Unveiled (2 page)

She'd counted on being invisible to him in this guise.

Then, as if she'd been but a brief snag in the fluid silk of his life, he looked away, finishing his survey of the massed knot of servants. Beside her, the upstairs maids held their breath. Margaret wished he would just get it over with and say something dastardly, so they could all hate him.

But he smiled. It was an easy, casual expression, and it radiated a good cheer that left Margaret feeling perversely annoyed. He took off his black leather riding gloves and turned to address them.

“This place,” he said in a voice that was quiet yet carrying, “looks marvelous. I can tell that Parford Manor is in the hands of one of the finest staffs in all of England.”

Margaret could see the effect of those words travel like a wave through the servants. Backs straightened, subtly; eyes that had been narrowed relaxed. Hands unclenched. They all leaned towards him, just the barest inch, as if the sun had peeked out from behind disapproving clouds.

Just like that, he was stealing from her again. This time, he robbed her of the trust and support of her family retainers.

Mr. Turner, however, didn't seem to realize his cruelty.

He removed his riding coat, revealing broad, straight shoulders—shoulders that ought to have bowed under the sheer villainous weight of what he'd done. He turned back to the majordomo. He acted as if he were not stealing onto Parford lands, as if he hadn't won the grudging right to come here in Chancery a bare few weeks ago to investigate what he had called economic waste.

Smith, the traitor, was already beginning to relax in response.

Margaret had assumed that the servants were
hers.
After all those years running the house alongside her mother, she'd believed their loyalties could not be suborned.

But Mr. Smith nodded at something Mr. Turner said. Slowly, her servant—her old, faithful servant, whose family had served hers for six generations—turned and looked in Margaret's direction. He held out his hand, and Mr. Turner looked up at her. This time, his gaze fixed on her and stayed. The wind blew, whipping her skirts about her ankles, as if he'd called up a gale with the intensity of his stare.

She couldn't hear Smith's commentary, but she could imagine his words delivered in his matter-of-fact tenor. “That's Anna Margaret Dalrymple there, His Grace's daughter. She's stayed behind on Parford lands to report your comings and goings to her brothers. Oh, and she's pretending to be the old duke's nurse, because they're afraid you'll kill the man to influence the succession.”

Mr. Turner put his head to the side and blinked at her, as if not believing his eyes. He knew who she was; he had to know, or he'd not be looking at her like that. He wouldn't be stalking towards her, his footfalls sure
as a tiger's. Now, she could see the windswept tousle of his hair, the strong line of his jaw. As he came closer, she could even make out the little creases around his mouth, where his smile had left lines.

It seemed entirely wrong that someone so awful could be so handsome.

Mr. Turner came to stand in front of her. Margaret tilted her chin up, so that she could look him in the eyes, and wished she were just a little taller.

He was studying her with something like bemusement. “Miss?” he finally asked.

Smith came up beside Margaret. “Ah, yes. Mr. Turner, this is Miss…” He paused and glanced at her, and in that instant, the growing bubble of betrayal was pricked, and she realized he had not given her secrets away. Ash Turner didn't know who she was.

“Miss Lowell.” She remembered to curtsy, too, ducking her head as a servant would. “Miss Margaret Lowell.”

“You're Parford's nurse?”

Nurse; daughter. With his illness, it came to the same thing. She was the only protection her father had against this man, with her brothers scattered across England to fight for their inheritance in Parliament. She met Mr. Turner's gaze steadily. “I am.”

“I should like to speak with him. Smith tells me you're very strict about his schedule. When would it least inconvenience you?”

He gave her a great big dazzling smile that felt as if he'd just opened the firebox on a kitchen range. As bitterly as she disliked him, she still felt its effect.
This
was how this man, barely older than her, had managed to make a fortune so quickly. Even
she
wanted to jump
to attention, to scurry just a little faster, just so he would favor her with that smile again.

Instead, she met his eyes implacably. “I'm not strict.” She drew herself up a little taller. “
Strict
implies unnecessary, but I assure you the care I take is very necessary indeed. His Grace is old. He is ill. He is weak, and I won't brook any nonsense. I won't have him disturbed just because some fool of a gentleman bids me do so.”

