Surrender to Sin Page 7

  Cary’s interest became genuine. “How small, do you think?”

  “Easily a thousand pounds,” Abigail said promptly. “Quite possibly more.”

  He stared at her. “You’re mad. A thousand pounds?”

  She nodded earnestly. “If you could find the two Catherines, in good condition.”

  “There are some other miniatures in my study,” he said, leading her quickly through a door down a long, dark hallway into a small, untidy chamber with low casement windows. Unlike the formal rooms she had already seen, this one had not been paneled, and the original plaster and beams were exposed. Cary went to a large cabinet and, after rummaging in a few drawers, brought her a large box in which a half dozen miniature portraits had been casually jumbled together. He began taking them out and arranging them on his desk, after clearing a stack of unopened correspondence out of the way.

  Abigail picked up one. “Why, this is Henry’s daughter, Mary,” she exclaimed. “How extraordinary. I’ve never seen a miniature of Bloody Mary, sir. She was so hated in her lifetime, there wasn’t much demand for her portrait, large or small.”

  He shrugged. “Worth much?”

  Abigail shook her head in regret. “As I said, she wasn’t very popular.”

  Cary held up another, this one depicting a slim girl with carroty hair and demurely folded hands. “Could this be a young Elizabeth?”

  Abigail smiled at him. “That, Mr. Wayborn, is Catherine Howard. And this boy here is Edward VI, son of Henry and his third wife, Jane Seymour.”

  There were several more miniatures in the box that Abigail could not identify, but no Catherine of Aragon. “If you could find her, Mr. Wayborn, you would have an enviable collection; King Henry, all six of his wives, and all three of his children. I might value that as high as three thousand pounds.”

  “I’d sell it in an instant.”

  “Shall we put Catherine, Mary, and Edward in the table with all the rest?” Abigail moved towards a door, but found that it was locked.

  “That door leads out to the gardens,” Cary said, leading her to the correct door. “I’d take you, but the grounds aren’t much to look at in winter, unless you like brambles and snow. We do have a traditional knot garden that stays green, if you’d like to see that.” He smiled to himself, thinking it would be great fun chasing his skittish cousin through the maze.

  Abigail demurred because of the snow, which was still falling.

  “I suppose eventually I shall put in some modern French windows,” he said on the way back to the portrait room with the miniatures. “At Wayborn Hall, where I actually grew up, we have French windows leading out to all the terraces.”

  “On no account,” cried Abigail, quite forcefully, “are you to put in French windows, Mr. Wayborn! You mustn’t do anything to compromise the historical integrity of the house.”

  Cary raised his eyebrows. “It’s my house, cousin,” he reminded her, laughing.

  “But you can’t!” cried Abigail. “It would spoil the whole house if you did.”

  Cary grinned. When provoked, she quite forgot to be shy, as she had when he’d questioned Mr. Coleridge’s integrity in Hatchard’s Bookshop. “I suppose you think my ancestors were wrong to put in chimneys and staircases when they had perfectly good fire pits and ladders.”

  “No, of course not,” said Abigail. She held strong views on the subject, he could tell, but she struggled to present them effectively, while he, without caring half as much, could talk circles around her. “A chimney is one thing. But to put French windows in a beautiful old Tudor house—! I think that would be a crime, Mr. Wayborn. You ought to be restoring Tanglewood to its original state, not disfiguring it with French windows.”

  Cary couldn’t help laughing. “I told you what it was originally—a cow byre! Do you really want me to restore it to its original state with a bunch of moilies and milkmaids?”

  Abigail pressed her lips together. She could not compete with him in open debate, but, in her view, the only way to truly win an argument was to be right, and he was definitely wrong.

  Cary couldn’t resist teasing her throughout the rest of the first floor rooms, threatening to replace every arched doorway with a French window. Abigail did not once laugh.

  “Don’t sulk,” he finally told her as they came to the main staircase. “I couldn’t possibly afford to have French windows put in. The historical integrity, as you call it, is perfectly safe.”

