Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

"Oh, d…ear." Penelope had nearly cursed. The inspiration for her profanity stood by the library's French doors, the same place his ghost had stood for nearly a decade. "I didn't realize the library was occupied, my lord. You will excuse me."

"I will not." Lucien abandoned the shaft of golden afternoon sunlight he'd been standing in and advanced on her. "Somebody has moved my Don Quixote , and I will ransack this entire library to find it. I did good work with that project, and it's nowhere to be found. Tell me the footmen didn't use those pages for the spill jar, please. If Aunt Purdy nicked it, she will un-nick it before supper or enjoy the pleasure of dwelling in the gatehouse."

Penelope endured again the sense of disorientation that Lucien's appearance in the orchard had caused. His voice was the same, but different. Deeper, not as lilting. His movements were just as quicksilver-y, but had acquired a prowling quality too. He'd crossed the library without making a sound, and while his impatience was endlessly familiar, the hint of a threat backing it up was new.

Woe betide whoever had purloined the knight of the sad figure.

"I will locate my lord's manuscript after the maids have given the place a thorough dusting." If the marquess had been searching for his treasure, he'd done so without disturbing a single book. "Nobody would dare make tinder of anything written in your hand, my lord." As for Aunt Purdy, she stashed her finds in the dower house lumber rooms, where they safely collected dust until Penelope retrieved them.

"Stop ‘my lording' me."

Penelope was tired, busy, and vexed. She made for the door.

"Please," Lucien called after her. "Stop ‘my lording' me, please. I haven't used the title in years, and plain Pritchard grew on me as a form of address."

Giving orders had also apparently grown on him. The young Lucien had been a polite, diffident soul, despite his lofty title, and not at all interested in telling other people what to do.

"You are not plain Pritchard," Penelope said, rounding on him. "You are Lucien, Marquess of Lynnfield. Why do I have the sense you would rather be plain Pritchard?"

His lips kicked up at one corner, and he slanted her a mischievous look. "Pritchard saw a lot of places where a marquess would not be safe or welcome. Beautiful, interesting places, and he met the fascinating people who dwelled in such locations."

His tone was wistful, which should have been Penelope's cue to stalk off and make another pass through the kitchen, where Cook's nerves were doubtless again in need of calming.

"What were you doing, my lord, all those years away? The family speculates, and you might be better served by appeasing their curiosity."

Penelope had wondered, too, of course, for the first two or three years, but then she'd acquired some discipline to go with her dignity and put Lucien, Marquess of Misplaced Hopes, from her heart and mind. Mostly.

"I was on the king's business, growing up, seeing the few great capitals Napoleon wasn't busily sacking. The Russians get credit for destroying Moscow. Do not tangle with an angry Russian if you can avoid it. Some brilliant chess players, though, and from all walks of life."

Her annoyance with him gained a second wind. "I ask you about ten years of your life, and you are maundering on about chess three sentences later. Very well, have your mysterious past. If you are done with the library for the nonce, I'll send in the maids for a quick tidying up. We usually leave the thorough annual cleaning until evening fires are less of a necessity."

"When did you become the head housekeeper, Pen?"

Nobody else called her that. Pen, Penmanship, Penultimate, Penumbra… Lucien's vocabulary had no end, and he'd made a game of modifying her name to suit the moment. The family had other names for her Lady Many Penny, Penny, or—when they wanted some special favor—Lady Penelope.

"I am not the head housekeeper any more than you are plain Pritchard, but your aunt, in case you haven't noticed, is getting on. Her memory is not what it once was. The staff and family require attention, and I'm able to provide it. I'll see you at supper."

She would go directly to the kitchen, where the pandemonium was sure to distract her from the look in Lucien's eyes. Was he disappointed to find her directing maids and devising menus? Somebody had to do it, else food arrived to the table cold, cutlery was never polished and rugs never beaten.

Penelope was within six feet of the door before realizing that privacy with Lucien was likely to be in short supply, and now was the time to approach him about rescinding the betrothal agreement. She turned, intent on her topic, only to find that Lucien was two paces behind her.

"I didn't hear you following me."

"You are much preoccupied with domestic matters," he said. "The solicitors gave me accounts, Pen, and their reports focused on harvests, expenses, and Aunt's health. I should have known that you were maintaining order in the house itself, and I thank you for it. You didn't, and don't, owe me or any of us that."

What an odd, infuriating thing to say. "We don't owe each other anything."

He regarded her the same way he used to look at a chessboard when the game defied his preferred strategy. That look presaged intense concentration and a formidable will in service to an even greater intellect.

"We were friends once," he said. "Companions in adventure and misery. My fondest memories of Lynnfield largely involve you and your mad schemes. You owe me nothing—you are right about that—but I offer you a gentleman's regard and whatever version of friendship is appropriate in your eyes, given the passing years."

