To Charm a Naughty Countess Page 17

  At last, though, the numbers grew more promising, when five minutes after the gong, their host arrived. He made no excuses for his absence; he simply appeared, looking marvelous in dark blue coat and red—or was that coquelicot?—waistcoat.

  Seventy-three inches of ducal grandeur, from his sleek dark hair to his hard mouth to his broad shoulders to his careful hands.

  Before Caroline saw Michael, she had been ready to freeze him with icy dignity for neglecting his guests. For making her look foolish, dragging a dozen and a half fashionable Londoners northward to an empty drawing room.

  But when she saw him for the first time in weeks, her ice melted. Her skin prickled, remembering—this one.

  Based on her past experience with rejected lovers, Caroline knew Michael might have one of several reactions upon seeing her. He might act coldly to waken her shame; he might flirt with another woman to waken her jealousy. He might even attempt to flirt with her, to waken her lust. None of those would sway her.

  As usual, though, none of her preparations did any good where Michael was concerned. Because he didn’t act jealous or lovelorn.

  He didn’t even look at her.

  And now that she saw him, stern and strong and distant, she could not imagine why she had thought him the one rejected. She was the one who had offered her body, who had surrendered pieces of her heart to his absent guardianship. She was the one who had sent notes and invitations, planning this house party to keep herself in his sights.

  He had barely acknowledged her flurry of plans. Now that the names on her carefully considered lists were enfleshed before him, she wondered if he found her judgments fitting after all. She had selected the guests with great care. The men were either married and known to be pleasant company, or they were unmarried but judged not to pose competition to the duke.

  Lord and Lady Tallant, of course; the earl’s good cheer might put even Michael at ease, and Emily’s friendship was essential. Josiah Everett was always amusing, and so Caroline had pried him temporarily free from his employer. Hambleton had been invited, for he was pleasant when separated from Crisp, the cousin whose lofty cravats he so unfortunately enjoyed emulating. The party was filled out by others from the fringes of the ton who had no objection to meeting a supposed madman of such elevated rank.

  Including the third possibility Caroline had identified for Michael’s hand, Eleanor Cartwright: lovely, wealthy, needle-sharp. She really might be perfect for him.

  Michael’s eyes roved over his guests, greeting them all with a slivered nod, sharing a word here and there. But for Caroline, he had nothing.

  And Caroline added another possible reaction to her mental list: he might ignore you—and waken everything. Shame, jealousy, lust, all rolled into a spiked ball. She wished she could turn it into a mace and strike him with it.

  Especially when, without meeting Caroline’s eye or speaking a word to her, he interrupted her tumbling thoughts with a curt sweep of his arm.

  Time to go in to dinner. So she smiled as though she were completely at ease, and she marched in at his side. Her fingers hovered over Michael’s arm as they walked, wary of touching, of the effect it so often had on him—or might now have on her.

  When she entered the Callows dining room, she forgot Michael for a few seconds; she simply dropped her hand to her side and stared. In the room’s stretching height and width, it was as sturdy and graceful as a medieval cathedral: centuries old; stone-floored and timber-beamed. Completely unornamented by tapestry or carpet, painting or glass. Only a great iron hoop of a chandelier relieved the hard angles of rock and wood.

  The chairs and endless table were huge and heavy and dark, Norman in style, and nicked until their finish was no longer glossy. Not fashionable, but made of the finest quality; well-maintained, but not precisely cared for.

  Rather like their owner.

  The rooms she’d seen so far made quite plain that Michael did, in fact, need a wealthy bride. His house had seen none of his fortune for too long. The realization made her stomach as heavy as though she’d dined early on a course of bricks—maybe because she didn’t like to think of him rattling around alone in this Spartan house.

  Or maybe because she didn’t like to think of him taking a life’s companion.

  Well, it was his decision. As the nominal hostess of this party, she seated herself at the foot of the dining table and allowed Michael’s servants to fuss unobtrusively with her chair, with serving dishes and glassware.

