Tarnished Amongst the Ton Page 11

  Chapter Ten

  Phyllida hesitated a betraying second too long. ‘No! Of course I will not come to your bed!’ Her hands were knotted in her apron and she made herself release it, smooth out the creases.

  Ashe half-turned and moved to examine the Meissen figures as though to soothe her by putting a little distance between them. ‘A pity. I am very attracted to you.’

  His long fingers caressed down the bare arm of the dancing lady and Phyllida shivered as though they touched her own naked flesh.

  ‘You told me you wanted to be friends,’ she accused.

  ‘I have always been friends with my lovers,’ he countered.

  ‘How pleasant for you! I am very conveniently here, am I not?’ And I am a weak-willed woman who has been dreaming of the touch of your lips, the pressure of your hands, the hardness of your body and I am not sophisticated enough in these matters to hide that. ‘And there are no other distractions to entertain you.’

  ‘There are plenty of distractions, Phyllida. Not that any of them are very entertaining,’ Ashe said wryly. ‘But are you telling me that you feel nothing for me? That I am so far adrift in my reading of you?’

  She moved round the packing case, glad of its bulk between them, and reached in for another wrapped object. ‘I am a respectable woman, my lord.’ Liar. ‘I cannot afford to allow my feelings to dictate my actions.’ The wrappings fell away to reveal a pot-pourri bowl. She set it down on the table too hard and the fragile pierced lid rattled like her nerves.

  ‘Then you do have feelings for me?’

  ‘Only the realisation that you kiss very well.’ She wiped her hands on her apron and dug into the chest again. If she fled from the room, she would never have the nerve to return and the work steadied her hands. ‘I expect you have had a great deal of practice. Or perhaps it is simply that I have had very little and you are actually quite mediocre at it.’

  That surprised a chuckle of laughter from him. ‘Should I be suffering from any excess of masculine conceit, you, Phyllida, are a most certain cure for it.’

  She removed the paper from around a stack of delicate Worcester fruit plates, lips tight on a thoroughly unladylike retort. After an interval when he said nothing, made no move to touch her, she asked, ‘You expect feelings in your liaisons, do you?’ His face went very still. ‘You charm your mistresses with talk of love, perhaps?’ She had meant to be sarcastic, to show her scorn for his talk of feelings when all he wanted was to bed her, but the expressionless face was suddenly vulnerable. For a second she thought he flinched.

  ‘Ashe? What did I say?’ Phyllida realised she had blundered into something she did not understand.

  ‘I no longer make that mistake,’ he said tightly.

  ‘You loved one of your mistresses? What happened to her?’ As she asked it she guessed. There was loss, bleak and cold, in those green eyes. ‘She is dead.’

  ‘Yes.’ Ashe turned away as though to study the porcelain she was setting out. ‘All this is European. Is it any good?’

  ‘It is excellent.’ If he thought to divert her by changing the subject she would not oblige him. ‘And valuable. And that is not important. Tell me about her, the mistress you loved.’

  ‘She was the only mistress I ever had, I suppose,’ he said, his attention apparently fixed on the piece of Meissen in his hands. ‘Before her there were… encounters. After her, liaisons. I learned my lesson with Reshmi.’

  ‘She was Indian?’ Phyllida took the statuette from his unresisting hands. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Her name means The Silken One. She was a courtesan at my great-uncle’s court. Beautiful, very sweet, gentle. Exquisite.’ Phyllida saw with a pang that his eyes were closed, the thick, dark lashes shutting her out. ‘I let myself fall in love with her and, far worse, I let her fall in love with me. The mistress of the women’s mahal spoke to the raja and he showed me that I was simply being unkind to her and that it must stop.’

  ‘But why? If you loved each other—’

  Ashe opened his eyes and smiled, the twist of his lips bitter. ‘My great-uncle pointed out to me that I was the heir to a marquess’s title, that I would be leaving India for England very soon. Did I expect to drag an uneducated Indian girl halfway across the world to be my mistress for as long as I remained besotted with her? I protested that this was love, that I would marry her. He told me not to be a fool and to go away and think about it.’

