Damn and blast!
He could smell her perfume, and her, but it wallowed amid the smell of lust, and devil take it, Fitz would be coming up here soon. He couldn’t be expected to put up with this.
Ash tugged on the bellpull, frustrated by not being able to hear it ring. Pestilential idea. He yanked again and the wire came off in his hand, staggering him back.
“Hell and damnation!” He hurled the thing into a corner.
Henri, his valet, rushed in, jacket disordered, his powdered wig askew. “M’lord, I thought you with the dancing!” He looked around and Ash saw his expression. It said,Not again.“The sheets, they need changing, m’lord. I will see to it, m’lord. And your clothes…”
Henri went to the bell, then stared at the hole. “Your indulgence, m’lord,” he said, bowing out to find servants the old-fashioned way.
Ash didn’t want to be here when they arrived. He dressed himself and found a button missing from his waistcoat. He unbuttoned all the rest so it wouldn’t show. There would be plenty of other disheveled revelers. He combed and tied his hair, his mind tangled in combing Genova’s….
After a quick check in the mirror, he escaped. He couldn’t face company yet and went to the picture gallery, cold and quiet as it had been the last time.
“Is this a damsel that I see before me?…”
He didn’t even have the excuse of meddling witches for the bloody mess he’d made of everything.
The moonlight was dulled by clouds, making the paintings more ghostly than before.
Damn your prosy faces! If you were my ancestors, you wouldn’t want me to marry a penniless nobody. I’m trying to do the right thing. To do my duty!
The portrait of a young, wary Rothgar seemed to accuse him. Of what? Rothgar would laugh to see the Trayce family stuck in such folly.
Then Ash remembered peace. Damn peace.
It was all very well for Rothgar to disapprove. He had a thriving marquessate and a large, loving family.
There was a date on the scroll tumbling off the table by his cousin’s pale hand. Ash went closer and read,1744. The year the Marquess of Rothgar and his wife had died of some virulent fever. The year Ash’s cousin had inherited the title.
Ash knew the Malloren family tree as well as his own. Rothgar had inherited at nineteen, which was young, but not as young as inheriting a title at eight.
For the first time, however, Ash considered what that must have been like. Rothgar had had no grandparents to take care of everything. His mother’s family had been alienated—were, in fact, active enemies. His paternal grandparents had been already dead. His stepmother’s family was French.
Rothgar’s half brothers and sisters would have been children, not support. Elf Malloren and Ash were of an age, so she and her twin brother would have been seven.
Ash remembered the day when the news had reached Cheynings that his grandmother’s bete noire, her Malloren son-in-law, had died. She’d ordered a feast and sat Ash at the table to enjoy it. At last, she’d crowed, justice had fallen on the monster’s head. The hand of God had struck, blasting him and his wife, leaving the house of Malloren in the hands of a wild youth.
She’d made Ash drink toasts, so even though theyhad only been watered wine, he’d become woozy. He remembered being happy because she was happy. The Mallorens were evil and a blight upon the land. Anything that destroyed them was God’s work.
Children believe what they are told.
When Grandy heard that the new marquess was insisting on keeping his half brothers and sisters in his care, she’d danced around the schoolroom with him, singing, “We’ve won, we’ve won! They’re doomed.”
Soon, however, his father’s death had loomed larger than the affairs of the Mallorens, who were only names to him. He didn’t miss his father, but he’d minded being moved from the schoolroom to the marquess’s suite of rooms. At least he’d been allowed to bring his nursery governess down with him.
He’d had to go to court at eight to be presented to old George II, who’d pinched his cheeks and teased him about women. Grandy had pointed out Rothgar in a whisper of hate. Ash had seen a man looking very like this picture, and to an eight-year-old, Rothgar had seemed terrifyingly tall and adult.
“He’s a devil,” his grandmother had whispered, turning him away. He hadn’t know then that Rothgar’s success in holding his family together and continuing the Malloren prosperity was already burning into his grandmother like acid.
He hadn’t known she was actively seeking to balk Rothgar’s work until he was sixteen. His grandmother had rounded off a lecture about gaming with the gleeful news that Bryght Malloren had turned out to be a gamester and could be depended upon to ruin the family.
She hadn’t said as much, but Ash had suspected then that she’d played a part. He’d thought it an excellent plan, the Mallorens being so despicable. And after all, if a man played to ruination, it was his own fault.
Ash had returned from his grand tour to find the Mallorens unruined and Grandy a bitter woman pouring guineas after guineas into a losing battle. Bryght Malloren was gambling with investments rather thandice, and winning. Brand Malloren was overseeing improvements in the estates. The youngest brother, Lord Cynric, had gone into the army, apparently against Rothgar’s wishes, but was having brilliant success.
There’d been a brief moment of hope. King George II liked a rake, so Ash had become the sort of rake the king enjoyed, and had picked up plums and preferments by the handful.
