James cursed when he got the letter from Thomas Drake.
He had gone to Middlewich for Christmas. He longed to stay in London and wait for Catherine’s return, but he had promised his mother to come home. So he went. He might take some comfort in his sisters’ company, anyway.
True, he had not seen his friend Thomas in London for many weeks, but he had not expected a letter from him. Thomas had never written to James before. They were not men who wrote letters to each other. The letter from Thomas forwarded from London and arriving in Middlewich on Christmas Eve was, therefore, a surprise. The letter had been written weeks ago and had gotten delayed, likely somewhere from Sommerleigh to London and then also en route to Middlewich.
The letter was a greeting and an invitation and Thomas’ wife’s stepmother and sister were coming for Christmas and Thomas would be drowning in women and would James like to join the festivities and rescue Thomas since it was well-nigh impossible to drag his wife Harry from her mathematics and all the entertaining of the Lovelock ladies would fall on Thomas’ shoulders? And with all his sisters, James must surely know how to amuse genteel ladies? Thomas felt he himself would be hard-pressed to come up with suitable topics of conversation.
James fidgeted through the midnight church services that night and the services on Christmas day itself. He helped his sisters decorate an indoor tree, especially in honor of Queen Charlotte, who had died in November. She was the one who had brought the custom from Germany, still not widely practiced in England, of a decorated tree on Christmas.
That night, he kissed his sisters, said goodbye to his father and mother.
“Where are you going again?” his father asked.
“To see Thomas. The Earl Drake.”
“The old Earl Drake was a good man. His son, your friend?” The duke made a grimace of disapproval. “A wastrel, like you. A rakehell. How he could live and my William be taken from me I will never know. But I have heard that the young earl has married recently. A common chit of some kind. But very rich.”
“The Countess Drake’s father could have bought a dozen knighthoods, if he had wished to,” James said evenly.
His father harrumphed. “It’s good he did not. It sounds like he knew his place, at least.” His father leaned forward and spoke sotto voce. “And I hear her mother was a whore.”
James slouched and let his eyelids droop and gave a lazy smile. “The Lady Drake’s mother was, I believe, the daughter of a tailor. Her stepmother was an actress before she married the countess’ father.”
“Like I said,” his father yawned, “a whore.”
James gave instructions to his valet Enfield to enjoy his time with his wife here in Middlewich and to return to London with James’ luggage after the new year. No, he was off to see Thomas. No, they did not stand on ceremony at Sommerleigh, he could get by with very few clothes, just a saddle bag. Thomas’ man Jackson would be willing to shave him, he did not want a valet and he especially did not want the redoubtable Mrs. Enfield angry at him for stealing her husband away early after so many months in London.
And in truth, he did not want a chaperone. Even one as understanding as Enfield.
At dawn, he saddled a horse. He could be at Sommerleigh by noon.
He left his horse in the stall next to Thomas’ stallion Octavius. Two grooms quickly had his mount’s saddle off and were currying the sweat off the horse and watering him. Thomas had the best horsemen in the county in his employ. James stopped for a moment, still inside the stable, and used his fingers to try to arrange his hair. Finally, he gave up. Besides, maybe Catherine liked his hair disarrayed? She had put her hands in it so many times that night at the inn in Duddenhoe End.
As he crossed the stable yard, he heard voices. Female voices. Catherine’s voice. He rounded the corner and saw Catherine walking down the drive toward the house. Toward him. There were two other women with her and his friend Thomas, but all he really saw was Catherine.
“Jamie!” Thomas called out and strode to him and clasped him in a hug. “I got no message that you were coming. Happy Christmas!”
“I was at the castle when I received your invitation quite late on Christmas Eve. Yes, happy Christmas, Tom.”
The three women had reached them at this point. Harriet, tall and thin with wild tendrils of brown hair, looking rather fierce but a good deal healthier than when James had last seen her, at the wedding. Some color in her cheeks, some more flesh on her still-spare form.
Arabella, a younger version of Catherine, petite and blonde and smiling.
And Catherine. Kate.
James bowed. “Lady Drake. Mrs. Lovelock. Miss Lovelock. Happy Christmas to you all.”
He had met them all last spring. No one would think it odd that he remembered their names. He tried very hard not to let his gaze linger on Catherine. It was extremely difficult. She was beautiful, her cheeks pink. A bonnet covered her hair. It was a blue that matched her eyes. She held holly in her gloved hands.
