A Less Than Perfect Lady

‘No, I don’t care to be reminded of the past,’ Miranda refused with a shudder.

‘Mumchance in this place.’

‘True enough, but I want no extra reminders of my past folly and they are a young girl’s gowns, so get rid of them for me, would you, please?’

‘Of course, Miss Miranda.’

‘Thank you. You have always been a better friend to me than I deserve,’ Miranda admitted ruefully.

‘Nonsense, now get along out of my way, do. If I’m ever to get your things unpacked and stowed away, I need to clear the shelves straight away.’

Miranda thought of the quantities of over-trimmed gowns she had once thought essential for her comfort, and marvelled at such vanity.

‘Thank you,’ she said sincerely, mighty relieved to be spared the task herself, ‘and don’t wait up. We’ve both travelled interminably these last few days, so just this once pray don’t argue with me.’

‘If you promise to ring if you need me,’ Leah cautioned.

‘I will,’ she lied serenely. ‘Now go and charm Reuben out of his wits again and forget about your duty for once.’

‘A breath of fresh air before supper might just do me good, after being cooped up like a broody hen for days.’

‘I dare say it might, but don’t break his heart.’

From what she had seen earlier, the youthful head groom had matured into a very well-looking man during the years she and Leah had been away from Wychwood. Miranda knew her maid too well to mistake the gleam of interest in her eyes when they dwelt upon the suitably dazzled Reuben.

‘Just so long as you take care not to get yours broke either,’ Leah cautioned shrewdly.

‘I’ll guard it like the crown jewels,’ Miranda said with heartfelt ardour. Not that Nevin had exactly broken hers; more trampled on her pride and then smashed any remains to dust.

Kit allowed himself the luxury of lurking in the shadows for a moment as he watched the former darling of Wychwood descend the stairs like a fallen queen. The multicoloured mane he remembered so well was subdued and pulled back from a heart-shaped face that was now a little too calm and controlled, as if she had been chastened by life into hiding whatever emotions animated her. Those blue, blue eyes would still steal a man’s soul away if he only let it slip, but look closer and you could see a deep wariness. Impatient of just looking after so many years of not being able to touch, he emerged from the darkness and stood in the open space at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the beautiful Mrs Braxton to step into his web.

As Miranda descended the last few steps her heart thumped a tattoo she was thankful only she could hear at the sight of him waiting for her. She was conscious that the cunningly cut lilac gown emphasised the sway of her hips, the swish of silk against her long legs seemed very loud in the stillness and she felt that her figure was outlined rather too emphatically by the soft fabric that clung lovingly to every movement. For some reason she longed for him to see beyond the gifts nature had lavished on her, but knew it was too much to ask. Miranda tried to hide whatever regrets she felt from his sharp eyes.

In evening dress he looked even more magnificent. An immaculate black coat fit his broad-shouldered figure superbly, knee breeches and stockings only emphasised his leanly muscled legs. His snowy linen made his dark eyes and hawkish features more arresting than ever. She stepped down beside him at last, just in time to see a flare of heat flash through his dark brown eyes before he ruthlessly controlled it. It was just as well that she was a woman of the world, she told herself, for no unfledged girl could have stood her ground in the face of such an untamed rake.

‘We are both very fine tonight, are we not?’ she asked calmly enough.

‘As fivepence,’ the earl replied blandly and offered her his hand.

Stiffening her backbone yet again, she laid her gloved hand in his. Through the soft kid she felt his strength and sensuality threaten her self-imposed isolation. She stamped hard on the promise that threatened to surge into life between them once more. She could do this, Miranda assured herself, and raised her chin to challenge any resolution he might have to the contrary.

‘You’re even lovelier than rumour reported you,’ Lord Carnwood informed her and raised her hand to his lips with apparent sincerity, drat him.

The depth and range of his quiet voice reflected the mighty physique that produced it, but somehow she managed to blame the frosty night for a shiver that ran through her like quicksilver. She couldn’t possibly be feeling the warmth and threat his mouth promised through her supple glove.

‘Am I? Reputations often lie, don’t you think?’ she challenged him.

‘I always form my own opinions, Mrs Braxton, and once they are made I rarely find need to change them.’