Mr. Turner's smile grew as she spoke. “Precisely so,” he said. “Tell me, Miss…” he paused there and lowered one eyelid at her in a shiver of a languid wink. “Miss Margaret Lowell, do you always speak to your new employers in this manner, or is this an exception carved out for me in particular?”

“While Parford lives, you are not my employer. And when he has—” Her throat caught at the words; her lungs burned at the memory of the last grave she'd stood beside.

Hold yourself together,
Margaret chided herself,
or he'll know who you are before the day's over.

She cleared her throat and enunciated with particular care. “And once he's passed on, you'll hardly have need of my services. Not unless you're planning on becoming bedridden yourself. Is there any chance of that?”

“Fierce and intelligent, too.” He let out a little sigh. “When I'm in bed, I don't suppose I'll want your services. Leastwise, not as a nurse. So yes, you are quite correct.”

His eyelashes were unconscionably thick. They shielded eyes so dark she could not distinguish pupil from cornea. It took her a moment to realize that what he'd said went well beyond idle flirtation. Smith coughed uneasily. He'd overheard the whole thing, from
that unfortunate compliment to the improper innuendo. How horrifying. How lowering.

Still, the image came to mind unbidden—Mr. Turner, stripped of those layers of dark blue wool and pristine linen, his skin shining gold against white sheets, turned over on his side, that smile glinting just for her.

How
enticing.

Margaret pressed her lips together and imagined herself emptying the chamber pot over his naked form. Now
there
was a thought that would bring her some satisfaction.

He leaned in. “Tell me, Miss Lowell. Is Parford well enough for a little conversation? You can accompany me to the room and make sure I don't overstep myself or overexcite him.”

“He was alert earlier.” And, in point of fact, her father had insisted that when that devil Turner arrived, he wanted to see him straight away. “I'll see if he's still awake and willing to speak with you.”

She turned away, but he caught her wrist. She turned reluctantly back towards him. His naked hand was warm against her skin. She wished he hadn't removed his gloves. His grip was not tight, but it was strong.

“One last question.” His eyes found hers. “Why did the majordomo hesitate before pronouncing your name?”

So he'd noticed that, too. In circumstances such as this, only the truth would do.

“Because,” she said with a sigh, “I'm a bastard. It's not precisely clear what name I should be given.”

“What? No family? No one to stand for you and protect your good name? No brothers to beat off unwanted suitors?” His fingers tightened on her wrist a fraction; his gaze dipped downwards, briefly, to her
bosom, before returning to her face. “Well. That's a shame.” He smiled at her again, as if to say that there was no shame at all—at least not for him.

And that smile, that dratted smile. After all that he'd done to her, he thought he could waltz into her family home and take her to bed?

But he gave a sigh and let go of her hand. “It's a terrible shame. I make it a point of honor not to impose upon defenseless women.”

He shook his head, almost sadly, and turned to gesture behind him. The young man who had accompanied him when he'd arrived loped up the steps in response.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Miss Lowell, let me present to you my younger brother, Mr. Mark Turner. He's come into the country with me this fine summer so he can have some quiet time to finish the philosophical tract he is writing.”

“It's not precisely a philosophical tract.”

Mr. Mark Turner, unlike his brother, was slight—not skinny, but wiry, his muscles ropy. He was a few inches shorter than his elder brother, and in sharp contrast with his brother's tanned complexion and dark hair, he was pale and blond.

“Mark, this is Miss Lowell, Parford's nurse. Undoubtedly, she needs all her patience for that old misanthrope, so treat her kindly.” Mr. Turner grinned, as if he'd said something very droll.

Mr. Mark Turner did not appear to think it odd that his brother had introduced him to a servant—worse, that he had introduced a servant to
him.
He just looked at his brother and very slowly shook his head, as if to reprove him. “Ash” was all he said.

The elder Turner reached out and ruffled his younger
brother's hair. Mr. Mark Turner did not glower under that touch like a youth pretending to be an adult; neither did he preen like a child being recognized by his elder. He could not have been more than four-and-twenty, the same age as Margaret's second-eldest brother. Yet he stood and regarded his brother, unflinching under his touch, his eyes steady and ageless.

