James Cantrell, at the end of his first month as one of the highest-ranking peers in the realm, sat in a house crammed with broken-down furnishings and decided that his life had become a rather similar mare’s nest. Somehow, steps that had seemed reasonable one by one had led him to that blow at the end of the fencing match. And its consequences, which he must of course face. Just not now.
He’d discovered one functional bedchamber on the first floor of his great-uncle’s town house. It contained the customary furnishings, not an insane, dusty tangle of discarded items. The single servant had clearly cleaned and aired it out before she departed. The sheets on the bed were fresh, and whatever clutter Uncle Percival had left was tidied away. The previous duke’s clothes remained in the wardrobe, however, and his shaving gear on the washstand. James hadn’t brought himself to use either. He still wore the shirt, coat, and breeches in which he’d fought the disastrous bout. His cheeks rasped with whiskers. His hair had been left to its own devices.
James was aware of the irony, and that he was sulking. But awareness seemed to make no difference to his mood. He couldn’t bear to see anyone after that shameful public loss. It was all too easy to envision the stares, the titters, the sly enjoyment of men he’d bested in the past. The pity! He would not endure it. His distinguished place in society was based on his athletic prowess, his enviable style, his unflappable manner. Now, with one foolish impulse, he’d destroyed the identity he’d been shaping since he was fifteen years old. He couldn’t see, at this point, what he was to put in its place.
So he stayed quiet in the large, eerie house. He didn’t use lights where they could be seen from the street. He lit no fire in the bedchamber. When twilight fell, he sneaked out a side door with his hat pulled low, swathed in a scarf from his great-uncle’s wardrobe, to buy pies from a nearby shop. The greasy pastry barely sufficed to keep body and soul together. He was increasingly hungry, and the poor diet was upsetting his innards as well. Fortunately, his great-uncle hadn’t interfered with the wine cellar. James had made good use of the dusty bottles there and was not reduced to the water pump in the kitchen.
Perhaps too good a use, he decided as he stared into the mirror on a gray rainy morning. He barely recognized the image staring back at him. There were smudges of dirt on his clothes despite all his care. This place was rife with dust. His scruff of whiskers shadowed his face. His hair stood up in lamentable spikes, and he hadn’t even put on his neckcloth today. The open collar below his stubbled chin demonstrated an utter abandonment of standards. He’d lost the person he had been. He was no longer the Corinthian who’d led society before the prince defeated him.
James turned away from the mirror. He knew this was unacceptable. He had to return to his rooms and take up his life. But he wasn’t ready to do so until he could see what it would be after this.
He left the bedchamber and edged along a corridor nearly filled with detritus. This house made one feel like a serpent, slithering through narrow spaces, bending and twisting around a dusty maze. He navigated the obstacles to the room he’d chosen to begin the work of clearing away. It was the smallest he could find on the ground floor, which had been his sole criteria. A place to begin when isolation and boredom had goaded him into action.
He wedged into the space he’d dealt with so far. He’d found a few things he wanted to keep and taken those to his bedchamber. When he had this space emptied, he would store them here, lest it also fill up around him. Items he wished to be rid of went out a window that opened onto a walled garden. He’d forced a path to the window and thrown it open first thing in a bid to disperse the musty smell.
James confronted the jumbled pile of things. What had been in Uncle Percival’s mind as he accumulated all this? How had he not seen the madness?
James reached into the mass and pulled out a large hourglass in a carved wooden frame. Rubbing at the dust covering it, he found that the glass was cracked in several places. The sand had run out. “How very apt,” he told the air. “But I find it difficult to appreciate the humor.” He carried the hourglass to the window and tossed it onto the pile of moth-eaten tapestries he’d thrown down to muffle any noise from his discards.
As he turned back, a thumping sound intruded. Someone was knocking on the front door. He stood still until the rhythm stopped, and then for a few minutes afterward. This had happened once before. Whoever it was could go away.
