How to Seduce a Bride

Chapter Two

She was too nervous to eat, but Daisy knew how to pretend she was enjoying her luncheon. Years of marriage to a man who wouldn’t put up with disobedience had taught her that much.

When her heart had slowed to a normal beat after her daring entrance, she sat in the earl’s dining parlor and tried to make polite conversation. They spoke about the earl’s three sons: Christian, son of his body, and the two adopted sons of his heart. They were all recently married, the earl reported, and doing wonderfully well.

“Marriage was like an epidemic around here last year,” the viscount commented with a theatrical shudder.

They laughed at the obvious distaste in the viscount’s expression. But Daisy was truly happy for all three young men. She’d liked each of them, and they each in turn had treated her with the same sympathy and courtesy their father did. Now she tried to listen to stories about Christian’s new house, his adopted brother Amyas’s penchant for Cornwall, and the miracle of Daffyd’s settling down at last. But she couldn’t stop sneaking glances around at the room she sat in.

She’d lived in a fine house when she’d been a child, but she’d never seen anything like the earl’s dining parlor. An elaborate Venetian cut-glass chandelier hung over the dining table, which was set with fresh flowers as well as food. The china plates the food was served on were almost transparent; the glasses looked as though they’d been spun from water; the cutlery was elaborately embossed and pure silver. The walls were covered with patterned stretched green silk; the sunlight that poured in through the long windows made them shimmer. The sideboards and chairs were antique, heavy with age and worth. The footmen were smiling but silent, the food served beautifully. Daisy was awed.

The gentlemen she dined with matched the splendor of the room. They were both well dressed, charming, and mannerly, more so than any men she’d seen in years.

This was her long-held dream, realized at last. Daisy was overwhelmed. She was also suddenly so terrified, she couldn’t eat. She wondered if she hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew, though she could hardly take a bite of food.

Geoffrey Sauvage, now Earl of Egremont, wasn’t as she’d remembered him.

She’d remembered a genial, hardworking older man, usually weary, often sad. He’d dressed in the same rough clothing all the men she knew wore, but he’d worn his with a certain casual style. And, she remembered most clearly, he was always clean. He spoke well and softly, and was always kind to her. Most other men had treated her with wary respect because of Tanner and their fear of his anger if they didn’t, because to show no respect to his wife was to insult him. But she’d seen their eyes whenever they thought Tanner wasn’t watching. They’d looked her at with appreciation, greedy lust, and calculation. Geoff had never done that.

Nor did he look at her that way now. That wasn’t what made her uneasy. It was that he no longer looked sad, or weary, and most of all, now he didn’t look that old anymore. He was still dressed casually, but now in fashionable clothes. He looked prosperous, fit, robust, healthy. She wondered why he was still unmarried. She also wondered how many mistresses he had, and didn’t doubt he probably had at least one. Because now he looked like a man who would and could use a woman, and not just for show.

That wasn’t what she’d been expecting. That wasn’t what she’d traveled halfway across the world to find; it was never what she wanted.

She didn’t want to be caught staring so she turned her attention to the earl’s guest, and found him watching her. She looked away again, quickly. The viscount was always watching her. But he didn’t eye her with any kind of lust; instead he seemed merely amused and curious. She wondered at his friendship with the earl; the two didn’t seem to have much in common.

He was years younger than the earl, and far more fashionable, even though his tall, thin frame must have made the perfect fit of his clothes difficult for his tailor to achieve. He had a long face, high cheekbones, and a long nose. Those watchful eyes were dark blue. His light brown hair was just overlong enough to make a fashion statement, and his curling smile was half mocking and half self-mockery. None of this, she thought with annoyance, should have been as attractive as it was.

He was dressed wonderfully well, from his tight blue jacket to his intricately tied neck cloth, to the sapphire pin he wore in it. He wore a quizzing glass, though he never used it to look at her. That, she thought rebelliously, would have been the outside of enough. But it would have given her a reason to dislike him, and she didn’t have one, which annoyed her, because he made her uncomfortable and she didn’t know exactly why.

She forced her gaze, if not her attention, back to the luckless baked prawn sitting on her plate. There was only one thing for her to think about now. What about her plans? What was she going to do?

“Don’t you find the prawns to your taste?” the earl asked her.

