The Dangerous Viscount (28 page)

“That was yesterday. Today
is
later.”

“I don’t understand. What business was so urgent that he couldn’t take the time to escort his pregnant wife?”

“As I explained, I shall take the journey in very easy stages and Chantal will look after me. I shall hire outriders in Shrewsbury so there isn’t the least reason for you to worry.”

“Let her alone, William,” said his spouse. “She’s with child, not at death’s door. Just because she is increasing a woman doesn’t have to be treated like an ornament. I certainly never did.”

Diana’s mother had greeted the news of her pregnancy with a delighted snort and a great deal of information about broodmares of the equine variety.

“A woman belongs with her husband, not her
parents,” she concluded, an opinion that almost made Diana order her carriage to London instead of Northumberland.

Instead, since much against her better judgment she agreed with her mother, she and Chantal climbed into her carriage, with a minimum of luggage but every fur she possessed, and headed through the late December damp for the frozen north.

She was not going to let Sebastian avoid her for the remainder of her pregnancy, and perhaps beyond. If they were to make anything of this marriage, begun under such inauspicious circumstances, they were going to start by living in the same house.

Gray clouds swirled like a stormy ocean as the carriage passed through the gatehouse into a broad treeless avenue. Diana braved the cold to lean out of the window. If the icy wind blowing from the North Sea hadn’t taken her breath away, the first glimpse of her new home would have. She’d never seen a larger house. Saxton Iverley dwarfed the ducal splendor of Mandeville.

A tall central block with a massive columned pediment dominated sprawling wings that truly defined the meaning of that common architectural term. The house resembled a giant bird of prey: dark, grim, and ready to swoop down on its victim.

The impression that she had wandered into the plot of a novel grew once she entered a front door built for a race of giants to find herself in a chamber designed to oppress the spirits of the pluckiest heroine. The three-story hall climbed in ranks of somber
roman colonnades, barely visible in the afternoon gloom of a northern winter. Not a carpet, a tapestry, a painting, nor a splash of gilt relieved the iron gray stone of the arches and the vaulted ceiling. Saxton Iverley wasn’t much more than one hundred years old and the architecture was classical rather than Gothic, but Diana had seen cozier castles and more welcoming ruined monasteries.

It was also freezing. As the great door clanged shut the sea gale at least was excluded. Otherwise there was little perceptible improvement in the temperature.

“I am Lady Iverley,” she said to the footman who had opened the door. “Please inform His Lordship that I have arrived.”

The servant, a young man who wore the same old-fashioned livery as the footman at the Iverley house in St. James’s Square, said something. What it was Diana had no idea. He spoke in an accent or dialect so thick she could make out not a single word. From his face she gathered their incomprehension was mutual.

“Perhaps you could summon the house steward. Or the butler. Or the housekeeper,” she suggested, slowly and clearly.

He nodded at the word butler, said something that might have been “Mr. Hedley,” and left.

“Mon dieu.”
Chantal’s oath, or prayer, came out in a whisper. Diana doubted it would last, but for the moment her opinionated maid was silenced.

The two of them had ample time to further examine their surroundings. Grateful for her furs, Diana
noticed that despite the pervasive gloom, the proportions of the hall were excellent and the design rather beautiful. With a few hundred candles burning, or sunshine coming through the huge arched windows, it would be magnificent. Meanwhile frost seeped from the black and white marble floor up through the soles of her boots.

Finally an extremely old servant in an ancient white wig and clothes of the style worn fifty years earlier limped into the hall.

“My lady.” When he bowed Diana wanted to put an arm out to make sure he didn’t topple over. “We weren’t expecting you,” he said, his accent thick but thankfully understandable.

“My letter must have been delayed. Please inform His Lordship that I have arrived,” she said again.

“His Lordship divint in the hoose. He’s doon the mine.” At least, she thought that’s what he said. “I am Hedley. I’m butler here.”

“Have you been at Saxton Iverley a long time, Hedley?”

“Sixty years, fifty as butler.”

“You must know so much about the history of the house and I look forward to hearing your stories. But for now, please take me somewhere warm, while my bedchamber is prepared.”