When he felt certain they had departed, he went back to work, pulling out a burnished case that looked as if it might hold dueling pistols. Those would come in handy if he decided to shoot himself. “Not amusing,” he said aloud to whatever aberrant part of his brain had produced this thought. “Not in the least.”
Opening the case he discovered a set of flint blades that looked very ancient. They were beautifully crafted—a spearhead and several knives. He couldn’t imagine how anyone had made such exquisite leaf-like shapes with primitive tools. He picked one up and sliced a tiny cut in the ball of his thumb. They were incredibly sharp, as effective now as when they were created centuries ago. Carefully, he set the blade back in the case. He would keep these, he decided, though he had no use for them. They were too lovely to discard.
He set the case aside and went to haul out a massive wooden chair. Various small items rained on his head as he pulled. Narrow and probably nine feet tall, the seat had an ornately carved canopy that towered over him. This looked like something a Tudor king would sit in while he ate his way through your stores on a royal visit. It was also riddled with woodworm. Powdery residue darkened his hands. When he yanked again, one arm came loose and fell off, eaten through by the pests. Which made it much easier to chuck the chair out the window onto the pile of fabric.
With the chair gone, the mound of rubbish in the room groaned, tilted, and resettled, fortunately without burying him in a painful avalanche. A skitter of tiny feet told James that the local residents were not pleased by his incursion. “Your days are numbered,” he declared.
“And now you are speaking to mice,” he added. “Splendid.” He reached for the next bit of ducal inheritance.
***
Cecelia felt certain that James was in the town house. She didn’t know why, but she was sure he’d gone there. And whatever she’d told Lady Wilton, she couldn’t resist checking her intuition. She’d come to Tereford House alone, however, in a plain dress and bonnet to avoid servants’ gossip.
She’d pounded on the front door and called out to him, with no result. Unsurprised, she walked around the corner to the mews behind the house. She did not sneak, but she did check to see that no one was watching before she slipped into the narrow cobbled lane.
The house wall turned the corner and extended along it. Cecelia soon came to the stables that served the town house. They were closed up, naturally. She tried the door beside the larger carriage portals, expecting it to be locked, and found that it opened easily under her hand. She stepped inside and came face-to-face with a very thin, worn-looking woman in a threadbare stuff gown.
For a moment, they were equally startled. Cecelia nearly dropped the basket she held over her arm. Then the woman scowled and said, “What do you mean, walking in here without so much as a by-your-leave?”
“I didn’t realize anyone was here,” replied Cecelia.
“Well, we are.”
There was a quiver in the woman’s voice. Several ragged, skinny children peered from behind her skirts. “Did you work for the old duke?” Cecelia asked.
A flash of fear in the woman’s pale-blue eyes told Cecelia that matters were not that simple. “The old man’s dead,” the woman said. “And we ain’t leaving.”
She looked desperately tired. Examining the group more closely, Cecelia concluded that this poor family had somehow discovered the unusual situation and taken advantage of it to move into the empty building. So, despite her bravado, the woman must know that they could be ejected at any time. But it wasn’t Cecelia’s place to do so, even had she wished to. “I don’t care about that,” she said. “I just want to get inside the house.”
“There’s a little door in back,” said one of the children, a boy who looked about ten. “Mostly they forget to lock it.”
“Ned!” exclaimed his mother. She evaded Cecelia’s eyes, making Cecelia wonder if they slipped inside now and then to steal small bits they could sell. No one would ever discover the losses from the old duke’s hoard. In fact, she thought this might be a worthy use for some of it.
“I ain’t gone in since the new fellow come,” said Ned with an air of wounded virtue.
“New fellow?” asked Cecelia.
“Been here a day or so. Came through the front real quiet like. We was thinking he might be…”
“Ned,” repeated his mother.
The boy fell silent.
He must be referring to James. She’d been right then. “Will you show me this door, please?”