‘Then I must argue for more flexibility of mind. It is the gift of great men, and should be cultivated by the mightiest of us. After all, Rumour seldom deals well with her victims, does she, Lord Carnwood?’

‘You may argue for whatever you please of course, ma’am, but we’re all at the mercy of our reputations, I fear, although I suppose we can prove whether or not they are deserved by our actions.’

‘Excellent, so pray let us join my aunt and set about witnessing that theory in practice, Cousin Christopher.’

With the very tips of her fingers brushing his offered arm, she let him lead her down the lofty hall to the state drawing room Lady Clarissa insisted on using, however few of them were assembled for dinner. Knocked off balance by the ridiculous urge to tremble at the contact of his firm flesh under her over-sensitive fingers, Miranda felt her composure waver for a perilous moment. She slanted a furtive look at the new earl’s impassive face and almost succumbed to an urgent desire to turn tail and bolt back to her room, declaring herself too tired to face this ordeal so soon after her journey.

‘Do the Reverend and Mrs Townley join us tonight?’ she asked more or less at random.

‘Not unless they have abandoned their new living.’

‘I suppose it’s foolish of me to think all will be as it was after so long.’

‘Not so very long, surely, Cousin?’ he replied with a quirk of his eyebrows that told her he thought she had been angling for that very compliment.

‘When a lady has as many years in her dish as I have, she eschews exact calculation, my lord.’

‘Nonsense, my dear. You can’t be much more than seven and twenty,’ he baited her with a touch of his initial hostility, as if he found her assumption of the air of a bored society beauty distinctly irritating.

While he was cross with her, at least he would not be slanting her any more of those disturbingly perceptive glances from his sharp dark eyes. ‘I could even be a little bit less,’ she said with a bland smile and hoped he had waited in vain for an indignant glare when he set her age five years beyond reality.

‘Age is largely irrelevant when experience is added into the equation,’ he replied cynically.

‘Now there, my lord, you are quite wrong. Age is never irrelevant and you may ask any woman between eight and eighty for corroboration of that particular truth.’

‘Thank you, I’ll take your word for it.’

‘My, that will be a novelty,’ she returned smartly and thought she had won that round, until she saw his mouth lift in a sardonic smile and knew it had just been a skirmish he thought too unimportant to contest.

By the end of it, though, they had reached the drawing-room doors and the butler nodded regally to the head footman, who solemnly opened the double doors as if admitting supplicants to the royal presence.

‘The Honourable Mrs Braxton and his lordship, the Earl of Carnwood, your ladyship,’ the butler announced, and Miranda wondered how long the man of power beside her would tolerate being announced as if he were a guest in his own home.

Lady Clarissa waved a regal acknowledgement from the largest and most comfortable chair in the room, staring at the newcomers in a fashion that would have been considered distinctly ill bred in a lesser aristocrat. Then a frown twitched her brows together, probably in vexation at the sight of her scapegrace niece dressed so finely and standing at the side of the heir as if she belonged there, so Miranda just smiled blandly under her basilisk glare.

Celia adhered determinedly to her sofa, while somehow finding the energy to smile a languid greeting at the new Lord Carnwood. She ignored Miranda regally, obviously satisfied that her warning needed no repetition despite Miranda’s position at his new lordship’s side.

‘Niece,’ Lady Clarissa acknowledged flatly, ‘you may kiss me now you are not travel-stained.’

‘Why, thank you, Aunt Clarissa.’ Miranda placed a peck on the cold cheek offered to her like a royal favour. ‘As I remarked earlier, you look well.’

‘I cannot return the compliment, but I suppose it is not possible to live the sort of life you do and not have it show in one’s face.’

‘What a fast existence you do credit me with, Aunt Clarissa,’ Miranda replied lightly.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ Lady Clarissa barked. ‘I will not put up with your impudence now, my girl, any more than I did six years ago. If I hear any more of it, I shall pack you off back to Nightingale House, and good riddance.’

‘I believe it is five years since I lived here, not six, and I am not here now by your invitation, but my grandfather’s, so you will just have to ignore me for the next few hours, will you not? After so many years of practice, I dare say it will come easily enough.’

‘Impudent hussy! If I had my way, you would never have darkened these doors again. I cannot imagine what Papa was thinking of, ordering you must be here before a word of that section of his will could be read.’

