A Season to Be Sinful Page 37

  “If I were contemplating it in regard to any woman other than Lady Rivendale, marriage would be merely a solution to a thorny problem. It is the lady herself that makes the idea of marriage agreeable. Do you regret the introduction, then? You gave no sign of it at the time, you know. But keeping your own counsel has always been one of your most admirable traits. It made you particularly well suited to our peculiar institution.”

  The pocket doors parted, and Wolfe entered carrying the tray of tea and cakes. He took it to the table closest to the fireplace and set it down. “Shall I pour?” he asked.

  Sherry nodded. “Perhaps you better, Wolfe.” He waited until the butler finished pouring and exited the gallery before he addressed Woodridge again. “Will you have tea?” he asked, holding up a cup and saucer. “Gant’s biscuits are very good also.”

  Woodridge approached and took the refreshment he was offered and chose one shortbread biscuit for himself. He held up the biscuit, contemplating it a moment, then did the same to his teacup. “I am all for the rituals of civility.”

  “It is the same for me. Will you not sit, or has your long journey merely made you want to stretch your legs?”

  In answer, the baron chose a nearby wing chair and eased himself into it. When Sherry was also sitting, he said, “You have not answered my question. Do you regret introducing me to Lady Rivendale?”

  “Yes. I did not want to make the introduction, but she insisted. Further proof, if any is needed, that she will have her own way in all things. It has always been my practice to keep the affairs of my family separate and private from what it is that you and others would have me do. You taught me that, you know, through your own example. You rarely spoke of your family.”

  “You rarely inquired.”

  “Again, by your example, I believed it was discouraged.”

  Woodridge’s slight smile was cool. “I already knew the most important details of your background. There was no reason for me to refine upon them with you. I always learned what I needed to know before I approached anyone, and I kept my hand in with my special young men as they progressed in their apprenticeships. You never brought anyone into the fold, did you?”

  Sherry recognized this last for the rhetorical question that it was. Woodridge knew the answer to it well enough.

  “I have had cause recently to wonder why that was.” He sipped his tea, regarding Sherry over the rim of his cup. “You might have mentored a student yourself before you left us. It would have been your legacy . . . as you were supposed to have been mine.”

  “Ahh. Your legacy. But surely you cannot mean your hopes rested squarely on my shoulders. I am not the only one you mentored. There was Gibb before me and Barnett after me.”

  The baron set his cup aside. Crossing his legs, he brushed the knee of his breeches, removing a thin layer of dust that clung there. “You are better than they are. Do not shy away from it. It’s not flattery. I am merely speaking the truth.”

  “You will understand if I do not thank you for it. If I shy away from the notion, it is not because I am flattered by it. Quite the opposite.”

  “So you no longer believe in our mission.”

  Sherry shrugged. “I no longer can justify it. Whether or not I ever believed in it is a question I’m still asking myself.”

  “You believed,” Woodridge said. “If you arrive at any other conclusion, then you are a coward, and what you fear is the prospect of a lifetime of guilt and regret. Did I say you are better than Gibb and Barnett? You are. But you are also weaker. Introspection such as you are practicing does not serve anyone, Sherry, least of all yourself. I left you too long on your own, I think. I did not suspect your convictions were so ephemeral.” He rested his elbows on the arms of the chair and folded his hands in his lap. His eyes did not waver from Sherry’s, and his study was frank. “It was the Crick affair, was it not? That is when you began to make this reassessment of your purpose. I should have reali—”

  He was startled into silence as the wall at the far end of the gallery seemed to shift suddenly. It required a moment for him to understand what he was seeing, then a moment longer to truly believe it. “I say, Sherry, three children just walked through the wall.”

  Sherry turned in his chair and saw the scoundrels scrambling to get back inside the entrance to the hidden stairwell. “Hold!” That single word, delivered in stentorian tones, was enough to halt them in their tracks. They froze in rather comical contortions and awaited the next directive. “Come here.”