It was as if they'd exchanged an entire conversation with those gestures. And Margaret despised Mr. Turner all the more for that obvious affection between him and his younger brother. He wasn't supposed to be handsome. He wasn't supposed to be human. He wasn't supposed to have any good qualities at all.

One thing was for certain: Ash Turner was going to be a damned nuisance.

M
R.
T
URNER CONTINUED
to be a nuisance as Margaret led him up the wide stairway towards her father's sickroom. At first, he said nothing. Instead, he gawked about him with a sense of casual proprietorship, taking in the stone of the stairways, and then, as they entered the upper gallery, the portraits on the wall. It wasn't greed she saw in his gaze;
that
she could have forgiven. But he was an interloper at Parford Manor, and he looked about him with the jaded eye of a purchaser—searching out the flaws, as if he didn't want to say too much by way of compliment, lest he raise the price too high in subsequent rounds of bargaining.

He glanced out the leaded windows. “Pleasantly situated,” he remarked.

Pleasantly situated.
Parford Manor was the center of a massive estate—fifty acres of parkland on the most beautiful rolling hills in all of England, surrounded by tenant farms. The gardens were the labor of her mother's life, a living, breathing monument to a woman who was even now fading from common memory. And he thought it was merely pleasantly situated?

He was a boor.

“Beautifully maintained,” he said as they passed a tapestry in the stone stairs.

She rolled her eyes, which thankfully, as she walked ahead of him, he could not see.

“The manor needs a bit of updating, though.”

Margaret stopped dead, afraid to even look in his direction. He came abreast of her and turned to look at her.

“You don't agree? All that dark wainscoting downstairs. Tear it down—get some bright papers on the wall.” He gestured above to the gallery's ceiling. “New chandeliers—Lord, it must be dark in here, of a winter evening. Don't you think?”

He was absolutely intolerable. “The gallery was last renovated by the duchess herself, a decade prior. I shouldn't like to set my tastes against a sensibility as refined as hers.”

His brow furrowed. “Surely you have an opinion of your own.”

“I do. I believe I just expressed it.”

There was a bit too much asperity in her tone, and he looked at her in surprise. Of course; a nurse wouldn't have been quite so bold in her speech. Not to a duke's heir. Not even to a wealthy tradesman who held the power of her employment in his too-large hands.

But what he said was “So. I'm a lout to think of altering her choices. I suppose I am fouling up a great lot of tradition. But only to improve, Miss Lowell. Only to improve.”

Margaret's life had hardly been improved when he'd made her a bastard. That, however, she couldn't say. Instead, she sighed. “Are you always this chatty with servants?”

“Only the pretty ones.” He cast her another sidelong glance, and a grin. “The pretty, intelligent ones.”

A beat fluttered in her stomach and Margaret started walking again. Down the gallery, into the hall beyond. She stopped before a wide wood door. “We're about to
enter a sickroom, so consider restraining your flirtations. His Grace is not well.”

Mr. Turner shook his head, solemn again. “A shame. I'd prefer him in his study, hale and hearty. There's little honor in vanquishing an invalid.”

Margaret gripped the brass handle of her father's door. She couldn't look back at him, for fear he'd read the truth in the rigidity of her features. Her mother's locket hung heavy on its chain, a great weight around her neck. “Is that why you did this, then? Is that why you had the duke and the duchess's marriage of thirty years voided for bigamy, their innocent children declared bastards and disinherited entirely?” Her voice was shaking. “You claim to have too much honor to importune a woman without family, but let a man have a dukedom, and you feel free to…to
vanquish
him?”

There was a long pause behind her. “Are you always this chatty with your employers? I should imagine the Dalrymples—and no, Miss Lowell, I would not describe your employer's poisonous offspring as either ‘children' or ‘innocent'—would have stamped that trait right out of you.”

Margaret closed her eyes. Poisonous, was she? She wondered what she had done to deserve that particular epithet from a man she had met only this day. “I served the duchess when she was ill.” True; she'd spent her waking hours in her mother's sickroom. “She was never well, these last years, but when you announced to the world that her husband was a bigamist—that she herself had been nothing more than an adulteress for the last thirty years, you destroyed her. She simply lost her will to continue. She was dead a few months later. To hear you talk about the circumstances that led to her death in so easy a fashion is utterly repellant.”

