Claire Page 6

  “Only a kitten!” he contradicted, standing uncertainly, his hand on his slim waist drawing back the corner of his coat, in the doorway of the salon. “A very small one!”

  “He is quite as fast as the larger kind!” she laughed, and knelt before a skirted sofa, a second before a flash of white fur streaked out from underneath. Her hands had him within her grasp for a heartbeat, and then he was gone again. “I thought you would have known better, after— Oh, the devil!”

  Claire was off again, cornering the kitten beneath a china cabinet and kneeling down to try and coax him out. “Stiles! Perhaps you might bring a bowl of milk?” she called, and turned back to the kitten.

  Varian had knelt down in the carpet beside her. “You’ve frightened him to death!” he said in a low voice.

  “No! I haven’t!” she said. “I did no more than peep inside that basket and he was off like a cannon blast! Come here, Sully, do!”

  “Sully?”

  Another laugh; “Well, of course! What else do you think I should call him, after this?”

  “If, in addition to his name, he also acquires that disgusting habit of raking over my boots, I shall ban him to the stables!”

  “Varian!” Claire put down her head and inched her hand forward, speaking in a low voice to the small cat; he was very pretty, with huge blue eyes and a tiny pink nose, and a fluffy white tail that he had curled tightly around his little paws in the corner. “Of course you shan’t! He shall learn manners and be perfectly respectable!”

  “Like all your devotees, I see!”

  “Mãe de Deus!” came Consuela’s voice, her stout black-garbed figure lowering itself to one knee by the china cabinet with a groan of effort and a stream of Portuguese, which Claire, laughing as she replied, waved away.

  Stiles brought in the milk, and Claire took it from him, without a glance at her husband still on one knee beside her, and laid it beneath the cabinet. “There you are, Sully! And I shan’t allow these horrid creatures to blame you at all; I daresay I wouldn’t have cared a bit for that basket, either!” And the kitten, after eyeing the milk hungrily for a moment, ventured, a single step at a time, to the bowl, and then, with those blue eyes fixed suspiciously on the humans, stuck out his tiny pink tongue and lapped up the milk hurriedly. “You see!” said Claire, nodding.

  “Well, while Sully has his milk, I believe that I shall have my tea!” observed Banning, and stood and extended his hand to Claire, which she accepted automatically.

  “Yes; I imagine he will be happier if we leave him in peace for a few moments to recover from his fright, and then perhaps we can coax him out,” she said.

  “I see,” said her husband casually, as the tea tray was brought in, “that Sully may teach me a thing or two!” and asked her so quickly about her afternoon, and if it had been pleasant, that she hardly heard that small, amused comment, and thought even less about it. They laughed again when Sully appeared at the edge of the carpet and began washing his face.

  It was, after all, a very pleasant afternoon.

  That evening the Bannings accompanied Tony Merrill to a dress ball at the imposing residence of Lord Melville, former First Lord of the Admiralty. For a Banning to be invited to Henry Dundas’ house was perhaps more of an accomplishment than anyone much remarked, for it had been Henry Dundas who had, five years ago, ordered an investigation into the personal affairs of Varian’s father, Admiral Vaughn Drew. At the time, the Admiral had had command of a ship under young Nelson in the Mediterranean, but when news of Henry Dundas’ accusations drifted to his ears, he departed for England immediately, even before he was called home.

  Vaughn Drew knew what was coming. For the whole of his adult life, he had struggled to gain the approval of his wife’s family. Even the advancement to Admiral, the treasures he brought home from his years at sea, the expensive gifts he lavished on his wife and son had not swayed the sentiments of Lord Swaffingham about his son-in-law; but Drew’s attempts to increase his esteem had left the Admiral most seriously in debt. Two years before he had secretly contacted a man in Marseilles whom the English suspected of recruiting spies, and Vaughn Drew, in a fit of despair, had agreed to pass English information to the French. It was all, he reasoned, for his family; it was to save the Banning family fortunes. Perhaps then would Swaffingham find him tolerable.

