Before Jemma could properly express her disgust and outrage Mr Speer’s arrival had been announced by Manwell. That information had stunned Jemma into silence. A moment later she’d bolted with just one horrifying thought in her mind: she had discovered the identity of another recipient of her guardian’s scandalous letters.
‘Mr Speer has simply come to tell Theo what he thinks of him…and me…’ Jemma finally told Maura on a heavy sigh. ‘One cannot blame him for that.’ A moment later her spirit had again rallied. ‘I wish he had just discarded the stupid, stupid letter and forgotten all about it as Philip Duncan did.’
* * *
‘Ah…do come in, Speer. Glad to receive your message and your prompt visit, sir.’ Theodore Wyndham’s voice held a high note of confidence as he continued to nonchalantly pose against the high mantelpiece with an arm slung along its marble shelf.
Theo now appeared so indolent that it would have been hard to imagine a more docile individual. Never would one have guessed that just moments ago this gentleman had been simmering with temper whilst listening to his ward violently berate him for interfering in her life.
Jemma had discovered, sooner than Theo would have liked, his scheme to get her married before she completely ran through the Bailey inheritance. She’d turned up like a whirlwind, moments before Marcus Speer was due, making Theo fret that she might erupt in hysterics just as the fellow arrived. He’d been worrying needlessly. When his butler had announced Mr Speer’s presence in the hallway it was as though an invisible hand had dashed a bucket of water over her. She’d drawn a shuddering breath, taken on a ghastly pallor, then quietly fled from Theo’s study via the connecting door to the library as though the hounds of hell snapped at her heels.
Now, as Theo watched his very welcome visitor close the door, then begin to bear down on him with a startling speed and purpose, he surged upright and fiddled at the knot in his cravat. He could tell, before a conversation had passed between them, that he’d misjudged this man’s reaction to his bold suggestion. Speer’s swift steps cracked against the boards like percussion pistol shots and his expression looked lethal. Marcus’s refusal to return a greeting, or say anything at all, added to the air of menace emanating from him, and Theo strove not to betray by look or manner his alarm and disappointment.
So far he’d received just one reply; it had come from this gentleman and had been delivered just hours ago. From its few lines he’d only been able to glean that Marcus demanded an audience that very afternoon. Theo had been happy to grant him his wish and had, whilst pacing to and fro excitedly awaiting his arrival, persuaded himself that the fellow was eager because he still harboured a tenderesse for Jemma despite the fact that, in five years, she’d turned from a saucy minx in to a tiresome bluestocking.
Along with the rest of the ton, he’d seen gazetted Marcus Speer’s engagement to Deborah Cleveland. Theo had dismissed it as an irrelevance. His letters had been ready, and he’d despatched every last one. Now, with Speer within striking distance of him, he belatedly paid heed to two vital facts: the fellow had a far superior height and breadth to his own and was renowned as a talented pugilist and, secondly, Deborah Cleveland was, undoubtedly, younger, sweeter, and richer than was his cousin Jemma.
* * *
‘How do I look?’ Jemma asked breathlessly as she pulled her coat this way and that to straighten it. Her hands next darted to her abundant locks to try to bring some order to the ruffled chestnut waves. ‘Am I presentable? Are my cheeks stained with tears?’ Jemma was of above average height for a young woman and of necessity dipped her head to gaze at her reflection in the glass on the dressing chest. Watery jade eyes were rapidly blinked to clear them and briskly she rubbed at her complexion with her fingertips to erase any sign that she’d been crying. Her appearance had suffered during the past hours due to her acute distress. But now, having conquered the worst of her shock, and brought her wrath under control—for the time being, she certainly had not finished with Theo!—she was ready to set another gentleman straight on the matter of her guardian’s shocking plot, and her lack of a part in it.
‘I don’t think you should do that!’ Maura whispered with a throb of foreboding. To her mind Jemma was still in a stupor over it all and not thinking straight. Having listened, drop-jawed, to Jemma’s determination to loiter somewhere outside in Hanover Square in order to ambush Mr Speer as he left the house, Maura could only foresee such an action bringing more trouble down on her cousin’s head. She could sympathise with Jemma’s need to immediately set the record straight, but such a highly irregular scene was bound to be spotted by a chinwag who later would gleefully pass on what they’d witnessed.
Graham Quick had no doubt already passed on in the gentlemen’s clubs what Philip Duncan had told him. Soon those fellows’ wives would know too that negotiations were underway to get Miss Jemma Bailey a husband. If it was reported that Jemma had accosted a gentleman known to have once offered for her, and one who had recently become engaged to another lady, her name would be mud. The Clevelands were an important and popular family at the heart of the ton. Jemma would be labelled a shameless hussy who was trying to steal Deborah’s fiancé. She would be cut dead by everyone, and her disgrace would haunt her for very many years.
‘If you think waiting quietly outside to state my case the greater risk to the Bailey name than making a scene within these walls I shall simply go back to Theo’s study and say what I must now. It will be a nasty argument with your brother, I promise you. If Theo is made to look a fool in front of his visitor, so be it. He deserves all that is coming to him.’
‘No! You must not do that! It would never do to act so disrespectfully.’ Maura gulped in panic. ‘Theo is your guardian…your family, after all.’
‘Indeed he is,’ Jemma agreed bitterly. ‘Yet he has shown me no respect or consideration in acting so sly and underhand.’
Now that Theo had started scheming to arrange a marriage of convenience for Jemma it would be wise to leave it to him alone to finish it, so Maura thought. People would consider it an appropriate duty for a guardian to try to arrange his ward’s future security by marrying her off, especially when the woman in question had her début a good few years behind her. Maura relayed that advice to Jemma, then let out a doleful sigh when it simply caused her cousin to frown and violently shake her head.
‘Oh, you’re too late,’ Maura cried joyfully, interrupting her cousin who had been ready to quit the room. Maura had been standing close to the window and, twitching the curtain aside, she peeked at the top of a dark glossy head and impressively broad shoulders as Marcus swiftly descended the stone steps and strode off.
‘He is gone already?’ Jemma cried in disappointment. She darted to the window and craned her neck to check for herself that her quarry was on the move.
Maura’s sigh of relief that the immediate threat was removed only fired Jemma’s determination to impress on Marcus the truth. Now that she felt more composed, she regretted having let shock and humiliation cow her. She ought to have stayed in Theo’s study instead of scampering away like a frightened little girl. She’d had more courage at seventeen, she inwardly scolded. Then she’d brazenly borne the brunt of her papa’s chastisement, and the disapproval of the ton. She’d deserved both, too, for she’d believed her heart, her loyalty, belonged to another man when she’d flirted outrageously with Marcus during that heady Season when she’d made her début. She had led him on, taken everything he had offered as her friend and suitor, and now, older and wiser, she felt thoroughly ashamed of her selfish behaviour.
This time she was innocent of any wrongdoing, yet she had crumpled and cravenly run away instead of immediately mounting her defence and protesting against the injury done her.
