Chapter Three
Three years earlier. Rider Hall, Kent,
August 17, 1811
Sophie’s heart slammed against her ribs when the front door opened with a crash that rattled the windows. Her first thought was that someone had broken in. It was half past two in the morning, and the servants had gone home hours ago. Nan, the maid of all work and the only one who lived in, was fast asleep. Even if she was up and about, the girl was incapable of making that much noise.
Downstairs, something crashed to the floor. A painting falling from the wall?
“Damn me, I’m killed!” a man yelled. She heard more thrashing about and then the screech of something heavy being dragged or pushed across the marble floor.
She bowed her head to her desk and concentrated on steadying her breathing. Not a house cracker, but Tommy. Her husband, whom she had not seen in nearly a year. Her hands trembled as she put away her writing, hiding it deep in a bottom drawer. Tommy. After all these months apart. And instead of joy at his arrival, all she could think was, why?
“Where’s a bloody lamp?” Tommy shouted from downstairs. But then his feet clomped and shuffled on the stairs. He was singing “Whisky, You’re the Devil,” but the words didn’t make any sense until he got to the chorus.
Her knuckles hit the ink bottle when she reached for the cap, and she lived a moment of pure terror while she juggled the cap and the bottle both. But no harm was done, except to her racing heart. She capped her ink and put away her pen without cleaning the nib. Those, too, went inside a drawer. Tommy’s singing became louder and then stopped. He was home and in no fit condition. A welcome thread of anger pulsed in her.
“Sophie?”
The door rattled, covering the clack of the desktop closing. She turned the key just as the door to their room crashed open. Tommy swayed in the doorway, staring at the empty bed. He squinted. This time, she thought for just a moment, things would be different.
“Sophie? Where the devil have you got to?”
“Here, Tommy.”
Her husband, as angelically handsome as ever, turned his head toward her. He squinted again. “Sophie?”
He wore a green coat and the gold watch she’d given him on their second anniversary. Several fobs she didn’t recognize hung from it now. He had on soiled white gloves and a beaver hat. His neckcloth was askew. He wavered on his feet. Sophie hurried to him, but she was too late. He lurched toward the bed and tumbled face-first onto the mattress. At the bedside, she could smell the drink on him.
She was unable to rouse him. She felt a pang of guilt for thinking perhaps that was for the best. He was her husband, after all, and she ought to be glad he was here. With some effort, she got him onto his back and then levered his legs onto the mattress. She rescued his hat from the floor. His gold-buckled shoes were new and shined to a blinding polish. Was that what they wore in Town these days? When she unfastened his coat, she smelled a flowery perfume. Nothing at all had changed. She managed to undress him down to his shirt and breeches, and then she gave up. Tommy outweighed her by too much to hope she could move him. Besides, he was snoring now. He wasn’t going to wake up until late tomorrow morning—with a headache and a murderous temper. She pulled the duvet over him and hoped he would not take a chill.
“Tommy!” cried another masculine voice, deeper than Tommy’s and more commanding than Tommy’s had been. The owner of that voice was in the hallway, for heaven’s sake. “You whoreson, where are you? It’s bloody dark here.”
Sophie tightened the sash of her dressing gown, picked up her lamp, and left her room to find the devil himself had taken possession of her hallway. A man with startlingly pale skin stood with his arm draped around the shoulder of a woman whose gown glittered with silver tissue. The woman put an ungloved hand to her blond hair and smiled at Sophie with eyes whose vagueness might have been due to exhaustion. Or drink.
As for the man, the words cold hauteur must have been coined directly from his face. One black eyebrow rose when he saw her. He was about Tommy’s age. Late twenties, possibly thirty, and pale, though not from ill health. He seemed paler still because hair the color of ink hung thick about his temples, long enough to reach his collar. She’d thought Tommy’s clothes were fine, but this man’s put his to shame. Tall and broad shouldered, he wore clothes so beautifully cut he fair hurt her eyes. The woman tucked herself tightly against his side.
“What have we here?” the man said, laughing into his companion’s neck. He turned his head again and looked her up and down not once but twice. “A wee faerie?”
“No,” Sophie said.
He studied her some more. “My God, you’re a dainty little thing. Why is Tommy hiding you away here?”
“You are under a misapprehension, sir—”
And then, just like that, he stood straight. His arm fell from the woman’s shoulder. “Ah,” he said in a different sort of voice. “The fog of Bordeaux has been penetrated at last.” He closed his eyes and kept them shut to at least the count of three. When he opened them, his voice was as cold as his eyes. “Mrs. Thomas Evans, I presume?”
“Yes.” She was near enough now to see his eyes. Black rimmed his irises, the color bleeding slowly into a solid and unrelenting gray eerily flat of expression, or rather, she thought, the color, like silver gone to tarnish, made them impervious to reflection of his interior thoughts.
“Tommy failed to mention his wife lived here.”
If she’d been in a better mood, Sophie would have laughed. The man actually sounded personally affronted to have found her here. “Since my husband did not warn me of his arrival, let alone that he would be bringing guests, we are equally inconvenienced, wouldn’t you agree?”
