As Arthur Shelton, seventh Earl of Macklin, walked through his home on his way to bed, he could hear the sharp scratch of sleet on the window glass, driven by a bitter late-January wind. A draft fluttered the flame on the candlestick he carried. The new year was beginning with a long, hard freeze. He was glad his children and their families had gotten away well before this storm hit, even though their departure had left the house feeling empty. The sound of his grandchildren’s feet pounding down the corridors and their high, childish voices calling to one another had been such a pleasure.
On impulse, he turned and went into the gallery. The long room stretched out before him, scarcely lit by his one candle. It was frigid, too, with no fires lit. He passed the portraits of his ancestors, their ranks a panoply of English history, and stopped near the far end, raising the candlestick to better illuminate the painting that hung there. It had been done nearly twenty years ago and showed his wife, Celia, in the early years of their marriage, a lovely young woman in a gown of sapphire silk and lace.
He gazed into her serene blue eyes. The artist had caught the little half smile that so often graced her features. That smile had drawn him across a ballroom to wangle an introduction and a dance. When they’d talked, its promise had been fulfilled. Celia had possessed warmth and humor and an eager gusto for life. How she would have enjoyed the holiday visit just past! How unfair that she’d missed it, along with so much else.
Arthur caught his own reflection in a dark windowpane. It was almost as if they stood side by side again. Except that Celia was still young, and he was nearly fifty. It was true that his dark hair had no gray. His tall figure remained muscular and upright. His square-jawed, broad-browed face showed few lines. But he was not the young man who had wooed and won her and brought her here to Macklin Abbey.
More than ten years Celia had been gone now, struck down by a raging fever before she reached forty. It had been a hard death. She’d fought it with all her strength, and he’d sat beside her and tried to lend his own. There was nothing worse than seeing the one you loved suffering and being able to do nothing, Arthur thought. Even now, a decade later, that pain lingered.
He gazed into Celia’s painted eyes. While his friends were sowing their wild oats in London society, he’d been getting to know her. He hadn’t envied them, hadn’t regretted even when they joked about his stuffiness. He’d had no doubts when he stood up beside Celia and made a vow for life. He’d expected to fulfill it, with all the joys and sorrows, complications and difficulties the years might bring, right down into old age. But fate had stepped in and changed the rules, and he’d been left alone. That, he had never planned.
Arthur allowed himself a brief pang, thinking of all the duties and familial pleasures he’d experienced without Celia. He’d carried on. When he looked at his children, he thought he’d done well. But it had been a long time since he was Celia’s husband. Arthur met the eyes of his reflection once again. He thought of the four young men he’d helped this last year with the grief that oppressed them. He’d had some small part in establishing pockets of happiness scattered around the country, with their three wives and an upcoming wedding. They had each found a new life.
Perhaps this was a lesson he should learn for himself as well? A shock went through him at the idea, and at the realization that it had not occurred to him before. Odd that it had taken near strangers to plant the notion of change. But now that it had appeared, the idea began to take root and unfold.
He would go down to London early this year, Arthur decided, perhaps as soon as next month. He could see how young Tom was getting on in his theatrical adventures. That lad always had some interesting tale to tell. And who knew what else might turn up?
As he continued to his bedchamber, the earl’s step was lighter.
* * *
“Now then, Yer Honor, have ye taken a wrong turning?” called a mocking voice.
Arthur turned to see a group of young men lingering near a shop front on the shabby London street. They all grinned at him. He judged they were apprentices having a rare day out on this first clement spring afternoon.
“Naught to worry about,” said another of them. “This is a respectable neighborhood. No footpads lurking in the alleyways to cosh you and lift your purse ’round here.”
“Naw, just mouthy coves making a nuisance of theirselves,” said Tom, who sauntered up just then and joined Arthur.
A volley of good-natured insults followed. Arthur gathered that the parties, near in age, knew one another and rather enjoyed a verbal tussle. And Tom exhibited a flair and volubility that Arthur hadn’t seen in him before. “Yer naught but a beslubbering dog-hearted flapdragon,” he told one of the group. “And Alf there is a weedy, toad-spotted puttock.” He rolled out the final word with obvious relish, as if it had a savory taste.
