The Wife Trap Read online

  Jeannette hid a smile at the image.

  At least the dress’s colour wasn’t bad, she decided, the vibrant cornflower blue youthful enough to bring out the sparkle in her cousin’s grey eyes.

  As Jeannette crossed the threshold, Wilda laid her knife along the edge of her plate, strawberry jam shining berry-bright on the golden triangle of toast she held in her left hand.

  Wilda beamed a smile. “Oh, good morning. Come in, come in. Do please take a seat.”

  Jeannette strolled forward and accepted a chair across from the older woman, murmuring a polite good morning in reply. A footman appeared, teapot in hand. With a silent nod, she gave her permission for him to serve her. He set a fresh cup and saucer before her, then poured the tea.

  Her eyebrow went up of its own volition as she noted the colour of the steaming brew—a dark, nutty brown that resembled coffee far more than tea. Obviously a different varietal than the pale gold, flower-scented Darjeeling she preferred. An Irish derivation, she supposed. Something that Darragh O’Brien would likely drink.

  Forcing him from her mind, she reached for the sugar and cream, added healthy dollops of each to her cup.

  “We breakfast casually most mornings,” Wilda explained, pointing to a row of silver chaffing dishes on a nearby sideboard. “Please help yourself to eggs and sausages and kippers. They should still be warm. Or if you’d rather, we can send down to Cook for something else. Pancakes perhaps?”

  “Eggs and toast will be fine, thank you.”

  When she made no move to rise, Wilda took the hint and nodded to the footman to prepare a plate. A second later, her cousin bit into the slice of toast still in her hand and chewed, tapping a nail against her teacup whilst she did so.

  Was she making her nervous? Jeannette pondered. She supposed with her London manners it might be possible. Then there was the fact that despite her unmarried state she outranked the woman socially. Mrs. Merriweather might be a relation of her mother’s on the Hamilton side, but the connection was inauspicious at best.

  Cousin Wilda’s father had been a mere baronet, and Mr. Merriweather, though descended from good stock, was no more than the younger son of a viscount. A rather impecunious viscount who hadn’t had the means to provide adequately for his offspring in England. The reason her cousins Cuthbert and Wilda had moved to Ireland nearly forty years before.

  The footman set Jeannette’s plate before her. Improperly laden, she saw, with too many eggs, a blood sausage for which she had not asked and only a single square of toast. Oh, well, she was no longer at home and would have to get used to new routines and customs, she supposed. Lifting her fork, she tried a bite of scrambled eggs.

  She had just swallowed when a loud crash reverberated through the house. Jumping an inch in her seat, her gaze winged across to her cousin. Wilda sat sipping her tea, apparently not in the least disturbed.

  Wilda met her look. “And how did you sleep, Cousin Jeannette? Well, I hope?”

  Hmm, how to respond? Particularly with the nearly constant round of banging and pounding that rang out more loudly than a harborful of shipbuilders.

  “My room is quite comfortable, thank you, and the colour most soothing.”

  Wilda’s thin lips curved in a buoyant smile.

  “There is the matter of the noise, however—”

  “Good day, my dear, good day,” boomed an older man as he burst into the morning room on a short but quick pair of legs.

  A puff of pure white, his hair stood nearly straight up in a ring encircling his all but bald head. His eyes were dark as mahogany and every bit as opaque, slightly unfocused as if his thoughts were elsewhere. He wore breeches of brown worsted and a plain blue waistcoat and jacket, his ill-tied neck cloth clean but horribly wrinkled around his throat.

  Barely glancing at her and Wilda, he made a beeline to the sideboard, clanged open one chaffing dish after another until he found what he was seeking. Plucking a sausage out of a pan, he ate the entire thing in a trio of bites. Jeannette watched in amazement as the odd little gent picked up a plate and began to heap eggs, scones, butter, jam, bacon and four more sausage links onto it.

  He gathered up a fork and napkin, started back toward the door. “Can’t stay, m’dear, ever so sorry, but I’ve got an experiment running and I mustn’t leave it long.”