He didn't answer her, and she turned to look at him. He was watching her seriously, his lips pressed together. He looked as if he were actually
listening
to her, as if she had something important to say. Maybe that was why she continued.

“You weren't the one who had to urge her to eat. You didn't watch the light in her eyes wink out and die. You men never see the consequences of what you do. All you care about is that in the end, you collect the title and the estates. That's not honorable.”

Another longer pause. “You're perfectly right,” he finally said. “It wasn't honorable. It was revenge. I doubt you understand the complexity of the family relationship. But, at least, I didn't
intend
to cause the duchess's death. Parford, on the other hand…” His fingers clenched at his side. “I doubt Parford could say the same of my sister, were you to query him on the matter. As for the worthless boys he called sons? Quite frankly, after what they did to my brothers at Eton, I'd have wished far worse upon him.”

“Richard and his friends must have been quite the terror, to justify having his title stripped.”

“Richard? You're calling the former Marquess of Winchester Richard?”

Rather than answer that, Margaret swung the door open and pushed it inward. “His Grace is waiting.”

Mr. Turner gave her one last long, searching look. Her heart thumped as he perused her face. Surely he would know what her little slip of the tongue had meant. But he just shook his head and entered the room. She followed behind.

Over the past few months, Margaret had learned to hide how completely aghast the sight of her father left her. She knew, rationally, that he was ill. But between
her visits—even if no more than an hour elapsed—this image of him, thin as a fence rail and swathed in bedclothes, never managed to lodge in her memory. She remembered him healthy and robust, larger and more incomprehensible than the sky itself. That memory had riveted itself in her imagination, unable to be dislodged by something so trivial as the passage of time. In her heart, he couldn't change. Her father was bigger than her, stronger than her, more frightening than her.

Reality had been cruel. He'd shrunk into a glazed shell of a man, holding on to life with the same tenacity that held him upright in this perfect seated posture. He ought to have been lying down.

“Parford,” Mr. Turner said. He put his hands in his pockets and stood there, glowering, all his chatty conversation evaporated. He was as still as a tombstone, looking forwards. That rigid stance seemed entirely at odds with his easy manner to a servant.

Her father rolled his head lazily to regard him. “Turner.”

Mr. Turner stared at him for one long instant before swiveling away. He turned to a basin on a nearby table, and when that could not hold his interest any longer, his gaze moved to a jumble of medicines in brown apothecary's bottles.

He picked up one and turned it over. “Well. My finely honed speech, saved all these years, seems too big for this room after all.”

“Oh, pull up your trousers and be a man. What in God's wide world are you waiting for?” That whiplash crack of authority in her father's voice set Margaret's teeth on edge. “Just get it over with, Turner. Say your piece, and then let me sleep.”

“It seems unsporting to crow about my triumph to
a linen-clad scarecrow.” Mr. Turner set down the laudanum and looked over. “But I suppose you wouldn't have it any other way, would you?”

Her father let out another exasperated sigh. “Get
on
with it, Turner. I'm dying. I have no wish to spend my last days enduring your endless hand-wringing and shilly-shallying. We both know how this is supposed to go—eyes for eyes, and all that. Am I supposed to beg you, as you once begged me?”

Margaret had no idea what her father was speaking about.

But Turner must have, because he scowled. “You're making a mockery of this.”

“That's not your line,” Parford snapped. “You're supposed to throw my own words back at me. What did I say to that smelly, bedraggled child who visited me? Oh, yes: ‘We have as much blood in common as the queen has with a pig farmer.' I
did
say pig farmer, didn't I?”

“Coal miner, actually. And at the time, George was king.”

“Damn. My memory is full of holes. Still, you've deviated from the script. Here you are, heir to the Duchy of Parford, despite everything I did. Aren't you going to grind my nose in it? Will that satisfy your vengeance? Or would you prefer to drive a dagger through my chest and drink my blood?”

