Clandestine Passion (The Lovelocks of London Book 2)

As Wright helped her dress that morning, Catherine noticed that her maid was acting as anxious as Catherine felt. Wright had been changed of late, for perhaps three months or more. On edge. Restless and easily startled.

Catherine scolded herself. She had been so caught up in her own drama of James and her own condition and then the painting that she had had no thought for anyone else.

When Wright had fumbled with the clasp of Catherine’s necklace for a full two minutes, Catherine put her hands up and took the necklace from her.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am.” Wright flushed.

“I think no necklace today.” Catherine smiled in her mirror at the maid. Wright seemed near tears.

Catherine stood and took the maid’s hands.

“Wright, what is the matter?”

The young woman shook her head and gave no answer.

That night, Wright took her things and left the house. No one knew where she had gone. She left no word with anyone. The rest of the staff could not explain but agreed the girl had seemed nervous recently and that she had purchased some new and expensive-looking clothes.

Catherine only hoped that Wright had landed somewhere safely. She wrote to the vicar in Wright’s home village, hoping to hear some word that she had gone home, but she received no reply.

Even as Catherine worried over Wright’s safety, she was glad that James had said they should stay apart. She had plans to make. Plans James could not know about. Time was fleet. Time was treacherous. She would be showing soon.

The magistrate deemed Siddons’ death the result of an act of self-defense by the new Duke of Middlewich, not a crime, and there was no charge to be made. But even after Siddons’ body had been removed and the blood had been scoured off the floor, James did not return to his rooms. He told Enfield to leave everything in place, it all smelled of smoke. He would now live in the town house as befitted the new Duke of Middlewich, and he could wear his father’s clothes until the tailors fitted him for new ones.

He had never noticed that he and his father were exactly the same size.

He got his hair clipped very short, with all the burnt ends cut off. He hoped Catherine would not mourn his locks too much.

Mr. Bulverton asked for a meeting with James and Isabella. But not at Madame Flora’s. Instead, they congregated in Mr. Bulverton’s office in the Palace of Whitehall. They might as well do this openly, James thought. The jig was up for him, at any rate. Isabella, too, had said she was retiring from what she called being a “pillow spy.”

Bulverton’s office was a surprise. Unlike Bulverton’s appearance, his office was luxurious. A spacious room. Fine carpets, mahogany desk, velvet curtains. James began to think that Bulverton was a great deal higher up than he had ever suspected. Clever, that bad wig, the patched coat, and those stained cuffs. Senior clerk, my arse.

“I heard there was an incident, Your Grace, in your rooms,” Mr. Bulverton said as he shuffled some papers at his desk.

“An intruder, a thief. He had a pistol and shot at me.” James rubbed the stitched-together ridge on the top of his scalp. “Had to kill him.”

“I see. What was he trying to steal?”

Mr. Bulverton stared at him. James shifted uneasily.

“A picture he had painted. That I had bought from the Royal Academy and he . . . wanted it back.”

“Where is the picture now?”

James licked his lips. “It got burnt, destroyed, when a lamp tipped over.”

“I see.” Mr. Bulverton shifted some papers on his desk and cleared his throat. “The Prince Regent,” he said, looking down at the top piece of paper on his desk, “is aware of your actions over the last many years and thanks you for your gallantry, your courage, and your valor in preserving the safety of the Empire and of England. He has asked me to present you with a medal that he has named the Cloak and Sword.”

James and Isabella stood and received the small golden medal embossed with a furled cloak and a broadsword, held by a crimson ribbon with blue edges.

Bulverton cleared his throat. “And now, I must ask you for the medals back.”

James had expected something like this and unpinned the medal from his coat and put it in Bulverton’s hand.

“Thank you, Your Grace,” Bulverton said.

Isabella handed back her medal as well and as she did so, James saw a ring on her left hand. Good for her.

It was over. What had been the best part of his life for many years was done. He had thought that he would feel devastated, but he didn’t. If he could only get Catherine to marry him. This was nothing in comparison to that.

