Claire Read online

  For a moment all Tony could do was gaze in incredulity at the man before him, for the only thing at all like the Varian Drew he had put aboard ship for India two-and-a-half years ago was his blue eyes, and perhaps a slight, lingering limp, that nonetheless took nothing away from that casual magnificence.

  Merrill said, “My God, Varian— ” and this time it was Drew that threw his arms around his old friend in a great enthusiastic embrace, laughing, and pummeling his back, and telling him how glad he was to be home, and asking if he’d had dinner.

  “Good god, I can hardly credit my eyes,” Tony said, after that first heady greeting had carried them, laughing, swearing, across the elegant lobby to the stairs, and Varian had led him down the hall to a supper parlor, and had poured him out a glass of wine and brought it to him.

  “I’ve got back my two or three stone,” nodded Varian Drew, those blue eyes alight in his brown face. “And a little life, and a hell of a lot of money,” he added, with another laugh. “You should’ve come with me, Tony! We would have made two or three fortunes.”

  “I’ve been busy, myself,” said the placid Merrill, smiling slightly. “I went over to bring home the Ffawlkes ladies, after Sir Colbert passed away; I’m very glad that I did so, for I think they were a little lost for a while, you know. Sir Colbert took so much of— of life with him, I’m afraid, for that household.”

  The brown face before him sobered slightly. “If I could have sailed home a moment sooner, I would have done so,” said Drew. “And December is not the best time of year to set out from India for England. I’m damned lucky that I’m not at the bottom of the ocean; I had chance enough, I assure you.”

  “Oh, I know; don’t regard it.” Merrill considered the claret-colored liquid in his wineglass. “I suppose I ought to warn you; it’s been a difficult few years for them. They’re not the same.”

  “I imagined,” said Lord Banning, casting that jewel-blue gaze over his friend, “that it would be. I wish— ” Drew’s square jaw jutted for a moment, and then he said instead, “You’ve brought home Claudia and Chloe, haven’t you? Why did Claire not come with them?”

  “She didn’t explain,” said Merrill. “She said she wanted to do some shopping, and that she thought she might enjoy a week or two to herself. I didn’t ask.”

  “Alone?”

  Merrill’s placid face broke into a rueful grin. “I told you: they’re not the same. Claire is not the same; I hadn’t the least reservation about her staying alone. My God— she’s got a whole houseful of servants, you know, that are devoted to her and jabber constantly at her and at each other in Portuguese. Any one of them would die before allowing her harm. And— ”

  “And what?” prompted Drew.

  “Oh, god knows, Varian, I don’t.” The placid gentleman sighed and shrugged his broad shoulders slightly and stared at nothing in particular. “I— I rather had the feeling that something had happened to— to distress her, in a very great way, and I could see that perhaps something was wrong, and I shall be honest with you, my friend,” he said, his lazy eyes straying to his friend’s bronzed face, “I rather think it has to do with you. She refused to talk about you; when your name came up in conversation, it was instantly ignored. I don’t suppose you’ve done something regrettable in India, and she has somehow found out about it?”

  “Good god, no,” said Varian blankly. “Not that I know of; unless she would hold— No, of course she wouldn’t; I’m not a monk,” he said bluntly. “I haven’t left any fatherless children behind, and I haven’t killed anyone— ” That intense, somehow invigorated blue gaze fixed itself on his friend’s face. “Has she fallen in love with someone there, and she’s regretting this damned marriage?”

  “I don’t know,” Merrill confessed honestly. “Although she seemed to take perfectly for granted that she would resume her life as Lady Banning as soon as you returned to England. I think she expected to arrive first; you very nearly beat me home, you know.”

  “Well, you had a few excuses, I understand,” laughed Banning. “Chloe’s brats; where’s her husband?”

  “God only knows; he’s a first officer on some Navy ship. I think she means to live at Finchingfield until he comes home. Though if he’s like her father, it won’t be for long, and he’ll be off again somewhere.”

