Carla Kelly (36 page)

It was a melancholy reflection; the idea of losing his secretary pained him.
I could keep her in the indenture,
he told himself as he came closer and looked over her shoulder at the ledger and her careful entries.
But that would be heartless, and if I have discovered anything this spring, it is that I have a heart. It is a dashed nuisance, but there you are.

But Emma among convicts? Emma condemned to toil for her bread in such an inhospitable climate? Emma so far away?
I will not think about it,
he told himself firmly.
There is no indication that we are any closer to a solution to her mystery, and for all we know, the Costellos went down with the
Lady Penthyn
.
He sighed and kissed the top of Clarissa's head, then leaned back, closed his eye, and won- dered why on earth he had felt compelled to kiss Emma when he left.

They had just finished the most prosaic of conversations in the book room, like many others during the last few months. She had assured him that she would return to the dock for another look and that she would participate in his banker's upcoming audit. She even promised to go to Norfolk with Lady Ragsdale, if he did not return after two weeks, and check out progress on the construction.

Maybe I shouldn't have put my arm around her shoulder
, he considered as the carriage bowled along. He had thought it was a brotherly gesture, perhaps even avuncular. He had not been surprised particularly when her arm went around his waist as they walked together to the book-room door. Truth to tell, they had both been through a lot in the past week.

But why had he kissed her? She had done nothing in particular to encourage it, other than look at him when he was raving on about being pitchforked into a visit to Bath that was destined to end in his proposal to Clarissa. It wasn't his fault that she got that twinkle in her eyes when he started to complain about exertion and ill-usage. And truth to tell, probably nothing would have happened, if she had not stopped, put her hand on his shoulder, and straightened his neck cloth.

It must have been Emma's fault, he decided, because I was only falling back on natural instinct.
He thought about the matter, concluding that the experience was inevitable, considering that every time previous to his reformation that he got that close to a woman, he invariably kissed her.
You put water in a streambed, and it will flow,
he reasoned.
If you place Lord Ragsdale in breathless proximity to a female who is not a relative, he will kiss her. It happens ten times out of ten, whether kisses or water.
“Hydraulics,” he murmured, then nodded and smiled at Lady Partridge when she looked up from the intricacies of her tatting with a faintly puzzled expression.

A mere few months ago, that would have been enough explanation to satisfy him. He would have promptly dismissed the event from his mind and gone on to other conquests.
Things are different now,
he thought.
I am now blessed with a modicum of sense, and my sense tells me that I enjoy kissing Emma Costello.

The motion of putting his hand under her chin and his lips on hers had required not an iota of thought, so practiced was his love-making. The part that so unsettled him then, and that was breaking out sweat on his forehead now, was the way Emma's lips and then her embrace made him feel.

He eased out his pocket watch, so as not to disturb the sleeping Clarissa, and consulted it.
Up until half past seven this morning, I kissed females with the idea of what I would get out of the exchange,
he thought.
Kissing Emma was the first time ever that I wanted to give more than receive. I wanted to let her know that someone cared what happens to her. I wanted to share my strength, I who have never been strong. That one little kiss—well, perhaps it was not so little—made me better than I ever was before.

He looked out the window at the glorious spring and wished himself back in the book room. He tried to imagine how he would replay that good-bye again, and he could not envision any other conclusion. As surely as God made sinners and fools to test the world, he would have kissed Emma Costello. The thought shook him to his very soul, and he felt tears starting behind his eye.
Why did I have to do the most stupid thing of all?
he berated himself.
Why did I have to fall in love with Emma?

At his insistence, they stopped for the night at Market Quavers. “I do not know why we cannot stop at Reading,” Clarissa protested, her pout more pronounced than usual. “I mean we usually stop in Reading.”

Well, too bad,
he wanted to say,
change your blasted routine.
Instead, he kissed his love's forehead. “I have a banking transaction to undertake in the morning, my dear,” he explained, tucking his arm through hers as he escorted her to the Quail and Covey.

She suffered him to lead her along, pausing only at the doorway for another attempt to reason with him. When it failed, she gave him a searching look. “This quite cuts up my peace,” she assured him.

“I trust you will forgive me,” he said with a smile, all the while writhing inside and wondering if he had been so vacuous before his reformation. The realization that he had been that petty and more so did nothing to raise his spirits.

He allowed her to tease him into an explanation, partly to placate her for the disruption to her usual itinerary. “I wish to begin an annuity for Mrs. Mary Roney, the sister of my former secretary. That is all, Clarissa.”

He paused, knowing that she would fawn over him for his kindness to the downtrodden and embarrass him with her praise. He waited uneasily for her to laud him for such benevolence to someone who had cheated him. What she said surprised him.

“You cannot be serious,” Clarissa said, her voice a trifle flat, the music gone out of it.

“Of course I am,” he replied, wondering where this was going.

“You are actually going to help the sister of the man who robbed you?”

He nodded. “It seems about the least I can do for David Breed-low, who only thieved from me to help his sister in her great need.”

“John, what do you think prisons are for?” she asked, stamping her foot. “A servant should never steal from his master.”

“Not even when the master was a stupid lout who should have cared enough to see to his servant's needs?” He heard his voice rising. “Clarissa, there is a man on his way to exile and possible death in a place I wouldn't wish on a dog because I whined about twenty pounds.”

