The Songbird's Seduction Page 2

“The banker?”

  Lavinia nodded. “ ‘I can’t take these with me,’ the boy said. ‘It would be disastrous should they be found on my person.’ ”

  “I wonder what he meant by that?” Bernice pondered at this point just as she had a hundred times before and, just as she had a hundred times before, replied, “I fear we shall never know.”

  “I asked the boy what was in the pouch but all he said was, ‘They’re mine, don’t worry on that account.’ Then he seemed to come to a decision, for he said, ‘You’ve already done so much for me. Would you do one more thing and keep this until I return for them?’

  “Lord John and I traded despairing looks at his brave words, neither of us willing to acknowledge what was uppermost in our minds: Mr. Smith wasn’t likely to live to return. Hundreds of rebels waited outside in the darkness. But Lt. Burns, then the most senior officer remaining, had no such compunction.

  “ ‘But what if you . . .’ he started to say but then, looking at the brave lad standing in front of him, faltered.

  “ ‘Die?’ Robert Smith shrugged. ‘So be it. If I do, divvy them up between the lot of you. You saved my life. God willing, you’ll have saved a good many more if I can reach my destination.’ ”

  “But Lord John pressed him to give you some name that you might contact in the eventuality of his death,” Lucy said.

  “Yes,” Lavinia said. “Lord John was always scrupulous about doing the right thing, though he got no pleasure in having to remind the lad that his chances of making his destination were slight.

  “It didn’t seem to bother Smith. He swung up into the saddle and declared with an almost savage pride, ‘I haven’t got a family.’ ”

  “But then the banker spoke up,” Lucy said. “ ‘And just how long are we to wait for you to come fetch these . . . whatever they are?’ he demanded angrily.”

  “I think his anger was more for the situation than the lad,” Lavinia explained. “ ‘What are we to do with them if you don’t return? The fact is that none of us might make it out of here alive.’

  “I felt my flesh grow cold at his words. I knew our chances of survival grew worse with each passing day but until that morning I had never allowed myself to appreciate what might befall me.

  “I fear I must have looked faint. But then, I felt a hand brace my elbow and an arm reach around to support me and I heard John say, ‘We will,’ and his calm confidence restored my courage.” Lavinia’s gaze had grown distant but then she came to a sense of her surroundings with a start, a soft blush rising in her papery thin cheeks.

  “Over the weeks of enforced intimacy, we had become close friends,” she said in a hushed voice.

  More than friends; Lavinia had fallen in love with the young Englishman.

  “Anyway,” Lavinia hurried on, “Monsieur DuPaul kept insisting Robert Smith say how long we should hold on to the purse until finally the young man threw up his arms and blurted out a time. ‘Fifty years,’ he said. And then he spurred his horse through the narrow gap of the gate.

  “I watched until he disappeared, silently praying I would not hear gunfire and offering a word of thanks when I did not. But then I heard someone emit a low whistle of astonishment. I turned to find the Portuguese boys staring at a mound of colored stones in Monsieur DuPaul’s palm.

  “ ‘There’s a fortune in rubies here,’ Luis Silva said. Then, ‘What should we do with them?’ ”

  “And so you made a pact!” Bernice burst in excitedly.

  “Indeed,” Lavinia said. “It was Lord John who suggested it, more as a way to bolster our courage than of any thought of future rewards. We decided we would honor Mr. Smith’s request and when he returned, we would have a celebration, give him his rubies, and demand the story of how he had come by them.”

  “And if he didn’t return?” Lucy prompted, though she already knew the answer.

  “If he had not returned by the time we were rescued, Monsieur DuPaul was to take them back to France; with all the nationalities represented it seemed the most central location. He would enter them into an account at his bank, registering all our names—civilians, officers, and soldiers alike—as co-owners. And if Mr. Smith did not claim them sometime during the next fifty years, we agreed to meet in in Saint-Girons and divide them up amongst those still living. Like a tontine.