“Well, you’re a gudgeon,” replied one of the apprentices.
Tom shook his head in mock disappointment. “That’s the best you can do, Jem Dowling? Where’s your imagination, ye pribbling jolthead?”
“Jolthead,” repeated the one Tom had called Alf. “Jolthead.” He grinned as if the sound alone was hilarious. And indeed the whole group seemed to admire Tom’s eloquence. Arthur began to suspect that they goaded him just to hear the result.
“Shall we go, my lord?” asked Tom, with a gesture fully worthy of the stage.
“Milord, is it?” called one of the apprentices. “Well, ain’t we grand?” The group began to mince about the cobbles and bow to each other, drawing a laugh from their target.
Arthur fell in beside Tom, and they walked on. “That was extremely…colorful,” he said.
“It’s that fellow Shakespeare,” replied Tom. “Reckon you’d know already that his plays are chock-full of first-rate words.”
“Ah, yes. So you’ve been reading Shakespeare?”
“Puzzling it out, all I can get my hands on,” answered Tom cheerfully. Tom was nearly always cheerful, which still surprised Arthur sometimes, considering the lad’s history.
Tom had spent his earliest years scrounging through the rubbish on the streets of Bristol, with no knowledge of his family or even his last name. After a series of odd jobs, he’d taken to wandering the countryside on his own, where he’d encountered Arthur and then joined him on his travels for a while. Exposed to the inner workings of the London theater in the course of their adventures, Tom had discovered a desire to join that colorful world.
Nearing sixteen, the lad was beginning to grow into his features, as well as the large bones that showed in his hands and wrists. He seemed to have sprouted several inches in the last few months, Arthur thought. Tom’s homely, round face was gaining definition. He’d taken to wearing his brown hair longer, tied with a bit of cord at the back. His blue eyes continued to look out on the world with amiable curiosity.
“I’m thinking of Jesperson,” said Tom.
Arthur realized that he’d missed a remark or two. “What?”
“For my name,” said Tom. “Mrs. Thorpe calls it a stage name, but I reckon it’ll be more than that for me since I ai…haven’t got any name of my own.”
“Ah. Jesperson?”
“Because I’m just-a-person,” replied Tom with a broad smile.
Arthur laughed. “Mrs. Thorpe would know best about that choice.” Arthur had introduced the two. His unusual friendship with the acclaimed London actress had come through her banker husband.
“She’s been right kind to me,” Tom acknowledged. “Found me a job building scenery pieces. They call ’em flats, did you know? Because they’re flat, I reckon. Can’t be because they’re boring, since they ain’t.” He offered this information with gusto. Tom had a passion for learning, if not for schools.
“And you’re enjoying it as much as you expected?” Arthur asked, though he was fairly sure he knew the answer.
His young companion nodded. “It’s like I said before. I feel at home at the theater.”
It was true that many actors were as rootless as Tom, Arthur thought. They formed a class of their own outside the bounds of conventional society. Tom’s lack of antecedents didn’t brand him there, as it would almost anywhere else. “I’m glad,” he said.
They turned into the street where Tom was living. Arthur and Mrs. Thorpe had helped find him a room that was near the theaters but outside the raucous passageways that tended to surround them. His landlady looked after him like a ferocious mother hen.
“No, you will not look inside it!” declared an accented female voice just ahead. “You will go away and let me be!”
Arthur looked over the head of a passerby in time to see a woman confronting a burly fellow who was reaching for a cloth bag she held, as if to tug it from her grasp. She stepped back, swung the sack in a wide arc, and struck him square on the nose with it. The man roared and raised a fist. Tom surged forward, but Arthur moved more quickly, stepping ahead of the lad to stand behind the woman. Arthur met the attacker’s angry eyes, showing his readiness to intervene by gripping his walking stick.
The fellow glared at him for a long moment. Then, with a growled oath, he whirled and strode away.