“I see you have been out gathering greenery.”
She met his eyes and smiled. “Yes, Lord Daventry. We have been having what Harry calls a ‘good tramp.’ The grounds are extraordinary. I think I have never seen a place as pretty as Sommerleigh.”
Thomas laughed at that. “It’s plain you have never been to Middlewich then and seen the castle and the gardens there. Someday, when the old Duke Crosspatch is away in London, we’ll have Jamie take us up to the castle and show us all around.”
Arabella’s eyes shone. “Oh, yes, please. That would be lovely.”
Harriet—no, she was Harry, wasn’t she?—tugged at Thomas’ sleeve. “Luncheon.”
“Oh, yes, the wife is hungry,” Thomas said. “Come, let’s all go in before there is a temper tantrum.”
Catherine laughed and started walking toward the house. “I find it hard to believe that Harry is hungry. If you only knew the trouble I always had in getting her to leave her mathematics and come to eat.” Her voice trembled a bit at that, but James thought it likely he was the only one who noticed.
Thomas thumped on his chest. “Country air and long walks, there’s nothing for it!”
As they approached the front door of the manse, James lingered slightly and as Arabella, Harry, and Thomas entered, he said to Catherine under his breath, “Why did you run away, Kate?”
“Please.” She turned to him, her eyes pleading. “Not now. Let me be happy now.”
“I only—” he started but she had gone into the house. He finished alone, “—want your happiness.”
But, during luncheon, he admitted to himself that he wanted his happiness, too. More than anything, he wanted to be near Catherine. Catherine herself was gay at the dining table, suggesting a game of hoodman blind this afternoon, to keep their blood coursing. He seconded the notion, knowing he would have agreed to anything she said, but the rest of the group was not enthusiastic. Harry gazed at the ceiling and said she really had something she needed to take a quick peek at upstairs. Something with a proof she was working on. Arabella said she wanted to read her novel she had received from the Dalrymples for Christmas, Rob Roy by Mr. Walter Scott, did Lord Daventry know it, it was most dreadfully exciting. She loved everything Scottish, didn’t he? Thomas said he was tired and wanted to sit in the library with James. Catherine had laughed then and said she would read as well. But tonight, they would play Snapdragon and no one would tell her no.
James ate steadily, realizing he had not really eaten anything since receiving Thomas’ letter on Christmas Eve. He needed his strength. He had eleven days in the same house with Catherine. Eleven days to win her. To woo her.
In the library, Thomas poured them each a small whisky.
“To your marriage, Tom.”
“Yes, thank you. To my marriage and to Sommerleigh.” They drank.
James looked around the library. “You know I haven’t been here since the spring, when I told you to marry for money.”
“Yes, since you told me to marry my mother-in-law.”
James laughed a trifle too heartily. “Well, I was mistaken in that, I agree. But you seem to have settled quite happily with your choice of a Countess Drake.”
Thomas flung himself into the chair. “It’s the damnedest thing, Jamie. I have only just realized that before I married Harry, I don’t think I’d ever had a conversation of substance with a female. You have a mother and sisters, of course, but my sister Jane married when I was very young . . . .”
James knew that his sister Jane was a sad topic for him.“Are you sure you’ve ever had a conversation of substance with anyone, Tom?”
“Well, no, you’re right, maybe not.” Thomas smiled. “And certainly, with Harry, I can’t follow a lot of what she says.”
“You’ve not been to Madame Flora’s or to London recently.”
A silence. “No.”
“That’s a change.”
“Don’t pick at me, Jamie, just come out and say what you have to say.”
James looked down at his now-empty glass. “I wondered if you had found after you bedded your wife, that something had changed, irrevocably, for you.”
Thomas got up and poured another finger of whisky into his glass and came over with the decanter and gave James another finger, too.
“Happy Christmas,” he said.
“Happy Christmas,” James echoed.
They drank.
“Well, I guess this is actually the damnedest thing, Jamie.” Thomas crossed to the window and stared out. “I haven’t bedded her.”
James kept silent.
“I know, I know, here I am, the biggest whoremonger in London, and I haven’t fornicated with my own wife. It’s not to be. It was part of our agreement when we married. I got her money, she got to keep her virginity and her mathematics. This whole Christmas thing and having her family here is just on sufferance, you know. Otherwise, she would be up in the attic sixteen hours of the day, doing whatever she does with numbers up there. That’s what she’s doing right now.”
