Chasing Raven (7 page)

"That was an extremely heavy sigh, Hale," Deverell exclaimed. "I hope the steak is to your liking."

But it was not the steak that troubled him. It was cooked exactly to his specifications. He simply had an appetite for something different, something he'd never had before. Something that just might take a bite out of him first.

Chapter
Nine

Anxious to get out and breathe some fresh air, Raven finally replied to Matthew Bourne's note and agreed to meet him in the little park across the street, but only to pass along their winnings from Hale. She did not want any share of it now. When she looked at that cheque and the sternly penned signature, it felt as if he had paid her to break with Matthew.

Her mother accompanied her to the park that day, watching her too closely to allow much conversation.

"When she's like this it only lasts for a while," Raven assured Matthew with a whisper and a smile. "Before too long she will find something else to worry about and I'll be free again to do as I please."

"Raven, I must tell you—"

"You're soon to be engaged. Yes, I know." She had to cut him off, couldn't bear it when he whined and simpered. Better be brisk and get it over with. "Matty, I never expected anything from you but friendship. We had a very jolly time, did we not?"

He lowered his voice and muttered urgently, "But I had hoped for more. So much more."

Lady Charlotte, waiting by the park railings, summoned her with a sharp cry, "Raven, do hurry."

So as she gave him her hand to kiss, she said cheerfully, "Let me congratulate you, Matty. Lady Louisa Winstanley is a delightful girl. Or so I have heard. I don't know her well, of course."

Staring at her fingers, he stuck out his lower lip. "I hoped this...circumstance...would make little difference to you and I. That's why I never mentioned it. We can go on as we did before."

She paused, reminded again how naive he could be, how young and unthinking. "I'm sure Louisa would not like that much. Better you make a fresh start with her."

"But such things are often arranged and she need not be consulted."

Appalled, Raven tugged her hand from his. "I may not care for the idea of marriage myself, but I would never spoil another woman's chance of contentment and happiness if that is what she has chosen. If you marry her she has a right to expect your fidelity."

"I don't understand you."

That was just the trouble, she thought sadly. "We will always be friends, Matty, but I fear it must be from a distance. I do not want to cause any trouble for you, or for your fiancée." It was different before, when they were both merely having fun, but now their playful adventures must be over.

He swore under his breath. "If my brother Douglas were alive, my parents would let me have whomever I wanted. He was always their favorite and as the eldest this duty would have been his, not mine.
He
would have married Louisa Winstanley, and I would have had you."

Raven said nothing, but she doubted this scenario very much. Matthew's father had been just as eager to keep her like a bird in a cage, not that she'd ever told him about that strange conversation.

"If my brother were alive..." The subject of his dead brother was surely a painful one for Matthew, but he continually brought it up, as if he was afraid of forgetting if he did not keep the wound open. Or else he enjoyed the pain. "So Hale has cost me again," he mumbled resentfully at the ground. "Now I've lost you too, as well as Douglas, thanks to that man's interference. You know, of course, why he paid the wager to you, instead of to me?"

"No, I hardly thought of it at all." She'd wondered about little else those past few days.

"It is Hale's sly, condescending way of telling me he knows what we did. Now he expects me to tremble in fear of how he might retaliate and when. He wants me to throw myself upon his mercy."

"I don't believe he will act to have you banned. It was merely a warning, I'm sure."

"What makes you think he wouldn't have me ousted from every club in London? You don't know him. He's vindictive and callous, a man full of rage stifled inside those flannel waistcoats he wears."

"I told him it was my idea, not yours," Raven assured him. "Besides, I've no doubt he has many other more important things to worry about."

He glared, his face pale and sour. "Why did you dance with him?"

Explaining how that happened was quite impossible, and she was sick of the subject.

Seeing her hesitate, he lost his temper and snapped, "He is just as responsible for my brother's death as if he aimed that pistol himself. Hale has blood on his hands. My brother's blood."

She looked up, startled. "But you said your brother died of a fever."

