Heartless Read online

  “Some men, Marj,” he said, “want toys for wives. And breeders, of course. Eighteen sounds a good age to me.”

  “For my sake”—she turned her head to kiss his cheek—“let us make it Anna, Theo. She is very precious to me. I would dearly love to marry her to a duke. And to your nephew into the bargain.”

  He turned his head so that their lips met. “Why not?” he said. “The boy is not easily led, anyway. It has taken me two years of wheedling just to get him back to England. It may take another two to get him down to Bowden. And he insists he is not in the market for a wife. We will try to interest him in the mature beauty.”

  “And Anna too declares quite emphatically that she is not in search of a husband,” Lady Sterne said. “It took all my ingenuity just to persuade her to have some fashionable clothes made so that she may go about in town. She looked quite rustic.”

  Lord Quinn grimaced. “Harndon would not like that,” he said. “So, granted that we are probably embarking on an impossibility, when shall we bring them together? Lady Diddering’s ball?”

  “The night after tomorrow?” she said. “Yes, ’twill do nicely, Theo. Oh, if only it works. My dear Anna a duchess. And a lady of fortune. I am as anxious for her happiness as if she were my own daughter.”

  He stroked her hair. “Has it been a sadness in your life, not having children of your own, Marj?” he asked. “Should we have tried, perhaps . . . ?”

  “No,” she said. “Regrets are pointless, Theo. I have had a good life. And ’tis not over yet. Perhaps not nearly over. I am still only in my forties. In fact, ’tis not yet quite impossible . . .” She did not complete the thought.

  “But this afternoon is nearly over,” he said. “I am to dine with the Potters and they always begin a meal promptly. Shall we make use of what time we have left?”

  “Yes.” She turned to him with another sigh of contentment. “Yes, let us do that, Theo.”

  2

  HIS mother and his sister and brother would be at the Diddering ball, which his uncle was urging him to attend. Luke had guessed it even before he knew it as a fact. It would be altogether too awkward to encounter them for the first time in ten years in such a public setting. Besides, the meeting was not to be avoided. It was to see them that he had come to England, after all. And he could not expect them to call on him, even though they must know he was in London; Theo would have seen to that. If he delayed beyond a few days of his arrival from Paris, it might be thought that he was afraid of meeting them.

  He was not afraid. It was just something that he did not want to do and that he wished he need not do—ever. If George had lived, or if he had had a son to succeed him, everything would have been different. He himself could have stayed in Paris for the rest of his life and forgotten that he had been born an Englishman. He could have forgotten the fact that he still had family there. He would not have been needed by them, and he certainly would not have needed them. He had long outgrown such a need.

  But George had not lived and George—and Henrietta—had had no son. And so there was the tie forever binding him to England and to Bowden Abbey, where he had been born, and to the family still living there.

  It was fact and unavoidable, and so the day before the Diddering ball he made his appearance at Harndon House, his own town house even though he had rented another for a month—a foolish move, perhaps, and suggestive of a certain cowardice. The simple fact was that he did not want to live under the same roof as his mother. And he had not been invited to live there, though of course he needed no invitation. Perhaps his mother had not even known he was coming to England.

  The butler who received him in the hall of Harndon House was a stranger to him. But he was a master at the art of passivity, cultivated by all the best of his breed. There was scarcely a flicker in his eyes when Luke identified himself, though the man’s bow deepened and his manner became perceptibly more deferential. But clearly the man faced a dilemma. Was he to present his master as a visitor or . . .

  Luke helped him out. “You will ask the Dowager Duchess of Harndon if she is receiving this morning,” he said and strolled across the tiled hall to examine a rather well-executed landscape painting in a gilded frame.

  His mother received him alone in the morning room since he had not announced his intention of calling. She rose to her feet as he entered the room, having been given only a minute or two in which to compose herself to receive the son she had not seen in ten years.

  “Madam?” Luke made her a bow from just inside the door. “I trust I find you well?”

  “Lucas.” She spoke his name after looking at him for several silent seconds. “I had heard that you had changed. I would not have recognized you.”

  She was as he remembered her: unsmiling, straight-backed, composed. Her dark hair, unpowdered, was dusted with gray. It was the only sign that she had aged by ten years. But then his mother had never been young—or old. And she had never been smiling or warm or maternal. Duty had been the guiding principle of his mother’s life. Any love she might have felt for her children had been smothered by a devotion to preparing them for the positions they must expect to hold in life. While never harsh and never neglectful, she had been humorless and unaffectionate.

  “I was a mere boy, madam,” he said, “when I was judged no longer fit to be your son. Ten years have passed since then.”

  She made no comment on his words. “You have come home to your responsibilities at last,” she said, “though ’tis wrong that you have chosen to take up residence in another house when this is your own.”