“I would have thought that,” James cleared his throat, “that would bring you to London more, rather than less.”
“I would have thought so, too.” James couldn’t see Thomas’ face but his voice was angry. “But, Jamie, when I go to London, I only long to be back here.”
James walked to the window and turned his back to it so he could see Thomas’ face.
“Do you love her, Tom?”
Thomas laughed, but there was a bitterness in his voice and in his face. “Love? I don’t know what that is. I know what copulation is. I know what friendship is, thanks to you. But I don’t know what love is.”
James nodded. “I see.”
“And even if I did, I don’t think Harry would ever love me back.”
“Because . . . why? Because you’re not good enough?” James searched Thomas’ face. It was the question James had asked himself every day since waking up alone in the inn at Duddenhoe End.
Thomas looked confused. “No, Jamie. Because Harry probably can’t. Harry has room in her for only one love and that’s mathematics. Do you know she’s never told her stepmother that she loves her? Mrs. Lovelock told me that last spring, before I married Harry.”
“That doesn’t mean she is intrinsically incapable of love, for God’s sake, man!”
“I know, I know. But can you imagine falling in love with someone you think will never tell you ‘I love you’ back? It would be like shouting into the void.”
I know, James said silently. I think I am shouting into the same void.
They did play Snapdragon after dinner. James burnt his tongue. Thomas burnt his fingers. Arabella snatched the most raisins from the flaming brandy bowl.
“Oh, Mama, that means I will meet my true love within a year!” Arabella announced. Catherine smiled thinly at that.
James thought the blue flames of the brandy bowl were enormously becoming to Catherine.
Later that night, James lay in his bed in his usual room at Sommerleigh, feeling he had made no progress with Catherine.
While he had waited for Catherine to return to London, he had met with Mr. Bulverton in Isabella’s room. There had been the mildest of reprimands from Mr. Bulverton about James going to Sir Francis’ house party, almost as if he had expected James to do something of the sort. And Isabella had told him, airily, almost in passing, that Mrs. Lovelock thought he, James, was too drunk and too silly.
So, today, he had worked hard at not being silly. True, he had had two fingers of whisky after luncheon with Thomas in the library, but nothing more than that despite Thomas’ excellent cellar and his own desire for Dutch courage. He could not be accused of being drunk.
But there had been nothing but friendly camaraderie and politeness between him and Catherine.
Well, he had ten more days.
And then warmth and softness and a pair of arms around his middle, breasts and lips pressed to his back, and she was in his bed with him, naked. He turned to speak to her and she covered his mouth with hers and gently probed at his burnt tongue with her tongue.
Later, much later, after he had stroked and caressed and kissed every inch of her body and she had sneezed three times, and if he had been a sneezer, he would have sneezed twice himself—after all that, he had said, “Kate” and again she had kissed him. And then, despite his best efforts, he had fallen asleep with her in his arms.
When he woke in the morning, as before, she was gone.
The days passed. In many ways the most glorious days of James’ life. The daylight hours filled with his best friend, laughter, stories, exercise, good food, and his nights filled with Catherine. True, the supposedly long winter nights were still too short. And Catherine came to him silently. Every time he tried to speak to her, she covered his mouth with a kiss, so that his attempt to tell her that he loved her turned to a yearning and an aching desire to be inside her once again. Every night, he swore that if he could just slake his lust for her that would give him the mettle to tell her that he loved her.
Because surely that must be what this all-consuming desire to be with her was—love.
Catherine had not known of Thomas’ invitation to James. If she had known, she would have gone elsewhere for Christmas, stayed with the Dalrymples where she and Arabella were welcome, gone to Wales to Mary, or even traveled back to London, despite her strong desire to see Harry.
And she had been so pleased her first week at Sommerleigh, the week before Christmas, to see how well Harry was. How much weight she had gained, how far she could walk, how much more even her temper was. Catherine had been extremely reluctant for Harry to marry Thomas and she could see now that she had been wrong. Very wrong. Harry was thriving, as much as Harry could thrive in this world that was not built for her.
And then, her Jamie had arrived. What did she mean by her Jamie, anyway? James had arrived. All that promise, that youth, that beauty, that tall, rangy, muscled body with its ticklish knees.
