Tremaine's True Love (32 page)

George was on his feet, arms around her, before she got out another word.

“Hush. I’m as able to give you children as the next man, Elsie Nash. You’re dear and desirable, and provided you find some similar attributes about my humble self, we’ll manage splendidly.”

She felt right in his arms, sweet, good, and precious.

“I won’t be demanding. I won’t nag, George. I promise.”

The daft woman was giving him permission to stray.

“I’ll be demanding,” George said. “I’ll demand of myself the same faithfulness and loyalty I expect from you, Elsie. I’ll demand that my vows are spoken in earnest, not empty words. I’ll demand that you and Digby never want for anything and never fear for your well-being. Should anything happen to me, my family will provide a home for you both.”

Of that, George was certain. By the end of the day, Nicholas and their sisters would be certain of it too.

Elsie laid her head on his shoulder. “Then yes, a thousand times yes. I will gladly marry you, George Haddonfield. The sooner the better.”

George imprinted the moment on his memory: Elsie in his arms, the kitchen quiet and fragrant with fresh bread, weak winter light coming through the window, and peace and joy flooding his soul.

“When does Edward rise?” George asked. “I’ll speak to him today, unless you’d rather I wait.” As a widow, Elsie could remarry where she pleased, though George would observe the courtesies for her, provided those courtesies didn’t take too long.

“Edward didn’t come home last night,” Elsie said. “He occasionally overimbibes and spends the night at the inn. He comes home in a foul temper the next morning, having drunk too much and gambled too deeply.”

“He’ll not trouble you with his moods once he knows we’re engaged,” George said. “I’ll retrieve him from the inn and improve his mood before he arrives home.”

Elsie eased from George’s embrace. “Be careful, George. Edward’s foul moods can turn violent.”

“I know how to be careful, Elsie. Start packing, for we’ll be married within the week.”

When she ought to have beamed a smile at George worthy of a prospective bride, Elsie walked him to the back hallway and took down his greatcoat.

“We’re not married yet, George. Don’t turn your back on Edward. My heart would break if he hurt you.”

“Edward Nash has indulged his last violent mood,” George said, whipping his scarf around his neck and kissing his intended once more for luck.

Before Elsie allowed George to make good on his pronouncement, she grasped the ends of his scarf and kissed him right back.

* * *

“I wanted to take my leave of you in private,” Nita said, though most of her didn’t want to take any leave of Tremaine at all.

She could no longer read his expressions, or perhaps she no longer merited much emotion from him. He cut an elegant figure in his riding attire, though riding boots were next to no protection from the elements.

“I hadn’t thought to trouble you with farewells,” he said, crossing his bedroom to close the door behind her. “You didn’t sleep well.”

And Tremaine hadn’t locked the door. He could still read Nita, apparently, for he drew her into his arms. His generosity was more than Nita could endure.

“Tremaine, I’m sorry. I never meant to mislead you.” Tears welled, when Nita had been certain she’d never cry again. Her head throbbed, her eyes were scratchy, and her voice sounded as if she’d overindulged at the men’s punch bowl.

“I wanted to be misled,” he said. “Maybe you did too.”

Badly, badly, Nita had wanted to be misled, also loved and accepted. “I should not have—”

“Made love with me last night? Perhaps not. I’ll have a lifetime to puzzle out your motivations, won’t I?”

The small sting of his words was nearly welcome, because Nita’s motivations had been foolish and selfish. Desperate. Would she ever stop feeling desperate?

“Maybe we wouldn’t have children,” Nita said miserably, though no method of preventing conception was foolproof, except the one she’d failed to use.

“We’d have children, God willing. Many children, and even if we weren’t so blessed, there’s you, my dear. I will pray nightly for your continued good health.”

Tremaine’s hand on Nita’s hair was a benediction and a torment, a final tender caress and reminder of all Nita was casting aside. She’d wracked her brain for a compromise, for a way through their dilemma.

Wee Annie, gasping for every breath, choked the life out of Nita’s hope. Mr. Horst, his cough finally quiet, closed the lid of its coffin. Mary Eckhardt, coming through another winter of successive ailments, put flowers on the grave.

