you get away?’ Jane leant forward, both elbows on the table among the cups and saucers. Her eyes were fixed on his face. She caught her lower lip between her teeth as though she was listening to some gripping tale of derring-do. Clearly she had no idea that this was even more personal than he was admitting.
‘I would have asked for leave, of course, but, in the event, the news of my father’s death reached me on the day we buried Charles. I had every good reason to hasten home to England and sell out and my colonel sent me on my way with his blessing. The Treaty of Fontainebleau had been signed, Napoleon was defeated, I could easily be spared.
‘I was too late: Daphne had already eloped from home with her dubious baronet. Her aunts were distraught, but finally received a letter from her four days ago. She was back from Scotland where they had married and had been for weeks. I found her in her new home, a crumbling old house just outside Kensington. Sir Clement was away from home and I thought that being abandoned with cobwebs and surly, unpaid servants while he dealt with unspecified business would be enough to bring her to her senses. I suggested that he was paying off his most pressing creditors with promises of Daphne’s money, but that got me a vase thrown at my head.’ He did not repeat to Jane the angry, defiant words she had thrown first. It was foolish of him to believe that such beauty was incapable of venting such spite and anger. He was shocked as well as hurt. What had happened to the laughing, clinging girl he had left behind?
‘Ouch,’ Jane sympathised.
‘I ducked,’ he said with a shrug, pride making him hide the personal hurt from her. ‘It hardly touched me. She was defiant and determined and she refused my offer to take her back to her aunts while the problem could be settled of how legal the marriage was. I told her that the courts might be able set aside the union, although it would take some time and money. I pointed out that she was still just under age, was abducted from her home and married without her brother’s permission.’ And he had managed it calmly, somehow hanging on to his temper, somehow refusing to let Daphne see how deeply this affected him. All he had achieved was to salvage a little empty pride.
‘How did she respond?’ Jane asked. ‘With another vase?’
‘No,’ he said wryly. ‘She laughed in my face and told me that she loved her husband, that she knew perfectly well he was a rakehell and that was what she wanted, not a dull husband like all her friends had married.’
Like me, the man she was promised to, the man who had dared put duty before her.
‘She wanted adventure, freedom—’
He sought for the least shocking way of translating Daphne’s frank admissions. ‘She had come to appreciate the joys of the marriage bed, she told me as she tugged on the bell pull and demanded that I leave. I could hardly abduct her myself, so I left to think over my tactics. I was aware that I was being followed, but thought no more of it than that she did not want to risk my return. An hour later, I was nursing a pint of ale and facing the fact that there was probably nothing I could do other than to report back to her aunts that she was not being held against her will and wanted to remain in the marriage. Then I was facing four large louts with clubs and brass knuckles.
‘It seems she felt that, to ensure I left her alone, I needed more convincing than her words could achieve. Or perhaps she feared that I would confront her husband. Whichever it was, she had sent her grooms to deal with me. You arrived in the midst of their very persuasive arguments for forgetting the whole thing and going away.’
So, yes, he did want to go down to Merton Tower because he wanted to lay his hands on the best legal advice. And the man who would know how to find it—if he was not already employing it—was his famously litigious grandfather. He could go back to London and waste time trying to find the right lawyers to help the aunts with what was, almost certainly, a hopeless cause or he could swallow his pride and ask the Marquess. And, faced with Daphne Parris’s welfare, his pride was unimportant. She was in the hands not just of a rakehell, but, it now seemed, one who employed violent brutes as his grooms.
‘If she has lain with him, then she may be with child already,’ Jane pointed out, with far less embarrassment than a single lady should be showing when discussing such a thing. ‘And even if she is not, then surely the fact that the marriage has been consummated will make any kind of annulment very difficult, especially as she would probably protest that she was entirely willing to go with him. And if it was possible to separate them despite that, her reputation would be in tatters.’ Her brow was creased with thought as she concentrated on the problem. If she was shocked by Daphne’s story, then she was hiding the fact.
‘Quite,’ he agreed. ‘But I promised Charles I would try.’
And I owe that laughing, reckless, charming friend of my childhood something. If only I could believe that some trace of her remains.
‘And you have tried and she now knows of someone who will help her if she does repent of the match,’ Jane said.
‘True.’ That had not occurred to him and it was some small consolation. Daphne had shown the spirit and determination to do what she had wanted and, surely, if she came to regret her actions she would show as much determination in escaping. ‘I do need to get to Bath,’ he admitted finally as he sat down. ‘If we are careful, then we should escape detection and a scandal of our own.’
To her credit, Jane Newnham showed neither disappointment in him for failing to extricate the deluded bride nor triumph at getting her own way and his escort. He was coming, reluctantly, to like his improbable rescuer.
‘That is a relief,’ she said. ‘I will feel so much more comfortable with your company on the road and I will not have to worry about you.’
It was a novelty, to have anyone to worry about him. His mother had died when he was five, he had no siblings and his father had appeared to believe that no Merton might be vulgar enough to be shot, skewered or blown up on a battlefield and, therefore, there was no cause for concern when his only son joined the army. Ivo wondered sometimes if the late Earl had ever seen him as anything other than the fulfilment of his duty. The title had been secured, tutors and instructors would look after the boy, there was nothing for him to trouble himself about.
As for his grandfather’s emotions, they had always been a mystery to him.
‘We will have our dinner soon. If we retire immediately after it, then we will be able to make an early start.’ Jane finished her tea and carried the tray to the sideboard.
‘It seems I have acquired a very managing sister,’ he said. He meant it for a joke and wondered at the shadow that seemed to cross her face.
‘It is about time I learned to manage and not be a mouse,’ she said, with no amusement in her voice at all. ‘I have accepted too much and not thought of alternatives.’ The alternatives she appeared to be thinking about did not seem to be making her very happy, judging by her frown.
That sudden seriousness was a pity, Ivo thought, leaning back in the chair and trying to find a position where his bruised ribs would allow him to breathe in comfort. Jane’s voice was pleasant, but nothing out of the ordinary until she was amused, when he found it made him want to smile, even when he did not know what the joke was.
There was clearly some difficult history behind that bitter remark, just as there was behind her quite impossible implication that she intended to earn her living from her art. He was curious, but he did not know her well enough to probe—she would, very rightly, snub curious questions. Still, pondering someone else’s concerns was a pleasant distraction from considerations of either his own future or the futility of attempting to save Daphne, the stubborn Lady Meredith, from herself. He flatly refused to let himself think any more tonight about his own feelings for Daphne.
The maid came in with a laden tray and began to set food out on the table. She was followed by the cellarman, cobwebs in his hair and on the vast baize apron he wore, and Ivo discussed what he recommended, received a frown from Jane when he ordered ratafia for her and added a light hock to his own order of claret.
‘I am resolved to ask for what I want and not meekly accept what is considered appropriate,’ she said a few minutes later, wrinkling her nose in distaste over the word as she ladled out steaming oxtail soup.
‘Are you used to drinking wine?’ he asked, suddenly wary. Jane was a handful sober, he winced inwardly at the thought of her a trifle high-flown.
‘An occasional glass with meals,’ she said demurely. ‘Ratafia makes my teeth ache, it is so sweet.’