  Abigail was delighted to see the exposed timbers at intervals in the plaster walls upstairs. In the hall, the plaster had been painted a green that had darkened with age, but clear, lighter areas showed where paintings must have hung until quite recently. She guessed, correctly, that Cary Wayborn was selling off the treasures of the house little by little.

  “These are the two best rooms,” he said, coming to two doors at the end of the hall. “Since you’re my cousin, I think you should have one of them. Mrs. Spurgeon, I suppose, may have the other.”

  He opened the first door.

  It was not a very large room, but Abigail thought it was perfect. The casement window allowed in plenty of light. The paneled walls were painted a creamy white, and the coffered ceiling was decorated with the red and white double rose of the Tudors, symbolizing the union of the Lancasters and the Yorks. The feather bed was set on a huge, intricately carved box of walnut. From its four posts hung red and white crewel-work curtains. The only other furnishings were a large wardrobe against one wall, a small washstand with a mirror, a little chair near the window, and a stone fireplace that, at present, was cold and dark.

  “I know this room!” Abigail exclaimed.

  “Seen it in a dream, have you?” he teased her. “In novels, the heroine always comes to a room she has seen before in a dream. She usually faints in the arms of the nearest man.”

  “I recognize it from the painting downstairs,” she told him sensibly. “This must be where Lettice Cary sat for her portrait.” She pointed at the red and white bed hangings. “She must have sat there, on the bed.” It occurred to her all at once that she was alone in a bedroom with a man, and she became rather flustered, to his immense enjoyment.

  “I daresay only Lettice and her husband would have known she was sitting on her marriage bed. Apart from the artist, of course.” He grinned. “I always thought she looked as though she might fall over backwards at any moment. Now I know why.”

  “This is not original to the room,” she said, moving quickly to the wardrobe.

  “No,” he agreed, “but there’s a secret to it I think you’ll like.”

  “What sort of secret?”

  “I’ll show you,” said Cary, opening the heavy carved doors. “There’s a secret door in here. If you press it in a certain place, the panel slides back.”

  “A door to a secret room?” Abigail asked eagerly.

  “Not a secret room, more’s the pity. Just an ordinary, everyday secret passage between two ordinary, everyday bedrooms.” He gave her his wickedest smile.

  “But why would anyone want that?” she asked, puzzled. “Why not simply go out into the hall and use the door there? Why go crawling around through somebody’s wardrobe? It makes no sense.”

  “It’s all very strange and mysterious to me, too,” said Cary, his gray eyes laughing at her innocence. “But I must correct you on one point. One does not go crawling through the wardrobe. It’s really quite as comfortable as walking through a doorway.” He demonstrated this by stepping inside the wardrobe. “See? I needn’t even crouch down.”

  “But there aren’t any clothes hanging in it now,” Abigail pointed out. “I imagine it’s rather annoying to have to go through a lot of dresses and coats to get through to the other side.”

  He ignored this unworthy statement. He was busy feeling along the back paneling of the wardrobe for the secret spring. “It’s stuck,” he said, annoyed. “Warped from the damp, I shouldn’t wonder. This never happens in books—the secret panel always slides back at the merest touc
h of the hero’s finger, with a sibilant hiss, I might add.” He stopped trying to force the panel open and looked at Abigail. “Give me a hand, will you?”

  “Of course,” she said, without thinking. Cary doubted the girl had ever refused a direct request for help in her whole life. She was, in fact, such a nice girl in every way that, if he hadn’t been so sure that she was going to enjoy what he planned to do, he might not have done it. As soon as she was in the wardrobe with him, he pulled the door tightly closed, sealing them together in the darkness, pulled her close to him with both hands, while at the same time kissing her mouth. Even in the dark, his aim was true.

  Abigail felt something warm and furry brushing against her mouth and went berserk. She burst out of the wardrobe, brushing away from her body wholly imaginary vermin. “Mr. Wayborn!” she gasped. “There is a bat—or a rat—in that wardrobe!”

  Once or twice in Cary’s life, he had come across a female who, inexplicably enough, did not want to be kissed by him, but none of them had ever resorted to inventing small rodents.

  “A rat or a bat,” he repeated sourly. “In the wardrobe, you say?”

  Abigail jumped onto the bed, frantic for a place of safety. “I felt it touching my face, and then—oh, God! It moved.”