Hedley appeared uneasy. “I don’t know where a lady could stay.”

Diana remembered that Sebastian’s great-uncle, the previous viscount, had never married. The house had lacked a mistress for some decades. “All I require for now is a bed and a fire. My dresser, Miss Dupont,
will direct the maids preparing the room and see to my luggage.”

“Well. There are rooms next to His Lordship’s.”

“That will be quite acceptable. Now take me to whichever room has a fire.”

“No fire in the drawing room.” He scratched his chin and pondered some more while Diana’s feet turned to blocks of ice. “Nor in the morning room. Nor in the blue saloon yet.”

“Which room has His Lordship been using? Surely you must keep a fire burning there in this weather.”

Hedley smiled. “The library?”

Of course. Where else? “Show me to the library, then send for some tea and ask the housekeeper to attend me there.”

After half an hour the tea appeared but not the housekeeper. In keeping with what she’d so far seen, the library was constructed along monumental lines. Unlike the room where she’d bearded Sebastian at St. James’s Square, it was a mess. Books by the thousand were stuck into shelves without regard to order. Many were upside down or on their sides. Volumes and papers were piled on chairs, tables, and on the floor. There were also a number of strange mechanical devices in varying states of completion, miscellaneous tools, coils, springs, and odd pieces of metal. Diana smiled as she realized the room, despite its massive scale, reminded her of her father’s study at Wallop. The late Lord Iverley and Mr. Montrose had corresponded, she recalled. They must have had much in common.

At one end of the room a large ceramic stove
emitted a most welcome warmth. Diana stood near it thawing her hands. She’d never seen one quite like it and guessed it was of foreign manufacture. It was a blessedly efficient device, so effective that after a few minutes she discarded her outer garments and drew back from the source of heat. The only unencumbered chair in the room stood beside a desk that was free of heaped volumes, drifting foolscap or twisted metal. Instead it held papers tidily held down by paperweights and a pile of correspondence. Diana flipped through the letters and found her own, unopened. Whatever occupied her husband away from home, it had kept him from attending to his mail for some days.

The incomprehensible footman returned after an hour or so. She managed to discover that his name was George and he would guide her to her rooms. The heat in the library had made her sleepy and she looked forward to taking a nap in a soft bed. The journey through endless arched stone corridors dispelled her comfort. By the time George opened the door to her room she was thoroughly chilled and the sight that greeted her did nothing to raise her spirits. If this was what passed at Saxton Iverley for feminine décor, she hated to think of how the men must live.

A huge chamber, lavishly appointed with the inevitable gray stone, contained an old-fashioned four-poster bed with crewelwork curtains that, in addition to being so faded their original color was lost, appeared to have provided square meals for generations of moth. Aside from a couple of wooden chairs with rush seats, the only piece of furniture was a massive and hideous wardrobe-chest combination made from
some kind of dark wood and plentifully embellished with crude carvings. Diana, who had studied such things, estimated there wasn’t an object in the room less than two hundred years old and thus much older than the house itself.

The floor was uncarpeted and the large windows lacked curtains, with only wooden shutters provided to block out light and the wind whistling through the cracks. Diana crossed the endless stone floor and saw the room faced east and offered a view of the sea. Under normal circumstances she would have been delighted. She and Tobias often went to Brighton in the summer and she loved the seashore. But the North Sea in winter was a far cry from summer on the south coast: wild, dark, and vaguely threatening.

Diana began to understand Sebastian’s decision not to bring her to this benighted spot. She’d taken it as an insult but perhaps he’d been doing her a favor.

“Why haven’t you lit any candles?” she asked Chantal, who radiated displeasure with every movement as she unpacked Diana’s underclothes.

“Tallow.”

The single word was enough. With Diana’s delicate stomach the gloom was preferable to the smell of cheap candles. She shuddered and walked over to the fireplace where a healthy glow beckoned. Within a few feet she stopped and clutched her belly. A particularly pungent, sulfurous odor drifted from the burning coal.

“The basin, Chantal,” she gasped, lurching backward into the far corner of the room to get the stench out of her nostrils.