The woman turned. But when she saw Arthur and Tom, the satisfaction in her face faded to a frown. “Oh, he went because you were standing there,” she said. She stamped her foot. “I thought I’d bested him.”
“You bloodied Dilch’s nose,” said Tom. He offered her a jaunty bow. “Only thing wrong with that is—it weren’t me as done it.”
“He made me angry,” she replied.
“As he does,” Tom acknowledged. “You got in a good hit. What’s in the bag?”
“Vegetables,” she replied, with an ironic smile and a shrug. The word had three syllables in her smoky voice with its slight foreign lilt.
“You faced off with Dilch over vegetables?” Tom grinned.
“It is the principle of the thing.”
Again the words had more sounds than a native English speaker would have employed. This woman’s speech was like warm honey pouring over one’s ears, Arthur noted.
“We must do something about that man,” she added.
Tom agreed. Arthur said nothing, because in plain fact he couldn’t. Her presence had struck him like a coup de foudre, and his famous aplomb had temporarily deserted him. It wasn’t simply the chiseled beauty of her face or the grace of her figure, clad in a gown with a unique air of fashion. He was ravished by the crackle of vitality in her eyes, so dark as to seem black; the glint of auburn in her raven hair; the aristocratic arch of her nose; the unconscious nobility in her stance. What was this magnificent woman doing in a seedy street, fighting off ruffians with a bag of vegetables?
“My lord, this is Señora Teresa Alvarez de Granada,” said Tom. He pronounced the name as if he’d carefully learned the Castilian lisp. “She’s a neighbor of mine. Señora, this is the Earl of Macklin.”
“Earl? De verdad?”
Tom nodded. “I’ve been learning some Spanish from the señora,” he informed Arthur.
“And what is an English milord doing here?” She looked around the street and back at Arthur as if she couldn’t quite believe the juxtaposition. Then she looked from him to Tom, frowning.
“Señora,” said Arthur with a bow. She received it with a distant nod and a twitch of her shoulder that was nearly a shrug.
He couldn’t remember an occasion when he’d been received with such rudeness.
“She paints the flats I put together,” Tom added.
“For the theater?” Arthur was puzzled. She didn’t look like someone who would perform such tasks. “How did that come about?” he asked.
Her expression grew even cooler. “A matter of luck,” she replied. Her tone was vastly unencouraging, making it clear that her doings were none of his affair.
“Indeed.” Arthur could speak frostily, too. He didn’t often bother, but she was acting as if he was an encroaching mushroom whose pretensions required depressing.
“Lord Macklin found me my job,” said Tom. He looked amused.
“Mrs. Thorpe was the prime mover,” Arthur said.
This earl knew Mrs. Thorpe. Teresa found that almost as odd as his apparent ease in Tom’s company. She gazed up at the tall man before her. There was no denying his square-jawed, athletic attractiveness. Perhaps ten years her senior, she judged, more or less. His handsome face showed few lines, and those seemed scored by good humor. Seemed indeed, she thought with contempt. Charm was the mask aristocratic gentlemen used to hide their ruthlessness. But she knew the breed all too well. They took what they wanted and cared nothing for those without power. Indeed, they enjoyed exerting their dominance, savored it as a dark pleasure. Nothing such a man said could be trusted.
This earl’s blue-gray eyes gleamed with intelligence, which made him even more dangerous. She had to suppress a shudder. The smart ones were worse. They found ways around obstacles. They set cruel traps for the unwary and relished their struggles. Her fingers tightened painfully on her cloth bag.
She reminded herself that she didn’t need anything from this nobleman. She didn’t have to please him. She didn’t need anyone, and wouldn’t, not ever again. She was free. “I must go,” she said.
“I’m headed back,” said Tom. “We can walk with you, can’t we, my lord?”
“Of course,” said the tall earl.
Teresa was amused to hear reserve in his voice. He was vexed that she hadn’t bowed and scraped when told his rank. And she could afford to annoy him. How she enjoyed that. But what was he doing with young Tom? Was she obliged to warn the lad? Yes, she would, when the object of her concern wasn’t looming over them like a storm cloud. “There is no necessity to accompany me,” she said. She wished they wouldn’t, in fact.
