Captain Durant's Countess(20)

“Are you sure, sir? I could bring a brandy up to your rooms.”

“I’ve had enough to drink.” Reyn never overindulged. He found he preferred being clear-headed, especially since the world was such a confusing place. “But you might fetch me a cheroot. I’m afraid I forgot mine upstairs.”

“Certainly, sir. Wait right here, sir.”

Reyn leaned up against a wall and stared at a hideous painting of an unfamiliar allegory. All this sir-ing was stirring up nostalgia for his army service. Maybe he shouldn’t have sold out, but asked for a transfer. He might be playing vingt-et-un with a bejeweled maharaja right this very minute. But then where would poor Ginny be? No, I’ve done the right thing, he decided.

The footman returned less than two minutes later. “If you’ll just follow me, sir, there are French doors from the music room to the garden and we shall get you settled.”

The music room was dark, but moonlight spilled in through a wall of windows. The footman opened a glass door, handed Reyn his cigar, and lit it for him.

“Thank you. What is your name?”

“John, sir. All the footmen at Kelby Hall are called John.”

“Are they indeed? What does your mother think about that, John?”

“She’s dead, sir. But I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

What rot. What sort of people were the Kelbys to rob their servants of their own names for convenience? He forgot his earlier vow not to try to fraternize with the servants. “You feel fortunate to be employed here then?”

“Oh, aye, sir.” John continued to hold the door, but Reyn resisted stepping over the threshold onto the stone terrace.

“An easy job, is it?”

“Oh, no, sir! There’s plenty to do, and long hours. But I don’t mind. The master’s a very fair man.”

“And Lady Kelby?”

“She . . . she’s lovely, she is.”

She was indeed.

“Thank you, John, for your assistance.” Reyn dug into his pocket for a coin, which disappeared with alacrity. “Tell me, what’s your real name?”

“Aloysius, sir. Mr. Amesbury says it’s a burden, but I do feel sorry for the Williams and Roberts who work here. Nothing wrong with those names.”

“Nothing wrong with yours either. Good evening to you, Aloysius.”

“And to you, sir.”

Reyn stepped out into the night. The moon hung low and stars sprinkled the sky. After getting his bearings, he could see the gleaming crushed stone path that led from the patio to a corner of the formal garden. That way wasn’t much of a challenge. He’d seen squares and rectangles, all tidy and tamed and pruned back for the spring. He could march around their borders as if he were on parade, but that wouldn’t do much for the inexplicable yearning he felt. He rested his hand on the balustrade and took a puff of his very fine cigar.

People who claimed the country was quiet had never listened. Reyn heard a fluttering above—probably a bat—and the distant hoot of an owl. Bushes rustled in the light wind.

He heard the lap of water in the lake on the property, the place where the earl’s poor daughter had ended her life. He’d seen it in an illustration in the guidebook he’d bought to learn more about Kelby Hall. Always be prepared, that was his motto, but the place itself had exceeded all his preparation. It was a very, very grand house. Reyn supposed these sorts of places owned the men who lived in them, not the other way around. The lords were temporary caretakers for future generations of temporary caretakers. Ridiculous when you thought about it.

And a son of his might be one of them.

He stepped off the terrace onto thick, springy grass. For a mad moment, Reyn wanted to remove his boots and sink his toes into its cushion, but the bite of night air drove that thought from his mind. He headed in the direction of the moving water with only the light of the moon and glow of his cigar’s end to lead him.

To have one’s child die must be an insurmountable grief. Maris had said her husband had changed, and it explained some of the urgency of the task before him. Not that Lady Jane Kelby could have inherited Kelby Hall, but at least the earl would have left something behind for posterity besides the book he was writing. A flesh and blood legacy. Reyn had never thought that far ahead as to what mark any future descendants of his would leave upon the world. When one’s life was regularly in danger, one didn’t have time to think beyond the present.