As he left the building, his arm was seized and he was pushed against the wall.

“You eejit,” a woman’s voice hissed. It was Isabella. Normally lazy and languorous, she was practically spitting in her fury.

“Mamselle DuMornay,” he got out.

“Dontchoo ‘mamselle’ me, Yer Grace!” Her French accent had fled, replaced by that of her native East London. “Yew ’aven’t got the sense Gawd almighty gave a feckin’ ’edge-’og, yew don’t!”

A few passersby stared, curious.

James pulled his arm from Isabella’s grasp and straightened his sleeve. “I don’t have the slightest idea to what you are referring. But I am sure that you are prepared to illuminate my deficiencies. So, let’s cut this short and you tell me exactly where my sense is absent.”

“What I want ter know is, Yer Grace, whenjoo last see our Mrs. Lovelock, eh?”

He hedged. “A while ago.”

“Whatchoo noticin’ about our Mrs. Lovelock then, hmm? ’ow she look?”

“I, uh, she looked much the s-same as usual.”

“Did she, Yer Grace?” She threw her hands up into the air and broke into a stream of French so rapid and curse-filled that James could not follow her. Somewhere in there she said “idiot” and “wouldn’t know his penis from his nose.”

He waited.

“Did Yer Grace not see her skin? Glowin’, I’d say. And ’er buzooms? Fuller and bigger than before. And ’er woom?” Here Isabella clutched her own lower abdomen.

James opened his mouth and it hung there open while he stood on Whitehall Street and his mind raced.

Glowing skin. Larger breasts. A very gentle rounding of the lower abdomen that he had felt the night of Siddons’ killing, when he had knelt for her inspection and put his hands round her waist and his thumbs and his fingers had not met each other. As they once had before.

But she had said . . . she must have believed . . . and then he remembered that his own mother had just turned sixty-one. And his youngest sister was fifteen. Subtraction, James, subtraction.

Isabella folded her arms in front of her and nodded.

“Ah, Monsieur le duc, he sees at last, I think.” Her French accent had returned.

“I–must,” he stammered. “I–must find–a carriage.” He went to the curb and looked helplessly up and down the street.

“Bonne chance, Jacques,” Isabella said and disappeared into a throng of passing government office seekers.

He arrived, sweating, at her house, mouth dry, cravat askew. Chelsom the butler eyed the duke and said Mrs. Lovelock was not at home.

“Tell her she owes me a conversation. She promised. To sit. And talk with me. Tell her.”

“I am sorry, Your Grace, but Mrs. Lovelock is not at home.”

James backed down the stairs and swore out loud in frustration in the middle of the Mayfair street.

He walked away from the house. What could he do? Where was she? She was likely at home and just refusing to see him. Perhaps he might be able to scale the house from the back and break into her boudoir?

No, no, that was no way to convince her. She would think that juvenile and invasive. But he must find a way to convince her that she must see sense. She must marry him. She had refused him before, but this time, he would overwhelm her.

Wait. Had she refused him before? Refused marriage from him before? He stopped in the middle of the pavement. Had he actually ever asked her to marry him?

Yes. In a letter. Which she had not answered.

But she had said she had answered all his letters. Which meant she had never received that letter. In Catherine’s world, he had never asked her to marry him.

He had asked her to share his bed. To partake in mutual pleasures of the flesh. But he had never said out loud, “Will you marry me?” or, “Will you be my wife?” or any of the dozen other blasted ways there must be to tell a woman you wanted her forever, legally and carnally.

She must have thought he wanted her to be his mistress. As she had been for Siddons. No wonder she had turned from him. And she was carrying his child. How horribly alone she must have been these last weeks.

He saw now that if he had wanted her by his side, he had done everything wrong. Because some deep part of Catherine must crave convention. She had married a banker, for heaven’s sake! He had mistaken the woman who aroused him like no other—the fierce, brave, desire-driven Viola—for the woman whole. And, yes, even Viola had wanted to marry her duke.