Tremaine’s mother, choosing death instead of watching her sons grow to manhood, sang the final hymn.

“I’ll keep you in my prayers as well,” Nita said, though she couldn’t step back, couldn’t move away from the warmth and comfort of Tremaine’s arms. Even when a knock sounded on the door, she stayed in his embrace.

“Nita, I’d give you my handkerchief,” Nicholas said, “but I’ll need it myself. Lovey, please stay with Nita while I see St. Michael on his way.”

Still, Tremaine made no move to step back, and Nita realized he was leaving the final instant of their parting up to her. Not exactly a kindness, maybe more of a closing argument.

They belonged together, and wee Annie deserved a chance in life too. Both were true.

Nita stepped back, snatching at the handkerchief Tremaine held out to her, a white flag of surrender that bore his initials and his scent.

“Fare well, my lady,” he said, making the words both a parting and an admonition. “If you ever have need of me—”

“Good-bye,” Nita said, kissing him, though Nick and Leah were both in the room. She stayed where she was, back to the door as Tremaine walked out of her life. When his footsteps had faded, she crossed to his bed, unbelted her dressing gown, and climbed under covers that still bore his scent.

“I shall cry now,” Nita said, because Leah had offered not a single word. “I shall go completely to pieces, and sob and scream, and wail, and carry on. I will put Mrs. Siddons to shame with my self-indulgent dramatics. You’d best leave. I’ve just sent away the only man I’ll ever love, and he is too g-good to hate me for it.”

Leah settled at the head of the bed. “I’ll leave if you want me to, but as for that other, all the tears and self-indulgence, I say you’re past due. You’ve soldiered on long enough, Nita Haddonfield, and heartbreak is one tragedy a lady should not have to deal with alone.”

Leah wrapped her arms around Nita, which only made the tears come faster.

* * *

“I was hoping to have a word with George before I left.” Tremaine had also been hoping for a miracle, a brilliant insight that would allow him to renew his offer of marriage to the only woman he’d ever love.

For Nita’s very stubbornness and selflessness, Tremaine loved her, even as he wanted to pen her into a luxuriously appointed stone keep, where disease and a charitable heart couldn’t lay her low.

“I was hoping you’d marry my sister,” Bellefonte said as they crossed the chilly garden. “George is probably still sleeping off the effects of truly bad punch. Looks like we’ll get more snow this afternoon.”

The sky was indeed adding its melancholic contribution to a day Tremaine wanted behind him.

“I’ll be in London by midafternoon, then the weather can do whatever it pleases.”

Except bad weather meant Digby Nash’s lung fever might get worse, and Nita would be at greater risk of illness herself.

“Are we in a footrace, St. Michael?”

“I’m trying to outrun a broken heart.” Where in the bloody hell had that come from?

“You’ll lose,” Bellefonte said with the merciless certainty of an experienced man. “You can’t outrun a broken heart, can’t outthink it, can’t outdrink it, or outswive it. If it’s any consolation, I don’t blame you for putting Nita’s welfare above that of the parish poor. Nita never visits the nursery at Belle Maison. That arrangement works for an auntie, but not for a mother.”

Nita avoided the nursery in part because she would not expose the Bellefonte heir to contagion, but also because she’d thought never to have children of her own.

“God damn you and your attempts to cheer me up, Bellefonte.”

“Anger doesn’t work either,” Bellefonte said pleasantly, “not for long. George’s horse is gone.”

They’d reached the relative warmth of the stables, and indeed, George’s handsome gelding was not in its stall.

“Perhaps your brother has gone to check on the sheep,” Tremaine suggested, though nothing about this day would go as planned. “Mr. Kinser was nipping from a sizable flask at last night’s assembly.”

“We were all nipping from sizable flasks once we’d got a taste of that devil’s brew in the punch bowl.”

Edward Nash had been nearly facedown in the punch bowl, like a hog at his slops, while Nita had been risking her health, tending to a boy whom Nash—

“Promise me you’ll keep Nash on a short rein,” Tremaine said. “Make him beg Lady Susannah for her hand, preferably in public, on his knees. Make him promise her that he’ll fill the library with the books of her choosing.”