Ned glanced at his mother for permission, received a defeated shrug, and led Cecelia through the dim, neglected stables and out into a cobbled yard behind the house. In better light she could see that the boy’s clothing consisted of layers of tattered garments. Beneath them he was even thinner than he’d first appeared. The family was obviously destitute with no home to go to.
He took her over to a low door at the back of the house. As he’d promised it opened without difficulty. Cecelia dug in her reticule for a coin and handed it to the lad, then shut the door on his incredulous delight. Not wishing to be followed, she shot the bolt.
She was in a small, dark space facing a stair leading down to the cellar. Light came through a half-open door on the right. She went through it into the kitchen, large and echoing. She saw no sign that the room had been used recently. The hearth was cold. But at least it was not crammed with things like the other rooms she’d seen here.
She made her way quietly across it and down the cluttered corridor to the front entry. There she stood still, listening. At first there was nothing, just the vacancy of a cold, empty house. Then something—a quick, sharp exclamation came from the hallway she’d just traversed.
She followed continuing sounds to a cross corridor and then to a small chamber at the back corner of the house. There she found James maneuvering a battered footstool out of the ceiling-high pile.
Cecelia stopped in the doorway, shocked by his appearance. He looked like a vagabond—dusty, unshaven, disheveled. She’d never seen James in such a state in all the years of their acquaintance. A small sound escaped her.
James whirled, dropping the footstool. He stared as if she was an apparition. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
“I was looking for you,” she answered. “Of course. Everyone is wondering where you are.”
His dark brows came together in a scowl, and his fists clenched. “It’s no business of theirs.” He glared at her. “I suppose you told everyone you were coming here to look for me.”
“No, James, I did not.”
His features relaxed a bit.
Cecelia breathed the stale mustiness that permeated the house. The air was full of dust. “How can you stay in this place?”
He grimaced. “Uncle Percival’s bedchamber is…not insupportable.” He put a hand to his chin as if suddenly conscious of its unshaven state. “So now you know where I am. You can go.”
“You won’t even offer me a cup of tea?”
“I have none.”
“There must be some tea left in the kitchen.”
It seemed he had not thought of this. “I have no idea.” There was a spark of longing in his blue eyes.
“Also, I brought you scones.”
The longing ignited into burning avarice.
“As well as some other things,” Cecelia continued. “Bread and cheese and apples. Because I couldn’t imagine, if you had come here, what you’d been eating.”
“Pies,” he said hollowly. “Horrible, greasy pies. With ominously unidentifiable fillings.”
“Oh, poor James.”
“May I have an apple?”
She took one from her basket and tossed it to him. He caught it and bit in as if he was starving. “I will even make the tea if we can find some,” she added.
James devoured the apple as they navigated past the piles of hoarding to the kitchen. Cecelia found a nearly empty box of tea in a cupboard and began to fill a kettle at the pump. “Will you make a fire? Can you?”
“Of course. May I have a scone first?” James reached toward the basket she’d set on the table and seemed to notice the dirt under his fingernails. He drew back. Cecelia set the kettle aside, took the cloth from the basket, and gave him a scone.
He took a bite. “Ah.” He gobbled it up in seconds.
He started a small fire in the hearth, then ate a second scone as they sat on a wooden bench and waited for the kettle to boil.
“You must be quite uncomfortable here,” Cecelia said.
He looked away, annoyed or ashamed. She couldn’t tell.
“You cannot stay on. You should go home, James.”
His jaw tightened. “I suppose everyone is talking about the fencing match.”
She could not deny it.
“That never would have happened if you’d simply accepted my offer.”
“What?” She couldn’t believe she’d heard him correctly.
“Or if I hadn’t ever thought of marrying you,” he added as if conceding a point. “But I have.”
Cecelia simply stared.
James’s petulant expression slowly shifted, as if an idea was unfolding in his brain. He gazed at her. “You know, if we were to announce our engagement now, everyone would see that Prince Karl hadn’t really won anything.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You may have it and welcome if you do as I ask. Finally.”