Alas, the room was not yet ready for a lady in an
interesting condition. She cast up her accounts in the chamber pot.

“Ring for Hedley,” she ordered, huddling in a far corner of the room, as far from the noxious fumes as she could manage. “And order some firewood. And some wax candles.”

“No bell.”

Of course not. Nothing she’d yet seen at her husband’s mansion led her to expect such a basic amenity.

“Mr. Hedley told me to tell you …”

“Not now.” Accustomed since childhood to the Northumbrian dialect, Sebastian had no trouble understanding George, but this evening he wasn’t in the mood to hear the details of a trivial domestic problem. “I need a bath as soon as possible. I’ll be in the library.”

Cold, hungry, tired, and above all dirty, he wondered why his great-uncle had never turned his mechanical ingenuity to the problem of an efficient hot water supply. In some houses, Mandeville for one, copper boilers had been installed on the upper floors. At Saxton Iverley the water was often cool by the time it had been carried from the kitchens in the west wing to the bedrooms, one reason why Sebastian hadn’t moved from his own rooms in the west to his uncle’s suite in the east. But Uncle Iverley had never been much concerned with personal cleanliness.

As he strode down the long, frigid corridor to the library, he thought about Diana’s London house: new and appointed with every luxury. No waiting for a bath there, he’d wager. At once a vision of Diana
naked in a tub entered his brain, the kind of invasion that occurred far too often, despite his best efforts to banish them. Every feeling of grief, frustration, and guilt about the events of the past three days unified in fury at Diana, and himself, too. Had he been attending to his responsibilities at Saxton instead of playing games of lust and revenge, tragedy might have been avoided.

Nevertheless, a flare of emotion ignited his heart when he discovered the subject of his reluctant thoughts in the library. A wild hope battled his anger and he stopped at the doorway to prevent himself from rushing forward to embrace her.

“What are you doing here?” The words came out more accusation than question.

She rose from one of the hard library chairs and set aside a book. As usual she epitomized a sleek, opulent femininity that couldn’t have presented a greater contrast to her surroundings.

“I preferred not to announce to the world that my husband left me the day after our wedding,” she said, her words as unruffled as her appearance.

Foolish to think she’d follow him for any other reason. He mustn’t forget that his wife would rather have married the heir to a dukedom. Her standing in the polite world was important to her and he’d threatened her pride and her reputation.

He ventured farther into the room and noted the pallor of her complexion, a hint of shadow around the eyes. “You’re not looking well. You shouldn’t have made the journey.”

“I’m merely tired.”

“For God’s sake, Diana.” Anxiety for her health
made him snappish. “There’s a freezing rain outside and the roads are a hellish mire. You could have been killed traveling in this weather.”

“I survived. However, I have to say that you live in the world’s most uncomfortable house.”

He ignored the tinge of ironic humor in her tone and concentrated on the complaint. “I warned you. You should have stayed with your family where you would have been warm and safe. This is no place for a lady.”

“You humiliated me in front of my family by leaving. I told them we’d agreed I would follow slowly.”

“And you didn’t think to discuss this with me?”

“Naturally I would never make an important decision about my whereabouts without asking for the opinion of my husband.” The slightest arch of her eyebrow managed to convey both innocence and insolence. “But I couldn’t ask for your permission because you’d already left.”

“I don’t believe you. You made up your mind to follow me even as I expressly forbade it.”

Her only response was to raise her brows higher.

“Damn it! You should have told me.”

“So that you could stop me?”

“Yes!”

Her composure seemed to grow in proportion to his own agitation. “That’s why I preferred not to discuss it. You were quite incapable of rational thought.”

“Irrational! Me?”

“There’s no need to shout.”

“I am not shouting.”

“You are shouting and you are being completely unreasonable.”

Sebastian clutched his head in disbelief. She gave him a sickly sweet smile. “I might have expected a warmer greeting from my husband but I can see you’re not in the mood.” She punctuated her remarks with an insincere curtsey. “I am pleased to see you, my lord, but for the moment the pleasure of your company has worn thin. I believe I shall retire to my room and take supper there.”