‘Neither can I, but I plan to restrain my curiosity until a more appropriate time.’ Miranda couldn’t be sorry for answering back, even when her ladyship was powered by fury to actually rise and ring the bell herself.

‘Mrs Braxton will be taking dinner in her bedchamber,’ she announced as the doors opened too rapidly for anyone to doubt the butler had been well within earshot.

‘Don’t trouble yourself, Coppice,’ Lord Carnwood intervened coolly. ‘Mrs Braxton is far too conscious of the extra work it would cause the staff to put them to so much trouble. Lady Clarissa overestimates the tiring effects of her long journey on her niece’s excellent constitution, do you not, ma’am?’

Lady Clarissa’s chilly grey eyes locked with the Earl’s fathomless dark ones, then fell before a more implacable will than even her stubborn one. ‘Apparently,’ she conceded as if it might choke her. ‘You may go, Coppice, unless dinner is ready?’

‘Not quite, my lady.’

‘Then you had better find out what is delaying both Cook and our guests, had you not?’

Lord Carnwood let that ungracious order pass. From the look Coppice sent him and the faint shake of his dark head, Miranda doubted it would be carried out anyway.

As the doors shut behind Coppice, Lady Clarissa glared at her erring niece with a venom that would have set the gauche Miranda of five years ago trembling in her satin evening shoes. Now she returned her aunt’s hard look with an insincere smile, before subsiding on to a gilt chair at a healthy distance from the roaring fire.

Celia continued to stare into the fire as if she was lost in a world of her own. Miranda draped herself across the chair in imitation of a notorious beauty she had met scandalising a neighbour’s party she once attended with her grandfather, before she became notorious herself, of course. Having been given a bad name, she might as well hang herself in style.

Ignoring both Celia and the artistically draped Miranda, Lord Carnwood engaged Lady Clarissa in stilted conversation. Miranda was annoyed to find that she was so attuned to the dark timbres of his voice, even across the formality of this great room, that she missed not a single word he said.

It was a relief to hear voices in the hall just before the doors opened to admit her grandfather’s middle-aged lawyer, along with a handsome couple possibly ten years older than she was herself. When she was introduced to the Reverend Draycott and his lively wife, Miranda soon decided she preferred them to the stuffy couple who had inhabited Wychwood Rectory when she was a girl. She detected none of the sour disapproval she would have met from the Reverend and Mrs Townley for her sins, so she sincerely hoped they were not ignorant of them.

The Earl of Carnwood greeted his guests genially, but Lady Clarissa managed only a stiff nod in the lawyer’s direction as Celia pretended to be lost in a world of her own. Unable to watch another greeted as uncivilly as she had been herself, Miranda gave him a warm smile.

‘Mr Poulson, I hope you are recovered from your journey?’

‘As much as can be expected at my age,’ the rotund little man replied with a self-deprecating smile. ‘Fancy you remembering my name after all these years, Mrs Braxton.’

‘Since you used to give us children peppermint drops whenever you came to visit Grandpapa, I was very unlikely to forget it, sir.’

‘So I did! Those were happier times for us all, were they not?’

‘Indeed they were—would that we had them back again.’

For a brief minute Miranda allowed herself the indulgence of the might have been. If only her brother had not caught an epidemic fever at school, and come home so weakened he had to be accompanied by a tutor. If only she had listened to Grandfather’s fierce pronouncements on her infatuation with Nevin Braxton, said tutor, and, above all, if only Jack had not died weeks after her defection. Of all her regrets, that was the heaviest of all, she realised now—it far outran the thought that, if Jack had been here, she would not have to steel herself to avoid Christopher Alstone’s eye whenever possible.

‘Regrets, Mrs Braxton?’ he questioned her softly now, his deep voice hard with distrust again for some odd reason.

‘Memories, my lord,’ she replied briefly, determined not to let his suspicion incise Jack’s wicked smile from her mind.

‘A commodity I patently cannot share. How are you, sir? It was an ill day for travelling today, was it not?’

‘That it was, my lord. I freely admit that these days I much prefer my chambers to the open road.’

‘Maybe one day we will be able to travel like birds instead of it taking us days to get from one side of the country to the other,’ Miranda mused.

‘Like flying pigs, Cousin?’ Kit asked impatiently.

