One Little Sin Read online

  MacLachlan craned his head round the chaise to look at her. “Rendered you speechless again, have I?”

  Spurred to awareness, she rushed toward him and snatched up the child. “Good God, what are you doing?” she cried, smoothing a hand down Sorcha’s hair. “How dare you? Where did you get her? How long has she—”

  “Whoa! Whoa!” shouted MacLachlan, holding out one palm. “Cease the inquisition, my dear! The child’s been here half an hour or more, and came in of her own accord, so far as I know.”

  “Oh, aye! And you—you—you just kept her?” Esmée was indignant now. “And did nary a thing about it? It did not occur to you to ring for someone? To let someone know you had her?”

  MacLachlan’s eyes flashed darkly. “Did it not occur to you, Miss Hamilton, to keep the child where she belonged?” he returned. “Besides, she’s my child, isn’t she? I can have her wherever I bloody well please, can’t I? This parenthood business runs both ways, my dear. You keep railing at me, and I’ll take the chit down to Crockford’s for a hand of loo.”

  Still drowsy, Sorcha was scrubbing her eyes with her fists now. Esmée felt her face burning. “You—you would not dare!”

  MacLachlan gave her a narrow, sidling look. “You don’t know what I might dare,” he warned. “I told you I wasn’t a fit parent at the outset. Now take the child back to the nursery, and for God’s sake, keep her there. Wait! How the devil did she get in here, anyway?”

  Esmée stopped, her hand on the door, Sorcha still on her hip. “She climbed over her bed somehow,” she admitted. “She was gone when Lydia came in to draw the draperies.”

  “So for all you knew, she’d flung herself down the kitchen stairs, or crawled out one of the windows?” he said. “Is that it?”

  Esmée whirled on him. “I do not need you, sir, to point out my failings!” she exploded. “I am quite well aware of them. Aye, Sorcha could have come to a very bad end. Aye, ’tis my fault, and I am terrified, as I wish you were. But you aren’t, are you? You think it all quite funny, do you not? Well, when you get done laughing, MacLachlan, you may come upstairs and dismiss me if you can stagger your way off that chaise and up the stairs without breaking your damned fool neck!”

  Alasdair stewed in his own juices for the rest of the day, angry with himself and angry with Esmée. She was right, of course. He should have rung for a servant the minute he saw the child. He should have known others would have been worried. In his weakened condition, it simply had not occurred to him—hell and damnation, he knew no more of child care than she obviously did—but he’d be damned if he’d admit it to Esmée, just so she could look down her perfect little nose at him.

  He was almost relieved when his old friend Devellyn sent round a note asking him to meet him at White’s that afternoon. The plan suited Alasdair perfectly. He needed some air, and Dev could always give a chap a good bucking up. Then, after a few hours in Dev’s company, Alasdair would just find something else to amuse him. Perhaps he would fight down his newfound aversion to the female sex and spend a few hours between Inga Karlsson’s perfect, milk white thighs. That would put Miss Esmée Hamilton out of his mind.

  He rang for Ettrick and allowed himself to be bathed and dressed in sullen silence. When at last his cravat was tied to Ettrick’s satisfaction, Alasdair stepped back and studied himself in the mirror. “I apologize, old chap, for last night,” he said quietly. “I was dipping rather deep, and I have the vaguest notion I behaved abominably.”

  Ettrick gave a muted, inward smile. “You took great exception to being carried inside,” he agreed. “Then you did not wish to be undressed. Nor put to bed. Nor left without your whisky. In short, there were all manner of problems.”

  Alasdair set a hand on Ettrick’s shoulder, made another terse apology, then went swiftly down the stairs and into the afternoon light. All manner of problems! What an understatement that was. And the most insurmountable problem of all was Esmée. That was what his anger—and even the quarrel over Sorcha—was all about.

  He was still angry about what he had done yesterday. He didn’t hold himself to a great many standards of decency, but “thou shalt not trifle with servants” was definitely on his list. Then again, she wasn’t exactly a servant, was she? No. It was worse than that. She was a gently bred young lady. She was his own daughter’s sister. And he had begged her to stay, even though he’d known how young and inexperienced she was.

  For those reasons alone, he should be shot. Alasdair started across Princes Street, very nearly dashing out in front of a mail coach. The horses veered, harnesses jangling and hooves ringing wildly on the cobblestones. From the box, the coachman blared his horn. The riders atop jeered down at him as the blue beast careened round the corner.