  “Two of our number did not live to see the end of the siege and several others died of wounds sustained there. But then a rescue expedition arrived and managed to evacuate the rest of us. We dispersed, each going back to the lives we’d led before.” She sighed and it seemed to Lucy a sigh from a place deep within her, from her soul. “I heard some years later that Lord John had married the daughter of an earl,” she finished in a softly musing voice.

  “Why didn’t you write to him afterward?” Lucy blurted out and at once regretted it.

  She had never asked aloud the question that had always vexed her. She had always thought that someday Lord John Barton would appear at Robin’s Hall and explain himself. Because Lavinia was not a woman given to flights of fantasy and if she reckoned she and Lord John Barton were friends, then they were. Even if he hadn’t loved her as she did him, surely he should have kept in touch with her?

  But the years had come and gone and Lord John Barton had never appeared. Time had not diluted the emotion Lucy heard in Lavinia’s voice every time she spoke of the man but if Lavinia had loved him so much, why hadn’t she put forth an effort to win his heart?

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Lavinia. I had no right to ask that,” she said when Lavinia did not reply.

  Lavinia only smiled, a little sadly. “My dear, the relationships one forms during times of crisis are at best suspect. Everything is heightened. Everything seems more precious, more vital.” She glanced at Bernice for support. But Bernice had never left Robin’s Hall except in the company of their parents and knew little of the world and even less of the sort of experiences Lavinia had encountered. Lucy had always considered her timid for all her blustery ways.

  “Besides, I was only eighteen,” Lavinia went on when no help was forthcoming from that quarter. “Everything seems doubly tragic when you are eighteen. And afterwards . . . Well, I never was a beautiful woman and our family, while genteel, is not titled and I had no fortune. In short, I had nothing to recommend me to a man who would inherit an earldom. And, of course, I never presumed a relationship born amidst blood and fear. I never considered it. A lady didn’t.”

  I would have, Lucy thought. I would have fought tooth and nail for him.

  But then, I am no lady.

  “—and if what I suspect is true, we shall have more than enough money to repair Robin’s Hall to its past glory and better!” A quarter hour later, guilty over any pain her inquisitiveness might have caused, Lucy had turned the conversation from the past to speculation about the future.

  “Bit of a hand here!” a voice called from outside the conservatory doors.

  Lucy leapt up and opened the door, stepping aside for their raw-boned, fourteen-year-old maid-of-all-work—and never was an appellation more appropriate—Polly. The girl huffed past under the weight of a crowded silver tray, setting it down on the table before removing a plate of sandwiches. She deposited it proudly in front of the sisters.

  “There’s cucumber and butter or deviled egg.” She stepped back, awaiting the sisters’ approval. She didn’t even bother looking at Lucy, who she considered only half a step above her in the social hierarchy.

  “Look, Bernice,” Lavinia said, helping herself to a thinly sliced triangle. “Polly has cut off all the crust. Isn’t that nice?”

  “Very nice, Polly. Quite like those our old cook used to serve.” For some reason, Polly had undertaken as her personal mission the re-creation of an era that she had never known, nor, for that matter, had her mother or grandmother. She considered any comparison of her efforts to those of her long, long dead predecessors to be the highest form of compliment.

  She pinked up, pleased, and ho
oked a strand of frizzed red hair behind a protruding ear. “Mind, don’t you go ruining your dinner with too many of them now, Miss Bernice.” Alas, the verisimilitude of Polly’s re-creation did not extend to the deference those pantry ghosts had shown their betters. “I’ll be back shortly,” she announced and trudged back into the house.

  “I do hope Polly is continuing with her typewriting lessons,” Lavinia fretted, lowering her sandwich down toward the waiting maw of their omnivorous feline, Pauline. “I hate encouraging her illusions about her culinary prowess, but I should hate even more to hurt her feelings. But I am afraid once we are gone—”

  “You won’t be gone for a long, long time,” Lucy said decisively. It had been touch and go with Lavinia this past spring and while the doctor had assured Lucy that her great-aunt had made a full recovery, she remembered all too vividly her great-aunt’s awful helplessness and the despair in Bernice’s square face.

