Chapter Five
Number 26 Henrietta Street, London,
March 12, 1815
Is Mrs. Evans at home? Banallt asked the butler who answered the door at Henrietta Street. Ah yes, the redoubtable Charles, with his luxurious head of white hair. Down from Havenwood with his employers.
“Who, may I ask, is calling?”
From the man’s expression he knew too well who Banallt was. He suspected as well that Sophie was home. Whether she would see him was another matter. He handed the butler a card. “Gwilym, Earl of Banallt.”
The butler opened the door. “Will you wait while I see if she’s in?”
“Yes, thank you.” He walked in. Truth to tell, he was anxious. His feelings for Sophie were utterly and incomprehensibly unchanged. From the moment he’d heard she and her brother were in London, he had been unable to think of anything but her. Her dismissal of him at Havenwood had failed to cure his affliction. He followed the butler to the front parlor, a dreary room of faded blue and yellow. The only spot of color in the room came from an extravagant bouquet of white roses in a red vase. Roses he had not sent. A card leaned against the vase. Vedaelin had sent the roses. What business had he sending roses to a woman half his age?
Welcome to London, Mrs. Evans. What was the duke after?
He had no idea if Sophie would agree to see him. She was here. In London. As was he. Their town house overlooked a small park, well tended and colorful with early spring flowers on a rare day of blue skies. Voices from upstairs had him turning away from the window. Masculine voices. Footsteps followed, coming closer until, at last, they approached the parlor where he waited like some lovesick boy.
“My lord,” said John Mercer. He came in and closed the door behind him. “Good day.” He walked to the center of the room. He did not sit down. “What a surprise to see you. I’ve not been in Town twenty-four hours.”
“Mercer.” He kept his back to the window. Was Mercer going to pretend Sophie hadn’t come with him? Ridiculous. “Is your sister not at home, then?”
Mercer indicated a chair. “Please, my lord, sit.”
He raised one eyebrow. Damn. “Ought I?”
“Suit yourself.” He had his sister’s eyes, but for the color. Mercer’s eyes were dark green, but the shape and thick lashes were the same as Sophie’s. Mercer focused his gaze on the floor, gathering himself, Banallt fancied. Mercer took a breath, let it out, and lifted his head. “My lord. May I speak frankly to you?”
“If you must.”
“Sophie is my sister. My only relation. It is my duty to look after her. When you came to Havenwood and professed to have fallen in love with her, I confess I imagined you meant the girl who ran away with Thomas Evans and broke all our hearts.”
“Then you were incorrect.”
“She’s a girl no longer, I’ll allow you that. And yet I think no two could be more unsuited than you and my sister.” The edge of his mouth quirked. “It’s not her you claimed to love, but some other woman. A woman I don’t know and never did. And still don’t.” He threw himself on a chair, legs sprawled, one hand clutching his hair. “I don’t know how best to protect her. You did not see her after you left Havenwood.”
“A dilemma for you, to be sure.”
“It was worse, my lord, almost worse, than when she first came to Havenwood. After her husband’s death.” Mercer’s gaze was unfocused. Obviously he was privately recalling those days. “She was…so altered then I hardly knew her.”
“She was very much in love with her husband.”
“I know.”
“She mourns him still,” Banallt said. “I do understand.”
“Actually, I don’t think you do.” Mercer sat forward, forearms on his spread-apart knees, immune, it seemed, to his glare. “You haven’t any idea what she was like as a girl, do you?”
Banallt said nothing. Sophie had told him almost nothing of her childhood.
“Always laughing. She was a happy child. Did she happen to mention to you how much time she spent at Castle Darmead?” Mercer waited a heartbeat. “I thought not. She’d badger the caretakers for information and come home full of facts about the castle and its history. The history of your family.” He smiled fondly. “And then she’d work all those facts into stories. No reason she’d tell you about that, but she did. The earls of Banallt always loomed large in her tales. I used to try to trip her up in her facts, but I never succeeded. Eventually I gave up trying. Ripping good stories, too.” He sat up straight. “I’m telling you this so that you’ll understand why she would be more susceptible to you than anyone else. To your title in particular. Don’t misunderstand me, I mean the fact that you are the Earl of Banallt. If you were Prinny himself she wouldn’t care half so much.”
“Your sister is quite the democrat.” He was certain where their conversation was headed. But he did not intend to be so easily discouraged.
“My point, sir, is that however it was you met, you couldn’t possibly live up to her girlhood ideal of the absent master of Castle Darmead.”
“You underestimate your sister if you think her unable to separate childhood imagination from a flesh-and-blood man.”
His eyes narrowed. “Whatever you were to her, I think we both know you didn’t come close to being her knight in shining armor.”
Banallt barked a laugh. “Me, a knight in armor? She never thought that of me.”
“Perhaps not. Yet I know seeing you again has hurt her.” He stood up. “My sister has had more than her share of unhappiness, my lord. More than enough. What happened between you two I don’t care to know. What I do know is that Sophie assured me she would be unaffected should we have the misfortune of meeting you in London.” He lifted a hand. “Hear me out. She insists that’s so, but I don’t believe her.”
