The Harem Bride (25 page)

After one swift glance at what she could only
term the smug satisfaction on her husband’s usually saturnine
features, the countess ducked her head, nodding dumbly as Stackpole
proffered a variety of selections from under their round silver
covers. Blast the man! And what if she had not been a virgin? Would
he have rejected her out of hand? Would she now be standing beside
her trunks in the foyer, waiting for the coach to be brought round?
The coach that would take her into exile, abandonment, and divorce?
The world, Penny thought, not for the first time, was vastly unfair
to its females.

“
Well, sir,” she said with more
asperity than intended, “are we off to Shropshire, or are we
not?”

The earl paused with a bite of beefsteak
halfway to his mouth, then laid his fork carefully upon his plate.
“I believe we discussed this matter at some time during the night,
my dear. Did you not express a loathing to run away as we did from
Constantinople?”

“
And did you not counter by reminding
me of Wellington’s tactics of strategic retreat and live to fight
another day?”

“
Perhaps I did,” the earl murmured,
adding provocatively, “I fear I was not completely attending to the
debate at the time.”

“
Jason!” His wife, much shocked, once
again bent her head to her gammon, eggs and toast.

The earl, lips twitching, resumed his attack
on his beefsteak. After some moments of taut silence, he suggested
mildly, that he still believed the wisest course was to return to
Shropshire and let the entire matter fade of its own accord.

“
That is cowardly!” Penny shot back.
“All my beautiful clothes . . . I had such plans . . . ” The
countess, encountering her husband’s unwavering stare, choked to a
halt.

“
Your gowns will be as lovely in
Shropshire as they are in London,” the earl pointed out with
maddening logic.

“
And who will see them?” his countess
demanded.

“
I will.”

“
Oh.” Penny, mortified, fisted a hand
to her lips. Hot tears sprang to her eyes. Was that not what she
had wanted all along? For Jason to see her as beautiful? Did it
truly matter that this was not her year to dance at balls, reign
over a salon of artists and authors, or be the so-clever hostess at
dinner parties for the influential politicians of the day? Once
again, she had been air-dreaming, constructing castles of
glittering crystal when she needed to appreciate the good English
earth beneath her feet.

Shropshire. It would be beautiful now,
fulfilling the green promise of spring that had begun to decorate
the hills, valleys, and gardens just before she left for town. As
long as Jason came with her, as he had promised, all would be well.
Her disappointments were the silly maunderings of an overgrown girl
who had never had a Season. Next year would do as well, of course
it would.

“
Lady Rocksley,” Stackpole intoned,
interrupting Penny’s penitent thoughts.

“
Mama!” The Earl of Rocksley shot to
his feet so fast, his napkin dropped to the floor. Penny’s surprise
was so thorough only years of strict training brought her, wavering
slightly, to her feet. Unconsciously, she held on to the back of
her chair for support.

The lady (on the wrong side of fifty), who
had just swept through the doorway, examined her daughter-in-law
with exacting scrutiny. The Dowager Countess was not an imposing
female, it being instantly obvious the earl had inherited his
height from his father. But her garments were precise to a pin, her
dark brown hair featuring enough streaks of gray to reveal that she
did not resort to artifice to cover her age, and her cobalt eyes—so
like her son’s—were alight with intelligence and worldly
wisdom.

“
So,” she declared a moment before it
was perfectly plain the new countess was about to take umbrage at
her inspection, “you have plunged yourself into a pickle, have you,
Rocksley?”

Her son, ignoring this jibe, said, “Perhaps
you would care to join us for breakfast, Mama?”

“
I broke my fast at Lady Carlyle’s,
where I spent the night and,” she added with a baleful glance at
the pair of them, “received the full gist of this disaster. But I
might be coaxed into another cup of chocolate and perhaps a rasher
of bacon. I am particularly fond of bacon, you know.”

The footman immediately pulled out a chair
for the dowager, and a maid scurried in with all the amenities for
a full place setting. After the elder Lady Rocksley allowed she
might also have one of cook’s muffins, with butter and a bit of
blackberry jam, the earl dismissed the footman and calmly returned
to his breakfast. His countess, however, merely stared at her
plate, unable to swallow more than a sip or two of coffee.

