Page 6 of Hearts at Home

6

L ord Dom arrived several minutes early. Chloe saw him out of the parlour window as he talked to the urchin who was usually to be found hanging around outside the Tavistock door. The lad went to the horses’ heads, and they bent to examine him, and to facilitate his caress of their necks. He was obviously fond of animals, and they returned his regard. Rosario always greeted him with enthusiasm, whenever she saw him.

Lord Dom checked his pocket watch to see how close he was to his time. Chloe was already wearing her gloves and bonnet. She picked up Rosario, making sure that the monkey’s leash was firmly attached. “Lord Dom is here, Aunt Swithin. Are you sure you do not wish to come?”

“Run along with you, child. I plan to read the latest Teatime Tattler , and perhaps have a nap. You have a good time with your stepsisters and your young man.”

Was Lord Dom her young man? He was about to knock on the door as she opened it. “Miss Tavistock! It is a lovely day for a drive. I see you have brought your hairy chaperone?”

Chloe took his hand and allowed him to aid her balance as she climbed up to the seat. “I hope you don’t mind, Lord Dom. I had to leave Rosario at home this morning while I was at Lady Seahaven’s writing thank-you letters, since the schoolroom party were not home to entertain her. Aunt Swithin promised to take her out and let her play in the garden, but she forgot, so the poor beast was shut in her cage from the time I left until I got home.”

Lord Dom went around to his side of the curricle, took his own seat, and held out his hand for Rosario to shake, distracting the monkey from her focus on the boy with the horses. “You are very welcome, Sister Rosario.” He grinned at Chloe. “She adds a certain air of adventure to our outings, do you not think?”

Chloe blushed at the sly reference to Rosario’s escapades. Earlier in the week, she had climbed a tree in Tower Gardens and refused to come down until Lord Dom had borrowed a ladder from the gardeners’ shed, whereupon she had climbed down the other side of the tree. If Emma and Merry had not cornered her, she would have been up another before Chloe could have reached her.

Two days ago, she had stolen an ice from a passing waiter, tasted it, then thrown it with unerring accuracy at the back of the waiter’s retreating head. Lord Dom had soothed the man’s irritation with a large gratuity.

Then there was the concert, where Rosario conceived a passion for the brooch on the hat of the dowager in the next row, and reached out to snatch it when Chloe became lost in the music. Had it not been for Lord Dom’s quick action—the monkey’s hand was within an inch of the target when he jerked her back by her leash—the ensuing apologies for Rosario’s complaints would have been for a much worse offence.

“I shall keep tight hold of her today,” Chloe promised.

“Or I shall,” Lord Dom agreed. His smile warmed away her embarrassment. “She does not mean to cause mischief, I know. We shall endeavour to keep her out of trouble, you and I.”

He called out to the urchin who stood at the head of the horses. “Thank you, Sam.” He tossed a coin to the lad, who caught it one handed without taking his eyes off the monkey. “You can let them go, now.”

“I could get up behind and look after the ’orses where you and the liddy are going,” Sam offered.

“Not this time, thank you,” Lord Dom replied, and moved his hands in a signal to the horses, saying, “Walk on, boys.”

Soon, they were clopping swiftly through the streets and out through the city gates. The estate where they were meeting Lady Seahaven was thirty minutes away. Lord Dom broke the silence. “I met with your brother today.”

Chloe stiffened. Not Lord Dom, too. Two men had asked Martin for her hand in marriage, without first consulting her wishes. Martin, bless him, told them both to apply to her. One she knew as an interminable bore. She asked him why he wished to marry her, and he replied that she was a good listener. She refused him politely.

The other was charming enough, but even before he went behind her back to try to make an arrangement with Martin, she could not warm to him. His proposal was done in proper form, but with an overtone of smugness that would have argued against accepting even if she had been inclined.

She asked him the same question. He told her she was the loveliest creature he had ever seen. “Lovelier than the Seahaven Diamonds?” she asked. He coloured. “In a different way,” he hastened to add. “Truly, Miss Tavistock, I am convinced you will make me a good wife, and my father says I must marry.”

