CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

MORDECAI DIDN’T TAKE Eleanor riding in her breeches and tailcoat that afternoon because it rained. Fresh, cool rain that washed away the sticky heat of the past month.

Instead of riding, he showed her Coombe Regis, trying to share his delight in the house with her, pointing out his favorite absurdities: the songbirds cavorting across the ceiling in the music room; the gargoyles grinning down from the pelmets in the library; the trompe l’oeil panel in the Long Gallery that invited one to step through into a sunlit garden.

He suspected that he talked rather too much, but Eleanor didn’t seem to mind. She was even surprised into a laugh when she saw the great, gilded four-poster bed that had been relegated to the very sparest of the spare bedchambers because it was so blindingly gaudy.

Mordecai took her up to the attics last, and they spent an hour opening long forgotten trunks and uncovering paintings wrapped in Holland cloths. They discovered several paintings that Mordecai rather liked, and a trunk of silk brocade gowns that made Eleanor gasp. She knelt on the floor and went through them, turning over the rich fabrics.

“I don’t want to wear this,” she said, fingering a blue and silver brocade. “But surely it deserves to be seen.”

“Cushion covers?” Mordecai suggested.

“Slippers, I think.” She glanced up at him. “Would you wear slippers made of this?”

“I’ll wear anything you make for me,” Mordecai said.

Eleanor blushed, and she looked a little bit shy and a little bit flustered and so delicious that if her sister hadn’t been dead he would have spread the brocades on the floor and tumbled her on them—but her sister was dead, so Mordecai went to have another look at the paintings.

AFTER THE ATTIC, they went down to the library, where it was cool enough to light the fire. Mordecai would have happily passed the rest of the afternoon reading, but Eleanor was restless. She browsed the shelves, pulling books out, flicking through the pages, putting them back, and finally ended up at the tall windows, staring out at the rain, her hands twisting together.

“What is it, Nell? Would you like to go riding?”

“In this weather? No.” Eleanor came to sit by the fire. After a moment, she began to fidget, pleating her skirt.

“What is it?” Mordecai asked again.

“I beg your pardon.” She flushed, as if embarrassed, and smoothed her skirt hastily.

“For what?”

“Father always said it’s unladylike to fidget.”

Mordecai snorted. Which was ungentlemanlike, but he didn’t care.

Eleanor smiled faintly, and pushed to her feet and crossed to the tall windows again. She stood for a moment looking out, then turned to face him. “It’s my cousin’s birthday tomorrow. Georgiana.”

“Oh?” Mordecai said, wondering what this had to do with anything.

“Her twenty-third birthday.”

“Oh,” he said again, and put down his book. “Will she receive a . . . a wish?” He gave an instinctive, inward wince. I can’t believe I said that word. I can’t believe I believe in magic.

“Yes.” Eleanor’s hands twisted together. “I know Georgie wants to find out what happened to Hubert.”

Hubert?

And then Mordecai remembered: Hubert was Lord Cathcart’s youngest son. The one who’d gone missing four years ago. The one who’d been engaged to Georgiana Dalrymple.

“What if . . . what if . . .”

Mordecai stood and crossed to the windows. He captured Eleanor’s hands and stopped their twisting. “What if what, Nell?”

“What if she wishes to be able to find people?” she burst out.

“Do you think she will?”

“She might. It’s what I was going to choose. If it hadn’t been for the fire I would have chosen it.”

Mordecai was silent, remembering that blazing stairwell.

“I want her to choose it—and I know she might not—and I just wish tomorrow was over. I wish I knew.” She leaned into him, resting her forehead against his chest, and sighed deeply. “I’m so full of hope and dread that I can’t sit still. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Mordecai said, stroking the nape of her neck. Her tension was contagious; he felt it himself now. Tomorrow Georgiana Dalrymple might know where Sophia’s baby was.

Or she might not.

“Do the Dalrymples know you’re here?”

Eleanor shook her head. “It doesn’t matter, does it? If Georgie chooses that wish she’ll know where I am—and if she doesn’t, it’s irrelevant.”

She was correct. Mordecai brushed his fingers soothingly over her skin and looked out at the streaming rain. Eleanor Wrotham needed a distraction, but it was far too wet for riding. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll teach you how to fence.”

Her head lifted. “What?”

“Or box. Your choice. Run upstairs and change into those breeches of yours.”

ELEANOR WROTHAM CHOSE fencing, and Mordecai spent the next two hours teaching her how to hold the foil and perform a basic lunge step. After dinner, they retired to the library again. She curled up alongside him and he read aloud to her from Wordsworth’s poems, and she almost relaxed.

An hour later when he slid into her bed and took her in his arms, she was tense again.

“Thinking about your cousin?” Mordecai asked.

“I’m trying not to.”

