Claire Read online

  “Claire!” he interrupted finally, folding up his paper noisily.

  “Oh, Varian!” she said, looking up with a question in her eyes. “What is it?”

  “You don’t mind that I’ve got business in the City this morning, do you?”

  “No, of course not! I think we’re going to drive out at ten with Tony Merrill; you don’t mind?”

  It was the first pleasant news he had had in four-and-twenty hours; he smiled and said, “Excellent idea!” and told them he would be back by luncheon.

  “Oh, don’t mind it; we’ll very likely be out shopping all afternoon,” said his wife off-handedly. “Claudia’s got to have a new gown or two, and the sooner the better, if the Princess expects us at Almack’s next week!”

  He grimaced. “Oh, very well! I shan’t mind to take you once or twice; but it is not my particular favorite!”

  His wife waved a negligent hand. “Quite all right, Varian; Petersham has told me he’ll escort me if you don’t want to go. I think he’s in love with that little brown-eyed Shelby girl, only he doesn’t want her to suspect it!”

  He flicked her chin carelessly as he stood and left them. “Don’t get in over your head, Claire! You haven’t the greatest experience in the world at arranging other people’s lives, you know; I should hate to be at your mercy!”

  But the sisters did not hear him, for they were already discussing sarsenet and sprigged muslin, and laughing over Sully licking his chops, and enjoying a very pleasant morning, without the least thought for the man who had just left.

  In fact Claire and Varian Drew saw very little of each other the next few days, and when the two sisters came downstairs one morning and Varian’s place was gone from the table, they were so deeply involved in a discussion over the play they had seen the night before that neither of them even took notice of it. If Claire could have been said to be a little quieter that morning after breakfast, which was when she sat outside on the terrace and instructed Consuela, Elena, and Rajat in English, it was nothing to remark on, and since Claudia was to drive out alone at ten with Lord Merrill, as Claire had other plans, the sisters parted rather early, and Claudia went upstairs to change her dress.

  A reflective Claire drifted down the terrace steps and out into her garden; the back bed was doing nicely, and Thomas-gardener was already busy at work setting out a rose bed on the south wall. He greeted his mistress with a fond good morning and went back to his digging, and she strolled around the garden peering at the newly-mulched bed in the center and the beginnings of a very pretty gazebo, and turned slowly back toward the house.

  Claire was to drive out with Jonathan Fiske this morning. She had kept it from Varian, for she was certain that he would object, as she had read very well the look in his eyes when Jonathan paid her court, and neither had she mistaken the intentions of Mr Fiske. He took certain tributes of affection for granted, which she did not remark upon; he would kiss her hand without the least reserve, and retain her hand while he sat by her, and hold her a little too closely for politeness when they waltzed. She had mistaken none of this, for she had very effectively put off a number of just such men in Portugal. Yet with Jonathan she had allowed it to continue, chiefly because she had discovered that he had known her husband while he was in India, and she was determined to pick his brain for every scrap of information she could.

  She was glad that Varian had not been at breakfast this morning. She went up to her bedchamber to collect her hat and gloves and parasol, and after a last determined stare at the packet lying half-hidden in the bottom of her jewel box, she went downstairs.

  Tony Merrill, that placid, unruffled gentleman, a great deal more attentive than any of his friends imagined, had had a number of unhappy revelations in the last week or so. The first was that there was something very wrong between Varian and Claire Drew, and that it was causing his friend a good deal of distress, which he took great pains to hide and did so rather well. The second was that Jonathan Fiske, that slightly questionable financier who possessed a faintly questionable fortune made recently in India, and who was allowed into society by virtue of his wealth but was accepted with a vague reservation, was pursuing Varian Drew’s wife with the most obvious of intentions. The third was that Claire, seemingly without any of the worldly savoir-faire which Tony thought she had mastered in Portugal, was allowing it.

