"Wizards Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coulter Catherine)

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He walked directly to the older man who'd danced with her, and bowed. "Sir, I am Nicholas Vail and I would like to dance with-" Nicholas stalled. Could she be his wife? Surely not. His daughter? "Ah, this young lady, sir."

The man gave him a brief bow in return. "I know who you are. As for the young lady, she has already promised this waltz to my son."

Nicholas flashed a quick look at a young man around his own age, smiling at something the girl said to him. He looked up, cocked his head to one side, and nodded to Nicholas. Then the girl turned to look at him, straight on, her eyes never leaving his face. So joyous she'd been, but now her expression was remote and unreadable. But he saw something in her eyes, something-knowledge, secrets, he didn't know. Ah, but he would, and soon. Then the young man spoke to her and she placed her hand on his forearm and let him lead her to the dance floor. She did not look back at him.

It seemed to Nicholas that she'd recognized him. Well, he knew her, so it made sense she would recognize him-but he just wasn't sure. She'd never met him, but her eyes-the light-filled blue, just as he'd known they would be-yes, he'd found her, even though he didn't yet know her name.

The older man cleared his throat and Nicholas realized he'd continued to stare after her. He said to Nicholas with amusement, "I am Ryder Sherbrooke. This is my wife, Sophia Sherbrooke."

Nicholas bowed to the woman, plump and pretty, her mouth full and soft, but she wasn't smiling, she was looking at him with a good deal of suspicion.

He felt huge relief. She wasn't his wife. He bowed to Sophia Sherbrooke again. "Ma'am, a pleasure. I am Nicholas Vail, Lord Mountjoy. Your husband is an excellent dancer."

She squeezed her husband's arm, laughed, and said, "My husband tells me he was born with accomplished feet. When we were younger he would let me dance on his accomplished feet. I was known as the most graceful female of the season."

Nicholas was charmed.

Ryder said, "As I said, I have heard of you, Lord Mount-joy, and I am not at all certain I wish you to meet my ward, much less dance with her."

His ward? Nicholas admitted to surprise. He hadn't imagined anything like this.

"I have not been in England long enough to earn a reputation to alarm you, Mr. Sherbrooke. May I inquire why you feel concern about me?"

"Your father was a man I would have gladly challenged to a duel had he but once crossed the line rather than always toeing near it. I suppose I am foisting his deficiencies upon you, his son, grossly unfair of me, I know, but there it is."

"To be honest, sir," Nicholas said slowly, "I escaped him as soon as I could. I rarely saw him after he wedded his second wife, which was during my fifth year."

An eyebrow went up. "I understand his three younger sons would gladly stick a knife in your throat." Ryder paused a moment, looked at the young man searchingly. "You are aware, I assume, that Richard, your eldest half brother, feels the title should be his?"

Nicholas shrugged. "Any or all of them are free to try for my gullet, sir, but I am a difficult man to dispatch. Others have tried."

Ryder believed him. He looked big and hard, a young man who'd had to make his own way, a man who knew who and what he was. He watched Nicholas Vail look yet again toward Rosalind, who was laughing, as she always did when she waltzed. Ryder said, "It grows late, sir. After this waltz, I am taking my family home."

"May I call upon you tomorrow morning?"

Ryder looked at him appraisingly. Nicholas felt the weight of that look, wondered if he would be found acceptable. Of course he'd heard of the Sherbrookes. But to find this couple acting as her guardians, he simply didn't understand, and he knew to his gut that complications would now billow up like a raging wind. How had it come about?

Ryder slowly nodded. "We are staying at the Sherbrooke town house, on Putnam Square."

"Thank you, sir. Ma'am, a pleasure. Until tomorrow, then." Nicholas strode from the ballroom, oblivious of the guests who moved out of his way.

Ryder Sherbrooke said to his wife, "I wonder what this young man is about."

"Rosalind is beautiful. It is probably the simple interest of a man in a woman."

"I doubt there is anything at all simple about Nicholas Vail. I wonder who and what he is."

"If he is a fortune hunter, he will learn soon enough that Rosalind isn't an heiress, and he will look elsewhere."

"Do you think he is in need of an heiress?"

Sophie said, "I've heard it said his father gave him naught but a title and a dilapidated property, and he did it apurpose. I wonder why. Is this young man in debt? I don't know. But I do know, Ryder, that pride and arrogance meld very nicely together in him, don't you think?"

Ryder laughed. "Yes, they do. I wonder if he realizes he is all the talk of London."

"Oh, yes, of course he does. I imagine it amuses him."

Neither of them noticed Rosalind staring after Nicholas Vail, who looked neither to the right nor to the left as he strode from the ballroom.

Nicholas was accepting his cane and hat from a liveried footman, palming him a shilling for his service, when a voice said, "Well, well, if it isn't the new Earl of Mountjoy, the sixth, I believe, in the flesh. Hello, brother."

Nicholas fancied he remembered that voice from his boyhood, but it took a moment for him to recognize that the young man facing him was his eldest half brother, Richard Vail. It occurred to him in that moment, staring at the young man, that he minded very much sharing his name. He looked into Richard's brilliant eyes, dark as his own, nearly black, and they glittered-with anger? No, it was more than simple anger, it was impotent rage. Richard Vail was not happy. Nicholas smiled at the young man. "It's a pity your memory has failed you, and here you are so very young-I am the seventh Earl of Mountjoy, not the sixth, and the eighth Viscount Ashborough."

