The Rake and Miss Asherwood Read online

  Elizabeth caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the windowpane. The lavender silk had been a good choice, she decided. The dark, heavy ringlets of hair made a pleasing contrast, falling almost to her shoulders from where they were gathered at the top of her head. She was tall and her figure curved nicely, which the present-day fashion for lower necklines set to advantage.

  Finally she stepped back from the window and took a deep breath, preparing herself for the brief stint of acrobatics to follow. A ball gown required effort to remove without a maid; Elizabeth managed it with the aid of experience and a long-handled tire-bouton. Laying aside the gown for Daisy’s attention the next day, Elizabeth shrugged into her night-chemise and sat down at the dressing table. She brushed out her hair, staring absently at her reflection in the mirror.

  Glossy, chestnut-brown hair, the ringlets now relaxing under the brush. Large, brown eyes and a straight nose, full lips.

  The chin, Lizzie decided, was perhaps a bit too defined for current fashion, the jaw a trifle pronounced. Otherwise she had no complaint.

  I wonder if people see my mother, when they look at me.

  Am I as pretty as she was?

  Elizabeth’s mother had died of the grippe some twelve years past. In the happy, innocent days before her death, Lady Asherwood had been the most beautiful lady in the world, gracious and soft-spoken, an object of worship to her daughter and only surviving child. Lizzie remembered sitting at the second floor landing of Aisling House, legs dangling through the balustrade, waiting to bid her parents goodnight as they left for some dinner party or musicale. Her mother swept down the stairs in a gown of cloth of gold and took her father’s arm—

  Lizzie stopped herself. There had been a time, after her mother’s death, when she had lived in her memories, but they led nowhere. She transferred her attention from the mirror to the washbasin, and began scrubbing off all traces of the hot ballroom and the city soot.

  What had gotten into Geoffrey tonight?

  Elizabeth dried her face and smiled, remembering. He had been nearly beside himself, and she had felt—

  Flattered, Lizzie decided. Flattered that a man felt such desire for her.

  It isn’t fair to keep putting him off.

  She supposed it really was time to announce their engagement. One hint from her, she knew, and she would be wearing the Winthrop sapphire by Tiffin. Her father had been dead over a year, and even Lady Jersey had told her that no-one expected more.

  Why did she still hesitate?

  Elizabeth looked at Marguerite’s letter, waiting on the nightstand.

  She sighed. I should have told him long ago.

  Elizabeth Asherwood had a secret; or rather her father had, a secret which he had passed on to his daughter only a few months before his death.

  Marguerite du Merveille. A young Frenchwoman of fifteen years to Lizzie’s nearly twenty-one—and her half-sister.

  Elizabeth remembered, with some chagrin, how horrified she had been to learn of the girl’s existence.

  “Papa! Papa! How could you?” She had stared down at her father in his sickroom bed, tears starting to her eyes.

  “Don’t cut up the schoolroom miss on me, gel,” Sir Terence had replied, with a trace of his old asperity. He had grown sicker by degrees that year, until Elizabeth had been forced to accept that he would never regain his former health. “ ’Twas no worse than many a gentleman, and better than some.”

  “But—our family—my mother—”

  “Your dear mother knew nothing about my . . . relationship with the comtesse.”

  Elizabeth was reduced to indignant sputtering. “How can you be sure?” she cried. The figure of Lady Asherwood suddenly filled her vision, beautiful, an angel in the eyes of a child.

  How could her father do such a thing? They had been so happy.

  “What if she knew? What if her heart was broken? What if she died broken-hearted—”

  Sir Terence shook his head and gestured irritably with one frail hand. “Stop talking nonsense,” he told Lizzie.

  “Did you even love my mother?” Elizabeth blushed to remember that, at this point, she had stomped her foot.

  “Stop!” Sir Terence pulled himself upright in the bed. “Aye, I loved her well-enough,” he said, and stopped, his breaths coming in short gasps. He continued with some effort. “My love was never in question, daughter, and I’ll thank you to remember it.”

