Stephanie and the Wicked Deceiver (Wild Marchmonts #2)

8. Hedleys Absence

Chapter 8

Hedley's Absence

S tephanie rode off a little concerned. Hedley was going away and that would impede her programme for his improvement.

She was a person who set herself goals. She had practised with bow and arrow for long hours and days until she knew she could hit her target accurately, and then moved back further and started all over again. She did not permit herself excuses or avoidance – and she did not like that her plans this time were being disrupted. That was probably why her heart had fallen so far when Hedley had said that he was going.

Did he not take her plan seriously? She could not abide a slacker. But no, Hedley had applied himself; she could see by his flashes of improvement that he had practised on his own. He did take her seriously.

At the start of this afternoon’s lesson he had seemed like a different man, so grave and distant, and he had driven her back during their fencing bout like an expert. Perhaps he had received bad news from London?

His mood had at least improved his concentration, and she had seen that glimpse of a sportsman that he revealed occasionally. It warmed her heart that he had improved so. But after he had nearly disarmed her, he had seemed to tire again and lose focus; she must cure him of that.

She had been glad that his friends were not there during their fencing lessons; it would be dreadful to have Horace Pettigrew scoff or Sir Rupert look sardonic. She acquitted Fortescue of both, but even so she liked it better when she and Hedley were alone. When she was sure at last that the earl might be able to challenge his friends a little, she would be happy for them to watch. They would have been amazed at the start of today’s lesson, she was sure.

But now she was sad and she was not quite sure why. Hedley had said he would return soon and they could recommence her determination to make a strong man of him. But sometimes, when she gazed at his kind, grey eyes, she saw steel there and did not think there was much for her to do. His body was powerful, his shoulders broad, his face incredibly handsome.

She did not much notice handsomeness usually: she was used to handsome men, after all. Her father had been lauded as handsome; Richard and Eliot were both remarkably handsome, but Hedley’s handsomeness was somehow more … she could not quite describe it to herself. He had said to her today that she was a ‘lovely young lady’ and she had lost her breath for a second; for a moment her view of him had tilted and she understood that that strong face, those kind grey eyes, might be deceptive. Hedley might be more dangerous than she had thought. She shook her head.

She and Pietro had just reached the lodge gates, which were already open. A young woman accompanied by a groom had walked her horse through them and pulled the animal across the road, causing them to stop.

The young lady was a little older than Stephanie with a classic style of beauty and blonde ringlets surrounding her face. She was dressed very finely in an orange-velvet driving dress with a sharply tailored spencer over it, complete with a deal of military frogging, epaulettes, and a tall riding hat with a sweeping trail of black net that fell to her shoulders.

Stephanie supposed the woman looked fashionable but felt she was overdone for the country. Stephanie’s very fashionable cousin Ophelia, for example, had impressive riding habits for exercise in Town but rather simpler versions for the country.

She looked at the stranger in open surprise, taking in the positioning of the horse across the middle of the carriage path. The groom and horse were taking up even more room beside her.

‘Who are you ?’ the lady demanded rudely.

Stephanie did not reply; rudeness was something that had little effect on her family (excepting perhaps on her sister Roseanna) but coming from a complete stranger it was surprising.

‘I asked you. I do not know you. Who are you?’ the woman demanded again.

Stephanie adjusted her reins and moved around the obstruction. Pietro, vulgarly spitting to one side and adjusting his round hat, followed on and rode straight between the lady and her groom, requiring the servant to move his mount or be injured. The look that he gave the lady’s groom stopped that person’s outrage and replaced it with fear.

‘ You! I was speaking to you!’ called the lady after Stephanie.

Stephanie found her Neapolitan companion at her side, ‘Strange woman,’ she said, unconcerned, and the little man permitted himself an evil grin.

The strange lady was Lady Cressida Parkinson, daughter of the Duke of Dorchester. She had persuaded her reluctant papa to let her accompany him to his shooting box, Hardcastle, six miles from Hedley, thus seriously curtailing the pleasures of the ducal visit. The incumbent of the hunting box had been forced to settle herself in the rather less well-appointed village inn after receiving an urgent note from the duke. It was a place where she knew the duke would not choose to conduct their more pleasurable business together since it would rather rub it into the face of the locals.

