Dishonour and Desire

‘I won it,’ he said. ‘The horses, too. From your brother.’ His voice was deep, as one might have expected from such a well-built man.

‘My aunt’s dapple-greys? Harry took those?’

‘A good colour. Goes well with the brown.’

She suspected he was not talking about the phaeton and pair. ‘Father,’ she said, stripping off her gloves, ‘will you tell me what’s going on, please? Aunt Amelie lent them to me, you know, and—’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Chester, ‘and young Harry’s returned to Liverpool on the early mail this morning without saying a word about this ridiculous wager. It appears that Sir Chase and he had a race round Richmond Park last night and Harry lost. Hadn’t you better sit down, my dear?’

‘Harry lost with property that was not his to lose. I see,’ snapped Caterina. ‘No, I don’t see. Sir Chase, if you knew it was not my brother’s, why did you—?’

‘I didn’t,’ interrupted their guest, pushing himself off the wall and going to stand by his host’s side from where he could see her better. ‘He led me to believe it was his when he made the bet. And I won. He was obliged to leave the phaeton at Mortlake. When I looked, I found this tucked into a corner of the seat.’ His hand delved into his waistcoat pocket as he spoke, then pulled out a very delicate lace-edged handkerchief, which he handed to Caterina. ‘The initials A.C. in the corner suggested the young man’s aunt, the former Lady Amelie Chester, now Lady Elyot. And in case she particularly wants the phaeton back, I have offered your father the chance to redeem it. I dare say it’s worth about two hundred or so. One of the great Felton’s, I believe. Five years old, one owner, patent cylinder axle-trees, and the horses…well…they’re worth—’

‘And my brother walked back from Mortlake, did he? Or did you offer him a lift?’

His eyes sparked with scorn. ‘Your brother owes me money, Miss Chester. I don’t offer lifts to people in my debt. Do you?’

‘The point is, my dear,’ said Caterina’s troubled father, ‘that Sir Chase has every right to expect his winnings to be paid promptly. It’s extraordinarily decent of him to return the phaeton and horses, but a wager is a wager, and—’

‘And it would be even more extraordinarily decent if Sir Chase were to draw a line under this silly nonsense and write his loss down to experience, wouldn’t it, Father? After all, I don’t suppose Sir Chase is lacking horses, or phaetons, is he? Harry is twenty, not yet earning, and tends to be a little irresponsible at times.’ Her heart beat a rhythm into her throat, and she could not quite define the singular hostility she felt towards this man. Was it simply his claims? His uncompromising directness? Was it his attitude towards her father? Or to her? Was it that she had heard of his many and varied love affairs?

‘Your brother’s lack of funds, Miss Chester, is his own problem, not mine,’ Sir Chase said. ‘If he makes a wager, he should have the resources to back it without embarrassing anyone else. His irresponsibility is farcical, but when I win a wager I tend not to draw lines under the debt until it’s paid. Nor do I pretend that I’ve lost. I’m not a charitable institution, and it’s time young Mr Chester learned a thing or two about honour.’

‘I would have thought, sir,’ said Caterina, ‘that in a case of this kind, a phaeton and pair, for heaven’s sake, you might have waived the inattention to honour. I realise that my brother is at fault for gambling with something he doesn’t own, but surely—’ She stopped, suddenly aware that there was something yet to be spoken of.

Stephen Chester had never been good at concealing his thoughts, and now his long face registered real alarm, with a hasty doleful glance at Sir Chase that spoke volumes and a twist of his mouth before he spoke. ‘Er…ahem! It’s not…oh, my goodness!’ He sighed, casting a longing glance at the two glasses of brandy, just poured.

‘Father, what is it? There’s something else, isn’t there?’

He nodded, abjectly. ‘Harry owes money, too,’ he whispered. ‘Sir Chase was just about to tell me as you came in, but I really don’t think you should be hearing this, my dear. I didn’t know all this when I sent a message for you to come. Perhaps you should—’

‘How much?’ Caterina said, flatly. ‘Come, Father. Sit down here and tell me about it. You cannot keep this to yourself.’

