Chapter Ten
The following day was unbearable. Jasper had nothing to do but wait, feeling completely helpless, while Julia continued to suffer through whatever had befallen her. Amelia said it was just a headache, albeit a strong one, but Jasper had never seen a headache that could buckle someone’s knees.
To make matters worse, Ruby was still following him like a diligent debt collector.
“Go away, Ruby.”
“Go home, Jasper.”
He sighed, tossing the morning paper onto the cushion. He didn’t care what was going on in London or the world—he cared about what was going on upstairs. About when Julia would be all right again.
“You like her, don’t you?” Ruby was peering at him from the opposite sofa, making no pretense of having anything else to do besides stalk him.
“Of course I like her.” What an asinine thing to say. Julia was very likeable. And delectable, when she wasn’t being brought low by some unseen force. Even when she was, really, but it was hardly the right time to appreciate her finer physical features.
“Bring her with you, then.”
Jasper’s eyebrows rose, and he focused his full attention on Ruby. “Excuse me?”
“If she’s what you need to help you accept grandfather’s passing, bring her with you. She certainly has the spirit to be your mistress.” Ruby leaned forward. “I’ll even smooth the way for her in town, if you’ll come back.”
If it was anyone else, Ruby’s offer would be intriguing. But because it was Julia, Jasper’s hand clenched of its own accord. “You will not speak of Julia with disrespect.”
“On the contrary, the fact that I think she can keep your interest is one of my higher compliments.”
“It’s not like that.”
Ruby laughed. “It’s always like that with you. If they’re attractive and at all clever, you can’t help yourself.”
It wasn’t true. Maybe it had been, but it wasn’t true anymore. Jasper had helped himself, against all odds. There was more to him and Julia than the usual thing. How much more, he still wasn’t entirely certain—but he knew enough to know it was different.
Suddenly, he couldn’t stay in Ruby’s company a moment longer. All his nerves were on edge and his patience was stretched far too thin. If he didn’t get out of this room and out of this house, he was going to break something or say something he regretted. He stood up and Ruby stood up to follow him.
“Ruby, I swear to God, if you don’t give me some time to myself, I will not be held responsible for what happens.”
She stopped. “Promise me you’re not going to disappear.”
“As if my promise means anything to anyone.” As if he had any intention of leaving Julia without any explanation.
“Promise it,” she insisted.
“I promise.”
As Jasper passed into the hallway, Nick was coming the other direction. “Jasper. Perfect. Put on riding clothes. We’re going out.”
“We are?”
“We are. Don’t argue, just do it.”
It suited Jasper fine. He let Nick call for the horses to be saddled while he bounded upstairs to change his clothes. As furious as Ruby was, she hadn’t been too furious to bring some of his own belongings with her. Jasper was back down in the foyer in record time, leading Nick out into the drive.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think this ride was your idea,” Nicholas joked as he struggled to keep up.
“I’m tired of being stuck inside.” Jasper hustled them out the door and onto their waiting horses. He couldn’t help the sensation of the walls closing in around him. He needed to be out and moving. He needed to be on an adventure. “Are we going anywhere in particular?”
“I thought we could just ride for a while—and talk.”
Jasper’s hands clenched on the reins. There were only two things Nick could want to talk about. One of them was lying upstairs, possibly in agony. The other, Jasper had no intention of talking about. “Let’s go to Woodley. They have a pub, don’t they?”
“Yes, but—”
With a nudge, Jasper urged his mount into a sprint, but it made no difference. Racing at top speed didn’t soothe him the way it did to Julia.
Hooves thundered and then slowed as Nicholas caught up to him. “I assume you did that because you know we can’t talk at a gallop, and you’re trying to pretend everything is fine.”
Jasper avoided Nicholas’s eyes. “Everything is fine.”
“The hell it is. No one has ever been in this big of a hurry to get to Woodley, least of all you.” Nick stopped his horse in the middle of the road. “What is the matter?”
“Nothing. I just need…I need…” He didn’t know what he needed.
“Your grandfather died.”
It dropped like a cannonball between them. Jasper stared down the road without really seeing anything.
“You’re not handling it well.”
Clearly. “Is there a good way to handle it?”
“Probably.” Nick directed his horse forward, filling Jasper’s view. “If there is, this isn’t it.”
Jasper scrubbed his hand over his face. “I can’t do it, Nick. I’m not ready to be him.”
“No one ever is.”
The pity in his furrowed brow was too much. Jasper nudged his mount around Nick’s and started down the road again.
Nick kept pace with him. “I wasn’t ready when I found out my father was losing his mind.”
“It’s not the same. You have your brother, Phillip.”