Of course, everyone locally knew where the lovely Mrs Taunton lived and what her business was there, but on the whole the tattling had given up a long time ago. She had lived in Shropshire and London for ten years now in houses owned by the duke. But where another mistress might be relieved to be let off her duty, Mrs Taunton was disappointed for she was sincerely attached to the duke. She was, in fact, the love of his life.

Cressida had begged the boon from her father, who had at last given in when his ears bled, but he had told her coarsely, ‘Force feeding never does, gel. You won’t get him that way.’

Cressida's bosom had swelled. She would get Hedley in whichever manner she desired because she was the crowned beauty, daughter of a duke, with men who fawned and fell at her feet all over London. Only the one that she wanted, the Earl of Hedley (in her own view the only man worthy of her), did not fall at her feet.

He had danced with her twice only at two different balls, and not all her stratagems for meeting him had given her the boon of his regard. He seemed to look past her. At first she had played a little proud and hard to get, but when he appeared only to be bored she had adopted many other moods and methods, all of which had resulted in the same response.

This time, in the privacy of the country, she would get him. She excelled at all country pursuits; she would invent opportunities for him to witness how close a fit she was for him.

But then she had encountered a girl on horseback coming out of his estate. What did that mean? Cressida was furious. The girl wore her ugly red hair down her back, was dressed dreadfully, had despicable freckles and rimless eyes, but somehow Cressida, seeing her riding forward with such an easy seat, felt … threatened. It was absurd. And that blank look she had encountered when she had spoken to the girl! It was somehow alarming. The child-woman had not cared at all for someone so above her in station; there was no hint of annoyance or resentment even. It was infuriating.

When Cressida came back from Hedley’s house, she was even more enraged. It seemed the earl was indisposed and she had been entertained by that sardonic baronet Lord Fortescue, even more devilish Sir Rupert Armitage, the idiot Horace Pettigrew, plus some spinster friend she did not regard at all. When she enquired about Hedley, she was told he was leaving for London on the morrow. The spinster, in reply to Cressida’s further question, said it was unknown how long it would be until his return.

Pettigrew began to say something but Lord Fortescue leaned on his shoulder and silenced him.

Everyone was civil. Fortescue and Armitage said suave words but she felt that they were laughing at her. She told them of the lady she had met at the gates and spinster said in her vague way, ‘A lady…?’

Pettigrew uttered a word but this time it was Armitage who silenced him by putting a scone to his mouth.

They all looked blank as she described the dreadful bonnet and cape. Pettigrew, Cressida’s last hope, chewed on his scone and remained dumb.

However pleasant their words, they were her enemies; that much was evident. It was not how Lady Cressida Parkinson was used to being treated.

Although he was driving his sporting curricle and best pair, the earl did not reach the metropolis until late the following night. The conning of a speech of excuse and explanation that Armitage and he had briefly discussed had not been helpful, so they had given it up. Hedley had decided he was best to deal with the situation on his feet, as it were, when looking his opponent in the eye.

He presented himself at Tremaine House the next morning at an hour when he thought that breakfast might be finished yet the day’s entertainments not commenced. He met a lady coming up the steps at the same time, a very handsome woman with dark curls and a fashionable chartreuse pelisse with a long scarf reaching to the ground.

‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Do you visit at this hour?’

‘I am here to pay a call on Lady Eleanor Marchmont,’ explained Hedley as the door opened magically ahead of them.

The lady entered the hall. Divesting herself of her bonnet and pelisse, she looked over her shoulder and smiled. ‘Ah, you must be the new Earl of Hedley. Come!’

A voice sounded in the hall as a servant opened the door. ‘Lady Eleanor!’

Hedley glanced over to see who had called and saw it was the handsome but sometimes raddled Dorian Marchmont, a member of his club.

‘Later, Dorian!’ said Lady Eleanor. This gave Hedley permission to greet Marchmont only with a nod as he followed the self-possessed Lady Eleanor into a smallish book room.