“Oh, they are, but I had a late breakfast,” she said, telling partial truth. She smiled an apology. “And a big one. I haven’t learned to nibble in the mornings the way I hear London ladies do. I still wake up and tuck in, as though I had a day of work ahead of me.”

The earl laughed.

“What sort of work?” Leland asked. “Excuse me, of course it’s not my business,” he added when she didn’t answer right away. “Do forgive my insatiable curiosity.”

“No, that’s all right,” she said, her irritation with him giving her the courage to look him in the eye. Why not tell him? If she didn’t, Geoff would. And it would be fun to shock this lazy dilettante.

“My work?” she asked. “I woke at dawn, dressed, ate, and then fed the chickens, gathered the eggs, came back and cleaned the house. We had help, but I had to oversee everything and do much of it myself so it would meet my husband’s specifications. I helped wash the laundry, and there was a lot of it. My late husband used his sleeves the way the gentlemen here use napery or towels. He was also a horseman, or fancied himself one, and there was always dust and dirt on his clothing.

“I also tended the garden in summer, knitted and sewed in the winter. I shopped and helped prepare our meals, and cooked them, too. We were well enough off and could have hired more help. God knows servants in the Antipodes were cheaper than dirt. Recently freed convicts are always eager to earn a stake so they can start over with their own houses or businesses, or else they need the money for fare for passage out of there. But my husband became a real skint. I told you that,” she said to the earl, with a smile.

If the viscount was shocked at her candor or her history, she didn’t catch it. When she looked back at him, he was smiling with appreciation.

“A mighty lot of work for such a delicate-looking lady,” he commented. “I commend you.”

It didn’t sound like that to her. It sounded sardonic. After all, why would such a peacock admire a woman who had worked like a peasant?

“So what are you going to do now?” the earl asked, his real concern clear to see by the furrows on his brow.

She had to make up her mind, and found she had. Things looked different, but nothing had really changed but her perceptions, and they could be wrong. And so she’d change nothing until she saw she had to. She gave Geoff her sweetest smile, and told him most of the truth, which was always best, her father had taught her, because there was less danger of being caught in a lie when you had to lie.

“That’s just it,” she said. “I don’t know. My greatest plan was to get here. I can’t believe that I actually did that. Now? I suppose I want to find a place for myself.”

“Not a husband?” a cool, amused voice drawled. “That is what most single females I know are after.”

“But I’m not one of them, am I?” she replied as sweetly. “And you don’t know me.”

“Alas, my loss, which I feel more acutely each moment,” the viscount said, hand on his heart.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “How many ladies do you number among your acquaintance who were jailed and then sent to the Antipodes? Not a whole lot, I’d wager,” she said with a roguish wink at Geoff.

She looked at her inquisitor again. “I didn’t kill anyone, so you don’t have to pick up your knife in case you have to defend yourself, my lord. Actually, all I did was hold a brace of partridges my father brought home for me to cook. They were one brace too many, especially after the trout he’d taken the week before. Because they were poached from the woods of our neighbor, his dearest enemy, as our dinners often were. This time, the squire had my father followed. So we were caught with the goods and removed from the premises, as they put it. We were also speedily tried and convicted of a long string of similar offenses.”

She raised her chin, and spoke in her haughtiest accents. “You can do a great many things in this country, my lord, but God help you if you take a ha’penny from a gentleman’s purse, or money in the form of a rabbit or a trout from his property. My father, who had been wellborn, was unfortunately overly fond of spirits and not lucky at his favorite sport: gambling. He was also in the habit of lifting his dinners when the spirit moved him, and it frequently did. He also particularly loved to vex the squire.”

She gave a pretty shrug. “I suppose the squire had second thoughts at the last. My father had been a gentleman in the neighborhood before he drank and diced away his own house and lands, and gentlemen have a code of honor, I’m told. So the squire had our sentence commuted to transportation rather than hanging. And so there I was, and now here I am. Not in need of a husband at the moment, thank you very much,” she said with a sly smile, aping his exaggerated way of speaking. “Just happy to be home again at last, safe, and,” she added with a soft look to Geoff, “among friends.”

“You are that!” the earl declared. “Don’t mind Lee. He teases unmercifully but there’s no real harm in him.”

“Gad!” Leland murmured. “That sounds dreadful! Worse than if you thought I meant harm.”

“The thing is that you are here now, as you say, Daisy,” the earl went on. “I’d like to help you settle in, if you’ll let me.”