  Phyllida watched him as he wandered across the room to end up with one foot on the hearth stone, his hands braced on the mantelshelf, his back to her. ‘So I thought about it. My mother is half-Indian, an educated daughter of a princely house, trained to run a great household, confident and used to European society and yet I knew she dreaded coming here, however well she tried to hide it. How could I uproot the daughter of a peasant from everything she knew—and how could I create such a scandal for my parents with such a marriage?’

  ‘How did she take it?’ Phyllida asked, dreading his answer.

  ‘She sobbed and pleaded and then, when I was adamant, cruel because it was hurting me so much, too, she controlled herself, bowed her head, murmured that it should be as her lord commanded. She walked away into the gardens at the foot of the walls and I let her go, thinking she needed to be alone to compose herself.’

  ‘Ashe, she didn’t kill herself?’

  ‘No. I tell myself not. She trod on a krait, a small, very deadly snake, and died in agony.’

  Oh, God. Phyllida struggled to find the right thing to say, if the words even existed.

  Ashe pushed himself away from the fireplace and came back to stand beside her. ‘And when I had stopped wallowing in my self-indulgent grief I understood two things. That I would marry as befitted a future marquess, someone who would be a support to my parents, not a source of embarrassment to make their lives harder, and I would put juvenile fancies of love to one side before I hurt anyone else, let alone myself.’

  ‘Ashe, love is not a juvenile fancy, it is real and strong. It exists.’ She took his hand as though she could somehow infect him with that belief. ‘Don’t your parents love each other?’

  ‘Passionately, without reservation. That sort of love is like a lightning strike, rare beyond belief.’ The emotion, the pain, had gone from his eyes as he pulled his hand free. ‘Enough of this.’

  He would not confide further, not now. She had caught him off balance and he was regretting exposing that emotion and that weakness.

  ‘If you wish to be useful, you could help me unpack these chests,’ Phyllida said briskly, as though she had not wanted to weep for him and for that poor girl. And for yourself. All you can ever be to him is a lover.

  ‘The tartness of your tongue is a constant delight to me,’ Ashe observed, his change of tone startling her so much she almost dropped the set of fire irons she had found packed at the bottom of the chest.

  ‘Then you must give me leave to observe that you are attracted to the strangest things in a woman.’ He appeared to have recovered, which she found worrying. All that had happened, she was certain, was that he had buried the pain behind a formidable barrier of charm.

  ‘And whoever packed these things away had the oddest ideas of what could be safely placed with what,’ she added, beginning to drag the empty box towards the door.

  ‘Let me.’ Ashe strode across the room and lifted it, dumped it outside and took the chisel she was using to pry off the lid of the next one. ‘Why are the footmen not assisting you?’

  ‘I have them moving furniture so the drawing room can be cleaned.’

  ‘Then sit down here,’ he ordered, placing a chair next to a clear length of table, shrugging out of his coat and rolling up his shirtsleeves. ‘And I will lift things out for you to check.’

  ‘Very well,’ Phyllida agreed meekly. Her legs were a little tired, to be sure, but it was also a pleasure to watch Ashe working, however unladylike it was to appreciate the play of muscles in his back and shoulders and the way his breeches pulled tight over
an admirably trim backside when he bent over. He seemed to find some relief for his feelings in physical work.

  The desire to see him naked, to touch him, to run her fingers over those muscles, those tight buttocks, warred with the need to hold him and comfort him. The former he would agree to without hesitation, the latter was impossible.

  ‘To revert to your observation just now,’ he continued as he lifted a bronze figure out, grimaced at it and took it straight to the rejects table, ‘I have spent a lot of time in a place where I could not converse at all with respectable ladies and then three months on board ship with only my mother and sister for feminine company. It is a pleasure to talk to an intelligent woman who is neither a relative, a servant nor—’

  ‘A concubine?’ she murmured and could have bitten her tongue out.

  ‘Exactly.’ Ashe dumped the rest of the contents of his box on to the table and pushed a stack of badly chipped delftware towards her.

  She pushed it back. ‘This is in too bad a state.’