  The service was good. The guests would approve.

  But when the soup was served, Caroline’s face fell. It was not the usual white soup she had expected; there were… plants in it. Strange little green coils such as she had never seen before.

  Before she could consider this surprise further, at the head of the table, Michael raised a glass, and the guests fell silent.

  “Thank you all for making the long journey north to my home,” he began, his voice tight and chilly. He took a sip of wine, caught Caroline’s eye for an instant before his wintergreen gaze flicked away.

  It was the first time he had looked directly at her.

  And then she understood: he had practiced a speech. He had withheld himself until the time came for a scripted greeting—with which he felt more comfortable than milling about in his drawing room asking everyone how their journey had gone.

  Though that should have been easy enough. Deuced cold, wasn’t it?

  He continued, sounding less stilted now. “I have never before hosted a house party, so this will be a time of many new experiences for us. During your time here, I hope you will come to love Lancashire as I do.”

  The third and final candidate Caroline had identified for Michael’s hand, Miss Eleanor Cartwright, sat halfway down the table on Michael’s right side. Tall and fair-skinned, with dark hair and a high, intelligent brow, she was listening to His Grace’s words with all the quiet attention of a student absorbing a lecture from a favorite professor.

  “This soup,” Michael said, “is the first introduction many of you will have to a Lancashire delicacy. Taste it, please.”

  Eighteen spoons, including Caroline’s, lifted. Caroline caught one of the mysterious coiled plants in her spoon and took a hesitant taste.

  Ah.

  The soup was a revelation, creamy and buttery and savory. The mysterious plant was slightly crunchy, with a sweet-bitter taste that cut through the fat of the broth and enlivened it.

  “This is a soup of bracken fronds,” Michael explained. “I have heard them called fiddleheads. The cold weather has tinkered with our growing season here, as you can imagine, and bracken is almost the only plant growing well this year.”

  Out of a lowly bracken, such food could be made? Caroline studied the soup again. Marvelous.

  Down the length of the table, spoon after spoon dipped down for more. Each bite added to the skein of flavors woven by simple ingredients combined well. Michael wasn’t aping the sophistications of London; he was giving them something new, something uniquely of the land and of himself.

  The evening was turning for the good, and Michael had not needed Caroline’s aid at all.

  Then, down the long length of the table, he winked at her.

  It wasn’t a subtle expression: he screwed up one side of his face until the eye closed. Then he grinned.

  This was a reaction Caroline had never thought to prepare for: ease, humor. Her careful mask of courtesy shattered like spun candy. They were sweet, that wink and that grin, as if he shared a secret with her and they belonged together.

  But they did not. Michael was so fond of the truth—so was he lying to himself, or was Caroline seeing only what she wanted to?

  She couldn’t tell.

  So she winked back and drank her soup.

  ***

  The rest of dinner didn’t match the startling wonder of the bracken soup,
but it was pleasant. Given enough wine, the guests were disposed to consider themselves well fed and were also prepared to be well entertained.

  One awkward moment occurred when, as soon as the meal was completed, Michael requested that all his guests follow him into a drawing room they’d not yet seen. The male guests shared we-knew-it glances to be so denied their port and cigars by this madman, and even the women—who usually waited dully after dinner until the men rejoined them—were surprised to have the usual progression of the evening shaken up.

  No more winks came from Michael; he was evidently impervious to the oddity of what he proposed. So Caroline smoothed over the situation, teasing the men about sharing their port with the ladies, speculating about the surprises Michael must have in store for them.

  The room to which they were led was large and spare. At its center, atop a scarred marquetry table, squatted a black-painted metal device about the size of a lapdog. It looked like nothing so much as a tiny chimney atop a barrel.

  As guests gathered around and blinked at this mysterious contraption, Hambleton gave voice to their puzzlement. “What is this, Wyverne? Some kind of tobacco pipe?”

  Michael’s mouth curved. “It’s a magic lantern.”