She felt the hard knot of tension ease in her chest. She gave him her best, most winning smile, and the whole truth. “Oh, Geoff,” she said on a sigh. “Of course. Thank you. That is exactly, precisely, absolutely what I wanted you to say.”

“A lovely creature,” Leland commented after Daisy had left them. “Clever, too.” He sat back and swirled the brandy in his glass, but kept watching his host, who stood by the fire staring into it, thinking, long after Daisy’s coach had gone. “Very clever, indeed.”

“She’s had to be. Poor child.”

Leland’s silence was his question.

“No harm in telling you the rest,” the earl said. “She told you how she got into her predicament, and if you’re going to help, you need to know more. You are going to help, aren’t you? You weren’t just being polite?”

“I’m never just polite. I meant it. I’ll send word to an employment agency; she’ll have eager would-be companions lining up at her hotel door tomorrow morning, early. And I’ll help to outfit her, too. That, at least, will be a pleasure. She really is a charming armful. Her body is exceptional. Slender, but firm and full… Oh, don’t scowl. I could go on, but I won’t. Still, she has spectacular good looks, you know.”

“I do.”

“That sounded very matrimonial,” Leland said with interest.

“What? Oh, ‘I do’? What? Me, and her? What are you thinking of? She’s younger than any of my boys. Far too young for me.”

“She’s also widowed, I remind you, and of age.”

“Yes, widowed, and good for her, poor child.”

Leland raised an eyebrow.

“Her husband, Tanner, was a brute,” the earl said sadly. “A good-natured brute when things were going his way. But a bully when they weren’t. He was a prison guard sent to the Antipodes with the convicts to watch over them in the new penal colony. He did it for the extra pay. He always loved money. Her father-now there was a cad-got her into prison. But he tried to do one good thing for her, at least. Or what he’d thought was good. He urged her to marry Tanner, as asked, so she could be protected from the other guards as well as prisoners on our ship.”

“I thought they kept the females separate,” Leland said with a frown. “That’s what the reformers are always demanding.”

“So they do. And so they have, here, or at least at most prisons in England. But once a ship is under way, it has its own law. No one can have a thousand eyes, and the few Bible thumpers who sailed with us were fooled a thousand ways. No question a little beauty like Daisy would have been ill used. So she did her father’s will and chose to be ill used by one brute instead of many, and married Tanner.”

“A wise choice,” Leland said into his glass, though his lips were curled in distaste. “She didn’t do too badly, though, did she? She’s rich now, or so she says. And she doesn’t look the worse for wear.”

The earl gave him a strange look. “Lee, you’re a clever fellow for a fool.”

The viscount sat up, his manner no longer lazy. “I play a fool, my lord, that’s true,” he snapped. “Lamentable, but true. It is an affectation that amuses me. Are you telling me you now believe me?”

The earl waved a hand. “Relax, please. Forgive me. My experiences in prison are still a sensitive subject. But no man can understand unless he was there. Life’s different for a convict. Actually, he no longer has a life of his own, that’s the point. He has only his dreams. Someone else owns his body. Many don’t survive. Those who do bear scars, some visible, some not, however deep and potentially lethal they may be. Amyas still has nightmares. He’s happy now, but I think he will always have them. We all do, because we lived a nightmare.

“Still, if it’s possible, it’s harder for a woman than a man. Daisy was just turned sixteen when she had to marry Tanner. He was three-and-thirty. He was a robust young man, not unhandsome, but she didn’t marry him for his looks. They were wed by a parson aboard ship on the way to the penal colony. Her father told her that if she married a guard, she’d be safer. And so it was. The authorities looked the other way and let her live with Tanner until her sentence was done.”

“So her father did try to look out for her? That’s good.”

“Did he?” the earl asked. “We’ll never know. Some of us thought that money changed hands, as did promises of special favors, because though other men wanted to marry her aside from Tanner, he was the only one her father urged her to wed. Whatever he meant or got from it, her father never saw any other gain. He died of a fever before we reached land.

“There’s no question living with Tanner helped Daisy survive her time in Botany Bay,” the earl went on as he stared at the glass in his hand. “But I think only just, in some ways. Hers might have been just as hard a sentence to serve as ours.”

Leland drained his own glass and waited for the earl to continue.

