Lady of the Lock Page 8

  “Oh, my poor dear,” Hetty whispered, “it is quite understandable. You have had him to yourself for too long. Most young ladies—myself included—scarce know their fathers. They are beings who exist on another plane, leaving their daughters’ rearing solely in the hands of their mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and a vast array of governesses. Truly, it is difficult for me to even imagine a life where my father is also teacher and best friend.”

  Mandy scrubbed her face with a finely embroidered handkerchief. Red-veined eyes wide, she stared at Hetty. “How very astute you are, to be sure. I am jealous, am I not? His is a lonely life. Papa stands at the pinnacle of the canal project, answerable only to the committee who pays for it all. He employs thousands, yet must always stand alone.”

  “With you by his side.”

  Slowly, Mandy nodded. “A most unusual life.”

  “Indeed.” Hetty’s anxious but encouraging look urged Mandy to examine her unique situation through someone else’s eyes. “If you could but find—”

  Hetty bit off her words in mid-sentence as Mandy held up an imperious hand. While snowflakes drifted down outside the window, silence enveloped them. “That is the problem,” Mandy said at last, “or at least part of it. I found the man I wanted years ago—when I was eleven, if you can believe. His image is ever before me, and no one else will do, even though I know it is impossibly, abysmally hopeless.”

  Miss Oglethorpe, destined always to feel empathy for the plight of others, clasped Mandy’s hands in hers. “Oh, my dear friend, tell me all.”

  Forty minutes later, when a maid informed them Mr. Merriwether had come to escort his daughter home, both young ladies were forced to wipe their eyes and blow their noses before descending to the drawing room below.

  On the walk back to Laura Place, cold, wet snow seeping through her half boots and the sting of snowflakes blowing onto her cheeks quickly brought Mandy back to reality. This was the harsh world where she owed her father an apology, where the Marquess of Montsale simply did not exist, and where she was being forced to determine the right course for her life far sooner than she had expected. Should she enjoy Bath but return to the Challenor Tunnel, come spring? Or should she accept a “suitable” offer and free her father to have a life of his own?

  Which did he want?

  Which did she want?

  And could their wants be reconciled?

  It was a long, stingingly cold block back to Laura Place.

  Chapter Nine

  It was fortunate, Mandy thought, that the Pump Room’s gracefully arched windows rose well above the heads of the milling crowd, allowing the gray light of yet another gloomy day to lighten the overflowing room. After two days of confinement, it seemed all Bath was present this morning, determined to return to gaiety. The room’s crystal chandeliers were lit as well, their hundreds of candles sparkling above the heads of those who, eschewing the waters, were chattering nineteen to the dozen as they paraded the room, craning their necks to see who was present on this wintry morning.

  Not surprisingly, there was no sign of Aunt Tynsdale or Miss Grimley. It seemed likely the two elderly ladies would not venture out until snow no longer made the streets treacherous. Once again, Papa and Mr. Tharp had been winkled off by Mrs. Honeycutt and Mrs. Baggett. The latter, Mandy had discovered, was just coming out of mourning for a husband lost to a fever while working for the John Company. Mrs. Joan Baggett, quiet and less blatantly attractive than Isabelle Honeycutt, did not grate on Mandy’s nerves. She was, in fact, happy to see Mr. Tharp’s interest fixed elsewhere, as his regard for her had shifted from avuncular to something more animated over the past two years, and that Mandy could never accept. Dear Mr. Tharp. A substitute papa, perhaps, but never a substitute lover. Mrs. Baggett was welcome to him.

  Mr. Tharp’s defection from her list of admirers did little to assuage her guilt, however. Mandy greatly feared Papa and Aunt Tynsdale must find her a sad disappointment, even ungrateful, for her inability to develop even a mild tendre for any of the young gentlemen presented to her. Nor could she see a clear path to her future. Continue in her role as Lady of the Lock, her Papa’s helpmeet? Make a “suitable” but loveless marriage which would grant Papa his freedom? After all, if she was destined to wear the willow for Bourne Challenor for all of her life, did her decision really matter?