“Excellent idea,” Bellefonte said as William was led out. Two sacks were draped over his withers, probably Nita’s doing. “I wish you weren’t leaving, St. Michael. I could learn from you. That bit with the sheep was brilliant—also generous.”

“One-third of the proceeds of the sale of the sheep funds are to be deposited in a trust for the boy. You and George are the trustees.” Tremaine hadn’t intended to disclose that either. “Nash might be under the mistaken impression the offer he received for the sheep was from his great-uncle, the newly remarried baronet, whose title Digby is unlikely to inherit.”

“
Newly
remarried?
”

Bellefonte was entirely too trusting, but then, many good men were. “To the lovely Miss Pamela Sandeen,” Tremaine said, “late of Hagerton Crossing, Derbyshire. Her father’s in trade, her mother’s people are bankers, and one hears things.”

Bellefonte eyed the lowering sky. “Let me guess: she made her bow only last year and comes from a family of legendarily good breeders?”

The baronet’s bride was from a family of fourteen, twelve of them boys.

“Her come-out was two years ago,” Tremaine said, repeating the contents of the report delivered to the Queen’s Harebell by messenger. “Nash’s prospects linger mostly in his mind. The present baronet allowed his lady a year’s engagement, though by all accounts the couple is shamelessly affectionate.”

“Maybe I’m not so reluctant to see you get on your horse,” Bellefonte said slowly. “I assume you researched my situation thoroughly before enjoying my hospitality.”

Yes, Tremaine had, and Lady Della’s come-out weighed heavily on the earl’s mind.

“Not thoroughly enough, my lord.”

When Tremaine extended a hand to Bellefonte, he was yanked into a sturdy male embrace, thumped stoutly between his shoulder blades, then shoved in the direction of the mounting block.

“Godspeed, St. Michael.”

Tremaine climbed into a bloody cold saddle, saluted with his crop, and turned his horse in the direction of Town. As he trotted past the sheep pastures, he noted two places where the stone walls were giving way to the heave of ground alternately frozen and thawed. The sheep would spot those weaknesses any day, and then Lucky’s mother and her friends would go on a grass-drunk tour of the neighborhood.

A drunk of any kind had pathetic appeal. Tremaine reached the village on that thought, and saw George Haddonfield’s horse tied outside the inn. The familiar call of business sounded in the part of Tremaine’s mind that hadn’t the decency to be felled by grief.

He prided himself on snatching commercial opportunity where it arose, no matter how inconvenient or awkward, and George Haddonfield would make an excellent factor both in England and abroad.

Though look where snatching opportunity had landed Tremaine with Nita. Business be damned. Tremaine could solicit George’s assistance by letter. He urged William on past the green, but the horse balked.

“If you tarry here in Haddondale, you’ll only have that much more foul weather to deal with later in the day,” Tremaine informed his horse.

William moved forward at a grudging shuffle.

“You want a go at the horse trough,” Tremaine reasoned. Particularly in winter, watering a horse frequently was part of good care, and William was owed excellent care. Tremaine turned the gelding toward the Queen’s Harebell, a crackling in the pocket of his greatcoat catching his attention.

“Bother this entire day,” Tremaine said, swinging down before the inn.

A responsible man did not neglect his horse. Then too, Tremaine and George should talk, no matter how badly Tremaine wanted to put distance between himself and a certain dear, stubborn former fiancée.

George surveyed the inn’s common, disappointment blighting his good spirits. He wanted to buy somebody—anybody, everybody—a celebratory drink, but the only creature stirring was a bleary-eyed maid.

“Is Bartlow about?” George asked her.

“In the back, making coffee,” she said, bobbing a curtsy. “He’ll have a sore head though, so you’d best not shout.” She scurried off toward the kitchen, while George hung his greatcoat on a peg and stepped around behind the bar.

