"No. No. No. Must I say it again?"
Chloe stared past him, apparently gazing with unwarranted interest at the rain-drenched windowpane.
Oeven days later, two fascinated postilions watched as one of their passengers busily ensconced a basket of mewling kittens and a bird cage inside the chaise. The occupant of the bird cage offered a ripe opinion on this change in his circumstances and then cackled with the appearance of self-satisfaction. A tortoisesheU cat leapt into the chaise after the kittens and curled on the squabbed seat by the window. A huge brindled mongrel ran, barking excitedly, around the chaise, his feathered tail flailing all and sundry.
Hugo stood supervising the securing of Petrarch to the rear of the chaise. He had no idea how it had happened. He couldn't even pinpoint the moment when he'd yielded. His ward had the most obdurate will, one that simply ignored opposition. She had behaved as if he couldn't possibly have meant his prohibition and somehow he'd come to believe that he hadn't.
But, dammit, he had! The prospect of a two-hundred-mile journey with that circus was hideous. No less so was the thought of arriving at his deserted and neglected house on Mount Street accompanied by a menagerie.
With a helpless frown he listened to Chloe's cheerful reassurances as she bestowed her family within the chaise. She seemed to be extolling the virtues of travel by post-chaise and all the excitements to come their way. Judging by Falstaffs response, they were not wholly impressed.
"Don't fancy travelin' with that lot," Samuel muttered, appearing at Hugo's side. "I've 'alf a mind to ride along wi' you."
Since Samuel was not much of a rider, rolling decks suiting him more than the rolling gait of a horse, the possibility was indicative of the depths of his feelings on the matter.
"I'm sorry," Hugo apologized, shaking his head. "I don't know how it happened."
"Won't take no for an answer, that's 'er trouble," Samuel pronounced.
"But what's mine?" Hugo demanded.
Samuel cast him a shrewd look. "Reckon ye know that as well as anyone." He stomped around to the open door of the chaise and peered doubtfully within. "Any room in there for me?"
"Yes, of course," Chloe said. "I'll sit with Beatrice and Falstaff and the kittens, and you can have the whole opposite seat to yourself."
"What about the dog?"
"He'll sit on the floor… but I expect some of the time he'll want to run along beside the carriage."
Samuel sighed heavily and clambered in. Chloe smiled warmly in welcome and scrunched herself up
against the squabs as if to make herself even smaller than she was.
"You do have enough room, don't you?" she asked with anxious solicitude as he settled down.
"Reckon so," he said with a grudging sniff. "But it'll smell to 'igh 'eaven in here, soon enough."
"It won't," Chloe insisted, trying to make Dante diminish as he leapt exuberantly into the carriage and bestowed his breathy grin on his fellow travelers. "They're very clean. And we can have the window open."
"Drafts is bad for me neck."
"Oh, Samuel, please don't mind." She reached over and placed a hand on his knee.
As always, he was not proof against the beguiling charm of her appeals. He grunted in half-acceptance. The whole expedition struck him as lunacy. He was Lancashire born and bred, and apart from his years at sea had never been out of the county. He had never been to London and had never wanted to go. He didn't want to now. It seemed to him they had enough to do at the manor, and now that Sir Hugo had come out of the doldrums, life could jog along quite smoothly. But where Sir Hugo went, he went too, and if Sir Hugo believed this crazily uncomfortable disruption of their lives was necessary, then Samuel would bite his tongue.
Hugo swung onto his horse, and the chaise moved out of the courtyard. He cast a glance behind him at his home. He had never been fond of it, not even as a boy, and had left it without regret when he'd joined the navy. Since his return, its proximity to Shipton and Gresham Hall had destroyed any desire to make a permanent home there. He'd stayed, attached by some fantastical umbilical cord to the one pure love of his life… and because it was as good a place as any other to drink himself into an early grave.
But all that was behind him.
Now he was caught up in a convolution to which he had to find a solution. And the only solution was a husband for Chloe. No suitable husband could be found if she remained at Denholm Manor. He couldn't establish her on her own without exposing her to Jasper's machinations. So it had to be London under his protection. Quod erat demonstrandum. The Latin tag from schoolboy geometry was somehow appropriate in its absolute truth.
And maybe in London they would find the distractions that would lessen the spell that diminutive bundle of love had cast over them both. Until the spell was broken, Chloe wouldn't be truly free to follow the conventional paths that Elizabeth would have wanted for her. She would find friends, activities, a social whirl that the sheltered girl could never have imagined. And as she became absorbed, so would the ties to himself lessen.
As for himself-once he had found London a hypnotic treasure chest. There were members of Society who would remember him… there were distant relatives who knew no worse of him than that he'd gone somewhat precipitately to fight Napoleon. He had friends at the Admiralty… men who existed on half pay rather than sell out at war's end. Once he'd been gregarious, there was no reason he shouldn't become so again. The shadow of the Congregation of Eden could be thrown off.
And in the pursuit of these distractions he would be able to withdraw gracefully from the unnatural… no, not unnatural, but utterly improper and disgraceful liaison with his seventeen-year-old ward.
And once she was respectably married, she'd be free of Jasper's threat, and he would be free to leave England and make some kind of a life for himself on the Continent.
He knew one thing, it was a knowledge that came from the marrow of his bones rather than his brain. He couldn't endure to live close to Chloe once she was married… in love… lost to him for all the right reasons. He'd ached in the wilderness for her mother. He wouldn't do it again for the daughter.
Chapter 17
Hugo Lattimer, isn't it?" At the quiet question, Hugo looked up from the shelf of music books he was perusing in Hatch-ard's. He frowned for a second at the black-eyed man who'd addressed him, then his expression cleared as recollection came.
"Carrington," he said, holding out his hand to Marcus Devlin, Marquis of Carrington. "It's been many years."
"At least fourteen," Lord Carrington agreed, shaking hands. "We were both a pair of striplings. You joined the navy, I believe."
"Yes, for the duration. I sold out after Waterloo."
"And what brings you to Londoa7 The joys of the Season?" Carrington's voice was faintly sardonic. He was not an aficionado of Society's social whirl.
Hugo shrugged easily. He remembered some old story about a broken engagement that had soured Marcus Devlin's view of Society's pleasures. "I've acquired a ward," he said with a smile. "And it seems orchestrating a come-out lies within the duties of a guardian."
He glanced around the crowded bookshop. "She's here somewhere, searching for Miss Austen's posthumous publication; Persuasion, I believe it's titled."
"An interesting lady, Miss Austen," Marcus observed. "A painfully sharp wit and no patience with fools and their foibles."
"No," Hugo agreed. "Pride and prejudice…"
"Sense and sensibility," Marcus continued promptly.
"Well, if you'll excuse me, Lattimer… I'll see you in White's or Watier's perhaps?"
Hugo inclined his head in vague acknowledgment. He was still a member of both clubs, but he had neither the resources nor the inclination for gaining-the major activity in the exclusive clubs of St. James's-and no desire to draw attention to himself by refusing to join in the heavy drinking that accompanied social intercourse in those bastions of male privilege.