  Elizabeth stared at him. “What?”

  But Sir Terence would say no more of the subject, and Lizzie was forced to retreat.

  As the months of illness wore on, Sir Terence’s condition worsened at an ever quicker pace. Once a great bear of a man, with a booming voice and gruff demeanor, he withered before his daughter’s eyes.

  Lizzie’s hurt and shock warred with her love for him. She knew of numerous affairs among society marriages, of course. But her own father—

  Were all marriages hopelessly unromantic, intended for finances and a home, children and security, and naught else?

  Would Geoffrey love someone else, someday? she wondered.

  Would she?

  Weeks passed before Sir Terence spoke of Marguerite again. By that time he had grown so frail that Elizabeth never thought to argue.

  “Papa,” she soothed. “Papa, it’s all right. I don’t need to know any more.”

  “I want you to . . . to understand,” said Sir Terence. “The situation in France is becoming worse. Marguerite may need . . . may need your help someday.”

  The news from France was indeed disturbing. Louis the Sixteenth and his queen had been forced from Versailles, and compelled to live at the Tuileries in Paris, under the vigilant eye of the mob. The Paris Commune held military power in the name of the sans-culottes, but that faction now fought with the rival Committee of General Security, which controlled the police. Moderate voices urged caution, some even suggesting the formation of a titular monarchy à la Bretagne.

  But Elizabeth never put these events together with Marguerite and her mother who, as she knew, lived in a chateau well away from Paris. Why would anyone bother with one woman and a young girl? An entire country, to Elizabeth’s knowledge, did not go mad.

  “I want you to understand.”

  Her father was seized with a bout of coughing, a distressingly frequent occurrence. Lizzie opened the heavy velvet draperies of his bedroom and threw open the windows, hoping that fresh air would ease his breathing. Then she listened wordlessly, pacing back and forth and fighting tears, as her father explained the circumstances of her sister’s birth. His voice was halting and weak, but he would not stop until the end.

  And so Elizabeth learned, for the first time, the story of her father and Alice, comtesse du Merveille.

  The comtesse had been in those days a young widow, and the niece of one Edouard Villeneuf, from the French town of Doullens.

  Monsieur Villeneuf was, through happenstance, an old friend of Sir Terence. Elizabeth’s mind held a scrap of memory, her mother coming into the nursery schoolroom to tell her that her father would be gone for a few weeks, that he was visiting Picardy, in France.

  The days at the home of Monsieur Villeneuf led to a chance meeting with the comtesse, followed by a visit to Beauvoir, her chateau, which was known for its vineyards and lush, park-like gardens, more in the English style than the French.

  A chance meeting, a chance affection—and a passionate affair.

  There had been many more visits to Monsieur Villeneuf. Elizabeth only remembered that her father was often gone, but that was no peculiarity among the other families of her acquaintance. Her mother attended society functions as before, and the only change was that, during her father’s absences, Elizabeth’s lessons were overseen by a tutor.

  After some years, the comtesse had given birth to a healthy baby girl. Marguerite was to be her only child, and the pride of her eye.

  “I offered to bring them to England,” said her father, his voice a hoarse whisper. “To give them my protection.
She could have lived in London for the rest of her life.”

  His fortune would have been more than adequate for the event, Elizabeth knew.

  “She . . . refused.” A tear escaped from Sir Terence’s eye. “She would not leave France, even after—”

  “After my mother died,” said Lizzie, gently.

  “Yes . . . yes.” Sir Terence’s voice broke. “She said her home was at Beauvoir. That Marguerite would never be accepted in England, that we could never be a . . . a family.”

  It was several minutes before he recovered, and by then Elizabeth’s world, her memory of the idyllic childhood preceding her mother’s death, had suffered its final and most shattering blow.

  Because it was clear that, whatever his feelings for Lady Asherwood, her father had truly loved the comtesse du Merveille.