  “What sort of experiment?” Wilda asked, her usually even tones pitched high in suspicious alarm. “You haven’t left a beaker of mercury heating again, have you?”

  The man, who Jeannette concluded must be her cousin Cuthbert, turned an offended look upon his spouse as though her question had wounded him to the heart.

  “Of course not,” he said. “You know I promised I wouldn’t ever do that again, not after what happened last time. If you must know, I’m timing the pollination cycle of my Strelitzia reginae.”

  “Well then,” Wilda declared on a relieved breath, “your tropical flowers can wait a moment, long enough for you to meet your cousin Jeannette who’s come to stay with us for a few months. Remember, Bertie dear, my telling you about her?”

  His bushy white brows furrowed for a moment as his gaze settled upon Jeannette as if he’d only just then noticed her presence at the dining table.

  The expression cleared as abruptly as it had come, then he smiled. “Of course, of course. Brantford’s chit, eh? Jeannette, is it? Well, welcome to you, cousin. Most welcome, and pardon my lack of manners.” He clipped off a quick but respectable bow.

  Jeannette rose, curtseyed in reply. “Thank you, cousin, for inviting me to your home.”

  “From what I heard tell, it was your mother did the inviting and not the other way round. Edith always would have her way even when she was younger than you. Knew your mother in my youth and she always shot the fear of God straight up my spine. Worse than being chased by Diana with her quiver of arrows.” He broke off, nodded at Jeannette. “Some sort of scandal, wasn’t it, got you shipped off here?”

  “Bertie,” Wilda hushed, admonishing him with a stern look.

  “What?” he asked on a shrug. “She’s the one involved in the dustup, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise to her, what? Doesn’t come as a surprise, does it now, girl?”

  Jeannette paused, caught somewhere between affront and laughter. Humor won as she burst into the first laugh she’d had in a good long while. “No, no surprise at all.”

  “See, Wilda, she don’t mind. Well, my eggs are getting cold and my Strelitzia awaits. Make yourself at home, Cousin Jeannette. Wilda, my love, I’ll see you this afternoon at tea.”

  And with that he hurried from the room, breakfast in hand.

  “Tea indeed,” Wilda scoffed, “if he doesn’t lose himself in one of those projects of his and forget the time like he always does.”

  Jeannette resumed her seat and let the footman refresh her tea.

  “You’ll get used to Bertie if you stay here long enough,” Wilda continued. “He puts in an appearance for meals and not much else. Heaven knows why I continue to love that man. When he’s not lost among his plants he’s busy experimenting with his sun-image idea. Wants to make pictures of his flowers.”

  “Drawings, you mean?”

  “No, dear. There are blind men who draw better than my poor Bertie. Try as he might he’s utterly helpless with a pencil or paintbrush, much to his eternal regret. No, no, he’s taken the notion into his head to put images of living things onto a hard surface. He mutters on about it to me occasionally, talks about silver halides and such, but I don’t understand the half of it. Thomas Wedgwood and some French fellow—Niépce, I think that’s his name—are apparently busy attempting to beat Bertie out. They’re all playing around with the same dangerous nonsense. I only hope those other men don’t burn down half their houses like Bertie did.”

  Jeannette stopped buttering her toast in mid-stroke. “Burned the house?”

  Wilda nodded animatedly, the lace edging on her cap fluttering at her movement. “Yes indeed. The silly man left one of his experi
ments heating over an open flame while he wandered off to the library to look up some fact or other. By the time he returned, his entire laboratory was engulfed. We were lucky only the west wing burned to the ground. If not for the local people setting up a bucket brigade down to the nearby stream, I fear we’d have lost the entire house.”

  “How dreadful,” Jeannette sympathized.

  “It was, and we’ve had workmen here ever since. Surely you’ve heard them racketing away?”

  A fresh crash reverberated in the distance, followed by several indistinguishable male shouts.

  Jeannette hid a grimace at the irony, set her knife and slice of toast onto her plate before politely reaching for the marmalade dish. She wondered if the older woman might be slightly deaf, since no one with adequate hearing could possibly miss the on-going clamour.

