The Sometime Bride (41 page)

Late the following morning Cat discovered Blanca stretched out on the small sofa in the morning room, frowning over
Pride and Prejudice
, which had evidently struck some chord despite the difficulty of the English. Cat paused a moment in the doorway, appreciating the irony of Blanca occupying the same sofa where she had had her strange meeting with Anthony Trowbridge only a few hours earlier.

Although a fire was roaring only a few feet from the sofa, Blanca was covered from neck to toes by a heavy woolen shawl. She was holding the book up to the feeble winter sunlight filtering through the panes of glass in the French doors. Beyond the glass . . .

Ah, deus!
Cat choked. Beyond the glass, footsteps were clearly visible in the thin layer of snow which covered the garden. With a sharp exclamation Cat grabbed the hearth broom from the fireplace, flung open one of the doors. Frantically, she brushed the snow until the footprints leading from the garden walkway to the morning room doors were dispersed into the frosted yard.

“
Have you gone mad?” Blanca exclaimed. “Is not this English cold of mine bad enough without your wishing to give me an inflammation of the lungs?”

Instantly contrite, Cat closed the door, put away the dripping fireplace broom. She threw her arms around her friend, begging her forgiveness. “It is a very good thing you were not at the Hawley’s last night,” Cat added cryptically, seating herself in the chair Anthony had used. “Your cold would have been as nothing compared to the shock to your nerves.”

Blanca carefully laid aside her book and regarded Cat with inquiring dark eyes. Which widened—suitably interspersed with exclamations of surprise, joy, disgust and finally anger—as she learned of the return of the Duke of Marchmont’s prodigal son.

“
Miss Lovell’s Anthony!” Blanca fumed. “It is just as Tomás said! Blas was not to be trusted. He is a beast! A monster. Ah, if only I had been in this room last night, I would have defended you with the poker.”

“
There was no need for defense,” said Cat with a sigh. “He had no interest in my person.”

“
But it has been months!” Blanca was horrified. As wife to a highly virile
português
and mistress to an Englishman of similar proclivities, she found Blas’s attitude incomprehensible. No promise should be sufficient to keep a man from his wife. Particularly when he had just come home from a war. Blanca paused to blow her reddened nose on the fine lawn handkerchief tucked into her reticule. “Did he say nothing of what he intends to do?”

“
Not a word. It was like a scene from a play. We mouthed words dictated by someone else, feeling our way, saying what we thought we should, not what we truly wished to say.”

Outside, the sun had disappeared, the wind had come up, and it looked as if it might come on to snow at any moment. Cat pulled her own woolen shawl more tightly about her shoulders. “We were two people who knew each other in another lifetime. Last night we were not only strangers, we did not even speak the same language.”

“
I cannot believe Tomás wished you to suffer in this manner,” Blanca declared. “Do you wish to return to Lisbon? If so, I do not think you should feel bound by your promise.”

Large wet snowflakes began to fall, drifting down to cover Cat’s frantic brushings with a pristine coat of white. The sunny days and gently chilly nights of Lisbon had never seemed so far away. “I have this terrible fear,” Cat admitted. “I want to run back to Lisbon where everything is warm and familiar. Where I knew love. And yet . . . somehow I have begun to suspect Papa was right—my life lies here in England. It would be so easy to turn tail and run, but can you not see the scorn in his eyes if I did so? Even Blas would think me a coward. No, I will play the hand that has been dealt, even though I fear it is obvious someone is fuzzing the cards.”

Blanca studied Cat with some anxiety before nodding her acceptance. “Then it is settled. We will contrive. Does Lady Clara know of this thing?”

“
No! No one must know.” Cat’s face fell, eyes widening as further complications struck her. “Gordon knows, of course. And when the soldiers start to return . . .
Ah, it is impossible! The devil! How could he do this to me?”

The son of the Duke of Marchmont, whom no one had seen in London in years, was inevitably the most sought-after guest in London. Cat was not at all surprised to see him at a rout party that very night. In a few snatched moments behind a pillar he attempted to calm her fears. “I see no sense in pretending we don’t know each other,” said Anthony calmly. “It’s bound to come out that I haven’t spent the last few years in Derbyshire, and there’s no reason we could not have met in Lisbon.”