  Pinch, Dash, and Midge obliged, though their feet dragged so much they turned over the carpet when they passed by the edge of it. They lined up in front of Sherry with all the enthusiasm of soldiers caught in the act of desertion.

  Sherry was on his feet, giving them a proper inspection. Woodridge stood also, coming closer when Sherry invited him to do so.

  “I hope there is an explanation,” said Sherry. “You will notice that I did not qualify it in any way. It is perhaps too much to expect that it will be either reasonable or good.” The boys merely blinked at him. Sherry’s eyes narrowed on the faint purple stain around Midge’s mouth. He bent his head closer to the trio and sniffed. Straightening, he regarded them each in turn, shaking his head as he did so. “It is to be hoped that you enjoyed the bottle you took from the cellar. It is a wonder you are not foxed, or perhaps you are.”

  “We only ’ad a taste, my lord,” Dash said. “Then we put it back so you wouldn’t notice.”

  “I see. Well, I have noticed, and so has our guest. He is certain to arrive at the opinion that you are the least grateful of all young ruffians, and I can think of nothing to say in your defense.” He turned to Woodridge and witnessed the baron’s severe disapproval. Pointing to the boys one at a time, Sherry introduced them. “Well?” he demanded as they bent their heads and shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “Did you leave your manners in the cellar with the wine?”

  Like bees to a flower, they swarmed the baron to make his acquaintance in the most familiar of terms. They buzzed around him, jostling one another to be the first in line to make a bow. They never fully realized any order to their introduction as one bumped the other out of the way. No one could put a word in, including Woodridge who found himself moved off his feet by their fierce enthusiasm and competition for his attention.

  Sherry reached into the huddle around the baron and plucked Dash from it. He set the boy down a few feet away, then pulled Pinch back. Midge had a firm grip on the baron’s hand, so Sherry left it to Woodridge to extricate himself from it.

  “My apologies,” he said. “They obviously drank more than they would have me believe.”

  Woodridge pried his bloodless knuckles free from Midge and shook them out. “Who are they?”

  Sherry caught Midge by the collar and dragged him to stand with his compatriots. “My wards, I am chagrined to admit. Or at least they will be when my solicitor has completed all the legal particulars.”

  “Wards? You’re serious?” He looked at the three boys who were all wobbling on their feet. “Where did they come from? Are they relations?”

  “No. No relations.” Sherry started to move the boys toward the pocket doors. “Go on. Find Mr. Wolfe and tell him what you did. Don’t think I will not inquire later.” He parted the doors and let them make their escape. They stumbled out and took off in the direction of the servants’ stairs. Shaking his head, Sherry stepped back. When he turned around, he saw that Woodridge was no longer standing near his chair but had moved to the open walnut panel. The baron was investigating its construction.

  “Where does it go?” Woodridge asked, poking his head inside the dark stairwell. He looked up and down the narrow passage. “Clever. My country house has a priest’s hole, but nothing like this.” He drew his head back and stepped aside as Sherry closed the panel. “Does it lead outside?”

  “You may have already guessed that it goes down to the wine cellar. That room is locked on the kitchen side so there is no exit. If o
ne goes up, then it leads to a drawing room and a bedchamber.”

  “And on the other side of the passage? It looked as if it might open on another room.”

  “The music salon.” Woodridge made a noise at the back of his throat that might have indicated that he was either impressed or bored. Sherry did not ask him to explain. He followed the baron back to where they’d been sitting and took up his chair. “The scoundrels are not always at their best on short acquaintance. My apologies for their interruption.”

  “You truly intend to make them your wards?”

  “Yes. I like them well enough, and they have no one else.”

  “Bloody hell, Sherry. Can you not see what you are doing? It is just as I was beginning to say when they came in here. It is all about the Crick affair. Your doubts. Your judgments. Your decision to leave. Even these children are part and parcel of that business. Surely you must know that.”

  “Of course I know it.”

  “But you bear no responsibility for how that turned out.”

