The Wicked Wedding of Miss Ellie Vyne (9 page)

“But Napoleon is dead, sir.”

“Just because the man is dead, Grieves, doesn’t mean he’s changed for the better. And he was French.”

Nothing further to be said on the matter of the French, the valet took out a small brush and worked it briskly over the back and shoulders of his master’s waistcoat. “Are you going out this morning, sir? So early?”

“Hmmm.”

The events of the previous evening waltzed through his mind again. A pair of stunning violet eyes, a warm hand slipping out of his grip, lips trying not to laugh at him. Extraordinary lips he silenced with a kiss.

Ellie Vyne hadn’t let him sleep a wink last night, and he swore that tonight he would repay the favor.

“What time is it, Grieves?”

“It is half past eleven, sir.”

“Good. Order the carriage brought around, will you?” He whistled a light tune as he shrugged his shoulders into his coat.

“Is everything all right, sir?”

Grabbing the elderly valet by his ears, James planted a kiss on his furrowed brow. “Grieves, if I thought you wouldn’t fritter it away, I’d give you an increase in pay at once.”

“Good heavens, sir…that would have been very nice.”

“I’m in an excellent mood today and shortly to regain the treasure stolen from me by that Frenchman.”

“What a relief, sir.” Clutching the little brush in both hands, Grieves edged cautiously around his master. “The treasure in question is the Hartley Diamonds, sir?”

“No, no! The Vyne woman. Do follow along, Grieves.”

The valet swayed backward on his heels. “Miss Vyne, sir? The one you do not wish on your worst enemy?”

“The very same.”

“Miss Vyne of the stubborn demeanor and quarrelsome streak? Little Miss Vyne of the ink moustache?”

“Not so little anymore.” His gaze went foggy as he thought again of her long legs and the rosebuds framing her bosom. “But quite grown-up.”

“I never met the infamous lady, sir.”

“Think yourself lucky. She’s naught but trouble, and I can’t imagine what has possessed me. But there it is. Someone should take her in hand. It may as well be me, since I’m a reformed man, shouldering the responsibilities no one else wants.”

“Hartleys are speaking to Vynes this year then, sir?”

“Indeed we are, Grieves.” James swept out of the room and down the stairs, completely forgetting his boots, obliging Grieves to run after and stop him before he could walk out into the street barefoot.

The footman heard them coming and leapt into action to swiftly open the front door. A chill morning breeze blew into the hall, bringing with it several dry leaves that scratched across the black-and-white hall tiles and spun in a rapid circle. The footman, still holding the door and looking out into the street, froze in surprise.

Another man stood there, hand raised to pull on the bell at the exact same moment the door opened.

James, still barefoot and with Grieves following close behind, came to an abrupt halt. The man on the doorstep wore an old-fashioned white wig and a very self-satisfied expression on his face.

“Good morning. Mr. Hartley, is it not?” A pair of sinister dark eyes roved upward from James’s bare feet to his face and then beyond, into the hall, scanning the place, circling, following the route of those dead leaves. “I believe you’ve been expecting me.”

James straightened up. “I have?”

“Indeed, Mr. Hartley. I am the count de Bonneville.”

***

He took the visitor into his library and signaled for Grieves to leave them alone. The count was right, of course; he had expected this meeting sooner or later, in light of what happened at the party the night before. News traveled fast in Town. Scandal even faster.

The count, without all his evening finery, frills, and face powder, was rough about the edges, coarse in manners and appearance. He was older than James expected, his face much more weathered and worn, yet there was a handsomeness to his hard features. Most surprising of all, he had no French accent. Today, it seemed, he did not bother with his act. Seating himself—without being asked—in a chair before James’s desk, he sprawled in a languid fashion, his boots leaving clumps of mud on the carpet. He brought the chill of the day inside with him, and there was a crisp rustle each time he moved, for his clothes had yet to thaw out. He was a fidget, fingers never still, eyes constantly surveying his surroundings.

His lips slid into a crooked smile. “I saw you cavorting about with my girl last night.”

James stiffened.

“Surely, I says to myself, a gentleman like Mr. Hartley wouldn’t think of stealing my girl away on the sly. He’d want it done proper.” At first James thought the man was suggesting a duel, but then he added, “A gentleman’s agreement.”

James said nothing, just looked at the man’s dirty heels now lifted from the carpet to mark his polished desk.

“If you want her, Hartley,” the so-called count added jovially, “you’ll pay my price, eh?”

“Pay your
price
?” James strode around his desk and sat, falling heavily into the chair.