“
But what if someone recognizes you as Don Alejo?”

“
I shall simply put my quizzing glass and come the son of a duke all over them. ‘I, my dear sir? In mother-of-pearl buttons and a satin sash? Surely you jest!’“

Cat swatted him on the arm. “Don’t be absurd. This is serious—my reputation would be in shreds.”

“
Part of the reason I came back early was to protect you. To control any rumors.”

Protect her!
After all he had done to ruin her. “The son of a duke may be forgiven anything,” Cat snapped. “A girl from a gaming house in Lisbon is ruined if her marriage should be shown to be false.”

“
A
virgin
would be ruined. A widow with a shady past is merely found to be more intriguing.”

In the nick of time Cat remembered where she was and did not hit him. Later, she realized it was the most Blas-like remark she had ever heard Alejo make.

The weather did not cooperate with Anthony’s plan to visit his estate in Derbyshire where he had hoped to keep a safe distance between himself, his alleged widow, and his prospective fiancée. The bitter cold increased each day. Within two weeks of the fateful ball at Hawley House, the winter of 1814 surpassed itself. Not since Elizabethan times had the Thames frozen solid. From London Bridge to Blackfriars signs were posted at every cross street announcing that citizens could now walk across frozen river. And, as in bygone times, enterprising merchants quickly erected a hodgepodge city of tents along what was dubbed “Freezeland Street,” an icy thoroughfare running down the center of the river.

An enthusiastic discussion of this winter phenomenon in the Lovell’s drawing room during a visit from Lord Anthony resulted in the organizing of an excursion to the Frost Fair. The Earl of Wrexham arrived back in London just in time to be dragooned into joining what he sourly termed “the infantry.” His consolation was that he was expected to escort Catherine Perez. No one but Lord Anthony seemed surprised by this assumption.

It was a thoughtful Lord Wrexham who arrived at Everingham House early on the chosen afternoon. His welcome on his return two days earlier had been filled with gratifying warmth, but he sensed that something momentous had happened in his absence. There was a brittle edge to Catherine Perez’s cool self-possession, a droop to a carriage which had been proud and regal. A grimness about a mouth which had been soft and inviting. Lord Wrexham, his considerable intelligence alert to every nuance, set out for the Frost Fair with more interest than he had expected. He was a man with a puzzle to solve.

With the addition of Gordon Somersby and Adelaide Hawley, the Frost Fair excursion party numbered six. Flora Hawley, who was susceptible to the cold, elected to stay home. As they approached the area north of the Frost Fair, the crush was so great they were forced to walk several blocks through the dirty trampled snow. The ladies were in high spirits, rather enjoying the slippery conditions which allowed them to cling to the strong arms of the gentlemen.

As Catherine turned to smile her thanks for the earl’s tight grip which had just saved her from slipping into the gutter, Lord Wrexham was pleased to note she seemed to have put off her melancholy. As they negotiated the last block down to the river, the raucous notes of an impromptu band could be heard over the growing murmur of the crowd. As one, their small group increased its pace, plunging down the sloping street to the mound of snow and ice along the riverbank.

“
Oh, I can scarce believe it!” cried Amabel. They stood out of the way of the streams of fairgoers and simply gazed at the striking scene along the frozen Thames.

“
It would seem Red Indians are not the only ones who know how to build teepees,” said Wrexham in his usual dry manner.

“
Ingenious,” Gordon Somersby agreed.

Anthony did not hear either comment. Having decided, quite arbitrarily, that he was tired of playing other people’s games, he was completely himself that afternoon. He would indulge his long-standing camaraderie with Cat with blithe disregard for how it might appear to others. Intrigued by the logistics of this solid but fleeting city on ice, Anthony was busy analyzing how it was possible to build a city of tents in an area where a peg hammered into the ice could mean disaster. “Look at that, Cat,” he said, pointing to the wooden platform on which the nearest tent was built. “Two pairs of triangular beams, some rope, a crosspole, a large canvas—
et voilà
, instant fair booth.”