  Merrill saw the two of them drive off from Banning House just as he pulled up to collect Claudia. He frowned slightly, those lazy eyes of his suddenly intent, and threw the reins to his tiger as he ran up the steps. Stiles opened the door to him before he could pull the bell; he asked quietly if Miss Ffawlkes was in the drawing room and was informed that she was upstairs in the Blue Parlor, Stiles thought, reading. He said he would send up a housemaid.

  “Oh, no, don’t bother,” said the placid earl, and smiled and told Stiles that he would go up. “For Miss Ffawlkes and her sisters grew up not two miles from my estate, you know. I’m practically an uncle.”

  “Of course, Your Lordship,” nodded Stiles, and pointed out the parlor in question, which was just at the top of the stairs to the right, and Lord Merrill gave him his beaver hat and his cane and said he wouldn’t be a moment.

  He climbed the stairs with a silence unusual for one of his bulk. In spite of his size— which was of some magnificence, although none of his detractors could accuse him of an ounce of fat— Lord Merrill was neither slow nor indolent, although very few of his friends had ever seen him driven to much exertion, not even sparring at Gentleman Jack’s Boxing Salon, where Tony Merrill’s skill was held in some regard. He paused in the doorway of the parlor, which was indeed rather blue, with a plump, blue-sprigged skirted sofa and two very large blue chairs on either side of the fireplace, beruffled, light-blue curtains at the windows, and a blue-gowned lady, perched in the window-seat with her back to him, a book in one hand and her chin on the other.

  He had not been expecting another revelation, but in a moment of motionlessness as he stood there in the doorway gazing at that delicate profile, his heart and lungs abruptly ceased to function. Anthony Merrill, the third earl, large, placid, calm, very rarely driven to exertion, five-and-thirty years old and solidly settled into his existence, discovered himself to be suddenly very much under the influence of a feeling neither placid nor calm, and only with the greatest exertion of will did he overcome an intense impulse that most all of his friends would have been very surprised to have found in him at all. Those gray eyes of his beneath his hooded lids burned for a moment, and then he smiled in that easy-going way of his, and came into the room, once again himself.

  “Oh, Lord Merrill! I am so very sorry!” said Claudia Ffawlkes, laying down her book instantly as she turned her head at his step. “I didn’t hear the bell; I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

  “No, of course not, Miss Ffawlkes,” he said placidly, and strolled over to where she was sitting to glance at the spine of her book. “Lear, again? I thought you finished it yesterday.”

  “Oh, I have; just a sonnet or two,” Claudia said quietly, with that shy smile of hers full of a charm that he had somehow heretofore neglected to notice. “It seemed that sort of a morning.”

  “If I could write the beauty of your eyes and in fresh numbers number all your graces,” he said, smiling with his avuncular smile and picking up her book. “Ah! You’ve found my favorite.”

  “I didn’t know that you cared for Shakespeare, Lord Merrill,” she said.

  “Of course I care for him! I’ve just last month found an original edition of Cymbeline, dated 1610, which I rather think I’ve paid too much for, but I have always had a fondness for Imogen, you know.”

  Claudia blinked at him in some slight astonishment, and then lowered her eyes and said, “I— I always thought she deserved better than Posthumus.”

  “Did you?” Tony Merrill shrugged slightly. “He was only human; he came to know his wife’s worth in the end and loved her perhaps more for having doubted her.”

/>   “Yes, but he ought never to have done so!” she said, with a sudden animation that lit her face.

  Claudia Ffawlkes was very much like her sisters; in fact, all five of them were as alike as peas in a pod, and yet different, in subtle and meaningful ways. The two eldest, Clytie and Cleo, were beautiful but not of much more than an average intelligence, and Merrill did not think they possessed their younger sisters’ animation nor charm. Chloe had not her sisters’ depth of feeling, and yet Claudia would never have Chloe’s exuberance and enthusiasm for earthly things. Claire had Claudia’s grace and quick wit, and yet, in spite of her intelligence, she would never have Claudia’s devotion to knowledge, nor her fine-tuned and logical mind.

