A Sister's Secret Page 3

  ‘You assume correctly,’ said Caroline, ‘and she is in utter distraction, for her ardour died after a few brief months and she is terrified her husband will discover her guilt. If you can procure that letter from Cumberland, you will be gratefully rewarded. Since he is blackmailing her, I trust I can rely on you to see that the biter is bitten. You can accomplish this at the card table, achieving such substantial IOUs as to compel him to give up the letter in exchange for them. Such are the debts of all the royal dukes that they are never in any position to remit payment of heavy gambling losses. Cumberland is an avid, addicted gambler. No sooner will he hear that you are renowned at cards yourself than he will want to set to with you at once. You will ensure he loses very heavily.’

  Captain Burnside mused on what was coolly expected of him. ‘I shall need money, marm, and luck.’

  ‘I will provide you with funds, sir. But luck, do you say? What need do you have of luck when you own so many accomplishments?’ Caroline’s softly drawn vowels were laden with irony. ‘You are a consummate cheat, are you not? That is to say, you can palm a card or cause a dice to fall as you wish without arousing the smallest suspicion?’

  ‘Well, it’s true I’ve had moments when all has been won by dexterous sleight of hand,’ said the captain, regarding her with much thought. To Caroline, he seemed to be musing on the feminine appeal of her fashionably low décolleté, which did not please her at all. ‘Cumberland,’ he murmured, ‘ain’t known to be a dunderhead, however, and his one sound eye is wickedly keen.’

  ‘Is one sound eye keener than the sharp talents of a virtuoso? Or have you merely been offering me the conceits of a braggart?’

  ‘Substantial IOUs,’ said the captain thoughtfully. ‘Very well, marm, consider it done.’

  ‘I hope, sir,’ said Caroline with asperity, ‘that you don’t think me simple enough to accept that particular conceit. The matter will be accomplished when it has been. It will not be accomplished merely by your saying so.’

  ‘We shall see, marm, we shall see.’

  ‘So we shall,’ she said, ‘and I declare myself hopeful. But I should not be true to my honour if I did not warn you that Cumberland is an adversary as dangerous as Satan. One mistake, one wrong move, and I vow you are like to be discovered in the Thames, drowned and very dead.’

  ‘As a professional hireling, marm, I accept the risks.’

  ‘I commend you for that,’ she said. ‘Now, sir, what are your present circumstances?’

  ‘In faith, I’m deucedly short of the ready,’ admitted the captain, ‘if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Most men who live by their wits own thin purses,’ said Caroline. ‘Have you never considered honest work?’

  Captain Burnside appeared pained. ‘God forbid, marm, I should ever become a porter or a shipping clerk.’

  ‘Either might keep you from ending up in prison,’ she declared. ‘I find it difficult to believe your father was a bishop.’

  ‘Well, so he was, marm, and died in a state of peace and beatitude. I had not then disturbed his soul by becoming the family black sheep.’

  ‘I do declare, you are singularly deplorable, sir,’ she said. ‘Are you not ashamed that, as the son of a gentle mother and a man of God, you are a self-confessed rake and even a thief?’

  ‘I assure you, marm, I could own finer principles if I weren’t so poor.’

  ‘Hard, honest work would lift you out of poverty, Captain Burnside. Now, I shall advance you fifty guineas. It will cover such expenses as you entail. You are to come to this house on Friday, bringing a suitable wardrobe with you. You will profess to be an old friend of mine, lately returned to England from service abroad, and my guest for a period. Do you still own a uniform?’

  ‘I do,’ said the captain. ‘I find on occasions it can induce a young lady to regard me as becoming, valiant and deserving …’

  ‘Spare me these ridiculous irrelevancies, sir,’ said Caroline. ‘Bring your uniform. Is the rest of your wardrobe as acceptable as that which you are wearing now?’

  ‘I confess, marm, that part of your advance will sweeten my tailor and persuade him to release to me two new coats, some silk cravats and—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said in some impatience. ‘Meet the costs out of the advance.’

  ‘I’m obliged, marm, very,’ he said.

  ‘So you should be, for in giving you any monies at all I am placing almost foolish trust in you.’ Caroline opened a drawer and took out a soft leather bag of coins. She pushed it across the desk to him. ‘Fifty guineas in gold,’ she said.