  He inclined his head to her but offered no explanation of his decision to live elsewhere. He found himself wondering for no apparent reason if his mother had ever hugged him. He could not remember such a time. This welcome—if welcome it were—was exactly what he might have expected of her. Had he expected open arms and eager eyes and tears and fond words? He would not have welcomed them even if they had been offered. They would have come ten years too late. She had made no attempt to shield him from his father’s harsh sentence. She had not kissed him good-bye or assured him that she loved him despite everything. She had been dutiful to the end.

  “I trust that my sister and brother are well too?” he asked.

  “Doris is nineteen, Ashley two-and-twenty,” she said. “They have been without the guidance of a father for five years and without that of the head of the family for two.”

  Was it her way of asking for his help? Or was it a reproach that he had hitherto neglected the duties of his position? Probably the latter, he decided.

  Had she grieved, he wondered, when his father died? When her eldest son died? George had been taken by the cholera, a disease that had killed only him from the family, though apparently several people from the village had been struck down by it too.

  “There is a problem?” he asked. They were still standing at almost opposite ends of the room. She had not invited him to sit down, though the thought struck him again that he did not need an invitation to be seated in his own home. Nevertheless, he remained where he was.

  “Doris is determined to make an ineligible match,” she said, “despite the fact that I brought her to town to meet a husband worthy of her rank and she has met any number of eligible gentlemen. Ashley is—well, he has become wild and unmanageable and totally forgets his position.”

  “It is called sowing one’s wild oats, I believe, madam,” he said.

  “The worst of it is,” she said, “that they have heard about their elder brother’s exploits in Paris and expect you to support their indiscretions or at least to ignore them. They believe that with their father gone and George gone they can do whatever they please.”

  Luke raised his eyebrows. “Indeed?” he said quietly.

  “You have come,” the dowager said. “Whether you have come to indulge or ignore them or whether you have come to assume the responsibility of your posi
tion remains to be seen. As does the question of whether you will continue to allow the duchess”—she put emphasis on the words—“to rule at Bowden as if she were still married to the head of the family.”

  Ah. So there was conflict between the two women, was there? Between his mother and Henrietta. Both duchesses but neither one of them quite the duchess. Neither one of them his duchess. It was another argument in favor of his taking a wife, perhaps. The thought came unbidden and unwillingly. Why should he care if they were feuding? He did not care.

  And then, before their conversation could continue, the door behind his back was flung open. A very pretty young lady wearing a fashionable sack dress over hoops, her hair vividly dark without powder, rushed into the room and stopped short a mere foot away from him.

  Doris! She had been a thin gangly child of nine when he left home. She had been the only member of his family to show regret at his leaving—Ashley had been away at school at the time. She had hidden among the trees near the gates at the end of the driveway and had hurtled out into his path as he rode down it on his way from the house. He had jumped from his horse and caught her up in his arms and held her there for perhaps a whole minute before telling her that she must be a good girl and go back home and grow into a beautiful and accomplished young lady. She had been sobbing too helplessly to say anything beyond his name, repeated over and over again.

  She looked into his face now with wide, dark eyes and bit her lower lip. He had the feeling that she had been about to throw herself into his arms but had checked the impulse. He made no move himself. He had been too long out of the habit of hugging—at least of hugging from simple affection.

  “Luke?” She looked doubtful. “You are Luke?” She laughed breathlessly. “They said you had come. You look . . . so very different.”

  There had been no one more unfashionable than he when he was a boy. He had been interested in nothing but books and his future career in the church and his family and home . . . and the woman he had planned to marry.

  “And so do you, Doris,” he said. “You have grown up. And you are as lovely as I knew you would be.”

  She flushed and smiled with pleasure. But the moment for spontaneity had passed. He knew—perhaps with a small pang of regret—that she would not now rush into his arms. He was a stranger to her although he was her brother. At first glance she had even doubted that it was he.

  “Why are you standing here?” She glanced uncertainly at her mother and looked back at him. “Come and sit down, Luke. Are you going to come and live here? It seems strange that you do not. Was it hard leaving Paris? You must tell me about the latest styles there. I fear we are far behind the newest fashions here. Tell me about the ladies’ fashions. I can see what gentlemen must be wearing. Oh, Luke, you are very splendid. Is he not, Mama?”

  The dowager did not reply. She busied herself ringing the bell for tea.

  It was a strange homecoming. Even though Doris chattered, apparently at her ease after the first moments of shock, there was a certain awkwardness and a consequent air of stiff formality in the drawing room. He felt, Luke decided, like a stranger who was paying a difficult courtesy call.

  Which was exactly what he was, in a way.

  Except that he was head of this family.

  As he was about to take his leave, the door opened again and a tall, slender, dark and handsome young man hurried inside. For one moment Luke’s breath caught in his throat. George? But George was long dead. He got to his feet and exchanged bows with his younger brother, who gazed at him with mingled eagerness and awe.

  “Luke?” He stepped closer. “Zounds, but I would not have known you. Uncle Theo said I would not. Zounds!”

  “Ashley.” Luke inclined his head slightly. His brother had a pleasing, open countenance. It was easy to imagine that he was indeed sowing his wild oats—an admirable activity for a man of his age, provided the wildness was not of a nature to destroy him.

