Vixen (2 page)

“Ah, you’re back, Sir ’Ugo. An’ right glad I am to see you. Such goin’s-on, as I’ve never seen.” A stout, grizzled man in leather britches, boots, and waistcoat, sporting two large gold earrings, broke into Hugo’s fascinated observation of the laboring cat.

“What the hell is going on, Samuel?” he demanded.
“What is this?” He
jabbed a finger at the hat box.

“Looks like she’s started,” Samuel observed somewhat redundantly, peering at the contents of the hat box. “She picked the ’at box and since it was so close to ’er time, like, Miss said as ’ow we’d best leave ’er to it.”

“I appear to be losing my mind,” Hugo declared in a tone of mild interest. “Either that, or I’m still in a drunken stupor in a whorehouse and this is some hideous nightmare.
What the hell are you talking about, Samuel. What ‘miss?’”

“Oh, you’re back, I’m so glad. Miss Anstey can go on her way now.”

The voice was low and musical, with a most appealing catch in it. Slowly, Hugo raised his head and looked across the chaos in the hall toward the refectory door. The apparent owner of the attractive voice stood smiling with an air of total unconcern.

The years fell away and the room seemed to spin. It was Elizabeth, as she had been sixteen years before, on the day he’d first laid eyes on her. It was Elizabeth … and yet it wasn’t. He closed his eyes, massaged his temples, then opened them again. The vision was still standing in the doorway, still trustfully smiling.

“And just who are
you?”
he demanded, his voice sounding rough and cracked.

“Chloe.” The information was imparted as if it were self-evident.

Hugo shook his head in total confusion. “Forgive me, but I remain unenlightened.”

A frown crossed the girl’s eyes and tiny lines appeared on her brow. “Chloe Gresham,” she said, tilting her head to one side as if better to judge his reaction to this further information.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Hugo whispered. She must be Elizabeth’s daughter. He didn’t know whether he’d ever known her name. She had been three years old on the night of the duel.

“They sent you a letter to expect me,” she said, a hint of uncertainty now in her voice. “You did get it?”

“Who’s they?” He cleared his throat, struggling to marshal his scattered thoughts.

“Oh, the Misses Trent, Sir Hugo,” a second voice chimed in, and he saw that another figure stood just behind the vision that was and was not Elizabeth. A little lady timidly stepped forward. “From the Trent Seminary for Young Ladies, Sir Hugo, in Bolton. They wrote last month to tell you to expect Chloe.”

Her head was nodding almost convulsively, her mittened
hands twisting, and despite his bemusement and splitting head, Hugo tried to bridle his growing irascibility. “You have the advantage of me, ma’am. We appear not to have been introduced.”

“This is Miss Anstey,” Chloe put in. “She’s going to a situation in London and the Misses Trent thought she should accompany me here on her way. And now that she’s seen you and knows that you’re not a figment—”

“A what?”

“A figment of the imagination,” she said cheerfully. “We were afraid when we arrived and there was no one here that perhaps you were. But since you’re not, Miss Anstey can continue her journey, which I know she’s anxious to do since she’s expected to take up her duties in a week and it’s a very long way from Manchester to London.”

Hugo listened to this rushed yet somehow lucid speech, wondering rather desperately if the girl always talked so much and so fast, even though he thought he could listen to that delightful voice indefinitely.

“Now, Chloe, you know I can’t leave until I know everything is all right with Sir Hugo,” Miss Anstey ventured, her head nodding even more violently. “Oh, dear me, no. The Misses Trent would never forgive me.”

“Oh, stuff,” declared the confident Miss Gresham. “You can see he’s here, in the flesh, so you can leave with a good conscience.”

Hugo had the feeling that in a minute she would put those small hands on the governess’s shoulders and propel her out to the post-chaise. It was certainly clear who was in charge in this twosome.

“Might I ask why you are to be left?” he inquired. “An honor, I’m sure, but rather puzzling nevertheless.”

