Andrew Lord of Despair(57)

“I will be on my way as well,” Fairly said, “though we should plan a rendezvous at Willowdale soon. Astrid, if you like, I’d be happy to pay a call on Douglas on my way home. I will deliver a letter in your hand, informing him of the nuptials.”

God bless Fairly, and a mind that tended so effortlessly to strategy.

Andrew kept an arm around his wife—his wife—who still looked miserably pale. “We might want to create the impression we’ve taken a short wedding journey to my Sussex estate. I will also send a note to Douglas, explaining to him that Astrid is now in my keeping, and he needn’t trouble further over her welfare.”

“Fine then,” Gareth said, calling for his hat, gloves, and riding crop. “I will expect you all to join me at Willowdale by week’s end, and do not disappoint me, or Felicity will be unhappy. Brenner, if you could walk with me to the stables?”

Fairly made his good-byes, and Astrid and Andrew were soon left alone, seated side by side on the big leather sofa.

“I did not expect even to see you today, much less end up married to you,” Astrid said. She looked and sounded dazed, not at all like the confident, articulate woman who seized life by the lapels and lectured it into submission.

“Nor I to you,” Andrew replied. “I am pleased, despite all.” Pleased and relieved, also furious on her behalf and rattled as hell.

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I cannot think of all today, Andrew. I can barely form coherent thoughts, if you must know. But I am pleased as well.”

Pleased was something. He took her hand, glad for the solitude that allowed him such familiarity, only to realize that as her husband, such familiarity was… permitted. “This has not been the quiet day the doctor ordered.”

“Dr. DuPont? I do not want to see him again. He bore tales to Douglas, and suspected me of harming my own child. I went back to him because he attended me last year.” Astrid opened her eyes and focused on Andrew, looking more like herself—a little disgruntled and weary, her eyes not quite right, but like his Astrid. “I suppose, having dispensed with a wedding breakfast, this brings us to the wedding night?”





Eleven





“A pleasure, Fairly.” Douglas Allen, Viscount Amery, bowed correctly to his guest, though he managed to convey to David that an unexpected visitor was not a pleasure at all. His lordship’s sitting room was chilly, though comfortably appointed in green, brown, and cream—but then, it was public and visible from the street. The windowsills boasted no fresh bouquets; the walls were bare of domestic adornments. No paper cuttings, no watercolors from a talented cousin’s days in the schoolroom, no pressed flowers as a token of Lady Amery’s idle hours.

Nothing to suggest the house was anything other than a bachelor encampment with walls.

“Shall I ring for refreshment?”

“Please,” David replied, relishing the thought of a hot, sweet cup of tea, but also wanting to preserve the fiction of civility.

“I confess to some confusion,” Amery said, gesturing to the settee opposite the empty fireplace. “My mother stopped by only an hour or so ago and told me you were entertaining your sister Astrid. Did Astrid tire of your company?”

“I fear there has been a misunderstanding, Lord Amery,” David began pleasantly. “Though I have in fact spent much of the afternoon with my sister. I left her in reasonably good health and in great good spirits.” Two exaggerations in the name of strategy. David flipped a sealed note onto the low table before the settee. “Perhaps this will explain.”

He watched Amery’s features as his lordship read the brief missive, though Douglas’s expression did not change.

Not in any detail.

“My sister-in-law is due congratulations,” Amery said at length. “When may I call upon the happy couple to offer them in person?”

“Lord Greymoor has written to you as well,” David said by way of answer. This missive he passed to Douglas, allowing their hands to brush. David had removed his driving gloves upon entering the house, and Douglas—called from his desk, if the ink on the heel of his right hand was any indication—was also bare handed. The man’s fingers were like ice, and he made no reaction to the unusual, if accidental, touch of another man’s hand on his.

Amery read the note, looking up only when a servant entered with the tea tray.

And again, not a flinch, not a flaring of the nostrils or a narrowing of the eyes. Over cards—or dueling pistols—Amery would be impossible to read.

“Because we have no hostess, I propose we serve ourselves,” he said. “After you, Fairly, unless, of course, you are concerned I might be of a mind to poison you too?”