“She’s four-and-twenty now,” the earl finally said. “I saw her tonight and marveled. She looks and sounds wonderfully well. I don’t know how even that valiant spirit stayed so bright after six years of marriage to Tanner. He never spoke when he could shout. He never asked when he could order. He never hit her in the face, because even he could see how rarely beautiful she was, and I suppose he didn’t want to ruin that. It was a source of pride with him. But he did hit her, because he didn’t know how else to argue or show his displeasure; we all knew that. He struck her for such infractions as speaking up, for not speaking, for being there when he was drinking deep, but mostly, I think, for being who she was. He was as proud as he was resentful of her superior breeding, knowledge, and spirit.”

The room was still except for the spitting logs in the fire in the hearth.

“I did not know,” the viscount eventually said. “I wouldn’t have guessed. You’re right. She possesses more than a lovely face and a clever mind. She must be a brave spirit, indeed.” He cast a bright eye on his host. “So, what exactly is your part in this now? Do you think you can make it up to her? I wouldn’t blame you. You could; you’d be a good husband. And she’s very beautiful, and single again.”

“God! You have wedlock on the brain. No, and no, and no again,” the earl said, pacing in agitation. “I’m happy in my single life. I’m content. My wife was the best of wives; I’ve no desire to have less. And, sadly, I’d think any other woman was less.”

“Oh, you’ve taken up monkhood then,” the viscount commented dryly. “A new order? One that gives up abstinence? Interesting. Do you fellows make cheeses or brandy when you’re not at your prayers?”

The earl’s ears flushed. “I have my diversions, and well you know it. But those good women don’t demand more than my company and support. I can’t give them more, and don’t want more in return. As for Daisy? I always admired and pitied her, and just want to do good for her.”

“And if she wants more from you? Because I suspect she does.”

The earl stared at his guest.

“Her voice, when she speaks to you,” Leland said impatiently. “Her eyes. Good Lord, you could see it if you opened your eyes. She wants you, and for more than an old friend.”

“You see it, maybe,” the earl scoffed. “I don’t, and I don’t look for it.” He stared at his elegant guest. “So. The only question is: Will you help me help her?”

“You trust me with her?”

The earl laughed. “With a beautiful woman? Of course not, unless you give your word not to toy with her, and I won’t ask that. Not to denigrate your charms, Lee, but I believe her to be impervious to them. Open your eyes, my friend. Didn’t you see how she reacted to you? I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but for once in your career, you must admit you failed to charm a female. She didn’t like you.”

Leland gave his friend an odd look. “You thought so?”

“Yes, and I’m glad of it.”

“Am I then such a monster?” Leland asked mildly. “A seducer, a despoiler?”

“No, nothing of the sort. You never do real harm. You take a willing female under your protection, or dally with one, and leave her none the worse for the experience.”

“And usually a little richer,” Leland commented wryly.

“Yes, in funds and experience. But I don’t want that for Daisy. Because for all her experience, she’s inexperienced with men such as you.”

“There are no others such as I,” Leland said in mock affront.

“Probably true, but I’m not joking,” the earl said. “She doesn’t seem to like you, and that’s good because it will keep her safe. The only problem with it is that she must work with you if you’re to bring her up to snuff.”

Leland cocked his head to the side.

“She has to take your advice and follow your lead,” the earl said, as he took his friend’s glass and filled it again. “You know fashion. You know who is acceptable, and who is not. You’re accepted everywhere. My God, you could rule London Society if you wished.”

“I certainly do not wish,” Leland said. He raised his glass in a toast. “To not being king of the ton! Society amuses me. It wouldn’t if I took it seriously. Nothing is amusing if taken seriously, and I live to be amused.”

“I know it. Now, my plan is to get Daisy Tanner into Society, find a good man to take care of her, and see her well settled. I’ll have to think of some way to get her to trust your advice, at least. But that’s what I mean to do. Are you with me?”

“Of course,” Leland said. “Make a chit from Botany Bay into a paragon of fashion? Create a diamond of the first water from a felon, and marry her to a lord, at least? It would be quite a coup for me.”

“You aren’t working with an empty basket. This isn’t the fable of Pygmalion. You aren’t making something of mere clay, building an ideal woman from nothing. She already has breeding and beauty and wealth.”

“And a fascinating criminal past.”

“It’s her future I’m speaking of. I’m serious.”

“So am I,” Leland said. “I mean it. Count me in. This is something I have to see.”