“Mornin’, Master George,” Bartlow said, emerging from the kitchen with a towel over his shoulder. “What can I do for ye?” He was a good-sized wheat-blond fellow with a full complement of the publican’s good cheer, usually, but this morning Bartlow was moving slowly and speaking softly.

“I’m in search of Edward Nash,” George said. “Where do you keep your cinnamon, Bartlow? I mean to stand Mr. Nash to a toddy or two.”

The fixings were at hand, all but for the spices. Bartlow took up a stool while George stirred together enough spirits for two drinks.

“You don’t want to be disturbin’ Mr. Nash, Master George. He’ll have a powerful head, and him not so kindly when in such a state.”

“Shall I make you a toddy as well?” George asked, because he was in charity with the world, which was surely a harbinger of a happy marriage.

“Aye. That’d be a kindness.”

Tremaine St. Michael strode into the common, his expression suggesting sore heads were in ample supply throughout the shire.

“Mr. Haddonfield, have you found employment at this fine establishment?” St. Michael asked.

St. Michael was soon to be family, so George poured more spirits.

“I’m here to fetch Edward Nash back to the comfort of his own hearth. Bartlow, get him down here and tell him I’m brewing his breakfast. St. Michael, you’ll join us?”

St. Michael had a rather grand beak of a nose, which he wrinkled. “I’d like a word with you first, though if Nash bestirs himself, I suppose my manners are up to the challenge.”

George’s sentiments toward Nash were of the same variety, though because Nash would also be family, George kept mixing.

“What brings you out on this fine and frosty morning?” George asked St. Michael.

“Business, you might say. You need spices, if you’re attempting to brew a toddy, and before I forget, tell Kinser he’ll want to mend his pasture walls sooner rather than later.”

“You tell him,” George said. “Unless I miss my guess, you’ll be underfoot for the next fifty years or so.” George bellowed for the maid to bring him the spices, and to hell with anybody trying to sleep off their excesses upstairs.

St. Michael slouched onto the bench in the snug. “Your guess regarding my future whereabouts would be in error, Mr. Haddonfield.”

“Forty years then, because Nita will wear you out.” The maid brought the spices, then disappeared back into the kitchen. Elsie probably had the same ability to move silently, for which Edward Nash ought to answer.

George heated his mixture over the coals in the common’s enormous hearth, poured two drinks, and joined St. Michael in the snug.

“Congratulate me, St. Michael. I’m to be married.”

St. Michael put two documents on the table. One was foolscap with a list of some sort written upon it, the other was an official document, complete with a dangling seal.

“Felicitations on your impending nuptials, Mr. Haddonfield. Condole me, however, for I’m
not
to be married. You see before you a special license that, alas, Lady Nita has declined to put to its intended use. This other paper is a list of properties in the area I thought might suit your sister. Perhaps you and your bride will take up residence in one of them.”

“Bloody benighted perdition,” George said, sliding a drink before St. Michael. “I’m sorry. Did Nita cry off?”

St. Michael took a dainty sniff of his toddy, as if it were whiskey. “We would not have suited. You and Mrs. Nash have my best wishes, and I would like to discuss a business matter with you when you’re recovered from your nuptial joy.”

“Are you truly that coldhearted? We would not suit, best wishes?” And how did St. Michael know to whom George had proposed?

St. Michael had yet to sip his drink when Edward Nash came thumping down the stairs in the middle of a silence just about to turn awkward.

“What in the vilest hell requires that I rise at an indecent hour at your request, Mr. Haddonfield? And what’s
he
doing here?” Nash asked, blinking at St. Michael.

St. Michael rose. “I’m leaving. Mr. Haddonfield, you may expect further correspondence from me on the subject of serving as my factor in France. Mr. Nash, good day.”

“It ain’t a good day,” Nash said, swiping the drink George had intended for St. Michael. Nash drank about half the toddy before pausing. “Nita sent you packing, then?”

“Lady Nita, to you,” George said in unison with St. Michael.

“She’s not anything to you though, is she, St. Michael?” Nash asked with nasty glee. George could smell the man’s breath from two yards away—rot and ruin blended with poor personal hygiene—which meant St. Michael was getting a blast as well.

