The Golden Season (38 page)

Josten turned and motioned. A travel-stained and hollow-eyed youngster shuffled in, worrying a knit cap between his hands.

“Are you Captain Lockton?” he asked.

Ned nodded curtly and the boy stepped forward, digging into the leather satchel strapped around his neck and producing a thin envelope. He handed it to Ned and retreated.

Josten turned him by the shoulder and told him, “Go to the kitchen and have them find you something to eat and a place to bed down.”

The boy bowed awkwardly and disappeared as Ned opened the envelope.

The blood drained from Ned’s face and he wheeled around, snatching up the breeches and shirt he’d so recently shed.

“What it is, Ned? What’s the matter?” Josten demanded, alarmed. “What can I do to help?”

Ned had already donned his breeches and was shoving his arm through the sleeve of his shirt. “Have the fastest horse in your stable saddled!”

Josten began bellowing and the servants rushed to do his bidding. Within a quarter hour, Ned was on horseback, racing toward London.

He rode through the night, stopping only to drink or switch out horses at the stations along the way. He galloped, face taut, leg shrieking in protest, lashed by fear. His heart thundered in time with the hoof strike on the road.
No. No. No
.

Dawn opened like an artery along the horizon and bled into the sky and still he kept on, riding like a man possessed, holding on to one thought: He had to be there in time to stop her.

Childe Smyth did not prove as great a friend as Lydia had hoped and every bit the pragmatist she had expected. He’d met her request that he lend her fifty thousand pounds with a blank stare and then a laugh. When she’d assured him that she was serious, he told her that regrettably he would not be able to make a loan of that size when he knew for a certainty she would never be able to repay it.

He would, however, make certain she had immediate access to such a sum as soon as she became his bride. Indeed, he would make it part of the marriage contract he could have drawn up that very day, in which he would promise to present her with a personal note for fifty thousand pounds directly after the archbishop signed their wedding license.

He needed a wife, he explained gravely, and soon. She needed fifty thousand pounds even sooner. He suggested they come to an arrangement.

And so they had.

All of which Lydia had expected. But expectation hadn’t kept her from hoping.

Feeling like a spectator watching the unfolding events in her life from some balcony seat, she walked down the church aisle toward where Childe’s uncle, the Archbishop of Canterbury, waited. Childe moved slowly at her side. Though her face felt numb and her lips stiff, her manner remained composed. But inside a voice was screaming. She ignored it. She would not let Cod send Emily back to the asylum.

She would be strong. She would live with her decision. Other women had married for far less important reasons. Other women had been in love with men they could not wed. Other women—

Oh, God. Oh, God. They were before the altar now and the archbishop was saying something and she could not hear him. All she heard was a rushing in her ears and the remembered sound of Ned’s voice saying, “I love you. . . .”

The archbishop peered at her closely and she gulped for air. “M’dear?” he prompted.

“Yes.” She hoped it was enough. She hoped that it was appropriate. It was all she could manage.

And then more words, Childe Smyth’s voice low in the affirmative, the witnesses murmuring behind her. Where was Ned? What would he think? Would he wonder if she’d decided she could not live without wealth? That she’d changed her mind? Oh . . . Oh!

Her head swam but she held on to consciousness. It was best this way. It was the
only
way.

The archbishop pronounced them man and wife.

Lydia sat at the ornate dressing table in the bedchamber where Childe had had her things brought. Emily was somewhere else in the house, in some room Childe had assigned her at Lydia’s insistence. And she was alone. She heard a sound in the hall and turned her head as Childe appeared in the doorway between the bedroom and dressing room. She turned back around and with a shaking hand put down the pen she had been using to write to Ned.

She closed her eyes. She had thought she would have more time to grow used to the idea, that at least she would be able to finish her business with Cod before Childe—before. She wasn’t ready. She would never be ready. Never.

She bit down hard on her lip, her spine stiffening as though in rigor mortis.

“I am sorry,” Smyth whispered. His tone was stricken, even anguished, and she opened her eyes to meet his in the mirror.

Lydia’s husband was crying. Tears welled in his eyes and his lower lip trembled with his effort to contain himself.

Amazed, she pivoted. “Mr. Smyth? Your grandfather. Is he . . . ?”

“No. No, the old bastard draws breath yet. It’s just that . . .” He stopped and came into the room at a foot-dragging pace, approached the high, four-poster bed sitting like a sacrificial altar in the middle of the room. He sat down on its edge, his hands hanging between his knees, and gave a long, shaky sigh, staring at the carpet.

“I have never been unfaithful,” he said sadly. “Never once in all these years.”

She didn’t know what to think, what he was talking about; she only perceived that somehow she’d gained a reprieve from her inevitable marital bedding. Relief, however short-lived, set her to trembling. She could not imagine being intimate with this man, a stranger to her in so many ways, doing something so profound, so significant as the act she and Ned had shared. “I beg your pardon?”

“She will be so hurt,” he murmured to himself, slow tears trickling from the corners of his eyes. “She won’t understand.”

“I’m afraid I don’t either, Mr. Smyth,” she said cautiously. “To whom are you referring and what won’t she understand?”

“Kitty,” he said, his face stricken with misery. “My beautiful little Kitty.”

Amazement supplanted confusion. Could he be referring to a cat? Had she married a madman? Oh, dear. “What of your little kitty, Mr. Smyth?” she asked carefully.

But he wasn’t listening to her. He shook his head vigorously, his lower lip thrusting out in a resolute pout. “It’s no good. I can’t bed you.”

