Lord of Regrets Read online

  He didn’t want to go home just yet. To sit with his mother across the table, eat soup and pheasant or whatever the meal would be that evening. Instead, he made his way to White’s, which he supposed was somewhat en route back to Grosvenor Square.

  At the club, the conversation was of Napoleon, as it had been for years. He wasn’t friends with these men, though he knew them. There, at least, was Kirchfield, with whom he had gone to school and shared many a pleasant conversation. Marcus nodded and passed by the man, looking for a warm corner where he could have a drink.

  He didn’t want to speak of Boney, of the constant back and forth of victories and losses. In his early youth, there had been summers abroad at his grandfather’s request, with the intent that he learn the diplomatic arts at the elbows of Britain’s finest. It had all seemed rather boring back then compared to the action on the field. In his last year at Eton, he’d enlisted as a private, attempting to pay his dues. Three months in, his grandfather had caught wind of it and hauled him back home from training.

  There are many ways to serve one’s country, his grandfather had said. Marcus had learned quickly that the only ways allowed were the ones that pleased the old man. He wondered sometimes if it were the chicken or the egg: had his grandfather’s demands made Marcus’s father rebel, or had Vincent Templeton’s actions triggered the earl’s controlling nature?

  Of course, the whys hardly mattered, especially now that Marcus had almost freed himself from the constraints of his grandfather’s will. Between investing his annuities and quarterly allowance and actively engaging in his own successful soap business, Marcus’s coffers were filling up. Perhaps his product wasn’t quite as popular among the ton as Andrew Pears’s clear soap, but the use of rare flowers and fragrances had made Marcus’s soaps an exotic luxury and earned his products a sizable share of the market.

  He preferred the citrus blend. However, the delicate fragrance was currently overshadowed by the more potent scent of the 1795 Glenturret whisky in his hand––a luxury that he could afford with no help from his grandfather. If at the end of these six months, Marcus returned to the family fold, so to speak, he would be doing so on his terms, out of his own volition and not his grandfather’s coercion.

  Mostly. He would still have to marry someone to gain access to the unentailed family coffers, the wealth he had once thought necessary to keep the estates from poverty. On that point, the earl would not be swayed.

  There was Kirchfield again, and another man with him. Marcus dragged himself from his thoughts to make the obligatory conversation. A round of drinks, of course.

  Marcus finally stumbled into his house late, his fingers and cheeks numb from the cold. He brushed away the footman who would take his cape, not willing yet to give up its warmth. There were three letters on the salver, forwarded from the estate. He spread them across the silver plate idly, intending to look at them in the morning. Then his fingers thudded to a stop and he pulled up one letter.

  The name on the back read Dunleavy.

  Marcus had hired men to search for Natasha, had paid them well to scour the countryside––discreetly of course. He had only one man searching for her now; he’d called off the rest two years ago. Robert Dunleavy, however, still sent in his thin, weekly reports, and Marcus suspected that he was really paying for the man to drink his way around the country.

  Dunleavy had sent his monthly report only the week before, and this additional letter was unusual. Marcus shrugged out of his cape, its weight suddenly unbearable, and handed it to the waiting footman. Then, his fingers tingling with pain as they thawed, he tore at the missive, striding to wall where the sconce shone a brighter light.

  Lord Templeton,

  I don’t wish to give you false hope, but I have found a woman who matches most of the particulars. Whose likeness is close to that of the miniature, whose accent is that of a woman who learned English at the feet of a foreigner, and who has a child of the age—a daughter.

  A daughter! Finally, the amorphous idea of a child began to take on a shape. He, she––a thousand times he had wondered even though he had known it to be foolishness. The first stirrings of––something––made him swallow hard.

  This woman, who goes by the name Prothe, is known as a war widow, her husband dead in Salamanca. She came to live here in Little Parrington, a fishing village, three years ago. I was told she followed the drum before her husband’s death. They seem to live frugally, though well.

  There is no sign of the fortune in jewels to which you referred. I await your direction.