“I can’t just give her away, can I?” The other man smiled. “She’s a very special girl, is my Mariella. From what I saw last night, you agree.”

“You were there?”

“Oh yesss.” The sound lingered, like the hiss of a snake. “I am always there. She doesn’t go anywhere without me these days.” His grin broadened. “We’re a team, me and her.”

James felt nauseous. “Is that so?” Anger rose quickly over the bile. So she was up to her neck in trouble with her lover, as he’d suspected the moment he saw her in the man’s bed. What game were they playing last night at Lady Clegg-Foster’s? What game did they play now?

“I have to be compensated, don’t I? For my loss, if you take her away from me.” The count swung his feet down from the desk and leaned forward. “I hear you’re thinking of marrying my girl.”

He’d thought it wouldn’t take long for Walter Winthorne to spread that little gem. Silent, James eyed his unwelcome visitor, waiting for the next strike of the serpent’s tongue. It was Ellie Vyne who’d started the engagement rumor, of course. Last night he’d assumed it was by accident, but now he wondered. Knowing her love of tricks and pranks all too well, he suspected it might have been deliberate.

“Like I said, if you’re interested in my girl, you’ll have to pay up. Otherwise I’ll let the word out about a few things. Won’t go down too well with Lady Hartley, once she hears all about your fiancée’s crimes. Will certainly be the end for the lovely Mariella, won’t it, if I tell what she’s been up to?”

He faced the man steadily across his desk, heat rising under his collar. “What she’s been up to?”

“Thieving from your fancy friends. Cheating at cards. Lifting a few jewels, emptying a few unguarded pockets. How else do you think she pays the admiral’s bills?”

It felt as if the ground fell away beneath his chair and he was hurtling through the darkness. If she needed money, why had she not come to him? Instead, she’d let herself be dragged into criminal behavior, consorting with this crook.

He imagined his grandmother’s scornful laughter as she derided him for foolishly imagining, even for the briefest of moments, that the Vyne woman cherished a tiny spot of fondness for him—enough to make her blush when he kissed her, enough to let him nibble playfully on her naked fingertips.

It had all been an act. A clever one that drew him in like a baited hook.

He reached for the letter opener on his desk and tapped it against his open palm. She’d tricked him into an engagement while slyly pretending all the time that she didn’t mean to do it, and he fell for it, drawn in by her secretive, seductive eyes and elusive lips. She’d made a fool of him last night, running off and leaving him on the dance floor with her glove, knowing he’d follow her after she tempted him.

Disgust burned bitter in his throat. Then came jealousy, a hot fist that punched harder than any sparring partner.

He
and
I
have
a
very
close
connection. We are almost inseparable.

He’d stabbed the letter opener into his hand. Not enough to draw blood, but it caused a sharp pain that brought him quickly back to the present. He spread his fingers over the desk blotter and waited for his vision to clear.

“I saw the way you looked at her last night, Hartley.” The crook chuckled. “Surely you can’t object to a little exchange. If you want my Mariella, want me to keep silent about our connection and her…shall we say…light-fingered tendencies.”

“How much do you expect to get from me, Bonneville?”

“Shall we say a thousand pounds?”

He’d anticipated far more. Perhaps this fellow didn’t know how much he was worth. But Ellie did, surely. “I suppose you plan to keep the Hartley Diamonds.”

“Diamonds? What bleedin’ diamonds?” His accent wavered between cockney, an Irish lilt, and something else, a drawl of indeterminate origin.

James wanted to reach across the desk, grab the man by the throat, and wring the laughter—and the last breath—out of him. How could she have given herself to this graceless oaf? Had the villain somehow bribed her into it? No. If that was the case, she would not defend him and conceal his whereabouts. She was no weak-headed female. She was in this with Bonneville, right up to her slender neck. He knew she’d come to this one day. His grandmother had always said the Vyne woman was a criminal in training.

“The necklace of diamonds you took from Ophelia Southwold.”

“I don’t know about that, Hartley. I’m here for my girl, Mariella, not some other woman. Now, do you want her or not?”

The man’s behavior was not adding up. His manners—or lack thereof—and the strangely shifting accent were not what James had expected. But his thoughts were too focused on Ellie Vyne just then. He stared, and his fingers curled into claws against his desk. “Oh, I want her.”

“Well, then.” The other man stood, clearly too restless to remain still for long. Thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, he paced before the desk. “You’d better pay me for the pleasure. Fair and square. All I want is my due. What I’m owed for giving her up. And remember, Hartley, if I go down, I take her with me.”