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  Letters from France

  By late spring, Terence Asherwood’s life was moving rapidly to its close. At his bedside day and night, Elizabeth could not remain angry with him, but she had been inclined to resent Marguerite, and certainly the comtesse. They had full knowledge of her and of her father’s life in London, when she had known nothing of them.

  And Marguerite du Merveille still had a mother, whereas she, Elizabeth, was to be without either parent before long.

  But Lizzie’s heart was not fashioned to be resentful. She wrote Marguerite shortly after Terence Asherwood’s death, as she had promised, and was charmed by the thoughtful and loving reply, written in the careful hand of a schoolgirl.

  My dearest sister, I grieve for your loss—

  Thus began a correspondence—and a secret.

  For the past year the letters from France had arrived regularly at Aisling House, a few weeks after her own had been sent out. The two sisters shared, at first, the barest outlines of their life; weather, gardens, and the abysmal condition of local roads during the winter rains. Then Lizzie asked more about the chateau Beauvoir, and her sister was happy to oblige. Of the house itself Elizabeth learned very little—it was big and had many rooms—but Marguerite described the animals of the farm and the surrounding countryside in charming detail. The girl began to include small watercolors with each letter. She possessed an artist’s eye and a devoted interest in the humble activities of everyday life; Elizabeth now knew that the wash, pristine and white, was hung out every second Monday, that butter was churned in a dash kept near the milkhouse, and that Marguerite loved the barns—airy and full of sweet smelling hay—best of all.

  Of politics her sister said nothing and Elizabeth, lulled by descriptions of the dappled shade and birdsong of surrounding woods, of ducklings and piglets and chicks, nearly forgot her father’s warning that Marguerite might one day need her help.

  At first Elizabeth said nothing of Marguerite, even to her closest friends. She told herself it was to protect Sir Terence’s reputation and his memory; after all, her father had told no-one himself. Eventually she confided in Penny, who took the revelation of a half-sister born to Alice du Merveille with remarkable equanimity.

  “Excellent,” she told Elizabeth. “An entirely new population to gossip about. What does she say of the Paris fashions this year?”

  So Penelope knew. But Elizabeth did not tell Lord Winthrop.

  Elizabeth finished her toilette, pulling her hair back into a loose mare’s tail with a velvet ribbon. She carefully removed the dozen or so sham-covered pillows that Mrs. Talliaferro seemed to think necessary for her bed, and crawled under the covers with a happy sigh. It was chilly and she snuggled for a few minutes with the duvet pulled up to her nose. As the bed warmed up, she relaxed. Then she pulled herself upright and opened the letter from Marguerite, neatly popping off the planchet of wax with a fingernail.

  No watercolors this time, Lizzie noticed. Only a few sheets of paper covered with her sister’s neat, Italian copperplate.

  Ma chère sœur,

  My heart leapt to see your letter of the twenty-fifth.

  What a pleasure to hear again from you so quickly! Maman sends her greetings. She hopes that the London air has not made you ill during the past winter, and that you have taken no chill—

  Lizzie smiled. Maman—the comtesse—seemed to have no good opinion of the English climate, or at least that of London; Marguerite’s letters regularly passed on her mother’s concerns for Elizabeth’s health.

  She read on:

  —we have no complaints of the year; the situation in Paris is difficult of course, but maman and everyone says that we shall be perfectly safe here in Picardie.

  My mother wishes to ask you if perhaps I might visit

  London sometime quite soon. We know that the time of mourning is only just past—

  My mother wishes to ask you if I might visit. Elizabeth re-read the line, frowning, wondering if her sister’s normally excellent command of English had faltered. A visit from Marguerite would be delightful, of course, but in one of her last conversations with Sir Terence, he had made the comtesse’s feelings clear. Marguerite was French absolument. There was to be no chance of the girl forming an attachment to an Englishman, nor of being shunned as illegitimate by fussy English society. Until she was well secured in marriage, Alice du Merveille would not allow her daughter to travel outside France.