Some emotion, quite possibly irritation, flickered over his face but was quickly tucked away behind the coldness of his eyes. “Touché, Mrs. Evans. May I ask where your esteemed husband has gone?”
She pictured Tommy, flat on his back and gently snoring. “He is…asleep, sir.”
“Ah.”
“I am at a disadvantage,” she said, lifting her lamp. His hair flashed blue black in the light. “You know who I am, while I have no names to put to you or your companion.”
He bowed, though Sophie had the impression he had to concentrate to perform the motion. So he was drunk. “Lord Banallt, at your service, ma’am.”
Her heart stuttered at the familiar name. Lord Banallt. The universe was perverse indeed. Of all the noblemen Tommy might have brought home, he’d brought this one. A man who could buy and sell Tommy twice over. A man whose name she’d grown up hearing and about whom she had made up all manner of silly, romantic fantasies. “The Earl of Banallt?” she asked. As if he could be any other.
“The very same, ma’am.” Lord Banallt put his arm around the woman again and walked her away to whisper in her ear. Sophie’s hearing, however, was excellent, and Lord Banallt’s voice was not as low as he likely fancied. “Forgive me, kitten. Maeve,” he murmured. Sophie heard the drink in his low, soft voice. But with that smoky note, no wonder Maeve was melting against him. “You cannot stay here.” She made a sound of protest and squirmed into his embrace. “My love, my heart. She’s Tommy’s wife. I’m desolate, I promise you.” He kissed the top of her bare shoulder. “King will drive you to the nearest inn.”
Sophie’s practical nature took over. “It’s too late at night to send her away, my lord.”
Lord Banallt lifted his head and looked at her, surprise etched on his face. And yet she saw nothing in his eyes. Nothing at all. She shuddered to think of the kind of life that gave a man such empty eyes.
She walked past them and opened the door to one of the other bedrooms. “You’ll both need rooms, of course,” she said.
“You are most gracious, Mrs. Evans.” Lord Banallt bowed.
“Separate rooms,” she said to forestall any chance he thought she condoned that sort of behavior under her roof. “Ma’am?” She looked at Maeve and prayed she would not object to being separated from her lover. What was Tommy thinking, bringing Lord Banallt and this woman here to Rider Hall? But then she remembered the perfume on Tommy’s clothes, and she was angry twice over. “My apologies. There was not time to air the room.” She went inside with Maeve. The earl followed, which worried her. She had no intention of letting him stay. While she lit another lamp, however, Lord Banallt made himself useful and started a fire in the hearth. She was surprised he knew how. “I’ll send my girl to help you, ma’am,” she told Maeve.
“Thank you,” said Maeve. She spoke in a cultured voice, in the accent of a woman who’d been respectably reared, yet she was certainly not sober. Lord Banallt had brought an expensive whore with him. Into her home. Her heart contracted to think of Tommy spending time in the company of a man who kept women like Maeve in gowns that cost the very moon and stars. “You’re kind, Mrs. Evans,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” Sophie said. She hated that she sounded stiff and pompous, too.
Maeve reached for Banallt’s hand as he passed her on his way from the hearth. He stopped. “Banallt,” she said in a voice that made his name both a protest and an enticement.
“Have a pleasant night,” he said while Sophie opened the cedar trunk at the foot of the bed and took out two extra blankets. It was August, but the room hadn’t had a fire for weeks and the air was not only cold but musty. She could not help the staleness, but the cold she could remedy.
When she looked up from the trunk, Lord Banallt had his arms around Maeve’s waist, and Maeve was plastered against him. The woman ran her fingers through Banallt’s thick, black hair. In response, he bent his head and brushed his lips across hers. Sophie saw his mouth open. She looked away, but not before his hands tightened around the woman’s waist. And not before she saw him sway on his feet. Her belly tightened as he made a low sound far too intimate for a moment that was not private.
Sophie closed the chest. Loudly. The couple broke apart, and she pretended she’d not seen anything. She placed the blankets on the bed. “If you’ll come with me, my lord.”
Banallt followed her out, one hand smoothing his hair. Nan, Sophie’s maid of all work, stood in the hall, a cloak drawn tight around her shoulders and gloves on her hands. She held up her lamp. “Mrs. Evans?” she said. Her attention went to Lord Banallt and her mouth dropped open.
“Thank goodness you’re up, Nan.” She smiled with relief. “I don’t suppose anyone could sleep through that racket. My husband is here unexpectedly, with Lord Banallt and—”
“Mrs. Andrews,” Banallt said from nearer to her than she’d thought he was.
“Can you do for Mrs. Andrews?” Nan was twenty years old, a pretty girl and utterly reliable. Without her assistance, managing Rider Hall would have been an overwhelming responsibility. “She’s just in there, and I expect she needs assistance.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Nan’s eyes constantly shifted to Lord Banallt. Sophie now had a new worry. Nan was a very pretty girl. Too pretty to find work at other homes where the ladies of the house preferred less temptation before their husbands. Sophie shot Banallt a look and was not reassured.
