Jane Feather: Vixen

"Let down your hair."

The abrupt command startled her, but obediently she untied the ribbons of her braids and unplaited the thick ropes, combing her fingers through her hair as she did so.

The final effect was astonishing. Guinea-gold radiance tumbled thick and straight down her back, framed her face, setting off the brilliant blue of her eyes, the peach-bloom glow of her complexion.

"Dear God," he whispered to himself before remarking, "That is the most hideous gown."

"Oh, I know," she replied cheerfully. "And I have at least a dozen just like it. I think they're supposed to be bushels."

"What?"

"Or is it bushes?" she mused. "Anyway, it's in the Bible… thou shah not hide your light under them." Her eyebrows quirked. "Bushes would make better sense, wouldn't it?"

Hugo rubbed his temples, wondering if his headache was about to return. "I'm sure I'm being very obtuse, lass, but I'm afraid you've lost me."

"They're supposed to hide my light," she explained. "From the curate and Miss Trent's nephew and the butcher's boy."

"Ah," he said. "I begin to see." He leaned back against the pillows, regarding her through half-closed eyes. There would be few callow youths impervious to that radiance. A prudent guardian would certainly attempt to dim it in the wrong company.

Chloe continued to stand by the bed, returning his scrutiny with one of her own. The sheet had fallen to his waist and her fascinated eye fastened on a tiny design pricked into the deeply tanned skin above his heart. It looked like a coiled snake. She had never seen a man without his shirt before and made no attempt to hide her interest. There wasn't an ounce of spare flesh on his upper body, his neck was a powerful column supporting a leonine head with a jutting chin. The chestnut hair was long and flopped over a broad forehead. Tiny lines radiated from his vivid green eyes under bushy brown eyebrows. His mouth was full and generous in repose, but at the moment was tight, presumably reflecting his thoughts. They couldn't be very pleasant thoughts, Chloe decided uneasily.

She put her hand in her pocket and the letters crackled against her fingers. "Would you like to read the letter from the lawyers?" she asked hesitantly.

"I suppose I'd better," he said, sighing. "Where has your timid chaperone gone?"

"To London."

"Leaving you here." He stated the obvious with heavy resignation. Somehow, he would have to untangle this mess, and it would require a deal more energy than in general he cared to expend.

Lawyer Scranton's letter enclosed a copy of the will. Lady Elizabeth Gresham had left the sole guardianship of her daughter Chloe to Sir Hugo Lattimer. He was to assume the management of her fortune, estimated at some eighty thousand pounds, until she married.

Eighty thousand pounds. He whistled soundlessly. Stephen had married Elizabeth for her fortune, that had been no secret. Presumably, on his death it had reverted to her. Four years of marriage hadn't been long enough for him to run through it, and after his death the Greshams hadn't laid hands on it. That was very interesting-he would have laid any odds on Jasper's finagling his way into his young and vulnerable stepmother's affairs.

He frowned, remembering something the girl had said earlier, about not grieving for her mother. "What did you mean when you said you only saw your mother for a few days a year?"

"She didn't like to see people," she said. "I went to the Misses Trent when I was six. I'd go back at Christmas for a week. Mama never liked to leave her room." She chewed her lip. "I think she was ill. The doctor gave her something that she drank and it made her want to sleep. She often couldn't remember things… people… I don't know what it was."

Suddenly she turned aside, seeing her mother as she had been just before her death, in the room that smelled of strange and unpleasant things, where the windows were never opened and the fire kept burning throughout the hottest days of the year. A woman with thin white unkempt hair and faded eyes that sometimes carried a fearful wildness in them. She would swallow the doctor's medicine and the terror would fade, to be replaced by a blankness. She had never talked to her daughter. Oh, they had said things occasionally, exchanged odds and ends of information, but they had never really talked. They had never known each other.

Hugo looked at the girl's averted back, saw the stiffening of her shoulders, heard the note in the voice that had so far been determinedly bright and cheerful, and compassion stirred. "Why did she send you away so young?" he asked gently.

"I don't know." Chloe shrugged and turned back to the room. "Because she was ill, I expect. The seminary was rather like an orphanage. There were other girls there, whose parents were abroad, or dead." She shrugged again.

And where had Jasper been throughout all this? Had he made no attempt to involve himself in his baby half sister's future?

"What about your brother?"

"Jasper? Do you know him? I suppose you must, since you knew Mama." She frowned. "He never came to the dower house. I remember going up to the big house to play with Crispin, but that all stopped when I went to school. I haven't seen them for a long time. They weren't at Mama's funeral."

Jasper's stepson, Crispin, was four years older than Chloe, Hugo remembered. He could understand, after what Jasper and his father had done to Elizabeth, why she would strive to keep her daughter away from the Gresham family. But he still wondered how she had managed it. What power had Elizabeth, a broken recluse, discovered? Could he have helped her? If he hadn't accepted her edict, could he have weaned her from the laudanum dependency that had been fairly well established at Stephen's death? Stephen had used the opiate to control his wife, and Elizabeth's hold on reality had been tenuous at best.

The violent memories, the old questions, the eternal self-disgust, rose again, bitter and invincible. He closed his eyes, the smell of the crypt in his nostrils; a parade of disheveled women, wild-eyed with drink and excitement, crossed his internal vision. He felt again his own excitement, saw it again reflected in the eyes of his fellow players. It had been his life-this single-minded pursuit of the ultimate sensual pleasure. His life and that of the others, joined by blood and oath in a dissolute quest that destroyed all decency. Until Stephen Gresham and his son had entered a realm of pure evil…

Chloe, watching his face, instinctively stepped backward toward the door. His face was a mask of anger, carved and immobile. He opened his eyes and she shuddered at their expression. They were the haunted eyes of a man who looked into hell.

And then abruptly it was gone. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, then ran his hands through his hair, pushing it off his forehead. "So, why have you left the Misses Trent?"

"They didn't want me there anymore."

"Oh?" He raised his eyebrows in interrogation. She seemed to find the question uncomfortable, judging by her suddenly shifting feet.

Chloe dug the other letter out of her pocket. "It was all because of Miss Anne's nephew," she said. "On top of the curate. I don't think it was my fault, but they seemed to think I'd led them on." This last was pronounced in accents that he assumed were an imitation of the Miss Trent in question. "Although I don't know how they could think such a thing," she said, aggrieved. "Anyway, I expect it's all in here." She thrust the letter at him.

He was aware of her anxious scrutiny as he scanned the closely penned sheet. When he'd finished, he scrunched it up into a ball and tossed it toward the fireplace. "What a pretty picture. Reading between the lines of that poison, lass, one can only assume you're a Jezebel of the first water. A deceitful, designing, lying little flirt from whom no innocent young man is safe."