The Wildest Rake

She stared, breathless, not sure how to respond to that. But she had to say something, or he might take her silence as a sign that she was tempted. ‘You … You refused a duel with Sir George,’ she said in the end.

Rendel shook his head. ‘Let me correct you. He refused to challenge me.’

She remembered the way Lavinia’s arms had clung to his neck, and felt a little hot-cheeked. ‘Would you have done so in his place?’ she asked pointedly.'

He laughed softly. ‘You do not know Lavinia. She married George for love, but has been trying to remould him ever since into an image nearer her idea of perfection. His languid airs annoy her. She longs to provoke him into a show of jealousy.’ His eyes were warm with amused affection as he glanced across the room at Lavinia. ‘She is a silly child. One day George may take her at her word, and that will break her heart.’

She watched him closely. ‘And is it your image which she is trying to impose upon her husband?’

He looked round at her, one eyebrow raised. ‘Shrewd of you. Yes, I fancy it is—yet she would run a mile if I tried to make love to her. Women are strange creatures. Their minds are water.’

‘You should not generalise,’ she said flatly. ‘Some women are capable of a serious love.’

He watched her with narrowed eyes. ‘You mean yourself,’ he murmured. ‘Ah yes. How is the saintly doctor?’

Her lips trembled. The very thought of Andrew brought a prickling of pain. ‘Why must you always sneer?’ she retorted.

He leaned forward. ‘I find it such a surprising match—a girl with your spirit and temper, and the quiet doctor. He has an austere face. I imagine he finds your ardent attentions impossible to resist.’ The grey eyes insolently surveyed her, lingering on the white curve of her shoulders. ‘You are a tempting little creature even for a killjoy Puritan.’

She felt her cheeks burning and, again, that betraying pulse beat at her throat, against her wrists. ‘How dare you?’ she said, and hated him for laughing.

‘I thought you had more honesty than that,’ he drawled. ‘You must curb this tendency to mouth conventional nonsense. When we first met, it amused me to hear you

talking to us with the bite of a fish-wife. It was refreshing.’

She glared at him. ‘I did not intend to amuse you. I only told the truth—you behaved like a pack of mad dogs. Had you been common men, you would have been thrown into prison to moulder for years, and it would have rid the world of a set of poisonous nuisances.’

He laughed. ‘Correct me if I am wrong, but this is not the way in which you address the noble physician?’

She caught herself up, biting her lip. Andrew would, indeed, have been shocked to hear her. What was happening to her? She did not normally lose her temper with strangers.

She gave him a cold, contemptuous look.

It was all his fault. He brought out the worst in her, tried her temper to breaking point. It made her ashamed to realise that, whenever they met, she ended up behaving like a vulgar fish-wife.

‘Andrew would never provoke me as you do,’ she told him coldly.

He leaned back, watching her with the intent gaze of a cat at a mouse-hole, and again she felt her pulses stir into angry life. Rendel Woodham was a dangerous man, shrewd, clever, practised in the art of flirtation, disguising his own thoughts and emotions, but quick to read those of others.

She looked helplessly into the fire, seeing shadows leaping there, strange images which changed colour and shape as the flames flickered. Her mind was like that lately, full of unfamiliar, dangerous shadows which shifted back and forth, troubling the surface and bewildering her.

The autumn wore on to winter. Chill winds blew along the narrow alleys. The river was a dull grey under skies leaden with cloud. The pieman huddled in his drab cloak, shouting his wares along Thames Street, and little ragged boys sniffed wistfully after him, their blue-cold fingers trailing along the house walls.

Cornelia forced herself to go through the usual household routines, sewing, mending torn linen, shopping with Nan. She visited Ellen from time to time, made calls on her friends and helped to entertain the visitors who came to see Alderman Brent.

Underneath her quiet exterior her mind ached like a sore tooth. She saw little of Andrew. He no longer came to the house to sit with her father. Alderman Brent had new friends now and had no time for the unsophisticated pursuits with which he had once been so satisfied.

Sir Rendel had introduced him to influential members of the Court circle, and Alderman Brent bent all his energies to pursuing these new friendships.

To keep pace with these rich friends, he ordered new cloaks, suits, shoes, and bought a magnificent new wig. Even more disturbingly, he began to indulge in the high play which was popular in Court circles. His moral aversion to gambling had, it seems, disappeared. His wife protested in vain. He merely assured her that the important contacts he was making would, in the end, far outweigh the money he had to spend.

It annoyed Cornelia even more that Sir Rendel was a frequent visitor at the house in Thames Street. He often escorted Mistress Brent to the playhouse, and once he drove the family to visit Mistress Brent’s old father, in his quiet village, sitting in the small parlour, attentive to Grandfather’s rambling tales of days gone by.

Nan, as always, bluntly expressed her belief that Sir Rendel had dubious motives for his frequent visits.

‘I know his kind,’ she muttered as she dressed Cornelia’s hair. ‘He’s only after one thing. He won’t mention marriage—see if I’m wrong. I don’t know what your mother’s thinking of, letting the man come here so often. There’s no fool like an old fool.’

Cornelia had learnt her lesson, though. She was always blandly courteous to Sir Rendel when she saw him, but found some excuse to leave as soon as possible, although this irritated her mother, and made him smile cynically after her.