  “Yes,” Jeannette agreed. “They are rather difficult to miss.”

  Wilda drank another swallow of tea, set down her cup with a delicate clink of china on china. “In the five months they’ve been here, I’ve gotten rather good at tuning them out. Barely even notice, these days.”

  Wilda angled her head to one side as if a new thought had just occurred. “They didn’t disturb you this morning, did they, cousin? I asked the architect in charge most expressly to begin late today since I knew you would want to sleep in. They usually begin at first light, around six o’clock.”

  Sleep in! Jeannette marveled in horror. Wilda considered seven-thirty sleeping in? Obviously the woman had kept country hours for far too many years. She opened her mouth to correct her cousin’s misconception, when she met the ingenuous expression in Wilda’s eyes.

  Now was her chance to complain, she realized, to unleash the barrage of displeasure that had been fairly burning a hole in her tongue for the past hour. But even as she opened her mouth to speak she realized she couldn’t do it. Wilda would be hurt despite the fact that it was the workmen who were at fault.

  Still, Jeannette knew she would simply die if forced to awaken every morning at the unholy hour of six. Perhaps some compromise could be reached.

  She smiled. “Thank you for your consideration. I wonder, however, if I might beg a favor?”

  “Oh, of course, child. However can I help?”

  “Since the workmen started late this morning, do you suppose they could continue to do so? I have to confess, I’m used to keeping Town hours and I fear the strain of having to rise at dawn may prove unhealthy to my constitution. I imagine it is deleterious upon your health as well.”

  “Oh, I’d never thought,” Wilda said in surprise. “You see, I’m long used to rising early. But if it will pose a misery for you, then I’ll see what I can do. Be forewarned, however, we are dealing with men, and you know how contrary men can be.”

  The comment couldn’t help but bring Darragh O’Brien to mind. With his face swimming in her thoughts, Jeannette finished spreading marmalade on her toast. Taking a savage bite, she chewed, swallowed and patted her lips dry.

  “Yes,” she murmured, “I know precisely what you mean.”

  Chapter Three

  Bored.

  She’d been here less than a day and already she was so insanely bored she was all but ready to be bound and gagged and carried off to Bedlam, or whatever similar facility might exist here in this pitiful excuse for a country.

  A light breeze played over her skirts, the sun bright, the sky blue, the temperature pleasant and not as warm as the day prior. As for the perpetual din that rang out in steady intervals from the construction site…well, she did her best to ignore that. She paused in her wanderings, used the toe of her slipper to nudge a few pieces of loose gravel on the path that cut through the gardens behind the house.

  She heaved out a desolate breath.

  She supposed she could read. A brief tour of the house had revealed the library—which thankfully had not burned down—and the extensive selection of literary works it contained.

  Yes, she decided, a book might well be her only salvation.

  A half smile played at her lips as she thought how shocked those of her acquaintance would be if they knew she was even contemplating such an act. Even her own her family believed her to be practically illiterate. But it wasn’t true. Secretly she enjoyed reading now and again, especially the lurid romantic novels printed by the Minerva Press, though she rarely had an opportunity to indulge herself in such pastimes.

  During the months when she’d been pretending to be her bookish twin, she’d had the opportunity to openly bury her nose in several volumes, including the Jane Austen novel Violet had been forced to abandon the day of their switch. The book had been quite diverting as she remembered, quite diverting, indeed. She wondered if there might be anything nearly as entertaining in the Merriweathers’ library.

  Unlikely. Wilda didn’t strike her as the literary type, and Jeannette couldn’t imagine Cuthbert taking an interest in anything but dry scientific and botanical tomes.

  She crinkled her nose at the idea, already bored again.

  Perhaps, on second thought, a book might not be the wisest choice. Just because she was away from home didn’t mean she needed to fall into bad habits. As she’d learned long ago, ladies who wish to be admired by Society do not read, and if they possess a brain, they make sure never to reveal it—especially to members of the opposite sex.

