Lady of the Lock Read online

  Bourne gave the bell pull a vicious tug. “Marsden,” he told his valet, “begin packing. We are removing to London.”

  And now the worst part. His last luncheon on the bank of the Kennet and Avon canal.

  “It’s my sister Lavinia,” Montsale said to Mandy, his features even more immobile than usual. “She’s making her come-out, and Maman demands my presence in London.”

  They were alone in the canvas pavilion, with Mandy struggling to match the marquess’s façade of bored indifference. After he had announced his immediate departure for London, her papa and Mr. Tharp had eaten their fill of the gargantuan lunch provided by the High Meadows cook, murmured polite phrases of farewell, and gone off looking altogether too pleased with themselves. And now Mandy could only pray she would survive Montsale’s stilted words of explanation without bursting into tears. “Of course,” she agreed around the lump in her throat.

  “I fear I must stay through the Season. Any other action would be considered—”

  “Quite unnatural,” Mandy supplied with a sage nod.

  “And it is customary for the family to spend a good deal of the summer at Carewe Castle, particularly this year when—”

  “When the sound of pickaxes and the navvies’ grunts has cut up your peace.”

  “I assure you that is not what I was meant.” A fleeting something broke through Montsale’s mask, leaving him looking as awkward and vulnerable as any other young man taking sudden leave from a young woman he had been openly dangling after for the past several weeks. “It is just . . . now that I have reached my majority, Carewe has demanded my presence at his side. He seems to fear he has neglected to prepare me for my future. I am to attend his every move until he finds me dukely enough to meet his rigid requirements.”

  “Of course, my lord, I quite understand. My papa also requires my presence at his side. There is great satisfaction in feeling needed, is there not?”

  Blast the little minx, giving him back his own, her eyes limpid pools of green. Bourne forgot himself sufficiently to run agitated fingers through his dark hair. “I fear Carewe heeds the call of duty, not of need.”

  “But surely there are ways—” What a silly chit she was, Mandy thought, dragging the conversation out when she should have realized . . . should have known Montsale and his family were indulging in euphemisms. The heir to a dukedom was on the verge of forming a misalliance, and his family was reining him in.

  Now who was indulging in bouncers? Montsale had been doing no more than enjoying a mild flirtation—and directly under the nose of her papa, at that. To him, she was nothing more than a pretty face and an eager partner in frequent battles of words. No need for his family to fly up into the boughs. No need at all.

  Oh dear, he was gazing at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for her to complete her sentence, which was not going to happen. Never would she suggest she wished to keep him close. Mandy summoned a haughty grimace worthy of a society matron greeting her worst enemy. “I trust your sister will enjoy a successful come-out, my lord, and I am confident you will exceed your father’s expectations, whether in London or at Carewe Castle.”

  “Miss Merriwether, I—”

  But Mandy’s head was bent as she gathered up the remains of their luncheon and packed it back into the basket the marquess had brought with him. With something altogether too close to relief, he accepted the end of their idyll. And, yes, that’s exactly what it had been. A few halcyon weeks he would forever cherish—memories of basking in spring breezes, the smell of fresh grass, the navvies’ sweat mingling with the sweet smell of a young beauty, whose green eyes shone with intelligence and frequently sparked with fire. Though he now greatly feared that fire was close to being drowned in tears.

  Devil a bit! He thought he’d come to terms with the inevitable. It wasn’t possible a slight young thing with a mind as sharp as her tongue and looks a courtesan would envy could have worked her way into his heart so thoroughly that he felt howls of anguish welling in his soul.

  She was not yet seventeen, however . . . and his family could not keep him away forever.

  But Tharp had an eye in that direction, as did several of the younger engineers. All as anxious as his own family to see him gone.

  And every last one of them right, of course. He accepted it. Calf love, that’s all it was.

  So why did it hurt like hell?

  But surely not worse than the loss of his first opera dancer to one of the royal dukes. He had adored her . . . or at least he thought he had. He’d been eighteen and thought himself madly in love. Yet now his only emotion was embarrassment as he recalled his first fumbling steps as a young man about town. But at the time . . .

