The Disgraceful Mr. Ravenhurst
Autorzy
Louise Allen
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Chapter One
August 1816—Vezelay, Burgundy
The naked female figure danced in timeless sensual abandon, revelling in the provocation of her blatant sexuality. The face of the hapless man watching her was etched with mingled despair and lust as he reached out for her, blind and deaf to the imploring prayers of the holy man who watched the scene unfold from behind a pillar.
It was hard to see the detail clearly in the shadows, and having to crane her neck upwards did not help, but the scene was unmistakable—and who was at fault, equally plain.
‘Honestly! Men!’ Exasperated, Elinor stepped backwards, furled parasol, rigid sketch book, sharp elbows and sensible boots, every one of them an offensive weapon.
‘Ough!’ The gasp from behind her as she made contact with something solid, large and obviously male, was agonised. ‘I beg your pardon,’ the voice continued on a croak as she swung round, fetching the man an additional thwack with her easel.
‘What for?’ she demanded, startled out of her customary good manners as she turned to face the doubled-up figure of her victim. ‘I struck you, sir. I should apologise, not you.’
As he straightened up to a not inconsiderable height, a shaft of sunlight penetrated the cracked glass of the high window, illuminating a head of dark red hair that put her own tawny locks to shame. ‘You were expressing dissatisfaction with the male sex, ma’am; I was apologising on behalf of my brothers for whatever sin we are guilty of this time.’ His tone was meek, but she was not deceived—there was strength in the deep voice and a thread of wicked amusement.
Yes, said a voice inside Elinor’s head. Yes. At last. She shook her head, blinking away the sun dazzle and whatever idiocy her mind was up to, and stepped to one side to see her victim better. He was smiling, a conspiratorial twist of his lips that transformed a strong but not particularly distinguished face into one that was disarmingly attractive. Somehow he had succeeded in charming an answering smile out of her.
She was not, Elinor reminded herself sternly, given to smiling at strange men. It must be part and parcel of hearing things. The voice had gone away now; no doubt it had been some trick of an echo in this cavernous place.
‘I was referring to that capital.’ Hampered by her armful of belongings she dumped them without ceremony on a nearby pew, keeping hold only of the furled parasol, partly as a pointer, partly because of its merits as a sharp implement. All men, her mother was apt to warn her, were Beasts. It was as well not to take risks with chance-met ones, even if they did appear to be polite English gentlemen. She gestured with the parasol towards the richly carved column top, Number 6B in her annotated sketches. ‘It is a Romanesque capital; that is to say—’
‘It was carved between 1120 and 1150 and is one of a notable series that makes the basilica of Vezelay an outstanding example of religious art of the period,’ he finished for her, sounding like an antiquarian paper on the subject.
‘Of course, I should have realised that, if you are visiting the basilica, you must understand architecture,’ she apologised, gazing round the wreckage of the once-great church. Outside of service times no one else was going to enter here on a whim. ‘Are you a clergyman, sir?’
‘Do I look like one?’ The stranger appeared mildly affronted by the suggestion.
‘Er…no.’ And he did not, although why that should be, Elinor had no idea. Many men of the cloth must have red hair. Some must also possess smiles that invited you to smile right back at a shared, and slightly irreverent, joke. And, without doubt, tall and athletic figures graced pulpits up and down the land.
‘Thank goodness for that.’ She noticed that he offered no explanation of himself in response to her question. ‘So…’ He tipped back his head, fisting his hands, one of which held his tall hat, on his hips to balance himself. ‘What exactly is it about this particular scene that merits your ire, ma’am?’
‘It shows, as usual, a man succumbing to his own base animal instincts and lack of self-control and blaming his subsequent moral downfall upon a woman,’ she said crisply.
‘I must say, your eyesight is excellent if you can deduce all that in this light.’
‘I have been studying the capitals for a week now with the aid of an opera glass; one gets one’s eye in.’ Elinor stared round at the nave, littered with crumbling masonry, broken pews and rubbish. ‘I have had to go round at least three times in an attempt to interpret as many as possible when the light is at its best. It is still possible to do that, but unless something is done very soon, I fear they may all fall or be damaged beyond repair or study. See the holes in the roof? The carvings must be exposed to the elements, even in here.’
‘You are a scholar, then?’ He was squinting upwards, his eyes fixed on the carved figures, frozen in their eternal masque of temptation and yielding. ‘Researching the iniquities of the medieval male mind, perhaps?’
‘My mother is the scholar, I am merely recording the carvings for her detailed study. She is an authority on the early churches of France and England.’ Elinor could have added that the medieval male mind probably differed little from its modern counterpart when it came to moral turpitude, but decided against it. It was not as though she had any experience of turpitude to base the assertion upon.