  Except, of course, to Papa. Did he care for Isabelle Honeycutt, or was she merely a Bath flirt, an amusement for the winter months?

  What a fool she was, Mandy thought, agonizing over a problem that very likely did not exist. Just because Papa was dallying with Isabelle Honeycutt was no reason to trap herself in a marriage where love was not present. Or at least the hope of love, friendship, and a marriage where her unusual upbringing would not precipitate disaster.

  “Miss Merriwether, we meet again.”

  Later, Mandy would suffer over how she must have looked, mouth agape like a landed fish, as she stared up at the Marquess of Montsale, her lips refusing to move, even as some of the navvies’ most colorful expletives flitted through her brain.

  “I beg your pardon,” Montsale offered as he seated himself in the chair next to hers. “I had no intention of startling you. I have come to Bath on a short visit and, as I crossed the room, I noticed you sitting here and wished to pay my respects. It has been some time, has it not? Nearly two years.”

  Mandy managed to snap her mouth closed. She swallowed hard, attempting to dislodge the lump in her throat and control the heart attempting to beat its way out of her chest. “Indeed,” she murmured, striving to emulate his perfectly controlled social mask. “I am merely surprised to see you amid all this snow.” Was that possibly a spark of warmth flickering in the depths of eyes as gray as the skies outside?

  “I fear I arrived at grandmère’s in the midst of the storm, for which she called me half flash and half foolish and would not let me set foot out the door yesterday until she was certain I was not going to succumb to an inflammation of the lungs.”

  Mandy peeped at him, discovered he was actually smiling. “A short visit, my lord? Will you attend the Assembly Rooms this evening?” Inwardly, Mandy cringed. She sounded as overeager as any Bath Miss confronted by the heir to a dukedom.

  “I fear I am not yet certain of my plans, Miss Merriwether,” Montsale returned, his mask firmly back in place, “but I suspect I will be joining in whatever activities are proposed by my grandmother and her guests.”

  “Then you are more likely to attend than I,” Mandy said, rejoicing in the complete indifference of her tone, “for if the streets turn to ice, I fear the chairmen will not wish to climb the hill from Laura Place.”

  “You are in Laura Place? A fine location.”

  Mandy caught his surprise and did not care for it. “Not all wealth lies with the nobility . . . my lord.” She was doing it again, being pert and argumentative, when—”

  He laughed, actually laughed. “Touché, Miss Merriwether. I had forgotten how much I enjoy sparring with you. You are, in fact, the only young lady of my acquaintance who gives me tit for tat . . . and since you were barely out of leading strings, as I recall.”

  Mandy gasped. “I was all of eleven, my lord, and you the rudest young man I’d ever met.”

  He considered a moment before nodding in agreement. “I was indeed. Looking back, I am quite mortified.”

  “Ha! A bouncer if I ever heard one. Although I assure you from the advantage of the age of eighteen I fully understand how difficult it must be to understand the world from the rarified height of dukely nobility.”

  His lips twitched. “Minx. Let us hope the hill does not turn to ice, for I look forward to claiming a dance tonight.” Montsale stood, his height, broad shoulders, and well-muscled body blotting out the colorful crowd in the Pump Room, just as he had long since erased every other man from her universe. “And now I must pay my respects to grandmère and her guests. And I believe I have a brother around here somewhere as well.”

  “Lord Jeremy,” Mand
y murmured. “Charming but . . . young.”

  Something flashed in Montsale’s gray eyes, something she couldn’t quite identify. A quick bow and he was gone. To his grandmother, to Lady Pontesbury and Lady Christabel. With Lady Silverdale and Lady Olympia undoubtedly pushing their way through the crowd to join them, like bees to the honeypot.

  A smug smile suddenly wiped away Mandy’s scowl. Montsale had requested a dance. A dance. They would actually touch hands, go down the line together. Be seen as a couple before his grandmother and all her high-in-the-instep friends. Before Jeremy, poor boy, who could not seem to understand that she would never, ever settle for a husband who would remind her of Bourne every day for the rest of her life.

  Devil take it! Why did Montsale have to come to Bath just when she was on the verge of convincing herself she could live without him.

