Vixen Read online

  After the duel, in a frenzy of guilt and misery, he had ridden to Liverpool and taken the king’s shilling aboard the frigate Hotspur. One year before the mast had stripped all vestige of privilege, of youthful excess, from him. It had honed and hardened him. At twenty-one he was promoted from the ranks to midshipman and, as the war took its toll, he moved rapidly upward. Within three years he was commanding his own ship of the line.

  During those years he was able to forget … except at night, when the nightmares came a-visiting. They were relentless and as far as possible he chose not to sleep during the hours of darkness.

  But with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo had come peace. He’d taken his conge of the king’s service and here he was, whiling away his days on the Lancashire moors and his nights in the Manchester stews.

  And he was not interested in his mail.

  He flung the letters down on the table and picked up a bottle from the sideboard. Its dusty coating indicated vintage rather than poor housekeeping. He glanced at the clock. Half past noon. A bit early for the first brandy of the day, but what did it matter? What did anything matter?

  “Why doesn’t Sir Hugo open his mail?” Chloe asked Samuel as she spread butter lavishly on a crust of bread.

  “None of your business, like ’e said” was the uncompromising response. Samuel dumped dishes in a bucket of water.

  Chloe cut a wedge of cheese and chewed in silence for a minute. “Why are you the only servant?”

  “Inquisitive, aren’t you?”

  “Perhaps … but why?”

  “No need for anyone else. Do right enough on our own.” Samuel walked to the door. “There’s a chicken wing in the pantry. Reckon it’ll do for that cat.”

  “And Dante?” Chloe said hastily, as he seemed about to disappear.

  “E’ll get what the hounds get. Ask young Billy in the stables.” He opened the back door.

  “And sheets,” Chloe said. “Where will I find sheets for my bed?”

  Samuel turned slowly. “Still reckon on stayin’?”

  “Oh, yes,” Chloe said with conviction. “I am going nowhere, Samuel.”

  He snorted, whether with derision or amusement, she couldn’t tell. “There’s prob’ly summat that’ll do in the cupboard on the upstairs landing. ’Elp yourself.”

  Lawyer Scranton was a short, fat man with bristling white whiskers and a bald head. He rode into the courtyard on a round cob at the end of the afternoon and dismounted, huffing and puffing as he looked around.

  Chloe observed him from her perch on top of an upturned rain barrel in the corner of the yard, then stood up and came over to him, Dante at her heels. “There’s a lad called Billy who’ll take your horse,” she offered.

  Scranton smoothed the skirts of his brown coat and adjusted his cravat, peering myopically at her. “Do I have the honor of addressing Miss Gresham?”

  Chloe nodded solemnly, swallowing the bubble of laughter at this pomposity. “My guardian is in the house somewhere.”

  “I should hope so!” The lawyer huffed again. He was not accustomed to receiving brusque summonses, and Sir Hugo’s had been imperious in its curt urgency. He cast a critical glance around the disheveled courtyard, littered with straw and manure. One of the stable doors hung crooked on its hinges.

  A youth emerged from the tack room, sucking on a piece of straw. He kicked an iron bucket, sending it clattering across the cobbles, and sauntered over.

  “This is Billy,” Chloe said. “Will you take Mr. Scranton’s horse, Billy?”

  “Reckon so,” the youth said, lethargically lifting the reins. He clicked his tongue against his teeth and the fat cob ambled off beside him to the stables.

  “Shall we go in?” Chloe offered a hostess’s smile even as she wondered which of the dust-laden gloomy rooms would be appropriate for entertaining the guest.

  She preceded Lawyer Scranton up the steps. At the door she instructed a disconsolate Dante to stay, and went into the cool of the great hall. The heavier items of her luggage were still lying around, since she couldn’t manage to carry them upstairs herself and had seen no one but Billy since her nuncheon in the kitchen.

  She took a step toward the library, when the door opened and Hugo stood on the threshold, holding a glass and a bottle by its neck in one hand.

  “Oh, there you are, Scranton,” he said shortly. “Come into the kitchen. We have to sort this mess out. I hope to God you’ve got some answers.”