He was thinking too much. He was deliberately—with the earl’s full approval—going to try to feather the Kelby nest with a Durant cuckoo. His own long nose—hell, his bushy eyebrows—might be passed down through the ages.

And he wouldn’t be around to see it. There was something terribly wrong about it all.

He clamped the cigar between his teeth and batted a bush out of his way. It had been a while since he’d been on a night patrol, and his instincts had gone soft. But it was peacetime, and he wasn’t about to be attacked on the manicured grounds of Kelby Hall.

He passed by all the regimented clipped hedges and came to a vast expanse of empty lawn. The ground beneath his feet sloped gradually down to the lake, which was lit with a shimmering stripe of moonlight. A folly with vine-covered columns rose like a stone ghost on a tiny island in the middle of the black lake. A rowboat was tied to a matching stone pillar at the water’s edge. At one time people had rowed out to the folly on a sunny summer day and picnicked, but that seemed pointless to him. A man-made lake, a man-made ruin, all very picturesque and all very false.

Even if Reyn had not known of the tragedy that had occurred there, an aura of sadness pervaded the place. Weeping willow trees shivered all around him, anticipating the winter to come. Did the lake freeze up? He wondered if the countess skated, her long legs gliding from shore to shore. Probably not. As she kept saying, she had no time for recreation, and it would not be fun visiting the place where her friend died.

Judging from the condition of the little boat, it had been ages since someone had gone out in it. Leaves floated on water that covered its bottom from the last rainfall. Rowing might be good for his bad arm. Despite the pain of it, Reyn didn’t want to lose what mobility he had left. Exercise was important.

Bedsport could be very athletic, but Reyn anticipated he and the countess would be restrained, as proper as one could be under the circumstances. Even with the privacy of the workroom, they could be discovered and then the entire plan would fall to pieces.

He bent and booted the cigar stub into the ground. Tomorrow would arrive soon enough to test his amorous abilities. He’d made enough headway today—at least Maris Kelby had been satisfied. Even her slender white thighs had been flushed, as lovely as her cheeks had been.

Reyn turned to walk back toward the house and stopped when he saw movement between a gap in the hedges that surrounded the formal garden. Someone else was enjoying the country air and moonlight. He could make out enough to know that his fellow nature lover was a woman.

A tall woman with darkish hair and fair skin that fairly glowed under the moonbeams.

He didn’t want to alarm her, so made plenty of noise as he walked up the lawn, whistling off-key and crunching his boots down hard on the fallen leaves and twigs that had scattered on the lawn. He heard her own feet on the crushed stone path. She was trying to make a rapid retreat.

Should he let her go? It might be less embarrassing all the way around. What did they have to say to each other, after all?

Reyn found himself loping up the lawn and through a break in the bushes. “Lady Kelby!”

Maris Kelby stopped at once and turned, nervously fingering the knot in the pale fringed shawl that had first attracted his attention. She wasn’t wearing gloves, and her hands were white as the tall obelisk not two feet away from her. She must be freezing.

“Good evening, Captain. I didn’t expect to find anyone out of doors at this hour.”

The implication was that he was trespassing on her privacy, which he was, but Reyn didn’t care. “It’s a beautiful night, don’t you agree? I stepped outside to enjoy one of your husband’s cigars.”

“Smoking is a filthy habit.”

Reyn ran a tongue over his teeth. Tobacco, like leather, whiskey, and horse, was a perfectly acceptable male odor. But he could give up smoking if it bothered the countess. There would be enough vice for him without it.

“Most everyone enjoys a pipe now and then. It’s a huge cash crop all over the Americas. It’s even grown in Canada now. Tobacco financed the American Revolution, you know.”

“All the more reason to avoid it. We want no more wars.”

“Amen to that,” Reyn said, although his heart wasn’t quite in it. War had been the making of him. “You are much too young to remember King George’s War.”

“My husband is a historian, Captain.”

Reyn was not used to discussing history and revolutions with lovely women in the dark. The night was designed for better things. “Come sit with me for a few moments, Lady Kelby.”