  “What idiocy. Was there someone else in the room when Ellison Crick put a pistol to his head? He killed himself because I persuaded him it was in the best interest of everyone that he do so. And do you know, Woodridge, I believed it. I could not have spoken so convincingly otherwise. He saved his family the embarrassment of a public trial. He saved the prince regent the humiliation of admitting he’d spoken too freely to his friend, the cost of which was that we were very nearly denied Napoleon’s abdication. He saved the people from a painful examination of their leaders in and out of the Parliament.

  “And he was guilty. The evidence supported his guilt, never his innocence. He was the only one who said it was otherwise, but does one truly expect to hear something different? I didn’t. I never have. I was presented with the charge, the evidence, the accused, and told to make it right. I never doubted that he was acquitting himself as honorably as he could, given the circumstances.”

  Sherry leaned forward and made a steeple of his fingers. He regarded Woodridge intently as he presented his case. The man did not loom so large before him as he had done in the past. There was a look of dissipation creeping into his countenance. The touch of gray in his complexion was much more telling than the gray threads in his ash-colored hair. Lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes made his expression seem brittle. As he spoke, Sherry thought it seemed that Woodridge was making himself smaller, somehow shrinking in his chair, and that in time he might disappear altogether.

  It was an end much desired.

  “The circumstances, however,” Sherry said calmly, “were wrong. They were wrong when they were presented to me, and they were therefore wrong when I presented them to him. His guilt was predicated on a lie, a lie that was told first by the man who was guilty, a lie that was believed and turned against an innocent man.

  “Do you know how I persuaded him to kill himself, Woodridge? It was not what I gave him in facts or in choices, but what I took away. I took away his hope. He was an innocent man who was made to understand there was nothing left to him. I know the precise moment when he abandoned hope; it was the moment when he saw I was unconvinced by his argument.”

  “Crick was a weak man.”

  “Perhaps, but shouldn’t that engage our compassion, not our enmity?”

  “You did nothing wrong.”

  Sherry smiled, albeit without humor. “And that is why I left,” he said. “Because you—and others like you—think I did nothing wrong. He had children, you know. Two boys. Two girls. His wife lost the child she was carrying. I have heard since that she was the one who discovered what her husband had done. He wanted to leave her a note, but I couldn’t allow him to do that. What could he have said that would not have aroused her suspicions? He had no debts, no mistress, no reason to do what he did except for his melancholia of late. She had to be satisfied with that. She will go to her grave thinking her husband’s despair was greater than the love he bore her.

  “I will go to my grave knowing I convinced him it made no difference.”

  Fifteen

  “Come away from the window,” Lady Rivendale said. It was not the first time she had cautioned Lily in such a manner. “It cannot be good for you to stand there staring at his carriage.”

  “His carriage is already gone. The grooms have removed it from the drive and taken it to the stable.”

  “Then there can be nothing at all for you to see. Come now. It is wearing on my nerves.”

  Lily turned away. “Are you afraid I will leap?”

  “Do not be absurd.” She was on the point of underscoring this with a dismissive wave of her hand when she paused and reconsidered. “Would you?”

  “No.” Lily managed a small smile. “Killing myself has never presented itself as a satisfactory solution, though I have always thought the baron would have been relieved if I had done so. Odd, is it not? He led me to believe it was the only way I should ever be able to leave him.”

  Her ladyship shivered. She squared off the deck of cards in her hand then began shuffling them again. “Come. Won’t you sit down? We’ll play two-handed whist, and I promise you an honest game.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Sighing heavily, Lady Rivendale put the cards aside. “Neither could I.” She glanced toward the open doorway. “What do you suppose they are doing now?”

  Lily thought her ladyship was referring to Sherry and Woodridge, but when she followed the direction of Lady Rivendale’s gaze she saw Pinch, Dash, and Midge were framed in the doorway, frozen in the act of tiptoeing past it.

  “Hold!” Her voice did not have the same resonance that Sherry’s had, but the authority it carried was sufficient to keep them from moving forward. They could not quite sustain the pose in which they had been caught out and teetered sideways so that they were in danger of toppling like dominoes placed on end. “Come here.”