“Her ladyship will always have my utmost esteem,” St. Michael said, abruptly sounding significantly more Scottish. “I suggest you guard your tongue, Mr. Nash.”

George had heard that cordial, nearly pleasant tone before, in various gentleman’s clubs, when the hour had grown late and masculine honor was fueled by an excess of spirits.

“Don’t mourn Lady Nita’s rejection too deeply,” Nash said. “My brother Norton said her virginal passions compared unfavorably with Addy Chalmers’s fledgling sorties into sin.”

Before George could act, St. Michael had snatched the drink from Nash and dashed the contents in the idiot’s face.

“Take back those words, sir, on behalf of both women.”

“I must agree, Nash,” George said, rising. “Though your ungentlemanly observation explains why the oldest Chalmers girl looks so familiar.”

A muscle leaped along St. Michael’s jaw. Bartlow stood halfway down the stairs, and the scullery maid scuttled out from the kitchen, turned around, and scuttled right back the way she’d come. On the stairs, four bleary-eyed fellows held perfectly still.

“It’s the damned truth,” Nash said, swiping at his dripping chin with a wrinkled handkerchief. “Nita Haddonfield is a cold fish, poking her nose where it doesn’t belong, basket of medicinals over her arm, while she puts on airs like some angel of mercy when she’s spread her legs—”

St. Michael clipped Nash on the jaw, a mere tap compared to what he could probably do, and compared to what George wanted to do.

“Apologize for that intemperate speech,” St. Michael said. “Admit the mistake of your words, the lingering influence of last night’s drink, and apologize. When your own household has benefitted from Lady Nita’s generosity and expertise, you are the last who should be allowed to malign her. The lady has rejected my suit, but I have not abdicated the honor of protecting her good name. Apologize, Nash.
Now.
”

Nash cocked back his fist with all the finesse of a first former and swung at St. Michael’s jaw, then further impugned his gentlemanly credentials by shaking his limp fingers as if he’d plowed them into a stone wall.

“I’ll meet you,” Nash cried, “you jumped-up excuse for a Scottish sheep farmer. I’ll meet you and we’ll see whose apology is in order. Nita Haddonfield has long been a plague on this shire. She has no care for a woman’s proper place, hasn’t an inkling of proper medical science, and the sooner she’s—”

St. Michael set aside the tankard from which Nash had been drinking. “As you wish, Nash. Lady Nita has borne the censure and indifferent thanks of her neighbors for too long.
Your
disrespect
of
her
ends
now.
Name your seconds.”

Bartlow lowered himself to sit on the steps. The other guests silently exchanged money.

While George tucked the special license and list of properties into his pocket.

* * *

Nita’s throat hurt, her head hurt, her eyes hurt. She sat at the kitchen table sipping a posset that helped with those various pains, but nothing would assuage the ache in her heart.

“I should be drinking pennyroyal tea,” Nita informed a marmalade pantry mouser. “The idea makes me bilious.”

She took another sip of her posset, then another. This was why men got drunk, because it hurt too much to remain sober. Nita would never chastise Mr. Clackengeld for his excesses again.

She was about to drain the contents of her mug when a gust of cold air heralded a commotion at the back door. The cat leaped onto the table and glowered in the direction of the noise.

“Don’t touch my drink,” Nita said, rising—a bit unsteadily. The boot boy had opened the door, though he apparently didn’t know what to make of Addy Chalmers.

“Addy, is Annie well?” Maybe the drink was to blame, but Nita could not find the resolve to don her gloves and cape and slog through a chilly morning to tend the child.

Please, not today
.

Though Nita would. Of course she would.

“Annie is fine, but, Lady Nita, I was at the livery, mucking stalls because Mr. Clackengeld is the worse for drink this morning. I knew he would be, and yet the horses must be tended, mustn’t they? The lads were talking, and they’d heard it from Bartlow’s scullery maid when she brought in the eggs.”

Addy was agitated. A mother with a child at the breast shouldn’t be agitated.

“What did she say?” Nita asked.

“Your Mr. St. Michael has been called out by Edward Nash. They’re to fight a duel, pistols, and George is Mr. St. Michael’s second.”