Eulalia Lisbourne, Dowager Countess of
Rocksley, finished her chocolate, placed the cup precisely in its
saucer. “I must admit to being profoundly shocked, Rocksley, when
you wrote to me of your marriage. And if you think I believed that
faradiddle about how you came to marry this chit in the first
place, you are fair and far out. Cassandra Pemberton was in her
third Season when I made my come-out, and I know full well what an
eccentric—”

“
Aunt Cass had a Season?” Penny
burbled, startled into forgetting her manners, as well as her
horror at the dowager’s arrival.

“
Oh, indeed she did and quite
frightened off every eligible nobleman in London. A shocking
bluestocking she was. Matched wits with anyone who would listen,
espoused female independence, trod on every masculine feeling of
superiority. And quite hoodwinked her papa into leaving her in
control of all his money. Most improper! So then she was off on her
jaunts, growing more odd by the year, with nothing slowing her
pace, not even when she took on your care, my child,” said the
dowager, looking not unkindly, at Penelope.

“
But,” the dowager added, drawing
breath and fixing her son with a stern eye, “if you wish me to
think she did not plan to entrap you, Rocksley, you are very much
mistaken—”

“
No, truly—” the earl
interjected.

“
Nonsense! I daresay she was fit as a
fiddle, laughing into the pillows of her sickbed the moment she
discovered she had fooled you into acquiescing to her outrageous
scheme—”

“
Mama!” the earl roared. “You will
listen to what I have to tell you.” And the true story came rolling
out, occasionally augmented by soft, chagrined additions or
corrections from the younger Countess of Rocksley.

“
Merciful heavens,” the dowager gasped
when the earl came at last to his renewal of vows in Shropshire. “I
daresay even Monk Lewis never came up with such a tale.”

“
I am so sorry, my lady,” Penny
murmured. “But Jason was a hero, truly he was. If not for him, I
would, this moment, be a poor soul lost forever in the sultan’s
harem.” Hopefully, she peeped at the dowager countess, looking for
a miracle, as she and Jason were certainly at an
impasse.

The dowager countess contemplated her empty
plate, raised her eyes, unseeing, to the colorful hunting scene
hanging on the wall. “I believe Rocksley is right,” she said at
last. “We must do as our dear General Wellington has done. This,
like the campaign on the Peninsula, is not going to be an easy
task. We must regroup and plan our strategy.”

Regarding her daughter-in-law’s fallen face
with some compassion, the elder Lady Rocksley added, “Yes, yes, I
see you wish to stay and fight, but it simply will not do, my
child. Though it may be through no fault of your own, you have
blotted your copy book most shockingly, you know. There is a most
nasty seed of truth at the bottom of Mr. Yardley’s lies. We must .
. .” The dowager tapped one slender finger against the tablecloth.
“Yes, I think we must go to Rockbourne Crest, where we may plan our
campaign in privacy, perhaps for a recovery during the less busy
Season in the autumn.” Lady Rocksley folded her napkin, and placed
it on the table. “When do you wish to leave?”

“
But you have just arrived from Bath,
have you not?” her son protested.

“
Yes, it is most unfortunate I did not
know the whole before,” she said in significant tones, “but it
cannot be helped. Hopefully, my maid has not yet begun to
unpack.”

In view of the dowager’s stoicism and the
impossibility of the younger countess referring to her own
exhaustion from a nearly sleepless night, the earl’s entourage of
two coaches, burdened by a mountainous quantity of luggage, in
addition to Kirby, Noreen O’Donnell, and Hitchins, the Dowager
Countess’s most superior maid, departed in the early afternoon,
returning Penelope to the wilds of Shropshire she had left with
such high hopes little more than a fortnight earlier.

Shropshire

The Earl of Rocksley was decidedly fond of
his mother, who possessed a great deal of good sense for a female,
and to whom he would be eternally grateful for not cutting up stiff
over his most peculiar marriage. But he did not want her at
Rockbourne Crest at this moment. Though, in all fairness, he had to
admit that if his mama had any idea she was intruding on the
equivalent of a wedding journey, she would scurry back to Bath with
all alacrity.