Now he flushed and his gaze roamed the tree branches above. "My family do not like to talk of what happened, and I can tell you no more. I only said it to warn you. Promise me that there is nothing between the two of you. The man is a villain. Do not let him fool you, Raven."

"There certainly is nothing between Hale and I, not that it is anybody's business." Then she softened her tone. "Goodbye, Matty. I wish you nothing but the best."

Before he could say anything more, she walked away to rejoin her mother by the park railings.

"Well, that's that," Lady Charlotte exclaimed crisply. "If you ask me the Winstanleys are making a mistake, tethering their cart to that boy. I hear he's just as much of an unlucky gambler as his brother ever was."

"Perhaps Miss Winstanley will help straighten his path. If she has the patience. I fear any wife of Matty's will find herself serving the role of nanny, nursemaid and schoolmistress too, no doubt."

"Well, I'm glad to hear you did not imagine yourself in love."

"Good gracious no, mama. You taught me how to remain detached. Everybody knows I have a heart of ice."

"Then do not look so mournful. You're much prettier when you smile. A smile always lifts a woman's features. And yours can be so dark when you don't try. That foreign blood of your father's—"

"I do not feel much in the mood for smiling, mama. Surely," she bit her lip, looking away down the street, "a genuine smile is better than a false one. Or so I've been told."

"I've never met a man who can detect the difference. Except your father, perhaps. But then he always had the gypsy ability of knowing what went on in my mind." Lady Charlotte slowed her pace to look in the window of a milliner's and soon after forgot her daughter's face, more interested in her own and how it might be better framed to advantage by a new summer bonnet.

They had not been there many minutes when a distinguished gentleman with gleaming silver hair jolted to a stop on the pavement before them. He greeted her mother in astonishment.

"Lady Charlotte! Can it be you, after so long?" He spoke in a thick French accent and swept a very elegant bow. "You are more beautiful than ever, I fear. And I am now such an old man. 'Ow can this be? You 'ave stopped time for yourself, I think."

Her mother's smile slid slowly into place, while her calculating gaze skimmed the fellow's finely made and fashionable garments. "Monsieur Reynaux! Goodness, how many years has it been?"

"Too many, my lady. But now I am back, as you see. I 'ope I am not so disgusting a sight to you now that I am aged."

"Monsieur, you are not at all altered!" her mother reassured him at once. Then she tugged Raven closer to her side. "But many things
have
changed since we last met. This is my daughter."

He drew back and studied Raven with interest, a finger to his chin. "A daughter? Mon dieu! Surely you are not old enough to 'ave such a tall and well-grown daughter, my lady! You must be sisters!"

Listening to his oily simpering and her mother's high, girlish laughter, Raven barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes— another unladylike habit.

"How delightful that you are back in London," her mother said a few minutes later, when he finally paused his excessive flattery. "You must call upon us at Mivart's Hotel."

"I shall, my lady! I shall indeed."

And so he did. The very next day.

Monsieur Alphonse Reynaux had apparently befriended Lady Charlotte during the season of her debut, when she was a girl of eighteen. Referring to their past connection as "une affaire de jeunes innocents", he claimed never to have forgotten her since, although when Raven asked where he had been for the past thirty years, he merely shrugged and replied gravely, "La vie est cruelle!"

Despite these "cruelties of life" he managed to spend lavishly and was always well-groomed— both habits that Lady Charlotte greatly esteemed in a man. He very quickly ingratiated himself into her affections again, calling every day before he was expected and staying long after his departure— in Raven's opinion— was overdue. But while his obsequious flattery made the daughter cringe, the mother was in her element. The lady had more color in her face without the assistance of carmine rouge or too many champagne bubbles, and she forgot to complain quite so much about her living arrangements, her wardrobe allowance, or the look she was given by the sullen sales girl at the haberdashers.

Raven's mother had enjoyed similar liaisons before with men who gave her a rejuvenating dose of the adoration she craved. Like sunlight on a spring garden it brought a fresh bloom of life. It would not last, because the change of season was inevitable, but while that glow remained they could all breathe a little easier with less tension in the air. So what harm could there be in it?