  Their collective sigh was loud enough for both women to hear. Pinch nudged Dash forward; Dash nudged Midge. It was with palpable reluctance that they filed into the sitting room that adjoined Lily’s bedchamber.

  “Well?” Lily asked. “I thought we agreed you would remain in the area of your own rooms this afternoon. Did you have tea?”

  Dash nodded. “Mr. Gant made sure there were extra cakes on our tray. Pinch played mother. We said please and thank ye even though there was no one to ’ear us do it.”

  “Truly?” Lily looked at Lady Rivendale and saw she appeared to be more disarmed than distrustful. “That is very good of you. And where did you come from?”

  “The kitchen,” Pinch said. “We ’ad tea in the kitchen.”

  At the same time Pinch was offering that explanation, Midge was saying, “We ’ad a picnic at the lake.”

  When Lily looked pointedly at Dash, he had the good sense to remain quiet. “I hope you do not mean to say you had tea twice,” she said. “Now, where have you been?”

  None of them could hold out for long against her. For once, though, it was not Midge who broke the silence. Pinch plowed his fingers through this thick hair in a gesture that was so like Sherry that Lily felt her heart being squeezed.

  “We wanted to see who’d come to visit,” Pinch said.

  “And?”

  “We were ’iding in the stairwell.”

  For all that his reply was mumbled, Lily did not mistake Pinch’s meaning. “Not any stairwell, I imagine. You were hiding in that passage again.”

  Pinch hung his head. “Yes, Miss.”

  Lily moved her attention to Midge. His head was also hanging, but she suspected his reasons were different than his brother in arms. She cupped his chin and lifted it. “What is that purple stain around your mouth?”

  “Blackberries. Mr. Gant made blackberry tarts.”

  “I thought you said you had cakes.”

  “And tarts. Dash forgot to mention the tarts.”

  “Perhaps because you lifted the tarts. Is that what you did? You pinched the tarts, then stuffed them in your mouths so fast y
ou left the evidence all over your face?” She dropped his chin and took Dash in hand, inspecting his sheepish countenance. “It appears you were a bit less greedy than Midge.”

  “I don’t like them as well.”

  “Ahh.” She shook her head. “You will have to tell Mr. Gant what you’ve done. All of you. What if he blames one of his helpers? Did that occur to you? No, I can see that it didn’t. Let us hope that has not already happened.”

  “Shall we go now?” Pinch asked.

  Lily released Dash. “No. Not to the kitchen. That can wait until his lordship’s guest is gone. Wash up and stay in your rooms. It is better if you are not underfoot right now.” They turned quickly and started to go, but Lily called them back. “Wait. One small favor. Will you show me this passage? I want to see it for myself.”

  Lady Rivendale stood up, clasping her hands together. “Oh, I do not think that is wise. Another time, mayhap.”

  “No,” Lily said calmly. “I wish to see it now. Boys?” They nodded, but Lily could see they were disinclined to obey. At least they did not apply to her ladyship to intercede on their behalf. “Go on. I’ll follow.”

  “I think I will come as well,” Lady Rivendale said stoutly. “I should like to see more of the thing myself.” She fell in step behind Lily as they filed out the door. In the hallway, Midge waited for her so that he might be her escort. “You’re a good lad, Master Midge.” She tousled his hair. He grinned up at her, the purple ring around his mouth making his smile even broader. She sighed. “Rascal. I think you mean to steal my heart.”

  Pinch led the way to the drawing room in their wing of the manor. It was a crowded repository for pieces of furniture that no longer served the style or function of other rooms. Still, in spite of the mismatched chairs and upholstered benches, or perhaps because of them, the room was entirely comfortable. It was in this room that the boys often took their meals and practiced their deportment. They also liked to see how high they could arrange the chairs without toppling them. The evidence of their failed attempts to reach the ceiling could be seen in the small scratches and nicks in the polished wood, but no one had yet discovered their game.