“Please bring me my breakfast,” Melisande said, and went back to the breakfast room to wait. Had Vale already left the house, or did he always sleep this late?
After a solitary meal shared with Mouse, Melisande turned her mind to other matters. She sent for the cook and found an elegant yellow and white sitting room to plan the week’s meals.
The cook was a small, wiry woman, her face thin and lined with concern, her graying black hair scraped back into a tight knot at the crown of her head. She perched on the edge of her seat, leaning forward and nodding rapidly as Melisande spoke to her. Cook didn’t smile—her face didn’t seem to know how—but the tight purse of her mouth relaxed as Melisande praised the tasty coddled eggs and hot chocolate. In fact, Melisande was just feeling that she’d established a nice understanding with the woman when a loud commotion interrupted their discussion. Both women looked up. Melisande realized that she could hear barking at the center of raised male voices.
Oh, dear. She smiled politely at the cook. “If you will excuse me?”
She rose and walked unhurriedly to the breakfast room where she found the makings of a pantomime drama. Sprat stood gaping, Oaks’s beautiful white wig was askew, and he was talking rapidly, but unfortunately in a voice that couldn’t be heard. Meanwhile, her husband of only one day was waving his arms and shouting as if impersonating a particularly angry windmill. The object of his ire stood resolute only inches from Lord Vale’s toes, barking and growling.
“Where did this mongrel come from?” Vale was demanding. “Who let it in? Can’t a man have breakfast without having to defend his bacon from vermin?”
“Mouse,” Melisande said quietly, but it was loud enough for the terrier. With one last triumphant arf! Mouse came trotting over to sit on her slippers and pant.
“Do you know this mongrel?” Lord Vale asked, wild-eyed. “Where did it come from?”
Oaks was straightening his wig, muttering under his breath, while Sprat stood on one leg.
Melisande’s eyes narrowed. Really! After making her wait an hour. “Mouse is my dog.”
Lord Vale blinked, and she couldn’t help noticing that even confused and out of sorts, his blue eyes were startling in their beauty. He lay on me last night, she thought, feeling the heat pool low in her belly. His body became one with mine. He is my husband at last.
“But it ate my bacon.”
Melisande looked down at Mouse, who panted up at her adoringly, his mouth curvedrea mouth as if in a grin. “He.”
Lord Vale ran a hand through his hair, dislodging his tie. “What?”
“He,” Melisande enunciated clearly, then smiled. “Sir Mouse is a gentleman dog. And he’s particularly found of bacon, so really you ought not to tempt him with it.”
She snapped her fingers and sailed from the breakfast room, Mouse on her heels.
“GENTLEMAN DOG?” Jasper stared at the door where his new wife had just swanned from the room. She’d looked remarkably elegant for a woman being followed by a foul little beast. “Gentleman dog? Have you ever heard of a gentleman dog?” he appealed to the males remaining in the room.
His footman—a tall, lanky fellow with a name like a nursery rhyme that Jasper couldn’t remember at the moment—scratched under his wig. “My lady seemed right fond of that dog.”
Oaks had put himself together by now, and he cast a rather fishy eye on his master. “The viscountess had specific instructions for the animal when she broke her fast an hour ago, my lord.”
Which was when it finally dawned on Jasper that he might’ve been an ass. He winced. To be fair, he’d never been particularly quick in the morning. But even for him, shouting at his new wife on the day after their marriage was a bit beyond the pale.
“I shall instruct Cook to make another breakfast for you, my lord,” Oaks said.
“No.” Jasper sighed. “I’m no longer hungry.” He stared meditatively at the door a minute more before deciding that he hadn’t the eloquence at the moment to apologize to his wife. Some might call him a coward, but discretion was the better part of valor when it came to women. “Have my horse brought ’round.”
“My lord.” Oaks bowed and whispered from the room. Amazing how lightly the man moved on his feet.
The young footman still stood in the breakfast room. He looked as if he wanted to say something.
Jasper sighed. He hadn’t even had his tea before the dog had spoiled his meal. “Yes?”
“Should I tell her ladyship that you’re off?” the fellow asked, and Jasper felt like a cad. Even the footman knew better than he how to behave with a wife.
“Yes, do.” And then he avoided his footman’s eyes and strode from the room.
A little more than half an hour later, Jasper was riding through the crowded streets of London, headed to a town house in Lincoln Inns Fields. The sun was out again, and the populace seemed determined to enjoy the fair weather, even at this early hour. Street venders were stationed at strategic corners, bawling their wares, fashionable ladies strolled arm in arm, and carriages lumbered by like ships in full sail.
Six months ago, when he and Sam Hartley had questioned survivors of the Spinner’s Falls massacre, they hadn’t been able to contact every soldier. Many had gone missing. Many were old men, crippled and reduced to begging and thieving. They lived their lives on the edge—the possibility that they might fall off and disappear at any moment wh=" any moas a real one. Or perhaps the danger was simply fading into oblivion, not so much dying as ceasing to live. In any case, many had been impossible to locate.
Then there were the survivors like Sir Alistair Munroe. Munroe hadn’t actually been a soldier in the 28th but a naturalist attached to the regiment and charged with discovering and recording the animal and plant life for His Majesty. Of course, when the regiment had been attacked at Spinner’s Falls, the hostile Indians hadn’t made a distinction between soldier and civilian. Munroe had been in the group captured with Jasper and suffered the same fate as those who’d been eventually ransomed. Jasper shuddered at the thought as he halted his mare, letting a team of shouting sedan-chair bearers past. Not everyone who had been captured and force-marched through the dark and mosquito-infested woods of America had come back alive. And those who had survived were not the same men as they’d been before. Sometimes Jasper thought he’d left a piece of his soul in those dark woods. . . .