as he went over the list of details in his head, David found it difficult to concentrate on such practical matters. With every passing hour, he grew more and more convinced he should never have asked Rosalie to marry him in the first place.

They’d parted company with just a few polite words, not only because they’d been forced to take their leave before an audience of disembarking fellow passengers, but also because he’d preferred it that way. He didn’t trust himself alone with Rosalie after the impetuousness of the kiss they’d shared.

True, it had been only a kiss, and in retrospect he should have expected the kind of physical response it had brought on. She’d been straining up against him, so soft and sweet and passionate it would’ve been a miracle if he
hadn’t
been aroused. The disturbing part was the emotion he’d experienced when he realized what effect she was having on him—alarm. A bit of belated decorum, too, of course, but mostly that pervasive sense of shock, as if he’d caught himself raping the girl with a hand clapped over her mouth to stifle her screams instead of merely kissing her.

Well, he deserved to feel shocked. When he’d pulled her into his arms, he’d sensed both her surprise and her inexperience. True, she’d quickly relaxed against him, even returned his ardor—but only because she’d trusted him enough not to question what they were doing.

He didn’t want her trusting him. He knew himself too well. Other people in his life had trusted him, and he’d rarely lived up to their trust.

How could he marry Rosalie—sweet, innocent Rosalie—when she didn’t know the first thing about this character? He must have been half-mad to offer for her. What if she were to find out the truth about him, about his past and the things he was capable of? He couldn’t bear the thought of her knowing. But how could he possibly keep the knowledge from her for the rest of their lives together? How could he marry her in good conscience if she didn’t know?

He couldn’t. He had only two choices—either confess the truth about himself to Rosalie, or find some way out of the corner he’d backed himself into.

Chapter Six

Oh, what portents are these?
Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not.

—
William Shakespeare

Thanks to the speed of the Royal Mail, news of her father’s death preceded Rosalie to London. By the time she arrived on the doorstep of Whitwell House with her brassbound trunk strapped to the back of a hired hack, her aunt and uncle had already taken up residence there.

Alone in her old bedroom, Rosalie was unpacking her belongings when a soft noise from the corridor drew her attention. A boy was peering through the open door at her—a boy of about eight, with tousled light brown hair and freckles. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected her aunt Whitwell’s natural son to look like, but the discovery that he appeared scrubbed and neatly dressed, not to mention every bit as curious about her as she was about him, made Rosalie smile. “Why, you must be Nate. Do come in. I’m your cousin Rosalie.”

A look of uncertainty crossed his face, but he took a step into the room. He wore a pair of high-waisted black trousers and a close-fitting green coat. “We’re not really cousins. Cook says we can’t be when Papa Whitwell isn’t my real father.” He stared down at the floor and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don’t have one.”

Something in the boy’s self-conscious posture tugged at her heart. “I don’t have a father, either, now. And I haven’t had a mother since I was about your age.”

He looked up sharply, his expression suggesting that not having a mother was the worst fate he could imagine. “You haven’t?”

Rosalie understood his look of dismay. She’d been anxious about sharing a house with her aunt. From everything Charlie had told her, she’d expected a woman of vulgar manners and vicious character.

Rosalie couldn’t deny her aunt Whitwell’s manners were sadly unpolished. The lady had a regrettable accent, and she spoke in the same carrying tone she must have used on stage to reach the theatergoers in the back row. Her gowns appeared likewise tailored for the stage, for they were eye-popping combinations of low-cut garish fabric and ostentatious trimming. She snorted when she laughed, and she liked to punch Uncle Roger on the arm and call him
you
old
dog
.

But none of that mattered to Rosalie, for it turned out her aunt Whitwell was also one of the kindest women she’d ever met. Rosalie had no sooner stepped out of the hack carriage and onto the pavement before Whitwell House than her aunt had come flying out to envelop her in a fierce, jasmine-scented hug. She’d peppered Rosalie with expressions of sympathy at the loss of her father, her eyes growing misty as she spoke. Before Rosalie could come upstairs and unpack, her aunt had made her take some refreshment, begging even as she plied Rosalie with tea and macaroons that she be allowed to help her assemble her trousseau. Beneath Aunt Whitwell’s brassy demeanor beat a heart of pure gold.

“No, my mother died when I was ten,” Rosalie told the boy. “I haven’t any brothers or sisters, either. If you don’t mind, I’d like to pay no heed to what Cook said and to think of you as my cousin. We’re cousins-in-law at the very least.”

