Ever His Bride Page 7

  “My pleasure.” Funny how Claybourne could be downright engaging when high finance was involved.

  “I’m not likely to forget such things, Claybourne.” Meath tapped the brim of his top hat with a finger and tipped a wave as he stepped around them and started down Threadneedle.

  Felicity winked at Adam as the wily reporter followed on Meath’s heels.

  Claybourne stared down at her, unblinking. “Who was that young man?” he asked.

  “A reporter friend of mine.”

  “You’ll have no reporter friends while you’re married to me.”

  She laughed at his frown, at his unenforceable, uncontracted-for demand. “I’ll have any friend I want, Mr. Claybourne. And I plan to spend most of the next four weeks touring Northumberland, so I doubt I’ll have time in my schedule for a soiree at his lordship’s.”

  “You’ll make the time, wife, or I’ll make it for you.”

  Then Claybourne wrapped his big hands around her waist and lifted her into his carriage.

  “Curse you for a liar, Claybourne!” She made a grab for the doorjamb, but he’d taken her by surprise and she stumbled to the seat as he locked the door behind her. She righted herself, reached through the open window, and took hold of his wrist.

  “Let me out of here! We made a bargain! You said I could leave any time I like. And unless you’re sending me to the Hearth and Heath in Fleet Street, I want out of this carriage immediately.”

  “Without money, where will you sleep tonight?” He cocked his know-it-all eyebrow. “In Waterloo Station?”

  “I’ve slept in worse places.”

  “You won’t while you’re married to me.”

  “Is that going to be your standard answer to my every request for the next year?”

  “Be prepared to hear it, or you’ll take up residence at my house for the duration of our marriage.”

  “I will not! Damn you!” She tried the door handle, but it didn’t budge. “You promised I could travel. You signed your name to our contract! Is that what your name is worth, Mr. Claybourne? Nothing but lies?”

  “We’ll speak of it later,” he said coolly. “Home to Hampstead, Branson!”

  The force of the carriage threw Felicity back against the padded seat.

  “Blazes!”

  She scrambled to the rear window, hoping to wound Claybourne with a glare. He stood shoulders above the stream of foot traffic, his attention intent upon her departure. He looked utterly out of place, a siege-built castle erected mid-river, buffeted by tree trunks and rising water. And yet he managed to remain unjostled, founded in the bedrock.

  The arrogant blockhead!

  With the carriage door locked again from the outside, and the windows far too small to climb out of without getting stuck, she sagged back against the seat. She could have jimmied the lock with the pair of scissors in her portmanteau, but she’d donated them along with all her clothes and her writings to young Mr. Pepperpot and his associate.

  Where would I go anyway? The boardinghouse was out of the question. Without ready cash, she’d be turned away at the door. Mrs. Wright and Mrs. Cobson could have been twin spirits separated at birth for all their natural-born charity.

  Right now, she was so hungry she could eat the batting out of the carriage seat. Well, then, if Claybourne was offering his hospitality, she might as well take him up on it, as long as he was willing to let her keep her appointment with Mr. Dolan and had paper and ink for her to rewrite her articles. She’d met more than one peevish innkeeper in her travels. This one could well afford a few amenities. Judging by the grandeur of his office, his estate must rival Windsor Castle. Elegant, well-kept gardens, a large stable and paddock chock-a-block with thoroughbred stock, liveried servants, a stately gallery of gilt-framed ancestors, and a kitchen complete with a French chef.

  “Bloody hell, I’m hungry!’ She imagined the dining room at Claybourne’s estate, bright with candles, a block-long table sagging under the weight of succulent meats, creamy desserts, and candied vegetables.

  “Another helping of Yorkshire pudding, Miss Mayfield?” she said in his basso voice.

  “Please, make that two, Mr. Claybourne.”

  She sighed. A day or two of splendor might do wonders for her spirits while she straightened out her finances and made sense of the coming year and a day. Her deadline to Mr. Dolan was the end of the week; without the usual interruptions she could easily recreate her travels in the meantime. Wouldn’t have to wonder where her next meal would come from, or where she would sleep the night. And Mrs. Wright wouldn’t be poking her head into her business every other moment.