  Even worse—what if he had not?

  For considerations of safety, John Merriwether insisted on escorting Mrs. Oglethorpe and her daughter to the Assembly Rooms, their four pairs of chairmen struggling manfully up the soggy, but fortunately not icy, hill. After divesting themselves of their cloaks, revealing gowns of white silk that emphasized their youth and innocence, Mandy and Hetty entered the ballroom side by side. As they scanned the room for familiar faces, Hetty suddenly hissed in Mandy’s ear, “Merciful heavens, what now? I know Lady Christabel and Lady Olympia do not care for our company, but tonight I swear if they had daggers, we’d be dead on the instant.”

  “You have not heard,” Mandy returned with admirable calm.

  “Heard what?”

  “Montsale is in Bath.” Hetty gasped, eyes wide. “And he spent a full ten minutes talking to me in the Pump Room this morning.”

  Miss Oglethorpe seized her friend’s arm, turned her straight around, and hustled her out of the room, across the Octagon card room, and into the relatively deserted Tea Room, where she maneuvered her into a chair and plumped down beside her. “After two years of silence, he dared single you out!” she exploded. “Quickly, tell me all.”

  Mandy sighed. “Men are very strange, are they not? I was sitting in a corner, struggling with thoughts of marriage, Papa, the canal, when suddenly he was there. At first, I thought my mind had suffered a fit of the vapors and conjured him out of thin air. But he was as real as you or I . . . and he asked me for a dance tonight,”Mandy added in a sudden rush.

  “Oo-oo,” Hetty breathed, “I can scarce believe it after he treated you so.”

  “He is heir to a dukedom and subject to his duty to the family,” Mandy returned, surprised to hear herself defending him. “Any other man would deserve a sound box on the ear, but for Montsale courtship is quite impossible. Yet I look at him and I am lost.” She hung her head, fingering the strings of her reticule.

  Hetty, a young lady who accepted the ways of the world more easily than her friend, nodded in sympathy. “I confess I did not catch a glimpse of him, but I can scarcely wait. Is he as handsome as Lord Jeremy?”

  “More so, I assure you.”

  Almost as if she had not heard, Hetty frowned. “The question is, why is the marquess here? What is so urgent he had come to Bath in a snowstorm?”

  Mandy’s brow creased for a moment before she suddenly bounded to her feet. “Then let us find out,” she declared. “I am Amanda Merriwether, Lady of the Lock, the equal of any young lady in the Assembly Rooms. But if I am not in the ballroom, how can Montsale solicit a dance?” She tugged Hetty to her feet. “And you, my dear friend, must have a dozen disappointed suitors looking in vain for your charming face. En avant!”

  Giggling, as only young ladies can, the two girls made their way back toward the sound of music, the glow of a thousand candles, and the colorful swirl of the dancers.

  Good manners dictated that Bourne dance the first set with Lady Christabel, the second with Lady Olympia, whose mama made little pretense of being interested in anything but the possibility of her daughter cutting Lady Christabel out and snabbling a potential duke for her herself. The two girls were, Bourne noted with grim satisfaction, almost as much at daggers drawn with each other as they were in their fiercely disparaging remarks about Miss Merriwether and the “poor little vicar’s daughter.”

  Generally, he was able to rise above being a bone of contention, but tonight he felt it strongly. Lady Christabel’s possessiveness, Lady Olympia’s aggressive flirtation. The knowledge he should not be here at all. He should have spoken his piece to Jeremy, dragged him home forthwith, and been done with it. Instead, he had sought out Miss Merriwether in the Pump Room, solicited her for a dance, been forced to endure the calumnies cast against her by two young ladies who were not as well brought up as they should have been. And when—if—he danced with the Lady of the Lock, he would be putting her in an even more difficult position than she had been before. And yet . . .

  Except for that first moment of shock this morning, she had maintained a cool decorum he found oddly annoying. He couldn’t have her, he knew that, but that she showed no sign of wearing the willow after . . .

