Claire Read online

  “Claire— ” he said roughly, in a slightly hoarse whisper, staring up at her. She was somehow still within his left arm; no power on earth could have prevented his closing his hand around her waist to hold her closer still.

  “Varian, I— ”

  Dear God; move—

  It was her thought; no, his. It was sanity; this was not. Varian saw Claire’s eyes fall slightly to his mouth; with a groan, he lifted his other hand to her hair, and almost before his fingers had sunk into those thick tresses to cradle the back of her neck, she had closed her eyes and parted her lips. In a great outburst of denied longing, swept past rationality by some hot, arid storm-wind of need, he pulled her toward him and tasted that curving, dimpling mouth as though it were an unexpected oasis in the midst of a desert.

  For a long, timeless agony Varian kissed Claire with increasing fire, driven by the response of her sweet mouth. He felt her hand on his cheek, and then she smoothed her fingertips over that square, unyielding jaw which he did not know had caused her so much discomfort this morning, touching, aching with touch. The button of his shirt was loosed; he felt her caress his chest and along his shoulder, and in that instant his whole heart was lost in the exquisite feel of her caught up against his side, his hand possessively across her back.

  Then, as he brushed his lips over the velvet skin of her cheek, he heard her whisper, “Varian, darling— why? Why did you do it?”

  Reality jolted the present back into focus. On an agonized sigh of separation he drew her head away and stared up into her face. “Oh, Claire— ” He closed his eyes on a moment of rending flesh and soul, and somehow managed an attempt at a smile. “And after I had promised— I am so very— ”

  “No, Varian— the letters— ” With unshed tears on her lashes, she stared into his frowning, questioning, uncomprehending face, and then shook her head. In a low, shaking voice she whispered, “Dear god, I would have loved you so well,” and then suddenly she wrenched herself out of his grasp.

  He was suddenly, painfully lighter, as if someone had cut away a limb. As he came up on one elbow there was a rustle of blue muslin and dark loose curls, and, as gracefully as her cat, she ran across the yard and up the terrace steps, into the house, just like Sully.

  Drew somehow survived the afternoon and evening. The four of them had been invited to attend a small gathering of music lovers at his grandmother Lady Swaffingham’s, and although the tenor was slightly flat and the harpist more than a little inferior, it was a passive sort of evening that did not require too many politenesses— or contact with his coolly civil wife— and he managed somehow to get home. As Claire’s and Claudia’s light footsteps receded upstairs, he poured out a drink for Tony Merrill in his library.

  “You look like the devil, Varian,” observed the placid earl, accepting his cognac with an appreciative sniff and settling with a sigh into his chair. “No wonder; I have never heard a pluckier harp, for all that she is your grandmother. It was enough to put me off tenors altogether.”

  “Tony,” began Lord Banning, and it was a particular note in his voice as he stopped that made the earl look up at his friend with those calm gray eyes suddenly overcast with concern.

  “Something happened, Varian?”

  A painful and slow nod; with a sigh he sat down carefully in the other chair and leaned back and closed his eyes, resting his cognac for a moment on the arm of his chair. “You shall tell me I am a fool, and I know it very well. I surprised her in the garden this morning.”

  “Did you?” inquired that quiet, considering voice, as Merrill’s gray eyes narrowed slightly over his cognac.

  “I— I shan’t go into it; only that she climbed that damned oak tree to rescue my cravat after that plaguey kitten carried it off, and she fell the last few feet as she was climbing down. I caught her; and, damn me, I kissed her. I no more could have stopped myself than— than I could cross the Atlantic in a rowboat.”

  And since the earl had lately been prone to somewhat the same feelings of wishing for something that he ought not to want just yet, he nodded rather more sympathetically than he might have otherwise. “I knew it would happen; only a matter of time. What did she do?”

  “Kissed me back,” Drew said instantly. The blue eyes came open; vibrant, wide, startlingly intelligent. “Quite enthusiastically, actually. And then she told me that she wished I hadn’t done it.”