  Prothe. There was nothing in the description to prove that this woman was Natasha. But surety thrummed through his veins and the iron box he had fastened around his heart sprang open. She lived.

  Clutching the letter in his hand, Marcus took the stairs two at a time. He swallowed the length of the hallway with his stride.

  In his bedchamber, he yanked open the drawer of his dresser and pulled out one of the two final remnants of her existence in his life: a small, white square of lace-edged muslin, embroidered in white thread with an elaborate N.

  The smoky glass bottle that had once graced her bedroom table he had kept tightly stopped so none of the precious scent would evaporate into the air. Evaporate into the ether as she had. He picked it up. Rested his fingers on the stopper for one long, hesitant moment before he pulled it open. A drop of perfume hovered in the air and then fell to cloth. He raised his hands to his face––letter, handkerchief, and all––breathing in the bergamot fragrance she had preferred, and wept.

  Chapter Three

  Marcus eyed the tiny town that hugged the gently sloping hillside. Old Parrington lay like a cluster of well-organized barnacles on the coast of Norfolk. It was surrounded by farmlands, in the shadow of the Earl of Parrington’s country seat, and far from London. Impatient after three days of traveling across a frozen England, Marcus burned with the wonder of possibility.

  Was Natasha really here?

  His carriage rumbled across the winter-rutted road. The air, even with the glass of the windows closed, smelled pungent with the sea. As they came closer, the edifices grew larger and started to take shape. The wood rectangle that swung in the wind before the first building bore the sign of the Red Lion. Just as he thought to rap upon the side of the carriage and alert his man, the horses began to slow.

  He forced himself away from the window and sat back against the seat. Shameful enough that his valet, Pell, bore witness to his agitation. The world, however, did not have to view such a display.

  Marcus stepped out of the carriage and, holding his cape close against the wind, walked the ten steps to the inn door. It was an odd sort of building, more Dutch than English with its gables and tiled roof. Marcus had only a brief second to take in the carving of the wooden door before his groom, Phineas, was there opening it.

  The interior of the inn was dark and welcoming. The common room of the posting house was empty, but he could hear loud conversation coming from what he presumed to be the taproom to the left.

  It was not yet noon, but he’d been traveling for nearly five hours already, having left Norwich that morning. He was eager to stretch his legs, eat, and clear his head of the pounding ache that had settled in the back of his skull.

  In the first days after she had disappeared, Natasha had been tracked from London to Exeter, to a shop where she had pawned some of the jewelry he had given her. Then the trail had been lost, every sign pointing to a departure from that city.

  Of all the different phases of this five-year-long search, the last hours had been the hardest. Every inquisitive and fearful thought that he’d had in the last three days had repeated at a breakneck pace.

  If it was indeed Natasha in this town, then she was now known as Mrs. Prothe. Had there ever truly been a Mr. Prothe? Had she married another man and let him give Marcus’s child his name? Dunleavy had not mentioned other children.

  “Sir, welcome.” Marcus barely glanced at the man, yet another innkeep
er, as he shrugged off his cape. He arranged for his room with the same indifference. These were the usual details, the menial tasks he needed to do away with so he could focus on the reason he was here. So he could find Natasha.

  All of his instincts suspected that Prothe was a false front. The years, the dates, did not add up, unless she had convinced some dying soldier to give her his name.

  In his fear, he had called her a whore all those years ago, but Marcus knew she was not. He had been her first lover.

  Marcus hoped that he had been her last.

  Would it matter if he hadn’t been? The thought stopped him yet again. For all these hundreds of days he had thought of her, longed for her, needed her. He’d been devastated by his own cowardice and by the loss of her. He had changed his life so that he’d never again have to be at the whim of his grandfather. Perhaps she had had another life entirely––midnight conversations with another man. Perhaps she even grieved for this Mr. Prothe more than she had felt for Marcus.