  Claudia was most like her mother. Lady Cecilia had been bookish to a fault, and Tony Merrill had never quite understood the attraction between the quiet, intelligent black-haired lady and the enormously energetic and vibrant sea-going man whom she had married.

  But this daughter whom they had produced had given him an instant clew this morning as he had stood in the doorway. In quiet Claudia’s well-trained smile and calm blue eyes, in that rational and logical mind of hers that did not descend to such inanities as the art of flirting or the learning of seduction, was a fascination that the flutter of eyelashes and the dimpling smile of a debutante had never before aroused in him.

  “No,” Merrill nodded. “In fact, I don’t understand why she took him back. It has always been a mystery to me.”

  “Oh, but she loved him, of course,” said the rational Miss Ffawlkes, without much ado. “Nothing so mysterious in that.”

  He smiled faintly, suddenly intrigued by all this excess of logic on such a very illogical and inexplicable emotion, and put his finger on the page she had been reading when he took up her book. “Here’s my favorite; I think it’s one of his best, don’t you?”

  As an unperfect actor on the stage

  Who with his fear is put beside his part,

  Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,

  Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart,

  So I, for fear of trust, forget to say

  The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,

  And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,

  O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.

  O, let my books be then the eloquence

  And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,

  Who plead for love and look for recompense

  More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.

  O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:

  To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.

  “Claudia,” he said immediately, staring at the book with that placid satisfaction of his.

  “Yes?” He had used to call her Claudia when they were just girls and played in Merrill Wood and occasionally even ventured up to the lake, but he had taken up ‘Miss Ffawlkes’ on that journey home from Portugal, as though he had become conscious that she was no longer a child. She had not questioned it, although she had missed his former easy familiarity.

  “You wouldn’t care if we forego the Park today?”

  Claudia thought Lord Merrill had recalled suddenly that he was to be somewhere else. She had had a great deal of reservation about his having to go to so much trouble over her, just because Claire had not offered to take her up with her and Mr Fiske, and she had felt a little guilty that the earl might wish to be somewhere else entirely, and yet feel constrained by his friendship with the family to sort of watch over her while she was in Town. “No, of course not,” she said instantly.

  “For there’s a bookshop in Westminster that I think you might like,” he was saying in that unperturbed way of his. “Some very credible first editions, and a great many medieval works that no one much cares about, except a scholar here and there who comes down to buy up something for his library. It is one of my secret haunts, you know; I don’t admit that I go there except to a few of my friends whom I know won’t hold it against me,” he said, raising those calm gray eyes to her face over the book in his hand. “You won’t, will you?”

  Claudia Ffawlkes smiled; she hadn’t the least idea that she even had dimples, he didn’t imagine. “Of course not, Lord Merrill. And I should like very much to go, if you could spare an hour or so.”

  “Excellent! We shall keep our faces down, and no one will know at all!” he said, nodding, and laid down the book. She took up her hat and gloves, still smiling, and went downstairs with him.

  chapter four

  Anger and Accusations Abound

  “Good afternoon, Your Ladyship, Miss Ffawlkes,” Stiles smiled, ever polite, as he opened the door for Claudia and Claire that afternoon upon their return from shopping. “Lady Banning, His Lordship has requested that you attend him in the library as soon as you come in.”

  Claire Drew returned a smile; it was the cool and reserved smile that she had brought back from Portugal that conveyed not an ounce of humor or warmth. “Thank you, Stiles. Claudia, if you don’t mind to wait on tea downstairs? I’ll just be a moment.”

  In the door to the library stood Varian, with an unreadable expression on his dark face and a set to his jaw that warned her about the coming interview. He had, she was certain, found out about her excursion with Mr Fiske. Claire supposed nothing she did while living in her husband’s household would ever go unnoticed. Without a change in her expression, she handed off her pelisse and hat to Stiles and went down the hall.