‘I don’t know how much,’ he said, weakly. ‘Sir Chase?’

‘He owes me twenty thousand, sir.’

Mr Chester’s head sunk slowly into his hands, but Caterina stared with her lips parted. She thought she saw stars until she blinked them away. ‘Twenty thousand?’ she whispered. ‘Pounds?’

‘Guineas.’

She gasped. ‘And how in heaven’s name did he…oh…Good grief! And he’s left you to repay a debt like that? How could he…how could he do that, Father?’

Sir Chase seemed remarkably composed, as if they were talking of pennies rather than guineas. ‘I have your brother’s IOU for that amount, for which I gave him twenty-four hours’ grace. He assured me he would bring the money to me yesterday morning, but when he arrived at my house in London, he proposed that we should race a team round Richmond Park, the debt to be written off if he won. I would not normally accept such a wager, but he begged me for one more chance and I could see he was in Queer Street. Even so, I saw no reason why I should entirely forfeit the blunt for his sake. As I said—’

‘Yes, we heard what you said, Sir Chase. Did my brother say how he would get the money? Money-lenders?’

‘It’s not my business to ask, Miss Chester, but I don’t think he’d found a way of raising the wind, otherwise I would not be telling your father about it.’

‘So you came here this morning expecting to find him?’

‘As you say. And to return Lady Elyot’s phaeton.’

Mr Chester’s hand groped blindly across the table for his glass of brandy, and Caterina pushed it towards him, then went round to support it as he sipped and sighed noisily, her anger at her brother’s lack of principles combining with sympathy at the shock of such a crippling debt.

Her father had done nothing to deserve this. Twenty thousand guineas was a vast sum of money for which he would almost certainly have to sell this house here in Richmond as well as the one he owned in Buxton, for the income from his late brother’s estate which he had inherited was already being stretched to its limits, and he was not allowed to raise capital by selling anything that had been entailed on him. That would all go to Harry, eventually.

Her father’s second and much younger wife, Hannah, had presented him with two pairs of twins in six years, and now their handsome house on Paradise Road, which had once been Lady Elyot’s, was bursting at the seams. For the sake of comfort, Harry’s month-long holiday had been spent mostly in London, about two hours’ drive away. And Sir Chase had clearly come here for full recompense, not to negotiate.

Hoping to put him out of countenance, Caterina went in with both barrels blazing. ‘Do you then live off your earnings, Sir Chase?’ she asked.

‘Caterina!’ he father spluttered. ‘My dear, you may not ask a man questions of that nature. Please, it’s time you went. Sir Chase and I will discuss this and find a way, somehow. The debt will be paid. You had better go and see how Hannah does. She’s been asking for you.’

Sir Chase reached the door ahead of her and, with one hand on the brass knob, would have opened it but for Caterina’s hand placed firmly over the join. ‘One moment, if you please,’ she said, tilting her head to look scathingly into his eyes. ‘I understand the meaning of honour as well as any man, Sir Chase, but if I may not ask you about your winnings, then perhaps I may ask if you truly believed it was honourable to challenge my brother to a race you must have known he could not win when he already owed you money he could not pay? What exactly was your purpose in encouraging him into such folly that could only end in my father’s embarrassment?’

Her heart-shaped face was held up to the light, showing him the full opulence of her loveliness, the luxuriant waving chestnut hair touching the silken-sheened skin, amazing golden-brown eyes framed by sweeping lashes, a straight nose and wide lips full of sensuous beauty. Her eyes blazed with the kind of passion that would respond instantly and without inhibition to any situation, and Sir Chase doubted very much that she would have obeyed her father if she had not already decided to do so. Perhaps she wanted him to see her as submissive, but he could see in her eyes, in her very bearing, that it was not so. This one would do as she pleased.

Mischievously, he incensed her further by allowing his eyes to roam briefly inside the frilled collar of her habit-shirt and then over her firm high breasts. ‘But I have already told you, Miss Chester,’ he said, unsmiling, ‘it was your brother who challenged me, not the other way round. So if you understand honour as well as you say you do, you’ll not need any further explanation, will you?’