Penelope wanted to shove him in the chest, hard. She'd sometimes caused him to stumble with that maneuver, when she'd caught him unawares.

A lady was above schoolyard fisticuffs. "We can be cordial, my lord. We shall be cordial. If I've taken a hand in the running of the household, I did so because I like to be busy, and the marchioness asked it of me." Not because I missed you and wanted to keep your home in good order for when you returned.

Was he attempting some sort of sideways apology with this little speech? Penelope gave him the same sort of study he was turning on her, and that was a mistake.

Behind Lucien's calm, blue-eyed regard lurked more of those emotions Penelope had put aside years ago. Lucien was alone in that vast mind of his, still, again. He was homesick while standing in the very library he'd made his private fiefdom by the age of ten.

"I'm glad you've come home." Penelope wished the words back to no avail, because they were only slightly true. She also resented his return, as she'd resented his departure. Friends didn't abandon friends without a word, and Lucien had been right about that part.

They had been companions more than friends and possibly even the juvenile version of inchoate lovers. More than possibly .

Damn him to blazes, anyway.

"I am glad to be here," Lucien said slowly. "Much to my surprise. I've asked Mrs. Cormac to attend me tomorrow after breakfast. Would you like to be present for that interview?"

The titled head of the household did not meet with the housekeeper. "You should confer with Mr. Kerry first, my lord. The butler is senior to the housekeeper." And male. Mrs. Cormac would no more enjoy taking orders from the marquess than the footmen would like taking orders from the housekeeper.

"I met with Kerry after lunch and asked if I might convey my thanks for past years of loyal service to Mrs. Cormac in person. He allowed as how gratitude communicated directly would be permitted."

Lucien was applying chess strategies to managing the household. That was new. "I'll leave you to converse with Mrs. Cormac privately," Penelope said, making another charge for the door. A ladylike charge. "Until supper, my lord."

She didn't pause for a curtsey, and Lucien made no further effort to stop her, nor did he bow. The lack of punctilio on both their parts bothered Penelope all the way up to her bedroom. She should have confronted him about the betrothal legalities, should have explained to him that companions in adventure who go off without a word of farewell are not entitled to trust or friendship upon their return.

Penelope stalked up the steps, trying unsuccessfully to rekindle the fury that had kept her such good company in Lucien's absence. Possibly, a younger Lucien hadn't known how to say good-bye. He'd been little more than a youth when he'd left, and corresponding from the Continent had been all but impossible while hostilities raged.

Perhaps he hadn't felt entitled to write…

By the time she reached her apartment, her ire had muted to an old useless sense of bewilderment. Lucien's mind was impossible to navigate. He was in some ways a prodigy, in others a dunce. Penelope had liked that, liked having the common sense that Lucien lacked, the everyday skills he'd never been taught .

He'd delighted in learning how to set a snare and marveled at Pen's skill with a fishing rod.

"I should take him fishing." She said the words aloud in the safety of her dressing closet, even as she knew them for foolishness. Sir Dashiel was protective of her good name, ridiculously so given that he had no claim on her. He would nonetheless take a dim view of any outings with the marquess that could be considered private.

Besides, Lucien was an adult. He could take himself fishing eight days a week if he chose to.

Penelope retrieved a manuscript wrapped in oilskin from the bottom drawer of her wardrobe and took it to the footman dozing in his chair at the end of the corridor.

"Young Kerry, might you take this to his lordship's apartment and leave it on the escritoire in his sitting room?"

Young Kerry, who resembled his uncle in every particular, except that Young Kerry had a full head of flame-red hair, accepted the parcel and bowed.

"Of course, milady. On his lordship's escritoire. If you'd like, I can wait while you pen him a note so he knows who it's from?"

"He'll know. Away with you. Cook will need every hand to get the feast properly laid, and you will want to finish your nap before battle is joined."

He grinned and strode off, and Penelope took the maids' stairs down to the kitchen. She really should have confronted Lucien about the betrothal.

Time and past to get that detail out of the way.

"Are you normally mute over the chessboard?" St. Didier asked, putting his queen away first. "A good game takes concentration, but your lordship seems both intensely focused on the board and off in another world."

Lucien was at war with himself. The small, safe corner of his mind where he kept All Things Penelope had expanded to take over any and all adjacent territories.

"Uncle Malcolm plays excellent chess without speaking a word. I was merely developing an understanding of my opponent. You are good at devising and testing strategies," Lucien said. "Not as interested in executing them. Murray has the same sort of mind, but he fortunately had Wellington to tend to the execution of his military plans."

St. Didier peered at him. "General Sir George Murray?"

Lucien began returning his pawns to their barracks, but he'd bungled, and St. Didier would not be thrown off the scent.