‘Not quite, but equally unlikely, I am afraid.’

‘A pleasant idea though, my dear madam,’ Mr Poulson put in with a fatherly smile of encouragement, seemingly oblivious to the suppressed tension between his companions. ‘It would certainly save a good deal of time on dirty roads.’

‘If only we could invent machines to direct all those balloons people spend so much time watching launched, maybe your idea would be possible, Cousin Miranda,’ his lordship admitted.

‘Until that happy day, I suppose we will just have to make do with mud and inconvenience like everyone else, my lord.’

‘Indeed, and you have had a longer and harder trek than the rest of us, if I am not mistaken.’

‘And I doubt that you often are, my lord,’ she replied rather waspishly and felt the lawyer’s shrewd gaze on them both this time.

He seemed to gauge the undercurrent of awareness that ran between the new earl and his scapegrace cousin and momentarily looked puzzled and then oddly pleased. Miranda ordered herself to be more circumspect in future, but something kept her standing at his lordship’s side, pretending to be sociable all the same.

‘I thought we had agreed to be cousins,’ he chided when Mr Poulson’s attention was diverted by the new vicar of Wychwood.

‘Do you mean to acknowledge me as such in public then, my lord?’ she asked mockingly. ‘I’m probably beneath your touch, as well as us being connected to you only in the third or fourth degree.’

‘And it would make such a change for your branch of the family to note the existence of mine, would it not?’

She covered her bemusement at his peculiar statement with a social smile, for Grandfather had been rebuffed in the harshest of terms when he tried to send his cousin Bevis Alstone’s son and daughters to school instead of settling Bevis’s vintner’s bill as demanded.

‘Are we to celebrate our newly established kinship, or mourn it, do you think?’ she asked lightly.

‘I shall withhold judgement.’

‘Shall you indeed, cousin? How very refreshing to meet a gentleman who refuses to rely on the prejudices of others to form his opinions.’

‘You can be certain of one thing, Cousin Miranda, I long ago made it a rule to trust my own prejudices ahead of any others.’

There was no mistaking the heat in his dark gaze as he let it dwell on her discreetly displayed curves for a little too long, but she chose to pretend ignorance and gave him a sweetly insincere smile. ‘How unenlightened of you,’ she said lightly, ‘so pray excuse me while I look up prejudice in my grandfather’s copy of Dr Johnson’s famous dictionary, Cousin. Does it come before or after proof, I wonder?’

‘Oh, dear, that tutor of yours really wasn’t very good, was he? Before, of course.’

‘Then should I not appeal to Mr Poulson? I believe it is customary to present all the evidence before the court forms a judgement?’

‘Or so we are told,’ he replied sardonically.

‘Then I rest my case, my lord,’ she told him.

‘Cousin,’ he corrected abruptly.

‘Very well, but Cousin what, pray?

‘I suspect you know very well my name is Christopher,’ he said and silently dared her to remark on the fact that it was a very common Alstone forename, and probably given to him in defiance of his father’s family rather than to please them.

She felt a sneaking compassion for the little boy he must once have been, forced to live with the consequences of Bevis Alstone’s drinking, gambling and whoring. Cut off by his family, Bevis must have been an appalling parent. Miranda forced herself not to look for the vulnerable boy in the hard man his son had become. It was far simpler to think of him as just another man of the world, not the complex creature he really was.

Chapter Five

Coppice opened the doors and warily informed the company that dinner was served. As the senior and most socially distinguished woman present, Lady Clarissa went in on Lord Carnwood’s arm. Miranda told herself she was well pleased to be next to Mr Poulson and opposite the new vicar. Lady Clarissa took the foot of the table and had to content herself with insisting Celia took precedence over the vicar’s wife and had the other seat by the new Earl.

‘Surely we don’t need to stand on ceremony?’ Miranda asked rashly, used to informality presiding over state at her godmother’s table.

‘Indeed not,’ Lord Carnwood agreed. ‘Coppice? See that a round dining table is installed in the Blue Parlour by tomorrow night,’ he ordered with the air of easy command that Miranda had already noted the servants obeyed without a second thought. ‘We shall take our meals there whenever there are less than a dozen of us to dinner in future, and meet beforehand in the Countess’s Sitting Room, not the State Drawing Room.’

