"Fine, go to Tortola. Free all your --- yes, your --- slaves, Lyonel. Do what you believe best for them."
"I must find out more about the situation," he said more to himself than to Lucia.
"Then speak to Diana."
"I don't knowShe probably does know this Bemis fellow and how the Mendenhall plantation is run. However ---"
"Doubtless she does. Of course, she is just a silly young girl, probably doesn't really understand all the ramifications ---"
"Don't be a bedlamite, Lucia! Diana is no fool, she ---" He broke off, and his frown was ferocious.
Lucia smiled. Ah, Lyonel, she thought, your days with a mistress are numbered. Your warped belief that all women are like Charlotte is losing its grip.
Lyonel looked at his favorite relative. The old tartar was just that, but he knew that even though she ruled her estate in Yorkshire, only twenty miles from his, with an iron hand, it was with a velvet glove. She was never unfair. He didn't like the thought of having to step into her slippers. He never wanted Lucia to die.
"Have I told you, Lucia, that I am most fond of you?"
Lucia blinked and felt an overflowing of love so intense that for a moment even her sharp tongue was stilled. "Yes," she said, her voice soft, "you have, not recently, of course, but you have in the distant past."
"Allow me to apologize for my past relapses, and tell you that I am most fond of you."
"And I am equally fond of you, my boy. You really are a lot like your grandfather. He was quite a man, and a gentleman as well." She would have liked to tell him that she wished she hadn't been such a fool so many years before, that she would give everything now to have wed the fourth Earl of Saint Leven. Then Lyonel would be her grandson, not just her grandnephew. But life was filled with foolish decisions, and Lucia very rarely allowed herself to wallow in self-recriminations.
"How is your health, Lucia?" He'd blurted the words out and now looked appalled at what he'd asked, but Lucia understood. Death, even of an unknown relative, was a shock.
"I shall live to dangle your children on my knee."
"I should live that long," Lyonel said, acid back in his voice.
"Everyone makes mistakes, Lyonel. The trick is to accept them and continue on, not to condemn all of one's fellow men."
"Does that also encompass one's fellow women?"
"Don't be an ass."
"I believe that is one of Diana's compliments."
"Then you must work on a cure for the malady."
"What I shall do, Lucia, is take myself off."
He paused, then strode to her, bent down, and kissed her parchment cheek. "You old martinet, do not overtax yourself."
She grinned at him and he saw that several of her back teeth were missing. Age, he thought, damnable, inevitable age and death. He didn't like it. The devil, he wouldn't accept it, at least not with Lucia.
Lyonel was sitting apart at White's, lost in a brown study, when the Earl of March, Julian St. Clair, came upon him.
"What you need," his friend said, quirking a brow, "is a good fight at Gentleman Jackson's. Come along, I shall see to it myself. And I shall be most careful not to destroy your beautiful face."
"Go to the devil, St. Clair," Lyonel said, but he went and all thoughts of death, responsibility for a hundred human souls, were temporarily shelved in his mind.
Diana had not a bit of interest in any of the five gentlemen who were assiduously sending her flowers, inviting her to drive in the part, and otherwise making nuisances of themselves, at least in her young eyes.
"I want to go home, Aunt," she said one evening, a rare occasion when they were not engaged somewhere. "I do not belong here. I am still cold most of the time. My tan is fading and soon I will look like a white lily, like all of those silly debutantes. They don't like me, Aunt. They think I'm some sort of oddity. They have no conversation, except to go on and on about Lord This or Lord That. And as for the gentlemen, all they wish to do is spew compliments at me, as if I wanted to hear their nonsense, and try in the most ridiculous ways possible to determine how much money I will have upon my marriage. And," Diana finished up, triumphant with disgust, "when they don't think I'm noticing, they ogle my bosom."
So does Lyonel, Lucia thought, but she didn't hark to that. Instead she said, "Lyonel doesn't whisper nonsense in your ears."
"No, indeed he tries to burn them off with his insults. Oh, very well, he isn't like the others."