  “I hear you are more skilled with it than any other man in France,” Ashley blurted as he took a seat, indicating the sword that Luke carried always at his side. “And with a pistol too. Is it true that you have killed your man in two duels?”

  Perfectly true. But it was not a topic of conversation suitable for female ears. Under the circumstances it was in particularly bad taste. It was in a duel that he had narrowly escaped killing their elder brother.

  “If it is true,” he said coldly, “’tis not something of which I boast. And ’tis not something that our mother and our sister need have discussed in their presence.”

  Ashley flushed and Luke felt instantly sorry for the harsh rebuke. Somewhere far back in memory he could remember what it was like to be young and impulsive and rather gauche.

  “I-I am sorry, Mama,” Ashley said.

  And conversation died.

  Luke was on his way back to his rented house a few minutes later, glad to be alone again, glad that the initial visit was over, stiff and awkward as it had been. He felt nothing for any of them, he decided. They were strangers to him. Even Doris—it was hard to see in her now the child he had cared for. He was relieved.

  And yet something in him ached. The tingle of long-ago memories, perhaps. The long-suppressed, long-forgotten memories of what it felt like to be rejected by everyone who had given meaning and stability to his life. The frightening emptiness of facing life alone when he knew nothing about life, when he had no defenses against it.

  It was not the ache to go home. He did not want to go home. More than anything else he wanted to go back to Paris. If he had a home now, that was it. He was comfortable there. It was a familiar world, a world that had shaped him into the man he had become, a world over which he felt he had some control.

  But he had come to England again and had seen his family again—or what was left of it. And he had felt again the old mingling of hurt and anger at his mother’s rejection of him and the old determination to break on his side the bonds that had held him to her, son to mother. He had seen no welcome in her during his visit and had felt nothing that would make him want to see her again.

  Yet he had seen Doris again, too, and Ashley. And his mother had suggested that they needed guidance. His guidance as head of the family. And he had loved them—in that time of innocence when he had been capable of love.

  Was guidance something he could give? Something he could give promptly and then return to Paris?

  Henrietta was ruling at Bowden as if she were still the mistress there. But why not? She had been George’s wife. She had suffered for her position. Perhaps she had suffered more than he, even though she had had a comfortable home and high rank.

  As far as he was concerned she could continue to rule there and his mother could continue to fret about the fact. But if he had a wife, there would be no argument about who was mistress there.

  There it was again! Damn Theo and his suggestions, which always somehow acquired the quality of a needle, pricking away at him night and day until he acted on them.

  But this was one suggestion he would not act upon. Not even for the sake of family order and peace would he sacrifice his freedom and take a wife.

  And so the worst was over, he supposed as he walked on. He had seen them all again, except for Henrietta, whom he had no intention of seeing at all. He would find out more of what was happening in Doris’s life and in Ashley’s, sort out any problems, if he was able, send for the books from Bowden and perhaps for Colby himself and find out if there were any grounds for dismissing the man and appointing another steward, and then take himself back to Paris. By the summer it should be possible for him to leave again.

  In the meantime he would enjoy himself. It would be a novelty to go about in English society for a change and see new faces and hear new gossip. Theo had urged him to attend Lady Diddering’s ball tomorrow evening. It was always one of the more glittering balls of the spring, his uncle had said, the pla
ce where one was likely to meet everyone who was someone.

  What his uncle did not say, of course, was that it was also the place to meet eligible young ladies. But Luke understood that that was what he had meant.

  He would go regardless. His mother and Doris were to be there. Doris had said so during tea. He would see how Doris behaved toward prospective suitors and whether there was any sign of the ineligible attachment his mother had mentioned. And it never hurt to look at and dance with young ladies of quality even if they were not mistress material. He enjoyed charming them and watching them smile and blush. He even enjoyed escorting the prettiest of them about once in a while.

  Yes, he would go. He might have forgotten how to feel deep emotion, but he had never forgotten how to enjoy himself.

  • • •

  They were going to their first ball, Lady Diddering’s, which would be a grand and magnificent affair, according to Lady Sterne. All the fashionable world was sure to be there.

  Anna was dressed in her new finery—an apple green silk mantua with robings from neck to hem heavy with gold embroidery and a stomacher so covered with the same embroidery that it seemed to shimmer all of gold. The mantua opened at the front to reveal a petticoat of paler green, huge and swaying over her new hoops. She had balked at having her hair cut short and curled tight to her head in the latest style, but it was curled at the sides and back and powdered white—she had never worn powder before. The small round cap she wore far back on her head was all of fine lace to match the three deep frills of her shift that extended below the sleeves of her mantua at the elbows. And the same lace trailed from the back of her cap in two long lappets. Her shoes, pale green with gold embroidery, had heels a few inches in height, another new venture for her. She had been wearing them in private for two days in order to be sure of her balance. She wore no cosmetics or patches despite her godmother’s warning that she would be more the exception than the rule.