"Him," Trev said. "But you'd have liked him, Callie. And I know he would have very much liked you. We had a quip between us-" He stopped himself, looking conscious. "Well, that's no matter. Perhaps a female wouldn't appreciate the humor."
"Perhaps," she said. Some of her rigidity left her, but she felt dissatisfied that she wasn't to be let in on whatever humor this might be. "I collect he is no longer living?"
"No," Trev said shortly. "He's dead."
"I'm sorry." Callie lowered her eyes. To be candid, she found herself jealous of any friend who commanded such loyalty from him. "I'm sure you miss him," she said, attempting to enter into his feel ings. "Was he a Frenchman?"
He gave a laugh. "The Rooster? No, not hardly! Though I met him in France."
"Oh," she said. "Oh, of course. The pugilist." Callie supposed she shouldn't be taken aback; the papers had mentioned his association with Mrs. Fowler's late husband, but she had never imagined that Trev would have a close rapport with one of the great, hulking men who pounded one another to bloody, raw f lesh in their illegal bouts.
He seemed to read her thoughts, for he clasped his hands behind his back and bowed. "I haven't led a very respectable life since I left Shelford, my lady."
She bent her head. "No, I suppose you haven't."
"I expect if you've read the papers, you know that I've got no property in France, either," he added gruff ly. "It's all a great fabrication that I made up to please my mother."
She had deduced that, in fact, and spent a number of her nights composing scornful remarks to her pillow on his general perfidy and falsehood. But she only said, "I see."
"I made an attempt to recover it," he said, "and all I received for my trouble was to find myself in the clutches of a moneylender the likes of whom I'd knife in the back if I met him today. But I was young and witless, and I wanted to have Monceaux; I wanted to go to my grandfather and tell him I had it back. Sadly for these fine ambitions, what I got was beaten sense less in a back alley of Paris."
Callie listened with her eyes lowered. In mockery he called her worldly wise, but she had stayed in Shelford, dreaming of adventures, reading his letters full of humor and invented tales, while he had gone out and been beaten up in an alley.
"But to shorten this unedifying story," he continued, "I fell in with some English deserters after the war. Big fellows. We were all starving to death." He gave a humorless laugh. "I had the lucky notion of making an exhibition of English boxing in Paris. None of us knew a thing about fighting, so we fixed it. It was a sensation. I'd call for a volunteer to take on these English goddamns-you'll pardon another lesson in my language, Mademoiselle, but I'm afraid that's what we French call your countrymen under certain circumstances-and we'd have some hulking local géant ready to come up and fight. There'd be a lot of sound and fury before we made sure he won, and split the takings with him." He crossed his arms and leaned back against the mantel. "But Jem got tired of it. He began to fight in earnest. And he was good." His voice softened, and he shook his head a little. "He was amazing. But we couldn't make any profit in France by thrashing Frenchmen. So we changed his name, came back to England, and made a bid for the championship."
"Instead of coming home to your family," she said tartly, "as you might have done in place of starving on the streets of Paris or becoming a… a-"
"An operator of the Fancy," he supplied. "I arranged bouts and held the stakes. I didn't want to come back. My grandfather was still alive." He paused. "Among other reasons."
That cause she did comprehend. The old duc had used mockery and scorn like a rapier on his grandson; Trev had always ignored it or turned it away with a shrug, but Callie knew. Their wildest adventures were driven by his grandfather's sneering voice. Trev would give his alley-cat yowl under her window in the middle of the night, and all the rules were at naught then. There would be a hint of violence in his laughter that only some journey to the edge of disaster could quell. To stand before his grandfather and admit that he had tried to regain Monceaux and failed-no. She understood that much.
"But this is a boring topic," he said with a shrug. "We did well enough for ourselves. Jem fell in love with the adorable Emma, and they had a son, and everyone loved them all, and when the Rooster lay there dying on the grass, he asked me to take care of Emma and the boy." His tone was light and careless, but his expression was rather hard. "Perhaps they didn't print that part in the newspapers."
"No," she said quietly, "they didn't print that."
"God knows I tried to do it," he said, drawing a deep breath. "She'd listen to Jem. She's a remarkably silly woman, but she doted on him. Once he was gone-we couldn't deal at all, she and I. There was a nice sum of money that was meant for her and the boy. I had charge of it, but I could see she'd run through it before he was out of short coats. And she did. So I made her an allow ance myself-aye, you may lift your eyebrows, but I'd built up a pretty fortune, and a good deal of it was from making book on the Rooster's fights, so I reckoned it was only what I owed him. But she got herself on tick with some jeweler, and he frightened her, and she was too stupid or stubborn to come to me." He blew a scoffing breath. "As if we'd let a bill broker carry her off without breaking his legs for him first."
She sat looking at him, sorting out this new Trevelyan in her mind: this rather fierce gentleman of fisticuffs and a friendship that outlasted death. In truth, it suited him better than presiding gravely over a grand châteaus, something that she had always had a difficult time envisioning even with his letters from France full of details and embellishments.
But there was a certain force, a hint of real brutality about him now. In all her fantasies of pirates and swords, amid the skewering and cannon fire-clean and bloodless in imagination-Trev had been at the center. It had always been a part of him, that violence: hidden and checked, but understood. The world had brought it out in him, she thought. No, he'd never allow anyone under his protection to be carried off or threatened-not when Callie had been tagging along with him on adventures, and not now.
"I marvel at her lack of sense," she said thought fully. "Certainly you would break his legs."
He gave her a sardonic smile. "Well, I wouldn't do it personally, of course."
"I did wonder why all your menservants were so large."
He made a slight bow.
"I ought to be shocked," she said.
He tilted his head to the side. "Aren't you, ma mie?"
Callie's forehead creased as she considered the ques tion. She stood up and took a turn across the carpet. "I am exceedingly cross with you, certainly."
"So I had noticed," he murmured.
"Trevelyan," she said with determination. She stopped and faced him, taking a deep breath into her lungs in preparation to speak her mind.
"Call me 'Seigneur,'" he suggested to her mildly. "If you wish to reduce me to a quivering dish of jelly in the most efficient manner."
She ignored this. "I was led to believe you were married to that woman." She gathered her skirt, strode across the room again, and then looked back at him. "Married!"
"I'm sure I never said so."
This was so reasonable that it merely fed her displeasure. "You also never said you weren't!"
"At what point did the topic enter into our conver sation?" he inquired.
"And that is another thing!" she expostulated. "Previous to this, sir, your conversation has been singularly uninformative regarding anything of any consequence whatsoever."