  How blazingly sharp the pain of lost love. Yvonne. Her name would remain imprinted on his memory for all the years of his life. As would Amanda Merriwether. The navvies had it right when they called her the Lady of the Lock. This was her milieu, and the ton was his. Two insular worlds, never destined to meet.

  Bourne rose to his feet with the easy grace instilled in him since childhood. “I hope to renew our acquaintance in the future, Miss Merriwether. In the autumn perhaps, or next spring.”

  She accepted his polite nothings with a remarkably regal nod. “We will miss you, my lord.” Cool. Detached. As politely conventional as his own words.

  A stiff bow, and Bourne mounted his stallion. As he rode along the towpath toward the bridge over the canal, he could swear he felt her eyes on his back every inch of the way.

  Devil take it! It seemed his spring idyll had been reduced to practicing for the role of rake.

  While the dangerous work of tunneling through the hillside moved at a snail’s pace, Mandy kept to her daily routine—taking notes, keeping accounts, making fair copies of her papa’s correspondence, cleaning scrapes, providing unguents, and adding a touch of femininity to the wilderness. And somehow finding a few moments to indulge in her sole hobby, sketching the canal and its environs, and all creatures, human and animal, who lived along it.

  Her efforts were not confined to the area around the Challenor Tunnel. After the opening of the Dundas Aqueduct, when, with the exception of the Caen Hill locks, the K&A was navigable from London to Bristol, Papa had suggested that the canal company sponsor a pair of narrowboats, luxuriously appointed for the enjoyment of the committee’s families. What could be lovelier than an afternoon excursion on the beautiful Kennet & Avon canal? And the boats—situated one on each side of the Caen Hill divide—would, of course, make it possible for the Chief Engineer to conduct his inspections closer to any problem that might arise, problems he might missed from horseback.

  His arguments were successful. And since the Duke of Carewe was providing the majority of the funds for the boats’ creation, the new narrowboats were named Duke and Duchess. The Duchess plied the river from Reading to Devizes; the Duke carried passengers from Foxhanger Wharf at the bottom of Caen Hill all the way to Bath and Bristol. Mandy’s smile was closer to a smirk when, before handing the boats over to the committee, John Merriwether set up a calendar, with his inspection weeks clearly marked. After that, the boats could be used at the committee members’ demands.

  And not even Carewe demurred. The needs of the canal came first. So three times over the summer of 1806 the Merriwethers made a full inspection of the K&A, with Mandy enjoying nearly every moment of the slow, serene journey—the beauty of the greenery, which was gradually replacing the ugliness of the initial canal cut, the wildlife in its many varied forms from ducks to butterflies, the warmth of their welcome at canalside inns and taverns. But there were times when everything turned black. When she tried to tell herself Montsale had come back to High Meadows, looking for her, only to find her gone.

  But the truth was, no one at the tunnel site saw hide nor hair of him. Or so Luke Appleton informed her after their final journey in early October. While wintering in their house on Upper Berkley Street in London, Mandy once thought she caught a glimpse of Montsale in Hyde Park, but it could eas
ily have been his brother Jeremy. Or wishful thinking. Nor was there a single sign of him during the long work season at the Challenor Tunnel in 1807. The Marquess of Montsale might as well have dropped off the face of the earth. Only an occasional mention in the newspapers assured her he still lived. And very few of those, she noted with a sigh. For the most eligible bachelor in the kingdom, Montsale seemed to make as few appearances in the ton as was humanly possible. The duke must be keeping him very busy indeed.

  Not that it mattered, of course. But for a short while they had been so close. They bickered constantly, but they had been friends. More than friends. And then he was gone. Her world turned gray. And for some insidious reason all the common sense on which she had long prided herself had not been able to let go of his memory.

  She was a fool. Deserving of every ounce of suffering. Yet he glowed on her horizon like some giant lighthouse, calling, calling . . .

  Ah, no! That was the problem, was it not? Sirens called. Lighthouses warned. Disaster ahead. Beware, beware.

