Julie Anne Long - [Pennyroyal Green 08] Read online

  It didn’t prevent him from liking her.

  She was officially the only woman of his entire acquaintance who had ever said such a thing, and she’d managed to sound sensible doing it. She didn’t tolerate fools, which amused him. In fact, talking to her had been a bit like taking off tight boots at the end of a long day: she had felt peculiarly comfortable, peculiarly spacious, in the way other women simply weren’t, by contrast.

  And he liked her laugh. Quite a bit. He wouldn’t mind making her do it again.

  He handed his coat and hat to the footman and now stood in the doorway of the parlor of the Redmond House, surreptitiously watching his sister Violet, who was being looked after by their mother while her husband was on business in London. She was ensconced on the settee, clicking away with knitting needles, some scarflike object unfurling at the end of them. Her shiny dark head was bent in concentration, and in the cool pale light pouring in the window, she looked like a serene, exemplary representative of English womanhood. Someone could paint her just so and call it The Sussex Madonna.

  And then the Redmonds could hang it in the parlor, and her family would gather round it and point and roar with laughter. For a more accurate name for such a painting would have been Appearances are Deceiving.

  “What are you making?”

  She whirled. “Jonathan!” Her face lit. “Don’t stand there gawking. You look splendid, if a bit dusty. Tell me how I look.”

  “Radiant. But if you get any bigger we’ll have to haul you about in a sedan chair. Or perhaps we can buy you a stylish cart and have it pulled about by a little white donkey.”

  She squawked in outrage and hurled a ball of blue wool at him.

  Or she tried. Her arm snagged on her bulging stomach, and the wool ball instead dribbled impotently to the floor.

  They both watched it roll to a listless stop at Jonathan’s feet.

  He handed it back to her, scrunched his eyes closed, leaned toward her, and sat obediently still so she could throw it at him again.

  It bounced feebly off his chest.

  They both watched it wobble to a stop a few feet from the window.

  “Feel better now?” he asked her.

  “No. But now will you fetch it for me?”

  “Of course.” He retrieved it and handed it back to her.

  “Now will you fetch me some marzipan? And perhaps some raspberries?”

  He turned an incredulous stare upon her. “Woman, you have me confused with your willing slave, the Earl of Ardmay. And where on earth would we find raspberries at this time of year? Oh God, you aren’t going to cry, are you?”

  She considered it. “Not this time,” she decided thoughtfully. “But I think the baby needs raspberries.”

  “I hope you have a girl and that she’s exactly like you.” He delivered this like a curse, and flung himself into a chair next to her, slouched, and hoisted his booted feet up onto a little upholstered stool. He would get away with this as long as his mother didn’t see it.

  “So does Asher,” Violet said dreamily.

  “He’d wish differently if he’d grown up with you, and had to pull you out of wells by your elbows and the like.” Violet had once threatened to throw herself into a well over an argument with a suitor, and had one leg over before she was pulled back by the elbows, and everyone in England seemed to know this. “I warrant that big mane of hair of his will be gray by the time your child is two years old. And he’s an earl, after all. He’ll want a boy.”

  “Honestly. The way all of you do go on about the well. I never made it all the way into the well, and I didn’t intend to. And besides, Asher’s done a good deal more for me than that.” She smiled dreamily again. “The things that man can do . . .”

  Jonathan clapped his hands over his ears. “No! Not one more word.”

  She laughed.

  “But you do look very well and so radiant it borders on the cliché, Violet, even if you are huge.”

  In truth, she looked a little weary to Jonathan. The faint lavender crescents beneath her eyes worried him. He supposed it was difficult to sleep comfortably when one was carrying living cargo, and possibly the earl’s heir. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy for Violet, but then Violet wasn’t known for making anything easy.

  “Thank you. Can you lean a bit that way, please? You smell of smoke and smoke still makes me a bit queasy, and I shouldn’t like to cast my accounts here in the parlor. Were you out throwing darts at the Pig & Thistle? Do you think you can take me on a trip, Jonathan?”

