Page 66 of Unmasked by the Marquess
She went automatically to the bell pull. With a start, Alistair realized that of course Mrs. Allenby would know where to find everything in this house. She must have spent countless evenings here with Alistair’s father. No wonder she knew how to get past Hopkins.
“Enough brandy.” She collected his decanter and glass and pushed them aside with the firm authority of someone used to tending to half-drunk men. That was something else she must have learned in this house, he supposed. “It’ll only make tomorrow worse, and tomorrow will be bad enough. Believe me.”
This woman had grieved his father, however much he didn’t like to think of it. And she had come here tonight out of loyalty to her lover’s child. What had she said about his grief for Robin? Not the sort of loss you could openly grieve. That was how she must have felt about Alistair’s father’s death.
“You need food, water, and a headache powder,” she said. “I’m so sorry to see you grieve, Pembroke, but I don’t mind saying that I’m relieved to know that you’re capable of it.”
Alistair reeled from the force of those words. To be capable of grief. To be capable of having one’s heart broken. What astoundingly useless capacities. What a shocking oversight on the part of the creator. Surely, he had been better off when he hadn’t let anyone close, when he had used his pride and rank to keep affection at bay.
But then he wouldn’t have loved Robin, and he wouldn’t have appreciated the gift that was her love. Mrs. Allenby was correct that he had been on ice, frozen and untouchable, for those years before meeting Robin. He had been cold and protected, but not quite alive.
“I would trade everything I have—my rank and position, my fortune, the respect and admiration of my peers. All of it, just to have Robin back.” He shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the pity on Mrs. Allenby’s face.
He only realized the next morning, when he woke up in his own bed with a clear head, how much forbearance it must have required for her to refrain from pointing out that Alistair’s father had made precisely that trade. The late marquess had given up money and respect in order to have a life with the woman he loved.
Perhaps this recklessness in the face of love truly was in the de Lacey blood. Maybe those ancestors whose portraits graced the Broughton Abbey gallery had known something after all. And maybe Alistair was a fool for having realized it only when it was too late.
Chapter Twenty-One
Every day the post brought letters, but none gave him any news of Robin. Nivins had turned up nothing, nor had any of his investigators. It had been the longest fortnight of Alistair’s life.
Gilbert’s letter announcing his marriage had been misdirected, and when it finally arrived it was accompanied by three other letters from Gilbert and a very pretty note from Louisa. They were grateful to Alistair for the Kent property, apologetic for having run off the way they did, and utterly confused as to what had become of Charity. As distraught as Alistair was, he was relieved to know that he still had his brother’s friendship.
There was the usual stack of letters on estate matters, but none of them brought him that old sense of satisfaction, that small pride of victory over chaos, in seeing his business conducted properly. He had always derived not precisely happiness, but rather relief, from seeing the numbers add up in an orderly fashion, income exceeding expenditures in a way that evidenced the fundamental rightness of his affairs. It felt something like opening a clock and seeing all the gears fitting together sensibly, ticking along predictably and usefully.
It had never brought him joy, though. A few months ago, he hadn’t expected these neat columns of numbers to bring him anything so frivolous as happiness, but rather to deliver a reprieve from anxiety. Now that he knew joy and contentment, now that he knew what it meant to have happiness in arm’s reach, it seemed that he was ruined for anything less.
Alistair resisted the urge to go to Fenshawe himself, or to climb aboard the ships at Dover and inspect each and every one with his own eyes. Instead he stayed in London in case Robin came back. It was nonsense, but he kept thinking of those tales of hunting dogs straying from the pack and being given up for lost, only to somehow find their way across dozens of miles, arriving home weeks later, filthy and thin but otherwise fine. This comparison was not one he would share with Robin if he ever saw her again, which was seeming increasingly unlikely. But he couldn’t let go of the idea that she would somehow find her way to him.
Perhaps this was the sort of delusion that visited grief-stricken minds. He would ask Mrs. Allenby.