‘We shall not be disturbed here at this hour, my lord. Do sit.’ A footman stood awaiting orders but Lady Eleanor waved him away with a slight gesture.

‘You were expecting me, my lady?’ Hedley was regaining some of his sangfroid in the presence of so much sophistication.

Lady Eleanor had taken up a seat by a small fire and indicated that he do the same in a chair opposite. Instead, the earl, who seldom did as he was bade, bowed from the waist. Still standing, he said, ‘I am here to confess to you, my lady.’

‘Yes, but do sit unless you wish my neck muscles to cramp. What height are you? Too tall by half.’ He sat. ‘Is your arm fully healed?’ she continued.

‘I see Morag has been a keen correspondent.’

‘She has. And I understand that, though my maid did not appreciate the irony, my daughter has been giving the leading sportsman in England lessons in riding, driving—’

‘And the foil. She is saving archery for later as she fears for my already injured arm.’

‘You are shameless, sir,’ Lady Eleanor said calmly, then frowned. ‘But that girl ! I did not know she fenced. I expressly forbade Richard to instruct her.’

Hedley certainly hadn’t expected the mother to be more concerned about her daughter ’s crimes than his own.

She looked an enquiry. ‘Is she any good?’

‘Excellent. If I were to be unlucky for even a second, she might defeat me.’

‘Of course it is so! You can have no idea what a trial she is. Do not say she has tried Pietro’s pistol—?’

‘I do not believe so. He tends her well, I think.’

‘Yes. It was a puzzle to find an attendant up to her tricks until I saw him perform. As I watched him leap and fly across the stage, it was as though he was lit up with the answer to my concerns.’ She folded her hands on her lap and her demeanour exuded a new calm. ‘I find myself garrulous this morning. It is not like me. You came, you said, to apologise?’

‘I did, for the deception I have practised on your daughter for my own amusement.’

‘I see.’

‘I have not spoken lies to her but I have certainly fabricated ineptitude on a horse, and so on. She thought me clumsy, you see, since I tripped over a dashed tree branch when I was practising using my wounded sword arm with my friends.’

‘The masked footpads?’

‘Yes. The farmers were spreading manure that day,’ he explained.

Lady Eleanor was betrayed into a laugh, which she covered with a lace-trimmed handkerchief to her mouth. ‘I see! And Stephanie rescued you?’

‘She threw herself from a moving coach, picked up my fallen foil and attacked my friends with it in the space of three seconds.’

‘She is very dexterous,’ said her ladyship with the placidity that Hedley was beginning to realise was habitual to her. ‘And I expect she has learned from Pietro. And then?’

‘And then she pitied me so much for my lack of skill and worried for my safety against marauding robbers, so she offered to tutor me.’

‘I can see the jest was too delicious to avoid at first – for gentlemen in the country at this season, anyway. Why on earth were you not in Town?’

‘My friends and I were to travel to London weeks ago but I fell from a tree rescuing my cat, so we were rather laid up until I recover.’

‘Loyal friends.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Hedley with raised brows. He had not much thought of it. He would do as much for them.

‘So my daughter has been coming to your house unchaperoned.’

‘As to that, my butler is much more respectable than I, my lady. He deployed a flotilla of female attendants on the one occasion that Miss Marchmont entered my home when her maid was not present.’ He smiled. ‘I rather think the butler’s disapproval had more effect on Miss Marchmont’s spirits than mine did.’

‘Serves her right!’ said Lady Eleanor. ‘I can see the beginnings of this jest, Lord Hedley, but it has continued far too long. Why?’

‘At first I thought of it as entertaining a child – and myself – with absurdities.’

‘And then?’

‘I realised she is not a child.’

Her ladyship nodded. ‘She is not. Indeed, I might have presented her this year along with her sisters. But because she is who she is, I did not.’

‘I think you were wise.’

‘I do not much care what you think, my lord. Your judgement seems to me to be seriously impaired.’

Hedley took the sudden cold tone as his due and dropped his head an inch.

‘Again, why are you here, my lord? I am still unsure,’ Stephanie’s mother demanded.

‘I await your judgement, my lady.’