  ‘That’s the last of the boxes from the hall. Come and help me explore some of the rest of the house for half an hour.’

  If he could act as though nothing had happened, so could she. Phyllida pulled the towel-turban from her head and tried to pat her dishevelled curls back into some kind of order. ‘Where is Lady Charlotte?’

  ‘Interrogating Cook. She tells me we need a new closed stove, whatever that is.’

  ‘Expensive.’ Phyllida removed her apron and went out into the hall. ‘Where shall we go?’

  ‘I thought the Long Gallery so I can inspect my host of ancestors.’ Confront them, was a more accurate word, from the set of his shoulders and the tight line of his mouth, unless those were the outward manifestation of her refusal to be his lover or the painful story of Reshmi.

  ‘Do you know much about them?’ Phyllida asked as they trod up the staircase side by side. She ought to be feeling apprehensive, going off alone into the depths of a strange house with a man who had just professed his desire to make her his mistress, but instinct told her that Ashe would not force her. The fact that he seemed to have no qualms about offering near-impossible temptation was a truth that she pushed to the back of her mind.

  Ashe pushed open the door into the Long Gallery. His body thrummed with unsatisfied desire. He was certain now that he wanted to make Phyllida his mistress and certain too that she could be persuaded. It had been agony to speak of Reshmi, but, strangely, a relief, too. And Phyllida would understand him better now.

  He needed her, he realised, for more than the physical release of lovemaking. He liked her and trusted her and he could not let this drop now. But it was a fine balance between leading her into something she truly wanted and forcing her hand. He would take no unwilling woman.

  His mood changed from a mixture of arousal and sadness into dark oppression almost as soon as he began to walk along the Gallery. It was uncanny. If he had believed in ghosts, he would think the place haunted by some spectre blowing cold misery over his soul.

  Ashe stopped halfway along the long, narrow room and strove for some sort of equilibrium as he studied the life-sized portrait of a man in puffed breeches, ruff and bejewelled doublet. There were so many ancestors, all with his nose, most with the same green eyes that looked back at him from the mirror in the morning. All utterly confident that they belonged here and that he did not. No doubt they were correct.

  The Jacobean marquess stared back, daring Ashe to walk on past him towards the most recent portraits at the far end of the gallery

  ‘They are all exceedingly blond,’ Phyllida remarked. ‘Your portrait will be a pleasant change. Is your father here, do you think?’

  ‘I doubt it.’ He could not decide whether she had noticed his withdrawal or was simply ignoring his mood. Ashe walked on slowly, past Cavaliers with ringlets, Carolingian beauties with too much bosom on display and roving, protuberant eyes and into the last century. The house and park began to appear as the background in some pictures.

  His pace slowed as he approached the picture almost at the end. Phyllida peered at the gilded frame. ‘I think this is your great-grandfather with your uncle who died and your grandfather.’ She pointed at a tight-faced lad leaning sulkily against a tree while his father held a fine bay horse, his elder brother played with a spaniel and a small child held a ball. ‘Is that Lady Charlotte?’

  ‘Probably.’ He tried to feel some connection with the two men who were so close to him in blood, but he could only feel dislike. The younger had sent his own son off thousands of miles away to almost die on a voyage into the unknown, simply because he resented the boy’s likeness to his dead mother and the way he defied him over his treatment of her. The elder had stood by and done nothing to check his wastrel son or protect his grandson.

  It would give his father some satisfaction to hang a new family group next to this one, an affirmation that despite everything he had survived, a far better man than either of his forebears had been.

  ‘Do you feel a connection?’ Phyllida asked, startling him. He had been so deep in his own brooding thoughts that he had forgotten he was not alone.

  ‘No.’ What he felt was oppression, the weight of hundreds of years of expectation on his shoulders. The expectation that he would carry on this line, this name, that he would devote himself to a cause that had not been his and a duty that he would never have chosen.

  ‘Think what it must be like for a royal prince,’ Phyllida said, chiming uncannily with his thoughts. ‘Not just a name and a great estate, but a whole country to care for and all that on your shoulders because of an accident of birth.’