Nate brightened. “I don’t mind. Are you going to live here from now on, too?”

“Only for a little while. I’m to be married soon, and then I’ll go to live with my husband.” Her
husband
. Just saying the word gave Rosalie a warm, happy feeling.

“I’ll wager he’s handsome.” The boy took a step closer. “Do you play dominos?”

“Yes, and backgammon and chess, too.”

“Chess? The one with the knights and the castles? Could you teach me to play?”

“Only if you promise to let me win now and then.”

They went on talking while she unpacked. Rosalie soon gleaned that he had no one his own age to play with at Whitwell House. He’d tried to befriend the neighbors’ children, but Bruton Street society had closed its doors to him—”On account of not approving of Mama,” he said, looking simultaneously wounded and fiercely protective of his mother’s honor.

“Well, if they don’t approve of your mother then they’re probably not worth knowing, are they?” Rosalie reasoned.

“I’m going away to school next year, and Mama says I’ll make friends there. She says she’ll miss me, but I’ll learn a lot and I shan’t get in Papa Whitwell’s way at school. He doesn’t like me very much.”

Rosalie had to resist a strong urge to gather the boy into her arms. Her own experience of school had been miserable. Then again, she’d had a father she loved and admired, while Uncle Roger was—well, he was a drunkard. Though Rosalie preferred to make up her own mind rather than listen to gossip, it hadn’t taken her more than a few minutes to reach the unwelcome conclusion. Not only did his breath reek of alcohol, but one could see it in his florid face. He walked with an unsteady gait and slurred his speech.

Poor Nate, to be trapped between the rock of staying at Whitwell House with a father-in-law who didn’t love him and the hard place of having to leave his mother to go away to school.

What a strange and fateful world it was, when children had no more control over who raised them than they had over the roll of a die, yet it made all the difference to their happiness.

* * *

David passed the week before the wedding brooding on what he ought to do—sometimes convincing himself he’d be able to make a marriage to Rosalie work, sometimes certain it would be a disaster. Doubts plagued him whenever they were together. Though he declined to attend church with her, he collected her after the service on Sunday and drove her home to her family’s house. He took her out driving in the park twice, and again to see the Elgin Marbles. Each time, he went intending to tell her he’d made a serious mistake and it would be wrong for them to marry. Each time, she smiled up at him with her steady, trusting gaze, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

The week slipped by until, just two days before the ceremony, he woke to the troubling awareness it was his last chance to speak frankly with her. To wait until the very eve of the wedding would be too cruel. If he was ever going to tell her about himself, he had to do it that day.

He passed the morning preoccupied and fidgeting. He resolved over and over to go and broach the matter before another hour passed. Even so, dinner came and went, and still he hadn’t acted on his resolution. The least excuse seemed reason enough to put it off.

He was in his library, nursing his third glass of claret and finding it impossible to concentrate on his book—a depressing German book of philosophy he was probably better off not reading—when the clock struck half past nine. Every toll felt like a reproach.

It’s
now
or
never
. A touch of the vaunted Linney determination stiffened his spine. What right would he have to even the smallest shred of self-respect, if he let her go on thinking he was some kind of knight in shining armor? He cast the book aside and rang for a hack.

Not twenty minutes later, he was waiting in the new Lord Whitwell’s drawing room, pacing the Turkey carpet in front of the fireplace. Suddenly, the paneled doors flew open and Rosalie burst into the room.

She was dressed in her black crepe dinner gown, still clutching his calling card in her hand. “What is it?” she asked, a trifle breathlessly. “Should I fetch my aunt Whitwell to chaperone, or did you wish to speak to me alone?”

The suddenness of her arrival had taken him by surprise, and for a moment he was too startled to speak. “Alone, if you have no objection.”

“What’s wrong, David?”

“Nothing.” He strove for something approaching nonchalance. “That is, nothing alarming has happened.”

She brightened, the tautness going out of her posture. “Well, that’s a relief. I didn’t know what to think when the footman brought in your card. You’ve never before turned up unexpectedly, certainly not at nearly ten at night and wishing to speak to me privately. I worried perhaps—”

“Rosalie, don’t marry me.”

He was sure she would draw back and freeze him with a look of dismay. After all, the wedding was less than two days away, and here he was, crying off.

