The Last Time We Met - By Lily Lang Page 0,4
said Jason, “you may not.”
Olly, not in the least intimidated, took a seat across from him. “This is the woman, then.”
Jason scowled at the man. “What the devil do you mean by that?”
“I always suspected there was a woman.” Olly looked vaguely apologetic. “There generally is.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jason.
“Well,” said Olly, “all that swooping about like the Prince of Darkness, despising women and refusing to fall in love.”
“I don’t swoop,” said Jason irritably. “And I certainly don’t despise women.”
He was, in point of fact, very fond of women. In the years since his escape from the hulks, he had known many beautiful women who desired him and wished to amuse him. Sally with her bright hair and laughing eyes, whose uncle had owned the tavern in which Jason had won his first thousand pounds… Isabella, the delicious little redheaded soprano who had sung “Papagena” and introduced him to the world of the demimonde where he had made his earliest fortune… Madeleine, the dancer he had installed in a small house in Mayfair, and who on parting had asked for and received a priceless diamond parure… Yes, there had been innumerable affairs in the last decade. It would be absurd to say he had never recovered from the events of ten years before. True, he had never fallen in love, but nor had any of his paramours. Everyone involved understood fully the subtle economics governing these transactions. Hearts were not a part of the equation.
Olly raised an eyebrow. “Very well,” he said. “You don’t despise women. Tell me about Miss Thornwood.”
“What is there to tell?” snapped Jason.
“To begin with,” said Olly, in the eminently reasonable tone generally reserved to address small and unreasonable children, “she is clearly a lady, and yet she has turned up here at Blakewell’s, looking for you.”
“I am acquainted with a great many ladies.”
“Yes, of course,” said Olly. He regarded his employer speculatively. “The Thornwood estate is in Hertfordshire, if I recollect correctly. Is that not where you grew up?”
“You know very well I’m from Hertfordshire,” said Jason. “Stop fishing and go away.”
Olly stiffened. “Very well, sir,” he said, a look of faint hurt in his face. “I’ll be in my office if you need me for anything else.”
The little man got to his feet. Jason watched him move across the room. Olly had nearly gained the door when Jason said abruptly, “You must think I’ve gone quite mad.”
The steward came to a halt in the doorway. “I would not dream of presuming such a thing.”
“It’s a deadly dull story,” said Jason. “Still, if you wish to hear it.” He shrugged.
Olly turned around. “I do.”
“Very well,” he said, leaning his head back against the armchair with ineffable weariness. He drew a breath and spoke aloud of Miranda Thornwood for the first time in ten years.
His father had been a footman at Thornwood, his mother a kitchen maid.
“They were both orphans, very young when they married, and very much in love,” said Jason, remembering the stories Mrs. Andrewes, the kindly housekeeper, used to tell him. “But they died of scarlet fever when I was a baby, so the servants at Thornwood, seeing as I had no other home or relations, agreed to raise me. They were very good to me, Olly. My childhood was not an unhappy one. I was a kitchen boy and then a stable boy and I probably would have become a footman, as I was six foot two by the time I was seventeen.”
“And very well-muscled in the calves,” said Oliver, sotto voce. “You wouldn’t have needed any padding in your livery breeches.”
Jason ignored his friend’s gibe, though he felt his mouth curve reluctantly. “Viscount Thornwood, however, was a harsh and cruel master. His wife had hated and feared him so much she absconded with a footman a year after presenting her lord with an heir. She died of fever after eloping with her lover to the West Indies.”
“I perceive Miss Thornwood and the current Lord Thornwood are the viscount’s progeny?”
“You perceive correctly. Lord Thornwood ignored them both for the most part, and they ran quite wild. But Miranda is nearly ten years older than her brother, and I was the only other child on the estate close to her age. I can’t remember a time when we weren’t friends and constant companions.”
Oliver’s kind, owlish face grew so sympathetic that Jason turned his head to gaze out the window at the damp, rain-drenched night.
“It was all very idyllic,