  French conventions, Elizabeth knew, were freer than those of England in some respects. The comtesse was not wealthy by the standards of the ton, to say nothing of the more distinguished members of the French aristocracy, but with the chateau and its land as dowry, Marguerite could expect to marry well. She was not quite at the age to receive suitors, although Elizabeth had heard of one or two families in past letters, families that had paid visits to Beauvoir with a son of the proper age in tow. Marguerite had described these visits in a very offhand manner. Young gentlemen did not rate more attention, in mademoiselle du Merveille’s eyes, than the chateau ducks.

  The lambs have begun taking their first steps away from their mamans, and it is so lovely to watch. They totter a few steps and bleat, then totter a bit more. But the ducklings are my favorite . . .

  I hope to hear from you very soon, my dear sister, and that you will consent to my visit in a very little while. This would be the dearest wish of my heart.

  Elizabeth finished the letter and stared at it, as if to work out a riddle.

  And that you will consent to my visit in a very little while.

  It might mean nothing, a mere whim, or the comtesse’s recognition of the affection that had grown between Lizzie and Marguerite over the past year. It might mean nothing. Still, Elizabeth felt a shiver of unease. She had attended Lady Ebersole’s salon just this past week, and the talk was replete with rumor and the latest unpleasant details from Paris, of mobs and guillotines, until Lady Marjorie Bremerton had said she felt faint, and if they would continue with such an objectionable line of discussion she would be forced to leave.

  I should have paid more attention, thought Elizabeth. I should have written the comtesse.

  In truth, Elizabeth had felt concern, but she had been hesitant to say too much in her own letters, thinking that she might alarm Marguerite. And the girl’s correspondence had been so cheerful—so filled with the news and happy details of the chateau—that she had been convinced that the Alice du Merveille was right, that the troubles were confined to Paris and that Beauvoir would be perfectly safe.

  The comtesse urges a visit . . . And then her own father’s words, spoken as he lay dying. I want you to understand. The situation in France is worse. Marguerite may need your help someday.

  Elizabeth sat up abruptly and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She padded over to the secretary and sat down, pulling out a sheet of writing paper. Marguerite’s letter must be answered at once.

  She sucked on a fresh nib for a moment, thinking about the difficulties presented by such a trip. There would a carriage and coachman to arrange, as well as a change of horses and an inn for rest; she had never organized such things before
. Lizzie determined she would ask Pivens for help.

  But when the girl arrived, how would she be received in London? Elizabeth faced what she had been loath to admit; the comtesse may have been accurate in her estimation of fussy English ways. She began formulating possible accounts of her sister’s sudden visit. Marguerite was a distant cousin. Marguerite was a friend.

  All lies. Pah, thought Lizzie, disgusted.

  And what of Lord Winthrop?

  Lizzie rubbed her eyes. She would deal with that later. The important matter at hand was to arrange immediately for Marguerite’s journey.

  My dearest sister, wrote Elizabeth,

  I am very well, and please assure the comtesse that the London winter was especially kind this year—

  I am delighted that you will be visiting England. Your room will be made up at once and I am eager to see you.

  I will make the necessary arrangements this side of the Channel—please advise me without delay of your plans—

  She sealed the letter with wax, and put it on the candlestand outside her door, with a note requesting that a footman take it to the post. Suddenly exhausted, Elizabeth climbed back into bed and fell asleep almost immediately, but as she drifted off her thoughts turned again to Marguerite, and she wondered if perhaps she should begin to worry.

  * * *

  Chapter 6

  A Trip to the Foreign Office

  The envelope was gone from the candlestand by the time Elizabeth arose the next morning. There was nothing else she could do for the moment; ’twould be perhaps ten days or a fortnight before Marguerite received the letter, and a similar length of time for her reply. As soon as she received word she could begin planning for her sister’s visit in earnest, the room immediately next to hers could be made up, with new linens—she should mention this to Mrs. Talliaferro—and perhaps even new draperies. The windows had a view equal to her own.

  What day was it? Ah, yes, Tuesday. Miss Asherwood smiled. She put on a wrapper and padded down to the kitchen for one of Cook’s raspberry scones.