James knew he shouldn’t care, after the lies she’d told him, the tricks and games she’d played.

But he did care. He couldn’t help himself. He had no choice but to pay the man and get her away from him.

***

When he finally left the house, his mood dark, Grieves met him halfway across the hall.

“This came for you this morning, sir.” The valet produced a small box wrapped in muslin, a sealed note tied on with ribbon. “A messenger boy brought it.”

James opened the box. One brilliant diamond winked up at him.

“Goodness gracious, sir, is that not one of the Hartley Diamonds?”

James closed the box and studied the messy, hurried writing on the attached note.

Catch
me
if
you
can. EV.

So she had his diamonds all along, and now she made a game of it. He thrust the small box inside his jacket pocket and realized he was grinding his jaw. With one hand he rubbed it, soothing his anger likewise until it was merely a dull ache.

James was not sure why she would return one of the diamonds, but it suited his temper at that moment to believe she was in this blackmail up to her neck. Then he could make her pay for her part in it. She now owed him for saving her from the count’s clutches. As far as he was concerned, she’d spend the rest of her life paying him back. James Hartley was done with being a gentlemanly loser in romance. In fact, in the case of Ellie Vyne, he was done with being a gentleman altogether.

After this, the only games she’d play would be by his rules. In his bed.

While she packed her trunk later that morning, her sisters took turns advising and lecturing. They both had presents for Aunt Lizzie and forced them into her trunk until there was barely room for anything of hers to be neatly packed. Instead, she resorted to jamming her clothes in wherever they fit, knowing they would be horrendously wrinkled by the time she arrived.

“Do give her our love,” exclaimed Charlotte, sounding harried as always, a woman frantically busy at all times while achieving very little to show for it. “If only I had nothing to do, like you, and could get away for a pleasant, idle few weeks, but now I am a married woman and soon to face confinement…”

Charlotte had been married five months, and her child was not due for another six, but she talked of the impending confinement constantly, already taking pleasure in the attention in brought her, all the special needs she was now at liberty to claim. Their sister Amelia, married six months, was yet to announce a visit from the stork, which had caused some souring between the two women. Ellie hoped, for all their sakes, that both sisters might soon be so overburdened with sticky-fingered offspring they’d no longer have the time to meddle in her life.

Amelia produced string to help secure the bursting luggage. “Do not talk to strangers on the journey, Ellie. There will be all manner and class of folk. When you stop at the Barley Mow, keep a close eye on your trunk. I wish my husband had agreed to let you use our private chaise, but it could not be spared.”

“Nor could ours, although I would have lent it to you in an instant,” Charlotte exclaimed as if someone had accused her of deliberately sending her carriage out on errands rather than let it be used for their sister.

Ellie shrugged. “I daresay my fellow passengers in the mail coach should be warned about me as much as I should be about them.”

“Oh, Ellie, do be serious. Papa will be very cross, you know, to hear that you are traveling with the post.”

“But unless he can produce a set of wings for me to fly by, I must make do.”

“Papa wanted you to stay the Season here with us,” Amelia fretted as her fingers adjusted the golden ringlets that peeked out of her lace cap. “He said it was time you found a husband and settled down.”

She hastily reminded them, “But Aunt Lizzie has not been well, and one of us must go to look after her. As married women, you both have far busier lives than mine, and it is only sensible that I go. I’m no use anywhere else, as you know.” Then she found her winning ace and cast it down with a flourish. “Besides, look what happened last night when I went out husband-hunting.”

Charlotte sank to the bed, clutching herself as if she felt contractions already. Both sisters left her alone to finish securing her trunk lid.

“You are quite sure it is only a rumor?” Amelia ventured, one hand to her throat, the other curled tightly around the bedpost. “There is no engagement between you and Mr. Hartley? Captain Winthorne sounded quite convinced of it.”

“Of course there isn’t any truth to that rumor,” Charlotte admonished her. “Why on earth should James Hartley want to marry Ellie when he cannot stand the very sight of her face? It was quite evidently a heinous lie put about deliberately to embarrass us.”

“But she did dance with the rogue, and he almost kissed her in the middle of the dance. Lord Clegg-Foster was so distracted he dropped sherbet down his wife’s bosom.”

Ellie straightened up, praying those hasty rope knots would hold for the long journey into the country and along bumpy roads. “I had no choice but to dance with the rake.” She turned away before her sisters could observe the guilt-hued color on her face. “How was I—an innocent spinster—to defend myself from his vile clutches?”

