‘My lady,’ Charles said to Heloise, placing his hand under her elbow. A word in private, if you please?’
Drawing her into a little ante-room, he shut the door to ensure total privacy. ‘I have little time to explain, but I would request a further favour of you. I had planned on sparing you the worst of Captain Fawley’s temper, but on this one occasion I would ask that you bear me company and back me up in whatever I say. Can you do that for me?’
‘This Captain Fawley … he is the man you wished me not to meet, who lives here with you?’
‘I have no time to explain it all, but the salient facts are these: Captain Fawley is my brother. He hates me. He hates the fact that since he was invalided out of the army he has been forced to depend on me. I fear he will use your presence in my life as an excuse to try to strike out on his own. He must not do so, Heloise.’ He took her by the shoulders, his eyes burning with an intensity she had never seen before. ‘He must stay in Walton House!’
‘Of course I will do whatever it takes to prevent him from leaving, if that is your wish,’ she replied, though it all seemed very strange to her. Whatever could have gone wrong between them? Was this to do with the rift Charles had referred to before, with certain of his family?
‘Robert—that is Captain Fawley—occupies a suite of rooms at the rear of the house, on the ground floor,’ he explained as he steered her out of the little ante-room and across the hall. ‘His condition when I first brought him back from the Peninsula made it imperative that he not have to attempt stairs. Also, I had hoped that installing him in these particular rooms would encourage him to make free of the place. They have a private entrance, leading to the mews, which would have made it easy for him to come and go as he pleased.’
They reached a set of panelled doors, upon which Charles knocked. To her surprise, he did not simply enter, but waited until the door was opened by a stocky servant, dressed in a plain black coat and stuff breeches.
‘Ah, Linney,’ Charles said, ‘I believe Captain Fawley has expressed an interest in meeting my bride?’
‘Indeed he has, m’lord,’ the stocky man replied, his own face as impassive as her husband’s. Why, then, did she get the impression that both of them saw this as a momentous occasion?
It took Heloise’s eyes a moment or two to acclimatise to the gloom that pervaded the room she walked into. Lit only by the flames of a roaring fire, it was clearly the domain of a man who did not care what his visitors might think. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of stale sweat, unwashed linen and general neglect that hung in the overheated room. Unfortunately, it was the exact moment her eyes came to rest on a figure sprawled on a scuffed leather sofa, to one side of the soot-blackened fireplace.
For a second her heart seemed to stop beating. The man who regarded her with piercingly hostile black eyes was so very like Gaspard that she uttered a little cry and ran to him, her hands outstretched.
Leaning on his shoulders, she planted a kiss on each cheek, before sitting down next to him. When he flinched, she said, ‘Oh, dear—should I not have done that? I have embarrassed you. It is just that you are so like my own dear brother.’ In spite of herself, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Who I will never see again. But now I find my husband has a brother, so I have a brother again, too.’
Somewhat overcome, she reached into her reticule for a handkerchief. While she was busy blowing her nose, she heard Charles cross to the fireplace.
‘You haven’t embarrassed me as much as I fear you have embarrassed yourself,’ Captain Fawley snarled. ‘Linney, perhaps you would be so good as to draw back the curtains?’
In silence, the manservant did as he was bade. Sunlight streamed in, illuminating the livid burns down one side of the Captain’s face, head and neck, which the length of his unkempt hair did little to conceal. The left sleeve of his threadbare jacket was empty; the lower part of his left leg was also missing.
Perplexed, Heloise said, ‘Why will drawing the curtains make me embarrassed?’
Captain Fawley laughed—a harsh noise that sounded as though it was torn from his throat. ‘You have just kissed a cripple! Don’t you feel sick? Most pretty women would recoil if they saw me, not want to kiss this!’ He indicated his scarred face with an angry sweep of his right hand.
But, ‘Oh!’ said Heloise, her face lighting up. ‘Do you really think I am pretty? How much more I like you already.’
The stunned look on Captain Fawley’s face was as nothing compared to what Charles felt. Her face alight with pleasure, Heloise really did look remarkably pretty. He could not think why he had never noticed it before. Her eyes sparkled with intelligence, she had remarkably thick, lustrous hair, and a dainty little figure. She did not have the obvious attractions of her sister, but she was far from the plain, dull little creature he had written off while his eyes had been full of Felice. ‘Captivating’, Conningsby had said of her. Aye, she was. And she would be a credit to him once he had her properly dressed.
There was a certain dressmaker in Bond Street whose designs would suit her to a tee …
‘You cannot mean that!’ Robert began to curse.
A few minutes of such Turkish treatment was all he would permit Heloise to endure, then he would escort her to the safety of her rooms.
‘Why not?’ Unfazed, Heloise untied the ribbons of her bonnet and placed the shapeless article on her lap. Charles had a vision of wresting it from her hands, throwing it off a bridge into the Thames, and replacing it with a neat little crimson velvet creation, trimmed with swansdown.
‘Well, because I am disfigured,’ Captain Fawley said. ‘I am only half a man.’
She cocked her head to examine him, in the way that always put the Earl in mind of a cheeky little sparrow. She missed nothing—from the toe of Robert’s right boot to the puckered eyelid that drooped into the horrible scarring that truly did disfigure the left side of his face.
‘You have only lost a bit of one leg and a bit of one arm,’ she said. ‘Not even a tenth of you has gone. You may think of yourself as nine-tenths of a man, I suppose, if you must, but not less than that. Besides—’ she shrugged ‘—many others did not survive the war at all. Gaspard did not. I tell you now, I would still have been glad to have him back, and nothing would have prevented me from embracing him, no matter how many limbs he might have lost!’
‘But you must want me to leave this house,’ he blustered. ‘And once an heir is on the way—’ he rounded on Charles ‘—you can have no more excuses to keep me imprisoned here!’
Before he could draw breath to reply, Heloise said, rather stiffly, ‘Is it because I am French?’
‘Wh … what?’
‘You reject my friendship because I am French. In effect, all this nonsense about being disfigured is the flimflam. You don’t want me for your sister.’
Faced with an indignant woman, Captain Fawley could do nothing but retreat from his stance, muttering apologies. ‘It is not your fault you are French. You can’t help that. Or being married to my half-brother, I dare say. I know how ruthless he can be when he wants his own way.’ He glared up at Charles.
‘Then you will help me?’ Again, her face lit up with hope. ‘Because Charles, he says it is not at all fashionable for a husband to hang on his wife’s arm all the time. I have heard in Paris all about the season in London, with the masquerades, and the picnics, and the fireworks, which he will not at all want to take me to, even if I was not his wife, because such things are all very frivolous and not good ton. But I would like to see them all. And he said I may, if I could find a suitable escort. And who would be more proper to go about with me than my own brother? And then, you know, he says I must learn to ride …’
‘Well, I can’t teach you to ride! Haven’t you noticed? I’ve only got one leg!’
Heloise