“We’re happy to,” said Tom. “Eh, my lord?”
Lord Macklin bowed, a polite acknowledgment rather than an agreement.
Tom was finding something amusing in this encounter, Teresa saw. As he did in so much of existence. She envied the boy his easygoing temperament. For her part, she wanted to get away. She did not require disruptive earls in any form. All was serene in her life now. Well, barring minor annoyances like Dilch. She was satisfied and settled and determined not to stray from the bounds she’d set. It had been a long, difficult road to this place. She would let nothing threaten that hard-won peace. “It is but a few steps,” she said. “I won’t trouble you.” She nodded at Tom and said, “Good day, my lord.”
The earl took his dismissal with bland grace.
Worse and worse, thought Teresa. Such smooth surfaces concealed deceit. It was much easier when this sort of man was cutting and cold. But no matter. She wouldn’t ever see him again. There was no cause for concern. “Good day,” she said again. And walked rapidly away with her lumpy bag of produce bumping at her knee. Though she could feel his eyes on her back, she did not rush. Prey ran; she was not prey. She would never be prey again.
“Who in the world is she?” Arthur asked Tom when the lady was gone.
“Like I said, a neighbor.”
“In your lodgings?” Arthur had never seen her on his visits to Tom.
“No, she has her own house just down the street from my rooms.”
“With her family? Her husband, perhaps.”
Tom gave him a sidelong glance as he began to walk along the cobbles again. “No, just her and a servant girl. I think her family all died in the war. She doesn’t speak of them. Turns the subject right quick if anyone asks.”
“Ah.” The war against Napoleon had caused a great deal of displacement on the Continent, and the Iberian Peninsula had been particularly affected. “So she lives here in London now?”
“Aye. I reckon she has a bit of money. She seems to be able to please herself.”
A small income would sustain an individual in this part of town, Arthur thought. “You say she paints scenery for the theater?” He still found this odd.
“That’s where I met her, at the workshop,” said Tom. “She can make the flats look real as real. Like you was…were looking out over a regular vista.”
“An artist then?”
“Learned watercolors as a girl, she said.”
One of the accomplishments of a lady, Arthur thought. He had no doubt she was one. Was it her fall in status that made her so prickly? Or did she blame him, as an Englishman, for the depredations of the war? That seemed petty and unfair. “And who is this Dilch?”
“Him.” Tom sniffed. “Our local bully.”
“He hurts people?” Arthur grew concerned for Tom.
“Mostly he blusters,” the lad replied. “When it starts to go beyond that, the people hereabouts band together against him. No need to worry, my lord.”
Worry was only a part of what Arthur was feeling. He was remarkably unsettled, he realized. Señora Alvarez had roused and interested and annoyed him. How long had it been since he’d felt such tumult? Longer than he could recall, he thought.
He ought to simply dismiss her from his mind. She’d clearly had no interest in him. Indeed, she’d seemed eager to get away. But he did not deserve her abrupt dismissal. That was what rankled, Arthur thought. He was a…worthy person.
His face heated as he acknowledged the pomposity of that phrase. Yet it was true. Many people thought so. And for some reason, he felt a strong urge to show Señora Alvarez that she’d misjudged him. After that demonstration he would probably never see her again. They obviously did not move in the same circles.
But how then to speak with her? He couldn’t call on her, a woman alone in a part of London where he didn’t fit. He would be noticed; eyebrows would be raised. He had no wish to cause her difficulties. A thought occurred. Perhaps Mrs. Thorpe knew the señora? His friend seemed to be acquainted with nearly everyone in the theater world, no matter how tangential. That was it. At the first opportunity, he would find out. Mrs. Thorpe could even vouch for his character to the señora, since he seemed to require such bolstering. His brain shied away from asking whyever this should be the case.
“My lord?” asked Tom. The lad had walked on a few steps and now turned back with a quizzical expression.
He’d been standing in the middle of the street like a moonstruck calf. “Coming,” said Arthur and hastened to catch up.