  Christ! Alasdair stepped back onto the pavement and pulled out his handkerchief. He’d broken into a sweat. He, Mr. Ever-Unflappable, who’d always thought to meet his Maker at the business end of some drunken husband’s dueling pistol, not beneath the wheels of an ignominious mail coach. Which brought on another harrowing thought. Sorcha. He was, whether he wished it or not, responsible for the chit. His life and fortune were no longer his own to squander. What would happen to the child if he lay in the street at this very moment, drawing his last?

  Sorcha would have her lovely sister’s sympathy, his three hundred pounds, that ugly troll of a doll she kept stripping naked, and very little else. Once he was dead, Esmée couldn’t prove the bairn was his—hell, she couldn’t prove it now, and he was still alive. Illegitimate children had no rights save those expressly given them.

  And the only way to do that was with a hawk-nosed, black-garbed solicitor and a ream of paper filled with legal claptrap, all of which he would have to read and sign but never fully comprehend. And that happy thought was the last nail in the coffin of what had otherwise been a promising afternoon—and it more or less extinguished any spark of interest in Inga’s thighs or any other part of her anatomy.

  Alasdair heaved a weary sigh, restored the handkerchief to his pocket, and pressed on to White’s. Upon winding his way to the all-but-empty coffee room, Alasdair was oddly comforted to see his dearest friend seated at a table by the windows. The Marquis of Devellyn was not, however, fully conscious. No matter. Some of Dev’s most enlightening counsel had been given whilst he was either half-asleep or in a drunken stupor.

  There’d been grim rumblings over the years about tossing Devellyn out of White’s altogether, but his father was a duke—a high stickler of a duke—so no one dared do it. Alasdair could see both sides of the argument. The marquis was, admittedly, a tad uncouth. At present, he had managed to tip his chair back on its hind legs whilst propping his own on the tabletop, boots nonchalantly crossed at the ankles. His head was flopped back, his jaw was dropped open, and he was making a sort of snorking sound in the back of his throat, like a rooting pig choking down an apple core.

  Alasdair glanced round, saw no one about, and gave the tabletop a good swift kick underneath. Devellyn’s heels bounced a good inch off the table. He awoke in a sputtering, cursing eruption, his chair clattering forward onto all its legs.

  “You, is it?” he finally managed when his eyes fully focused. “Come looking for trouble?”

  “Aye, well, you know what Granny MacGregor says,” Alasdair mused, sitting down. “High jinks will e’er seek low company.”

  “God spare me Granny MacGregor!” Devellyn muttered. “What’s the time?”

  “Half past twelve. When did you drift off?”

  Devellyn screwed the heels of his hands into his bloodshot eyes. “Don’t recollect.”

  At last, a servant came in. Alasdair sent him scurrying out again. Devellyn looked as though he needed a pot of coffee. “I have shocking news,” he said to the marquis.

  “Nothing shocks me,” Devellyn returned. “And it isn’t news, either. Had dinner with Quin last night. Gave me some tommyrot about the three of you being cursed by a Gypsy fortune-teller.”

  “Aye, well, my curse is
named Sorcha,” admitted Alasdair. Or Esmée, he silently added, depending how one looked at it.

  “I heard,” said the marquis. “What are you going to do?”

  Alasdair lifted both brows. “My duty,” he replied. “Much as it pains my oh-so-brilliant brother.”

  Devellyn shrugged. “Tell Mr. Oh-So-Brilliant to go frig himself,” he suggested. “Then do what you know you must.” He paused to yawn hugely. “Is she a pretty little thing?”

  Slowly, Alasdair nodded. “Quite beautiful, really,” he admitted. “But in a quiet, elegant way.”

  Devellyn looked at him oddly. “Never knew a two-year-old who could be quiet—elegantly or any other way.”

  Alasdair felt his face flush. “You meant Sorcha?” he muttered. “Yes, she’s pretty as a peach. I thought…I thought you meant the sister.”

  “The sister!” Devellyn chuckled. “Thought she was the veriest shrew!”

  Alasdair decided it was time to change the subject. “Where is Sidonie?”

  “Oh, I had to come in a rush on business,” he said. “My phaeton makes her ill now, so she’ll come in Mamma’s barouche next week. They are at Stoneleigh with Thomas and two pecks of yarn. Mama has taught Sid to knit!”