"One could hardly be on the Continent and not hear of his exploits. He was as angry with the Spanish and Portuguese at times as he was determined to best the French, but he kept his eye on the main objective through many vicissitudes."

"You've met him?"

Never lie unnecessarily. One of very few commandments uniformly adhered to in Lucien's former profession.

"Our paths crossed. One tended to prefer the company of the British army to that of its French opponents. Another game?"

"No, thank you. Who was the tulip at supper? We were not introduced, and somehow, the oversight does not leave me feeling slighted."

Lucien put away the major pieces in rank order. "Cousin Tommie, and he actually is a cousin, or second cousin at some remove. He had the bad luck to be orphaned and the worse luck to be orphaned by parents with more social standing than coin. The estate was taken for debts, and Tommie has been at loose ends. He's educated and not as frivolous as he appears, but lazy." Or he had been. Lucien's measure of the man was years out of date.

St. Didier sipped his brandy. "Angry at the world? He's getting a bit long in the tooth for that posture. Put him in charge of your art business."

Lucien's art business was supposed to be a hobby, a reason for a slightly eccentric peer to hare about the Continent. The enterprise had grown, though, with many Continental families looking to turn assets into coin and Lucien having an eye for what would appeal to English tastes.

"Tommie can manage in French, and he could probably make himself understood in Italian, thanks to his grounding in Latin, but other than that, he's not exactly a polyglot."

Tommie did have social polish, though. He dressed the part, and he was going to waste at Lynnfield.

"If you wait to hand the business over to an exact replica of you, my lord, you are doomed to disappointment. The House of Lords needs every rational mind it can command, and yours falls among that number."

Penelope could manage the art business. She might lack a grasp of vernacular Dutch, and she was surely not well acquainted with Russian, but if she decided to take on the art dealing, she'd make a proper job of it.

"There you go again," St. Didier said, pouring another half inch of brandy into Lucien's glass and then into his own. "Off blowing up castles in Spain."

Lucien had blown up only the one, and that had been mostly a home for bats. "Something is amiss with Lady Penelope."

The fire burned softly, and the clock ticked while the brandy dulled the sharp edges and geometric fence lines in Lucien's mind. The best hours for thinking were at the beginning and end of the day, though Lucien hadn't meant to include St. Didier in his musings.

"She's overtaxed with duty," St. Didier said, nosing his drink, "and under-rewarded with pleasure. One sympathizes." He took a sip, the gesture conveying a hint of self-mockery.

The level of the brandy in the decanter was considerably lower than it had been three games ago. St. Didier had almost won the first game, and Lucien had kept his focus on the chessboard thereafter.

St. Didier had been attempting to ply him with drink. Interesting .

"Her ladyship is lonely, " Lucien said, seizing on the word as an exact fit for his theories. "The restlessness, the bustling about, the being everywhere at once. She was like that as a girl, until she settled in. Happened again when her brother Henry went off to university. When he bought his colors, I doubt she slept for a month."

Lucien set his glass aside. Mention of the late earl was not for the fuddle-headed.

"I gather the young earl did not survive the war?"

"French snipers. Another pointless death. Lieutenant Lord Carweneth was leading the advance patrol, scouting for someplace to camp that had water but wasn't too exposed. Maps were useless in that area, and then he ran into bad luck. Very bad luck." Not quite an accurate retelling, but close enough for present company.

"Let us hope," St. Didier said slowly, "that having concluded more or less a century of war, with every petty despot and half the monarchies in Europe, that we English can learn to enjoy the blessings of peace."

Lucien raised his glass and pretended to sip. In the absence of war, England was falling apart. Bread riots, draconian oppression of any dissident voice, the rule of law contorted for the benefit of the wealthy few. Defeating Napoleon had exposed the conflicts long brewing within British society all the more clearly, and those could not be solved by force of arms.

Temporarily contained, put off, and repressed, certainly, and look how those measures had ended for the French.

"Does her ladyship blame you for her brother's death?" St. Didier asked.

"I was nowhere near the fighting, ever." Not true, of course. "I have no heir, St. Didier. I took precautions."

"The usual precaution is to marry and have lots of sons. You were betrothed at the time you went a-Maying under Napoleon's nose."

Back to this. St. Didier was nothing if not tenacious. "When I went traveling , I was not yet of age to marry without my guardians' consent. Marriage should be undertaken as an independent choice. I was entitled to see something of the world before settling down."

St. Didier's frown conveyed pity. "Perhaps Lady Penelope, your betrothed, is angry with you for abandoning her. An outlandish theory, I know, but you say something is amiss with her, and all but jilting the woman might qualify as the source of her upset."

The lateness of the hour, the brandy, and the long day conspired to defeat Lucien's natural reticence. "I left her a note."