Catherine, Wrexham noted wryly, was as fascinated as Lord Anthony expected her to be, her green eyes sparkling as they took in the ephemeral expanse of ice and snow. How could Trowbridge know she would be interested? And how was it he addressed her with such familiarity when the earl himself would not take such a liberty in public? Wrexham glanced up in time to surprise a look of anxiety from Gordon Somersby. So Somersby had also noticed Trowbridge’s familiarity with Mrs. Perez . . . and hoped her escort had not. A trifle annoyed, as well as intrigued, Lord Wrexham heightened the intensity of his vigil.

In spite of gray skies and a further threat of snow, the fair was far from colorless. The ice and snow provided an ideal backdrop for the colorful raiment of the fairgoers, the raucous cries of vendors of every sort of food and drink from gin to gingerbread, and booths featuring nearly everything from barbering to books to games of chance.

With a cheerful cry of “Tally Ho!” Lord Anthony suddenly plunged down the snowbank, turning to proffer a hand to each of the ladies, leaving Lord Wrexham and Gordon Somersby to bring up the rear. The group had no sooner started down the nearest row of booths along Freezeland Street when Gordon called a halt.

“
You’re not!” cried Cat. “Gordy, you cannot actually eat those things.”

“
A shocking comment from someone who was practically raised on fish,” Gordon retorted. “I
like
oysters,” he added plaintively. “Ale—Lord Anthony likes ’em too, do you not?”

Since Anthony was in the midst of casting some coins down onto the counter while the vendor dished up a platter of raw oysters floating in their pearly gray shells, he could scarcely deny it. Though he had to stifle a groan over Somersby’s slip of the tongue. It was rapidly becoming plain they were destined to pay dearly for their long years of masquerade.

Amabel Lovell and Adelaide Hawley stood by during the purchase of the oysters, both girls wide-eyed and murmuring unladylike noises for which their mothers would have chastised them severely. As Anthony tilted a crusty shell, sliding the whole oyster into his mouth, Cat caught sight of the shining inside of the empty shell and her lips began to twitch. She caught Anthony’s eye. “Mother of pearl,” she murmured. Anthony came perilously close to choking on his oyster.

The Earl of Wrexham was not opposed to oysters, but somehow the thought of slurping raw crustaceans only slightly warmer than the ice all around them, and in the company of three young ladies who looked horrified at the very thought, stayed his hand. He was not unconscious of the irony of the situation. That he had reached the age where he considered his dignity before his appetite was not the most salubrious revelation of the day. He escorted the ladies to the next tent where he bought four extremely savory sausage pies.

By the time the last pie had disappeared, Wrexham’s dignity had flown off with the icy wind whipping up the basin of the Thames. The three ladies twisted and turned, thrusting their faces forward past the hems of their heavy cloaks as they attempted to eat their pies while avoiding the juices dripping from the succulent creations. Their giggles became bubbling trills of laughter, which dissolved Wrexham’s composure into outright amusement. As the group of six set off for further exploration of the booths along Freezeland Street, Lord Wrexham was rewarded by a look of warm regard from Catherine’s sparkling green eyes.

The ladies paused over the bookstalls; the gentlemen hovered over the games of chance. Cat and Anthony exchanged reminiscent glances as Gordon Somersby indulged in two turns of the Wheel of Fortune. “Oh, look!” Amabel called. “We must try the swings.
Do
say that we might, Catherine.”

Until that moment Cat had not considered herself a chaperone to the two younger girls. Adelaide Hawley was, in fact, nearly her own age, but being married gave Catherine Perez seniority. Firmly, she turned her head away from the dancing lights in Anthony’s eyes. “Of course we will try the swings,” Cat declared. “I trust you gentlemen do not consider yourself above such fun?” she added dryly, peeking up at Wrexham.

“
I am at your service,” he returned, though his jaw could be seen to be working under some strong emotion. It could only be hoped none of his friends would think of attending the Frost Fair, or he would never hear the end of it!