Tarnished Amongst the Ton Part 8

Stanbridge cleared his throat. 'His late lordship professed himself uncaring about the state of the house, my lord. He refused to waste money, as he put it, on upkeep or even thorough cleaning and, with a skeleton staff, I regret...'

'I understand. But he lived here?'

'Most of the time, my lord. This is where he mainly, er, entertained.' The butler's face was so expressionless that he might as well have shouted his disapproval.

'Entertained? In this?' Ashe opened a door into what must once have been an elegant salon.

'His lordship's company was more concerned with drinking, hunting and the young female persons who were hired than with the amenities of the house, my lord.'

'So I see. Well, there is no way that my mother and sister are going to come and live in this.' The picture over the mantel was enough to make even Ashe, inured to erotic carving, raise his eyebrows.

'Quite so, my lord,' Perrott agreed. 'However, even the more objectionable items appear to be of some value and I could not undertake to dispose of them on my own initiative. I understand you have brought an expert to a.s.sess things?'

'Miss Hurst, who is coming on from the Dower House with Lady Charlotte. We will start work in the morning. Have bedchambers prepared for the ladies, Stanbridge.'

'Certainly, my lord. One of the footmen will attend you in the Garden Suite, the traditional rooms for the heir.' He regarded Lucifer through narrowed lids. 'I will have a large bird cage sent up, my lord. Dinner will be ready in an hour, if that is acceptable?'

Ashe climbed to the first floor, wondering if the best thing would be to set a match to the entire edifice. And yet... He paused on the landing and looked down the sweep of stairs, the proportions of the hallway. This was an elegant, well-made house that had been ravished and neglected. It could be saved, it could become a home if the ghosts that haunted it could be exorcised.

'I am glad I came and not my father,' Ashe said as Phyllida stood beside him in the hall the next morning and stared about her. 'He will have some concept of it as it should be.'

'It needs a platoon of scrubbing women, a good clear-out and a family living in it again and then it will be a lovely house,' she said stoutly, trying not to feel daunted by the gloom, the neglect and the clutter. 'Where shall we start?'

'Here and the drawing room, I thought-then it will at least appear more welcoming. Then the master suite and rooms for my sister. I should warn you, some of the artwork is of an indecent nature.'

'I will avert my gaze,' Phyllida said and Ashe smiled for the first time that morning. 'You will trust my judgement?' Three days to start to bring some order to this was a significant challenge. 'May I direct the staff to clean and move things?'

'I leave it entirely to you,' he a.s.sured her. 'Stanbridge, place everyone at Miss Hurst's disposal and hire additional cleaning women as she directs. She will doubtless need footmen to help her move things. I will go and inspect the stables.'

Three hours after breakfast the next morning Phyllida felt she was beginning to make progress. She had commandeered a long chamber as a sorting room, had directed the footmen to set up trestle tables and was dividing up items from the hall and drawing room into things which just required cleaning and which could then go back, things that seemed beyond repair, items of poor quality and, forming a dauntingly large section, items of some value, but in dubious taste or of an indecent nature.

The tapestries in the hall were fine Flemish work and were being lowered and rolled to go off for cleaning, maids were scouring the marble floors and washing down the walls and she had found some unexceptional pictures to hang.

Phyllida pushed up the sleeves of her cambric morning gown and rummaged in one of the chests brought in from the hallway. It was a good thing, she decided, swiping dust from her nose with the back of one hand, that she had not come here hoping to seduce Ashe Herriard. Not only had she hardly seen him since yesterday, but she must look a complete fright with her hair wrapped up in a linen towel, a copious ap.r.o.n borrowed from Cook and dust everywhere.

A wrapped object proved to be a charming porcelain figure of a lady, caught in the middle of executing a dance step, her hand raised as though to take her partner's hand. 'And where are you, young man?' Phyllida muttered, delving again. 'There you are!' She emerged triumphant and unwrapped the male dancer, tipped him up and studied the base. 'Meissen. Lovely.'

She set them carefully on the table of items to keep and caught her own skirts up with one hand as she raised her other arm in imitation of the lady. 'Exquisite.'

'Indeed.' Fingers interlaced with hers and she found herself turned to face Ashe. 'Shall we dance?'

He was teasing her, of course. There was no need for her heart to pound or her cheeks to colour and no excuse at all for letting her fingers curl into his as he kept their hands raised in the graceful hold. 'A minuet? Sadly dated, I fear, my lord.'

'You forget, I am lamentably behind the times, Miss Hurst. It might be just the dance for me. Shall we try?' He turned her under his arm and she found herself toe to toe with him. A little panicky tug and her hand was free, only to find that allowed him to put both arms around her, drawing her close. 'There are other dances we could enjoy together,' Ashe suggested, his voice husky.

She could not breathe. There was no mistaking his intent. But was he asking her to be his mistress or simply to indulge in a liaison here for a few days? Either of those possibilities should have sent her fleeing from the room and yet, in the fleeting seconds before he bent his dark head and captured her lips, she could not feel outrage or fear or anything she should have experienced. Only desire. Desire mercifully untainted by fear or apprehension.

