Vixen (30 page)

Hugo stood supervising the securing of Petrarch to the rear of the chaise. He had no idea how it had happened. He couldn’t even pinpoint the moment when he’d yielded. His ward had the most obdurate will, one that simply ignored opposition. She had behaved as if he couldn’t possibly have meant his prohibition and somehow he’d come to believe that he hadn’t.

But, dammit, he had! The prospect of a two-hundred-mile journey with that circus was hideous. No less so was the thought of arriving at his deserted and neglected house on Mount Street accompanied by a menagerie.

With a helpless frown he listened to Chloe’s cheerful reassurances as she bestowed her family within the chaise. She seemed to be extolling the virtues of travel by post-chaise and all the excitements to come their way. Judging by Falstaff’s response, they were not wholly impressed.

“Don’t fancy travelin’ with that lot,” Samuel muttered, appearing at Hugo’s side. “I’ve ’alf a mind to ride along wi’ you.”

Since Samuel was not much of a rider, rolling decks suiting him more than the rolling gait of a horse, the possibility was indicative of the depths of his feelings on the matter.

“I’m sorry,” Hugo apologized, shaking his head. “I don’t know how it happened.”

“Won’t take no for an answer, that’s ’er trouble,” Samuel pronounced.

“But what’s mine?” Hugo demanded.

Samuel cast him a shrewd look. “Reckon ye know that as well as anyone.” He stomped around to the open door of the chaise and peered doubtfully within. “Any room in there for me?”

“Yes, of course,” Chloe said. “I’ll sit with Beatrice and Falstaff and the kittens, and you can have the whole opposite seat to yourself.”

“What about the dog?”

“He’ll sit on the floor … but I expect some of the time he’ll want to run along beside the carriage.”

Samuel sighed heavily and clambered in. Chloe smiled warmly in welcome and scrunched herself up
against the squabs as if to make herself even smaller than she was.

“You do have enough room, don’t you?” she asked with anxious solicitude as he settled down.

“Reckon so,” he said with a grudging sniff. “But it’ll smell to ’igh ’eaven in here, soon enough.”

“It won’t,” Chloe insisted, trying to make Dante diminish as he leapt exuberantly into the carriage and bestowed his breathy grin on his fellow travelers. “They’re very clean. And we can have the window open.”

“Drafts is bad for me neck.”

“Oh, Samuel, please don’t mind.” She reached over and placed a hand on his knee.

As always, he was not proof against the beguiling charm of her appeals. He grunted in half-acceptance. The whole expedition struck him as lunacy. He was Lancashire born and bred, and apart from his years at sea had never been out of the county. He had never been to London and had never wanted to go. He didn’t want to now. It seemed to him they had enough to do at the manor, and now that Sir Hugo had come out of the doldrums, life could jog along quite smoothly. But where Sir Hugo went, he went too, and if Sir Hugo believed this crazily uncomfortable disruption of their lives was necessary, then Samuel would bite his tongue.

Hugo swung onto his horse, and the chaise moved out of the courtyard. He cast a glance behind him at his home. He had never been fond of it, not even as a boy, and had left it without regret when he’d joined the navy. Since his return, its proximity to Shipton and Gresham Hall had destroyed any desire to make a permanent home there. He’d stayed, attached by some fantastical umbilical cord to the one pure love of his life … and because it was as good a place as any other to drink himself into an early grave.

But all that was behind him.

Now he was caught up in a convolution to which he had to find a solution. And the only solution was a husband for Chloe. No suitable husband could be found if she remained at Denholm Manor. He couldn’t establish her on her own without exposing her to Jasper’s machinations. So it had to be London under his protection.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
The Latin tag from schoolboy geometry was somehow appropriate in its absolute truth.

And maybe in London they would find the distractions that would lessen the spell that diminutive bundle of love had cast over them both. Until the spell was broken, Chloe wouldn’t be truly free to follow the conventional paths that Elizabeth would have wanted for her. She would find friends, activities, a social whirl that the sheltered girl could never have imagined. And as she became absorbed, so would the ties to himself lessen.