It was only a little white lie, she reasoned, quite harmless by her standards, and neither sister noticed her failure to address the question of an engagement. Pulling her favorite bonnet quickly over her hair, she tied the lilac ribbons under her chin.

She wondered if he had received the diamond yet. No. James Hartley was very probably still in bed. Gentlemen didn’t gain a reputation like his by being up and sensate before noon. “Materially he is very well secure,” Amelia ventured. “I suppose she could do much worse than catch Mr. Hartley’s eye.”

“How could you suggest such a thing?” Charlotte reproached her. “Must I remind you James Hartley’s adulteress mother caused our poor uncle to be ostracized from Society because she lured him into an affair? Our family has suffered ever since. Uncle Grae was chased out of the country, ruined. Now we have no idea where he lives or how he survives in some dreadful wilderness—”

“He lives in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Charlotte,” Ellie interrupted pragmatically, “and keeps a tavern, the last I heard. Quite successfully.”

“Even so, Jamaica is a dreadful, hot, sticky place, full of poisonous snakes, and a great distance away. I’m certain he would much rather be here.”

“Where it rains all the time?”

“It does not rain
all
the time.”

Ellie gave a deep sigh. “No. It just feels that way.”

“In any case, James Hartley is a rake and a scoundrel. He has never had a good word to say about you. And although you are by no means so very plain,” Charlotte added cheerily, laying a dainty hand of comfort on Ellie’s shoulder, “you should not aim so far out of your…range.”

Ellie opened her eyes wide. “My
range
?”

“What you need, Sister, is a quiet, respectable husband, not too attractive, but of adequate means. Someone safe, dependable, and settled. A solid, sensible member of Parliament. Someone my husband would not be ashamed to invite for dinner.”

“Charlotte, can you truly see me happily married to a member of Parliament?”

Even Amelia chortled at that idea, and Charlotte put on her wounded face. Watching their reflections in the mirror, Ellie supposed it was, after all, very sweet of them both to worry about her. She could be in a good, forgiving mood now she was escaping into the country.

“My dear sisters”—she spun away from the mirror and smiled warmly at the two fussing women—“there is absolutely nothing for you to worry about. Now come, kiss me good-bye. It could be your last chance, in case I am mugged and left for dead on the road. Or I decide to run off to Gretna Green with some lecherous, unsuitable young man. I shall understand, of course, that my scandalous marriage will require you to cut me off. Should I need to resort to highway robbery, just to keep a crust on the table and buy shoes for my little ones, I trust you will remember your once-beloved older sister and stand witness at my hanging.”

Her sisters looked at her as if she was absolutely capable of such an end.

***

The frowning maid at Twenty-One Willard Street folded her plump arms and wedged herself in the door frame. “Miss Vyne has gone out.”

He might have known. For a marriage of convenience, this was already damned inconvenient. Not to mention costly.

Another chilling thought occurred—had she run off with the count
and
his thousand pounds? Perhaps she sent him that single diamond as some sort of jest. It would be just like her, naturally, to think all this most amusing. Yet again she got away with her mischief—or so she imagined.

One of her sisters appeared in the shadows of the hall, evidently come to see what the noise was about. She peered over the maid’s enormous shoulder and blinked a pair of wide brown eyes. “Sakes, Mr. Hartley. Have you come for Ellie?”

“I have, madam,” he replied, spitting his words out in anger. “I am told she has gone. Is this true?”

“My sister left on the mail coach to stay with our aunt in the country, Mr. Hartley. She did not expect you, surely,” her sister exclaimed, still hiding behind the maid. “She said nothing to us about—”

Not waiting to hear what she hadn’t said, or what lies she had told, James turned on his booted heel, leapt down the steps and into his carriage.

***

At last the busy crowds of London were left behind. The ceaseless clatter of hooves, wheels, and wooden pattens across paved roads gave way to the softer thud of hardened dirt under the post horses. Streets emptied of rumbling wagons, and the shouts of tradesmen faded as the coach turned into narrow, rutted lanes bordered with bare trees that sometimes scraped brittle limbs along the sides of the vehicle.

Ellie, pressed into a corner, tried to ignore the cramp already burning in her left hip and kept her gaze on the view through the small window. She carefully avoided eye contact with her fellow travelers and clung to happy thoughts of her destination.

Tomorrow evening she would be with her aunt in Sydney Dovedale, a quiet little village where she’d spent several blissfully unfettered summers as a young girl. Whenever her stepfather had felt his patience pushed to the limit by three growing daughters, he sent them to their aunt Lizzie, his only sister and closest female relative. Since Lizzie had no children of her own, he considered her little cottage in the country a perfect place to send his motherless girls, out of harm’s way for long periods while he was away at sea.