Phyllida closed her eyes as Ashe drew her close against him. It was not from modesty, but simply for the sheer pleasure of his hard body against hers, the strength of him, the male heat and scent, the deliciously contradictory sensations of safety and danger. Ashe's kiss on the quayside had fuelled arousing dreams, but that had been the merest caress, she realised as her lips parted under his and he took possession of her mouth. Then his attention had been half on the man who had made her so afraid, now he was focusing every iota of his formidable expertise on reducing her to quivering surrender.

Did he expect her to respond? She had no idea how to answer this onslaught, although her hands had curled instinctively around his neck, her lips had parted and her tongue seemed to be doing daringly wicked things without her conscious direction. He believes me to be a virgin, to be innocent, she rea.s.sured herself as she wondered dizzily if she was about to faint from lack of air, or simple l.u.s.t.

Ashe seemed to sense her weakness even as her legs began to give way. He broke the kiss and she opened her eyes to find herself still held in his arms. His heavy-lidded gaze studied her face. 'I thought I was not wrong,' he murmured.

Arrogant man. The thought flashed into her head as a deep indrawn breath steadied her. What had she been thinking of? This was madness. Delicious, exciting, infinitely tempting, but completely wrong. Besides, it could come to nothing. She liked Ashe, he took the trouble to kiss with finesse and consideration for her pleasure, but she could not pretend to herself that the delight would last were matters to go any further.

'You thought me a lightskirt?' she flashed at him. She would not back away. Phyllida stiffened her spine and her quaking knees and did her best to ignore the clamouring instinct to throw herself back into Ashe Herriard's embrace and find out if he could, after all, work magic and banish her memories and her nightmares.

'No. I thought you a pa.s.sionate woman it would be a pleasure to kiss and I judged you would respond if I did.' He was watching her like a man confronted by an unpredictable danger, calm but poised to evade both a slap on the cheek or a lashing from her tongue.

'And now what?' Phyllida demanded.

'We could do it again?' That wicked mouth was serious, but his eyes were filled with laughter.

'That is not what I meant! Am I to expect kisses whenever you find me alone-or do you have the intention of taking me to your bed, my lord?'

'My lord,' he echoed. 'Am I so in disgrace? Would you come to my bed if I asked you? It is what I hope.'

Chapter Ten.

Phyllida hesitated a betraying second too long. 'No! Of course I will not come to your bed!' Her hands were knotted in her ap.r.o.n and she made herself release it, smooth out the creases.

Ashe half-turned and moved to examine the Meissen figures as though to soothe her by putting a little distance between them. 'A pity. I am very attracted to you.'

His long fingers caressed down the bare arm of the dancing lady and Phyllida shivered as though they touched her own naked flesh.

'You told me you wanted to be friends,' she accused.

'I have always been friends with my lovers,' he countered.

'How pleasant for you! I am very conveniently here, am I not?' And I am a weak-willed woman who has been dreaming of the touch of your lips, the pressure of your hands, the hardness of your body and I am not sophisticated enough in these matters to hide that. 'And there are no other distractions to entertain you.'

'There are plenty of distractions, Phyllida. Not that any of them are very entertaining,' Ashe said wryly. 'But are you telling me that you feel nothing for me? That I am so far adrift in my reading of you?'

She moved round the packing case, glad of its bulk between them, and reached in for another wrapped object. 'I am a respectable woman, my lord.' Liar. 'I cannot afford to allow my feelings to dictate my actions.' The wrappings fell away to reveal a pot-pourri bowl. She set it down on the table too hard and the fragile pierced lid rattled like her nerves.

'Then you do have feelings for me?'

'Only the realisation that you kiss very well.' She wiped her hands on her ap.r.o.n and dug into the chest again. If she fled from the room, she would never have the nerve to return and the work steadied her hands. 'I expect you have had a great deal of practice. Or perhaps it is simply that I have had very little and you are actually quite mediocre at it.'

That surprised a chuckle of laughter from him. 'Should I be suffering from any excess of masculine conceit, you, Phyllida, are a most certain cure for it.'

She removed the paper from around a stack of delicate Worcester fruit plates, lips tight on a thoroughly unladylike retort. After an interval when he said nothing, made no move to touch her, she asked, 'You expect feelings in your liaisons, do you?' His face went very still. 'You charm your mistresses with talk of love, perhaps?' She had meant to be sarcastic, to show her scorn for his talk of feelings when all he wanted was to bed her, but the expressionless face was suddenly vulnerable. For a second she thought he flinched.

'Ashe? What did I say?' Phyllida realised she had blundered into something she did not understand.

'I no longer make that mistake,' he said tightly.

'You loved one of your mistresses? What happened to her?' As she asked it she guessed. There was loss, bleak and cold, in those green eyes. 'She is dead.'

'Yes.' Ashe turned away as though to study the porcelain she was setting out. 'All this is European. Is it any good?'

'It is excellent.' If he thought to divert her by changing the subject she would not oblige him. 'And valuable. And that is not important. Tell me about her, the mistress you loved.'