‘Indeed?’ The man switched his attention from the carving to her face and this time the smile lit up his eyes as well. They were green, she noticed. An unusual clear green, like water over pebbles, not the indeterminate hazel that looked back at her whenever she spared a glance in a glass to check that her bonnet was at least straight and there were no charcoal smudges on her nose. ‘I feel sure I should meet your respected parent. May I call?’
‘You are a scholar too?’ Elinor began to gather up her things, stuffing pencils, charcoal and paints into the battered leather satchel and swinging it over her shoulder. ‘I am joining her now, if you would care to accompany me.’
‘Let’s just say I have an interest in antiquities.’ He removed the easel from her hands, folded its legs up, lashed the straps around it with a competence that suggested he used one himself, and tucked it under his arm. There was a short struggle for possession of the stool, which he won, and for the parasol, which Elinor retained. ‘You are staying in Vezelay?’
‘Yes, we have been here seven days now. We are making our way down through France, visiting a number of the finer early cathedrals. Mama intends that we will remain at Vezelay for several weeks yet. Merci, monsieur.’ She smiled and nodded to the verger, who was wielding a broom and stirring up the gritty dust in the porch. ‘Sweeping seems pointless, he would be better employed on the roof with a tarpaulin.’
She dropped a coin into the outstretched hand of the beggar by the door and headed diagonally across the open space before the basilica, glancing up at her companion as she did so. ‘We have lodgings just down the hill here.’
There was something vaguely familiar about him, although she could not place it. It certainly made him easy to talk to. Normally Miss Ravenhurst would have contented herself with a polite inclination of the head and a murmured good day when she came across a male countryman to whom she had not been introduced. It would never have occurred to her to invite one back to their lodgings to meet Mama.
Perhaps it was the red hair, somewhat extinguished now as he clapped his hat back on his head. Being one of the red-headed Ravenhursts, she saw a less spectacular version of it every time she looked in the glass. It was generally considered to be a handicap in a lady, although if hers was less a good match for a chestnut horse and more the flame of well-polished mahogany by firelight as his was, she might have felt more reconciled to it. He seemed to have avoided freckles as well, she noticed with envy, but then, his skin was not as fair as hers was.
‘Here we are.’ It was only a few minutes’ walk down the steep main street, although it always took rather longer to toil back up the slippery cobbles to the basilica. The door was on the latch and she pushed it open, calling, ‘Mama? Are you at home? We have a visitor.’
‘In here, Elinor.’ She followed her mother’s voice through into the parlour, leaving her belongings on the hall bench and gesturing to the tall man to put the easel and stool down, too. At the sight of him, Lady James Ravenhurst rose to her feet from behind the table, its chequered cloth strewn with papers and books.
‘Mama, this gentleman is a scholar of antiquities who wishes to meet—’
‘Theophilus!’ Lady James lifted her quizzing glass to her eye and stared, for once clearly out of countenance.
Elinor stared, too. ‘Cousin Theo?’ Her disgraceful and disgraced cousin Theo? Here? ‘I haven’t seen you for years.’
‘Not since I was twelve, fifteen years ago,’ he agreed. ‘You must have been about seven. I wondered if it was you, Cousin Elinor.’
‘The hair, I suppose,’ she said, resigned to it being her most memorable feature. ‘I was ten,’ she added, ruthlessly honest. It was nice of him to pretend he thought she was only twenty-two now, and not an on-the-shelf spinster of almost twenty-six.
‘What are you doing here, Theophilus? I understood from your mama that you were undertaking the Grand Tour.’ Lady James gestured impatiently towards the chairs set around the stone hearth. ‘Sit.’
‘I am, you will agree, Aunt Louisa, somewhat old to be undertaking the Tour with a tutor to bear-lead me.’ Theo waited until the two women were seated, then took the remaining chair, crossing one long leg over the other and clasping his hands together. He appeared quite tame and domesticated, although a trifle large. If Elinor had imagined a dangerous rakehell, which she had been informed her cousin was, he would not look like this.
‘Mama uses the Tour as code for sent abroad in disgrace,’ he continued. ‘I am earning my living, avoiding English tourists and generally managing to keep my doings from the ears of my sainted papa.’
‘Your father, even if Bishop of Wessex, may not be a saint,’ his aunt said tartly, ‘but you have certainly tried his patience over the years, Theophilus. Where were you when the Corsican Monster returned from exile last year, might I ask?’
‘Oh, here in France. I became a Swedish merchant for the duration of the troubles. I found it interfered very little with my business.’
Elinor found she was grappling with unsettling emotions. Of course, she was pleased to see her cousin. Any cousin. The Ravenhursts were a large and friendly clan. But something—the memory of that unsettling little voice in her head, perhaps?—replaced the calm contentment that was her usual internal state with a cold knot in her stomach. If she did not know better, she would think it disappointment.
