Though it was a strange business. A man’s only son was in a coma, one foot in the grave, the other on an icy patch. He might even be dead at this very moment. And yet his father had left him in order to search for the woman who had tried to kill him. But the man never left his hotel suite, as far as Mick knew. The would-be murderess had stolen a fortune, yet the earl suspected she might be seeking employment. She had stolen jewels, but his lordship was unwilling to describe them or to have them hunted for in the pawnshops.
A very strange business indeed.
AFTER ONE WEEK OFmoving between his bed upstairs, the sofa in the drawing room, and the chaise longue in the library, Jocelyn was colossally bored. Which was probably the understatement of the decade. His friends called frequently—every day, in fact—and brought him all the latest news and gossip. His brother called and talked about little else except the curricle race that Jocelyn would have given a fortune to be running himself. His sister called and talked incessantly on such scintillating topics as bonnets and her nerves. His brother-in-law made a few courtesy calls and discussed politics.
The days were long, the evenings longer, the nights endless.
Jane Ingleby became his almost constant companion. The realization could both amuse and irritate him. He began to feel like an old lady with a paid companion to run and fetch and hold the emptiness at bay.
She changed his bandage once a day. He had her massage his thigh once, an experiment he did not repeat despite the fact that her touch was magically soothing. It was also alarmingly arousing, and so he rebuked her for being so prudish as to blush and told her to sit down. She ran errands for him. She sorted his mail as he read it and returned it to Quincy with his instructions. She read to him and played cards with him.
He had Quincy in to play chess with him one evening and instructed her to sit and watch. Playing chess with Michael was about as exciting as playing cricket with a three-year-old. Though his secretary was a competent player, it never took great ingenuity to defeat him. Winning, of course, was always gratifying, but it was not particularly exhilarating when one could see the victory coming at least ten moves in advance.
After that Jocelyn played chess with Jane. She was so abysmally awful the first time that it was a measure of his boredom that he made her try it again the next day. She was almost ready that time to have given Michael a marginally competitive game, though certainly not him. The fifth time they played, she won.
She laughed and clapped her hands. “That is what comes, you see,” she told him, “of being bored and toplofty and looking down your nose at me as if I were a speck on your boot and yawning behind your hand. You were not concentrating.”
All of which was true. “You will concede, then,” he asked, “that I would have won if I had been concentrating, Jane?”
“Oh, assuredly,” she admitted. “But you were not and so you lost. Quite ignominiously, I might add.”
He concentrated after that.
Sometimes they merely talked. It was strange to him totalkto a woman. He was adept at chitchatting socially with ladies. He was skilled at wordplay with courtesans. But he could not recall simply talking with any woman.
One evening she was reading to him and he was amusing himself with the observation that with her hair ruthlessly scraped back from her face, her eyes were slanted upward at the corners. It was her little rebellion, of course, to make her head as unattractive as possible even without the aid of the cap, and he hoped uncharitably that it gave her a headache.
“Miss Ingleby,” he said with a sigh, interrupting her in the middle of a sentence, “I can listen no longer.” Not that he had been doing much listening anyway. “In my opinion, with which you may feel free to disagree, Gulliver is an ass.”
As he had expected, her lips tightened into a thin line. One of his few amusements during the past week had been provoking her. She closed the book.
“I suppose,” she said, “you believe he should have trodden those little people into the ground because he was bigger and stronger than they.”
“You are such a restful companion, Miss Ingleby,” he said. “You put words into my mouth and thereby release me from the necessity of having to think and speak for myself.”
“Shall I choose another book?” she asked.
“You would probably select a collection of sermons,” he retorted. “No, we will talk instead.”
“What about?” she asked after a short silence.
“Tell me about the orphanage,” he said. “What sort of life did you have there?”
She shrugged. “There is not a great deal to tell.”
It must certainly have been a superior sort of orphanage. But even so, an orphanage was an orphanage.
“Were you lonely there?” he asked. “Are you lonely?”
“No.” She was not going to be very forthcoming with her personal history, he could see. She was not like many women—and men too, to be fair—who needed only the smallest encouragement to talk with great enthusiasm and at greater length about themselves.
“Why not?” he asked, narrowing his gaze on her. “You grew up without mother or father, brother or sister. You have come to London at the age of twenty or so, if my guess is correct, doubtless with the dream of making your fortune, but knowing no one. How can you not be lonely?”
She set the book down on the small table beside her and clasped her hands in her lap. “Aloneness is not always the same thing as loneliness,” she said. “Not if one learns to like oneself and one’s own company. It is possible, I suppose, to feel lonely even with mother and father and brothers and sisters if one basically does not like oneself. If one has been given the impression that one is not worthy of love.”
“How right you are!” he snapped, instantly irritated.
He was being regarded from very steady, very blue eyes, he noticed suddenly.
