Henrietta would lose them if she went her own way. And if she proved an embarrassment, or worse, if her escapades with Lady Bess were discovered, they might choose to send her away again. She would not be able to bear that.
But if it would please those she loved to see her bow before the Queen in an outrageous costume with an entire bird balanced upon her head, why, she would do it, and paste a smile on her face the entire time.
CHAPTER TWO
“You’ve done it now, you insolent puppy!” The Marquess of Langford threw the last broadside upon the pile on his desk and glared across the room at his son. “Cast yourself beyond the pale, once and for all. What should I do? Scratch your name from the family Bible?”
Darien affected a careless shrug. “If it will make you feel better, sir, I’ll furnish the pen and ink.”
It took all his effort not to stand to attention under his father’s wrath, but Darien forced himself to lounge against the expensive marble mantelpiece that lined one wall of the comfortable library. He flicked a hand over the smart blue waistcoat gleaming with silver braid, knowing the insolence of appearing in his riding coat, buckskin breeches, and high boots would be noted.
He didn’t need to glance at the portrait on the wall above him to see how much he resembled his father in his youth. Except at the age Darien was now, Cassius Bales had sole charge of an extensive estate and all its debts and incomes, while Darien wasted his youth and his advantages racketing about, seducing damsels, designing impractical machines, and generally exhibiting no shred of the sense his father had triedbeating into him. He could read this lecture to himself and spare his sire the trouble.
“If I disown you, my estates go to your cousin,” the marquess grumbled. “My brother’s insolent, grasping whelp. Bad enough he’s running Bellamy to rack and ruin, whenyouought to have charge of it.”
“You suggested, in light of my many failings, that Ratty was better suited to administer Horace’s estate.” Darien poked a finger at the scrolls piled on one side of his father’s desk. “You haven’t looked at any of my designs. My improvements could increase Bellamy’s profits by?—”
“Bellamy doesn’t need profits!” the marquess shouted. “It needs a proper executor who can sign contracts and stand up in court. Do you know how many suits of action are backed up by now?” He glared at the pile of blueprints. “All you could teach Ratty is how to be a libertine.”
It spoke to his sire’s vexation that he used the cruel nickname his three strapping, rowdy boys had given their less hardy cousin Rathbone when the marquess had always tried to set an example as a gentleman.
The marquess rested his elbows on the heavy oak desk that had stood in the library of Langford House for over a hundred years, as old as the building. He had put aside his wig for this interview, and Darien saw with a start, as his father buried his head in his hands, that the griefs of the past years had streaked the steel-gray locks with white. White hair belonged to old men.
Three strapping, boisterous boys the marquess had sired, and now he was down to one. Two years ago, Horace, the sturdy eldest and by courtesy the Earl of Aldthorpe, collapsed of heart failure at the bottom of the stairs of Bellamy Hall, the estate his wife had brought to their marriage. That loss alone would have flattened a man.
But then word reached Darien, while he was drowning his sorrows in the arms of a lovely Venetian courtesan, that Horace’s son, the heir, had taken a sudden fever. Darien returned in time to walk in the family procession behind the small black coffin, holding up his brother’s grieving widow with one arm and his white-faced, silent niece with the other as they laid Lucretius to rest next to his father in the Bales family tomb. The memory of that awful day made Darien itch for a drink, but he knew his father would never countenance liquor at this hour of the afternoon.
The marquess spoke through the cradle of his hands. “I can’t take legal control of Bellamy. It’s Horace’s estate, and he left it in trust for his children, with your brother Lucien as their guardian. He never would have imagined?—”
His father’s voice broke as he looked up to one of the newer portraits in the room, the portrait of a handsome, coal-haired young man wearing a scarlet coat and a cocky grin, his plumed hat under one arm. Seven years ago, Lucien, the marquess’s second son, had taken his commission and his plumed hat and his vibrant sense of life to India to fight in the Mysore Wars. He hadn’t been heard from since.
Darien braced his shoulders against the tide of old anger and grief. He had no right to still feel betrayed that Lucien, his playmate, his brother, his closest friend, had bought his colors and left for war. Certainly, he’d never meant to disappear. Doubtful he even knew of the bloody bad fortune that had felled their noble Horse and then Lucretius, the scion and hope of their house.
“Bellamy Hall needs an overseer, Darien. And I need an heir.”
Darien stood by the fireplace as if carved in stone. “You have an heir,” he said. “Lucien, Earl of Aldthorpe.”
A tense silence followed. Darien studied the elaborate design on the rug to avoid his father’s burning stare.
“He’s been gone seven years, Darien. That’s grounds to declare him deceased. And then you can take Bellamy in hand and look after Horatia.”
Darien clenched his jaw. “He’s merely traveling, as I’ve done across the Continent so many times. You can’t—” He couldn’t speak the word. Not when there had been so much death already. “You can’t simply remove him. I won’t support it.”
“And I won’t havethis!” The marquess thumped a fist on the pile of gossip sheets. “This is not behavior I would condone from a schoolboy.” He shook one paper at his son. “Have you no thought of this family? Of the name?”
“Truthfully?” Darien affected the insouciance he knew his father hated. His father angry was better than his father broken, bowed by defeat. “I was not thinking of our name while I was with Celeste.”
In fact, not thinking had been the goal of his many escapades over the last several years. Not thinking about his failures, his losses, his many ghosts.
The marquess regarded the sketch in his hand. “Randy puppy.”
“I look far more like a wolf in that one.” Darien leaned over the desk. “And I daresay the artist has overemphasized Celeste’s…charms.”
The sketch exaggerated Darien’s bold features with the addition of canine fangs, hair, and ears, his hands outstretched like claws and his mouth salivating. A young woman was trying to flee as her fashionable robe parted from her. The nipple of one plump, bared breast was fixed in the mouth of a canine-toothed infant, its smile as wolfish as its sire’s. The caption read “My baby! My baby! Lord Daring will devour us too!”
“Lord Daring, is it? And you say she won’t have you.” The marquess shook his head. “Could make Highcastle force her, you know.”
“Let Celeste decide for herself.” Darien caught himself before he snapped at his sire. He couldn’t show weakness or his father would pounce.