‘What are you frowning about, Elinor?’ her mother enquired. ‘Nothing is more productive of lines on the forehead.’
‘A slight headache, that is all, Mama.’ She had met an intelligent, attractive man—Theo was certainly that, even if he was not exactly handsome—and he turned out not to be an intriguing stranger, but one of the Ravenhurst clan. A relative. So what was there to be disappointed about in that, other than the fact he would treat her like they all did, as Mama’s bluestocking assistant? An hour ago she would have said she wanted a man to talk to about as badly as she wanted to be back in London, sitting with the wallflowers in the chaperons’ corner through yet another hideous Season.
Whatever Cousin Theo’s business was, it appeared to be flourishing. She might not know much about fashion, but she knew quality when she saw it, and his boots, his breeches and the deceptively simple cut of his riding coat all whispered money in the most discreet manner.
‘Did you say business, Theophilus?’ Mama, as usual ignoring her own advice, was frowning at him now. ‘You are not in trade, I trust?’
‘One has to live, Aunt Louisa.’ He smiled at her. Elinor noticed her mother’s lips purse; he had almost seduced an answering smile out of her. ‘My parents, no doubt rightly, feel that at the age of twenty-seven I should be gainfully employed and cut off my allowance some time ago.’
‘But trade! There are any number of perfectly eligible professions for the grandson of the Duke of Allington.’
‘My father has informed me that I enter the church over his dead body. It is also his opinion that I was born to be hanged and therefore a career in the law is ineligible. I find I have a fixed objection to killing people unless absolutely necessary, which eliminates the army and the navy.’
‘Politics? The government?’ Elinor suggested, smiling as much at her mother’s expression as Theo’s catalogue of excuses.
‘I am also allergic to humbug.’
Lady James ignored this levity. ‘What sort of trade?’
‘Art and antiquities. I find I have a good eye. I prefer the small and the portable, of course.’
‘Why of course?’ Careless of deportment, Elinor twisted round on her seat to face him fully.
‘It is easier to get an emerald necklace or a small enamelled reliquary past a customs post or over a mountain pass than a twelve-foot canvas or six foot of marble nude on a plinth.’ The twinkle in his eyes invited her to share in his amusement at the picture he conjured up.
‘You are involved in smuggling?’ his aunt asked sharply.
‘In the aftermath of the late wars, there is a great deal of what might be loosely described as art knocking about the Continent, and not all of it has a clear title. Naturally, if it sparkles, then government officials want it.’ Theo shrugged. ‘I prefer to keep it and sell it on myself, or act as an agent for a collector.’
‘And there is a living to be made from it?’ Elinor persisted, ignoring her mother’s look that said quite clearly that ladies did not discuss money, smuggling or trade.
‘So my banker tells me; he appears moderately impressed by my endeavours.’
‘So what are you doing here?’ Lady James demanded. ‘Scavenging?’
Theo winced, but his tone was still amiable as he replied, ‘I believe there is an artefact of interest in the neighbourhood. I am investigating.’
There was more to it than that, Elinor decided with a sudden flash of insight. The smile had gone from his eyes and there was the faintest edge to the deep, lazy voice. The coolness inside her was warming up into something very like curiosity. She felt more alive than she had for months.
‘Where are you staying, Cousin Theo?’ she asked before her mother insisted upon more details of his quest, details that he was most unlikely to want to tell her. Once Mama got wind of a secret, she would worry it like a terrier with a rat.
‘I’ve lodgings down in St Père.’ Elinor had wanted to visit the village at the foot of the Vezelay hill, huddling beneath the towering spire of its elaborate church. She would have enjoyed a stroll along the river in its gentle green valley, but Lady James had dismissed the church as being of a late period and less important to her studies than the hilltop basilica. They could visit it later, she had decreed.
‘Rooms over the local dressmaker’s shop, in fact. There’s a decent enough inn in the village for meals.’
And now he is explaining too much. Why Elinor seemed to be attuned to the undertones in what he said, while her mother appeared not to be, was a mystery to her. Perhaps there was some kind of cousinly connection. She found herself watching him closely and then was disconcerted when he met her gaze and winked.
‘Well, you may as well make yourself useful while you are here, Theophilus. Elinor has a great deal to do for me and she can certainly use your assistance.’
‘But, Mama,’ Elinor interjected, horrified, ‘Cousin Theo has his own business to attend to. I can manage perfectly well without troubling him.’
Her cousin regarded her thoughtfully for a long moment, then smiled. ‘It would be a pleasure. In what way may I assist?’