  “Evidently he’s been in her bed at least twice,” said Drew, and they laughed, for along with the quiet and composed Claudia, Merrill had brought home a vivacious Chloe Dickinson and her year-old son and her one-month-old daughter. “Well, when shall I expect her? Middle of next week, do you think?”

  “I imagine it won’t be much before then,” nodded Merrill, then, as two footmen knocked and came inside to lay out dinner, and they sat down to an excellent English roast beef, which Varian Drew consumed with fervor. For hours they talked of India, and then of France, and Napoleon, and of England. Finally, toward midnight, they talked of Varian’s plans for the future, which he said at the moment meant signing the papers for Banningwood in the morning at ten, followed by the transfer of the deed to his family’s London townhouse in Cavendish Square at two in the afternoon. There was such a look in his face as he said it that Tony Merrill hadn’t the heart to tell him the rest.

  It was raining again; it was the first of May, 1808, and across the Channel where Napoleon, empereur, ruled most of Europe, the skies were sunny and clear, but here in London, crossing the Thames and driving along the embankment in the shiny black coach that Varian Drew had sent to Dover to collect his wife Claire, it was dismal and dreary on this late afternoon of spring, in a way that she had forgotten.

  Claire Drew had thought that surely because she had changed, England would be different as well. She had imagined that those humid, drowsy afternoons under the wide porches and the almond trees, with palm fans to stir the air until a violent shower would come at sunset and sweep over them in cool relief, somehow would be transported with her when she left that pleasant pink house at Faro and moved up the coast and across the Channel to England. But of course it was not so; she let down the carriage window and breathed in the cool dampness of the City, with little Elena wide-awake and staring at her side, and Consuela drowsing off into placid snores across from her.

  They turned up Charing Cross Road, which she vaguely remembered from her trips to London in her childhood and youth, and then down another street, and by then she was quite lost. Claire watched the black carriages, some encrested, bowl along past her in the gray April afternoon past an occasional wagon or cart, along the façade of shops and houses that lined the shiny wet cobblestone street. It was nothing at all like the shimmering whiteness of the sand at Faro, or the bright red roofs of Lisbon, or the narrow and often filthy streets in Tangier; there were no golden stuccoed churches nor hordes of dogs and children making passage impossible. She had left one civilization for another, and she was not the same.

  The chaise pulled up before an imposing house in an imposing square; she drew in a deep breath as she put up the carriage window. Pulling on her gloves and tightening her hat, Claire shook Consuela’s shoulder gently, murmuring in automatic Portuguese that they had arrived, and gave Elena a comfortingly pat on the arm and smiled in reassurance. The door was opened and the step put down beneath an arbor of footmen’s umbrellas, and with a resolute smile, she swept up the step to the house and inside, through a door that had opened up before her, and paused in the hallway.

  “Good afternoon, my lady,” bowed a stately man whom she thought must be the butler. “His Lordship is in the library; shall I take your things?”

  “What is your name?”

  The lady’s voice, rich as honey and cream, retained only a trace of the exuberant child that had played and romped over the meadows of Essex, barely a hint of the fearless eighteen-year-old bride who had ventured with two sisters to a far-distant land. It was the quiet, controlled voice of a young woman who had nursed her father through almost two years of terminal illness, had delivered one of her sister’s babies
and nursed him through some fierce fever while Chloe was giving birth to his sister, and then had buried her father, had gathered up her life, and had somehow, finally, come home.

  “Stiles, Your Ladyship. Very glad to have you home,” he said, with a touch of a smile. He had served the Bannings in this house for decades, and he had watched in horror as Varian Drew was hauled away out of the library down the hall to debtors’ prison almost four years ago. Two weeks ago, when young Lord Banning had come to him with the news that he was again to serve at Banning House, dear old Stiles had wept.

  “Thank you, Stiles. Could you direct my women upstairs, please?” that elegant voice continued, and Stiles nodded.