“Ah!” Her breath came out in a gasp of relief and she fumbled for the support of her table. “
Oh, thank you
!” Tears sprang to her eyes and she swiped them from her cheeks. “And thank your wonderful, glorious feline.”

Childe Smyth’s dark brows drew together in a vee. “What feline?”

“Kitty.”

“Kitty’s not a cat. Kitty’s my mistress!” he said, clearly astonished.

“Oh. Oh?”

He nodded, his misery slowly returning. “She’s been my mistress for eleven years and in all that time I have never been false to her. I have never even been tempted. And she has been just as true to me. All those years . . .” He sniffed. “I was just come to town, down from Eton. I didn’t have much. I hadn’t inherited my dad’s business concerns yet. I was just a green- headed boy with the faint stink of the shop on me.” He looked up to see how she took this and his smile grew an edge. “But I will not be looked down on any more than my grandfather. My aunt married a marquis, my father was knighted before he died. And me? I’ve married Lady Lydia Eastlake. My standing in Society is not only assured but it’s now incontestable.”

His expression had become pugnacious, but she saw only a young man with the faint stink of shop, hungry for entrée and approbation. “You were telling me about Kitty,” she prompted.

His mouth relaxed into a smile. “Yes. Kitty,” he said. “She was just sixteen, newly arrived from Spain and the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen. She still is. She could have had her pick of any number of protectors, far wealthier and, needless to say, far more illustrious than I. But she chose me,” he said with evident pride. “She loves me.”

“And you love her,” Lydia suggested

He glanced quickly up at her to see if she was making sport of him, and seeing she was not, he sighed. “Yes. I suppose I do.”

“And always will.”

“I expect so. So, you see, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid our marriage will have to be one in name only because, for the life of me, I could not live with myself if I were untrue to the truest and dearest of creatures.” He gave her an apologetic shrug.

For a second she could only stare at him and then all the pain, all the rage, all the loss and heartbreak and unhappiness of the last twelve hours came boiling up and erupted from her lips. “
Then why the bloody hell did you marry me and not her?
”

He gaped at her.

“You say you love her, you needed a wife, and there is”—she bit off the word—“there
was
no legal or moral reason keeping you from asking for her hand in marriage and yet you did not. By God,” Lydia spat, fury such as she’d never known filling her, “if the woman is stupid enough and has so little regard for herself that she would stay with you after this, she deserves whatever unfeeling treatment you give her.”

“Don’t say that!” Childe shouted, leaping to his feet.

“Why not? It’s true.”

“I couldn’t marry her. She’s . . . she’s my mistress!”

“Ha! As though no man has ever married his mistress,” Lydia said, sweeping aside his excuse. “If you seek to emulate the highest orders, Mr. Smyth, best start by growing a spine. All great men have one.”

“Kitty—”

“Kitty may as well be a cat for all the consideration you’ve given her.”

“That’s a lie!” he shouted, stomping toward her. “I love her!”

She flung her head back, impaling him with a fiery glare. “You love your consequence far more. And may it keep you company with all your money, because they shall end up being your only companions.”

For a long moment they stared at each other, Lydia’s chin high, Childe’s face red with indignation and hurt. And then, abruptly, all the fight went out of him and before her eyes, he seemed to crumble in on himself. His head fell forward and he reached trembling hands up to his face.

“What am I going to do?”

She looked down at him, her husband, and felt only pity. He could have married for love and chose not to. What a fool. He looked up at her, his eyes red-rimmed and bleary. “What am I going to do?”

The mantel clock tolled and wearily she looked at it. It was three thirty. All the anger drained from her. Childe’s attack of remorse had only been a distraction from what needed to be done.

Time to go.

“You are going to give me your personal note for fifty thousand pounds,” she said in a hollow voice.

A commotion filled Childe’s downstairs hallway. Shouts followed and the sound of running footsteps. He heard glass breaking and the heavy thud of something falling.

Childe barely noted it. He sat at the dressing table, his head buried in his arms. What had he done? God help him, what had he done?

More voices, more thumping. Heavy footsteps surged up the stairs. Doors slammed open and shut in succession, growing ever nearer. Childe raised his head. The door flew open, shuddering on its hinges.

Ned Lockton stood in the frame, breathing heavily. His coat was open over an unbuttoned shirt, the tails hanging over his breeches. His boots were mud spattered and his hair disheveled, his jaw dark and unshaven. But it was his eyes that arrested. Those light, gentle gray eyes. They shone with a bright, lethal kind of madness. Lockton’s stance was wide, as though he stood on a pitching deck.

“Good God, man,” Childe said with a humorless laugh. “You really must fire your valet.”

Lockton was on him in a half-dozen strides, lifting him by his lapels out of his chair and shaking him like a dog. “Where is she?”

Childe didn’t need to ask whom Lockton meant. “Gone.”

With a snarl, Lockton released him, shoving him away. “Where?”

Childe tried to muster some sangfroid, some pride. How dare Lockton besiege him in his home. “That’s none of your business.”

With a growl Lockton seized him again. Childe didn’t care. Nothing this man did to him could compare to what he’d done to himself. Kitty . . . !

“Try to keep her from me,” Lockton ground out, “and I will kill you.”

He meant it. Childe could see that in his burning eyes, his haunted face, feel it in the fury and anguish pouring out of him. Had he thought this man passionless? A shiver of fear pierced his misery.