And the most advantageous point for Raven? A new affair kept her mother busy and out of
her
business. Hopefully, she would forget, for a little while, the importance of getting her daughter married.

Alphonse Reynaux was very striking with his bright hair, tanned skin and brilliant blue eyes. Clearly he knew how to use all that to his favor and there was little below the surface, but he and her mother made a handsome couple—pretty to look at from a safe distance, even if their conversation was mind-numbing to overhear.

Since Raven paid the man little notice and blocked out most of their chatter, she was surprised one day when her mother exclaimed, "Poor Alphonse. He has nothing, you know. I must do what I can to help him."

She looked up from the letter she was writing to her father's new wife. "What do you mean, he has nothing?"

"Alphonse is a casualty of many unfortunate investments. He trusted where he should not, and put his money into schemes that came to naught. Now he is left with a pittance."

Raven frowned, her pen leaving an ink blot on the paper. "He does not appear to be short of money. He's always very fashionably attired."

"Raven, how very tiresome you can be." Her mother was rearranging a bouquet of roses in her favorite vase and sighing like a sixteen-year-old ingénue. "One must always look one's best and keep up a good front, no matter how one is torn to tatters inside."

"Yes, but—"

"And one must spend money to make money."

She could have argued with her mother, but instead she muttered, "Seamless logic, as ever, mama."

Lady Charlotte in a good mood was like a well-fed leopard lying in the shade with its eyes closed. One did not prod the beast with a stick, if it could be at all avoided.

As her mother warbled on about "charming little Alphonse" and his difficulties, Raven wondered exactly how her mother— who was no better at holding on to money herself— expected to "help" the man, but if this mission kept the lady occupied, so be it. Although her French gentleman had evidently played heavily on the lady's sympathy, there could be no danger of her giving him any money, because that would mean having to ask True Deverell for more and he would, doubtless, put his foot down firmly this time.

So Raven returned to her letter. Although never a very consistent correspondent, she made an effort for Olivia, her father's former secretary and now his wife.

Most of the time, truth be told, Raven struggled over letters because she would rather be out enjoying herself than writing about it, and the games she got up to were often not fit to be read about— why leave evidence? For that reason she had never kept a diary, although her mother had bought her several over the years. She used to rip out the pages and make paper birds, to watch them fly out of her window and see how far the wind could take them.

Looking down at her letter, she read over the line she'd just scratched onto the paper.

On Tuesday I met a man called Hale.

She dipped her pen in more ink and then went back over the name, elongating the stalks of the "H", just the way she had seen it on the bank note. For several moments she became quite absorbed in decorating that capital letter, because she couldn't make it grand and pompous enough. Describing the man on paper was beyond her capabilities. Olivia was much better at that and could ruthlessly set a man down in three words.

Hale. His image flashed before her again in that old grey waistcoat and clumsily tied cravat. He was clearly not of the opinion that one must always be fashionably attired. Unlike her mother's Frenchman, the indomitable Earl of Southerton refused to be a "dandy". Of course he wouldn't follow fashion. He led, but he did not follow. Unless it was perhaps to chase some unfortunate fox.

Matthew Bourne claimed he had blood on his hands. Was it true?

And suddenly she saw those initials— S.R.H.— this time engraved amid curling leaves that slowly unfurled across the polished gold lid of a watch case. To her young eyes, eager to see magic, it had seemed as if the leaves grew as she watched. Then she opened it and found a grimacing skull inside, so fearful a sight that most little girls— or boys— would have dropped it at once. But the image was just gruesome enough to fascinate her.

Death. What a terrible thing to be reminded of whenever one looked at the time.

How many years ago had she held that strange object in her hands while she admired it? Of course, its owner did not realize that she took it to help him. He was going to lose the card game if he stayed at the table and he would not heed her advice on how to play, therefore what better way to save him than run off with his watch? She knew the young man would chase her, and he did.

That, in Raven's opinion, was a much better game. Not that he was grateful for the distraction.