  “Good god— ”

  She turned at that voice; she recalled it faintly. It had belonged to her husband. The blond giant with the bronzed skin and the broad shoulders, however, hardly resembled the man she had married; he was staring at her from a wide, open doorway, with his blue eyes brilliant in unabashed shock.

  “Claire?”

  “Yes?” she replied, considering him in that direct manner of hers.

  For she was not plump; as the pelisse and hat and were given over to Stiles, and she turned to the blond giant with an expressionless smile, he thought for a moment that some ghost in his library had just given him a stout left across the jaw. He beheld a dark-haired, blue-eyed goddess, with skin smoother than the finest rose Italian marble, with coils of dark hair gleaming in the light of the lamps just lit as she turned her head, and with a waist that he very likely could have encompassed with a single hand. That plump, round face that he had married had turned into a deliciously pink-and-white oval, those straight dark brows and a tiny dimple in her chin the only remnants of the child. Even her eyes were somehow larger and bluer, fringed with a profusion of lashes that swept across her cheek now as she blinked at him.

  “You’re not,” she said matter-of-factly, “Varian.”

  He could only stare at her, wishing vaguely that he could breathe. He was married to this divine creature.

  “Are you?”

  He looked away; he swallowed hard and stared at the hem of her very fashionable velvet traveling dress, of a color that he could only describe as summer-blue, which, he rather thought, matched her eyes; he closed his jaw firmly with an attendant rueful smile, and nodded his head. “I haven’t changed in the least,” he said blankly, “compared to you, my dear. Come in.”

  He stood aside, and she passed down the hallway and through the door into his library, and glanced quickly at the books, at the warm patina of cherry wood on the walls, and the dark leather chairs and inlaid tables, and at a rather roguish tiger staring up at her from the floor. “Meu deus!” she said, halting instantly.

  He laughed. “It’s only Balaghat; old friend of mine. We finally had it out, and I’ve made him a pet. Here, sit down. Have a glass of wine with me?”

  She made her way gingerly around the striped beast, glancing up once at her husband, and took one of the dark leather chairs.

  “Yes, thank you, I believe so,” she nodded.

  When he turned away from the sideboard he caught her staring at him; he smiled and brought her the wine. “The Varian you knew wasn’t nearly so healthy, but I assure you, it’s me; in fact, I’m much closer now to the me I know than I was then. I was devilish sick after that hellhole that your father rescued me from, you know.”

  “You seem— ” she accepted the wine and looked up at him. “Larger, I suppose. Should I not have said that?”

  He was laughing; he had recalled suddenly that forthright, plump child informing him one morning three years ago in Merrill’s park that he was old, and for a moment he had thought she meant to say so again. “No; I am only trying to reconcile that charming child that I left almost three years ago with this elegant lady who has just sat down in my library.” He bent down suddenly and kissed her, rather like that brief caress after their wedding, on that smooth, velvet pink cheek and knew suddenly that this was not going to be easy. “Welcome home, Claire; I am damned glad to be here.”

  “So am I,” she nodded, and they sipped their wine for a while, and talked pleasantly of the house and of his purchase of Banningwood, the family estate north of Cambridge that had been sold off when his father died. They did not speak of India or Portugal, of his father or her father, or any of those faintly threatening subjects. Rather he told her that Merrill was coming to dinner at eight, and that if she wasn’t too tired, he had thought they might go to the theatre this evening, the three of them. In a little while, she excused herself and went upstairs to dress.

  Within a half-hour of Claire’s arrival upstairs, she was soaking in a large copper bathtub, her dark straight hair floating out like a cloak around her in a sweet, lightly perfumed bath. Consuela fussed around her for a few moments, and then Claire sent both Consuela, her dresser, and Elena, the old woman’s niece, who acted as a sort of maid to her, away, and leaned back in the steamy water and closed her eyes.