“You’re funning,” Chloe said, but the uncertainty was back in her voice. “You’re my guardian and the Misses
Trent sent me to you when they decided I—” She paused, nibbling her bottom lip. “Well, I don’t know what they told you in the letter, but I’m sure it was a tissue of lies.”

“Oh, Chloe dear, you really mustn’t,” fluttered Miss Anstey. “So impolite, child.”

Hugo ran his hands through his hair; the sense of inhabiting some anarchic dream intensified. “I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about,” he said finally. “The last time I knew anything about you, you were three years old.”

“But the lawyers must have told you about Mama’s will—that she made you my guardian—”

“Elizabeth is dead?” he interrupted sharply. His heart jolted.

The girl nodded. “Three months ago. I only saw her once or twice a year, so it’s hard to miss her as I should.”

Hugo turned away, the wrenching sadness filling him. He realized now that he’d always carried a tiny flame of hope that she would let him back into her life.

He walked to the front door, staring through unfocused eyes at the brightness of the morning, trying to organize his thoughts. Was this extraordinary visitation the explanation for that strange note he’d received last year? Hand-delivered from the dower house at Shipton, across the valley, where Elizabeth had lived since her husband’s death. The barely legible scrawl had said only that she knew he would honor his long-ago promise to be of service to her however and whenever and wherever she should need it. There was no explanation, no words of friendship, no sense that this was the opening he’d been waiting for all these years. He’d had the impression that even the faint signature had been an afterthought, disappearing off the edge of the page.

The note had filled him with such a resurgence of
rage and longing that he’d torn it up and tried to put it out of his mind. Since the war had ended and he’d left the navy, they’d lived seven miles from each other. She had made no attempt to contact him and he’d been honor bound to respect her wishes, even after all this time. And then just a scrawled note … a demand. And now this.

He turned back to the hall. The dog had gone to Chloe and sat at her feet, gazing up at her adoringly.

“Letters’ll be in the library, I shouldn’t wonder,” Samuel observed, examining his fingernails. “Wi’ t’others ye’ve not opened. I always said one day there’d be sum-mat important in there.”

Hugo glared at the man who’d been his companion and servant since he’d first gone to sea as a lad of twenty. As usual, Samuel was right. The pounding in his head became fierce, and he knew he couldn’t deal with this another minute. “Get that dog out of the house,” he commanded, striding to the staircase. “And put that damn cat and her litter in the stables, where they belong … and put a cover on that parrot,” he added savagely as the bird tossed out another example of its dubious vocabulary.

“Oh, no!” Chloe exclaimed. “Dante lives inside—”

Hugo swung his head carefully in her direction. “Dante?” he demanded incredulously. “That dog is called Dante?”

“Yes, because he came out of an inferno,” she informed him. “I rescued him from a bonfire when he was just a puppy. Some louts had tied him up and were setting a fire around him. I did think of calling him Joan of Arc,” she added reflectively, “until I realized he was the wrong sex.”

“I don’t think I want to hear any more,” Hugo said. “In fact, I
know
I don’t want to hear any more.” He enunciated his words with great care. “I have not yet
been to bed, so I am going upstairs, where I shall probably say my prayers for the first time since I left the nursery. And when I wake up, I devoutly trust that my prayers will have been answered, and I shall find that this …”He waved his hand in an expansive movement across the scene in the great hall. “That all this will prove to have been no more than the hideous figments of a disordered imagination.”

The parrot cackled in an uncanny imitation of a hysterical drunk. “Get this menagerie out of here!” On which hopefully decisive note Sir Hugo Lattimer took himself to the sanity of his own bedchamber, hearing the fluttering whimpers of Miss Anstey behind him.

He was a chronic insomniac but proficient at catnaps. Ten years of night watches at sea had turned a tendency into immutable habit, one he welcomed since the nightmares haunted his night sleep but visited less often in the short bouts of daytime unconsciousness.