  She recalled a day years ago when her maternal grandmother, the Marchioness of Colton, had come to visit. A very great lady and undisputed leader of the fashionable set in her heyday, she’d made a rare trip upstairs to the third-floor schoolroom to visit her daughter’s children—Darrin, aged nine, and the twins, Jeannette and Violet, not quite eleven.

  Jeannette still remembered the silken rustle of her grandmother’s magnificent jonquil gown, the soft click of her heels against the hardwood floor and the scent of the lily of the valley she wore that filled the space like a whisper of spring.

  Usually bold, often to the point of folly, Jeannette had found herself stricken by an acute case of nerves. Quickly she’d lowered her eyes, praying her grandmother, whom she scarcely knew, would focus her attention upon the Wightbridge heir, Darrin. But her wishes crashed at her feet moments later when the marchioness strode over to her and reached out with an implacable gloved hand to raise up her chin.

  The older woman, still beautiful despite her years, stared down at her out of critical lilac-hued eyes. She turned Jeannette’s head left then right, inspecting her the way one might a horse or a dog. Abruptly, she released her.

  “She’s a pretty face, I’ll grant you,” the great lady pronounced, “as does the other one.” She’d paused, cast a disapproving glance at Violet, whose nose was pushed as far as it would go into the book she held.

  “But you’d be well advised, Edith,” the marchioness counseled her daughter, “to curtail all but the most cursory of their education. Too much knowledge ruins a female, and if they turn bookish, well, it will prove their downfall. There’ll be no marrying them off to anyone then, no matter how comely they might be. A woman’s job, after all, is to learn to please a man so later she may have the luxury of pleasing herself. Put samplers and watercolour brushes in their hands now so they don’t end up old maids.”

  Unlike her sister, who’d rolled her eyes and returned to her reading, Jeannette had taken her grandmother’s remarks to heart. Even at her young age she had known there could be no worse fate for a female than to end up on the shelf, unmarried and unwanted.

  From that day forward, she’d taken only indifferent interest in her more academic studies, turning her attention to strictly feminine pursuits. And truly, the change had been no great hardship, since she genuinely loved fashion and furbelows, singing, playing the pianoforte, dancing and painting—all skills at which she excelled. Her grandmother had been an arbiter of style, an acknowledged leader of her set, and so too would she, Jeannette decided. If she needed to conceal the fact that she possessed a brain in order to achieve social success, then so be it. What, aft
er all, was the loss of a few books along the way in comparison to having the fashionable world at her feet?

  And once she married and married well, Jeannette knew she would be able to live her life as she chose to live it, just as her grandmother had foretold. If she decided at that time to reveal she wasn’t quite as impervious to knowledge as some thought, then she would do so and give them all something new about which to gossip.

  But for now she must bide her time here in this purgatory, bored, with no foreseeable relief in sight.

  This morning while touring the house with Wilda, she’d inquired about local Society, anything to wile away the hours. To her consternation, Wilda had told her she and Bertie rarely entertained. Apparently the only assemblies were in Waterford, which was far too long a trip for people their age. Then she appalled Jeannette even further by telling her about the twice monthly get-togethers Wilda had with the vicar’s wife, the squire’s wife and a pair of local spinsters—not a single one of them younger than fifty. When Wilda invited her to join them when next they met, she’d swallowed her gasp of horror then very politely but firmly declined.

  Ooh, she bemoaned, how could Mama and Papa subject her to such a fate? It was quite the meanest thing her parents had ever done.

  She kicked another pebble and gazed in gloomy contemplation at a nearby cluster of vibrant scarlet poppies.

  An exuberant round of barking filled the air, capturing her attention. She turned, gazed up just in time to watch a huge gray beast lope around the far corner of the house. She froze in shock as it sprinted toward her, lean and almost wolflike in appearance. Before she could flee, it lunged up onto its hind feet, set a pair of massive hairy paws onto her shoulders and toppled her backward.

  She screamed as she fell amongst the flowers, then screamed again as the creature loomed above her, a great wet pink sponge of a tongue coming out to swipe her across the face. She shuddered and tried to escape, the scent of animal breath heavy in her nostrils. But the beast had her pinned, its weight and size heavy as a sack of stones.