  “What? Kissed her?”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said slowly, staring at the golden liquid in his glass. He lifted it musingly to his lips and tasted it. “I apologized; and then she shook her head,” he said slowly, as if recalling it for the first time, although it was all that had been in his mind all day, “and said, No, Varian, the letters. ‘The letters.’ What in God’s name is she talking about?”

  “Letters?” inquired the earl, those lazy gray eyes suddenly awake. They narrowed against his friend’s face. “Did you write her any letters while you were abroad?”

  He shook his head. “No.” A muscle tightened along that square jaw as he raised his eyes to his friend’s. “Not a one. Do you suppose she holds it against me?”

  “No, I don’t think that’s it. Tell me; you had some correspondence with Sir Colbert, didn’t you? What was in it?”

  “It was of the briefest nature. Instructions, the like, for his investment. He very seldom mentioned any of them, except he did write to me when Chloe married Timothy Dickinson. Nothing more.”

  “And yours to him?”

  “Very much the same,” said Lord Banning, with a sigh.

  “Nothing that she might have got hold of and read and misunderstood?”

  “God, Tony,” he said, helplessly, “I don’t know. Reports from the mine; reports on his investment. Business. Nothing else. Except— ”

  “Except what?” Tony prompted.

  “His last bank draft— It was very odd. He must have sent it off just before he died. It took rather a long time to arrive; as a matter of fact, he had addressed it in error. It went originally to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Barham; he was a particular friend of Sir Colbert’s, and I suppose they corresponded regularly for decades. Barham forwarded the bank draft to me with the explanation that he had found it in a packet addressed to him. Then, of course, you sent word that he had died, and to tell you the truth, I had forgotten all about it.”

  And Tony was staring at him; he said, “Damn! I wish Claudia were here; for I am certain that if she would put all this into its logical and rational order, it should fall instantly into place. A letter, addressed to Barham, with a bank draft for you. Well,” he said, sighing, and rousing himself a little, “I am much too tired to think it all out tonight. I shall sleep on it, Varian, and everything will look better in the morning.”

  “I suppose,” said Lord Banning, and then they talked for a while of the Tremaine, Drew’s merchant vessel that still had not come into port, that had recently been listed as most likely missing at sea or impounded by the French. Although Napoleon’s harassment of the English through his Continental System, by which he had completely blocked off all the northern ports from English trade, had caused England less trouble than Buonaparte had intended, it still posed certain dangers to merchant sea trade, in which all game was considered fair, and only with the protection of English gunships could a merchant vessel look forward to a relatively safe passage.

  This evening, the disappearance of the Tremaine seemed the crowning defeat for Varian Drew, the loss of those carefully collected treasures over which he had taken so many pains and which he had wanted so much to share with his lovely wife. Now it seemed they were as lost to him as she. With a heavy heart indeed, Lord Banning finally went up to bed in the early hours of the morning.

  Claudia, poor dear, was in the midst of a completely illogical and irrational dilemma that evening. She went up to bed and lay awake for a good part of the night as well, thinking very seriously about what she ought to do.

  She had said yes to Lord Merrill.
/>   In his library the day he had proposed, he had acted rather like a lover, and she had been overcome with a perfectly unreasonable desire that, indeed, he might be the sort of gentleman who did ravish innocent, awkward maiden females. And then he had kissed her lightly and had moved away; he had been, just as he always was, calm and pleasant, excellent company, and quite the very best friend that she had ever had. She was certain that she ought to be perfectly happy to spend the rest of her life with a man who shared all of her interests and who treated her with a great deal of good-natured affection. Indeed, there was every reason in the world that she ought to be perfectly satisfied with such an arrangement.

  Claudia knew that Tony Merrill was not passionate; he was calm and pleasant and good-natured, and not often moved to an excess of emotion, and if she were honest, she had to admit that a large part of her was exactly the same way.