  Yet there was Claybourne himself to consider. All of him: every inch. The searing heat and the bone-breaking chill, his arrogance, his greed.

  And the oddly stark realization that when he hadn’t kissed her at the end of their oh-so-brief wedding, she’d felt cheated. Cheated! The insatiable blackguard had not only stolen her railway from her, but he’d dashed any hope of a chance to marry for love, forever!

  The brougham rose up with the road as it carried her north out of London, then through Hampstead and soon turned off the rutted thoroughfare into a narrow lane. Another ten minutes and the lane ended entirely, blocked off by a pair of rusted iron gates that squealed as the footman opened them, and squealed again after he’d pulled through the gates and closed them.

  The carriage sped along inside a shaded avenue of overgrown yew and beech. Branches whipped past, slapping at the windows. She kept waiting for a break in the tunnel, but the green landscape went on for a quarter mile until the road crested and then hurdled downward and opened into a broad glade.

  She caught sight of the roofline first, vast and crenelated like a fortress, stubbled with odd-lot chimneys and twisted towers. A pitifully lonely-looking sight.

  Claybourne’s house grew out of an island of bramble and weeds that reached nearly to the second floor. If there had ever been a hedged and clipped garden, it had long since been overtaken. The wildness crowded against the courtyard, held in check by another iron fence.

  A few pallid faces peered down at her through the dark windows as the brougham clattered to a halt in front of the stone porch. What sort of man had she married? What sort of greed was this?

  A stick-thin man came flying out the front door, frantically flapping his elbows as he tried to fasten the front of his coat.

  “Hell and be damned!” she heard him hiss to Branson. “What’s the master doin’ home at this hour?”

  “Easy now, Ernest,” Branson said as he slipped down from his seat, “I haven’t got the master with me.”

  The stark terror melted from Ernest’s face, replaced by the grace found in a reprieve from death. “Just you, then—”

  “No.” Branson brushed aside Ernest’s worthless efforts at buttoning the livery coat and finished the job himself. “I’ve brought the master’s wife.”

  Felicity heard a chorus of gasps but couldn’t place the source until she saw the drapes swing back into place in the ground-floor windows. Claybourne was abrupt and disdainful in public; what kind of demon was he in the privacy of his own isolated estate?

  “His wife, Mr. Branson?” Ernest peered into Branson’s face and waited for his answer as a dog awaits a bone.

  “You heard right, Ernest. The master’s new wife. Now let’s get the little thing out of the carriage and settled into the house. Take care, though. She might have a mind to bolt.”

  “I promise not to bolt, Mr. Branson,” Felicity said as he opened the carriage door. Where would she go in this godforsaken landscape? “I’m too hungry to do anything more active than faint.”

  “We’ll see about a meal, then,” he said as he handed her down the steps to the gravel walk.

  “Afternoon, ma’am.” Ernest’s smile started on one side of his mouth and traveled quickly to the other side.

  She smiled back at his eagerness to please, more certain than ever that Claybourne was an overbearing, ungrateful tas
kmaster.

  “I’ll get her bags, Mr. Branson,” he said, vaulting the rear carriage wheel to the luggage boot.

  “I haven’t any bags, Mr. Ernest,” she said over her shoulder as she followed Branson toward the gloomy house.

  How could this woebegone property belong to Hunter Claybourne? The Claybourne Exchange outshone any other building in the City. His office spoke of careful design and limitless finances. His home looked utterly forsaken.

  A wicked beast, enchanted servants, a hoary old manor house; the tale had frightened her as a child, and now she’d come to live it. Dear God, what had she gotten herself into?

  “Does Mr. Claybourne actually live here, Mr. Branson?”

  “He does, indeed,” Branson said as they passed beneath the palladian entry and into the jail-dreary foyer. “Comes home every night. Mrs. Sweeney!”

  The shout echoed off the walls and tumbled up the massive stone staircase that clung to the central tower. Where the Claybourne Exchange overwhelmed the senses with marble and brass, the bleak, gray stone of Claybourne’s home dampened and dulled the heart of any hope. Just another kind of prison. Was there a dungeon waiting in the cellar, one designed for Claybourne’s more stubborn debtors?