  ‘I’m deeply obliged, marm,’ he said, slipping the bag into his pocket without opening it, and this at least she appreciated.

  ‘Am I now faced with the possibility that you’ll decamp?’ she asked.

  ‘You have my word that I won’t,’ said the captain.

  ‘I accept the risk that you might.’

  ‘Be assured, Your Ladyship, that there’s no risk, for you’re now my patron.’ He coughed. ‘Ah – we haven’t discussed the fee. You’ll forgive my mention of it?’

  ‘I should have been surprised if you had forgotten to,’ she said. ‘Your fee, sir, will be two hundred guineas.’

  ‘Marm?’ Captain Burnside looked a little put out. ‘That’s part of the whole?’

  ‘That, sir, is the whole, in addition to the fifty guineas for your expenses.’ Caroline was firm. ‘It’s an amount that will keep you very comfortably for more than a year. I consider it very generous, especially as you have implied the venture was no sooner agreed than accomplished.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said the captain, ‘which is to say that a professional of my class must command a worthier fee than a bungling amateur.’

  ‘Two hundred guineas and expenses amount to a fee as worthy as you could command from anyone.’ Caroline was on her mettle, determined to be in control of the relationship, the man himself and all events. ‘Such a sum would set you up in a small business and enable you to earn an honest living.’

  ‘Ye gods,’ said the shocked captain, ‘a small business? An honest living? Marm, am I to endure boredom?’

  ‘If you prefer to continue with your dubious practices, Captain Burnside, that is your affair. But very well, since you will be up against a dangerous man in Cumberland, I will raise the fee to two hundred and fifty, and not a cent more.’

  ‘I’m touched, marm. Done, then. Two fifty and expenses.’

  ‘However,’ said Caroline, straight of back and firm of bosom, ‘you will be paid only if you succeed. Half if you succeed with one or the other, the whole if you succeed with both. But nothing, sir, if you fail altogether, for you will have proclaimed your gifts dishonestly.’

  ‘H’m,’ said Captain Burnside, and smiled. ‘I see I’m to serve a critical patron.’

  ‘You are, sir, be in no doubt of that,’ she said. ‘Well?’

  ‘Your servant, marm.’

  ‘Cumberland will be here Friday evening for supper.’

  ‘Egad, d’you say so?’ Captain Burnside looked intrigued. ‘Do I take it, marm, that you’re on intimate terms with him, that you too find the devil has his own kind of appeal?’

  An angry flush suffused her. ‘How dare you draw such an inference, how dare you? Be very clear, sir, that I detest Cumberland. But that is not to say I spend my time quarrelling with him. I know him well, and he knows me just as well. I am civil to him, and he is always himself.’ She looked up as the door opened. She simulated a welcoming smile, showing teeth that were moistly white and even between her parted lips. ‘Annabelle, how nice that you are back from shopping at this moment, for you are in time to meet an old friend of mine, Captain Charles Burnside.’

  Captain Burnside came to his feet. Lady Caroline’s sister advanced, smiling.

  Chapter Three

  Miss Annabelle Howard of Charleston, South Carolina, was in essence a pretty young lady. Her face was round and pretty, her eyes round and blue, her mouth soft and kissable. Her looped-u
p gown of sky blue showed pretty ankles clad in pale yellow silk hose. Such hose was held in place above the knees by tied silk garters. She wore buckled blue shoes and a white tulle cap from which a tiny silk scarf hung over the back of her fair hair. She looked younger than her age. She was almost twenty-one. Vivacious light shone in her eyes, which were apt to sparkle at the slightest arousal of excitement or merriment. Her complexion was delicately creamy, her bosom plump. Her waist could not have been higher. It was a mere fraction below her bosom.

  She had wanted to come to London as soon as the family heard Caroline was not returning to Charleston after the death of Lord Clarence Percival, for that told Annabelle of her sister’s acquired preference for London and her country estate in Sussex. But there was the problem of Martin Appleby, to whom she had been engaged since she was eighteen. Martin was an undemanding young gentleman of old Colonial stock; he was also handsome and God-fearing. But when pressed to name the wedding date, Annabelle demurred and procrastinated, having gradually come to feel that, while Martin was a good man, he was not much fun. She felt she preferred him as a friend, not as a prospective husband, and so the engagement lingered on.