‘You may escort her to St Père to make some sketches in the church there. I will review your preliminary drawings of the capitals tomorrow, Elinor, and see what needs further detailed work. I doubt St Père will prove of interest, but you may as well eliminate it rather than waste a day.’
‘Yes, Mama.’
Theo watched Elinor, puzzled. Where was the assertive young woman from the basilica? It was as though the presence of her mother sucked all the individuality and spark out of his cousin. Sitting there, hands neatly folded in her lap, clad in a slate-grey gown that might have been designed to remove all the colour from her face and disguise whatever figure she might possess, she looked like the model for a picture of a dowdy spinster. He had been flattering her when he made the remark about her age when they last met; she looked every bit the twenty-five she admitted to.
He reviewed his agreement to take her to St Père. Was there any danger? No, not yet. It was probably too early for his client to have become restless over the non-appearance of his goods and, so far as he was aware, none of the opposition had yet appeared on the scene. If they had and he was being watched, escorting his cousin would be a useful smokescreen.
‘At what time would you like me to collect you and your maid?’ he enquired.
‘Maid? There is no need for that,’ his aunt rejoined briskly. ‘We are in the middle of the French countryside and you are her cousin. Why should Elinor require chaperonage?’
He saw the faintest tightening of Elinor’s lips and realised that she was sensitive to the unspoken assumption behind that assertion—that she was not attractive enough to attract undesirable attention.
‘I will walk down the hill, Cousin, at whatever time suits you,’ she offered. ‘There is no need for you to toil all the way up, simply to escort me.’
That was probably true; she seemed to know her way around the large village well enough, and it was a respectable and safe place. But he felt an impulse to treat her with more regard than she obviously expected to receive.
‘I will collect you here at ten, if that is not too early. The weather is fine; I have no doubt the inn can provide a luncheon we can eat outside. The interior is not really fit for a lady.’
‘Thank you.’ Her smile lit up her face and Theo found himself smiling back. Those freckles dancing across her nose really were rather endearing. If only her hair was not scraped back into that hideous snood or whatever it was called. ‘You will not mind if I am out all day, Mama?’
‘No, I will not need you,’ Lady James said, confirming Theo’s opinion that she regarded her daughter in the light of an unpaid skivvy. Her other children, his cousins Simon and Anne, had escaped their mother’s eccentricities by early and good marriages. His late uncle, Lord James, had been a quiet and unassuming man. Theo’s father, the Bishop, had been heard to remark at the funeral that his brother could have been dead for days before anyone noticed the difference.
Elinor was obviously fated to become the typical unwed daughter, dwindling into middle age at her mother’s side. Although not many mothers were scholars of international repute as well as selfish old bats, he reflected.
She might be a dowdy young woman, and have a sharp tongue on the subject of male failings, but he found he was pleased to have come across her. Sometimes life was a little lonely—when no one was trying to kill him, rob him or swindle him—and contact with the family was pleasant.
‘Is there any news from home?’ he enquired.
‘When did you last hear? I suppose you know about Sebastian and his Grand Duchess?’ He nodded. He had been in Venice at the time, pleasurably negotiating the purchase of a diamond necklace from a beautiful and highly unprincipled contessa. But even on the Rialto the gossip about his cousin Lord Sebastian Ravenhurst’s improbable marriage to the Grand Duchess of Maubourg was common currency. He had even glimpsed them together on one of his fleeting and rare visits to London, while their stormy courtship was still a secret.
‘And Belinda has married again, to Lord Dereham.’
Now what was there in that to make Elinor’s lips twitch? he wondered. ‘Yes, I had heard about that, too. I met Gareth and his new wife in Paris and they told me.’
‘Your cousins are all settling down in a most satisfactory manner,’ his aunt pronounced. ‘You should do the same, Theophilus.’
‘Should I find a lady willing to share my way of life, then I would be delighted to, Aunt. But so far I have not discovered one.’
‘Really? I wonder if perhaps the ladies who were willing were among the reasons your parents disapprove of your way of life,’ Elinor murmured with shocking frankness, so straight-faced he knew she had her tongue firmly in her cheek. She had a sense of humour, did she, his dowdy cousin?
‘They would most certain disapprove if I wanted to marry one of them! Perhaps you will be a good influence upon me,’ he countered. ‘Having heard a little of your views on male moral decadence, I am sure you can guide me.’
Fortunately his aunt was too busy ringing for the maid to notice this exchange. Theo refused the offer of tea, which he was assured had been brought from England in order to ensure there need be no recourse to inferior foreign supplies, and took his leave. ‘Until tomorrow, Cousin.’ He smiled a little at the heap of sketching gear and scholarly tomes in the hall; yes, this would prove an undemanding way to pass the time until all hell broke loose.
