Tarnished Amongst the Ton

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.