The Golden Leopard (11 page)

“But she has said nothing of this. Whatever put such an idea into your head?”

“She requires protection. Gerald beats her.”

“Does he, by God?” Sothingdon lapsed back onto his chair. “For what reason?”

“Reason?”
She took a long, calming breath. “What reason could there possibly be? Mariah is meek as a lamb. She would never provoke him. He needs to punish someone for his own failures, I expect. And he has a frightful temper. One day he’ll lose all control.”

Looking stunned, the earl pulled out his handkerchief and used it to blot his face. Briefly, his eyes were concealed from her. But when he removed the damp square of linen, she saw the blank expression she recognized from her childhood. In a matter of seconds, he had detached himself from the web of unpleasantness and responsibility.

But what had she expected? She met his eyes, saying nothing, until his gaze slid away.

“I shall speak to Gerald,” he murmured, “if you think it will do any good. Beyond that, I cannot interfere. Nor, I am sure, will the courts meddle with the legal right of a husband to discipline his wife. Unless there are other grounds on which a separation might be obtained?”

“There might be. I don’t know. We require legal advice.”

“No, Jessica. No wretched lawyers poking about and asking impertinent questions of the servants and neighbors. I would return the same answer to Mariah, were she here to speak for herself. But Mariah knows better than to embroil the family in a scandal. Only
you
would consider dragging us through the courts and exposing us to scurrilous reports in the newspapers. And all to no purpose, I must add. Sir Gerald would surely prevail.”

“Gerald is a rotter. Everyone in London knows it. If the Carvilles stood against him, he wouldn’t have a chance. How can you think of abandoning her, Father? She’s your firstborn child. Don’t you care what happens to her?”

There was a silence.

“Of course I care,” he said at last, unconvincingly. “But I must also weigh the consequences of taking action. Not those that would fall upon me, I assure you, for I am too old to be concerned about my own reputation. And you have long since abandoned any care for yours.” His face was the color of ripe plums. “A Carville, a daughter of the Earl of Sothingdon, in
trade
!
But have I tried to stop you, Jessica? Have I?”

He had diverted the subject. She had to steer it back on course.

But hell was descending. She rubbed her left hand against the arm of the chair, barely able to feel her fingers. The candles on the desk were brighter than before. Their flames, haloed with orange and green, danced like maenads in the hot, airless room.

“Indeed,” her father was saying, “I have given you everything you asked. A London Season after the year of mourning for your mother. An allowance. A
generous
allowance, and a carriage and horses, and I pay for their stabling as well. You have the use of my town house, and did I not lend you three thousand pounds not so long ago?”

“S-several years ago, Father, and it has been repaid with interest.” This had to end quickly, before she disgraced herself. And she had accomplished nothing. Nothing. “You have been generous, yes. If you believe me indebted to you, by all means send an accounting. If you want me out of the town house, I’ll find other lodgings. But this conversation, Father, is not about me. Mariah must not suffer for my failings.”

He had begun to wring his damp handkerchief between his hands. They were callused fingers, long and thick, on a sportsman’s hands. Hands that trembled. “You must consider how a scandal would affect Aubrey,” he said. “As the fourteenth Earl of Sothingdon, I am custodian of an honorable name. It must be passed unblemished to my heir, and to his. That is what he expects. It is his right.”

“Rubbish. Aubrey has an inflated sense of his own importance. He was born with”—Duran’s words sprang to her tongue—“with a poker up his backside.”

“Jessica!”

“Well, he was. And I fail to see why Mariah must be sacrificed on the altar of Aubrey’s scrupulous sensibilities.”

“There are his children to consider as well, and his wife. You may have evaded responsibility for anyone but yourself, but others cannot so easily ignore what is due to one’s name and family. I am certain Mariah does not. Marriage is a lifelong commitment. It cannot be revoked simply because she now finds the circumstances unsatisfactory. One makes promises before God and the law, accepts one’s responsibilities, and endures. There is no other honorable choice.”

