“Perhaps,” he said, “it was because they saw each other for only a few minutes three or four times a year. As my father came home to Acton Park, my mother would be leaving for London. As she came home, he would be leaving. A civil and amicable arrangement, you see.” One he had thought quite normal at the time. It was strange how children who had known no different could adapt to almost any situation.
Jane said nothing. She sat very still.
“They were wonderfully discreet too,” he said, “as any perfect couple must be if the harmony of the marriage is to be maintained. No word of my mother’s legion of lovers ever came to Acton. I knew nothing of them until I came to London myself at the age of sixteen. Fortunately I resemble my father in physical features. So do Angeline and Ferdinand. It would be lowering to suspect that one might be a bastard, would it not?”
He had not spoken those words to hurt. He remembered too late that Jane Ingleby did not know her own parents. He wondered who had given her her last name. Why not Smith or Jones? Perhaps it was a policy of a superior orphanage to distinguish its orphans from the common run by giving them more idiosyncratic surnames.
“Yes,” she said. “I am sorry. No child should have to feel so betrayed even when he is old enough, according to the world’s beliefs, to cope with the knowledge. It must have been a heavy blow to you. But I daresay she loved you.”
“If the number and splendor of the gifts she brought with her from London are any indication,” he said, “she doted on us. My father did not depend upon his months in London for pleasure. There is a picturesque cottage in a remote corner of Acton Park, Jane. A river flows at the foot of its back garden, wooded hills grow up around it. It is an idyllic setting indeed. It was home during several of my growing years to an indigent relative, a woman of considerable charm and beauty. I was sixteen years old before I understood just who she was.”
He had always intended to give the order to have that cottage pulled down. He still had not done so. But it was uninhabited now, and he had given his steward specific orders to spend not a single farthing on its upkeep. In time it would fall down from sheer neglect.
“I am sorry,” she said again as if she were personally responsible for his father’s lack of taste in housing his mistress—or one of them anyway—on his own estate with his children in residence there. But Jane did not know the half of it, and he was not about to enlighten her.
“I have much to live up to, you see,” he said. “But I believe I am doing my part in perpetuating the family reputation.”
“You are not bound by the past,” she told him. “No one is. Influenced by it, yes, perhaps almost overwhelmingly drawn to live up to it. But not compelled. Everyone has free will, you more than most. You have the rank, the wealth, the influence to live your own life your own way.”
“Which, my little moralist,” he said softly, narrowing his eyes on her, “is exactly what I am doing. Except now, of course. Such inaction as this is anathema to me. But perhaps it is a fitting punishment, would you not agree, for having taken my pleasure in the bed of a married woman?”
She flushed and looked down.
“Does it reach your waist?” he asked her. “Or even below?”
“My hair?” She looked back up at him, startled. “It is only hair. Below my waist.”
“Only hair,” he murmured. “Only spun gold. Only the sort of magic web in which any man would gladly become hopelessly caught and enmeshed, Jane.”
“I have not given you permission for such familiarity, your grace,” she said primly.
He chuckled. “Why do I put up with your impudence?” he asked her. “You are my servant.”
“But not your indentured slave,” she said. “I can get up and walk out through that door any time I please and not come back. The few pounds you are paying me for three weeks of service do not give you ownership of me. Or excuse your impertinence in speaking with lascivious intent about my hair. And you may not deny that there was suggestiveness in what you said about it and the way you looked at it.”
“Certainly I will not deny it,” he agreed. “I try always to speak the truth, Miss Ingleby. Go and fetch the chess board from the library. We will see if you can give me a decent game tonight. And have Hawkins fetch the brandy while you are about it. I am as dry as a damned desert. And as prickly as a cactus plant.”
“Yes, your grace.” She got to her feet readily enough.
“And I would advise you,” he said, “not to call me impertinent again, Miss Ingleby. I can be pushed only so far without retaliating.”
“But you are confined to the sofa,” she said, “and I can walk out through the door at any time. I believe that gives me a certain advantage.”
One of these times, he thought as she vanished through the door—at leastonetime during the remaining two weeks of her employment—he was going to have the last word with Miss Jane Ingleby. He could not remembernothaving the last word with anyone, male or female, any time during the past ten years.
But he was relieved that their conversation had returned to its normal level before she left. He did not know quite how she had turned the tables on him before that. He had tried to worm out of her something about herself and had ended up telling her things about his childhood and boyhood that he did not care even to think about, let alone share with another person.
He had come very close to baring his heart.
He preferred to believe that he had none.
7
OME HERE,” THE DUKE OF TRESHAM SAID TO JANEafter a game of chess a few days later, in which he had prevailed but only after he had been forced to ponder his moves and accuse her of trying to distract him with her chatter. She had spoken scarcely a word during the whole game. Jane had moved away to return the chess board to its cupboard.
She did not trust the tone of his voice. She did not trusthimwhen she thought about the matter. There had been a tension between them during the past few days that even in her inexperience she had had no difficulty in identifying. He saw her as a woman, and she, God help her, was very much aware of him as a man. She breathed a prayer of gratitude as she approached the sofa for the fact that he was still confined to it, though she would no longer be employed if he were not, of course.
The thought of leaving her employment—and Dudley House—in another week and a half was becoming more and more oppressive to her. In their careless conversation, his friends had several times referred to the fact that her father’s cousin, the Earl of Durbury, was in London and that he had the dreaded Bow Street Runners looking for her. The friends and the duke himself appeared to be on her side. They jeered over the fact that she had overpowered Sidney, a man who was apparently not universally liked. But their attitude would change in a moment if they discovered that Lady Sara Illingsworth and Jane Ingleby were one and the same person.