  “Yes, dear, but when we are, I should very much dislike Polly to be startled by the revelation that perhaps she is better suited to some other line of work.”

  “I’ll encourage her to keep up with her typing lessons,” Lucy promised.

  Lavinia sighed gratefully. “Thank you.” She reached over for the teapot. “I thought we’d sold all the silver.”

  “Most of it.” Lucy raised the lid on the teapot, releasing a cloud of oolong-scented steam. She peered inside. “I couldn’t bear to part with great-grandmother’s tea service.”

  She saw no reason to tell her great-aunts that the decision not to sell had less to do with sentiment than pride. The silver dealer had made an insultingly low offer for the set and she’d already been forced to accept mere pittances for many of the things her great-aunts considered priceless. She simply couldn’t stand to part with one more thing they valued, let alone give it away.

  Lavinia and Bernice Litton had taken Lucy in when she’d had nowhere left to go. Having been orphaned by her parents’ death in a train accident when she was seven, Lucy had spent the next four years being shunted from one distant relation to another, each having less obligation, or interest, in taking her than the last. The Litton ladies, her mother’s long-estranged aunts, had been the last possible way station on what seemed an inevitable journey to the orphanage.

  Despite their own poverty, Lucy’s youth, their advancing years, and their complete lack of experience with children, especially the children of “artistic types,” they had not hesitated for an instant before taking her in.

  “Soon we shall all be able to afford as much sentiment as we care to indulge,” Lucy said now, pouring out the tea. “We shall be able to put Robin’s Hall to rights, make all the repairs, buy new furniture, and,” she paused, her hazel eyes sparkling, “hire gardeners.”

  Of all the trappings of a formerly gracious lifestyle, Lucy knew that the dereliction of the garden, even more than that of the house, weighed most heavily on the Litton sisters. And with Lavinia’s prolonged illness this past spring, even the small plot they’d managed to maintain in some semblance of its former glory had shrunk to tablecloth size.

  “Oh, I do hope you’re not overestimating the value of those stones,” Bernice said.

  “From your description I should think not,” Lucy reassured them. “Besides, you recall that Monsieur DuPaul had an appraisal done in Paris the last time one of your compatriots was,” she floundered for a nice euphemism to make amends for the spontaneous vulgarity of having sung the news of Mr. Whinnywicke’s demise, “taken from us.”

  Lavinia nodded. “Vaguely.”

  “They were worth nearly a quarter of a million pounds at the time. Undoubtedly, they are worth more now. And now that good old Whinnywicke has had the courtesy to withdraw from the proceedings—”

  “Lucy!”

  Lucy wrinkled her nose in a manner Bernice had always found both vulgar and adorable. “I am sorry. Don’t mean to sound callous, but one can’t fault his timing, can one? Especially with the anniversary just a few weeks away, leaving you in the envious position of being one of only four now left to split up the loot.”

  “Don’t call it loot, dear,” said Bernice. “It’s common.”

  Lucy waved down this criticism. “All the bright young things speak this way. I daresay you would have too, had you been born in the same year as I, Aunt Bernice.”

  “Never,” she said primly but Lucy thought she seemed secretly pleased.

  As a girl, Lavinia had been considered the “spirited” Litton sister, always up for a spot of mischief and as like to thumb her nose at society’s edicts—within reason, of course—as abide by them. Bernice had been the predictable, unadventurous sister.

  “I don’t know that I would trust Monsieur DuPaul’s appraiser,” Bernice said, returning to the subject at hand. “You know the French are prone to exaggeration.”

  Lucy, who had her share of French admirers, did indeed, but she was not the sort to let past experience dash her optimism. If she were, she’d have arrived on Robin’s Hall’s doorsteps a very different sort of girl.

  “I daresay we’ll see soon enough.” She dropped two sugar lumps into Bernice’s teacup, surreptitiously adding a third because Bernice liked her tea sweet and was embarrassed by the fact. “Tomorrow morning I will go into the city and make travel arrangements.”