  Her parents worried a little. Caroline, her sister, had married in haste at eighteen and repented almost before the ink was dry on the certificate. She herself at twenty was neither married nor repenting of marriage. With so many beautiful girls in Charleston, all fluttering their eyes at prospective beaux, Mr and Mrs Howard felt Annabelle would soon be too old to be taken to the altar, even by good-natured Martin Appleby. In the climate of the Deep South, girls bloomed far in advance of New England’s young ladies, and by sixteen they were sweet peaches ripe and ready for wedlock.

  Six months before her twenty-first birthday, Annabelle broke the engagement, protesting she did not truly love Martin. Her mother was shocked, but her sympathetic father let her weep tears on his shoulder and agreed with her suggestion that she quit Charleston for a while and visit Caroline in England.

  London, its colourful society, and the brilliance of its grand ballrooms, dazzled her, the more so when the bucks, the young and the mature, gave her so much attention. She was introduced to scions of the nobility, and she even met the Prince of Wales, lately growing portly. She was a trifle confused by his close scrutiny of her bosom and the florid nature of his compliments. She also met one of his brothers, the Duke of Cumberland, who was a different proposition altogether. He took her breath with his physical magnificence, with the spectacular width of his powerful shoulders, the defined muscularity of his thighs, the sheer strength of every line of his face and his aura of indestructible majesty. His right eye was blind, palely blind, but his left was dark, glinting and malicious. He was neither suave of manner nor endearing of appearance. The cast of his features was devilish, and his looks were not improved by a facial scar, the legacy of a wound bravely borne at the battle of Tournai a few years ago. A German duchess of Mecklenburg was destined to become his wife. Various other women who found him strangely exciting had hopes, but none had advanced beyond the role of mistress.

  He dressed impeccably. His coats paid tribute to his massive shoulders, and his skin-tight breeches boldly shaped his strong thighs, causing a lady’s eyes to linger and her breath to quicken. To some women he was, with his superb physique and dark wickedness, wholly a man, and his reputed kinship with the devil, written all over him, fascinated them and induced shivers.

  He had nothing in common with his oldest brother, the effete Prince of Wales, called ‘Prinny’ by his intimates. Indeed, Cumberland had a great and regal disdain for the effete and all other lesser beings. Under the sensual, peering eyes of the Prince of Wales, Annabelle with her feminine prettiness had experienced a desire to retreat and hide. Under the bold, speculative eye of the Duke of Cumberland, she quickened with sweet excitement. She felt he should have been the heir to the throne, for he was surely made for kingship. Cumberland positively thought so himself.

  Annabelle was a monarchist before she was a republican. A royal palace and the brilliance of a royal court had far more magic for her than the businesslike mansion of a president.

  At her first meeting with Cumberland, he eyed her, examined her, reflected on her nervous, fluttering curtsey and the unarguable appeal of her décolleté. Then he took her hand, caressed it and said, ‘So, you’re from the Americas, are ye?’ His German accent was deep and guttural. ‘Damned if ye ain’t the prettiest package that ever came out of them. Are ye acquainted with those radical upstarts, Washington and Jefferson?’

  ‘Sir – Your Highness – I declare!’ she breathed in nervous protest. ‘I vow myself unacquainted with either. Nor do I wish to be, for of all things I cannot show a polite face to men who were so unmannerly in their resentment of the King and his brave Redcoats.’

  Cumberland laughed. ‘Ye gods, ye’ll not have witnessed their unmannerliness, sweet wench? Or will ye say ye did?’

  ‘Mercy, no! I was not yet born when it all began, and only a small child when the Redcoats departed. Sir, you do not see in me one so old as to have stood and watched that coarse Yankee, Sam Adams, at his brutal business of tarring and feathering the Loyalists, do you? Sir, I do declare myself not yet come of age.’

  ‘But ye’ve still come of sweet, plump prettiness,’ said Cumberland, and Annabelle blushed to her roots.

  ‘Plump, Your Highness?’ she gasped in dismay.