  He obligingly listed a bit in the opposite direction from her. “I smoked a cheroot late last night.” He contemplated telling Violet about his encounter with Tommy, but decided to keep it a secret. “It must still be lingering on my coat. Did you say trip? In your condition? Are you mad? Unless it’s to the foot of the garden, and then I’ll go and fetch a donkey and cart for you. Easier to obtain the two of them than it would be to obtain raspberries.”

  “Oh, please, say you will! It’s a short trip I have in mind, and Asher is in London at the king’s behest. So very selfish of the king to call him away in my time of need. I should like to visit the Gypsy woman Leonora Heron and her daughter, that girl, Martha Her—oh, my goodness! You should see your face! You’ve gone so white! Are you going to cast your accounts?”

  “I don’t like that girl.” That girl had once made a prediction that chilled him to his very marrow. “And you know why. Why do you want to see the Gypsy girl?”

  “Because I want to ask her about the baby.”

  He laid a concerned hand on her arm and lowered his voice to a hush. “Are you worried it might not be human?”

  She brushed off his hand. “I want to ask her about the baby, because she was right about . . .” She stopped. She bit her lip. Her eyes flared swiftly in alarm.

  It was too late. Jonathan knew her, and he was faster. “Right about what, Violet?”

  Violet kept her mouth clamped.

  “Right. About. What?” he demanded.

  “Things. I’ve heard she’s right about certain things sometimes.”

  He made a disgusted sound. “Try again. As I recall during our visit there with Cynthia, she said something about you taking a trip over water, Mrs. Heron did. And then that looby of a daughter of hers, Martha, blurted the word ‘Lavay.’ And . . . well, let me see. At the ball, you were oh so excited to learn that ‘Lavay’ was the first mate of the Earl of Ardmay’s ship. You were convinced it meant Lyon was a pirate named Le Chat, of all things. The earl was given a mandate by the king to hunt down this pirate. And then,” he said slowly, “and then you went to a house party. For a fortnight. And shortly after you returned from said house party, the Earl of Ardmay appeared here, and voilà! You’re married to him within weeks.”

  Violet listened to this. “That was the sequence of events, yes,” she allowed cautiously.

  Jonathan glared at her.

  She donned an absorbed, beatific Madonna-esque expression, and ran a hand absently over her belly, a ploy to make him feel guilty.

  She ought to have known better by now. Nothing of the sort ever worked on Jonathan.

  “Did this ‘house party’ by any chance take place on a ship?” he asked sardonically.

  Her mouth remained clamped shut.

  “Mother of God, Violet.” He was awed and disgusted and quite furious. “What happened? All I can say is I’m glad the Earl of Ardmay has the keeping of you now. You’re bloody lucky something didn’t happen to you. I’m so unutterably tired of secrets in this family. Give that ball of wool to me. Now.”

  Violet, like a true penitent, handed it to him with great trepidation, squeezed her eyes closed, and hunched her shoulders.

  He wasn’t going to pelt his pregnant sister. He hurled it instead across the room with impressive force.

  Just in time to strike their mother squarely in her expensively-clad bosom.

  It bounced from her and rolled across the carpet, unfurling a streamer of blue on its way, an
d coming to a stop obligingly near Violet’s feet, like a loyal pet.

  Jonathan and Violet froze, half aghast, half, truthfully, delighted.

  Their mother was stunned motionless for a moment. And then she stirred. “What have I told you about throwing things in the house, Jonathan?” she asked evenly.

  He pretended to mull this. “Never miss?”

  She laughed. Fanchette Redmond was always indulgent of her youngest son’s glibness. Probably because for a long while after his oldest brother Lyon disappeared, his mother hadn’t laughed at all. And Jonathan had been the one to make her do it when she finally did.

  “Your father would like to have a word with you, Jonathan. I wasn’t certain whether you’d yet arrived, but he’s in the library now if you’d like to go up.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  What a lot could be conveyed with one syllable. His father was considerably less indulgent of Jonathan’s glibness than his mother was.

  “Thank you,” he remembered to add.