  Autumn 1807

  Thanks to circumstances John Merriwether had never shared with his daughter, he and his family had long lived in comfort, if on the fringes of society. Each winter was spent in a modest townhouse on Upper Berkley Street, not far off Portman Square, where he surrounded himself with persons of similar interests, while attempting to expose Mandy to as many of London’s cultural events and treats as he could. Raising a daughter without his beloved Caroline had not been easy, but he thought he’d managed it rather well. Until the incident last year with Montsale.

  Deuce take it, but in that spring of 1806 the demmed canal had him as blinkered as a hackney horse. He had failed to notice Mandy was both strikingly beautiful and rapidly approaching her seventeenth birthday. And since her mother’s passing when she was ten, she had spent nine months of the year surrounded by nothing but men, most of them rough, uneducated, and skilled in raking a woman’s body with no more than a downcast, sideways glance.

  Hell’s hounds, he’d made a mull of it. Montsale might have disappeared from his daughter’s life—snatched away by his family—but the marquess had most certainly not trailed after Mandy with marriage in mind, which meant . . .

  No matter how much John had attempted to caution her about men, Mandy was ripe for the plucking. Not that the chit didn’t have a good deal of common sense, but . . .

  He’d spent too long ignoring his obligations. Had he been blind, or was it pure selfishness? Her understanding of each project, her ability to comprehend columns of intricate figures, her ability to juggle the many notes he threw at her . . .

  Surely he could not finish the canal without her. And yet . . .

  John scowled at the lease agreement laid out on the desk in front of him. Montsale had not been in residence at High Meadows this past spring nor had they caught a glimpse of him over the summer or into autumn. He had simply vanished from Mandy’s life. Except that John knew quite well she still scanned the social columns of every newspaper she could lay her hands on, looking for his name. Truth was, Mandy would turn eighteen next month and had never shown the slightest interest in any of the young men who flocked around her, whether engineers, solicitors, younger sons, or wealthy merchants. As much as John disliked acknowledging the right of it, his common-sensical, sharp-tongued, independent daughter had developed a tendre in an impossible direction, and he must find a way to nudge her back to reality.

  He stared down at the flowing script of the lease agreement. It wasn’t as if, after twelve years as Chief Architect and Engineer for the K&A canal, he could not afford a winter in Bath. His face a grim mask, John Merriwether signed his name, agreeing to the price for three months in a fine townhouse on Laura Place.

  Laura Place, Bath, November 1807

  “Papa, is something wrong? You are looking quite fierce.”

  Ruefully, John shook his head. His anger was with himself for delaying this moment for so long. But tonight his daughter was every bit the young lady, bent over her embroidery while toasting her toes by the fire. “I have written to your Aunt Tynsdale,” he said, “informing her we will be situated in Bath for the next few months. She has invited us to tea tomorrow afternoon.”

  Although the Merriwethers had never before wintered in Bath, they had spent many a day at the King’s Arms during the construction of the canal, which ran along the side of a hill far above town. And they had never failed to pay duty visits to Mandy’s elderly relative on her mother’s side of the family. Lady Tynsdale was a dowager baroness, who enjoyed the amenities of a townhouse on Gay Street, just downhill from John Wood’s famed circle of houses, known as The Circus. In her younger days, Mandy had found the elderly lady intimidating, but as she grew older she had developed a strong respect for the dowager, who had been a widow for more than forty years and had a strong streak of independence to show for it. As well as a tongue that could be as sharp as an adder.

  “Excellent,” Mandy returned, “though I fear sitting on the banks of the Avon for the best part of two years has not honed my climbing skills. I fear we shall arrive on Aunt Tynsdale’s doorstep with our tongues hanging out.”

  As Mandy had learned during her many visits to Bath, the healing properties of the warm, bubbling waters at the bottom of this odd, bowl-shaped land formation in western England had been known since the Stoneage, enjoyed by the Romans, and remained the center of the city that grew up around them. Over the years houses were built higher and higher up the precipitous slopes of the bowl until, now, residents either had to take chairs wherever they went or develop the stamina of mountain goats.