“The same way Ruby has you.”
Not the same—at all. Phillip Wakefield was a paragon of lordly virtues. Jasper DeVere was a reprobate, and that was only when the people doing the labeling were feeling kind.
A cricket chirped on the roadside, punctuating Jasper’s refusal to continue that line of conversation. Eventually, Nick asked, “Why Woodley?”
“I feel like getting into a fight.” It was the truth. He couldn’t do anything about his grandfather. He couldn’t get his sister to leave him alone. He couldn’t help Julia. He couldn’t do anything worthwhile, but Jasper could coerce someone twice his size into taking a swing at him so he didn’t have to think about any of it.
“Don’t you normally get yourself out of these moods by—” His horse stopped. Nick turned it again so he could see Jasper’s face. “That’s it, isn’t it? Normally, you’d find someone to disappear with for a few days and get it out of your system…”
“But the person I want to disappear with is Julia. Even if you and Amelia would accept that, Ruby would find a way to follow me.”
Nick closed his eyes, shaking his head. “Again, why Woodley? I’m a respectable landowner in this county now. We can’t just go around causing trouble.”
Jasper clucked both of their horses back into motion toward Woodley. “Did Julia tell you about our visit to the fair?”
The pause before Nick’s answer stretched out. “She didn’t have to.”
Right. Nick had grown up with the Bishop daughters. He’d probably seen plenty of abhorrent townsfolk behavior.
“How did you handle it?” Jasper asked.
“Ignored it, when we could. Tried to use the Wakefield name as a buffer, when I could.” Nick looked at him. “How did you handle it?”
“Well,” Jasper looked down the road where Woodley was just coming into view. “I stewed over it for a day or two, and now I’ve drafted my best friend into heading back with me to pick a fight.”
Nick turned his focus to the end of the road. “After we’ve done that, you’re going to talk to me about your grandfather.”
“All right.” As they drew up in front of Woodley’s premier—and only—drinking establishment, Jasper silently prayed to get knocked unconscious before that happened.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’m in a cloud.” Julia kept her eyes closed. There was a very real possibility if she opened them, her headache would come back. After many agonizing hours, she’d managed to restrict her world to the fluffy down of the pillow and the soothing coolness of Amelia’s silk sheets. “How do you feel?”
Amelia brushed the hair away from her face. “Soft white sheep cloud or storm cloud?”
She cracked one eye, just barely. “Dense. Gray. But I don’t think it will rain.”
“Do you think there will be clear skies in a few hours?” Amelia gave her an overly wide smile.
Julia was immediately suspicious. “Why?”
“We’ve been invited for dinner.” The mattress bounced as Amelia turned to face her. “By the Hathaways. Please don’t make me go alone.”
“Who are the Hathaways?”
“Apparently, they’re our neighbors.”
“And they invited you for dinner?”
“Us. All of us. But if you’re not feeling well enough, we can stay home.”
Julia opened both of her eyes. The apocalypse didn’t immediately descend upon her bedroom. “We can go. They really invited us? By name? Did they say why?”
“To welcome us to the area.”
“Well, that’s friendly.”
The sheets rustled as Amelia burrowed her way farther into the bed. “It’s odd, is what it is. I thought our bad reputation and my bad behavior while I was engaged to Montrose would save me from this sort of thing.”
“You’re impossible.”
“But you’ll come?”
“Of course I’ll come.” A log on the fire popped, and it miraculously did not send pain shooting through Julia’s temples. She really was feeling better. “I can’t turn down my first-ever invitation to a dinner party. What sort of message would that send?”
“The blissfully antisocial kind? Come on, Jules. Pretend to be sick for me.”
Julia threw back the covers, pulling them away from Amelia in the process. “Go away. I have a dinner party to plan for.”
“Are you certain? You’ve missed a great deal of excitement due to your headache. But if you’d rather not hear about it—”
Julia turned, unable to resist gossip. “What? What is it?”
“For starters, the entire staff knows Lady Ruby DeVere thinks you’re a harlot.”
“What!”
“Hand of God,” Amelia answered, raising her own in an oath. “That nosey upstairs maid I hired heard the shouting when you were in his room.”
Bloody typical. “One more reputation I don’t deserve.”
“You deserve it a little.”
“I’d like to deserve it all the way, or not at all.”
Amelia nudged her. “It gets better. This morning, she tried to bargain with Jasper by offering to sponsor you in London as his mistress.”
“That can’t be true.” Julia would bet all her pin money that Ruby DeVere would like nothing more than to never see her again.
“It is. I had that from a very reliable downstairs source.”
In Nora’s absence, Julia got up and went to open the windows herself. A soft breeze blew through the room, sending the curtains swaying and taking the sickbed feeling of the room away with it.