He was speaking now of his own marriage, she realized with a stab of sympathy. How could she have imagined he would help? Year after year he had compromised, and accepted, and endured. His imagination did not encompass an alternative.

Yellow and blue-green, the light condensed into a zigzag pattern. She could scarcely see him now. It would come and go by its own timetable, she knew, but closing her eyes, she willed the vision to fade. Above all things, her father must not know what was happening.

“If Gerald comes for her,” she said, “will you at least try to keep Mariah here, under your protection?”

“Certainly.” The earl sounded relieved to have something positive to offer. “I’ll tell him she is acting as my hostess and that I require her to remain for several weeks. But I cannot overrule him. As Mariah’s husband, it is his right to determine where she resides.”

“I know.” In her voice she heard the anger she was trying to repress. It had been a mistake to approach her father. He was the last man who would exert himself to rescue a daughter embroiled in an unhappy marriage. “You’ll wish to join your friends,” she said more calmly. “Please go on without me.”

He all but kicked over his chair in his haste to depart. She winced. Even slight sounds would pain her now, and bright lights. Words were increasingly hard to form. It was coming on quickly.

Opening her eyes, she saw only a dark tunnel coruscated with green light. She dared not navigate the crowded passageway, nor take the chance of meeting Duran. She could not speak with him tonight.

The servants’ stairs, then. If she could find the entrance door.

Wreathed in cigar smoke,
Duran sipped at a glass of excellent port, parried jokes with automatic good humor, and tried not to look at the mantelpiece clock. Unlike his host, he was finding it difficult to escape the dinner table.

Sothingdon, after receiving a message from a servant, had departed as soon as the covers were removed, leaving his guests to their analysis of Lord Duran’s mystifying accuracy on the target range that afternoon.

“Not so astonishing, I assure you,” he said when Marley demanded an accounting of his transformation. “I was finally allowed to shoot at something that didn’t move.”

“I’ll wager your luck won’t hold when the partridges are flushed,” Benneton put in, his nose ruddy with sunburn.

“I profoundly hope you’re wrong,” Duran said, coming to his feet. “Luck is all I have to rely upon. Anyone for coffee?”

But Jessica, to his disappointment, was not waiting for him in the parlor. He had expected to find her in company with her sister. Accepting a cup of coffee from Lady Mariah, he carried it with him on a search of the public rooms on the first floor, rejecting invitations to make a fourth at whist or take a stick at the billiard table and wondering where the devil Jessica had got off to.

After a while he made his way downstairs, passing a florid-faced Sothingdon going in the opposite direction. The earl, his eyes fixed on the marble stairs, didn’t appear to notice him.

He was considering this uncharacteristic behavior as he made his way toward the back of the house and the conservatory, where he had found Jessica that morning. Perhaps she was waiting for him there. He was just passing the library and the earl’s study when, a little distance down the passageway, a swirl of sapphire blue disappeared into the wall.

The illusion was explained when, drawing closer, he saw the outline of a servants’ door. But servants didn’t wear expensive taffeta or scent themselves with lilac water. Not wanting it to seem he had been following her, he returned to the main staircase and hurried to the third floor, arriving in time to see Jessica emerge from the wall and move slowly toward her room at the far end of the wing.

She was walking as though putting the slightest weight on the floor would crush it. Once she paused with one hand pressed against the wall for support. He started to approach her, but halted when she slowly continued to her room and went inside.

Moments later a maid, shaking her head, came out and, with a curtsy to Duran, went on about her business.

Something was wrong, although he couldn’t begin to guess what it was. Not for a minute did he imagine that Jessica, having agreed to meet with him, had changed her mind. Were that the case, she would have told him so with a flourish. Stepping into the shadows of an alcove, he waited several minutes, considering his alternatives.

They narrowed into one. And it wasn’t, he thought, striding purposefully down the passageway, as if she expected him to have any manners.

A gentleman would have knocked. No, a gentleman would not be seeking admittance to her bedchamber at all.

Duran, being a gentleman only when it suited him, raised the old-fashioned brass latch handle and, pleased to find she had not secured the lock, stealthily opened the door.