  “There isn’t any bat,” he said sharply, now quite annoyed.

  “There is too a bat,” she insisted, treading on the featherbed to keep from falling over. “It’s in that wardrobe, and I am not coming down from this bed until you find it and kill it!”

  Cary began to believe she was serious, which did not improve his temper. No one had ever mistaken his kiss for the attentions of a small flying mammal, and his vanity was wounded. Grimly he climbed out of the wardrobe. “Stand still,” he told her angrily. “Close your eyes.”

  Abigail obeyed. “Oh, God! Is it…Is it on me? Is it in my hair?” she whispered weakly.

  “Quiet!” He climbed up on the bed next to her. For once she didn’t shy away from him. Very gently he took her by the shoulders and tried again, pressing his mouth to her clenched lips.

  Abigail’s eyes popped open.

  “It was not a bat, you silly girl,” he told her. “It was me. I was kissing you.”

  “That’s it exactly. That horrid, furry feeling—” Abigail broke off, mortified. “I beg your pardon, sir!” she breathed. “I didn’t know it was you. You—you were talking about bats earlier at the Dower House. I’m absolutely terrified of bats, you see.”

  He sniffed. “I had noticed a slight aversion.”

  “I thought my heart was going to burst, it was beating so fast,” she said, climbing down from the bed. “I do hate them so.”

  “What? Kisses or bats? I’m not often mistaken for a bat, cousin,” he said sharply. “I think you owe me an apology.”

  “It—it must have been your beard I felt,” she explained, growing red in the face. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Wayborn. It’s just that it was dark, and I wasn’t expecting—” She broke off in confusion. It seemed to her, though perhaps she was wrong, that he was the one who ought to be apologizing. After all, she hadn’t given him leave to kiss her. She had never given anyone leave to kiss her in her whole life.

  “You weren’t expecting it,” he scoffed. “Isn’t this what you came for?”

  Abigail stared at him. “What?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Why did you come to Hertfordshire? To see me again, that’s why. Admit it.”

  Abigail gasped at the man’s unabashed conceit.

  “I know when a woman is attracted to me,” he said. “You’ve been staring at me all afternoon. You stammer like an idiot whenever I get within two feet of you, and if your face got any redder, it would be a tomato.”

  At this moment, Abigail liked Cary about as much as she liked Mrs. Spurgeon’s macaw. Indeed, Cato and Mr. Wayborn had a great deal in common. They were both physically beautiful and unforgivably rude. “I did not come here to see you again, you conceited ape,” she snapped. “You had a house to let. You obviously need the money. I was trying to help you. I had no idea of—of anything else. I thought you were safely married! I came here expecting to meet your wife. I did not expect to be mauled in a wardrobe.”

  Cary shrugged. “It was only a kiss,” he said coolly. “A bit of fun. Most girls enjoy it.”

  “I am not most girls!”

  “Clearly.”

  Absurdly, Abigail felt rejected. She turned away from him to look out the window. Her chin was going wobbly, and she knew she was about to cry.

  “Who in the deuce let that dog up the stairs?” Cary muttered, just as Abigail became aware of a commotion in the hall. In the next moment, the corgi knocked the door open and bounded into the room, barking excitedly, followed closely by a servant girl carrying a jug.

  “That wretched cur is not allowed upstairs, Polly,” Cary said severely. “He eats the plaster off the walls and hides marrow bones under all the pillows.”

  “Yes, sir,” the girl said. “I’ve just come to build the fires, sir, and to tell you that the other carriage is stuck halfway up the drive in the snow. The lady says she can’t walk, sir. She wants to be carried up to the house in a chair. A sedan chair.”

  Muttering under his breath, Cary left the room.

  “I’m Polly, Miss,” said the servant, a sturdily built, blue-eyed lass with red cheeks. “I’ve brought you some hot water.” She set the steaming jug on the washstand and closed the doors of the empty wardrobe. “Whatever you do, Miss,” she said, giggling, “don’t let the master get you in the old press. He got me in there once and the next thing I knew, my skirts was over my head! Of course, he was only eleven at the time and hadn’t a clue what to do with me once he got me. I expect it’d be a different story now,” she added wistfully.