  The city. It had been seven months since Bernice had sent word that Lavinia was “not feeling quite the thing” and suggested that “if it wasn’t too much trouble, a short visit” from Lucy would do “wonders for Lavinia’s spirits.” She had come at once, in her anxiety forgetting to inform management that she would not be present for the evening’s performance. Only a near-mortal illness would ever cause Bernice to send such a request.

  She had arrived to find Lavinia even more ill than she’d feared. There had been nothing for it but to send for the doctor. Later that same day she had sent a message to the director of the operetta in which she’d been performing explaining that she would be unable to return to her role until Lavinia was out of the woods.

  He had not been pleased; she’d developed a small following since her debut three years earlier and was being hailed as one of light opera’s rising stars, whose “angular aristocratic looks are so at odds with her comedic aptitude as to make an irresistible combination” and whose soprano “exhibits a light effortlessness that cannot fail to charm.”

  She’d been fired.

  It had proved costly in more ways than one. Everything she earned had been divided between paying the taxes on Robin’s Hall and day-to-day necessities. She well realized that her great-aunts ought to sell the place and move to more modest—and cheaper—accommodations but they had spent their entire lives here. It would kill them to have to leave it.

  Now they wouldn’t have to.

  And as an added bonus, it looked very likely she would be able to audition for the upcoming season’s plum roles. She couldn’t deny the pleasure of the thought of returning to the stage brought her, of hearing the audience’s laughter as she delivered some saucy line, of basking in their applause and approval, their admiration and their cheers.

  “How shall we get there?” Bernice asked. She sounded a little breathless. Bernice had only just made her curtsey in society when her father’s financial ruin had eschewed any further seasons. She had never appeared to resent it, seeming content to stay at Robin’s Hall. Traveling to France might be uncomfortably daunting for her.

  “We shall take a train to Weymouth, I expect, and from there a ferry across the channel. Once we are in France, we shall see what is available to us. Perhaps we’ll stay a few days in Bordeaux. There’s no reason to hurry.” She didn’t bother to point out that they couldn’t afford the cost of the higher-end, faster modes of travel. “On the way back we can take our time as well. Maybe tour the countryside, make a holiday of it.”

  Bernice and Lavinia exchanged a look.

  “It will be fun. You’ll see.”

  “How long shall we be gone?”

 
“A day to Weymouth and then one to cross the channel, two in Bordeaux and then a few days south to Monsieur DuPaul’s little town, Saint-Girons. Call it a week. We’ll allot a day to tidy up whatever legalities present themselves—though Monsieur DuPaul has assured me that everything has been taken care of. Then a week or so back. By month’s end you shall be in gravy and I shall be auditioning for the soubrette role in Mr. Lehar’s new operetta, The Merry Widow.”

  She regarded her great-aunts expectantly, fully anticipating that they would fall in with the plan. Why wouldn’t they? There was nothing to worry about. True, she’d never been out of Great Britain before and spoke barely a word of French but Brits traveled around Europe all the time. How difficult could it be?

  She fixed them with an encouraging smile.

  “You’ve been in correspondence with Monsieur DuPaul?” Bernice asked, looking mildly scandalized.

  “Yes, of course. It’s not as if we haven’t been waiting for this day. You practically weaned me on the story of Patnimba.” And the story of Lavinia’s lost love. “You’ve known this date was coming for fifty years.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  She divided a surprised gaze between them. “You’re not offended that I’ve been in touch with Monsieur DuPaul, are you?”

  “Oh, no! Not at all. Most enterprising of you.” Both elderly ladies hastened to reassure her. “We have always been impressed by your perspicacity and foresight. Had only dear Papa been similarly blessed in his investments, this entire trip wouldn’t be necessary.”

  They were spot-on, of course, but Lucy felt it only polite to modestly lower her gaze. She frowned as something occurred to her. “Do you feel up to making the trip, Lavinia?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite. But feeling able to do something is not the same as wanting to do it.” She flushed. “Are we really that desperately in need of the funds?”

  In point of fact, they were, but Lucy considered it a testament to her acting ability, not to mention her skill in doctoring the household accounts, that her aunts did not know this and, God willing, never would. She did not want their later years troubled by worry.