  “Sit down, Claire.” Varian closed the door; very seldom were doors closed downstairs. Drawing in a deep breath to still a sudden shaking, she took the same chair she had the first day she had arrived, the dark leather chair past Balaghat, and folded her hands in her lap and stared at them. “I know today is your name-day. I’ve a small gift for you. Happy birthday, my dear.”

  She looked up instantly, surprise in her eyes, to find him standing over her, a small box in his extended hand. Without speaking she took it and folded her hands over it in her lap. His limp hardly noticeable any more, he retreated to the chair behind his desk, those jewel-blue eyes regarding her seriously from his strong face.

  “Shall you open it?”

  She dropped her eyes. “If you wish.”

  “I might have guessed wrong on the size; your hands look smaller to me than I recalled,” he said quietly, that intense blue gaze fixed still on her face as she glanced up at him and then again at the box in her lap.

  By that she took to mean that the gift was a ring. She opened the box quickly, and sat very still, then, and stared at it after a tiny gasp.

  Indeed, it was a ring, but it was unlike any other ring she had ever seen. There was no elaborate set or border of small jewels, no heavy pretension, no skillful concealment of defects. There was only a diamond, enormous, blue-ice-white, perfectly round, glittering with a hundred facets, held onto a silver band by four small silver leaves. It was glorious.

  “Varian— ”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It is— ” Claire’s square chin trembled slightly; she swallowed and did not look at him. “It’s exquisite; I— ”

  “Then it fits you very well, Claire. I knew when I discovered it two years ago that I would give to you someday. I hope that you will wear it and think of me,” he said quietly.

  “Yes; I shall. I— ” She halted. His obvious regard, his remembrance of her birthday, that she had been so wrong about what he meant to say, increased her guilt over riding out with Jonathan Fiske a hundred-fold.

  “Claire?” Varian asked suddenly. “What’s troubling you?”

  “Nothing! I am just— ” A nervous swallow. “I wasn’t expecting— I didn’t expect a gift from you.”

  “Did you think I was angry with you over Jonathan Fiske?”

  Ah! So he had discovered it. Claire swept out of the chair and halted instantly at sight of Balaghat, fierce, fangs bared, staring up at her from the floor, and then went around the tiger-skin to the other sid
e of the room. “I haven’t done anything for you to be angry over,” she said, holding the box tightly in her hands and staring up at the leather bound volumes before her, her back to him.

  “You’ve twice been driving out with him alone,” he said evenly. “Don’t think that it is not remarked upon, Claire, just because you think it innocent.”

  “It is innocent— ”

  “I know very well what Jonathan Fiske is, and so do a number of other people in this town. It is his reputation that will affect yours, not the other way around.”

  She whirled around to face him. “Mr Fiske is pleasant company, and I cannot see that you should think otherwise! He has never been anything except the perfect gentleman in my presence, and if you think to criticize him to me, then it is you who are at fault, not me!”

  His blue eyes blazed at her; he was no longer calm, although he retained the even level of his voice very well. “Come and sit down, Claire.”

  “I shan’t come and sit down! If you have anything to say, then say it!”

  “Come and sit,” Drew said, in a low, steel-encased voice, “down. I do have something to say, and you will,” he added inflexibly, “listen.” His blazing blue gaze followed her, his hands lying calmly along the arms of the chair, as she came slowly, unwillingly, angrily, rebelliously, across the room and resumed her seat, stiffly, hanging to the edge of her chair, her hands folded tightly over the box in her lap. “Now. I have a request to make of you.”

  “What is it?” She did not look at him.

  “That you do not again,” he said, without a trace of gentleness or tenderness or anything except angry possessiveness, “go out alone with Mr Fiske.”

  She squared her shoulders defiantly and met his hard blue eyes with her own fiery ones. “By what right do you decide whom I should see?”