  “It’s just a word, not a sentence, darling.”

  It took him a moment. “A prison joke, Mother! Oh, well done!” he congratulated her.

  She glowed. His mother perhaps naturally assumed that Jonathan was in some sort of scrape. There would be plenty of time to explain later.

  He stood and stretched, and when he did, a swift startled yearning flickered over his mother’s face, and then it was gone. And he knew it was because she was noticing, as had so many others, just how much he’d come to look like Lyon.

  Bloody Lyon.

  He loved his brother. But he knew well that Lyon had been no saint, which was something other people seemed willing to forget, if they ever even knew it. And Lyon had disappeared without a word to anyone, allegedly because Olivia Eversea had broken his heart. Fulfilling, as all of England seemed to know, an ancient curse: that an Eversea was destined to fall in love with a Redmond once per generation, with disastrous consequences. The deep-rooted enmities between the Everseas and Redmonds had simmered beneath a veneer of civility this century (in another century, around 1066, rumor had it they’d cleaved each other’s skulls with axes), but the disappearance of Lyon had scraped open wounds, and made even this civility dangerously more difficult.

  Jonathan collected the wool ball and wordlessly handed it to his sister. He kissed his mother on the cheek in passing, and went up to persuade his father to invest in a son who had no intention of disappearing, let alone falling prey to a curse involving inappropriate love, of all things.

  No, he intended to conquer, rather than be conquered.

  The way Redmonds always conquered—with unsurpassable wealth.

  Chapter 3

  IF HIS FATHER’S LIBRARY had been a symphony, it would have been written by Bach—tasteful, controlled, masculine, orderly. Browns and creams and rich dense fabrics—velvet, wool, crepe. The better to muffle the screams of Isaiah’s victims, Jonathan thought, amused. Not that scream-muffling was strictly necessary. His father could paralyze a victim—a recalcitrant son, perhaps, or a poorly performing bailiff—with a well-chosen word and a beam from his greenglass glittery eyes. Much like a . . . native armed with a poison-tipped dart.

  Jonathan had learned about natives and poison darts and the like from his brother Miles, a famous explorer who’d nearly been eaten by cannibals out in the South Seas. Jonathan had naturally been more interested in the stories of affectionate dark-skinned women who went about wearing nothing above their waists, but residual facts about other things clung to this titillating notion the way fluff clung to a dropped candied sweet. And Jonathan never forgot anything he learned.

  One thing he’d learned was that Isaiah never missed his target.

  But then, neither did Jonathan. One could ask everyone in Pennyroyal Green. He’d taken home four Pig & Thistle dart tournament trophies, and possessed several Sussex shooting trophies as well.

  And no one knew that every dart that entered the board struck a metaphorical target.

  Besides, he knew his father well enough now to anticipate and deflect the darts. Being the youngest had its advantages. You learned what not to do, what to do, and how to do precisely what you wanted. Much of it involved staying out of his father’s proverbial sight, so he could stay out of his father’s proverbial mind.

  “Jonathan!” His name, at least, was imbued with warmth and pleasure.

  “It’s very good to see you, Father.”

  Isaiah didn’t offer him brandy, which seemed portentous—was the conversation about to be quick and painful? Did he suppose Jonathan was already drunk?—but then everything was bound to seem portentous when his nerves could be played like lute strings, so taut were they.

  “Have a seat, son.” He gestured at the documents arrayed on his desk. “I was just reviewing correspondence from a frustratingly obtuse Mr. Romulus Bean, the owner of the Lancaster Cotton Mill. I’ve been trying to persuade him to sell the mill to me, but he continually requests additional financial detail. The number of servants I currently employ, their ages, their wages . . . “Rather arbitrary of the man, but so be it. I’m certain I’ll have it in the end.”

  Ah, to be possessed of his father’s unshakable certainty.

  Jonathan casually decided to lay a piece of information at his father’s feet, an offering to soften him for the conversation to come.

  “The Duke of Greyfolk is interested in purchasing the Lancaster Mill, too.”