"One note in ten years? Perhaps the rumors about your mental unsoundness are true."

"I'm not unsound. I'm Welsh and as brilliant as much of my race is prone to being. I was raised among a troupe of eccentric relations, taught by tutors who valued learning over intellectual conventions, and allowed to think for myself." Then too, Lucien had left eight years, seven months, and nineteen days ago, not ten years.

"Yourself suspects something is amiss with Lady Penelope. Myself agrees. She does strike me as a woman scorned."

"Spooked, certainly. This handmaiden-at-large role suggests she has made herself as necessary as possible." But the plan had gone awry, and now Sir Dashiel could offer to rescue her from the surfeit of duty she'd taken on at the Hall. "I did leave her a note."

Small, simple words, but over the years they'd come to justify every path that turned Lucien away from home and every risk he should never have taken. "I asked her to come away with me," he went on more softly. "I made all the arrangements. We would travel as cousins, which we are albeit third cousins at least, and I had a lady's companion ready to travel with us."

"Travel where?"

"Southern Italy was safe at the time. Greece was quiet. The Outer Hebrides would have suited me. I needed to get away. We were being forced to the altar for the convenience of our elders, and I thought we could kidnap each other instead."

"The usual term is ‘elope.'"

Lucien rose and returned his glass to the sideboard, the contents untouched. "Exactly what I wanted to avoid. Penelope at seventeen was fiercely contrary. Her older brother barely bothered with her, her wealth was a burden—or so she claimed—and marriage was a trap. Sir Dashiel and his ilk were swarming about her even then. She was full of passionate arguments, and more than half the time she even made sense."

"You adored her."

I still do . "I was young, St. Didier. She was younger. We deserved to decide for ourselves whether we married, and quitting Lynnfield seemed the only way to gain us that freedom." To give Pen a semblance of a choice about her own future.

"So you moved your pieces into position, planned your escape, invited the lady to join your little adventure, and she—wisely, I might add—declined the great and clod-pated honor you were, or possibly were not, doing her."

Lucien hadn't aired this ancient history with anybody. His former employer, His Grace of Huntleigh, probably guessed most of it, but the duke was a kindhearted creature and good at ignoring another person's foolishness.

"She was to meet me in the orchard, but I waited an hour past the appointed time. Penelope was punctual even then, and her absence spoke clearly. In hindsight, I can see that my plan was ill-advised."

"Some might say mad."

Some who had never been nineteen, forbidden to serve in the military, passionately in love, and frustrated beyond all telling.

"Penelope apparently found it so, and yet, she is out of charity with me now. I let her know in a postscript that the solicitors would have my direction should she choose to bide at Lynnfield and that she could write to me using them as a poste restante. She never wrote."

St. Didier rose and stretched, then brought his glass to the sideboard as well. "You are trying to find logic in a woman's moods. That is surely the sign of a man who has parted from his good sense."

"Women are rational, St. Didier. Terrifyingly so at times. I did leave Penelope a choice and a simple means of communicating with me, but our every word and glance now are fraught with resentment on her part and bewilderment on mine."

"So you, in your time-honored fashion, are worrying the problems of why and what-happened and how-did-this-occur. Sign the documents rescinding the betrothal, and her regard for you might improve. Documents have come to mean a great deal in this modern world of ours. More than a man's word or his whole course of conduct."

St. Didier was alluding delicately to the letters patent that had controlled his family's title and the lands that went with them. Letters that specified a male entail on all the honors and thus left St. Didier to earn his living by his wits.

Letters patent. Betrothal agreements. Solicitors' reports. Documents. Missives. Epistles…

"Penelope never got my note." The only possible explanation for her grudging civility. "She cannot have read that note. Pen is fair-minded to a fault, and I played fair. If she never got the note, she's playing fair now too. If she never read my note, then by her lights, I left like a thief at dawn and gave her no way to contact me."

An enormous weight lifted from Lucien's mind and heart. He sank into a wing chair near the hearth, relief knocking the pins from under all previous assumptions. The game made sense to him now, though victory was far from assured.

"Notes don't just grow legs and steal away, Lynnfield."

"They blow away in the breeze, they become a toy for the cat, they are set aside by servants looking for a particular vase. They are snatched up for tinder when a fire must be lighted." None of those scenarios was likely—the note had been tucked into Penelope's tackle box, where she'd been sure to see it—but the general theory was still sound.

Penelope had never read the most sincere, passionate words Lucien had ever written.

"What will you do about this revelation?" St. Didier asked. "Assuming you are correct?"

"I am correct. I know I am correct. "

"You will have some difficulty convincing that lady that a note written years ago that she never read changes everything."

A chess player knew differently. One move could and often did change the whole game. "I will write another note. Thank you for your company this evening, St. Didier. I'm off to see to my correspondence."