  The sound eye gleamed, the strong teeth gleamed, and the smile was devious. Cumberland knew her for the sister of Caroline, Lady Clarence Percival, an established and unrivalled American beauty who had resisted his every advance, and he would not have been what he was if he had not seen the chance to win the elder by becoming a menace to the younger.

  ‘Plump?’ he said. ‘Aye, so ye are, my sweet, but only where ye should be. I vow it a delicious plumpness.’

  Her blush deepened. Cumberland laughed again, richly, and there began for Annabelle a royal attentiveness and pursuit that swept her off her feet, and had her enamoured all too soon of the man who some said coveted the throne, had no respect for his peers, little reverence for God and kept company with the devil. Certainly, he was intimidating in his towering majesty. Annabelle found him mesmerizing, and he found her a full-grown bloom of the American South who, remarkably, still owned the freshness of virginity. Because he seemed disposed to suggest assignments of a compromising nature, she declared her virginity to him, and begged him not to regard her lightly or carelessly.

  His sound eye took on its wicked light. ‘By God, a virgin? Say ye so, sweet girl?’

  ‘Sir, I beg, do not embarrass me so. It is said and it is true.’

  ‘Damn me, ye must be the only one in London,’ he said, and laughed at her blushes. But there she was, a sweetness to be savoured at leisure, not bruised in haste. If her sister regarded the dalliance with angry frowns and worried glances, so much the better. Let her, Caroline, come into his arms and he would cease his pursuit of virginity. Meanwhile, he enjoyed the teasing manner of his pursuit, and Annabelle was forever suffering quivers of excitement in his presence. In the compulsiveness of infatuation, she acquired and exhibited gowns that were as revealingly arch as they were dangerously provocative. She could not help herself in her desire to catch the eye of a man whose royal arrogance and uncompromising masculinity made him such an excitement to her. Cumberland, studying the increasingly arch contours, remarked that if all the roses of the American South bloomed so fulsomely, then it was a lusher nursery than he had supposed.

  Annabelle had all the demure mannerisms and fresh looks of a girl no more than eighteen, despite being within reach of the age when she could be her own mistress. If at that age she yielded to a clandestine affair with Cumberland, she would be no less responsible than he. She would be unable to make any claim on him in law unless she had his written promise to marry her. Marry her? The thought of being the wife of a son of King George turned her dizzy.

  In the library of her sister’s London house, her bl
ue gown seemed to swim and float as she advanced towards Captain Burnside. She did not look at Caroline, for there were secrets in her eyes, secrets she could not wholly hide, and she knew Caroline could be discomfitingly observant. She smiled at the debonair visitor, who bowed.

  ‘Sir?’ she murmured, extending her hand.

  ‘Captain Burnside,’ said Caroline, ‘this is my sister, Annabelle Howard.’

  The captain lifted Annabelle’s hand to his lips and returned her smile. ‘Faith, I’m enchanted,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I surely do think the manners of English gentlemen the last word in gallantry,’ said Annabelle.

  ‘A pretty coating over our many imperfections,’ said the captain. In his slender length he was as tall as Cumberland, but without the duke’s bruising weight.

  ‘But, sir, a man without imperfections must be very dull,’ said Annabelle, electing still to avoid her sister’s eye.

  ‘What am I to make of myself, then?’ smiled the captain. ‘I’m not only sadly imperfect but also miserably dull.’

  Annabelle laughed. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘by that you have just shown you are not dull at all. Might I ask if you are lunching with us?’

  ‘Alas, I’ve an appointment with my tailor, as your sister will confirm. I should have been on my way ten minutes ago. You’ll pardon me?’ He kissed her hand again, lightly, bringing another smile to her face. Her lively eyes took in the suppleness of his physique, his close-fitting pantaloons shaping sinewy legs. How well English gentlemen dressed, she thought, how finely their tailored garments clasped their bodies.

  ‘You all must go before we’ve scarcely met?’ she said, needing the kind of company that would help her avoid Caroline’s suspicious eyes and difficult questions.

  ‘Oh, you will meet him again quite soon, I dare say,’ said Caroline, ‘for he is to be our guest in a few days.’

  Annabelle’s eyes danced. A handsome man in the house would surely constitute an entertainment. ‘I declare myself delighted, sister,’ she said.