‘Very good, my lord,’ Coppice replied, a faint smile lifting his thin lips.

‘I do not approve of such shabby-genteel arrangements!’ Lady Clarissa announced regally.

‘Very well. Coppice, will you see that Lady Clarissa is served in here every evening? I doubt the rest of us will disturb her at such a distance.’

Coppice wisely said nothing, but Miranda thought she caught a twinkle in his eye as he waited impassively on events.

‘Well, I shall enjoy the novelty,’ Celia said, with a hard look for her bridling parent.

Ambition for her daughter narrowly beat Lady Clarissa’s pride. ‘Very well, let it be so,’ she said grandly and nobody bothered to point out that it would be so, whether she liked it or not.

After that Miranda was not the only one to concentrate on her excellent dinner and her thoughts. Deciding that her aunt would always be a mystery to her, she turned to her dinner companion in the hope of setting an innocuous hum of conversation going.

‘How did your journey really go, Mr Poulson?’

‘In truth, I would rather not travel at this time of year, Mrs Braxton. The roads are naught but a sea of mud and the beds at the inn I stayed in last night were decidedly damp,’ the little lawyer told her indignantly.

‘How very distressing for you,’ she said soothingly, thinking ruefully of her desperate journey to Lady Rhys’s remote home five years ago, when she and Leah slept fitfully on top of a swaying accommodation coach to stretch their small store of money.

‘Still, we must all suffer in the line of duty now and again,’ the little lawyer said piously, ‘but how was your own journey, ma’am?’

‘Uneventful,’ she said cheerfully, ‘and worth it to experience the benefits of Cook’s skills again. Have you tried her baked trout, sir?’

‘It almost blots out the memory of those sheets,’ he replied with a self-deprecating smile.

While he set to with a will, Miranda surreptitiously watched their dining companions. Mr Draycott was being condescended to by her aunt while she regally ignored his wife, presumably because Mrs Draycott was very pretty and must not interfere with Celia’s fascination of the Earl. She saw Mrs Draycott meet her husband’s gaze with rueful amusement and wondered how it felt to love like that after years of marriage. Her own delusions of love had barely outlasted the ceremony over the anvil, and how she wished she had possessed a little more patience and discernment.

Ironic, was it not, that a woman supposedly experienced in the arts of love knew virtually nothing about that tender passion? Luckily Celia’s polite titter distracted her just then and reminded her of another conundrum. Considering her cousin rarely did anything on impulse, her hasty wedding to a mere lieutenant of Foot Guards was a puzzle in itself. Surely Celia hadn’t married for true love?

Miranda frowned and wondered why she thought her cousin incapable of such untidy emotions. She had never met the gallant lieutenant, of course, and the poor man had been dead within weeks of their hasty London wedding. There had been no seven-month pregnancy to tell of illicit passion, unlikely as such weakness seemed on the part of her icily lovely cousin. Yet Grandfather must have disapproved, or Celia would have been married from Wychwood with as much splendour as Lady Clarissa could contrive.

‘This beef is as good as any I ever tasted, Mrs Braxton,’ Mr Poulson said with a hint of reproach as he eyed her untasted portion.

‘My appetite seems to have deserted me,’ she admitted.

‘Indeed, this must be an ordeal,’ he said with quiet sympathy.

Touched by such understanding, she sought to reassure him. ‘I have grown a very thick skin of late years,’ she assured him with a mischievous smile. ‘And my old friends below stairs seem pleased to see me.’

At last it was time for the ladies to retire to the barn-like State Drawing Room while the gentlemen enjoyed their port in peace. It wouldn’t be a riotous interlude, Miranda decided, considering the company. Yet she would rather have endured the earl’s jibes than join her aunt, Celia and a vicar’s wife who must disapprove of her on principle. She bore it stoically for a while, then excused herself, fearing that if she stayed she might say something scandalous just to live down to their expectations.

Opening the door of the library cautiously, in case his lordship had sneaked back into it when her back was turned, she sniffed the familiar scents of books and lavender polish. Closing her eyes, she could almost fool herself that Grandfather would be sitting in his favourite chair by the fire, absorbed in his beloved Homer and a glass of fine cognac. Of course the chair was empty when she opened them and she allowed herself a sigh of regret at not seeing him so one last time.