The kettle boiled, sending a plume of steam into the chilly air. There was a fireplace poker standing right next to it. Very tempting. Resisting its silent blandishment, Cecelia rose to go. She considered taking the basket of food away with her, but she couldn’t quite leave him to starve.
“Where are you going?” he asked as she walked toward the back door.
“Home.”
“You’re not going to make the tea?”
She turned to glare at him. “You expect me to make tea for you after what you’ve said?”
“What?” He gazed at her blankly.
“Did you not hear yourself try to blame me for your foolishness?”
“But you—”
“I did not behave like a childish rudesby or throw a punch at Prince Karl after losing a fencing match!”
He winced.
Cecelia turned back toward the exit.
“Wait. You aren’t going to leave me here?”
She felt like the kettle, steaming with exasperation. “No, James, you are ‘leaving’ yourself here. It has nothing to do with me.”
“I thought you came to help.”
“Did you?” Why had she come? Curiosity chiefly, she supposed. Though she had brought food. She had been worried.
“But you have always helped me.”
His tone stopped her. He sounded so much younger suddenly.
“I’ve gotten myself into a tangle that I have no idea how to escape,” he added.
The timbre of his voice took Cecelia back to a moment not long after they’d first met. He’d been fifteen, and even though she was years younger, a lifetime of dealing with her wayward father had sharpened her emotional “ear.” She’d understood that behind his sulky ill temper, he was lost and in pain and near tears. And that he would rather die than let her see him cry. Her heart had responded. She’d had to help him then. And so many times after.
She sighed. They were adults now, and this tangle was entirely of his own making. It wasn’t a serious matter. Only humiliating. Everyone had to deal with humiliations now and then in life, if they grew up. And to speak again of marriage as if it was simply another chore she could perform for him, upending her life for his convenience, expecting no tender sentiment… She shoved aside the hurt and the longing and any idiotic slivers of hope that tried to creep in. “I have helped,” she answered. “I came to check on you. I brought you food. I have been a friend. You must find your own way out of the tangle you created.”
“You are choosing the prince then?” he asked in a hard voice.
Cecelia felt an almost irresistible desire to throttle him. “Why do people ask me this? Does no one understand that your ridiculous posturing had nothing to do with me? I did not ask you to jostle each other like vulgar children. Or to bash each other with swords.”
“Foils,” he said.
Her hands rose of their own accord, crooked into claws. She struggled with the impulse and won, lowering them again. “This is not a case of me choosing anything,” she said through clenched teeth. “Except that right now I am choosing to go.”
“Will you come to visit again?”
“Do you ever listen to me, James? Even the least little bit?”
“If I apologize?”
She blinked. He never apologized.
“And admit you are right,” he added in a cajoling tone.
“Let us see if you can,” answered Cecelia too curious to resist.
“I…” He looked around as if an apology might be lurking in a corner of the kitchen. He seemed to notice the jet of steam for the first time and moved the kettle off the fire. “I am sorry.”
“For?”
“Making you angry.”
This was so typical of him. “And for not persuading me to do as you wish.”
“Well, of course that.” He smiled. Even in his current disreputable state, the smile was charming.
Cecelia ignored it. “And I am right that…”
His perplexed expression was almost comical. Or it would have been if Cecelia had not allowed herself a foolish instant of optimism. She abandoned it. “You can’t think of anything, can you?”
“What if I simply say that you are right about everything?”
“And so, admitting this, you will go back to your rooms and stop behaving like a spoilt child?”
He frowned, shook his head.
She sighed, wondering why she kept on, and turned toward the door.
“Cecelia.”
She stopped. It was so difficult to resist the appeal in that voice. Even when she knew it was the only sensible course of action. She couldn’t quite abandon him. “The poor family in the stables would probably do errands for you if you paid them,” she said.
“There are servants here?”
“Well, I don’t think they’ve ever been servants. They are more…opportunists.”
“In the stables?”
“Yes.”
“Living there without leave? Like gypsies?”