Clarissa, her eyes big at his outburst, yanked her arm from his and hurried to her mother's side. “I can only hope that you do not dole out too much of your income to gutter rats.”

There will still be plenty of it left, and then some, for your ribbons, hats, and shoes,
he thought. “But I thought you were pleased when I mentioned my work among the prisons?” he asked, reminding her of his fiction of several days ago.

“It is one thing to take Bible tracts and jellies to prisoners, but it is quite another to give them your money and encourage them,” she said. “Come, Mother. I feel a headache coming on.”

He ate in solitary splendor in the private dining room that night, and the food was excellent. To aid his digestion, he went for a long walk that took him through the village, out into the surrounding farmland, and back again. On the walk out, he had almost convinced himself not to make Clarissa Partridge an offer. On the way back, he realized that was impossible.

She expects me to propose,
he thought,
and I would be ungentle-manly not to. My reformation will be complete, and I will free Emma from her indenture. If she ever finds that her father and brother are truly in Australia, she will go to them.
He stood still in the road and watched the lamps lit in houses on the village outskirts.
And even if she never leaves England, she has seen me at my worst and could not possibly want anything to do with me.

No, he would speak to Clarissa's father tomorrow in Bath, propose, present her with a stupefying diamond, and become an unexceptionable husband. No one would ever know that he was in love with his secretary.
How odd it is,
he considered,
that here I am, trying to help Emma find her relatives. If I succeed, she will certainly leave.

“The old Ragsdale never would have done this,” he said out loud to a cow by the fence. “The old Ragsdale would have dragged his feet and whined, and not lifted a finger to help, especially if by so doing, he ruined his own chances. I am a fool.”

He walked back slowly, trying to figure out at what point he fell in love with Emma. As he stood outside the tavern, he realized that he must have felt something that night she stood beside him with her fate resting on the turn of a card.
Is it possible that what I took for hopeless submissiveness was courage on a scale so great that my own puny resources could not measure it?
he reflected.
Was that when something in me began to understand what Emma Costello meant?

He couldn't go inside. He stood beside the door, wondering at the workings of fate.
If things had been different, Emma, perhaps you could have loved me too. How tragic for us, this endless war between our people. You have been misunderstood, scotched, lied to, and diddled at every turn. I can only be grateful that at least you do not hate me anymore.

Clarissa was in good spirits in the morning. When he returned from his errand at the bank, she condescended to take his arm and allow him to walk with her to the waiting carriage. He helped her inside, then climbed in after her.

Lady Partridge was still inside the inn, giving a portion of her mind she could ill spare to the landlord over the damp sheets. He turned to Clarissa. Now was as good a time as any. He took a deep breath.

“Clarissa, I am sure you are aware of my pleasure in your company.”
I should take her hand,
he thought, so he did. “I wonder if you would do me the honor, the ineffable honor, of consenting to become my wife.”

There. That wasn't so difficult. It was words strung together, and from Clarissa's reaction, they were the right ones. She squeezed his hand, and he returned the pressure.

“I know a lady ought to turn down a first proposal,” she said, and his heart rose for a moment. “But I shall not,” she continued, “for I fear it would disappoint you, my dear. Yes, I will be your wife. Nothing would make me happier than to put some regularity into your disordered life.”

He almost winced at her words, and by the greatest effort choked back his own indignation.
Regularity? Regularity?
he wanted to shout.
I am so regular now that Greenwich could set its clock by me. You will make me boring, and prosy, and stuffy, and my children will only suffer me. They'll never know there was a time when I was fun and a bit of a scoundrel.

“I am so pleased,” he said and kissed her.

It was a test, really, and not a kiss, and he failed. Her lips were every bit as soft as Emma's, and if anything, her bosom pressing against him was more bountiful than Emma's, but he felt nothing beyond the usual stirrings of the healthy male. He could have kissed the most veteran doxy at Vauxhall and felt nothing more. She wasn't Emma, and he didn't care from his heart.

He was spared from another demonstration by the arrival of his future mother-in-law. Clarissa, all blushes and breathless sentences, told her the good news, and he was rewarded with a beaming smile from Lady Partridge, and the assurance that she would devote the remainder of the Season to arranging the most brilliant wedding.

He was content to suffer in silence for the remainder of the trip to Bath. Clarissa and her mother moved with lightning speed from silver patterns to china to damask curtains, and were careening onto the honeymoon itself when Bath appeared like a benediction. He sighed with relief and called their attention to the city before them, using it like raw meat before wolves to distract them. “Now tell me how I should approach your father,” he interrupted, not wishing to think about his honeymoon because Emma would not be the last person he saw when his eye closed, and his first sight in the morning.

“Papa will be delighted,” Clarissa assured him. “Only do not bump his foot, or ask for sherry. The doctor has put Papa on a strict regimen of pump water mixed with vinegar and cloves.”

“Heavens,” he said.
Is this to be my future, as well? Gout and pump water?

To his dismay, a tidal wave did not roar in from the Bristol Channel and float them out to sea before they arrived at the Partridge home. Sir Clarence was in the library, with his bandaged foot propped on a footstool, looking as though he could chew through masonry. Lord Ragsdale took a deep breath, blew a kiss in the doorway to Clarissa, and closed it behind him.

“Sir Clarence,” he heard himself saying, “how nice to see you again. I believe we have a matter of the heart to discuss.”