Mr. Turner set his jaw and reached sharply for a small sack at his waist. At that sudden movement, Margaret felt a small shock of fear go through her, and she darted forwards, her hand reaching out to stop him—

“Relax, girl,” her father grumbled. “What do you
suppose he's secreted in that tiny little pouch? The world's smallest rapier?”

Mr. Turner merely glanced at her and pulled something from the pouch and threw it forwards. “Here. This is yours.”

It landed on the Duke of Parford's lap, and for once, that harsh stream of words dried up. He stared at it and then closed his hand about it. “A sixpence? Oh, no! I'm feeling revenged upon.”

The entire conversation was opaque to Margaret. “
The
sixpence,” Mr. Turner said grimly. “When I came to you and begged for your intercession, you threw it in my face and told me the only thing you wanted me to get was a bath. My sister died, my brothers—” He shook his head. “I told you I would make you sorry. And now here I am.”

“Yes. Congratulations. You've stolen a dukedom. Am I supposed to care?”

“You stole it yourself. I didn't make your children bastards. I didn't steal their inheritance. It was you who did it, so certain your first wife would never come to light. And now you're reaping your own punishment.”

Her father leaned back against the cushions. “Me? Punished? Hardly. I'm the duke—and I will be until I die, which hopefully will be soon.” He yawned widely. “Once I have passed on to the next world, I can hardly care what becomes of my pitiful bastard offspring in this one.” He leaned back.

Margaret's spine felt tight with tension. Her hands flattened against the plasterwork behind her. Her father had never been demonstrative or affectionate. Still, she'd always believed that he cared for her, even if only in his high-handed fashion. At his words, she
wanted to melt into the wall and simply disappear. The hair on her head, scraped into that awful bun, pulled against her scalp.

But her father didn't glance her way. “You seem to be under the impression that I give a damn about those whelps I sired on that whey-faced chit I was forced to pretend was my bride. You're wrong.”

That “whey-faced chit” was Margaret's mother—sweet and soft-spoken, warm and gentle and loving. She was barely six months in the grave. Margaret stared straight ahead, her hands clenching.

“Now, if you've finished berating me, go away. I'm bored.” Her father leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.

Mr. Turner stared at him for a few moments, his jaw working. Finally, with one last look at Margaret, he left. Margaret closed the door behind him and turned to her father. He lay on the bed, his eyes shut as if he were sleeping. She doubted he was. She watched the ragged rise and fall of his chest, unsure what to think.

What on earth had Mr. Turner been alluding to? This was clearly not the first time her father had spoken with him. There was more to Mr. Turner than just a voided marriage and a grab for a dukedom, but if so, this was the first Margaret had heard of it. More important, had her father's unkind words been an act, put on to convince Mr. Turner her father didn't care about his children, and to thus shield them from revenge? Or had he spoken the simple truth?

As if sensing her questions, he opened his eyes. He must have seen the hurt on her face, because he expelled his breath in disgust. “Oh, Christ, Anna. You're already a girl and a bastard. Don't make yourself triply useless by crying.”

Margaret was beyond tears. She'd shed them all months ago, for all the good they'd done. But shame settled against her skin like a fine burning net. Over the past months, she'd had everything stripped from her: her name, when it was discovered that Lady Anna Margaret Dalrymple was a bastard. Her dowry, when Chancery decided that as illegitimate offspring, she wasn't entitled to the funds settled upon her mother.

Margaret took a deep breath. She had been scoured clean of everything except the hard truth of herself. It coiled, deep inside her, like a spiked little ball.

“Would you like a glass of barley water?” she asked calmly.

Perhaps her father took that smooth inquiry as meekness, because his lip curled. He didn't understand. It took every ounce of strength she had not to simply turn on her heel and walk out of the room. Because Mr. Turner had been right about one thing. It had been selfishness on her father's part—pure, utter selfishness—to lie to her mother, to pretend to marry her, to beget offspring he'd known were legally unable to inherit.

“None of that tepid stuff, now,” he warned her.

The water was room temperature against her wrist, but she had no desire to send down to the icehouse. In fact, in her current guise as lowly nurse, she might have to go herself. She poured the liquid as it was, a tiny act of defiance, proof that inside she was still Lady Anna Margaret. She wasn't some nameless bastard servant in a great house, to be ordered about at whim.