  Branson lost no time waiting for this Mrs. Sweeney to show Felicity her new home. She ran to keep up with him, managing a racing tour of the ground floor of the eastern wing—what little she could see of it in the near-dark—trying to memorize all the possible exits, just in case.

  Opaque drapes hung heavily over the enormous windows in the long gallery. Crates and boxes and barrels lined every wall and clogged every corner. The few pieces of furniture on display shone with elegance and taste, but there was so little of it: a gilded settee keeping solitary watch by a cold hearth in the drawing room, a chair and a small table in the dining room. Everything looked so temporary.

  “Has Mr. Claybourne just moved in?” She trailed a finger along a low bank of packing crates. Her glove came away caked in dust.

  “No, no. The master’s lived here five years now, and I imagine they’ll have to carry out his cold carcass when he dies. He doesn’t fancy change.”

  “I’ll agree with you there, Branson.” Rabidly curious, in spite of the dim shadows and the unknown terrors of the year to come, she stopped in the middle of the wide corridor to examine the lid of a crate. A fine coating of dust dulled the label. Erebus Glass Works, London. Deliver to Claybourne Manor, Hampstead.

  Erebus Glass. Only the best for the master.

  “But if Mr. Claybourne has lived here five years, why is everything still boxed up?”

  “You’ll have to ask the master, Mrs. Claybourne.” Branson continued his long stride and she followed at a run, drawn down another corridor by the smell of an unnameable food.

  “Here we are,” Branson said, breezing through the butler’s pantry to the whitewashed kitchen at the back of the house.

  A tall, broad-shouldered woman hunkered over a huge steaming pot, wielding her stirring stick, doing battle with the contents for the sovereignty of the stove. Droplets of steam clung to the ends of the steely hair bristling from under her ivory cap. Mist clouded her spectacles.

  “Mrs. Sweeney, didn’t you hear me calling?”

  The woman looked up and squinted. “Mr. Branson! Is that you?” She stopped her struggles and pinched the tiny lenses off her face.

  “I’ve brought the master’s new missus.”

  “What? Now you wait a hardy minute, Mr. Branson.” Mrs. Sweeney scrubbed at her lenses with her apron hem, then pinched the frail frames back onto the end of her nose. “There, now I can hear. Speak it again, sir.” She laughed. “I thought you said you’d brought the master’s new missus.”

  “Mrs. Claybourne,” Branson said with a well-practiced tone of irritation, “this is Mrs. Sweeney, the cook.”

  “Mrs. Claybourne?” the woman yipped, adding a snort.

  “I’m very glad to meet you, Mrs. Sweeney.” Felicity felt like a newly plucked chicken on the way to the stew pot as Mrs. Sweeney walked a circuit around her.

  “Too skinny,” she said finally, dismissing the new mistress with a wave of her hand. “Won’t eat more than a raisin a day, I warrant.”

  Felicity followed the woman, her misgivings dismissed for the moment and her mouth watering as she approached the darkly bubbling concoction on the stove. The food didn’t look at all edible, but at this point she was willing to try anything.

  “I’m a very good eater, Mrs. Sweeney! I promise! In fact, I’d like a big bowl of this soup … or whatever it is.”

  “Would you now?” Mrs. Sweeney laughed, a very girlish sound coming from a woman built of brick and timber. She was missing all of her back teeth, the lack made prominent by her wide grin.

  “Yes, ma’am, it smells heavenly.”

  Mrs. Sweeney stuck her long spoon into the watery blackness and dragged out a length of wool sacking. “Dearie me, Mr. Branson,” she said, “if the master’s new bride likes the taste of my dye works, think how much she’ll like my stew!”

  Branson joined Mrs. Sweeney in a hearty bout of laughter.

  Felicity felt foolish only for a moment; then her stomach let out a howl, and she had to laugh, too. Claybourne’s servants seemed as harmless and friendly as he was threatening. At least her days here might be untroubled. The nights would be another matter all together.

  They refused to let her eat in the kitchen. Branson set her at the dismal little table in the cavernous dining room, proudly pulling aside the single chair and lighting the single candle against the darkness, even though God’s bright sunlight shone just outside the draped windows.