  “I see,” breathed Eleanor Cartwright. “Yes, this aperture permits the projection of an image. What is the light source? That’s not the usual Argand lamp.”

  “Indeed not, Miss Cartwright,” Michael confirmed. “I’ve modified this apparatus to use a Carcel lamp instead. I believe it will provide a brighter light, and consequently a—”

  “A more vivid image.” Eleanor nodded her determined chin, apparently having no qualms about interrupting a duke. “Without the shadow cast by the Argand style of lamp, all the illumination will be channeled through the glass slide. Excellent.”

  Michael blinked. “Thank you.” More loudly, he added, “I hope you will all be pleased by this exhibition. Do be seated.”

  Caroline sank gingerly into a severe-looking chair next to the marquetry table; around the room, other guests found seats as well. There was no pattern to the furnishings in this room; velvet-covered chaises with carved Egyptian legs were intermingled with stiff, gilded Louis Quatorze chairs, sturdy Hepplewhite, and the human-sized mousetrap on which Caroline had, unfortunately, seated herself. Costly once, but now a complete jumble. Caroline’s hands ached to tug and pull the room into order. She could make something of this place; she knew it. All the elements were here.

  She slid her fingers under her thighs, reminding herself that she was not here to make any imprint on the place. She was here to cut ties. No more Michael. No more of this fascination. She would gain her greatest social success by marrying off the mad duke, and they would both have what they needed.

  And they would be finished with one another.

  That being the case, she should not have sat next to him. For instead of remaining indifferent, her eyes decided to follow his every movement. Watching as he retrieved a wooden box from a nearby table and slid open the top to reveal rows of glass squares and rectangles, separated by what appeared to be cloth wrappings. When Michael beckoned to a footman to snuff the lights, she couldn’t help but gulp down the sight of those long, square-tipped fingers flexing, remembering how they had played over her body.

  Fortunately, the lights went out—all but the one in the magic lantern—before she could betray herself with a blush.

  For a few seconds, all the guests stared at the far wall of the room, on which shone a blob of light. Then, with the clean snick of glass against metal, a slide covered the light and an image shone forth on the wall.

  It was Callows, sunlit and lovely, clean and golden, surrounded by a sweep of lawn so green the painter must surely have taken liberties with the choice of color.

  Caroline had never seen a magic lantern show before; she had thought of them as nothing more than amusements for children. But no, this was a wonder.

  “You may think yourselves in the north of England,” Michael said, unseen in the dark room. “But those of us who make their lives here think it the center of the world.”

  He slotted in another slide in place of the image of Callows, this one of low, brown-gray mountains that stood out sharp against a sky the color of a bluebird’s breast.

  “This is the Forest of Bowland, which you’ll see to the northeast of Callows if you approach during the daytime. I know,” he said with a touch of humor, “there’s scarcely a tree in sight, and so you’ll find if you look outside. It’s the ancient meaning of forest as a land that belonged to the Crown.”

  And now to me, were the unspoken words. Caroline wished he had spoken them aloud, reminding his guests that he was worthy of their respect.

  Though he would be even if he didn’t own a single acre.

  “To the west of us is the Fylde,” Michael continued, “which looks to the uninitiated like a stretching flatland.”

  “Damn right,” muttered one of the men, a Mr. Watkins, whom Caroline had invited based on his thorough inability to appeal to young women. “This land’s nothing to look at. Damned dull show. Wonder if he’s got any bawdy slides in that box of his?”

  Mr. Everett—Caroline recognized the wry, low voice of her impoverished friend—replied, “His land’s a fair sight better to look at than mine, since I’ve none. Let’s see what he has in store.”

  Michael, heedless of the slippage of his audience’s attention, added, “This far north, we’ve a surfeit of space if nothing else. But the Fylde is bounded by a river that serves as our lifeline. I plan to expand a network of canals for irrigation and, one day, transport. We’ll serve our cotton to the world, and our coal. We’ll bring this plain to life. Perhaps we’ll even make the mountains bloom.”

