Vitor laughed. “I know the ladies are probably too innocent for your liking, Wes. But their fathers are all deep in the pockets. Late-night play should be good.”
“Ah, deep play. Of course. Why did you invite me, Vitor?”
“I didn’t. Father did and told you I had. I received his letter only the day before I departed Lisbon.”
Wesley drew up his mount.
Vitor continued, allowing Ashdod full rein. “I hear Mother is eager for grandchildren. Perhaps she hopes that, trapped in proximity with eligible maidens, you will find a bride.”
“Father wishes to force a reconciliation between us,” Wesley said behind him.
Vitor drew the gray to a halt and looked over his shoulder. “For what it’s worth to you, I am glad Father did it. I am pleased to see you, Wes.”
“After seven years, I should hope you would be.”
But it had not been seven years since Vitor had last heard his brother’s voice, only four. Wesley, the arrogant fool, did not know he knew that.
“Ah well, I could not possibly resist the invitation.” Wesley glanced about the woods so far from his fashionable world of London society. “Town is a dull bore these days, and Mother pesters.” His eyes glimmered. “Why you couldn’t have been born first instead of me . . .”
“Fate is a comfortable mistress, Wes, if you accept her demands.” Fate, the mistress that four years ago had put him the hands of mercenaries who turned him over to the British to be tortured.
“Listen to the monk teaching me about mistresses.” Wesley chuckled. “Speaking of . . . The prince seems unreconciled to his matrimonial prospects. Was this party forced upon him?”
“Ask him yourself.” Never had Wesley acknowledged aloud Vitor’s relationship to Portuguese royalty. But he knew that their mother had slept in another man’s bed and bore a son from it. The Marquess of Airedale, an indulgent father to both his sons, had not balked when Vitor had left England at the age of fifteen to live in the house of the man who had cuckolded him. On the single occasion that Vitor had returned to England as a man, the marquess had welcomed him.
Vitor understood his elder brother. However much Wesley cared for him, he resented him because of their father’s love. But he hated him too, for a seven-year-old grievance that he could not apparently forget or forgive. Vitor knew this because, during the war when he had been a prisoner of his own country, accused of treason, he had heard it in his elder brother’s wintry voice when Wesley tortured him.
RAVENNA TRAILED HER toes along the rug as she neared the drawing room door, digging furrows in the pattern. With the world outside the castle a swirling mass of snow and wind, she could not avoid the humans within unless she wished to remain trapped in her bedchamber. And Petti and Sir Beverley would scold. But she delayed as well as she reasonably could.
She smiled at the footman stationed at the drawing room door and peeked around his shoulder.
“To our host!” Sir Henry, the Thoroughbred breeder, exclaimed. “May he prosper!”
“Hear hear!”
Guests raised their glasses toward the prince. He stood resplendent in the center of the room, wearing collars to his chin and enormous lapels. Eyes red and wandering, and grin sloppy, he bowed with drunken excess.
The Earl of Whitebarrow, a tall, golden-haired man of arrogant eye and patrician nose, cast Ravenna a swift, assessing glance. Young Mr. Martin Anders stared intensely at her from beneath an unkempt forelock. The skin around his right eye was red and shadowed, as though he’d been struck with a fist. His father, the Baron of Prunesly and a renowned biologist, peered at her above his spectacles, then frowned.
Ravenna looked for the delicately dark Mademoiselle Dijon and found her beside her father, the general. Her tiny white dog huddled in her lap, decorated with ribbons that matched her mistress’s gown. At least one person in the party kept good company.
Luncheon had been a purgatory of idle conversations, sly, silent assessments from the women, and peculiar perusals by the men. Dinner would surely be the same. And still dozens more of both must be endured before Sir Beverley released her from this prison. She must find some other activity swiftly.
Activity away from the stables, preferably.
Sir Beverley had spoken with the prince’s head groom. No stable hand, coachman, or other servant accompanying any of the guests resembled the man that had pinned Ravenna to the ground the night before. A tiny village flanked the fortress, but the groom said that the villagers were few and he knew them all well. Chevriot had been the property of Prince Sebastiao’s family for a century through marriage to a French heiress. The villagers here were loyal to their absentee overlords and wary of strangers.
Nevertheless, when the sun rose Ravenna had waded through falling snow to the village and into every craftsman’s shop, searching. If she confronted her attacker in the daylight, publicly, the prince would be obliged to take some action against him. There were some advantages to being considered a lady, after all.
But she found no man with broad shoulders, indigo eyes, and a laughing crease in his left cheek that made her stomach tingle. With snow clinging to her stockings and her hems encased in ice, she returned to the chateau out of sorts.
This party did not aid matters any.
Across the drawing room, the blond Whitebarrow twins were moving toward mousy Ann Feathers as though casually strolling. But ill intent lurked in their pale blue eyes. The hair on the back of Ravenna’s neck stood up.
Miss Ann Feathers lifted her round gaze from the ground and managed a curtsy for the twins. Then the torture began, like nasty little girls plucking the wings off a butterfly. Ravenna did not need to hear them speak to know the gist of their conversation. Miss Feathers’s round cheeks turned red as beets, her eyes rounder yet, and the champagne began to dance in her glass as her hand trembled. She passed a palm self-consciously over the ruffles at her throat and Lady Penelope’s smile hardened.
A little growl rumbled at the back of Ravenna’s throat. Pushing away from the wall, she moved toward the trio.
A hand touched her elbow and she turned to meet Lady Iona McCall’s regard, as blue as the breast of a damselfly in summer.
“Miss Caulfield,” she said quietly, a musical lilt in her clear voice. “I admire yer courage.” She cast a swift glance at the Whitebarrow sisters torturing Miss Feathers. “But I’d be takin’ care no’ to cross anybody this early in the game.”
Ravenna laughed. “Well, it’s refreshing to know that someone else realizes this is a game.”
“Aye. ’Tis a competition, for certaint.” Lady Iona’s flaming upswept hair sparkled with diamonds in the candlelight. Daughter to a widowed duchess, the Highland beauty was an heiress and had a better chance of winning the prince’s admiration than any other maiden present. “But there be prizes a clever leddy might consider beside his royal highness,” she added. Ravenna followed her amused gaze across the room in the other direction.
Lord Prunesly and his daughter Cecilia stood by the hearth with two men, the Earl of Case and another with his back to her.
“Lord Case is handsome, it’s true,” Ravenna stated the obvious.
“Aye. But his brither’s handsomer still,” Iona said upon a purr of delight. “We’ve only spoken once, yet I think I may be in luve wi’ him already.”
“Is that him?” He certainly made a fine figure from the back, with long legs set in a confident stance and a coat that stretched perfectly across his wide shoulders. “Has he only just arrived?”