  He awaited Dunleavy, ordered a fish stew––clearly the inn had a skilled cook––and itched to leave. When his meal was finished and Dunleavy had not yet arrived, Marcus left Pell to unpack his bags and strolled along the high street.

  The village was small. Past the cobblestoned high street were lanes of hard-packed earth and tufted grass. The high street itself wasn’t much to speak of. A blacksmith, a fish curer who also, proclaimed a sign, doubled as a shoemaker, a grocer, draper, joiner, and so on. Still feeling the edges of a headache, he stepped inside the apothecary.

  Which doubled as a shoemaker as well.

  The shopkeeper eyed Marcus’s polished Hessians with wary interest and then shuffled behind the counter to his potions and tinctures, clearly deciding that was the focus of Marcus’s business.

  “How may I help you, sir?” he asked. “Need you tooth powder or oil of daffodils? Tobacco?”

  “No.”

  Had there been a Mr. Prothe? Perhaps in all these years that Marcus had dreamed of Natasha, she had been blessed with a peaceful mind. He tried to push the encroaching thoughts away, to remember why he had entered this sweltering place.

  The door opened. A man entered, wet, his arm bloody. It was a ghastly, vivid sight, and Marcus averted his gaze from the injury.

  “Here, Sawsbury,” the man said, “do what you can for me, will you?”

  The apothecary looked apologetically at Marcus before rushing around the counter with a towel to stem the flow of blood that dripped like slow, noisy rain onto the floor.

  The door opened again and a child entered, so bundled in her winter clothes that only long strands of blond hair and wind-pinkened cheeks were visible. It was fast becoming a circus in the small, overheated shop.

  “Hello, Mr. Sawsbury.” The girl padded in, clapping her mitten-clad hands together. “Oh, Mr. Frisk, you’ve been hurt! Are you going to sew him up?”

  The man she called Frisk grunted.

  “No, Leona,” the apothecary said, as he mixed ingredients into a bowl. “He’ll be fine all wrapped up with a poultice against infection. Where’s your mother?”

  “I’ll return later,” Marcus said unnecessarily. Whether from the heat or the blood, he was beginning to need air more than he desired the headache powder.

  As he turned to leave, the girl stared at him. Her glass-green eyes dominated her little face as she said in a rather large whisper, “Who is he, Mr. Sawsbury?”

  The door opened again, bringing with it another rush of cold air and the jangling of the little doorbells.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Sawsbury.”

  Marcus heard her voice before he saw her face, but then she turned ever so slightly, and beneath the wide brim of her bonnet––

  Her eyes widened––green eyes a shade darker than emerald––and her lips parted. She swayed toward him, just as he shifted his balance, ready to move, to take her in his arms, to––

  “Leona!” The moment broke. Marcus had no more than stepped forward once before Natasha had swept the girl up into her arms, yanked the door open, and fled into the street.

  Natasha.

  He reached the door just as it closed and flung it open again. The wind had picked up, nearly blinding him as he stepped outside. He raised his arm to his forehead, searching. The street was empty except for shopkeepers perched with curiosity in the doorways of their stores.

  It felt like five years earlier all over again.

  “Curious way you have with women, sir.”

  The apothecary stood in the doorway, wiping his hands on a blood-speckled cloth.

  “Templeton,” Marcus bit out. He was hardly in the mood for this. “Viscount Templeton.”

  The title did its job, and Mr. Sawsbury looked down. “Was there anything I could do for you, my lord?”

  Marcus’s headache was gone. His very intentions were gone, too. In their place, a surging energy––the sort of nauseous excitement one felt in the wake of a brush with danger––thrummed through him. He had seen her. He knew unequivocally that she lived. That she lived here in Little Parrington.

  The shopkeeper’s expression changed, the cast of suspicion slowly shadowing it. Marcus would find no assistance there. But Dunleavy would have Natasha’s direction. Marcus needed to find the man. He needed to collect himself.

  He needed to hope that in the intervening time Natasha would not run.

  “No,” he said flatly to the shopkeeper and then pivoted on his heel.