  Isaiah leaned back slowly in his chair and stared at Jonathan. “Is he?” he mused after a moment. “How did you come by this information?”

  “Over dinner at his house.”

  A pause.

  “You were invited,” his father probed

  “I was, indeed.” Jonathan didn’t see a need to expound on how he got the invitation.

  His father absorbed this wordlessly, the wheels of his inscrutable mind no doubt turning. “Will you be at home for long, Jonathan?”

  “Back to London in a day or so, as I’ve accepted some invitations in town. I primarily wanted to speak to you. And of course to see how Violet was getting on.”

  “Your sister’s doing well.” It sounded careful.

  Jonathan suspected Violet had been gleefully using her pregnancy as an excuse to make everyone jump to do her bidding, his father included.

  “She’s radiant,” Jonathan concurred. Which he had learned was the safest compliment one could pay a pregnant woman.

  A little silence pillowed his father’s next words.

  “About your proposal to join the Mercury Club, Jonathan.”

  Ah. So it was to be quick, then.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “While I understand why you would want to join the club’s ranks, as all members benefit greatly from involvement and from the income of others, I do not see what qualifications you would bring to an esteemed and highly successful investment group.”

  Jonathan’s mind briefly blanked. Of all the responses he’d anticipated and prepared for, this one wasn’t among them.

  “There’s . . . my surname, for a beginning.” It was meant to be humorous.

  For Isaiah had founded the club. And if Isaiah didn’t precisely control this investment group, he powerfully influenced the activities of the club, as well as the membership.

  His father didn’t laugh.

  Jonathan cleared his throat. “I’ve many ideas, sound ones, and I think you and the other investors will be very interested to hear them. And haven’t you always said that ideas are capital?”

  “Have you ideas, then,” his father said, in way that implied he doubted it very much indeed. “I never dreamed you’d been listening to me.”

  It wasn’t just that it was dismissive.

  It was shockingly dismissive.

  As though Jonathan at no point over the years could possibly have begun to think for himself.

  He recovered smoothly enough. “I’ve become acquainted with a gentleman named Mr. Klaus Liebman, who has developed a process for p
rinting mass quantities in color, and I do believe it would be an excellent investment.”

  His father took this in expressionlessly. “Printing is a . . .” his father paused to search for a word. “. . . small . . . idea, Jonathan. And Liebman . . . isn’t he the Bavarian fellow you met at a gaming hell?” His father delivered those last two words with faint but unmistakable derision.

  “Outside a gaming hell,” Jonathan corrected. Which likely amounted to nearly the same thing in his father’s eyes, but there was a distinction. He’d saved Klaus Liebman from thugs, too, loaned him a little money, and bought him a drink, which was when Jonathan had heard all about his brilliant idea. Klaus was depending on Jonathan to return from Sussex with good news. “I realize it doesn’t sound as dramatic as a cotton mill, but the potential is immense.”

  “Of course, of course,” his father indulged. “Is that the same gaming hell outside of which you were involved in a brawl? During which you allegedly shouted epithets in the street?”

  That damned bruise. It was all he could do not to touch it now. How did his father know about that?

  “I intervened to help a man who was accosted outside the Boar & Bear, which is a pub, not a gaming hell. I simply happened to be in the vicinity. Three men attacked him for his purse. With knives. I was fortunate I lost only my handkerchief, not my life.”

  What he’d shouted, specifically, was “Get off him, you fetid bastards!” It could have been worse.

  “Of course,” his father said, as if it was inconceivable that Jonathan would leap into the fray to save a man, but for him to leap into a melee in the street for the sheer primitive pleasure of it was apparently in keeping with his character.

  So far, Jonathan thought dryly, there seemed to be very little benefit in playing Samaritan. Curse it for the reflex it was. Of course, he never would have been anywhere near the Boar & Bear if not for that salon Argosy had dragged him to.

  “And it’s come to my attention that you’ve been frequenting the home of a known courtesan who lives hear Hanover Square.”

  Speak of the devil.

  “She’s not a . . .”