“Nan,” Banallt said. Oh yes indeed, he had noticed Nan and her pretty face. Nan, in the act of knocking on Maeve’s door, froze at the command in his voice. “My valet is in the barn attending the horses. His name is King. You will recognize him from his crooked nose. He’s ugly as sin but putty in the hands of a pretty girl. Give him a smile, and tell him he’s required after all. Direct him to my room, if you would.”
Nan curtseyed. “Milord.”
Sophie opened a second door farther down the hall—inconveniently far, she hoped as she went in. She found a lamp and lit it while, again, Lord Banallt bent over the hearth to start the fire. “At least you make yourself useful,” she said.
“I’ve no desire to freeze to death.”
She pulled sheets off the furniture. Rider Hall so seldom had guests that Sophie kept most of the rooms closed up. Done with the fire, Banallt stood at the grate. He put a hand on the mantel to steady himself. She wondered how much he’d had to drink. To think this was the man she had once imagined as the hero of so many stories. “Sit down, my lord, before you fall and break your head.”
He threw himself onto a chair and let his legs sprawl out. “I’m foxed,” he said slowly. “More foxed than I thought.” He ran his hands through his hair. “My head’s spinning.”
“Overindulgence will do that.”
“You have a very tart tongue.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Well,” he said. “And so.”
“I disapprove of spirits.”
“Whereas I cannot live without them.” He let his head fall back against the chair. “I am not a happy drunk, Mrs. Evans. I hope that tomorrow you will have the kindness to recall nothing of my condition.”
She stopped with her arms full of sheets. “Leave Nan alone, and I’ll have no cause for complaint.”
“She is pretty.” He nodded to himself. “And she has a lively eye. I wonder that you hired her.”
“Tommy is never here.” She dropped the sheets onto a chair.
Once again he looked her up and down. His eyes were unpleasantly cold. “You’re not a’tall what I expected.”
“A crone?” she said.
He smiled, and it transformed his face, giving it all the warmth he’d previously lacked. He took her breath. “Bent over and crippled in both legs.”
“With a long, hooked nose.” She skimmed a finger along her nose, and Banallt’s gaze followed her motion. “Pie-eyed and shrewish, too.”
“But famously deep in the pockets.”
“Yes,” she said. “Tommy has described me to the last penny.”
He clasped his hands on his head and stared hard at her. “I am not too drunk to fathom the entendre in those words of yours. You’re a clever girl,” he said slowly. “Not a girl. A woman. A clever woman.” He shook his head. “No good ever comes of clever women.”
She wanted to laugh. To think here sat the man whom she’d given the role of knight in shining armor! Her imagination was far more pleasant than reality. As she’d done for Maeve, she took blankets from the chest at the foot of the bed. He stood again and walked to the fireplace where he leaned an elbow on the mantel and rested his chin on his palm, facing sideways so that he watched her. Sophie felt their rapport slip into intimacy, as if they were lovers who’d parted amicably and were now comfortable in friendship. Well. Was he not the very man she’d imagined meeting since she was ten and overheard her mother telling some visitor that, yes, the Earl of Banallt owned property just two miles distant? How strange that she should meet him now. So many years later and so far from home.
“I continue to struggle, Mrs. Evans, with the notion that you are Tommy’s wife. You were described to me as—well, nothing like you.”
“You said yourself you’ve had too much to drink. I expect tomorrow you’ll see me clearly and find your opinion in accord with my husband’s.”
“I’m not that foxed, ma’am.” He considered her again with a slow perusal she found more than faintly insulting. And—something else she couldn’t name. “Are you certain you’re not an imposter?”
“Quite.”
“You’ve the finest eyes I’ve ever seen on a woman. Bar none. And that, madam, is saying something. Your eyes are lovely.”
“Thank you.” She was in the process of spreading one of the blankets on the bed, and while she was doing that, she discovered he’d moved toward her without making a sound.
“Mrs. Evans.” He spoke in a different sort of voice. A voice that sent a shiver up her spine. It was the voice he’d used to whisper to Maeve. The kind of voice Tommy never used with her. She froze with one hand on the edge of the blanket. “Perhaps,” he said in that caressing, silken voice, “you would care to join me in this lovely bed?”
She turned around, the backs of her legs touching the mattress. “I am a married woman.”
“And I am a married man.” He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her with those awful eyes, gray with that odd rim of black. She felt quite certain she would never be free of the heat of his gaze. “What could be more natural than for us to be lovers while I am here?”
“You’ve had too much to drink,” she said.
He smiled. “Yes,” he said. His voice fell, and it wasn’t deliberate; it just was. “But I assure you, it won’t affect my performance.” Banallt touched her cheek, and she slid away from him, unpleasantly aware of the intensity of his eyes on her. He gripped the bedpost and leaned sideways, trapping her. “Darling, don’t go.”
“Let me pass.” She stared at him. Heavens, he’d trapped her in the darkness of his eyes, and there wasn’t any way out. His eyes enfolded her in layers of silver tarnish.
“Say yes,” he said. His voice fell to a whisper. “Let’s have a wicked, wicked affair while I am here.” He took a step closer.
With her heart galloping out of her chest, Sophie slapped him as hard as she could.