  Abigail washed her face and hands, tuning out Polly’s chatter. She could not flatter herself into thinking Cary Wayborn had kissed her because of some powerful attraction; clearly, molesting young women was simply a matter of course with him. She wished she had never come here. Her hero, the gypsy prince who had rescued her in Piccadilly, was no hero at all.

  Was there even a secret door, she wondered, leading through the wardrobe to the next room, or had that merely been a ploy to get her inside? When Polly was gone, she went into the wardrobe and felt along the back panel. When she pressed it at the top, it sprang back instantly.

  With a sibilant hiss.

  Chapter 5

  “This takes me back,” Mrs. Spurgeon screeched in Cary’s ear. “To be in the arms of a handsome young man again—at my age, too! On my wedding night, my dear husband carried me across the threshold. Of course, I was a mere slip of a girl then. I was light as a feather.”

  “You’re still light as a feather, Mrs. Spurgeon,” Cary muttered, grunting from the exertion of carrying the stout lady through the portico into the house. He would much rather have been carrying Mrs. Nashe, who was a good three stone lighter and extremely attractive. He tried to set his burden on her feet just inside the door, but the woman clung to him, crying, “Oh! Don’t drop me, sir! I break like the finest porcelain when I’m dropped.”

  As he struggled towards the fireplace, his knees buckling under the lady’s weight, he saw Miss Smith enter the room. She looked as though she’d been crying, and he felt a stab of guilt.

  He’d behaved very badly. Abigail was the first likely female to come his way in months, and he had pounced on her like a cad. Living alone in the country had left him more desperate than he cared to admit. Indeed, his housekeeper would have been shocked to know the young master had eyed her broad rear end more than once. He was definitely not a monk by nature, and Miss Smith had some right to consider herself ill-used.

  All the same, he told himself, it was only a kiss. There was no need for the girl to carry on as if he were the villain of a horrid mystery. It was not as though he had made any serious attempt on her virtue. Frankly, she was behaving like a ninny, and he had no patience for ninnies. He could only hope that
Mrs. Nashe would prove more congenial.

  “There you are, Miss Smith,” Mrs. Spurgeon boomed, catching sight of her ward. “Take my muff. It fell in the snow. It’s quite wet. Where’s Evans?”

  “No, don’t!” cried Abigail, darting forward as Cary nearly dumped Mrs. Spurgeon in the chair still occupied by Paggles. He managed to shift to the other chair in time, but lost his balance and fell on top of Mrs. Spurgeon as she landed. His nose lodged briefly in her bosom, and he doubted he would ever get the smell of sweat and talcum out of his nostrils.

  “Oh, this does remind me of my wedding night,” she giggled.

  Cary removed her arms from his neck and leaped to his feet, bowling into Miss Smith, who was standing behind him. Fortunately, the footstool broke her fall.

  “Pardon me,” he said, offering her his hand. She gave him a look of such intense dislike that he flushed, and, withdrawing his hand, he went to help Mrs. Nashe instead. The pretty widow was struggling to carry a very large birdcage nearly filled by a scarlet macaw.

  “What a gorgeous bird,” he said lightly, looking at the woman, not the bird, as he relieved her of the cage. She looked up at him through her dark lashes, which he took for encouragement. “Is it a canary or a canard?” he asked.

  Mrs. Nashe laughed softly. Cary was enchanted by the flirtatious sound.

  “Go and find his perch, Evans,” Mrs. Spurgeon commanded, and a thin gray woman seemed to materialize at her bidding. Cato caught sight of the lady’s maid and shrieked in a fair imitation of his mistress’s voice, “Evans! Where’s my yellow wig?”

  Cary and Mrs. Nashe smiled in shared amusement. The young widow had charming dimples, he noticed, and smooth skin. She was not adverse to a little flirtation at any rate.

  Abigail was not distracted by the bird’s indiscretion. “You are not thinking of letting that thing out of its cage!” she cried, jumping up from the footstool.

  Cato turned his icy blue gaze upon her. Shuddering, Abigail moved closer to Paggles.