“Ah. Then she is a lover. Which one did you choose? The blonde lady from the theater?”
Richard frowned. He barely remembered the woman who had invited him to her home, murmuring that her husband was in Wales for the month. He never accepted those invitations. Gerhard thought that was a bit prudish of him, but Richard wanted no part of a jealous husband. “No.”
Gerhard kept up his protests and questions, dogging his heels and blustering about the tides and schedules until Richard managed to outpace him. He had an excellent sense of direction and retraced his steps to the house where he had spent the previous night in erotic bliss, but the same butler who hadpoured his coffee that morning said the lady of the house was not at home. The man remained obstinately ignorant of Lady Courtenay’s direction as well.
He turned away in bitter disappointment. Whom could he ask? Not his sister. Allen had refused. He didn’t know many people in London, and certainly none well enough for him to confide his very deep, very personal interest in Lady Courtenay.
Grudgingly, he returned to his lodgings. He sent Karl to ask at the post office, but the man returned with no information. She did not have a house in London, it seemed.
His trip through the North Sea and the Baltic into Russia and the far eastern provinces had been planned over the previous eight months. Most of the funding for it came from people like Lord Allen, who wanted to stand on the dock and wave them off and boast of their connection to the brave explorers. Gerhard was rumbling about nailing him into a cask and shipping him to Copenhagen. All his belongings had been either put into storage or packed for the journey. Beleaguered and thwarted on all sides, Richard boarded the ship.
He was coming back to London, in a year and a half—two years at the most—and he would not forget Evangeline.
Chapter 4
1816
London
“We must find you a house.”
Richard Campion raised his coffee cup and sipped, gaze fixed determinedly on the window. A cart full of chickens was rumbling past, squawking loudly, as if they knew they were on their way to imminent death at the market.
He sympathized.
“A good house,” Clemency went on. His sister had been on this theme for a fortnight, and he’d begun tensing up every time she opened her mouth. Her prodding was like the stick of a needle, a minor irritant at first but now it had raised a welt that burned and irritated. “Something near us.”
But not too near,Richard thought.
He ought to regret thinking that, but he could not. He’d come back to England for Clemency, after the French invasion of Russia had scrambled all his travel plans and prolonged the journey from a planned year and a half into nearly four. WhenClemency’s letter had finally reached him in Urga, it was already a month old, and its tearstained message had made him head west at once. Clemency’s husband, Daniel, had died of a sudden illness, and she begged Richard to return to England to help her untangle his affairs.
He had returned expecting to find his sister prostrate with grief; instead, he found her still grieving, but no longer prostrate, and bent on getting him to stay. He was beginning to wish he’d remained among the yaks.
“Such a lot of trouble to go to,” he said aloud, “taking a house when I am not certain I shall stay here more than a few weeks.”
“No!” Her brows drew together, and she turned to the other man at the table. “Gerhard, you must persuade him to stay.”
Richard shot his friend a look that warned him not to join the battle. Gerhard turned mournful eyes toward Clemency. “How can I, if he is idiot enough to wish to leave?”
“You can,” she cried, reaching to put her hand atop his. “You are so dear to both of us—even if Richard will not admit it—and I know you will think of something. You have never disappointed me, Gerhard, never.”
He fairly glowed under her regard. “I hope to never! I will try to talk sense into him.”
Richard shook his head and went back to watching the bustling street outside. It was the touch on the hand that did it, he knew. Gerhard had been pining over Clemency since she turned sixteen, but the great oaf had been too cowardly ever to say anything to her. Instead he’d become a loyal puppy, grateful for any scrap of her attention.
Clem, oblivious creature, had never noticed he was madly in love with her. She’d married a dashing Englishman who’d come to visit their father in Zürich during one of the lulls in the wars, and Gerhard had never recovered.
“I don’t like this city,” Richard said. He could feel both of them plotting their attacks, Clemency because she never liked to be thwarted and Gerhard because she had touched his hand and thrown fuel on the smoldering embers of his dreams. Richard hoped he was never so pitiable over a woman.
“Something in Paddington,” suggested Clemency. “Lady Ardle was telling me about the most delightful picnic she went to in Paddington. It was quite rustic.”
Great God. Clem’s idea of rustic meant stone cottages and landscaped parks, within a convenient hour’s drive of a town with a proper number of fashionable shops. If he took a house there, his sister would bring parties to picnic on his grounds.
“I can send word to an estate agent to help locate such a place,” offered Gerhard, who was gazing at Clem raptly.
“Not Paddington,” said Richard shortly. “Somewhere out of town, or I won’t go.” He realized he’d have to view a place or two. Nothing else would satisfy Clemency, and despite her desire to dictate his life, Richardwasfond of her. She was eight years younger than he, and he had spoiled her as a child. Before their father died, he had impressed upon Richard that it was now his duty to look after Clemency. Since she’d been newly, and happily, married to Daniel Murray at the time, Richard had thought this would mean an occasional visit, gifts for her children, and regular letters from wherever he roamed.
Papa ought to have given that speech to Gerhard, who already thought Clemency a veritable goddess he would die to protect. Now Richard might have to take a house in London, of all places, or bear not only his sister’s tearful disappointment but the lashes of guilt from his late father’s spirit as well.