  “Good God!” The notorious Black Angel, scourge of lamplit London, now thoroughly domesticated? Alasdair searched for something constructive to say. “Thomas must love having all that yarn about.”

  The marquis rolled his eyes. “I fear the little feline terror is otherwise engaged. One cannot step a foot into the lawns or gardens without squashing a dead rodent of one ilk or another beneath one’s bootheel. Moles, voles, bats, rats, and worse. Sometimes he drags ’em up the front steps. Fenton fell over one yesterday. Likely heard him screaming all the way to Brighton.”

  Fenton, Dev’s valet, had bad nerves and a weak stomach, but he could tie one hell of a knot in a neckcloth. Alasdair had long wished to lure him away, but honor forbade it. A chap might sleep with another man’s wife and have society look the other way, but stealing a valet was indefensibly bad ton. Fenton would have to suffer the indignities of the countryside.

  At that moment, the coffee was brought in. Alasdair stirred his, and it made him remember how he had done the same thing yesterday morning, and of what had happened next. But that would not do. He needed to stop thinking of Miss Esmée Hamilton in general—and in particular, of how small and round and plump her arse had felt beneath his greedy hand. And of how her lips had tasted; like sweet, molten—

  “Sugar?”

  Alasdair stared across the table.

  Devellyn thrust the bowl at him again. “Sugar? Or not?”

  Alasdair shook his head. “No, thanks,” he managed. “Sidonie is well, I trust?”

  Devellyn hung his head. “Hardly,” he said. “Every morning she’s hung over the chamber pot heaving up her breakfast. It is horrifying, Alasdair. Beyond horrifying.”

  Alasdair lifted one shoulder. “That’s just the way of things, Dev.”

  “Yes, well, I have to watch it, don’t I?” His face was a sudden mask of agony. “Watch it, and know that it is all my doing. Watch it, and know that the worst is yet to come. And that even after the worst is over, I’ll still never be able to keep my cock in my trousers. And then we’ll soon be right back where we started.”

  Alasdair lifted one brow. “Thank you for sharing that cheering thought.”

  But Devellyn was not attending. “Alasdair,” he said, leaning urgently forward, “I am not at all sure I can endure six more months of this.”

  Devellyn, normally about as sensitive as a dray horse, looked undone by his wife’s pregnancy. It was beginning to make Alasdair acutely uneasy. He thought of the mysterious Lady Achanalt, and of what she must have endured. The poor woman had not had her child’s father to lean upon during her confinement. She had had no husband, nor even a lover, with whom to share the worry or the joy—assuming there had been any of the latter. Quite the opposite, her husband had wished her ill. Once again, the guilt stung him.

  “Tell you what, Dev,” he said, leaning across the table. “All this yammering is for teary-eyed females. We ought to approach our troubles like men. We ought to go up to Duke Street, open a bottle of your cheapest brandy, and get ourselves properly pissed.”

  Devellyn was easily persuaded. They set off together in an amiable mood, and reached the marquis’s rambling Mayfair mansion in short order. But almost as soon as the bottle was uncorked and the first dram drained, Alasdair remembered his pledge. His duty. His newfound moral obligation. Moreover, having barely recovered from the previous night’s lark, Alasdair found that the taste of brandy was making his stomach churn.

  “What is the name, Dev, of your solicitors?” he asked. “The ones in the City?”

  Devellyn was studying his empty glass. “Brown and Pennington,” he answered. “Gracechurch Street.”

  MacLachlan business, such as it was, was always handled in Stirling. Alasdair had never had much need for a local firm. “They are discreet?” he asked. “They can be relied upon?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then I must go,” said Alasdair, setting his glass down with an awkward clatter.

  But Dev either did not hear or misunderstood. Clamping a smoldering cheroot between his teeth, the marquis picked up the bottle of brandy and aimed it in the general direction of Alasdair’s glass.

  By five o’clock in the afternoon, Esmée was on her fourth nursemaid and taking little comfort in the process. The latest applicant, Mrs. Dobbs, was a sweet, sunny-natured woman who seemed to have adored and catered to her every charge. Esmée did not have the heart to tell her that Sorcha could eat sweet nursemaids for breakfast and crush anyone’s sunny nature beneath her dainty bootheel well before luncheon. This morning alone, she had upended her porridge onto the carpet, torn off her stockings and shoes in a fit of temper, scrubbed chalk all over the schoolroom walls, then tossed all of Esmée’s extra hairpins in the closestool. Lydia, at least, knew what she was up against.

