His Duty, Her Destiny

‘Vaguely. I must admit my contact with her over the years hasn’t been good.’

‘No, it hasn’t. And she’s grown up. She’s made an impression.’

‘Then there is someone else, isn’t there?’

‘No one that matters, no.’

‘Then I have first call. And I’m calling, George. I intend to honour the agreement. It was my father’s last wish, and I promised him.’ Not for a moment did he expect George to be taken in by that, knowing what he did of Fergus’s resistance to his father’s control. They had not seen eye to eye until recently.

As he suspected, George was not easily duped. He put down his knife and leaned forward. ‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Why else would you be so insistent, eh?’

Fergus’s stillness was all the answer he needed.

There was a silence between them as George, ever the merchant, assessed the balance of trade. ‘I suppose you know,’ he said at last, ‘that you’ll be starting at a disadvantage?’ When Fergus merely looked straight ahead, George felt it his duty to remind him. ‘For one thing you’ve left all this a mite too late. If you’d come when she was fifteen, Ferg, you might have found her easier to deal with. As it is…’

‘She’s been courted. Yes, but she’ll have to forget them, won’t she?’

George leaned back and took a deep breath. ‘I think, my friend, that you are forgetting something. Nicola is not your average young miss with stars in her eyes, waiting for the masterful swain to sweep her off her little feet. Far from it. She’s quite capable of keeping herself on ice until she sees exactly what she wants. And considering how she used to hate your guts when you took us all away from her on your wild goose chases whenever you came to stay, I’d say you have as much chance of winning her as you have of flying. I know she’s a beauty, Ferg, but you’ll have to do more than pull her hair and hide her pet rabbit if you want to get her into your bed. She has a long memory you know.’

Though his jaw tightened, still Fergus said nothing.

‘Did you think it was all cut and dried?’ said George.

‘No, I know I have my work cut out for me, but I have to try. I realise I want her, George. Will you help me?’ He dared not trust himself to say more, and for a moment, Fergus thought his old friend was going to refuse, so long was the pause before he replied.

‘I shall not see her hurt, Ferg. She may occasionally adopt the lad’s role when it pleases her, but that’s for a reason that’s gradually losing its validity. It doesn’t mean she’s tough or insensitive to pain. She’s not. She’s a woman now, with all a woman’s needs, and she’ll not be easily won over. The decision will be hers, believe me.’

‘I do believe you.’

‘So, you still think you have a chance?’

‘As I said, I have to try. You know my ways, George.’

George, Lord Coldyngham, leaned forward intently, placing his hands palm-down on the table. ‘Yes, I know your ways well enough, Ferg,’ he said. ‘And they may have worked on Scottish lassies or even on Cambridge whores, but they’ll not do for Nicola. She’s different.’

‘I want her, George,’ Fergus insisted. ‘I have to find a way forward. I think she’ll respond to my way, eventually.’ She was different, he knew. In every way she was rare and priceless, and the sight of her half-naked on the bed, below him, wounded, was something that would stay in his mind for ever. Heaven knows what might have happened if the maids had not returned at that moment.

‘Oh? You’ve spoken, then?’

‘Briefly.’

‘She’s still afraid of you?’

‘She’d not admit it, even if it were true. She still dislikes me, yes, but I cannot blame her for that. I gave her no reason to do otherwise, did I?’

‘Then, yes, you will have your work cut out. But I’ll help.’

‘Thank you. It’s the most I can expect after all this time. The rest is up to me.’

‘Er…no, Ferg. The rest is up to Nicola, wouldn’t you agree?’

Wincing at his own clumsiness, Fergus nodded. ‘Yes, I do agree. But never fear, George, I shall win her even if it takes for ever.’

George leaned back to watch his friend pour two more beakers of ale from a large jug with a smirking face modelled on its side. Fergus’s expression, he noted, was anything but amused, but held that grim determination he had shown as a youth when it was woe betide anyone who got in his way. Then, he had habitually won whatever he set out to win; now, George was not so sure. Nicola, he thought, might be in for a rough ride. And Fergus too.

Fergus’s thoughts went along much the same lines, though it also crossed his mind that he would be expected to pay very dearly for that string of shining rubies he had placed upon Nicola’s beautiful breast only an hour ago.

Chapter Two

I n the cosily panelled solar hung with tapestries and filled with morning light from a large pointed window, the sound of bells from St Helen’s Priory next door drowned out the constant thudding of Nicola’s heart as the two young maids went about the task of tending her wound. The thick oaken door had been locked and bolted since the departure of the unwelcome guest more as a gesture of defiance than necessity, for none of the three expected him to return, though the locks and bolts of Nicola’s heart could tell a different story.

For many years, the thought of marriage into the house of Melrose had seemed too remote to be real, especially during her father’s long absences from home when, motherless, Nicola had been left to run wild with her brothers, cared for by a large household and one aged nurse. Eventually, he had sent her to York to join the household of another noble family, there to learn the manners and graces required of all such women aspiring to good marriages. Nicola’s aspirations, however, were to avoid one marriage at all costs, the one to Fergus Melrose that her father was set on. When her father had died fourteen months ago, leaving her a sizeable income from property and his comfortable house in London, she believed that at last she would be allowed to manage her own affairs.