Banallt made sure his expression revealed nothing. Mercer looked at him, his curls wild from his hand scrubbing through his hair. Mercer continued. “I want Sophie’s happiness, my lord. Do you understand? She deserves that after Evans. What a debacle that was. At least three people saw her the night she ran away with Evans. Three. And no one said a word. No one warned us, and my father didn’t realize she’d grown up and needed watching. To him, she was still his little girl. He never dreamed she felt that way about Evans.”
“I think,” Banallt said, “you are unaware of how hurt your sister was by her family’s refusal to see her.” Mercer wasn’t blameless in Sophie’s unhappiness. “Her husband’s neglect she dealt with in her own fashion. But the letters returned to her from Havenwood? Unopened?” Mercer cocked his head, assessing what it meant that Banallt knew about the letters and how she’d felt. “She never recovered from that.”
Mercer looked at him from under his lashes. “That’s unfair.”
“It’s unfair of you to judge what you never witnessed. And you, Mr. Mercer, never witnessed your sister’s married life. Nor her devotion to an undeserving husband, nor her private heartbreaks. Nor my friendship with her.” He was angry but managed to maintain a smooth and even tone. “Which, I do assure you, is all there was between us.”
“She turned you away, my lord. Don’t overestimate my influence over her. I assure you, I have little to none. I can’t make her accept you if she doesn’t love you.”
“She’s a grown woman, not a girl. She can make her own decisions.”
“You will only cause her pain.” Mercer rocked on his heels. “I’m convinced of that. And I won’t have her hurt.” He glanced at the flowers. “Not when there’s hope she’ll meet a decent man.”
His heart stilled with icy certainty that their conversation was now headed in a direction he did not wish to follow. “Am I being asked to step aside, or told to?”
Mercer crossed his arms over his chest. “Perhaps you think that during my sister’s marriage, we knew nothing of her life. That is far from the case. Your name was connected with Tommy Evans’s. I followed your life of scandal because I followed Tommy’s. I have more than a small suspicion of the reason Sophie came home so altered. And that reason is closely connected with your name.”
“I am not responsible for the state of their marriage. He made her unhappy long before I met her. Long before I met Tommy Evans, as well. I assure you, I am not responsible for his decision to elope with your sister. I didn’t know the man until after he was married.” Because, quite frankly, Tommy Evans hadn’t had the money to enter his circle until after he’d secured Sophie’s fortune. “Neither did I influence his decision to live in London while she remained at Rider Hall.”
“And yet, as I say, she refused you at Havenwood, my lord.”
“Your point?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps you do love her. I can’t know what’s in your heart. But she does not love you. If she did, she would not have turned you away.”
“You say she is not unaffected by me. That observation is correct. When I went to Havenwood, I had not seen your sister in quite a long time.” He chose his words carefully. “Not seen nor corresponded with. Am I to have but one chance to convince her of my desire to make her my countess?” He looked Mercer in the eye. “Is that a connection you can afford to turn away?”
Mercer’s eyes turned hard. “My lord, I cannot with any conscience at all support your pursuit of her.”
He, too, looked at the roses. “Have I a rival already?” he asked.
“No one who’s declared himself, if that’s what you mean.”
Well. And so. He wasn’t blockheaded about who this potential rival might be. “I’m to be thrown over for Vedaelin? Yes,” he said bitterly. “An earl in the hand may well be thrown over for the prospect of a duke.”
“When you came to Havenwood, I thought you two had quarreled.” Mercer looked at him from under his lashes. “As lovers sometimes will.”
“Sophie was never my lover.” And not for want of his desiring that it should be so.
“And yet you make free with her given name.” Mercer’s eyes flashed. “You look at her as if you want to devour her. With a rake’s eyes. Do you think me so rustic I am easily fooled by London manners and a lofty title?”
“This is absurd.”
“I was willing to let you apologize and put yourself into her good graces. You did not. Having seen firsthand her reaction to you, I believe you cannot.”
“That’s something your sister ought to decide.” Banallt smothered his outrage. Mercer was a reasonable man, he knew that. As calculating as he was himself. Moreover, he believed he was acting in his sister’s best interest. And that, ironically, they had in common. “You say you know she’s not the girl who eloped with Tommy Evans. I say you don’t understand the woman she is.”
“I hope, sir, that if you meet my sister socially, you will do nothing to upset her.”
Banallt realized then that Mercer expected him to bring up Fidelia. He should. He ought to bring to bear every weapon at his command. Before Sophie he would not have hesitated. Now? Threatening Mercer in such a fashion was, alas, too despicable. “We are bound to meet; you know that.”
“But you are not bound to acknowledge your acquaintance with her.”
He drew himself up. He’d had enough of this arrogant puppy. “That’s presumptuous of you, Mercer.”
“Lord Banallt.” Mercer scowled. “I very much regret to tell you that you are not welcome here. Nor will you be if you call again. I won’t have her miserable, and misery is all she will ever have from you.” He walked to the parlor door and opened it. “Good day, my lord.”