  But it was not to be. Instead of repairing the family fortunes, his rash act of betrayal had left him disgraced, soon to be hanged or transported. Lord Swaffingham was about to be proved absolutely right: indeed, Vaughn Drew had been an unsuitable, unworthy husband for the beautiful Elizabeth. As his life began to unravel, the Admiral’s hatred of his wife’s family turned everything inside him bitter and angry, and, arriving in England, the third baron secretly sold everything he owned, Banning House, his estate near Cambridge, all unentailed, his horses, the family jewels, his investments, everything— and put it all on a horse at Ascot a week later.

  He lost it, lost the accumulated wealth of generations of Bannings on a single, unremarkable race. Knowing full well that he would be found guilty of the charges yet to be lodged against him, he came inside his house in London at two o’clock in the morning shouting in a mad frenzy that Swaffingham be damned, he had proven his father-in-law right. Let the old man rescue his precious daughter from ignominy and poverty now!

  His son, Varian, six- or seven-and-twenty years old, coming home not ten minutes after his father, was struck speechless; he finally wormed the whole out of the Admiral, who was determined to kill himself rather than face his accusers. Varian, managing to wrest away his father’s pistol, suffered a shot-wound in his foot.

  In four days it was over; the Admiral was charged and convicted of selling English naval secrets to the French in Egypt, and was sentenced to die by hanging. Four-and-twenty hours later his son and his wife discovered themselves to have been paupered as well.

  The cruelest was yet to come; it was discovered, too late, that six years ago Banningwood had had a mortgage applied against it in the amount of thirty-four thousand pounds, and when it had been sold a few days before, the buyer had received no notice of it. Now the debt had to be settled.

  The Admiral’s wife, the lovely Elizabeth, died of a heart seizure before the doctor could be summoned, and young Lord Banning was taken, silent, withdrawn, his foot already infected from that vicious wound, to prison. He had very nearly died. And he had wished, for a long time, that he had.

  So the casual handshake that evening was more than a greeting between young Lord Banning and the aging Henry Dundas; it was, in manner of speaking, a resolution of a long and torturous situation that had involved the two of them, even though they had neither been any more than chance participants. The invitation to Melville’s dress ball was the end of a struggle for Varian Drew to reclaim the family fortunes and, even more importantly, the family honor which his father had so willfully betrayed. If that handshake was perhaps lengthier than the one before it or the one that followed, and if there was perhaps a moment of silent communication between the brilliant blue eyes of the young man and those of the aged Lord Melville, it was understandable.

  In fact, the only person who noticed it at all was, quite illogically, the lovely Lady Banning.

  Claire Drew descended upon English society that evening like a dove settling from the heavens. Along with a striking set of sapphires and diamonds, she wore a Portuguese-made gown of exquisite silver lace over sky-blue satin, and on her dark head, like a crown, sat a Spanish mantilla. She was quite the most beautiful woman there, in the opinion of her husband, who did not say so, and as well, in the opinion of very nearly every other person, male and female, in attendance. To the amusement and amazement of the gentility, Lady Banning spent the first half-hour discussing Spain and Portugal with Admiral Middleton, Lord Barham, who had succeeded their host as First Lord of the Admiralty.

  “Dance with me?” asked Lord Banning of his wife, after Barham had moved away slightly to speak to Canning, who was dealing, at the
moment, with a rather large problem in the form of what the English should do about Spain.

  It looked as though Napoleon had two options in Spain: the king was aged, his son Ferdinand malleable, and his minister Godoy greedy. That left l’empereur with two potential rulers: Ferdinand, the king’s son, or Godoy, the king’s minister, who was hated fiercely for his cruelty and harshness. Napoleon could either exploit the dissensions in the royal family and dethrone the Bourbons completely, leaving Godoy in charge, or he could marry Ferdinand to a Buonaparte princess and still retain control of the country. With Napoleon’s recent problems on the Prussian front, he could not afford another crisis, so he did neither: he ousted the Bourbons and got rid of the tricky Godoy all at a stroke, by putting his brother Joseph on the throne in Spain.