"Damn you, you shouldn't be either!"

"And you, Richard, should consider growing up."

The rage smoldered as Richard's hands clenched, unclenched. A knife to the gullet? Surely a possibility. Richard was a handsome young man, nearly Nicholas's size, big enough to look down on many of his peers. Richard said, "I am a man, more of a man than you will ever be. I am welcome in London. You are not. You do not belong here. Go back to your savage life. I heard you came from China. That is where you have lived, isn't it?'

Nicholas smiled and turned to look at another young man standing at Richard's elbow. "I recognize you. You are Lancelot, are you not?"

They could not have looked less like brothers. Unlike either Richard or Nicholas, this young man was slight, fair, and pale, the image of a delicate poet. Nicholas looked at his artist's hands, with their long fingers and beautiful shape. He wondered what his father had thought of this pretty son, who resembled his mother, Miranda, if Nicholas remembered aright.

Out of his pretty mouth came a petulant voice. "Everyone knows I am called Lance."

Nicholas drawled, "No knight then?"

"Make no jest with me, sir. It was paltry."

Nicholas raised a dark brow. "I? Certainly I wouldn't consider a jest with you. You are my family, after all."

"Only by bitter and unjust circumstance," Richard said. "We don't want you here. No one wants you here."

"How very strange," Nicholas said easily. "I am now the head of the Vail family, I am your eldest brother. You should welcome me, delight in my company, look to me for advice and counsel."

Lancelot made a rude noise.

"You are nothing more than a ne'er-do-well adventurer, sir, who should probably be in Newgate."

"An adventurer, hmmm. That has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?" Nicholas smiled at both young men impartially, strangers, both of them, and they hated him, doubtless made to hate him by his father and their mother. They'd been innocent children once; he remembered them from their last visit to Wyverly Chase, just before his grandfather had died. He'd been an ancient twelve. He said slowly, "I remember there are three of you. Where is-what is his name?"

"Aubrey," Richard said, tight-lipped. "He studies at Oxford."

Oxford, Nicholas thought; it sounded alien, it felt alien. "Do give Aubrey my best," he said, nodding to Richard and Lancelot.

"I heard you were staying at Grillon's," Richard called after him. "A pity Father didn't leave you the town house."

Lancelot snickered.

Nicholas turned back. "To be honest with you, Wyverly Chase is more than enough. I am relieved that decrepit Georgian pile on Epson Square wasn't entailed to me. The repairs alone must cost you at least three nights' winnings at the gaming table, if you ever win, that is."

Lancelot said, "Father wouldn't have left you Wyverly Chase either if it hadn't been entailed. A pity now that it will molder into the ground."

"It moldered long before my arrival," Nicholas said.

Lancelot said, "And you will not be able to do anything about it. Everyone knows you're poor as a rooster catcher on the heath."

"I don't believe I am familiar with that term," Nicholas said.

"That's right, you are not a proper Englishman, are you?" Richard said, sneering. "It's a boy who handles the birds for cockfights, worthless little beggars with scarred hands from the birds biting them. We heard you sailed in from faraway China. We heard you even have several Chinaman servants."

Nicholas gave them both a schoolmaster's approving nod. "It is good that you listen. Myself, I recommend listening, I have always found it useful." As he turned to leave through the front door, held open by the same footman-all ears-he added, "Actually, I have always found listening more useful than talking. You might consider that."

Nicholas heard Lancelot huff out an angry breath. Richard's eyes were black with rage, his face flushed. Interesting how completely their father had bent their minds into hatred of him, Nicholas thought as he strode down the broad wide steps to the walkway. He remembered Richard had been a happy boy, and Lance a cherub, all pink and white and smiling, content to sit at his mother's feet whilst she played the harp. As for Aubrey, he'd been so small when Nicholas had last seen him-a little boy who loved nothing more than to hurl a bail and run up and down the long corridor, yelling at the top of his lungs. Nicholas remembered how he'd nearly gone tumbling down the front stairs. Nicholas had scooped him up just in time. He also remembered Miranda screaming at him, accusing him of trying to murder her son, and Aubrey between them, crying and afraid. His father, Nicholas re-called, had believed it, and taken a whip to him, cursed him, and called him a murdering little bastard. Nicholas's grandfather had been too ill to intervene, and he would have if he'd even been aware that his son and family had come to witness his death. Sweet hell, who knew why such memories burrowed into a man's brain?

There were at least two dozen carriages lining both sides of the street, both the drivers and the horses appearing to be asleep. It was a good long walk back to Grillon's Hotel. Not a single miscreant appeared in his path.

At the Sherbrooke breakfast table the following morning, a kipper poised on her fork, Rosalind asked Ryder, "Sir, who was that dark gentleman who wanted to dance with me last night? The young one with long hair black as All Hallows' Eve?"

Ryder was a fool to believe Nicholas Vail hadn't made an impression on her though she hadn't said a thing about him on their way home the previous evening. He said easily, "The young man is the Earl of Mountjoy, newly arrived on our shores, some say from faraway China."

"China," Rosalind said, stretching it out, as if savoring the feel of it on her tongue. "How vastly romantic that sounds."

Grayson Sherbrooke grunted with disgust. "You girls- you'd say that riding in a tumbrel to the guillotine, shoulders squared, sounded romantic."

Rosalind gave Grayson a big grin and made a chopping motion with her hand. "You obviously have no soul, Grayson."