  John Merriwether greeted his daughter’s statement with the snort of derision it deserved. “Have you become such a fine lady you wish me to hire a chair?” he returned with mock incredulity.

  Mandy laughed. “Unkind, Papa! But you must admit it is a challenging walk for those who are out of practice. Here in Laura Place we are nearly at the bottom of the bowl. We must descend to the river, cross Pulteney Bridge, then climb up, up, up until we arrive, quite out of breath, on Aunt Tynsdale’s doorstep.”

  “Be comforted she is not all the way up to the rim of the bowl.”

  “Indeed I am, I assure you.” Mandy put down her embroidery, offering her papa a fond smile. She made no mention of the fact they could have leased a house closer to her only female relative, yet they were across the river in Laura Place because it was but a short walk through Sydney Gardens to the canal, which ran in a straight line high along the hillside opposite Lady Tynsdale’s establishment. From the banks of the canal one could enjoy a spectacular view of the whole of Bath, with the River Avon winding in serpentine loops at its base. Only a short distance to the west, the river and the canal merged, flowing together in a gradual descent toward the Bristol Channel.

  “I look forward to visiting Aunt Tynsdale,” Mandy said. “She is always . . . refreshing.”

  “She’s an old tartar,” John Merriwether declared. But he had high hopes for her. High hopes indeed.

  The Dowager Baroness Tynsdale lived in one of the many townhouses stair-stepping down the steep sides of the Bath “bowl.” Built of golden Bath stone in the last century, the houses were now tinged with gray from smoke pouring from the soldier-straight rows of chimneys sprouting from each rooftop. The odd construction, with each townhouse a few feet lower than the one next to it, never failed to amaze Mandy. It was rather like the Caen Hill locks, she supposed, each lock lowering a boat a few feet until it arrived at a point 237 feet below where it began. But houses where the basement level was nonexistent on one side and had room enough for a window on the other, where the drop from the pavement into the open area, carefully fenced in black wrought-iron, was two feet on one side of the house and eight feet on the other? Mandy could only applaud the architects who had managed it. Everyone touted the magnificence of the Royal Crescent and the Circus, but those structures were built along the width of the hill, not down its side. Mandy reserved her greatest admiration for the
men who had constructed houses where the floors should have tilted, furniture and people inevitably sliding downhill, yet, incredibly, the floors on Gay Street were flat, only the foundations canting at a startling angle.

  The houses on Gay Street were, in fact, substantial, a full three stories, not counting the dormered attics or oddly shaped basements. Aunt Tynsdale’s townhouse was close enough to the Circus, the Royal Crescent, and the Upper Assembly Rooms to be considered fashionable, yet not too far from the Pump Room, Bath Abbey, and shopping on Milsom Street. Aunt Tynsdale, Mandy had to concede, had wits as sharp as her tongue. She and her companion, Miss Emily Grimley, might rattle around in such a large house, but suggestions of removing to something smaller were met with scorn. This is where Lady Eulalia Tynsdale had come after the death of her beloved Bertram, and here she would stay.

  John Merriwether rapped sharply on the wooden door beneath a pedimented arch, and they were soon shown into the dowager’s drawing room. In spite of a rather mild November day, Lady Tynsdale was ensconced in a deep wingchair before a crackling fire; Miss Grimley, whose unfortunate features tended to mimic her name, was in a similar chair angled toward the fire. “Come, come,” the dowager called, “let me see you, child.”

  Dutifully, Mandy stepped forward for the elderly lady’s perusal, but had the audacity to return her scrutiny full-fold. A plump package was the Baroness Tynsdale. Mandy pitied the chairmen who had to carry her up and down Bath’s steep hillsides. Lady Tynsdale had a round face, round shoulders, round . . . everything. A lacy white cap topped a mass of white sausage curls that must have taken her maid an hour to arrange. Her gown of rich purple silk provided a startling contrast, yet managed to enhance the whole. No one could doubt Eulalia, the Dowager Baroness Tynsdale, was a woman of consequence.