  “Of course,” Claire nodded, and accepted her husband’s hand. He led her into a waltz, and they continued that political conversation for a few moments. With some astonishment, Banning discovered that this exquisite lady to whom he was married had a mind.

  “I always wanted that dance that Tony gave you at our wedding,” he said suddenly, after they had been surprised, each privately, to discover themselves well-matched in dance as well as in politics. “I never felt my deuced foot worse than having to watch you dance with someone else on our wedding day.”

  “We shall forget it then; nothing should make me happier than to forget that day,” she said, lightly. She felt his hand tense on hers, and those intense blue eyes rose instantly to his. “No— I mean— I didn’t mean— that,” she said instantly. “Only Papa, you know.”

  “Was that what you were discussing so seriously with Barham?”

  “Not at all,” she said, surprised. “He asked a few things about Spain; I am to meet him at two tomorrow at Canning’s office. Just gossip, you know.”

  “Are you?” Drew said, regarding her with a faintly startled glance. “Shall you mind if I come along?”

  “No, I don’t suppose so,” she said. Claire had thought, of course, that she could take that horrible packet and give it over into Barham’s hands, and perhaps let him deal with it, and then, she abruptly, suddenly, intensely, fiercely wished for an excuse not to be able to do so. Her husband’s presence tomorrow would be precisely that. “Unless you know anything of southern Spain, I rather imagine that you will be bored. But I shan’t mind.”

  He did not tell her that he had lived with his mother in Lisbon for four years while his father had been at sea. “I shall learn something, I am certain,” Varian said, and added, “and I shan’t let it get around that you’ve faced down— what was it?— a dozen Moroccans one evening at Faro?”

  “How do you know about that?” she inquired evenly, those crystalline blue eyes unreadable.

  “One of my servants told me,” he said frankly. “I have an Indian in my employ who speaks Portuguese. I think your woman Consuela has told him.”

  “I have heard of him; I have not seen him,” she replied, without commenting on his linguistic expertise.

  “He rules my stables in a white turban; he is Hindu, and he does not speak English very well, in spite of my efforts to teach it to him. His name is Rajat, and he has saved my life twice,” he said.

  “How does he know Portuguese and no English?”

  A laugh; “Good god, I can’t tell you. He has a little French, too, and Stiles is quite fluent, but that is his only means of communication with the rest of the staff. They are rather suspicious of him, although he is perfectly harmless, in spite of his appearance.”

  Claire considered him gravely. “You have a strange household, Lord Banning,” she said, smiling faintly, without that cool reserve that usually destroyed the humor in her face. “And I am afraid I have complicated it somewhat.”

  Drew returned her amusement. “Yes, you have,” he nodded frankly, and took all of the barb out of his words with the smile that accompanied them.

  He danced with her only once more that evening, toward eleven, and not because he didn’t wish to, but because he could not get to her side. Varian’s beautiful wife had suddenly become surrounded by a throng of admirers who wished to hear her story, although none found it odd that she could recite the whole of two-and-a-half years in five or six minutes. Petersham and Vincent Pershing were there, and Alvanley and Demming, all of them single, and also, Drew noted, Jonathan Fiske, with whom he had had certain dealings in Madras, and whom he mistrusted implicitly where money or a beautiful woman, married or single, was concerned.

  Drew frowned slightly and turned away from watching his wife, and went over and discussed dogs for twenty minutes with Lady Eastleigh, and then was accosted briefly by his host, Lord Melville.

  “Well, Banning,” said the elderly man, coming forward with an extra glass of wine in his hand. “Thought you looked thirsty; have a drink?”

  “You’re very kind, sir,” he said, and smiled and took the goblet.

  “Meant to speak to you, you know,” he said bluntly. “I hadn’t an idea if you’d accept my invitation tonight, and I wanted you to know that it is very much to my honor that you have done so. No one regrets it all more than I.”

  “It’s over with,” said Banning, still smiling. “It’s all history, now, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve come back from Madras a nabob, I hear,” said Melville. “Bought up everything your father sold off, haven’t you?”