  Chapter Four

  “Why are we leaving, Mama?” Natasha felt the resistant tug on her hand as she led her daughter out of sight through the shadow-dark, narrow alley between the joiner’s and the draper’s, then past the Ellis cottage, and toward the tree-lined fields of Lord Parrington’s estate. She continued onward. They couldn’t slow down. “We didn’t get our shoes.”

  “We’ll get them tomorrow.” Or never. Perhaps by morning, if she could borrow the pony cart from the rectory, she and Leona would be gone. Fear propelled her forward. Fear and something like a tingling anticipation, an awakening. Which brought more fear.

  The rectory. The thought of Mr. Duncan calmed her. She had champions here. Marcus could not sweep into a small village like Little Parrington, commit an act of murder, and have no one the wiser. He had made no secret of his being here, so what did he want?

  Safely beyond the concealing line of trees, Natasha began to break hold of her distress and think. It was Saturday afternoon. Mary, the girl who helped, would not be back until Monday. For the first time in four years, Natasha regretted the location of their cottage, a good mile from the village, past the church and the vicarage, tucked in between Lord Parrington’s wheat fields and Mr. Welsh’s dairy farm. She had never felt threatened before, not even when there had been the occasional alert of a French prisoner of war escaped from Norman Cross.

  Marcus looked the same. Older, of course. Five years could change a man, and he had looked gaunt, the lines of his face more defined.

  Heat pounded at her face even as her heart sped. She was too aware of her thighs as they brushed and caught in the layers of her clothes, of her chest, which rose and fell sharply with each breath. She was too aware that everything in her, each inch of her body, had recognized Marcus––as her lover. He was not her lover.

  She should have heeded the seamstress’s warning. Time had dulled her defenses. Natasha had forgotten about running, had begun to imagine a more settled life.

  “I can’t run anymore,” Leona wailed. Natasha almost laughed, her daughter’s words so echoed her own thoughts. She slowed, swept Leona up into her arms, and walked briskly across the field. Her daughter’s slight weight grew heavier with each step, but thankfully the house was just in sight. Natasha had stayed off the main lane on the chance that Marcus would follow them. With any luck, Marcus would not know where she lived and no one would inform him.

  Not that she had that sort of luck. It was only a matter of time.

  When she reached the gate, panting from exert
ion, sweating despite the cold, her arms ached. But the focus on physicalities had momentarily cleared her mind of fear. She let Leona down and slowed her pace.

  Maybe it was an accident that he was in Little Parrington, village of two hundred and fifty-four souls. Or perhaps, he was merely curious. Perhaps there was nothing sinister at all about his appearance.

  Natasha threw away the foolish thoughts even as they passed through her head. She might not know exactly what he wanted from her, or what sort of danger he was to Leona, but she did know that he was a danger. She had created a life for herself here and his very presence underscored the lie that life was.

  She stopped for a moment and stared at the modest two-story cottage she had called home for the last four years. The rent was minimal, the housekeeping manageable, and when spring came again, the fields would bloom with beauty. This had been an idyllic refuge.

  Perhaps she had grown complacent, had forgotten to be watchful, but that did not mean she needed to stay. She would not lay down her defenses and give in to whatever it was he desired.

  She knew how to survive. Surely, too, she knew how to fight.

  The afternoon passed slowly. She knew that he would come. Fear and anger warred within her, and she paced the floor, nauseated and trembling. Her behavior frightened Leona, but there was little space outside the darkness within her to calm anyone else. When finally she heard the sound of a carriage, Natasha tucked Leona in her room and told her to stay there.

  Then she opened the upper-story window. There was a safety in the height and distance.

  He had made his way up the lane, stopped several feet from her front door at the sound of her window opening. It hurt to look at him, so familiar but so strange. In the apothecary, she had only had one stunning glimpse. Now he was before her and far too real.

  Her instincts had kept her here, waiting for his arrival, for a confrontation that could possibly free her from a life of hiding. Seeing him now, she knew she should have run.