Though she sensed there was more to be said on the subject, there was a limit to the time she wished to spend in the company of this arrogant man, so she took her hand away from the door and waited for him to turn the knob. When he did not, she looked up to find him regarding her from between half-closed eyes that were difficult to read, and it was being made to wait until he was ready that made her realise he was telling her something about her manner. When he did open it, very…very…slowly, she was not allowed to whirl out as she had whirled in.

Out in the hall, she found that her heart was beating a hollow thud between her shoulder-blades, and the desire to sweep his accessories off the table on to the floor was only curbed by the sound of a high-pitched infant tantrum. With a sigh, she turned and went upstairs.

The same sound reached Stephen Chester’s ears before the door closed behind his daughter, making him look up, ruefully. ‘Sorry about that,’ he murmured.

Assuming he meant the noise, Sir Chase took the seat opposite, sampling his glass of brandy while looking round him at the beautiful Wedgwood-blue room overlooking a large garden at the back of the house. A wellexecuted painting of a ship under sail against a background of some distant harbour hung on the wall behind Mr Chester’s desk. Through the new green of the trees, he could see the distant sparkle of the River Thames, alive with wherries and their passengers. There were no signs of poverty to be seen, but the discrepancy in the ages of his host’s family was intriguing, and obviously a cause of expense. And although Sir Chase had not come here intending to negotiate, there was now a new factor in the equation that had not been there when he arrived: Miss Caterina Chester.

‘You have an interesting family, Mr Chester,’ he said, replacing his glass on the table. He rested one boot across his knee and held it there. ‘I understand Mrs Chester is your second wife.’

Stephen smoothed a hand over his thinning dark red hair from the back of his head to the front, nodding. ‘My wife is one of the Elwicks of Mortlake,’ he said. ‘You will probably know them. Been married almost six years.’

Sir Chase’s dark brows moved. ‘Oh, indeed I do, sir. Near neighbours of my parents. I believe the eldest son died a couple of years ago.’

‘Mrs Chester’s brother Chad. Yes. I lost the first Mrs Chester ten years ago, and with three grown children of my own I didn’t quite expect so large a second family so soon. If I’d known there were going to be nine of us instead of five, I’d not have moved from Buxton. My Derbyshire home is a good deal larger than this one, plenty of rooms, woodland and paddocks, and orchards. But my wife is a Surrey woman, and Caterina and her sister wanted to stay near London.’ He smiled at last, softening with fatherly pride. ‘Caterina lived here with her aunt, Lady Elyot, who was still Lady Chester at that time. It was perfect for the two of them then.’

‘Ah, your daughter. May I ask her age, sir?’

‘Twenty-three, Sir Chase.’ Suddenly, Stephen’s hand slapped the table as he stood up, shimmering the remaining brandy in his glass. ‘Twenty bloody three, and not married. And not likely to be, if she can’t be more agreeable than that.’ He strode to the window, staring out into the distance. ‘I hope you’ll excuse her forthright manner, sir,’ he said, more quietly. ‘She can be quite difficult to handle at times, but we’ve all been under a bit of a strain, one way or another, and unfortunately Caterina has a mind of her own. My other daughter,’ he said, lightening his tone, ‘Sara , is just the opp—’

‘Tell me, if you will, about Miss Caterina Chester, sir.’

‘Eh?’ Startled, he turned to look. ‘I thought you’d have heard by now.’

Sir Chase smiled, but made no reply.

Stephen sauntered to the table, studied the remaining brandy and gulped it down in one go. Then, moving from one piece of furniture to the next and sliding his fingertips over the surfaces, he hopped through what he saw as the main events of Caterina’s twenty-three years in a verbal hotchpotch that reflected his own needs more than hers. ‘Well, I allowed her to come down here from Derbyshire to live with my brother’s widow. Caterina and her aunt are very close. She lives up at Sheen Court now, since she became Lady Elyot.’

‘Yes, I know Lord and Lady Elyot and his brother Lord Rayne well.’