“Of course, hearsay has blown it way out of proportion,” Amelia admitted. “I caught a scullery maid telling the cook you were already Jasper’s mistress, and that’s why he came out here in the first place.”
Julia was only half listening. All this talk of mistresses reminded her she’d been on the verge of something very promising with Jasper before they’d gone in to dinner. If not for her headache, some of those rumors might have come true last night.
“Stop it,” Amelia said.
“Stop what?”
“You’re looking gloomy.”
“Maybe this is just the face all wrongfully accused harlots wear.”
“Speaking of harlots, last night Nicholas asked me to—”
Julia threw her hands up, begging for mercy. Some things, she did not need to know. “How long do I have to get ready for this dinner?”
“Enough time for a bath. Nick and Jasper managed to get themselves into a pub brawl in Woodley.”
“What!”
Amelia nodded emphatically. “They went for a ride, and came back filthy and quite pleased with themselves. Lady Ruby is beside herself. I’ve got Nora seeing what she can do about the bruises.”
“A pub brawl. What on earth. Why?” Julia really had missed a lot while she’d been stuck in bed.
“I tried to get Nick to tell me, but he started talking about ‘a code among men’? I stopped listening when he started going on about Spartan warriors.”
“Honestly.” It was as much feigned indignation as Julia could muster. She hadn’t been able to keep her eyes off Jasper when he was flushed and perspiring from wrestling their boat into the water. She could only imagine what he looked like coming back from a fight. The thought of it hurried her through preparations for the dinner and had her waiting in the foyer to catch a glimpse of him.
Unfortunately, a bath and Nora’s ministrations had done their job a little too well. When Jasper came down the stairs in another borrowed set of Nicholas’s evening clothes, Julia couldn’t detect any sign of his ferocious afternoon activities.
Five of them, with three women in formal attire, meant taking two carriages. Despite her attempts to arrange it differently, Nick thwarted her and Julia was forced to give up her hope of riding with Jasper alone.
“Do you think they’ve killed each other?” Julia wondered. “The carriage would stop if it came to blows, wouldn’t it?”
They followed behind the DeVere carriage, and Julia had kept up a steady stream of pondering. It helped keep her from being nervous. Her first invitation to a dinner.
Nicholas shook his head. “Jasper and Lady Ruby are as devoted to each other as you and Amelia. They just show it differently.”
“They argue like sworn enemies.” Julia pressed her face to the glass, trying to see ahead of them.
“How long will we have to stay, do you think?” Amelia also looked out the window, but not with excitement.
“Unbelievable. And here I thought we had no friends because I destroyed our reputations at birth,” Julia said.
Amelia shook her head. “Convenient scapegoat. In fact, people wanted to be friends with us, but I’ve been writing them hateful letters to make sure they never made the attempt.”
“This whole time, sabotaged by my own sister.” Julia threw her hand against her forehead and flopped dramatically across the carriage bench.
“It’s true. I’ve actually received loads of dinner invitations, I’ve just never gone because none of the hosts seemed very interesting.”
“But the Hathaways piqued your interest.” Julia let her eyes go wide. “They’re very exciting, those Hathaways.”
Amelia joined the game. “I heard they served the fish before the soup once.”
“I heard they robbed a mail coach once.”
“It’s probably too late for me to decline on both your behalves.” Nicholas leaned back against the bench, shaking his head.
Julia leaned forward, tugging on his arm. “Come on, Nick. Play with us.”
Nicholas stared at them both. And then, in his most pompous Lords of Wakefield voice, he said, “I heard the Hathaways once ate in a public dining room.”
Amelia and Julia went wild.
“Scandal!”
“Mayhem!”
“Surely not.”
They were still at it when the coach rolled to a stop. Nicholas had to stifle them with his very sternest tone. The groom helped them down, and the nerves Julia had been distracting herself from started up again. Would they ask about her limp? What if another headache came on? What if something worse happened? What if they hated her? She followed Nicholas and Amelia to the door under a cacophony of worries.
When they reached the entry hall and were introduced to their hosts, Julia received an immediate answer to one of her questions.
Amelia leaned over to discreetly whisper, “Is that…”
“Yes.” The face was different, older, but there was no mistaking it. It was the same face that had sneered at Julia all through childhood. The same face that had rallied all of the women in what passed for society in Julia’s neighborhood to boycott any store that allowed Julia to shop there.
Lady Hathaway was the previous Miss Prudence Northam, daughter of Lord and Lady Northam, neighbors to the Bishop estate, and all around awful human being. She knew Julia and Julia knew her—and they definitely hated each other.