That night Mordecai made love to Eleanor Wrotham for the third time in his life. He bent his attention to distracting them both. He teased her with his tongue and teeth until she was desperate for release, and then shocked her by asking her to ride him. She was shy at first, hesitant, but then she caught the rhythm and her shyness fell away. She rode him, and it was fierce and urgent and altogether perfect, and when she climaxed Mordecai gritted his teeth and only just managed not to spill his seed inside her. He eased himself from beneath her hastily and ejaculated into his handkerchief, and the pleasure was bittersweet and unfulfilling.

IT WAS STILL raining the next morning. Eleanor fetched the blue and silver brocade gown down from the attic and set to work cutting up the skirt. For this task, she chose the drawing room, with its view of the long, sweeping driveway. Mordecai elected to stay there, too.

Ostensibly Eleanor was cutting the fabric, but what she was really doing was watching for an express rider. Ostensibly he was reading the London newspapers, but what he was really doing was watching Eleanor watch the driveway.

Mordecai knew roughly where the Dalrymple estate was—near Bridport—and he knew roughly how many hours it would take even the fastest rider to cover that distance—and how impossible it was for an express to reach Coombe Regis before noon, but he didn’t tell Eleanor that.

He watched her snip the fabric, watched her stare out the window, watched her tension, her anxious hope, her fear. As the morning slowly passed, it infected him. When Walter appeared in the doorway to announce luncheon, Mordecai started so violently that he tore the newspaper he was pretending to read. “Damn it,” he said, under his breath, and more loudly: “Thank you, Walter.”

Eleanor cast one last glance at the driveway and laid down her scissors.

They were in the great hallway when suddenly a footman hurried past and flung open the front door. A gust of cool air swept in, bringing with it the scent of wet grass and the sound of rain—and rapid hoof beats.

Eleanor’s hand clenched convulsively on Mordecai’s sleeve.

They arrived at the open door at the same time as two more footmen and the butler. An express rider pull up with a flurry of wet gravel. A footman ran down the marble steps. The rider unbuckled his leather satchel. Ten seconds later, the footman ran back up.

Mordecai took the proffered letter, glanced at the address, and gave it to Eleanor. “For you.”

A flare of emotion crossed her face: hope, fear. She tore the seal open.

Mordecai reached into his pocket, but the butler was already counting out a gratuity.

“Triple it,” Mordecai told him, and turned his attention to Eleanor.

The door was still open, the express rider still sitting on his horse, the footman running down the stairs again, this time with coins jingling in his hand, but Mordecai ignored these things. He watched Eleanor’s face, watched her gaze jump from sentence to sentence.

“Tiverton!” she said, looking up, and he saw tears in her eyes and a fierce, shining joy. “She’s in Tiverton. Do you know where that is?”

“Twenty miles the other side of Exeter.”

“Can we go there? Now? Today?”

“We can leave in half an hour.”

“Thank you!” Eleanor caught up her skirts and turned to the staircase, then swung back and thrust the letter at him. “You may read it.”

Mordecai watched her run up the stairs. “I want my traveling chaise ready to leave in half an hour,” he told the butler.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ll be bringing a child back with us. An infant. Tell Mrs. Putnam we’ll need a nurserymaid. And a wet nurse, if she can find one.”

“Mrs. Biddle is still nursing her wee boy,” his butler said. “And so is Mrs. Clee.”

Biddle was a groom, but who the devil was Clee? Mordecai’s mind went blank for a moment—and then he placed the name: Clee was one of his groundsmen. “Ask them both, will you? I’ll pay any sum they want.”

“Yes, sir. And your luncheon?”

“Uh . . . pack it in a basket.”

Mordecai read the letter as he hastily climbed the stairs. Baletongue came at dawn this morning, and I now understand why our great-great-great grandmother made such a grievous mistake with her wish. When one is half asleep and wholly terrified it is very easy to choose the wrong wish! But fortunately I knew what I wanted.

He skipped down the page.

Hubert is dead of course. I have known that for years. But at least I now know where he lies. By the time you read this, dearest Nell, we shall be on our way to Scotland. Mama and Papa are coming with me and we will be gone at least a month, if not more.

But if Hubert is dead, your little niece is alive. She’s in a cottage belonging to a Mrs. Rundle, in Tiverton. A foundling home, I think, or something similar; there are several other infants there. You will know Felicity by the yellow ribbon tied around her wrist.

Georgiana gave precise directions to the cottage. Mordecai read them as he climbed the second flight of stairs.

Good luck, Nell. I look forward to meeting my little cousin when I return from Scotland.

All my love,

Georgie

P.S. Mama says that if Mr. Black does not take good care of you she will turn him into a caterpillar.

Mordecai almost tripped over a step. A caterpillar?

Disconcerted, he folded the letter and tucked it into his pocket.

A caterpillar?

It was a joke, surely.