  After what? A few dozen lunches on the bank of the Avon—lunches shared not in bucolic privacy but on a noisy, dust-strewn construction site in plain view of navvies hauling back-breaking loads of rock and dirt out of the tunnel. Yet in the mysterious way of lovers, it had seemed romantic at the time. Even with Merriwether and Tharp sharing their meals, they saw only each other. The banter they’d shared, the arguments, hot and cold. Ancient philosophies, the rights and wrongs of Roman conquest—including the similarities to Bonaparte and his urge to conquer the world. The inequities of the British class system, which, according to Miss Merriwether, the French had had the good sense to rectify.

  Lord, but he’d missed her! So young, so well-educated, so opinionated, so well-spoken. So remarkably lovely. Bourne had no trouble picturing her as hostess to the finest minds, both in and out of government. Yet he’d bent to his father’s roar two years ago and to Carewe’s latest test, playing the tyrant to his brother. Over the same woman.

  Bourne studied his highly polished dancing shoes. Miss Merriwether had called Jeremy “young.” But was she condemning the boy only because she had better game in view? After all, marriage to the younger son of a duke would be a grand achievement for the Lady of the Lock. Once again, the jealous rage that had consumed him on the coach ride to Bath reared its ugly head.

  Hell and the devil, he was in the suds. Come to rescue his brother and as trapped by a fine pair of green eyes as he’d been in his salad days. And yet his papa had been so very right when he pointed out how wrong it was to encourage a young woman when all he could offer her was the life of a courtesan, an insult he could never offer Amanda or her father. Therefore . . .

  He should plead an indisposition, leave the Assembly Rooms, speak to Jeremy in the morning, and take them both off to London to drown their sorrows in the sins of the city.

  But somehow he found himself standing before her, bowing, uttering the words, “Miss Merriwether, would you do me the honor of standing up with me for this dance?”

  Eyes downcast, undoubtedly to avoid the interested stares of the crowd around them, she rose and gave him her hand. Shivers ran up his spine as he heard the surge of chatter rise behind them, the whispers enveloping them as they made their way to where the dance was forming. The devil was in it now. In addition to speaking with his brother, he would have to call on Miss Merriwether on the morrow, find some way to explain yet another defection . . .

  Impossible. He would write her a note.

  Coward! hissed his inner voice.

  The cacophony of the orchestra tuning up ceased. The dance began. Bourne bowed, took his partner’s hand. As they turned, back to back, fingers touching, the scent of her perfume, of pure Mandy, drifted into his nostrils, setting his body to quiver.

  He must leave. Tomorrow. As soon as he could boot his brother up the carriage steps.

  Chapter Ten

  “You are enjoying Bath?” the love of Mandy’s life inq
uired as they met for a moment in the intricate figures of the dance.

  Outrageous! Mandy barely avoided gritting her teeth at the banal question that screamed of supreme indifference. “Not at the moment!” she hissed before the dance parted them. There! That should put a dent in his miserable mask.

  And it did. When next they met, Montsale was frowning. “And just what did you mean by that?” he demanded.

  “I prefer the bank of the Avon . . . and friendly faces.” As they clasped hands, skipping sideways down the line, his hands suddenly tightened, almost painfully so. Each turned to the outside, moving behind their respective lines. By the time they faced each other once again, Montsale clearly had himself in hand, though Mandy thought she felt a quiver when their hands touched. More likely, the quiver was her own.

  But when the orchestra slowed to its final notes, instead of returning her to Mrs. Oglethorpe and Hetty, Montsale took a firm grip on her arm, leading her out of the ballroom into the relative quiet of the Tea Room, where, to her astonishment, he settled her into a chair in a shadowed corner and sat down beside her.

  “We will be remarked,” Mandy told him, eyes wide. “Your family will not like it if you single me out beyond one dance.”

  “To the devil with my family and Bath gossips as well,” the marquess declared roundly. “Tell me about you and my brother.”

  What? Mandy’s heart thumped so loudly, it threatened her power to speak. Was it possible the grand marquess was jealous? Certainly, the scowl he was wearing was far from indifferent. “There is nothing to tell. Lord Jeremy is but a boy sunk deep into his first admiration for a young lady. Compared to . . . other gentlemen of my acquaintance, he is but a member of the infantry.”