Cecelia turned to stare at him. She looked around the abandoned room, and then back at him.
“Ah.” He shrugged, acknowledging the similarity. “But you think they would be willing to do tasks for money?”
“Just about anything, I would imagine.” She considered the family’s plight. “They certainly need it.” Perhaps James could aid them while helping himself.
“I have very little money with me.” He looked mournful.
“Oh, James.” She took all the funds from her reticule and put them onto the kitchen table.
“Splendid. If you come back, I will be in better trim.”
“I shall not come back.”
“I’ve found some very interesting objects in the muddle here. I’m setting to work, you see.”
He knew how to lure her. But she would not be enticed. She couldn’t afford to be. She’d let James coax her into supporting his schemes too many times. And this time was different. She couldn’t wager her life’s happiness on his caprices. No matter how tempting he still managed to be.
Cecelia reached home without encountering anyone she knew, but Aunt Valeria emerged from the drawing room as she was passing up the stairs. “I thought you had given away that old gown,” she said.
Tugging at the ribbons of her bonnet, Cecelia once again sighed over her aunt’s penchant for noticing things just when you wanted her to be oblivious. It was some sort of annoying instinct, she decided. Her aunt missed all manner of obvious cues, just not the ones you wished her to.
“You said it was hopelessly outmoded,” Aunt Valeria added. “You can’t have been making morning calls in it?”
“I had an errand,” Cecelia replied.
“Alone, carrying off a basket, which now appears to be missing.”
An infuriating instinct, Cecelia decided, and a sharp eye when she exerted herself. She tried to control her temper. “You don’t care in the least about a basket,” she pointed out.
Her aunt acknowledged the truth of this with a gesture. “Cook was complaining that the kitchen maid had lost it.”
“I’ll speak to her.” Cecelia started to walk on to her bedchamber.
“Lady Wilton has written to me about you,” said her aunt. “She seems to think I should do something about your marital prospects.”
“It’s too bad you can’t pretend to be illiterate as well as deaf,” said Cecelia.
This earned her a frown.
“I beg your pardon. That was impolite.”
“It was.” Aunt Valeria examined her. “You are out of sorts.”
Cecelia could not deny it.
“That isn’t like you.”
“No, I’m always good humored and gracious and accommodating, aren’t I?” And where had it gotten her?
Her aunt startled her by laughing. “You have been. In the main. If you are giving that up, I congratulate you.”
Cecelia gazed into her aunt’s clear blue eyes. She meant it. She was encouraging Cecelia to be as acerbic as she pleased. Cecelia had to smile at her. “Please don’t do anything about my marital prospects.”
“Of course not. You must know I have no such intention.”
She did. One could trust Aunt Valeria not to interfere in any matter that was not related to bees. Cecelia gave her a nod of thanks and went on up the stairs.
But she did not escape to her bedchamber unscathed. She found her father turning away from its door, a petulant expression on his round face.
“Oh there you are,” he said, as if she usually lurked up here in the daytime. Cecelia noticed that he had an ink-stained wad of papers in his hand and immediately knew what he would say next. “I brought this to be copied out.”
He extended the pages. No one but Cecelia could read his scrawled handwriting or decipher the maze of circled text, arrows, and emphatic cross-outs he created when penning an essay.
“Tomorrow would be sufficient,” he added. He shook the paper a little.
He never asked if she was busy or when it might be convenient for her to produce a fair copy of his work. In Papa’s mind, she was at his disposal. It sometimes seemed to Cecelia that he didn’t quite see her until he had need of her services. She had tried to discuss this with him, but the incisive brain that grappled with the intricacies of German philosophy seemed incapable of absorbing her concerns. He really did not appear to understand what she meant. Just doing his copying had come to seem simpler. She took the pages from his hand.
“Splendid,” said her father. He turned and walked away, his attention already elsewhere. Certainly not on any expression of gratitude.
“Splendid,” repeated Cecelia in quite a different tone and went to remove her bonnet.