Regency Christmas Courtship. Louise Allen
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happen and the thought of being in Grant’s bed made her mind dizzy and her body ache.
She had lain with Jonathan just once and she had believed herself in love with him, a delusion she now knew was born out of ignorance, a desperation to get away from home and the lures of an accomplished rake. And the experience had been a sadly disappointing one, even though she had not truly understood what to expect. But she hardly knew Grant, the man, at all, he had never so much as kissed her hand and she was most certainly not tipsy with moonlight and champagne. And yet, just the thought of him made her breath come short and an ache, somewhere between fear and anticipation, form low down. Goodness knew how she had managed a rational conversation with him appearing like that.
Kate tucked Anna more snugly into her little blanket, settled her into the folds of her shawl to make a sling and began to walk back to the house. It would take almost half an hour with her arms full of her wriggling, chubby baby. Time enough to think about something other than how long Grant’s legs had looked, stretched out on the rug, how the ends of his hair had turned golden brown in the sunlight.
Time, in fact, to consider that locked door on the other side of Grant’s suite of rooms in the light of what he had said about Madeleine, the beautiful wife who had been such a bad mother and who had died in a fire.
She had realised almost from the beginning that the forbidden suite must have been her predecessor’s rooms. She could understand that the chambers would hold difficult memories for Grant, but even so, it was surely long past the time when they should have been opened up, aired, redecorated and put to use. What would happen when Charlie was old enough to be curious about the locked door? It was unhealthy to make a mystery out of his mother like that, and if he ever discovered that was where she had died, he might well have nightmares about it.
None of the keys on her chatelaine fitted the lock and all the servants denied having the right one, either. Eventually Grimswade told her that neither his late lordship nor his young lordship had wanted the rooms opened. ‘The earl holds the only key, my lady,’ he told her, his gaze fixed at a point over her head.
Since then Kate had tried hard not to allow the locked room to become a Bluebeard’s chamber in her imagination, applying rigorous common sense to keep her own nightmares at bay. She had found her way around the house without looking at the door if she could help it, she had asked no further questions of the staff, but it refused to be forgotten. There were times when she seriously considered picking the lock with a bent hairpin, or seeing if a slender paperknife would trip the catch, then told herself to not even think about something so unseemly.
Now she wondered just what Madeleine’s crimes had been. A disaster as a mother. That, somehow, did not make sense. Surely she could not have beaten the child—neither Grant nor his grandfather would have allowed her unsupervised access if they feared violence. And being a distant and cold mother was nothing unusual amongst the nobility, Kate knew. Many a child was raised almost entirely by servants without anyone accusing the parents of being a disaster.
The only explanation Kate could think of was that she was a failure as a wife and therefore morally unfit to be a mother. Had she taken a lover—had Grant found them together in her bedchamber? It was an explanation, but it was difficult to imagine Grant being cuckolded. In fact, her mind refused to produce an image of a more attractive alternative who might have tempted his wife to stray.
‘Which is very shallow of me,’ she admitted to Anna. The baby stared back at her with wide green eyes. ‘Grant is intelligent, good-looking, and he was the heir to an earldom when she married him. But good looks and position are not everything. If Madeleine had found her soulmate…’
Then she should have resisted temptation. Madeleine was married, she had made vows, she had a child. Which is easy enough for me to say. Despite being a well-brought-up, respectable young lady, I gave my virtue easily enough. Of course, having a scheming brother who put her in the way of a man who could be trusted to yield to temptation when it was offered and who could not afford a scandal had helped her along the path to ruination. Her becoming pregnant was, as far as Henry was concerned, the perfect gilding on his plan to blackmail her lover. What if Jonathan came back now, walked around that bend in the path ahead?
Kate watched the bend approach. No one appeared around it, of course, least of all the rakish Lord Baybrook. And if he did, he would not be coming with protestations of undying love, with explanations of how she had entirely misunderstood his flat refusal to marry her when Henry had confronted him two months later, after she had been forced to confess her predicament.
Not that she had seen him then, of course. Henry, as befitted the male head of the household, had taken himself off to London to, as he put it, deal with the matter. Only, he had not dealt with it, not brought her a husband back. At the time it had struck her as strange that her brother had not been more angry, but she had decided that perhaps he had been relieved that he had not found himself facing the viscount at dawn on Hampstead Heath. Then she had found the letter in Henry’s desk, the coldly furious response to blackmail, the counter-threats. But Lord Baybrook had not called Henry’s bluff. He would pay, she thought, reading the letter. Pay—and then she was certain that one day he would find some way to make Henry pay and Kate, too, the woman Jonathan thought had deliberately set out to ensnare him.
Anna gurgled and Kate stopped, her feet sinking into the soft mulch of the path. There was nothing to be gained by brooding on it, fretting over the long arm of a vengeful aristocrat or wincing in shame at her own part in her brother’s schemes. Most certainly, she was in no position to judge Grant’s first wife on moral grounds. Equally certainly, if she had the choice between Grant Rivers, Lord Allundale, and Jonathan Arnold, Lord Baybrook, she had no doubt which man she would choose now.
Grant sat up in the marble bath and considered the tricky, but eminently safe, subject of plumbing. His grandfather had installed baths with a cold-water supply and drains for the main bedchambers, but he had not risked the newfangled systems of boilers and piped hot water. Grant had agreed with him at the time, but lugging the cans of hot water upstairs and along endless corridors certainly made a great deal of work for the servants.
He lathered the long-handled brush and scrubbed his back while calculating the safe location for boilers and the length of pipework one would need. It was technical, complicated, and was entirely failing to stop him brooding on the subject of his wife. His second wife.
He had been deep in discussion with his secretary and the steward when he heard her voice in the hallway that afternoon. Six months ago Mr Rivers would have pushed aside the piles of paperwork and asked the men to wait while he went out to greet her. But the Earl of Allundale could not do anything as unfashionable and demonstrative as interrupting an important meeting in order to speak to his wife for no reason whatsoever. A few months in London society had reminded him forcefully of that.
Madeleine had always said he was far too casual, not sufficiently aware of his own consequence, or of hers. Now he was the earl he should behave like one, and, given the circumstances of their marriage, Kate was going to need all the consequence he could bring her, he was very conscious of that.
Now he put aside the brush and lay back to critically survey what he could see of his body as he stretched out under the water. Toes, kneecaps and a moderately hairy chest broke the surface. No stomach rising above the soap suds, thank goodness. The London Season was enough to put inches on anyone foolish enough to eat and drink all that was on offer during interminable dinner parties, suppers at balls, buffets at receptions. But with rigorous attendance at the boxing salons, sessions with the fencing master and long rides in the parks, at least the elegant new clothes he’d ordered when he’d first arrived still fitted him by the end.
Alex had laughed at him for having a fashionable crop, but he had hardly noticed the teasing—contemplating his old friend Alex Tempest married to the woman he had believed on first sight to be a nun was enough to distract any man.
Alex and Tess had seemed happy. Blissfully so and