Perhaps Marietta will come and stay with me.
The thought popped out of nowhere. He imagined Marietta with her fair curls and sparkling eyes tripping through Blackwood’s dismal corridors. Marietta, laughing in the candlelight over his pitiful homegrown meal and sipping the local cider. Marietta, in his bed at night, with the sea crashing below the cliffs outside his window, and her mouth hot and eager.
Dear God! What is wrong with me!
Max’s eyes sprang open and he glared at poor Daniel, who had been bathing his face with cool water, and caused the coachman to start and drop the bowl.
“I-I’m sorry, my lord,” Daniel stammered.
Max blinked, and his frown smoothed away. He was injured and weak, that was what it was. Once his body recovered he would not need to think of Marietta again—she would be completely and utterly removed from his life. And that was how it should be. Max knew he was in no position to be thinking about a woman—any woman. Not when he could barely look after himself.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, Daniel,” he assured his anxious servant. “How long have I been in bed?”
“Two days, m’lord. The doctor’s been here every day, givin’ you somethin’ to make you sleep. He’ll be back this even, and Mr. Harold and Miss Susannah’ll be here, too.”
Max wished he could draw his tattered pride about him and send Harold and Susannah away, but he was not a fool and he knew he couldn’t manage on his own, not yet. When he was better, when he was able to get out of this wretched bed, then he would begin to set his plans in motion for the move to Cornwall. Besides, it wasn’t their fault he wasn’t his father’s son. He knew how guilty Harold felt about his sudden and unexpected good fortune; he knew how Susannah had suffered over the question of whether or not to reveal the truth, when she found the duchess’s incriminating letter. It had been Susannah, the nearest thing Max had to a sister, who had the task of sorting through his mother’s papers when she died. Susannah, the duke’s adopted daughter, and now Harold’s wife. She would make a beautiful Duchess of Barwon, Max told himself, trying to still the ache of loss inside. He was glad, really.
He and Harold and Susannah had been friends from childhood, and they had played rough and tumble games at Valland House, and grown up together, the two boys and Susannah the tomboy. It had been Harold who Susannah wed; Max had always looked upon her as a sister. Perhaps, too, Harold and Susannah had more in common—both had lost their parents at an early age, both were taken in by the duke and duchess, and loved as their own. Although Max could recall Susannah saying to him once, in her soft voice with the Creole accent she had never lost, “I know they love Harold and me, but they love you more, Max.”
“The young lady sent a note around this mornin’.”
Daniel’s voice startled Max back to the present.
“Young lady?” Did he mean Marietta? Max almost groaned aloud, except that Daniel was watching him, his pale eyes wide and guileless, like a dog hopeful of a crumb. He was like a big child, sometimes—he had an innocence of mind that made Max smile. Daniel must come with him to Cornwall. The Pomeroys were too elderly and he would do his best to set them up somewhere—he might even have to swallow his pride and ask Harold to take care of it—but Daniel must be with him.
“I said, sir, that the young lady—”
“And I heard you, Daniel. Very well, what did Miss Greentree have to say in her note?”
“I didn’t read it, m’lord. It’s here,” he picked up the thin envelope. “Do you want me to open it up for you?”
Max nodded in resignation. “Go on then. And read it, if you please. I don’t trust my eyesight just now.”
Daniel made much of opening the envelope. Inside it was a single sheet of crisp paper, which looked fragile in Daniel’s big hands. Pomeroy had taught Daniel to read. “She says: ‘I will be callin’ upon you at three o’clock this aft’noon.’ Then her name, Mary…etta Greentrees.”
“Marietta Greentree.” Max shifted in the bed and found his head did not hurt quite so much. “What is the time now, Daniel?”
“It hasn’t long turned one in the afternoon, m’lord. I heard the clock strike.”
Then she would be here in two hours. Suddenly Max knew he did not want her to see him like this, lying unwashed and miserable, exactly as she had left him. Damn the woman, what did she want from him? Not that he wasn’t grateful to her for sitting with him and caring for him, but she was far too disruptive to what peace of mind he had remaining.
“Fetch me warm water, soap, and a razor, Daniel,” Max said in a suddenly decisive voice. “I need to be shaved. And fetch Pomeroy, too,” he added. “He has the steadier hands, and I don’t want to look like a badly sliced side of beef when Miss Greentree arrives.”
“Yes, m’lord.” Daniel, clearly relieved to have been spared, went to do his master’s bidding.
I’ll just tell her that I no longer require her kind interference, Max thought, as he lay waiting for Pomeroy, staring up at the canopy above his bed. Surely it can’t be that difficult? I’ve dealt with far more dangerous characters than her in my time.
Then why was he suddenly feeling so shaky? And what was that leap of his heart, at the thought of seeing her again?
There was a lighted lamp on the table by the bottom of the staircase, but it did little to dispel the shadows. Either the house in Bedford Square didn’t have gas or…maybe the bills hadn’t been paid recently. Again Marietta nodded sympathetically, as Mrs. Pomeroy continued to pour out her troubles, but half of her was thinking of other things. For instance, she pictured Max, feverishly tossing and turning in his canopied bed in this big, silent house that no longer belonged to him.
“’Tisn’t right, Miss. Master Max has always been the best of sons and he promised to be the best of dukes, too. Now he’s gone and lost everything. Not that I believe for a moment that Her Grace would ever have—” She bit down on her lip, as if she couldn’t bear to say it aloud. “Well, I just think it’s wrong,” she grumbled, as Pomeroy shuffled over to join them.
“Miss Greentree has come to see his lordship,” she informed her husband with a worried glance up the stairs. “Is he ready yet for visitors?”
Pomeroy looked particularly spick and span in his butler’s uniform of dark blue coat and white knee breeches, a powdered wig set upon his head and gloves upon his hands. “He’s all ready and waiting,” he informed them grandly. “Miss, if you would follow me…?”
As she followed Pomeroy, Marietta had plenty of time to look about her—he wasn’t very quick on the stairs—and notice that the ornate mirror that hung on the landing had been cleaned and polished, and that there was a vase of fresh flowers on the small table beneath it. She admitted she might have been somewhat distracted the other day, but she was sure the flowers weren’t there then, and the mirror wasn’t polished. In fact at that time the house gave off an air of forlorn neglect; now it was actually sparkling.