  At least she had rather imagined that she was that way; she had suspected for some weeks now, in fact since she had begun this very odd friendship with Tony Merrill, that there might be something in her hiding behind the Shakespeare and the Milton and the Pope, that caused her to read medieval love poetry and to think of a certain pair of gray eyes looking down on her, and that had elicited a tear or two, lately, when she had read a certain Shakespearean sonnet.

  Miss Claudia Ffawlkes had begun to suspect that she was a woman, in fact; all these years that she had so firmly kept Tony Merrill out of her mind had also forced her to put her heart and her feelings out of consciousness. But with his placid entrance into her life as a friend, and then as a fiancé, had come a surprisingly fervent wish that he might have a little of the same sort of feeling for her that Varian so obviously had for Claire. Once, just once, she wanted to know what it was like to be swept into a passionate embrace and kissed until she fainted.

  She supposed it was very foolish of her; in fact, she knew that what Tony Merrill felt for her was a sort of sisterly fondness, a sort of good-natured companionship. He probably expected that she would keep him from loneliness in his old age and would run his house well, a female who would not look askance in the least upon his spending a good deal of time in his favorite spot, which was among his books, as he had said. And she would be all that; she would be very happy doing precisely that.

  But her dilemma was of a different nature; the dilemma was whether she ought to hide it from him. Whether she ought to conceal that she had been head-over-ears in love with him for years, and that she had dreamt once or twice, in moments of unrestrained foolishness to which she was occasionally— in spite of her rationality— still prone, of that yes being a good deal different. She did not want to make Tony uncomfortable; of course she did not wish to give him the least cause for guilt over his inability to feel something that he could not feel, not for any reason other than that he just simply didn’t. She wished to make him a good wife, and to put such a constraint between them did not seem the way to do it.

  Claudia Ffawlkes was, after all, a very private and secretive person, and although Tony Merrill had discovered most of her secrets, more than any other human being, she rather thought she ought to keep this one from him: that she was wholly and passionately in love with him, and that she knew he did not return it.

  With a tearful sigh Claudia plumped up her pillow in the darkness and turned over, and wished just for an instant that she had had the good sense to say no.

  The ladies of Banning House went out early in the morning to the dressmakers, for they were well into Claudia’s trousseau, beset with a multitude of details for the ceremony and the subsequent celebration, and whether it all would be ready by August 1. Claudia had asked her sister if they might be married in Claire’s garden, in the gazebo, and Claire, thinking that her older and previously very unsentimental and rational sister had been changed overnight into someone very much as romantic as she was herself, agreed instantly, with a great deal of surprised pleasure. Chloe was to come down from Finchingfield with her husband Timothy, who had, they had heard, given up his commission in the Royal Navy; and Clytie and Cleo and their husbands were planning a journey for about the same time. So they would have a full house of guests indeed in another fortnight or so, and suddenly the time had seemed short, with all the preparations to be made.

  Fortunately for both Claudia and Claire, planning for Claudia’s wedding party provided plenty to occupy their minds, even to maintain a very credible cheerfulness. It made an excellent topic for conversation at the dinner table each night, one which did not require Claire to face her increasing estrangement from her husband.

  She continued to work in her garden, chiefly because it was her only refuge, and Varian did not again venture outside, although sometimes she felt his eyes on her from the terrace doors. She decided that he left her alone in her garden out of disinterest, dislike, out of hatred, even, now that he had discovered that she knew his secret. And they did not discuss it.

  Drew, quite to the contrary, left his wife alone out of a sensitive care for her own privacy, because he did not wish to distress her or to make her sanctuary unbearable. He had not discovered what she had meant; he had plagued himself to death over her cryptic comment, recalled every word that he had ever written to her father, and been over in his mind every letter to anyone that he had written from India that she could have possibly misconstrued, and the thing of it was, there was nothing there. Nothing.