Stripped of the lad’s clothes and sitting almost naked on her bed, she gritted her teeth at the next application of the maid’s special salve, letting her breath out slowly. ‘Mannerless churl!’ she hissed. ‘Still as full of himself as ever. I should have worn my dirk and stabbed him with it. That would’ve wiped the smug look off his face. Ouch!’ She grabbed at Rosemary’s hand. ‘Stop now.’

‘And didn’t ye notice his fine figure, then?’ said Lavender, rinsing out a pink-stained cloth in a bowl of rosewater. ‘There’s many a maid would like a wee while in the dark with such a one, mistress. I didn’t see any in York with a face as comely as that. Nowhere near.’

‘Nor in London, either,’ said Rosemary.

‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ said Nicola, pulling the fine linen chemise over her head and sucking in her breath at the touch of it upon her skin. ‘There’s nobody you’ve seen who’d have done this to me, either, and then walked away.’ The part in between was too shameful to speak of.

Yet she remembered only too well his eyes and the flood of excitement and heat that had suffused her face and neck at his shameful scrutiny, and that almost imperceptible moment when she saw him struggling to stop himself from touching, when his voice had thickened like deep velvet even while saying something stupid about a scar. It was not only her wound his eyes had examined. She knew. She had been watching them. She had seen them widen, and his lips part.

Slowly, carefully, she eased her chemise into place and then sat so still and quiet that Rosemary had to look hard to see if there were tears again. She was not weeping, but in answer to the gentle enquiry, Nicola kept her hands close against her breast while a frown deepened in the centre of her lovely brow. ‘He meant it,’ she whispered. ‘He meant to hurt me. Again. Nothing’s changed, has it? Except that now he’s bigger and stronger than ever.’

Lavender and Rosemary, their partnership being one of life’s coincidences, had been with Nicola for ten years since they were fifteen and eighteen respectively. Now they came to sit upon the soft coverlet at the end of her large curtained bed to offer their mistress some advice.

‘Of course things have changed,’ said Lavender, settling her large open blue eyes solemnly upon Nicola’s hands. ‘You’re obviously not the scruffy little lass you were when he last saw you, eleven…twelve years ago, are you?’ She reached behind her for the burnished steel mirror and passed it to Nicola. ‘Take a look. That’s a woman he’ll not have seen the like of in all his…what…thirty years, is it?’ It was twenty-nine, but addition was not Lavender’s strongest subject.

Nicola grimaced, pushing the mirror away. ‘Oh, you’re prejudiced,’ she said. ‘But it’s made no difference, has it? And if my brother has invited him here to revive all that marriage nonsense, he can think again. He knows perfectly well what I feel about it. There was no formal betrothal and I’ll not be bound to him. Nor will I ever be. Not for his father’s sake, or mine.’

‘So now,’ said Rosemary, smoothing her white apron seductively over her thighs, ‘you have to show him how you’ve changed, even if he hasn’t.’ Privately, she doubted that Sir Fergus had cut such a dash at the age of sixteen, but there was no way of knowing. ‘You have fine manners now, and you know how to give a man the cold shoulder when he doesn’t please you. And if you were to wear your finest kirtle when you go down to meet them, he’s going to get the message, isn’t he? Perhaps it was the lad’s clothing that made him behave so badly. So what will it be, the grey satin? The red? The green silk with ribbons?’

‘Not green. That’s the colour of hope. Sanguine, I think.’

Lavender’s wide blue eyes met Rosemary’s hazel ones long enough to transmit a shadow of alarm. Blood-red might be appropriate, but it was hardly the colour of compromise, was it? ‘Sanguine it is, then,’ she said.

‘And may the best man win,’ murmured Rosemary to herself.

As both Nicola and her two maids had intended, the preparations of the last hour stopped the two men’s conversation in mid-sentence, though George might have predicted the sheer amazement that Fergus betrayed before managing to marshall his features once more into the customary inscrutable mask.

The plaited hair was now quite hidden beneath an extravagant confection of floating veils that fluttered like a massive butterfly around Nicola’s head, kept in place by dagger-long pins and scattered with seed-pearls. The tomboy clothes had been replaced by a blood-red damask gown with wide floor-length sleeves and fur linings that touched the hem, sweeping the ground behind her. Beneath her breasts, a wide velvet sash revealed the contours of her lovely body and, because she had something to conceal, a richly jewelled collar covered her bosom, winking with diamonds and rubies. And for the second time, Nicola could feel Fergus Melrose looking at her without the usual disdain.

She smiled at George, holding out her arms for his greeting. ‘Lovely to see you,’ she said. ‘How are Lotti and the children?’ With a graceful arc of her body she put up her face to be kissed, touching her brother’s mulberry-brocaded arm and approving his cote-hardie with an up-and-down glance. ‘This is nice. Is it new?’

George understood the snub to their guest, exerting a gentle reproof. ‘Nick,’ he said, ‘you know why Sir Fergus has come today at my invitation. I believe you’ve already met this morning.’

She had not greeted him then, and she would not do so now. ‘Oh, I know what this is all about, George dear,’ she said, ‘though you should have given me some warning. I could have been out.’ Purposely ambiguous, she left it to them to decide on her meaning. ‘As it is, I have no intention of discussing plans for my betrothal before strangers. I’m sorry you’ve spent your valuable time for so little reward, Sir Fergus, but perhaps you’ll take a glass of malmsey before you go, and tell us all about your adventures. You must find London so very dull.’