  Banning hesitated briefly. “Everything,” he said, and there was a great deal in that one word.

  “Damned glad to see it,” nodded Melville.

  “May I ask you a question, sir?”

  “Of course, Banning,” said the older man, immediately.

  “Was it you who went to Sir Colbert Ffawlkes?”

  The aged eyes rested briefly on the young man’s bronzed face and those intense blue eyes. “Hmm. Well, now, could have been; don’t recall it all, you know,” he said, after a moment.

  The blue gaze did not waver; in a moment Drew nodded slightly. “Thank you, sir,” he said quietly, and after a final nod, excused himself and went back to his wife.

  chapter three

  A Gentle Assault

  One morning a week later, the breakfast parlor was deserted at half-past seven; not a place had been laid, not a cover set. As Claire stared at the empty room for a moment, she felt a pang of longing for the absent rustle of newspaper when Varian used to look up at her entrance.

  No matter how quietly she came in, Varian always looked up, as if he knew when she was there. Now, this morning, it looked very much like the household had forgotten about her breakfast, and her husband had gone off somewhere and left her on her own. She wandered vaguely down the hallway, past the doors to the terrace, and halted at an unexpected flash of white.

  It was the newspaper that caught her eye; she stepped backwards and stood in the doorway, watching as Varian bent over a small table, immaculate with white linen and silver service, and poured himself a second cup of tea, just as he always did after he finished the front page. Smiling faintly, Claire stood there in the doorway just a moment longer, and then, just as she had half-expected he would, he looked up and saw her.

  “Good morning, darling,” Drew said, smiling at her. He always said that; she had minded it terribly that first morning, but lately it had gotten to where she rather liked it, and the possessive way he stood over her when Jonathan Fiske appeared in their theatre box, or by her side at a dance, or sat down at her table at a rout party.

  “Morning, Varian; I thought perhaps I was forgotten,” she said, smiling, and coming through the parlor toward that golden head, that bronzed, handsome face, as he gazed at her over his folded paper. It was discarded; he watched her sit down after she had come outside onto the terrace, and then he leaned forward and poured her out a cup of tea and pushed the plate of toast toward her.

  “Never,” he said stoutly, and unfolded his paper and went back to the second page. She sipped her tea for a moment, while she imagined that he digested the latest on the riots in Madrid
. “Do you like it?” came his voice from behind the Times.

  “What? Breakfast on the terrace?” Claire gazed at the baskets of tulips that she had brought downstairs and set along the white stone wall, and at the freshly dug flowerbeds in neat lines along the garden wall, and the shade of the oak trees over the green lawn. “Very much; is it an occasion, or a new habit?”

  “An occasion, of course; you’ve been home a fortnight,” he said from behind his paper. “I thought we should celebrate.”

  She buttered her toast and spread a generous helping of marmalade over the whole and bit into it, to the accompaniment of a songbird in the garden and a pair of butterflies hovering over the tulips. “I like it; this is my favorite place, you know.”

  Blue eyes peered at her over the top edge of the Times. “You’re going to be fat as a flawn if you don’t spread that jam a little thinner,” he said blandly.

  She laughed. “No, I’m gardening this morning. I shall dig it off.”

  “Gardening?”

  “Yes; we’re setting out the back beds today.” Claire swallowed the last of the toast and reached for a second piece. “I— You wouldn’t mind if I did something a little different, would you?”

  The paper descended again. “Should I be worried?”

  “No, of course not! Oh!” She glanced quickly under the table, and then she laughed. “Well, good morning, Sully. You’ve found us, I see.”

  Varian moved his boots from beneath the table instantly. “Have you taught him yet his limits?”

  “He is very well-behaved. I shouldn’t worry, if were I you. He is a perfect gentleman,” she said assuredly, and bit a large corner off her second piece of toast.

  “What is this other you’re asking about?”

  “What other?”

  “The gardening!” he said, half-exasperated, and gave the kitten a threatening glance as he leapt up onto the white stone wall behind them and eyed the remnants of sirloin on Drew’s plate in the most covetous fashion.