  At least Tony Merrill had agreed, somewhat reluctantly, that Lady Morgan’s usefulness was most definitely past; after that rash moment or two in the grass behind the gazebo, Varian did not think there was any point at all in trying to conceal his heart from his wife any longer. He wondered if Claire had even noticed his sudden lack of interest in Lady Morgan, and indeed, in any other female at these rout parties and dress balls and musicales that they attended in the evenings, for she was so gay and carefree around her bachelor friends that he was certain she did not miss him.

  Drew began to find the card room earlier and earlier at these things; Tony Merrill hovered over him in that blandly fraternal way of his and would not allow him to drink too much or play past his limit, or it is very likely that Varian would have worked himself into a blue stupor.

  It was in the card rooms in the evenings that there was so much talk of Napoleon and Spain and Portugal. Bessières routed the main Spanish army at Medina del Ríoseco, a hundred miles or so northwest of Madrid, and, what was more worrisome, not fifty miles due east of Bragança on the Portuguese border. The English, God bless their phlegm, moved at last; around the middle of July an expeditionary force of English regulars was dispatched with all deliberate speed to Lisbon to reinforce the Spanish guerrillas, and everyone breathed a hearty sigh of relief.

  Foreign Secretary Canning had been reluctant, but had allowed himself to be convinced by Castlereagh and others who argued for war. It was obvious by the first of July that there was nothing else to be done if they did not intend to allow Napoleon free run of Europe from the Atlantic to the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Although the English victory three years ago at Trafalgar had demonstrated irrefutably the mastery of British sea power, Napoleon looked to be unbeatable on land if Italy and the Low Countries were any indication, and it looked very much like the German states, and possibly Austria as well, were soon to succumb.

  Even the outspoken Lady Banning had suggested, on that fiery visit to Canning’s office one afternoon, that mounting an English offensive in Portugal and Spain while Napoleon was still very much committed to his campaigns east of France was crucial. George Canning, insular and cautious, eventually came to agree with the hawks, although English troops did not begin to arrive in Lisbon until well into July. The first message to Westminster from Lisbon was, “Send over someone who can speak this damn Portuguese,” for it seemed neither the army nor the navy had many Portuguese who spoke English, and those who did— mostly sailors pressed into service on English ships— could not be trusted not to disappear the instant they were let ashore.

  This
peculiar problem brought a short note to Banning House one afternoon a week before Claudia’s and Tony’s wedding. A servant of Canning’s pulled the bell just after Chloe and Timothy Dickinson had arrived in the front hall with two very disgruntled youngsters, three nurses, Chloe’s maid, a mountain of baggage, and a small but energetic puppy. Lord Banning received the note for his wife, who at the moment was attempting to disentangle her young nephew, who had just begun to walk, from a hissing Sully and the barking puppy. Chiefly to get away from the noise, over which a five-month-old baby was crying for her dinner, he took the note into the library and glanced over it quickly.

  It was a missive from Canning; he wished to know if Lady Banning knew of anyone trustworthy in Town who spoke Portuguese fluently enough to serve as an interpreter for a month or so in Lisbon, until they could secure someone permanent. Drew stared at the note for a moment, and then quickly folded it into his pocket and went out into the hallway again to greet Timothy Dickinson and welcome him to London.

  There was good news that evening at the Sheridan’s dress ball: Dupont had been beaten at Baylen on the nineteenth by the Spanish regular forces under Castaños, supported by the guerrillas, and the Spanish were taking their guerrilla victory of the Grande Armée very much in pride, although in fact Dupont had been separated from his supporting division, and had ended up with only about nine thousand raw recruits in the final battle. At least there was hope; there was a great feeling of optimism in hearing that the English were unloading in Lisbon, and surely, everyone thought, it would soon be over.

  chapter eight

  Calamities and Errors

  on the last day of July, Varian Drew, feeling rather sorry for himself, wandered out into the garden after luncheon.