'She was the only mistress I ever had, I suppose,' he said, his attention apparently fixed on the piece of Meissen in his hands. 'Before her there were... encounters. After her, liaisons. I learned my lesson with Reshmi.'

'She was Indian?' Phyllida took the statuette from his unresisting hands. 'Tell me.'

'Her name means The Silken One. She was a courtesan at my great-uncle's court. Beautiful, very sweet, gentle. Exquisite.' Phyllida saw with a pang that his eyes were closed, the thick, dark lashes shutting her out. 'I let myself fall in love with her and, far worse, I let her fall in love with me. The mistress of the women's mahal spoke to the raja and he showed me that I was simply being unkind to her and that it must stop.'

'But why? If you loved each other-'

Ashe opened his eyes and smiled, the twist of his lips bitter. 'My great-uncle pointed out to me that I was the heir to a marquess's t.i.tle, that I would be leaving India for England very soon. Did I expect to drag an uneducated Indian girl halfway across the world to be my mistress for as long as I remained besotted with her? I protested that this was love, that I would marry her. He told me not to be a fool and to go away and think about it.'

Phyllida watched him as he wandered across the room to end up with one foot on the hearth stone, his hands braced on the mantelshelf, his back to her. 'So I thought about it. My mother is half-Indian, an educated daughter of a princely house, trained to run a great household, confident and used to European society and yet I knew she dreaded coming here, however well she tried to hide it. How could I uproot the daughter of a peasant from everything she knew-and how could I create such a scandal for my parents with such a marriage?'

'How did she take it?' Phyllida asked, dreading his answer.

'She sobbed and pleaded and then, when I was adamant, cruel because it was hurting me so much, too, she controlled herself, bowed her head, murmured that it should be as her lord commanded. She walked away into the gardens at the foot of the walls and I let her go, thinking she needed to be alone to compose herself.'

'Ashe, she didn't kill herself?'

'No. I tell myself not. She trod on a krait, a small, very deadly snake, and died in agony.'

Oh, G.o.d. Phyllida struggled to find the right thing to say, if the words even existed.

Ashe pushed himself away from the fireplace and came back to stand beside her. 'And when I had stopped wallowing in my self-indulgent grief I understood two things. That I would marry as befitted a future marquess, someone who would be a support to my parents, not a source of embarra.s.sment to make their lives harder, and I would put juvenile fancies of love to one side before I hurt anyone else, let alone myself.'

'Ashe, love is not a juvenile fancy, it is real and strong. It exists.' She took his hand as though she could somehow infect him with that belief. 'Don't your parents love each other?'

'Pa.s.sionately, without reservation. That sort of love is like a lightning strike, rare beyond belief.' The emotion, the pain, had gone from his eyes as he pulled his hand free. 'Enough of this.'

He would not confide further, not now. She had caught him off balance and he was regretting exposing that emotion and that weakness.

'If you wish to be useful, you could help me unpack these chests,' Phyllida said briskly, as though she had not wanted to weep for him and for that poor girl. And for yourself. All you can ever be to him is a lover.

'The tartness of your tongue is a constant delight to me,' Ashe observed, his change of tone startling her so much she almost dropped the set of fire irons she had found packed at the bottom of the chest.

'Then you must give me leave to observe that you are attracted to the strangest things in a woman.' He appeared to have recovered, which she found worrying. All that had happened, she was certain, was that he had buried the pain behind a formidable barrier of charm.

'And whoever packed these things away had the oddest ideas of what could be safely placed with what,' she added, beginning to drag the empty box towards the door.

'Let me.' Ashe strode across the room and lifted it, dumped it outside and took the chisel she was using to pry off the lid of the next one. 'Why are the footmen not a.s.sisting you?'

'I have them moving furniture so the drawing room can be cleaned.'

'Then sit down here,' he ordered, placing a chair next to a clear length of table, shrugging out of his coat and rolling up his shirtsleeves. 'And I will lift things out for you to check.'

'Very well,' Phyllida agreed meekly. Her legs were a little tired, to be sure, but it was also a pleasure to watch Ashe working, however unladylike it was to appreciate the play of muscles in his back and shoulders and the way his breeches pulled tight over an admirably trim backside when he bent over. He seemed to find some relief for his feelings in physical work.

The desire to see him naked, to touch him, to run her fingers over those muscles, those tight b.u.t.tocks, warred with the need to hold him and comfort him. The former he would agree to without hesitation, the latter was impossible.

'To revert to your observation just now,' he continued as he lifted a bronze figure out, grimaced at it and took it straight to the rejects table, 'I have spent a lot of time in a place where I could not converse at all with respectable ladies and then three months on board ship with only my mother and sister for feminine company. It is a pleasure to talk to an intelligent woman who is neither a relative, a servant nor-'

'A concubine?' she murmured and could have bitten her tongue out.

'Exactly.' Ashe dumped the rest of the contents of his box on to the table and pushed a stack of badly chipped delftware towards her.

She pushed it back. 'This is in too bad a state.'

'That's the last of the boxes from the hall. Come and help me explore some of the rest of the house for half an hour.'

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 ap.r.o.n 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.