Chloe was certain he would not make her a good husband. Her refusal appeared to take him by surprise. He tried to convince her that Martin had already agreed and her acceptance was not required. Caught out on that, he assured her that she need not have hopes of Lord Cuckoo, since everyone knew Pevenwood had cast him out when he was eighteen, so he was penniless and hanging out for a rich wife.

He, himself, did not mind that Miss Tavistock was not wealthy, he explained, since he had a large allowance from his father, which his father had promised to increase when he took a wife. She wished him luck and told him that wife would not be her.

And now Lord Dom had taken the same path, speaking to Martin as if she were property with no wishes or opinions of her own. “I did not know you had called,” she told Lord Dom.

Lord Dom shook his head. “I did not call. I saw him in the street while I was on my way here and walked with him for a bit.” He slowed to pass a group of girls who were half on and half off the road as they foraged in the hedgerows, filling their baskets with snippets of green. He chirruped at the horses to set them trotting again. Looking straight ahead, he added, “He assumed I was going to ask for your hand in marriage. Which I wasn’t.”

He wasn’t? How embarrassing. How… how disappointing.

“Not from him,” Lord Dom added. “Not before I’d talked to you first. I am courting you, Miss Tavistock, not your brother.”

That was better. Chloe turned her head to examine his face. His eyes were firmly fixed on the road ahead, but he must have felt the weight of her regard, for he shot her a look and an anxious smile. “Did you know I was courting you? Lord Tavistock said you did not, and that I should tell you.”

“I was not sure,” Chloe admitted. I hoped so . The words occurred, but she kept them in.

Lord Dom grimaced. “I am not very good at it, it seems. I have never done this before. And then I met you.”

He turned his face to her, and must have checked the horses, for they slowed to a walk. “You probably think this is all too fast. I am afraid I am rushing my fences and will take a fall. But I am more afraid that—if I hold back and say nothing—someone else will win your regard in my place.” His laugh was a nervous expulsion of air. “Do you think… Could you tell me if I have a chance, Miss Tavistock? Maybe give me a hint about how to get better at this courting business?”

“I don’t know,” Chloe replied. When his face fell, she hastened to add, “I have never been courted before, Lord Dom. I never thought anyone would wish to marry me, but Martin insisted on this season in York.” She wanted to bounce in her seat and repeat the word ‘Yes’ over and over in fast succession. She resisted, and tested him with the question that had stymied the other two. “Can you perhaps tell me why you wish to marry me?”

“I think I can,” Lord Dom said slowly. He looked along the road ahead as he spoke. “I was attracted before we met, when I saw you across the room at the meeting. That was to be my last engagement in Yorkshire. Then you impressed me with your courage, your sense of humour, and your quick thinking, and I wanted to stay to get to know you better.”

He shot her another of those anxious glances. “But the moment of attraction came first. I don’t know if I can explain it better than to say it felt like recognition. Something in me saw you and said ‘that’s her’.” Another of those short barks of laughter. “It sounds mad, does it not? I am glad I listened, though, for every meeting has confirmed my first impression. You are the woman I can picture spending the rest of my life with.”

He looked so apprehensive that Chloe blurted what she was thinking. “It was the same with me, Dom.”

He dropped the reins to turn to her and take both of her hands. “Chloe! May I call you Chloe?” The horses, his soft control suddenly absent, tossed their heads and quickened their pace. Dom had to grab for the reins again to exert his will on them.

His soft laugh was exultant. “I lose all my senses when I am with you.”

Chloe, coming to her own senses just in time to grab at Rosario’s harness as the monkey started a flying leap for a passing tree, knew exactly what he meant.

“We turn here,” Dom told her, suiting action to word and setting the horses between two ornate gateposts. “We can talk more on the way home, Chloe. My darling.”