Well, what did conventional lovers do when they wanted to marry their lady loves?

Flowers. He must find flowers. For a moment he considered raiding the central garden of the square. But all he could see were shrubs and grass.

And that is how the thirteenth Duke of Middlewich found himself in the back garden of his family’s town house, pulling up sweet peas and delphinium and pricking himself on thorns from roses. At one point, one of the footmen, still wearing the black armband for James’ father, had come out with a pair of cunning snippers for James and had taken over holding the flowers while James amassed every bright bloom he could find. The footman’s face was lost behind the flowers at the end.

“Good, good, but I must clean up. And find a ring. I need a ring. Get someone to make a bouquet of those, there’s a good chap.” James darted into the house.

A ring, a ring, a ring. James was glad to have the house to himself, barring the servants, as he stripped his clothes off while running from room to room, half-naked, Enfield following and picking up his discarded clothes. James was hoping to find some suitable piece of jewelry in his mother’s room or one of his sister’s rooms. Alas, no, all the jewels had been taken back to the country seat in Middlewich.

He would go to Rundell & Bridge. The jewelers. The goldsmiths. He could barely stand still long enough to have Enfield help him into a fresh shirt and tie his cravat.

“Ahem.”

“Yes, Enfield?”

“Last autumn, you asked me to take possession of an item for you. I have kept it with your cufflinks and your signet ring. I think perhaps it might be of use to you now. It does match the lady’s eyes.”

With a flourish, Enfield presented the sapphire ring.

James crushed Enfield in an enormous bear hug and clapped him on the back. “Capital, Enfield! Capital.” He put the ring in his waistcoat pocket and rushed down the stairs.

Enfield called down after him, “The flowers, my lord.”

James stopped halfway out the door and turned back. “Yes, yes, the flowers. Where are my blasted flowers?” The footman ran up the servants’ stairs from the kitchen, carrying an enormous bouquet. James grabbed it from him.

“Yes, good.” He ran out the door and down the front steps.

She had gone to Kent.

That is all he could find out. Chelsom had said only, “My Grace, I assure you, she really is not at home. Not just to you but to anyone.”

James believed him.

He went round to the rather elegant lane that constituted an alley in Mayfair and found an idling stable boy. The boy worked for the house next door but said he had been talking to Mrs. Lovelock’s coachman and footmen early in the morning.

“Off to Kent, but I think the mistress plans to stay there a good long while because she took two trunks, but Dawson, one of the footmen, says the carriage will be back tomorrow without her. Which is good because Dawson owes me a half a shilling.”

Kent.

She must have changed her mind.

She must have accepted Sir Francis’ proposal.

Of course, she had. Above all things, Catherine loved her daughters and although Mary and Harry were settled, there was still Arabella. Catherine would not give birth to a child in an unwed state, if for no other reason than it would fatally damage Arabella’s prospects of a good marriage. Even if that meant a bad marriage for Catherine.

There was no problem with the timing. If a child was born after a marriage, no matter how soon after a marriage, it was legitimate. Yes, there might be a few months of gossip, but that would pass. The matrons of the ton would eventually shrug and move on to discussing some new on dit. So? The engaged couple was a trifle eager and consummated the marriage early. This was common enough to be only a minor scandal. The tee-hees and knowing looks engendered by a baby born fewer than nine months after a wedding would in no way compare to the censure Catherine and Arabella would face if Catherine gave birth to a child while still unmarried.

James shoved the bouquet at a young nursemaid accompanying a little girl rolling a hoop on the street and ran the two streets back to the family town house.

But it was his child. She must be made to see it was only right that he be allowed to take responsibility for the baby. And for her.

Even if she did not love him, she must see that.

He would trap her with the baby. And once they were married, he would make her fall in love with him. He had to believe that was possible.

He left for Kent immediately on the fastest horse in the stable.