  The kitchen was certainly the most welcoming room in the house, Chloe reflected. The lawyer didn’t seem taken aback at the invitation, and she followed the two men.

  Hugo, his shoulder holding the door open for his visitor, seemed to notice her for the first time. He frowned, then said, “Oh, well, I suppose it’s as much your business as anyone’s. Come on in.”

  “You weren’t going to leave me out?” she demanded in some indignation, wondering why his eyes had become rather clouded.

  “To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.” He put his free hand between her shoulder blades and propelled her into the kitchen ahead of him.

  Chloe was not surprised to see that Samuel was to be present at this discussion. He was dividing his attentions between a sirloin of beef turning on the spit in the fireplace and a basket of mushrooms he was picking through on the table.

  The lawyer sat at the table and accepted a glass of port. Hugo refilled his own glass from the brandy bottle he held, and sat down. Chloe, who was feeling ignored, sat down and filled a glass of port for herself. She’d never drunk anything stronger than claret hitherto, and took a cautious sip. Hugo gave her a cursory glance, then turned back to Scranton, taking the copy of the will out of his pocket.

  “What can be done about this, Scranton?” He slapped the document on the table. “There must be some way to have it overset.”

  Chloe sipped her port, deciding that the taste improved on acquaintance.

  The lawyer shook his head. “As legal as any will I’ve seen, Sir Hugo. Drew it up myself at Lady Gresham’s dictation. Her ladyship was in sound mind and it was witnessed by my clerk and the housekeeper.”

  Hugo looked at the date of the will; It was October 1818. Had he received Elizabeth’s note by then? But he couldn’t remember. It was another of those facts lost in brandy fumes.

  “Of course, you’re not the only one who’d like to see it overset.” The lawyer waxed expansive over his second glass of port. “Sir Jasper’s been creating such a ruckus. Storming around my office, swearing it couldn’t stand in a court of law. But I told him it would stand up to anything. As legal as any will I’ve seen, I told him.”

  Hugo’s chair scraped on the flagstones as he suddenly pushed back from the table, but he didn’t say anything, his eyes were fixed with intensity on the lawyer.

  “You should have heard him.” The lawyer shook his head. “Such a pother. On and on he went about how he was Miss Gresham’s brother—the only fit person to assume guardianship—and it wasn’t fitting for a complete stranger with no ties to the family to have her in charge.”

  “He has a point,” Hugo said dryly. And even more of a point if the truth of his dealings with the Greshams were ever to be revealed.

  The lawyer seemed not to have heard him. “I told him that the law respects the wishes of the dead above all other claims in these matters, and as far as I could see, there was nothing more to be said.”

  Hugo sighed. The last thing he wanted was to find himself at daggers drawn with Jasper Gresham. A river of enmity ran between them already. But he knew that Elizabeth had chosen him because he would stand up to Jasper as no one else would. Chloe and her fortune would need protection from the Greshams, and he’d been designated to provide it. But there had to be a way to distance himself from his charge.

  He glanced sideways at the girl, whose stillness and silence had been almost palpable during the lawyer’s peroration. She reached for the port decanter again and he flung his hand out, catching
her wrist.

  “That’s enough, lass. Samuel, fetch some … some lemonade, or something.”

  “But I’m enjoying the port,” Chloe protested.

  “Don’t have any lemonade anyways,” Samuel declared, chopping mushrooms with a blinding speed.

  “Water, then,” Hugo said. “She’s too young for port in the middle of the afternoon.”

  “But you didn’t object before,” Chloe pointed out.

  “That was before,” he said with a vague gesture.

  “Before what?”

  Hugo sighed. “Before it was made irrevocably clear to me that I have no choice but to assume responsibility for you.”

  Imps of mischief danced suddenly in her deep blue eyes. “I can’t believe you’re going to be a prim and stuffy guardian, Sir Hugo. How could you be, living the way you do?”

  Hugo was momentarily distracted by those enchanting eyes. He shook his head in an effort to dispel the confusing tangle of emotions and turned back to the lawyer, forgetting the issue of the port.