  His voice turned wistful, a wave of floating vision unmoored by reality. Caroline sank into the brightness of it, of the space on the wall that showed Lancashire not as it was nor even as the painter had seen it. She saw the unfocused flatness as Michael wanted it to be: a land of purpose, matching his own energy and drive. As he expected the best from himself, so he did from the land.

  So he did from others. And surely he was disappointed by anything less than perfection.

  The room was quiet around them, and Caroline could not tell if the silence was that of people spellbound or bored to distraction. She hoped for the former, for she felt the stirring of a strange magic within herself. Michael had told them how to feel, just as she’d told him at a ball in London only a few weeks before. With his words, he had woven and unrolled the tapestry of his life, his love for the land, his fascination with it—and his sorrow over its betrayal.

  Could he possibly realize how much of himself he’d revealed to a roomful of near strangers?

  Apparently not, for with a scrape and clink, Michael drew out that slide and slotted in another. This rectangle of light displayed a scratchy pen-drawn image of a wheeled barrel, with a splash of red on a stretching smokestack. To Caroline, it looked not unlike the magic lantern apparatus itself. She turned to Michael for an explanation.

  “This slide shows the Catch Me Who Can locomotive,” Michael said. “A fascination of mine. I never saw it run in person, as I didn’t journey to London during its exhibition in 1808. But I’ve corresponded with the engineer who designed it, and he sent a sketch that I’ve had transferred to glass.”

  “You’ve written to Trevithick?” Miss Cartwright’s voice held all the awe that most young women expressed when discussing a court dress sewed by a fashionable modiste.

  “Indeed,” Michael said. “He’s an eccentric fellow, I fear.”

  From somewhere in the darkness came a snort.

  Michael shifted, and his face came into view close to Caroline’s right side, up lit by the filtering lamp. His eyes fell into shadow, his cheekbones scooped hollow by the stark light.

  “Thank you all for indulging me in this brief int
roduction to my world,” he said. The glass slides clicked in their wrappings as he searched for another among their number. “Ah. I think you’ll enjoy this one.” He slotted a new slide into place.

  They were faced with a velvet-blue night sky, spangled with stars and a benignly smiling moon.

  As they watched, their eyes adjusting to this dimmer image, the moon and stars began to drift across the night sky, left, then right. Constellations floating in a way no astronomer would ever imagine. The guests gasped at the sight of galaxies dancing on a drawing room wall.

  “How are you doing this?” Caroline whispered.

  “This is a two-part slide.” Michael sounded pleased by the murmurs of wonder. “The sky is on one, and the celestial bodies on another. They can move about in relation to one another.”

  “Ingenious,” said the crisp tones of Miss Cartwright. “Have you any others of that sort?”

  “Yes. But they might not be suited to…” Michael trailed off.

  “Are they bawdy?” Watkins sounded hopeful.

  “No, no,” Michael hurried to explain. “They are phantasmagoria slides from France. They might be frightening to young ladies.”

  “Oh, nonsense.” Emily, Lady Tallant, spoke out from across the drawing room. “Having been a young lady once myself, I can tell you that nothing frightened me so much as being left out of a rollicking good time. Do show us, Wyverne.”

  A chorus of agreement succeeded this, and Michael assented. The night sky disappeared, leaving behind a misty whitish rectangle.

  Then a skull leered at them, sudden and huge and horrible. With a start, Caroline shrank back from its lurid gray-green bone, the grisly grin of its snaggled teeth. Bloodshot eyes rolled hideously in the misshapen sockets.

  And Michael, bless him, was talking about it as though it was nothing more surprising than another landscape. “This is meant to be presented as part of a full show, complete with music and tactile effects.”

  “Tactile effects?” Caroline could not help but ask.

  Michael reached out to draw a finger delicately up the back of her neck, and she shivered. “Never mind.”