  Esmée rose from the sofa in MacLachlan’s study, still wishing Wellings had chosen any other room for the interviews. “I shall let you know,” she said, extending a hand to Mrs. Dobbs. “Thank you for coming.”

  She rang for a footman to show the woman out, then tidied her papers and went downstairs to compare notes with Wellings. Perhaps he would have gained some insight which she had missed.

  Regrettably, he had not. When she asked about Lydia, he agreed she might do. Esmée thanked him and turned to go. Just then, there was a knock at the door. Wellings opened it to reveal an attractive but decidedly middle-aged woman in a jaunty purple hat. She stood on the front step, a swath of muslin draped over her arm.

  “Good afternoon, Wellings,” she said brightly. “Is Sir Alasdair in?”

  “No, ma’am.” His voice was warm. “I’m sorry.”

  The lady stepped inside. “Oh, well! I just came by to drop this off.” She handed her armful of muslin to the butler, then extended her gloved hand to Esmée. “How do you do?” she said. “You must be Miss Hamilton, the governess. How pretty you are! I’m Julia Crosby, a friend of Sir Alasdair’s.”

  Stunned nearly speechless, Esmée took the hand. “Yes, I—I am,” she said. “Miss Hamilton, I mean.”

  “How delightful!” Mrs. Crosby returned her attention to Wellings. “Will you see that Ettrick gets that, please? He’ll know what to do with it.”

  The muslin sleeve obviously concealed clothing, probably the coat and trousers MacLachlan had left behind, though the woman was too tactful to say so. “Thank you, ma’am,” said the butler. “Will you take tea or some refreshment before you go?”

  “Only if Miss Hamilton will join me?”

  Esmée opened her mouth, then closed it. “I should be pleased to,” she finally said.

  Mrs. Crosby smiled again, and it lit up the room. Esmée had no trouble believing she was an actress, for she was beautiful and possessed what could only be called a commanding presence. Sh
e did not, however, look like Sir Alasdair’s type. She looked older, even, than Esmée’s mother had been, and was more than a little on the plump side, with a look of good humor about her eyes. Somehow, Esmée had imagined MacLachlan’s taste ran more toward thin, catty, bad-tempered opera dancers.

  She let her eyes drift over the woman again and felt a stab of envy. How dare MacLachlan kiss her with such passion when, not two days earlier, he’d been bedding someone who seemed so…well, so pleasant?”

  Because he could. Because she’d let him. Encouraged him.

  Abruptly, Mrs. Crosby cleared her throat.

  “Well, then,” said Esmée with false brightness. “Shall we go up to the drawing room?”

  Together, they started up the stairs while Wellings went off to order tea.

  “I hear Sir Alasdair was recently seen shopping in the Strand for children’s furniture,” remarked Mrs. Crosby, her tone mischievous. “Enough for an army of children, ’tis said. Quite a stir that’s apt to cause.”

  Esmée glanced over her shoulder. “He was supposed to have sent Wellings,” she answered. “I cannot think why he didn’t.”

  “Yes, Wellings is the soul of discre—”

  Suddenly, on the stairs behind her, Esmée heard a startled cry. She spun about to see Miss Crosby sinking to her knees, one hand clawing into the carpet, the other clutching her abdomen.

  “Wellings!” Esmée cried. “Wellings, come back!”

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Crosby on a moan. “Oh, God!” Her face was white as death. Her jaunty hat had tumbled off and down the stairs.

  Esmée knelt and clutched at the woman’s hand. “What is it, Mrs. Crosby? Can you tell me?”

  Suddenly, Wellings reappeared, one of the footmen on his heels. He took one look at Mrs. Crosby’s face and glanced up at Esmée. “Take the back stairs,” he said. “Tell Hawes to fetch a doctor. Now.”

  “Strauss,” rasped Mrs. Crosby, wincing. “Dr. Strauss. In Harley Street. Please.”

  The next few minutes were a flurry of activity. Esmée did as she was bid, sending Hawes across town on MacLachlan’s best horse. Somehow, the men got Mrs. Crosby into bed and sent for Mrs. Henry. The elderly woman trundled in and out, looking very grim and sending the footmen scurrying up and down the stairs for all manner of potions and linens.