As for himself—once he had found London a hypnotic treasure chest. There were members of Society who would remember him … there were distant relatives who knew no worse of him than that he’d gone somewhat precipitately to fight Napoleon. He had friends at the Admiralty … men who existed on half pay rather than sell out at war’s end. Once he’d been gregarious, there was no reason he shouldn’t become so again. The shadow of the Congregation of Eden could be thrown off.

And in the pursuit of these distractions he would be able to withdraw gracefully from the unnatural … no, not unnatural, but utterly improper and disgraceful liaison with his seventeen-year-old ward.

And once she was respectably married, she’d be free of Jasper’s threat, and he would be free to leave England and make some kind of a life for himself on the Continent.

He knew one thing, it was a knowledge that came from the marrow of his bones rather than his brain. He couldn’t endure to live close to Chloe once she was married … in love … lost to him for all the right reasons. He’d ached in the wilderness for her mother. He wouldn’t do it again for the daughter.

“H
UGO
L
ATTIMER
, isn’t it?” At the quiet question, Hugo looked up from the shelf of music books he was perusing in Hatchard’s. He frowned for a second at the black-eyed man who’d addressed him, then his expression cleared as recollection came.

“Carrington,” he said, holding out his hand to Marcus Devlin, Marquis of Carrington. “It’s been many years.”

“At least fourteen,” Lord Carrington agreed, shaking hands. “We were both a pair of striplings. You joined the navy, I believe.”

“Yes, for the duration. I sold out after Waterloo.”

“And what brings you to London? The joys of the Season?” Carrington’s voice was faintly sardonic. He was not an aficionado of Society’s social whirl.

Hugo shrugged easily. He remembered some old story about a broken engagement that had soured Marcus Devlin’s view of Society’s pleasures. “I’ve acquired a ward,” he said with a smile. “And it seems orchestrating a come-out lies within the duties of a guardian.”

He glanced around the crowded bookshop. “She’s here somewhere, searching for Miss Austen’s posthumous publication;
Persuasion,
I believe it’s titled.”

“An interesting lady, Miss Austen,” Marcus observed. “A painfully sharp wit and no patience with fools and their foibles.”

“No,” Hugo agreed. “Pride and prejudice …”

“Sense and sensibility,” Marcus continued promptly.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me, Lattimer … I’ll see you in White’s or Watier’s perhaps?”

Hugo inclined his head in vague acknowledgment. He was still a member of both clubs, but he had neither the resources nor the inclination for gaming—the major activity in the exclusive clubs of St. James’s—and no desire to draw attention to himself by refusing to join in the heavy drinking that accompanied social intercourse in those bastions of male privilege.

The marquis left the bookshop and stood on the street, looking up Piccadilly, waiting for his tiger to bring the curricle whose team he’d been walking while his lordship made his purchases.

He barely noticed the raucous commotion from a group of lads on the corner of an alley behind him, until a slight figure hurtled out of the bow-windowed shop, racing past him with a cry of outrage. Curiously he turned to watch, and suddenly the figure spun around and ran back to him.

“Your whip?” she demanded, her eyes crackling with passion. “Please, quickly.” Impatiently, she extended her hand for the long driving whip he held loosely at his side.

Marcus didn’t think he’d ever beheld a more exquisite countenance or an angrier one. She blazed with the pure fire of righteous rage. Before he could say anything, however, she had snatched the whip from him without further ceremony and was racing back to the noisy group on the corner.

He watched in stunned amazement as she plunged into the middle of the group, slashing savagely from side to side with his whip with a complete indifference to the shrieks of those she struck.

“What the hell … Chloe!” Hugo Lattimer appeared on the pavement. “I do not believe this,” he exclaimed.
“I turn my back for two minutes and she’s embroiled in some melee again.”

“Happens often, does it?” Marcus inquired, as amused as he was intrigued.

“When it comes to abused animals,” Hugo replied shortly. He strode over to the disintegrating group, where quite a crowd was gathering.