Sadly, in Ellie’s case, “out of harm’s way” had only put her into mischief’s way. A girl with a vivid imagination and a penchant for trouble had so much more scope for both in the country, out of her stepfather’s sight.

During one such summer she saw James Hartley for the first time. Then a young man of twenty, he rode at reckless speed down the country lanes in a jaunty curricle. He was always very tidy, too elegantly attired for the country, and that just made young Ellie Vyne—who couldn’t be tidy if she wanted to—feel the intense desire to make him dirty. It was surely her responsibility to do so, because no young man should be so concerned with his clothes. He was obviously vain and conceited. Three times that summer he’d ridden by her in his curricle and muddied her pinafore by racing through a puddle, not seeing the little girl there on the verge.

James had begun courting her friend Sophia Valentine at that time, for she was five years older than Ellie. Everyone said his grandmother was against the match because the Valentines had fallen on hard times, and Ellie rather thought this was why Hartley ran after Sophia in the first place. She knew something about defiance. Even at a young age she was already an observer of other people and their habits. She educated herself with books she was forbidden to read and eavesdropped on a great many conversations she should never have heard.

Aunt Lizzie warned her to stay well away from the young man, reminding her that Vynes and Hartleys had absolutely nothing to do with one another. That was, of course, the very worst thing anyone could have said, for no child of ten should be warned not to do something, because then she is most certainly obliged to do that very thing.

When she found James Hartley, one lazy, sunny afternoon, napping under an oak tree, apparently having emptied a jug of cider and eaten the contents of a small picnic basket all by himself, what else could she do but draw on his face? She just happened to have her ink pot in hand. After she’d run back to her aunt’s cottage to fetch it.

Oh the trouble that got her in! But it was worth it for the laughs. As she’d said to her aunt at the time, “If everyone was virtuous and always good, would not the value of being so rapidly decline?”

No one had any answer to that.

She caught herself smiling at her blurry reflection in the coach window. Better stop that at once, or the other passengers might think her a little odd. After all, there was nothing worth smiling at in her reflection. Her stepfather once told her she had her mother’s eyes, but that brought little comfort, since he also said his American wife was a nagging scold.

Ellie remembered her mother frequently chiding the admiral for his foolishness in buying Lark Hollow. A modest woman of simple tastes, always anxious to be seen as respectable and never to draw undue notice to herself, Ellie’s mother longed for a smaller, more practical home, easier and cheaper to maintain. In the admiral’s words she had “no vision.”

According to him, it was her fault that he sired only daughters, when he wanted strong, seafaring sons to follow in his wake. That was possibly Catherine Vyne’s most unforgivable sin. That, and dying nineteen years ago, leaving him alone to struggle with three mystifying little girls. But he did keep his wife’s portrait in a small oval frame in his study, so he must have loved her a little.

Men, honestly! They were never able to admit the truth about themselves but preferred to keep up a silly front, either pretending they cared when they didn’t or pretending they didn’t care when they did. She, of course, would never do such a thing.

The path of her thoughts traced back to Hartley. Was he up yet? Probably not. He may not even be in his own bed. Who knew what the blackguard got up to after she left the party last night with her sisters?

Suddenly a very smart coach, drawn by four black horses, raced by her window, stones flinging up at the side of the lurching vessel as it almost hurled the mail coach over into the ditch. Passengers cried out in alarm as they plummeted from side to side for ten breathtaking seconds and hung on to hats and one another, disregarding propriety in that moment of near death.

Somehow the coach driver regained control. They bumped, rattled, and bounced over deep ruts, and then were back on the road, all groaning but mostly intact.

Ellie adjusted her aching seat as best she could in the narrow space she was allotted by the spreading thighs of the very large person beside her, and stared out again through the tiny, smeared window.

If she ever got to Sydney Dovedale in one piece, the first thing she wanted was a nice cup of tea and to warm her toes by the fire.
Yes, concentrate on that
, she thought, closing her eyes tight, drawing the pleasant, welcoming picture in her mind, shutting out the overly ripe body odor and the rough, damp feel of the worn upholstery that reeked of alcohol. She closed her mind to the jolts that rocked the carriage constantly and shut her ears to the angry scraping of branches against varnish and wheel spokes. She tried not to notice how the lane narrowed until it was a twisty deathtrap, overhung with hooked tree limbs that might as well be witches fingers poised to drag them all to their grisly end in a flooded ditch.