  Chloe, with a tiny smile of triumph, filled her glass.

  “I understand Miss Gresham was a pupil at a seminary in Bolton,” Scranton was saying.

  “Unfortunately, there was a lovelorn curate, a butcher’s boy, and Miss Anne Trent’s nephew,” Hugo said with a wry grin. “The estimable Misses Trent found the lass too hot to hold. However, there must be another such establishment—”

  “No!” Chloe broke in with a cry. “No, I will not go to another seminary. I absolutely will not.” Her voice shook at the thought of being packed off yet again like some unwanted animal, banished again to a confinement that had become unendurable in its loneliness. “If you attempt such a thing, I shall simply run away.”

  Hugo swung his head toward her and the green eyes were no longer clouded. They held her gaze steadily, and she almost fancied little spurts of flame in their vivid depths.

  “Are you challenging me, Miss Gresham?” he asked very softly.

  She wanted to say yes, but those little spurts of flame were too intimidating and the short word wouldn’t get past her lips.

  “It would be inadvisable to challenge me, you should understand,” he continued in the same soft voice that had caused many a midshipman to shiver in his shoes.

  Chloe recognized the side of her guardian that she had encountered that morning in the bedroom. It was a side with which she had no particular wish to become reacquainted.

  There was total silence in the kitchen. Samuel scraped chopped mushrooms into a pan as if oblivious of the tension. Lawyer Scranton stared up at the smoke-blackened timber of the ceiling.

  “You don’t understand,” Chloe said finally in a much more moderate tone. “I couldn’t bear it anymore.” Then she turned her head away abruptly, biting her lip, desperately blinking away the tears crowding her eyes.

  Hugo wondered if she realized how much more persuasive he found appeals to his sympathy than challenges to his authority. If she didn’t understand it now, she soon would, if she spent much time under his roof. He remembered her desolate question earlier: Why does no one want me? The urge to scoop her up and cuddle her was as ridiculous as it was inappropriate, but he felt it nevertheless.

  “What would you like to do?” he asked with a briskness that disguised his sudden compassion. “Where would you like to go?”

  “To London.” Chloe looked up, the tears miraculously dried. “I want to be presented at court and have my come-out. And then once I’m married and have my fortune, I want to establish an animal hospital. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a suitable husband,” she added reflectively, “one who won’t interfere too much. Eighty thousand pounds should count for something, and I’m quite pretty, I think.”

  Elizabeth’s daughter had a talent for understatement, Hugo thought. “It shouldn’t prove too difficult to find a husband,” he agreed. “But whether you can find one willing to support your philanthropy, lass, I don’t know. Husbands can be an unaccommodating breed, or so I’ve been told.”

  Chloe frowned. “Of course, Mama said Jasper intended me to marry Crispin. And that I certainly shouldn’t care to do.”

  So that was it! Hugo drained his glass and reached again for the bottle. Simplicity itself. Jasper’s stepson from his wife’s former marriage would thus control Chloe’s fortune. There was no bar to such a union—not a drop of consanguinity. Presumably, Elizabeth had intended him to forestall such a plan. “Why don’t you care to?”

  Her response was sharp and definite. “Crispin’s a brute … just like Jasper. He rode his hunter into the ground once and brought him home foundered and bleeding from his spurs. Oh, and he used to pull the wings off butterflies. I’m sure he hasn’t changed.”

  No, not a suitable mate for someone with a mission to succor needy members of the animal kingdom. “Why has that foul-mouthed parrot only got one leg?” he asked involuntarily.

  “I don’t know. I found him in Bolton. He’d been left in the gutter and it was raining.”

  “Beefs ready.” Samuel made the laconic declaration as he turned the spit. “Lawyer stayin’?”

  Scranton looked anxiously to his host and received a calm “If you care to.”

  “Well, I daresay it’ll be way past dinner when I get home,” he said, rubbing his hands at the succulent aromas arising from the fireplace. “So I’ll thank ye kindly.”

  “I’m starving,” Chloe declared.