  Ernest, apparently Claiborne’s footman and valet, bobbed and chattered as he served her a bowl of hearty stew, a chunk of bread with a pot of fresh butter and another of strawberry preserves. The moment he was gone, she moved her chair to the window, intending to enjoy her meal in the daylight. But when she pushed aside the drapes, a thick hedge of arborvitae obscured the view entirely, grown so close to the panes that the brown and denuded interior of the bushes was laid bare. An abandoned bird’s nest hung askew among the branches, a long-dried yolk and delicate blue-green shell preserved among the twigs just below it.

  A deep melancholy settled over her. Oh, what a terrible year to come. She closed the drape, then retreated to the table and its feeble candlelight.

  To busy herself through the afternoon, she found paper and pencil in one of the crates from Dove and Sons Stationers, then set to work trying to recreate the half-dozen entries she had lost to Mr. Pepperpot’s light-fingeredness.

  When Claybourne didn’t return by dinner time, Felicity took that meal alone in the dining room as well. Stew again, filling and wholesome, but not exactly the fine French cuisine she’d imagined. Ernest stood over her table, seemed intent upon speaking, drumming his fingertips against each other.

  “Is there anything I can help you with, Ernest?”

  “Ah, well … yes. You see, the master didn’t send us instructions as to what to do with you, Mrs. Claybourne. And neither did Branson before he left. I mean as far as … where you’re to—”

  “Where I’m to sleep?”

  “Precisely.” Ernest cleared his throat. “Did the master, or Branson, by any chance, discuss the matter with you? Will you be taking the master’s… suite—”

  “Actually, Ernest, it had been my assumption, and my hope, that Mr. Claybourne would be sleeping tonight in Hampstead and that I would be sleeping in an altogether different county, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

  The poor man seemed shocked to the marrow.

  “What I mean is, put me wherever you wish, Ernest, except in the master’s chamber. This house is the size of a castle. Surely there must be a guest room to spare.”

  “Plenty of rooms, Mrs. Claybourne. But just enough beds for those of us who’ve been here awhile.”

  “Oh, I see.” She glanced at the crates of Wedgewood stacked near the pantry door and und
erstood completely. No one had ever been invited to Claybourne Manor. And it was clear that the master preferred it that way.

  “I’m awfully sorry, Mrs. Claybourne. You could have my bed, but I share a room with the gamekeeper. He snores. If I can do anything—”

  “A bath and some nightwear, and then some bedding will do for now. I’ll discuss the details with Mr. Claybourne as soon as he comes home. Which is usually when, Ernest?”

  Ernest frowned and shook his head. “Late, Mrs. Claybourne, ma’am. Branson has gone back to the City to fetch him. Sometimes they don’t come home till well after midnight.”

  “I’ll wait up right here.”

  Chapter 6

  As Hunter had watched his carriage cut into the traffic and wheel away that afternoon, he knew that his wife wasn’t at all happy. But the fool would have actually spent the night sleeping rough if he’d allowed it. The scandal would have rocked the foundations of the Claybourne Exchange. The woman hadn’t the sense God gave a lump of coal! Allowing herself to be advised by an incompetent attorney, then deserted by a scheming uncle, conned out of her worldly goods by a filthy urchin …

  And now married to you, Claybourne?

  Yes, and after less than two hours of marriage, he felt as if it had been a lifetime. How long was the coming year to feel?

  Lunch with Lord Spurling had proved ripe with impending opportunity. The man had hinted at a nomination to a committee of the Board of Trade as soon as an opening occurred. Hudson’s fall would surely take two members with him, maybe more. Hunter was not quite thirty; his reputation and record spotless. Time was on his side. And so, it seemed, was Lord Meath.

  The man had been unduly charmed by his wife. He wouldn’t exactly call the troublesome Miss Mayfield an asset, but like any other bit of flotsam that floated his way, he would orchestrate her talents to their fullest potential. Yes, he could see her on his arm in Meath’s parlor, clothed in satin, her wild hair tamed somehow, and piled atop her head and shot with silk ribbon, exposing that long neck of hers. A necklace of pearls would flatter her throat and bring every eye in the room to the woman he’d married. Another reason for envy. An even greater reason to keep himself well apart from her.