Fascinated, the marquis followed.

Chloe Gresham emerged victorious from the melee as the whipped youths slunk away into the alley. She held something clutched to her breast. Her hat was crooked, her skirt muddied, a streak of dirt down one cheek. Her eyes blazed with a mixture of fury and triumph.

“Just look!” she demanded of Hugo, the catch in her voice as always accentuated by emotion. “They were baiting him with pointed sticks.”

“Dear God,” Hugo muttered, staring at Chloe’s prize. “It’s a bear!”

Marcus could well understand the other man’s dismay. Nevertheless, his shoulders shook slightly as Chloe said, “It’s a baby … it can’t be more than two months old … and they were torturing it. I thought bear baiting was against the law.”

“It is,” Marcus said. “I beg your pardon, but I don’t seem to have had the honor …”

“My ward,” Hugo said with a sigh. “Chloe Gresham. Chloe, allow me to present Lord Carrington.”

“Enchanted, Miss Gresham.” Marcus bowed, his black eyes brimful of amusement and more than a little admiration. For some reason, the streak of dirt seemed to accentuate the peaches and cream complexion, emotion darkened her eyes to an indescribable depth of blue, and the angrily quivering lip merely served to underline the full perfection of a lovely mouth.

“Oh, your whip, Lord Carrington. Thank you, and I
beg your pardon if I snatched it from you.” She held it out to him.

“Not at all,” he murmured. “I would have offered to help, but such an offer seemed somewhat superfluous.” He cast a glance of complicit amusement at Hugo Lattimer, who returned it with a resigned shake of the head.

“Come here, lass. Your hat’s crooked.” Careful to avoid the bundle in her arms, he straightened the chip straw hat, affording Marcus a more thorough glimpse of a lustrous golden head.

Taking out his handkerchief, Hugo licked the corner and wiped the streak of dirt from her cheek. “Now, would you mind telling me what you intend doing with a bear cub. I doubt Dante will appreciate him … it … not to mention Beatrice.”

“Dante?” queried Marcus, fascinated. “Beatrice?”

“Oh, my household resembles a circus,” Hugo informed him. “So far we have seven cats, a massive, obsessively devoted mongrel, a one-legged parrot with the foulest mouth you’ve ever heard, and now, it appears, a bear … oh, and in the past we’ve also had a barn owl and a much-abused nag liberated from a turnip seller. They all rejoice in the most erudite of names.”

“You exhibit much fortitude, my friend,” Marcus commented.

“You’re laughing at me,” Chloe accused, looking between them.

“Heaven forfend,” Hugo threw up his hands. “What could be less amusing than a bear?”

“It’s only a baby,” she said again, bending her head to look at the mangy bundle of fur in her arms. A pair of bright eyes looked out at her and a black snout snuffled.

“But what are you going to do with it?”

“I wonder if bears can be housebroken—”

“No!”
Hugo exclaimed.

“You don’t think they can?” She looked up, frowning, her head on one side.

“I should think it’s highly unlikely.” Marcus weighed in on the side where fellow-feeling seemed to place him. “The stables seem the most appropriate place … at least until he … it … grows up.” His voice quavered as Hugo groaned audibly, and they both envisaged a fully grown brown bear in situ in a London establishment.

“Well, I’ll see,” Chloe said. “When I’ve had a chance to see if he’s badly hurt and how undernourished he is. I may have to keep him inside for a while.”

“I wish I didn’t have to go,” Marcus murmured, “before you resolve the issue, but unfortunately I have an appointment.” He extended his hand again to Hugo. “You must be blessed with remarkable forbearance, Lattimer. I don’t know whether to offer you my congratulations or my condolences.”

“I’ll accept either or both,” Hugo said wryly. He barely knew Marcus Devlin, but there was something about his reaction to the situation that created an easy familiarity. But then, Chloe tended to have that effect on most people. “I only wonder which Society will offer.”

“With that beauty,” Marcus said, softly enough for Chloe not to hear. “She’ll bring the town to its knees, my friend.”