  She did not like this chamber. It was pleasant enough, she supposed, with pretty blue-and-white satin hangings and elegant chairs and tables popular in the last century in France. A large bed reigned over the chamber on a low dais, bordered by expensive wool rugs and framed by tall windows that overlooked the gardens below, and there was a small receiving room just past the doorway. But what she had seen instantly, of course, was that other door; her bedchamber, that of the lady of the house, connected very conveniently to a dressing room that she shared with that of the master of the house, and that small, nondescript door had awakened such a panic in her that she had thought she would faint when she had first come inside.

  Seeing Varian had been a shock, of course; she had expected that slight, slender hulk of former masculinity still leaning on his cane, and she had found instead, ensconced in his library— with the skin of a tiger named Balaghat lying on his floor in mute testimony to his transformation— a golden-haired, blue-eyed, bronzed Apollo, staring at her with the same admiration she had seen in the eyes of many men in the last months since her father had died. The change in herself had been too gradual to be of much note to her, other than the fact that all that horrid baby-fat had disappeared, and in its place had come a womanly blossoming that men appreciated. She was still the same Claire who had stolen flowers from Merrill’s garden, and who had wished her eyebrows might be a little less straight and her chin not quite so square. But the change in the man who had appeared today with her husband’s voice had quite, quite up-ended her world, and she was having the devil of a time dealing with it.

  Claire was not a particularly rational being; she was intelligent and well-read, and occasionally too out-spoken, but she had long-ago accepted that hers was a soul ruled by intuition and a passionate heart and had ceased to give it serious thought. And lately her intuition had suspected that the man whom she had met this afternoon was no longer worthy of her affections, while her passionate heart had admitted— quite instantly when she heard his voice, before she looked up and saw that Adonis gazing at her— that plump little Claire Ffawlkes had fallen in love with Varian Drew, quite against reason, the second morning they walked by Merrill’s lake.

  Those intense blue eyes raking her over this afternoon had given her more of a start than she cared to admit. She had progressed from Gibraltar to Salcombe, and from thence to Dover with the calm determination to destroy the man whom she had married, and all she could think of when she had seen him standing there was that she was very desperately in love with her husband, and had been, quite hopelessly, for the better part of three years.

  The fact that in his eyes she had seen desire, which she had grown to recognize, and possessiveness, which was his right, after all, had not changed her heart in the least. She had smiled at him in that cool, expressionless way that she had learned in those long months at Faro and had put down the most overwhelming urge to throw herself into his arms and weep all over his very expensive and elegant coat.

  Of course nothing had changed.
She still had to do what she had returned to England to do; she still had to see him punished, and somehow right the wrong that had been committed, and perhaps then she could go home and face the manor house at Finchingfield, and recall the memory of her father with something more than anguish. She had to absolve herself, if not her father; she somehow had to root out this evilness which would take over her, too, if she did not cleanse it.

  And in the meantime she did not know quite how to manage her heart.

  For she was certain that the innocuous and innocent door would open tonight and his bronzed and hungry body would enter it; she was certain that he would gaze at her with desire in his eyes, and this time, after all those times in Portugal when she had seen that look in men’s eyes and had felt nothing, she would feel. She would feel. She had had plenty of opportunity for dalliance in that small, ingrown community of English at Faro, and later when they had gone to Lisbon, she had acquired a certain power with her cool lack of response that she had been a little proud of. And yet the lack of response had been genuine, because she dreamt at night of cool blue eyes laughing at her, and of a slight, limping figure who was a little old, and of his swift caress after their wedding. Claire had always known quite certainly where her heart was.

  When he had bent and kissed her cheek this afternoon, she had been overcome by the desire to turn her head, just a little— to feel— just for a moment, to feel a deeper caress, such as she had dreamt of, and only by the most vivid recollection of a certain letter buried in her trunks had she resisted.

  She opened her eyes onto her right hand against the copper tub over the steamy water of her bath.

  Well, Banning, here’s another bit of lucre— hope it will prove as valuable as what you’ve made out of the rest of it.