Nita sagged against the wall between her sisters’ everyday cloaks, hung in age order on pegs. A hanging ham dangled by her shoulder, and her posset abruptly provided anything but comfort.

“A duel?” Nita whispered. “Why, in the name of all that’s sensible—?”

That Tremaine St. Michael—shrewd, calculating, brilliant, and dear—would go off to face death, and over what? Some rash words? A stupid exchange between stubborn men?

Nita would have been enraged, but the idea that Tremaine could
die
kept her pinned to the wall, knees abruptly refusing their usual office. Death had no honor. A man who woke up hale and hearty could repose in a coffin by nightfall. Tremaine was daft if he thought he alone could cheat death.

Daft and endlessly, hopelessly dear.

“Men can be stupidity itself when they get to flinging their honor about,” Addy said. “You should sit down, Lady Nita. You look a mite peaked.”

“Excellent suggestion, but I cannot seem to move.” Or breathe, or think. Tremaine could die. A quick end if he took a shot to the heart. A terrible, lingering death if the wound festered in a limb, and the worst death of all if the bullet hit his belly.

Nita had not absorbed the grief of Tremaine leaving her future, and now this most awful, nonnegotiable, permanent…and he’d apparently chosen this path
willingly
.

“You!” Addy snapped at the boot boy. “Fetch the countess, or my lady’s sisters, and be quick about it. Mind the earl doesn’t see you.”

“A duel.” A funeral, more like. Nita could adjust to a world without Edward Nash in it, but she could not fathom that Tremaine might have Edward’s blood on his hands. Let cholera end Edward Nash some months hence, or the protracted indignity that was typhus, anything that posed no risk to Tremaine St. Michael’s continued well-being.

“Come, my lady,” Addy said, taking Nita by the arm. They steered around hams, cloaks, boots, braided onions, and the marmalade cat to return Nita to the worktable.

“Why pistols?” Nita wailed softly. “Gunshot wounds bleed like the devil and can so easily kill a man. They get infected, they disfigure. I hate gunshot wounds.” Nita hated all wounds, come to that, wounds to the heart most of all. “I believe I’m tipsy.”

“I’m the last who’d judge you for having a tot,” Addy said. “Norton Nash told me that guns are preferred to swords so the duel is more quickly over, and because guns allow the duelists to delope. Everybody fires into the air, honor’s avenged, and the gentlemen can get back to their clubs and cards.”

“Norton Nash told you that?” The scoundrel with the cowlick, may he rest in peace, whom Nita was relieved not to have married.

Addy swung the teakettle over the coals. “Norton liked to talk almost as much as he liked to engage in other activities. We were to be married, but because he’d bought his colors, he said we should keep our engagement quiet. You’ll not tell anybody?”

Nothing made any sense. “Why wouldn’t I tell Nicholas, who will hold Edward accountable for Norton’s bad behavior? Nicholas cannot engage in duels because Leah would kill him and he’s the magistrate. Mary is a Nash, isn’t she?”

With the same bright red hair Norton had been so vain about—no cowlick, though.

“Would you turn your bastard daughter over to Edward Nash’s tender mercy? I considered approaching Penny Nash, but didn’t because he might well have left the matter in Edward’s hands. I’m sorry—I know you were sweet on Norton too.”

Half the shire had apparently been sweet on Norton, though what did that matter when Tremaine was facing death?

“Addy, good day.” The countess came down the kitchen stairs, followed by Susannah, Kirsten, and Della. Leah’s greeting held a question, for Addy would no more presume on Belle Maison’s hospitality than she’d open the dancing at an assembly.

“Edward has called Tremaine out,” Nita said. “Tremaine could die in the next hour, and I’m about to be sick.”

* * *

“No wind,” George said. “That’s a good thing.”

The lack of wind was a matter of indifference to Tremaine. “What’s
he
doing here?”

Here
was a clearing in the Belle Maison home wood, one apparently denuded of deadfall and brush by the enterprising Chalmers lads. Patches of snow alternated with bracken and bare, frozen ground.