And her wonderful escape to Sommerleigh turned into a prison. Every morning, she returned to her own bed, vowing she would not go back to James’ room that night. And every night, the throb between her legs and the fear that she would never have him again would combine into an irresistible Siren song, and she would rise from her bed, tiptoe down the hall and through his door, shedding her nightdress on the floor of his room, and climb into bed with him.
And every night had been like the first—tender yet fierce, deeply satisfying yet wild and stirring. But always, always, always dangerous. She dared to let the demon out of the cage every night, not sure she would be able to haul it back in in the morning. Perhaps, one day, she would not have the strength.
And that made her tremble in fear.
Twelfth Night came. The guests’ last night at Sommerleigh. There were cakes, of course. Arabella performed a piece from a puppet show she had seen with the Dalrymples. James told an amusing story about the arrival of the three wise men and the wrong turns they made on the way to Bethlehem. And Catherine was cajoled into reciting as well.
She chose to do Viola’s monologue from Act II, scene two. After all, it really was Twelfth Night, why not do Twelfth Night? For her, there was no association between the role of Viola and that odious painting by Roger Siddons. The person in the painting was someone else entirely. That person was someone who still lived inside Catherine and who was threatening to destroy her life even now. But it was not Viola, despite the costume. Viola had never looked at her lover like that. Viola had not despaired at knowing herself and how vile she was. Viola had lived in a comedy, and comedies must end in marriage. Happily ever after.
When she finished with O time! thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me to untie! she saw James staring at her.
That night when she came to his bed, he put his hand over her mouth before she could kiss him.
“I want you to know,” he said. “I have loved you since I was ten years old.”
She blinked.
He went on. “I saw you. When I was ten. As Viola. First, I thought it might be splendid to be your twin brother, Sebastian. And then I thought I’d rather like to have you in love with me. I remember thinking the duke, that Orsino, was a fool to want Olivia when he could have you. And I remember being jealous. I loved you then as I love you now.”
He slowly removed his hand from her mouth and waited.
She rolled onto her back.
“The seduction of an older woman,” she said, “is a delicate thing. ‘I have loved you since I was age ten’ does not arouse as much as one might think.”
“But I don’t want to seduce you, Kate, I want—”
She got out of the bed and pulled her nightdress over her head. James got out of bed, too.
“I just told you that I love you and you’re leaving now?”
“No,” Catherine said. “I mean, yes, I’m leaving. But no. You didn’t tell me you loved me. You told me you loved Viola.”
“I meant, I mean, I do love you.” He stood naked in front of her.
She hardened her heart, her face. She made her voice harsh. “You couldn’t possibly mean that.” She fled the room.
The next day in the carriage, on the way to London, James sat across from Catherine who sat next to Arabella. They both kept silent as Arabella prattled about the scenery, their Christmas, what she was going to do as soon as they got to London. Finally, Arabella nodded off and slept.
James leaned forward.
“Please, Catherine, give me some hope that you can love me as I love you,” he whispered, hoping not to wake Arabella but still be heard over the wheels of the carriage.
Catherine looked out the window.
“There are plenty of other women to give you hope, my lord. You don’t need it from me.”
“I know I need you. Please look at me.”
She shifted her blue eyes from the window to him.
“Once we return to London, please promise you won’t run from me or refuse me.”
Catherine looked at him. For a long time. As if she were memorizing his face. Then she looked down at her lap.
“We’re pretenders, my lord. Both of us. I’ve pretended many things. I’ve pretended that our differing ages, our differing ranks, my past, your future . . . and my weaknesses, particularly my weaknesses . . . I’ve pretended none of these matter. But, of course, they do. I know why I’ve pretended. What else is there for me to do when faced with my Jamie? You make me mad with desire and so I would have pretended anything, I think, to have you—”
James’ mind roiled as his heart leapt up into his mouth and his groin ached. He made her mad with desire. Were there any sweeter words in the universe? But she was still speaking.
“—but why you walk around London one tenth the man you really are . . . it’s a waste and a shame, James Cavendish.”
She cleared her throat. “You should know that I last played Viola when I was nineteen. The company had difficulty finding a short-enough man to play my twin Sebastian and make the role-swapping and mistaken identity convincing. That was the end of my time in the part. You were two then, were you not? Even if your mother or your nursemaid had been crazed enough to take you to the theater, and I have never heard of such a thing—but even if they had, you would not remember. You are in love with quite another woman.”