  ‘How does your brother feel about inheriting a title and an estate? Or does he simply take it for granted, being the only son?’

  She went still, all the energy seeming to ebb out of her. Her memories, he was coming to realise, were not good. Finally she shrugged. ‘When Gregory inherited things were in such a bad state that he almost gave up caring, I think. He was too young for the responsibility and he ran away from it to be with his friends. I was angry with him at first, until I understood that it was a form of self-protection, pretending not to care.’

  ‘But you cared?’

  Phyllida turned her back on the ranks of portraits and crossed to look out of one of the windows that formed the opposite wall. ‘I am older than Gregory and I think women are better suited to cope with seemingly hopeless situations. Gregory would have fought if it had been a battle, climbed a mountain if that was what it took, but he could not deal with the daily dragging misery of having no money, a load of debt and no training for what he was facing.’

  ‘It sounds as though your father and my grandfather were well matched.’

  ‘I believe they knew each other.’ Phyllida’s mouth twisted in a fastidious moue.

  ‘So it fell to you to find a way out of the situation.’ Her face was still bleak. He saw how she would look as an old woman, all the colour stripped away, her fine bones and the delicate arch of her eye sockets still holding a elegant beauty. Ashe wondered just how bad things had been, how much strength it had taken to keep fighting until her reputation was established, their finances were under control and her brother finally matured into his responsibilities.

  ‘It fell to me to scheme and nag, yes. You joke about my sharp tongue, my lord—it has been honed on my brother’s skin. I just clung to the hope that one day he would grow up, see for himself that if he exerted himself there was a way out.’

  ‘And now he has?’

  ‘I think so. I hope so! And I suspect Harriet will be the making of him. Gregory is not very used to examining his own feelings, but I believe he may be falling in love with her.’ She glanced up at him. ‘Do not smile so mockingly, I will not accept your assertion that love is so rare, so unlikely.’

  ‘Was I mocking you? But it seems to me that to hold out for romantic love is almost always to doom oneself to disappointment or disillusion.’ He went back to the beginning of the gallery to look
at the Tudor portraits once again.

  ‘Your parents give the lie to that—one only has to look at them.’ Phyllida followed him, refusing to let go of the subject as he had hoped.

  ‘Their story is almost a fairy tale—the hero rescues the princess from a fortress under siege, they escape across a hostile land, fight dacoits, elude pursuing maharajahs. How could they fail to fall in love? The whole thing must have been conjured up by some djinn. My mother jokes that if we ever fall upon hard times she will turn novelist and write tales of dramatic romance and make our fortune again.’

  ‘And you fear you will never find anything as wonderful as they have.’ He shrugged. ‘And so you will not hope, you will not seek it, because that way you will not be disappointed,’ Phyllida observed.

  That was too near the knuckle. Ashe glared at a wooden-faced couple almost obscured by heavy varnish. He would not delude himself that affection, desire or liking were love and he would not risk hurting himself, or another woman, as he had so carelessly with Reshmi.

  ‘I must choose with my head, not with my heart,’ he said when he had bitten back the angry retort. ‘I cannot afford to drift around, hoping my fancy will fall upon a woman of the right breeding and temperament and connections.’

  ‘Instead you will approach the matter of marriage as you would buying a horse?’ Phyllida snapped, suddenly and inexplicably irritable. ‘You left out inspecting her teeth and checking for childbearing hips.’

  The hold on his own temper broke. ‘And just what have you been doing to marry off your brother that is so different? Making lists of wealth, temperament, looks—and parents who want to buy a title.’

  ‘That is different! Gregory will be ruined if he does not make a good match. Everything that I have done will have been for nothing.’ She was sheet-white and there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘And my family have given up everything that was dear and familiar to come here and take up this responsibility. I do not give a damn about this lot.’ He swept an arm round to encompass the entire pantheon of ancestors. ‘But I will find someone to support my mother socially, help with Sara’s come-out, bring my father connections in politics and at court. I cannot play around living some romantic daydream.’ Damn it, I will not feel responsible for upsetting her! She started this.