* * *

Pevenwood and Gary were at the garden party. Dom saw them almost as soon as he and Chloe arrived, as they looked around for Lady Seahaven’s party. He steered Chloe down another path. “I do not particularly wish to meet those two people,” he told her.

Chloe visibly restrained herself from peering around him. “Who are they?” she asked, then corrected herself. “Never mind. You do not have to explain yourself to me.”

“Do I not?” Dom smiled down into her lovely eyes. “If I am planning to ask you to share your life with me, I think you do have a right to an explanation.”

He took a deep breath, wondering where to start. Chloe, that wonderful woman, said nothing, giving him the time to compose himself.

He had better start with the cause of the breach between himself and the family he was raised in. “Your brother knows about my family scandal. Has he told you?”

“Aunt Swithin told us both. She reads the scandal columns in the news sheets, and she remembers your… the marquess’s divorce case.”

“Attempted divorce case.” It had changed his life. Or, rather, the fight between Pevenwood and his wife had changed Dom’s life, but the public application for divorce and ensuing trial had let the whole world in on the secret.

“I was ten years old. My brother Totters, the heir, must have been eighteen, for he is six years older than Gary, my next brother. Gary and I were born only eighteen months apart, and were the firmest of friends. We never saw much of the marquess and our mother, or of Totters. But we had each other.”

Rosario, who had been sitting on Chloe’s shoulder, leapt across to his and embraced his face with one long cold hand.

Dom swallowed the lump in his throat and continued. “The marquess and our mother were seldom in the same place at the same time, and when they were together, they fought. Usually about the marquess’s affairs. In one of those fights, Mother told the marquess that I was the son of the Duke of Haverford, and not his son at all.” Dom had heard them yelling at one another.

Chloe did not need to hear the detail—that she’d found herself with child after a brief dalliance with Haverford, undertaken in revenge for one of Pevenwood’s periodic infatuations. That she’d coaxed Pevenwood back into her bed and then convinced him that the ensuing child was premature.

“Pevenwood and Haverford had never liked one another. I think he could have ignored anyone else. When my mother confronted him with the affair, he threw her out and me with her. And he began divorce proceedings. After they failed, he had to take us back, but by then, he’d turned Gary against me. They called me Cuckoo. Gary started it, and even the servants took it up.”

Gary’s defection still hurt, all these years later. More, even, than his mother’s. “Mother didn’t stay. She moved to another of Pevenwood’s houses, and I never saw her again. She died three years later.” He fell silent, remembering those days.

“Dom,” Chloe said, squeezing his arm in a warm gesture of support, “I am so sorry. No one deserves to be treated like that. From the sounds, the marquess and his wife were both guilty of disloyalty to one another and cruelty to you. And your brother, who lost his best friend too, just because he wanted to please his father.”

Dom had not thought about the position in which Gary found himself. “I suppose you are right, my darling. Trust you to see it from both sides.” He took a deep breath. “Anyway, the people I was avoiding are Totters and Gary. My brothers the Marquess of Pevenwood and Lord Pythagoras Finchley. I haven’t seen them or heard from them since I turned eighteen.”

Chloe dimpled when she smiled. “Gary is Pythagoras? I take it Totters is Aristotle, then. Who was the enthusiast for Greek philosophers?”

“Pevenwood,” Dom admitted. “He insisted on the names, or so I am told, and my mother on the nicknames. “Look. There is Lady Seahaven.”

Chloe turned obediently in the direction he indicated as Rosario clearly decided the emotional crisis was over and clambered back to Chloe’s shoulder. “You should talk to them, you know. Perhaps you may never again be friends with your brothers, but the marquess is dead and so is the old Duke of Haverford. You brothers are all adults now, and you deserve a chance to see if you can put the old hurts behind you.”

“More wisdom,” Dom commented. “I will hope our children take after their mother, Chloe.”

“You haven’t proposed to me, yet,” Chloe pointed out.

“We are about to be surrounded by your stepsisters,” Dom said. “This might not be the best time.”