But pride would not allow him to drop so much
as a hint of the turtle-like progress of his marriage. Unthinkable
his mama should discover him to be such a slow-top! But it was
hard, devilish hard, to find himself alone with his bride only in
the late evening privacy of their suite of rooms—with the odor of
greening earth and early blossoms drifting in through the open
windows reminding them of nature’s renewal of life—and do anything
but what was uppermost in his mind. And what, he very much hoped,
was in the mind of his wife as well.

Yet, when daylight came, the passion of the
bedchamber seemed part of a separate world, for his mother and his
countess had plunged with near frenetic intensity into the world of
women, including visits to neighboring families and taking a hand
in the affairs of the village, while he was left to attend to
estate business, a classic division of duties that did not, at the
moment, appeal to him in the least.

The Earl of Rocksley truly did not care if
Blossom and her Ned had been blessed with a baby boy. Nor that his
countess was determined to find a wife for the vicar. (And spending
far too much time in that blasted Greek God’s company, by Jupiter!)
Nor did he wish to sit between his mama and his wife in the
high-backed Lisbourne family pew while Stanmore flashed his benign
gaze, perfect white teeth, and overly friendly smile upon his
captive audience of a Sunday morning. But there he had been the
past two Sundays—with visions of endless annoyingly erudite sermons
stretching into the infinity of his exile in Shropshire.

The earl had also deigned to dine at the
squire’s, a duty he could not avoid, and, indeed, his mama had
pointed out with some asperity that he should get down on his knees
and thank Matthew and Tabitha Houghton for arranging a dinner that
included the four leading families of the area, a definite fillip
to his wife’s efforts to take her proper place in society. But
Jason could not help but note that the dinner had been an ordeal
for his countess, even though Penny had put on a gracious social
façade that had never slipped under the guests’ blatant scrutiny.
Too many sideways glances, too many gleams of speculation. Too many
people trying too hard to act as if the London rumors had not made
their way to Shropshire.

Yet when Jason went to her bed the night of
the squire’s dinner party, she lay like a stone frozen at the
bottom of an icy stream. He had taken her in his arms and simply
held her until her poor stiff body nestled into his and, at last,
he held a woman and not a carving of ice.

Was that the night, the earl wondered, as he
gazed out over his acres from a vantage point well up the steep
hill above Rockbourne Crest, when the Jason Lisbourne he should
have been had begun to make himself known? Just when had he begun
to doubt that his odd mix of fatalism, interspersed with moments of
erotic fantasy, were a proper approach to marriage.

Jason slumped in his saddle. He had ridden up
the winding rocky path in a quest for the solace this particular
view always brought. Yet now that he was here, he was so lost in
thought he scarcely saw it.

There was something that hovered just
out of his grasp, something his wife expected from him that he had
not been able to give. Yet, for the life of him, he was unsure what
it was. She was so
determinedly
willing. She had gifted him with Gulbeyaz—achingly lovely,
accommodating, skilled—but the . . . eagerness was gone. Yes, that
was it. Impossible as it seemed, there must have been a time at the
beginning when she had loved him. Worshipped him as a hero. Waited
for him to come to her.

And he had not.

So his once-shining Penny, now his tarnished
bride, had settled for what life had dished out to her—a rakish
earl who now wished to set up his nursery. Rather than live the
life of a lonely recluse, she had agreed to be his broodmare. And
even though she seemed adverse to the process, his wife now held
her heart close, encased behind an iron wall he had undoubtedly
helped build.

Surely their present calculated
arrangement was sufficient, the earl grumbled. Many men must deal
with wives who showed no interest in bedchamber activities at all.
That was the way of the
ton
.
Marriages were made by blood lines, titles, land, and wealth. In
society, love was more apt to presage disaster than
happily-ever-after. Look at the current disgrace of the very much
married Caro Lamb chasing after that idiot Byron. And there was
always the sad example of the Prince of Wales—surely the most
foolishly romantic prince of all time—who had married for love a
woman thrice condemned by society’s rules—a commoner, a widow, and
a Roman Catholic. A sorry affair that had ended in his
formal,
approved
marriage to
a woman who so disgusted him they had lived apart almost from the
moment of conception of their only child.