‘My judgement ?’

‘Your punishment, then, for bringing hurt to your innocent daughter’s door.’

‘You have hurt her?’

‘No, not yet … I mean that the truth may well hurt her. I do not wish her to feel a fool, an object of fun.’

‘But that is precisely what she has been, not just for you but for three of your friends, too.’

‘Whose mouths will speak nothing of it, I assure you.’

‘Stephanie will not think of reputations , and nor will I. But she may be hurt. She has not known much of betrayal.’

The word stung Hedley and he was silent.

‘So the punishment you expected was … what? That I demand an offer for my daughter’s hand since you have led her astray? I should rather let Stephanie’s blade punish you – or perhaps I will permit Pietro to instruct her in the pistol after all. You would be well-served.’

That this was colder venom than this calm woman usually permitted herself was evident to Hedley. She continued, ‘Why should my daughter’s betrothal be a punishment to any man? It will be a golden privilege when it comes. However, she is too young, if not in years then in temperament. But you must not continue the deception.’

‘I know.’

‘However, the truth must be told in the way that least hurts Stephanie, and she must not be in Hedley Court unprotected. Innocent as she is, and as trustworthy as you say you are, others may look at it differently.

‘I know, ma’am. I have asked Miss Gertrude Galloway, an old friend about your own age, to stay at the Court these days.’

‘Indirect chaperonage? Morag has not yet written of it.’ She looked into the fire.

Hedley asked, ‘Can you think, Lady Eleanor, how I might best tell Miss Marchmont the truth with the least hurt to her?’

‘There may be no hurt at all – Stephanie is a stoic. But she may have been touched by your handsome face, as I was by your father’s, and in that case she will be sad. No. I cannot come back with you,’ she said, as though she had given it thought, ‘for next week is the Queen’s Ball where two of my daughters are to be presented. I will come to Reddingate directly afterwards.’

‘You said you were moved by my father’s handsome face, ma’am. If that be true, may I ask why you refused him?’

‘I could see that he may later become a rapscallion, and I was much too practical to succumb to someone like that.’ Then she gave a tinkling laugh that surprised him. ‘But then I met a properly formed rapscallion and betrothed myself to him in a day!’

‘You wish me to delay my confession to Stephanie until you arrive?’

‘I do, but that is for Stephanie’s sake only. And do not let my maid Morag find out your deception. She suspects your intentions already as she would suspect any male in her charge’s vicinity, but if she knew you had been tricking my daughter you might not survive the consequences.’ Hedley blanched. ‘A knitting needle would be her weapon of choice, I believe,’ remarked her ladyship wickedly.

She changed to a more serious tone. ‘You may continue this charade until I arrive at Reddingate so that I am there if my daughter should prove hurt. But I tell you now, if Stephanie chooses to punish you for your deception, my lord, I shall not curb her excesses on that occasion.’

Hedley laughed. ‘You terrify me, ma’am, as does Miss Marchmont. I have seldom been more ashamed of myself, or more fearful of the outcome.’

‘It will do you good, I expect.’

‘My lady!’ said Hedley, inclining his head.

‘I will be candid, my lord. I see how this began, but how to best end it is a mystery. I am familiar with Stephanie, the prodigal of bravery and industry, and if it is she that you deal with then your confession of sins may grant you and your friends a severe beating with her foil blade or a series of mantraps that would cause you injury. She set those for her brother Richard if he teased her too much. Once she dropped on his head from a tree, and once she tied him up by a river and escaped with his boots. I hope this – or something more creative – is the outcome. But what I fear now that I see you is that look on your face, that look of sincerity. It suggests that you have not completely seen my daughter as a child and if that is true, I no longer know who I am dealing with. If Stephanie feels herself a woman in her relations with you, I am afraid the woman may be more hurt than I can bear to think of.’

‘I do not think she sees me as more than a project and, perhaps now, as a friend,’ Hedley countered. ‘Be reassured. It is just that I … I am no longer sure I see a child before me.’

‘If you are right, my lord, then the punishment you came here to receive is decided. If you are just a scapegrace friend to her, it will be your punishment to keep from her that you have ever seen her as a woman. If you fail, I will move her back to London and you will not call here but only see her from a distance.’