Instead she laughed her light, musical laugh. “Oh, David. Have you come down with a case of bachelor jitters?”

“I mean it. Don’t. Not if you want to be happy. I’m telling you now, while I still have the nerve to say it. I’m no good, Rosalie.”

It wasn’t what he’d intended to say at all. He’d thought to treat the conversation as a sort of negotiation, a formal give-and-take in which he would explain the nature of his misgivings and they would forge some sort of mutually agreeable arrangement—a financial settlement, most likely, or perhaps a marriage of convenience. Instead he’d blurted out his innermost thoughts.
Don’t
marry
me
.
I’m
no
good
.

A look of uncertainty crossed her face. “You’re no good? So...you do still want to marry me, then?”

He glanced down and noted with a strange detachment that he was clutching the back of the sofa between them in a white-knuckled grip. “Of course I want to marry you. But I don’t believe I’m cut out for marriage. Perhaps it’s in my blood—they say my father was mad—I don’t know. I only know that if you marry me, I’ll end up hurting you.”

This was a mistake. Yet he wasn’t sure exactly which mistake he was regretting—having asked her to marry him, or having come to her tonight, spouting disjointed objections.

She smiled with a look of patient indulgence, the kind of look one might give a small child who insisted monsters were hiding under the bed. “In what way will you hurt me?”

He shook his head. “I can’t say. I’ll wrong you somehow, though. I know it. I’ll be unfaithful to you, most likely, or—or do something to you, something despicable. You mustn’t marry me.”

Her smile had faded, though there was no hint of coldness in her eyes. “Then why did you offer for me, if you were so sure of this?”

“I don’t know.” He turned away to stand rigidly in the middle of the room. “It made sense at the time, when we were at sea. I thought you should have a home of your own and the protection of marriage.”

“And you cared for me?”

“Yes.” He turned back to her, surprised by the doubtful note in her voice. “Of course.”

Her smile returned. “Has any of that changed?”

“No. Or—yes. I realized it was wrong, that I was being selfish. There are things I haven’t told you about myself.”

She sat on the gold damask sofa and looked up at him, folding her hands together in her lap. “Then tell me.”

He darted a glance at her, a sweet-voiced girl dressed modestly in mourning, and he could sense his resolve weaken. “I’m trying to, but I can’t just—” Restless, he began pacing again. “I’m no good, that’s all. There’s something wrong with me.”

“Have you murdered anyone? Stolen some poor widow’s life savings?”

He gave her an imploring look. “Be serious.”

“Very well, then, are you prone to violence? Do you think you might beat me, or strike me?”

“No, I—” He stopped, at a loss how to go on. “Jove! I can’t just come out and say it, as if I were confessing to nothing more than a drawing room
faux
pas
.”

She studied him with a look of sympathy. “David, does this have something to do with your past and...other women?”

“Yes.” His eyes flew to hers gratefully. “Yes, that’s it exactly.”

She lowered her gaze to her hands. “I can’t pretend any lady really wishes to hear such things about her prospective husband, but men are expected to sow a few wild oats before marriage, are they not? I know that, and I don’t fault you for it, especially when we hadn’t even met until just a short time ago. Besides, you live so quietly, I’m sure your past can’t be so very bad.”

“No. Don’t be so quick to excuse my past when you know next to nothing about it.”

A flicker of curiosity crossed her face, but after a moment’s hesitation, she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, David. I trust you.”

“Then stop trusting me!”

The words came out with such vehemence, for a moment Rosalie looked as startled as he felt. Then she drew a deep breath. “Whatever it is, whatever you’ve done or not done, it doesn’t matter. Not as long as you care for me.”

He closed his eyes. “Make me tell you, Rosalie. Perhaps I can confess it if you ask it of me.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I don’t know what I want. I want to keep you safe from me, from all the ways I could hurt you, I know that much. But if I tell you...” He trailed off. “I’m not sure I can bear the look on your face when you learn what kind of man I really am.”

“Then tell me when you feel ready.” Her voice was once again the soothing murmur of a mother reassuring a fretful child. “Until then, I have faith in you.”

He studied her for several long seconds, his heart heavy, before his shoulders slumped in defeat. “I can’t do it.” He shook his head. “I thought I could, but... When we’re not together I forget what it’s like talking to you, how young and hopeful you are. If you won’t make me tell you, I can’t. But remember this night. Someday, when you come to regret marrying me, remember that I did try to warn you.”