He dropped his clothes in an untidy heap on the floor, crawled into bed, and closed his eyes with relief. The throbbing at his temples lessened with the absence of light. He couldn’t begin to think about Elizabeth and the child who looked so like her and yet so unlike her. Some vast mistake had been made. She belonged at Shipton with the Greshams.

The brutal face of Jasper Gresham swam abruptly into his internal vision and he was wide awake again. Jasper was his father’s son … Stephen’s son. No fit man to have charge of a young girl. Was that what Elizabeth had been trying to avoid? But in what kind of madness could her father’s killer be considered a fit guardian? A recluse who sought relief from the past in drink and the city stews.

He groaned and turned over. The sound of wheels on the courtyard cobbles came from below the open window.
Hope flickered that the post-chaise with two passengers and a menagerie was leaving, and when he awoke this craziness would be over. But he had a prickling premonition that his life was about to undergo a profound change.

D
OWNSTAIRS,
C
HLOE STOOD
on the steps and waved the chaise and Miss Anstey out of the courtyard. The poor lady had been torn between her perceived duty to Chloe and her unquestionable duty to her new employers. But her perceived duty had not been proof against Chloe’s brisk dismissal of her fears, and she had finally been persuaded into the chaise, dabbing at her eyes and pouring forth a stream of benedictions on the dear child she was leaving. She bemoaned the disreputable state of the house, the strangeness of Sir Hugo and his servant, and the significant absence of either housekeeper or a Lady Lattimer. The last words Chloe heard were: “Oh, dear, perhaps I shouldn’t leave you like this … what will the Misses Trent say … but then what will Lady Colshot say … such a bad impression to arrive late … oh, dear …”

Chloe firmly shut the door of the chaise, putting a period to the vacillation, and called good-bye. The coachman cracked his whip and the vehicle and its still indecisively bewailing passenger disappeared from Denholm Manor.

Thoughtfully, Chloe turned back to the house. It did seem that there was no Lady Lattimer, although it had been assumed at the seminary that there would be. Chloe had never heard of Sir Hugo Lattimer until her mother’s will had been read. She had no idea why her mother had chosen him, but then, she knew almost nothing about her mother, having spent no more than a
few days a year with Elizabeth since she was six. The only thing she knew at the moment was that this change in her circumstances could only be for the better.

She knelt down by the hat box. The cat’s labors seemed to be over and Chloe counted six damp kittens squirming at her belly. They were curiously repellent, she thought, absently stroking the cat’s head, more like baby rats than the entrancing creatures they would soon become.

“Best get that lot out to the stable before Sir ’Ugo comes down.” Samuel’s gruff voice came from behind her and she stood up, brushing the dust off her skirt.

“I don’t think we should move her outside just yet. She’ll feel threatened and she might abandon them.”

Samuel shrugged. “Not an animal lover, Sir ’Ugo … except horses, of course.”

“Doesn’t he like dogs?” Chloe caressed Dante’s massive head, pushing against her knee.

“Not indoors,” Samuel informed her. “Gun dogs is fine, but their place is in the kennels.”

“Dante sleeps with me,” Chloe stated. “Even the Misses Trent accepted that. He howls all night otherwise.”

Samuel shrugged again. “I’d best get back to me kitchen. Sir ’Ugo’ll be wantin’ his breakfast when he wakes.”

“Don’t you have a cook?” Chloe followed him out of the hall, down a long corridor to the kitchen at the rear of the house.

“Who needs one? Wi’ just the two of us?”

Chloe looked around the room with its huge fireplace and spit, the massive table, the array of copper pots. “Only you and Sir Hugo live in this house?” It seemed very odd, but one could become used to anything.

“Tha’s right.” Samuel broke eggs into a bowl.

“Oh.” Chloe frowned, nibbling her lip. “Well, perhaps
you could direct me to my bedchamber. I could move some of my things out of the hall, then.”

Samuel paused in his beating of the eggs and gave her a searching look. “You reckon on stayin?”

“Of course,” Chloe said with an assumption of confidence. “I have nowhere else to go.”