The punishment was dreadful, thought Hedley. Stephanie would not attend balls this Season, so he could not ask her to dance, nor could he visit and take her for a drive. The notion wounded him. He thought of hanging around the city streets she had told him of, searching for a female pickpocket who could scale buildings to escape, all this to see her again. But this lovely mama was right: it was not thirty-year-old Max Chance’s place to drag a child from her innocence into womanhood. Stephanie needed to arrive there when it was time.

He said bleakly, ‘I await your arrival at Reddingate, my lady.’

Lady Eleanor nodded and stood; it was a dismissal. They moved to the hall and, as a footman threw open the tall doors of Tremaine House, Hedley bowed over her outstretched hand. ‘It was my father’s loss, my lady.’

As he looked up, her eyes glittered a little. ‘Oh, I do not know so. It seems to me that all goes as it should.’

Was she offering him a sliver of hope? He was moved by it but his confused brain could not quite fathom why. Nonetheless, he went down the house steps smiling to himself, head lowered in thought.

When his eyes caught a pair of gleaming Hessian boots at street level, he looked up to see the blond locks of Dorian Marchmont. His sea-blue eyes were strangely full of fire and there was a grimmer look on his usually laconic face than Hedley had ever seen before. ‘Keep away from Lady Eleanor Marchmont, Hedley!’ Dorian said, sotto voce.

Hedley, surprised, felt the threat. Marchmont slapped his hat on his head and left.

The earl moved away, grinning and wondering what that had been about. Dorian Marchmont, rake, was now a protector of middle-aged relatives? And what reputation did he, Hedley, bear that made it likely he would be a threat to her ladyship? He remembered an early affair he’d had with an unhappy forty-year-old baroness, and wondered if tongues still carried that ten-year-old tale.

When he arrived back at Hedley House, Armitage was waiting for the results of the interview. It was difficult to describe.

‘Lady Eleanor is a remarkable woman,’ Hedley said. ‘A true beauty, too, but pragmatic like her daughter. She seemed to expect me.’

‘Eh?’ It was not as urbane a reply as Armitage was famed for.

‘Took me by surprise, too!’ Hedley said frankly, accepting a glass of wine from a footman whom he then waved out of the room. ‘She says I must delay my confession of the jest until she arrives the week after next.’

Armitage frowned, then his intelligent face showed comprehension. ‘Ah, Queen Caroline’s Ball. I do not suppose Lady Eleanor can leave this week.’

‘Yes – so I set off back today.’

‘So soon? I thought we might go to White’s.’

‘You may. I shall go back.’

‘Anxious not to waste an hour of your stay of execution?’

Hedley frowned at him nastily; some days it was not so fine to have an intelligent friend. ‘By the by, Dorian Marchmont threatened me today,’ he said.

‘Dorian?’ said Armitage, who was the man’s intimate. ‘Cresswell wrote that he was a new man these days – no excesses, a life of rectitude almost. And their mutual tailor told him Dorian had paid his bill at last. It had increased year on year but the tailor still served him, for Dorian looks so fine in his work that it probably brought him more business. If Dorian was belligerent today, it looks like abstinence doesn’t agree with him. I have never known him to display a surfeit of emotion – his tone is generally mild and lazy, sardonic at most.’

‘Well, he did not shout but I should say he delivered a warning against approaching Lady Eleanor in a…’ Hedley thought to describe it ‘… hiss .’

‘A hiss ? Dorian ?’ said Armitage, his slanted brows flying. ‘I could see if he were warning you off one of the younger sisters, perhaps – though no, not even that. You are not known as a universal threat.’

Hedley, remembering the open door and the bow that may have looked like a kiss over Lady Eleanor’s hand, had another thought but dismissed it as soon as it was formed.

‘Perhaps Dorian suffers from the bad humour of the reformed drinker,’ mused Armitage, sipping his wine. ‘I should take him out for a good soak this evening if we were not returning to Surrey today.’

‘Are you coming?’

‘I miss Misty,’ his friend replied blandly.