poet blinked at him owlishly. ‘Who?’
‘Caroline! Lady Rider. How many other women have you here, for heaven’s sake! How long?’
‘I don’t know. I do not recall...’ Augustus St John Marne ran a hand distractedly through his over-long blond hair. ‘Two hours? Three at most.’
‘Three! And she has not stirred in all that time?’
‘I’m the host, not a governess, for goodness’ sake. I can’t be expected to keep an eye on all my guests. Let her be, she’ll come round. Obviously she has misjudged the quantity.’
‘She has not taken it in a pipe, St John Marne, she has ingested it.’
‘Egad!’ Suddenly the former poet was all flapping concern. ‘Are you sure? You must get her out of here. This is very pure—the best, I only ever serve the best. What can have possessed her. Take her away, get her to a doctor, give her a purge, just get her out of here right now, I beseech you.’
Sebastian told himself yet again to walk away. Caro was a grown woman. Given the four year age gap between them, she must be seven-and-twenty and therefore more than capable of taking care of herself. Except that there was something about her that told him she no longer cared for anything. The way her hair fell about her in lank tresses, the pallor of her skin, the outmoded gown. Her breathing seemed to be growing ever more faint.
In all conscience Sebastian could not leave her here, but he had no idea where she lived. A terse question prompted St John Marne to look at him in surprise. ‘Did you not you hear? Rider threw her out. Caught her in flagrante with the boot boy, according to the Morning Post. Turns out that the boot boy was merely the latest in a long line, and Rider being the up-and-coming man in Tory circles, he really had no option but to be shot of her.’ The poet tittered. ‘Quite the social outcast, is Lady Caroline. She has lodgings somewhere. My footman will know, he knows everything.’
Sebastian struggled with a strong and perfectly unjustified desire to smash his fist into his host’s supercilious face. ‘What of her family?’ he demanded tersely. ‘Surely Lord Armstrong...?’
St John Marne sneered. ‘Oh, the great diplomat is off saving the world, I believe—the Balkans or some such place, last I heard. The house on Cavendish Square is shut up. That frumpy wife of his must be in the country with her brood of boys. As for the sisters—not one of ’em left in England now, save for this one and the youngest, who has apparently eloped.’ He looked contemptuously over at the comatose figure. ‘You could say, you really could say, that poor Lady Caroline is quite alone in this world.’
Pity overwhelmed Sebastian, and anger too. Whatever she had done—and he simply could not bring himself to believe those scurrilous allegations—she did not deserve to be abandoned. Whatever had happened to her, she had obviously given up hope. He would regret what he was about to do. He would curse himself for it, but he could not leave her alone in this state when there was no one else to care for her. Wrapping a black velvet cover around her body, Sebastian lifted her into his arms and strode, grim-faced, from the room.
Killellan Manor—Summer 1819
The sun beat down remorselessly from a cloudless sky as Lady Caroline Armstrong made her way towards the rustic bridge which spanned the stream at the lower border of Killellan Manor’s formal gardens. She paused on the pebbled banks, tempted to pull off her shoes and stockings and dip her feet in the burbling waters, but knowing she would then be in full view of the house she resisted, her desire to be alone much more powerful than her need to cool down.
Not that anyone was at all likely to be interested in her whereabouts, Caro thought dispiritedly. At sixteen, she already felt as if she had endured enough upheaval to last her a lifetime. She barely remembered Mama, who had died when Caro was five. Celia had taken her place, but two years ago Celia too had abandoned them to accompany her new husband on a diplomatic mission to Egypt. Her eldest sister’s departure had left the four remaining sisters quite bereft. The murder by renegade tribesmen of George, Celia’s husband, had shocked Caro to the core, though not nearly as much as the subsequent developments which saw Celia happily ensconced in Arabia and married to a Sheikh. Of course Caro was glad Celia had found happiness but she couldn’t help wishing, just a little selfishly, she had found it a little closer to home. She missed Celia terribly, especially now that things had changed so drastically at Killellan Manor.
Pausing in the middle of the bridge to carry out the ritual of casting a twig into the waters, waiting only long enough for it to emerge, bobbing and bumping along in the shallows on the other side, Caro took the path which led through the woods to the borders of her father, Lord Armstrong’s estate. It was quiet here and cooler, the sun’s rays dappling down through the rich green canopy of the leaves.
She made her way along the path almost without looking, her thoughts focused inwards. They had always been close, the five sisters, but Celia had been the glue which bound them. Since she left they had all, it seemed to Caro, retreated from each other in their own way. Cassie, who always wore her heart on her sleeve, had hurled herself, in typically melodramatic fashion, into her coming-out Season. She had already fallen wildly in love with the dashing young poet Augustus St John Marne and had taken to declaiming long tracts of his terrible poetry, at the end of which she inevitably collapsed dramatically in tears. Caro, for what it was worth, thought Augustus sounded like a bit of a ninny. Cressie had simply locked herself away with her precious books. And as for Cordelia—well, Cordelia always was as mysterious as a cat.
The only thing which united the sisters these days was their enmity towards Bella. Caro kicked viciously at a stone which lay in her path, sending it flying into a cluster of ferns. Bella Frobisher, now Lady Armstrong, their father’s new wife. Their new stepmother. Cassie had summed it up best. ‘Bella,’ she had said dismissively, ‘has no interest in anything but usurping all of us by providing Papa with a son and heir. As far as Bella is concerned, the sooner she can empty Papa’s nest of its current occupants and replace us with her own little cuckoos the better.’ And that prediction had proven to be wholly accurate. Bella made her indifference towards her stepdaughters quite plain. And as for Papa, once he had ensconced his new wife at Killellan, he was as absent a father as ever, wholly consumed by his political manoeuvrings. Not even Bella, it seemed, was as important as the diplomatic affairs which sent him to London, Lisbon and goodness knows where he was just now.
It could be Timbuktu for all Caro cared. Except she did care, no point denying it. Papa was all she had left. She wished that he would, every once in a while, put his family before his country. She knew he loved her, he was her father, after all, but there were times, like now, when she was completely miserable and it would be nice to have some evidence of the fact. She kicked even harder at another, bigger stone. The pain which stabbed her toe was comforting, a physical reflection of her inner mood.
The woods came to an abrupt end at a boundary wall. On the other side, the lands belonged to the Marquis of Ardhallow. Rich and holder of one of the oldest titles in England, the marquis was a virtual recluse. His wife had obviously died long ago, for no mention was ever made of her. Papa was one of the few visitors permitted access and always made a point of visiting the marquis on the rare occasions when he was at Killellan long enough to pay calls. ‘The Marquis of Ardhallow has one of the most prestigious titles in the country. If he chooses to live in seclusion, it is not for us to question, or to annoy him with unwanted invitations,’ he had once informed Celia, who had inadvertently roused Papa’s anger by inviting the marquis to dinner. ‘It is a shame the man decided not to take up his seat in the Lords for he’s a Tory to the core, and one must never underestimate the power he could wield if he chose to.’
Lord Armstrong’s enigmatic words had unwittingly given rise to a myth. Propping her chin on her hands, gazing across the meadow at the house in the distance, Caro recalled the many tales she and her sisters had spun about their elusive neighbour. Tall and very thin, he could have been a handsome man were it not for the meanness of his mouth, the coldness in his eyes. Upon the rare occasions she had come across him out on his estate—for Caro and her sisters were wont to trespass there often when out playing, when they were much younger—the marquis’s haughty stare had frozen her to the bone. He