  “Had enough bread and cheese for nuncheon to feed a regiment,” Samuel commented, bringing the meat to the table.

  “But that was hours ago. Shall I fetch knives and forks?” “In the dresser.”

  That hideous dress did nothing to mask the grace of her movements, Hugo thought, watching her dance around his kitchen with an assumption of familiarity that filled him with foreboding. He went down to the cellar to bring up wine.

  Chloe pushed her glass forward expectantly when he drew the cork.

  “I’ve no objection to your drinking burgundy, but this is a particularly fine wine, so don’t gulp it like orgeat,” he cautioned, filling her glass.

  Lawyer Scranton sipped and purred. Eating in the kitchen of a decaying manor house in the company of a man and his servant might be unusual, but there was no fault to be found with the fare.

  Chloe seemed to agree. She consumed a quantity of rare beef, mushrooms, and potatoes that astounded Hugo, who wondered where in that tiny frame it could all be stored. Elizabeth, as he recalled, had had the appetite of a sparrow. He shook his head in a bemused gesture that was becoming all too familiar and returned to the issue of first importance.

  “Scranton, you know both sides of Miss Gresham’s family. Are there any female relatives she could go to?”

  “Oh, you can’t send me to stay with some elderly aunt who’ll expect me to walk an overfed pug and polish the silver,” Chloe said.

  “I thought you liked animals,”

  “I do, but I prefer the ones that other people don’t like.”

  Revealing, he thought, but said only, “Do you have such an aunt?”

  “Not that I know of,” Chloe said. “But there was a girl at the seminary who had one.”

  Someone else’s aunt was not helpful. “Scranton?” Hugo appealed to the lawyer, who wiped his mouth with some deliberation and took another sip of his wine.

  “Lady Gresham had no living relatives, Sir Hugo. Hence the size of Miss Gresham’s fortune. I don’t know about Sir Stephen’s side of the family. But perhaps Sir Jasper would be of assistance there.”

  That was a dead end if he was to honor Elizabeth’s unspoken wishes. “I suppose I could employ a governess—no don’t interrupt again,” he said sharply as Chloe’s now-familiar expostulation began. “The lass could be established somewhere in the charge of a respectable female.”

  “And do what?” Chloe demanded.

  It was not an unreasonable question, he was obliged to admit. However …

  “I don’t see any other solution. Your educatio
n isn’t yet complete—”

  “It’s perfectly complete,” she interrupted, forgetting the earlier stricture. “I can do everything any schoolroom miss can do, and a great deal else besides.”

  “Like what?”

  “I can mend a bird’s broken wing, and deliver a lamb. I know how to treat a sprained fetlock and foot rot—”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he interrupted in his turn. “But it doesn’t alter the facts.”

  “Why can’t I stay here?” She asked the simple question almost without emphasis.

  “And do what?” Hugo gave her her own again. “Lancashire is a long way from a come-out in London.”

  “Maybe not,” she said quietly.

  Now, what the hell did that mean? Hugo gave up. There was clearly nothing to be done tonight. “It seems there’s little choice for the moment. You’ll have to stay here tonight.”

  “I told you so,” Chloe said to Samuel with a sweet smile, gathering up the dirty plates.

  “Reckon you did,” Samuel said.

  Chapter 4

  THE DOG’S DESOLATE howling was a perfect background to crowding memories. Hugo sat at the pianoforte in the library, a single tallow candle throwing a pool of yellow light over the keyboard as his hands strived to pick out a melody from the past. It was a piece he’d composed for Elizabeth, but part of the refrain was missing from his memory.

  Impatiently, he swung away from the instrument, picking up his glass. He didn’t think he’d ever played it for her anyway. He drained the contents of the glass and refilled it.

  His love for Stephen’s wife had been a secret he’d kept from everyone but Elizabeth … a secret that the infatuated stripling both nurtured and fed upon during the two years he’d known her. They had never consummated their love. It would have been unthinkable for Elizabeth to have done so, and, despite the gnawing need he had suffered, he had enjoyed the purity of his feelings for her. It was such a contrast to the sewage in which he’d been wallowing.