During the two weeks that passed since he received the newspaper, various Allenbys found daily excuses to visit. Mrs. Allenby, it would seem, had adopted Alistair and there was no reversing the process. She sent cakes, as if he were an invalid rather than a perfectly healthy grown man. The Allenby girls brought a box of kittens that had been born in their kitchen and abandoned by their scapegrace mother. By all rights, the lot of them ought to be drowned, and it was surely a sign of Mrs. Allenby’s poor household management that they hadn’t been. The creatures would have to be fed drops of milk, for heaven’s sake, and would likely die anyway.
Nobody was more astonished than Alistair when he realized that he had decided to keep one, a very unprepossessing tabby that seemed almost entirely composed of fluff. Alistair was still holding it after his half sisters left.
He did not name it Robin, nor even Charity. He did not name it anything at all. But he fed it by dipping his handkerchief into a saucer of cream and letting the mite suckle away.
One afternoon Lady Pettigrew swept into Alistair’s drawing room in high dudgeon, swathed in unseasonable furs. “Tell me that the gossips are mistaken and that Gilbert has not run off with that Selby girl, and that Portia Allenby does not come and go from Pembroke House at all hours. And Pembroke,” she said, her voice rising to a fever of indignation, “you have araton your shoulder.”
“It’s a kitten, Aunt Pettigrew,” he said, removing the animal from where it was trying to burrow into its owner’s cravat. “And Gilbert did not elope—both I and Mr. Selby gave our consent to the match.” This statement wasn’t even fifty percent true, as the couple had eloped not once but twice, and Mr. Selby didn’t exist, but Alistair felt he was being precisely as honest as the situation called for.
“As for Mrs. Allenby,” he continued, “it occurred to me that she’s the mother of my sisters, and that she’s done a damned fine job of raising them, given the circumstances. While I may have my own reservations about marital infidelity, I won’t stand in judgment of her or my father.”
“Won’t stand in judgment?” She drew her mantle close around her shoulders, as if an evil wind blew through Pembroke House. “What twaddle is this? It’s your job to stand in judgment of those who don’t behave themselves. You’re one of the highest ranked gentlemen in the land. If you don’t uphold standards, who do you think will?”
Not long ago, Alistair had asked the same question. He had thought it his duty to set an example. Hell, he still did. He had only changed his mind about what that example ought to be. “My dear Aunt Pettigrew,” he said in his most aristocratic tone. “If you do not find brotherly love and filial respect to be standards worthy of being upheld, then you and I shall simply have to disagree.” He drew out that last word, letting it sink in that this was a threat. If Lady Pettigrew wanted to declare war on Lord Pembroke, so be it. But Alistair outranked and outwitted her, and they both knew it.
She begged his pardon in equally chilly tones. Alistair thought that when she got home and took stock of all the favors she wished to have granted by the Marquess of Pembroke, she’d come around. And if she didn’t, it was a small loss.
The next morning at breakfast, while Alistair was once again dipping his handkerchief into cream to feed the kitten, a letter arrived from the Broughton housekeeper. This was a highly unusual occurrence—Mrs. Jones had free rein over household matters and required no input from Alistair or anybody else. She hated to disturb his lordship, she wrote, but there had arisen a most awkward matter. A person—always such a damning descriptor, when coming from a servant—had arrived, saying she was instructed by his lordship to make a catalog of the library. Had his lordship commissioned this undertaking? Where was this woman to be housed? And what was to be done with her very strange manservant?
Alistair walked directly to the stables and was in his traveling chaise within a quarter of an hour. By the time he realized he was still holding the kitten it was too late to turn back.
Charity was not even pretending to make a catalog of the library. For one thing, there already was a catalog. For another, she was feeling utterly indolent after the events of the past few weeks. Lounging in the library and readingMoll Flanders—predictably, Alistair’s father had acquired all the naughtiest novels—was about all she could muster up the energy for.
When Keating had hauled her, cold and dripping and in a very ill temper, onto the deck of the boat, she had only one thought: that she was an utter fool for having whistled down the wind a chance at happiness. Alistair was ready and willing to throw his weight around to help her, and instead of taking him up on his offer like a sensible creature, she had fled from him. If he wanted to make a scandal of himself on her behalf, then so be it.
Now it only remained to be seen whether he still wanted her.
