The Countess.

Catherine Coulter.

Chapter One.

Of course I didn't know who he was the first time I saw him. Nor did I really care who he was?not at first. It was only three weeks after I'd buried my grandfather. My cousin Peter, who had miraculously survived Waterloo unscathed, except for his soul, he wrote me, had been unable to come home from Paris until the French, who, he always said, lived in a constant state of overwrought emotion, had accepted Louis XVIII, their rightful, albeit idiot, of a king.

At the moment, unlike the French, I didn't feel much of anything.

Until I saw him.

I was in the park walking George?my Dandie Dinmont terrier, whom some people believed to be ugly as a devil's familiar on a bad day?oblivious of all the beautifully dressed people driving around in their landaus, riding their prime horseflesh, or simply walking, as I was. George and I were both silent, George out of habit, as there had been little else but silence since Grandfather had died. He was silent even when I picked up a small tree branch and threw it a good twenty feet away for him to fetch, an activity that usually sent him barking hysterically, leaping and bounding about until he clamped his jaws around the wild prey he'd captured and wrestled it to the ground. He was silent in his chase. He managed to get the branch, but it was at a cost.

The man beat him to it, picking up the branch, eyeing George, then giving my dog a blinding smile even as he threw it a good thirty feet. He stood there, hands on hips, watching George, again silent, run so fast his runty legs were a blur.

Instead of bringing his beloved mistress?namely me?the branch, George trotted back to the man, tail high and wagging as steady as a metronome, and deposited the branch at his booted feet.

"George," I said, too loudly, "come away now. You know that you are the king of dogs. You have the silkiest topknot in creation. God looks down upon you daily and is very pleased. Come along. I don't want anyone to steal you."

"It's true he is a magnificent animal," the man called out, and I knew sarcasm when it punched me in the nose. "Yes, he is blessed with an amazing presence, but I swear I am not thinking of his abduction for a possible ransom. You know, though, there may be some people, dolts naturally, who just might say that with all that mustard and red hair, someone would steal him in order to blind an enemy."

"He doesn't have mustard and red hair. Mustard on a dog is ridiculous. It's more a fawn and a lovely reddish-brown sort of color." I walked to where the man stood with my terrier. I thought George's colors, particularly the fawn, even though one could per haps call it, unkindly, sickly yellow, was splendid. At least there wasn't all that much of it, since George wasn't even twelve inches high and weighed only a bit over a stone. I frowned as I looked at him. His coat, a crispy mixture of both hard and soft hairs, needed a good brushing. I hadn't groomed him for nearly a week. I'd been sunk too deep inside myself. I felt guilty for ignoring him.

As for George, the little traitor looked besotted. I came down on my knees and patted his large domed head, peeled back his silky hair, and looked him straight in his very large and intelligent eyes. "Listen to me, you miniature ingrate. I'm the one who feeds you, who walks you, who puts up with your snoring when you've eaten too much of Cook's rabbit stew at night. I am going to walk away now, and I want you to come with me. Do you understand, George?"

George cocked his head at me, then turned to the man who had come down on his knees beside me, his damned eyes all fluid and adoring. The man said, as he tried for a disarming shrug, "Try not to be upset. You see, animals adore me. I was born with this gift, a sort of power, if you will. If I'm not careful, when I merely go for a walk on Bond Street all the frivolous little dogs the grand ladies are carrying about leap from their arms and chase after me. Dogs all over Piccadilly hunt me down. I try to ignore them. I always return them to their owners, but it just doesn't stop. What am I to do?"

Humor, I thought, something that hadn't been in my life for more weeks than I could now easily remember, hit me between the eyes. I smiled, unable not to. He smiled back at me, a beautiful white-toothed smile, took my hand, and helped me to my feet. He was big, too big, and too tall. Most of all, he was too young. He wasn't just there?he overwhelmed. Immediately I took a step back, then another.

"George," I said, growing more uncomfortable by the minute, "it's time to see what Mrs. Dooley has made for our lunch. You know that on Tuesdays, she does something very special with bacon for you. Yes, bacon, fried down to its core, cooked so stiff you can bang it on the floor several times before it crumbles.

Come along, now. You will ignore this gentleman. He may be nice to you here, where there's an audience who can see how talented he is with you, but he doesn't want you to catch his coattails in your teeth and pursue him home. Come along."

I turned then and walked away, praying that George wouldn't stay with the man, wagging his tail and cocking his very homely large head in that cute way he had, his ears at half-mast, that clearly said, "Do you really think she has bacon for my dinner?"

"Wait," the man called after me, coming after me, his hand raised. "I don't know who you are." But I didn't wait. I didn't want him to know my name. Besides, why would he care? Didn't he see that I was wearing deep mourning? Didn't he know that being three feet away from him was too close? I even quickened my step. He was big and tall, and he was too young, too strong. No, I thought, he couldn't do anything here, in the middle of the park, with all these people about. I merely shook my head, but didn't turn around. I nearly shouted with relief when I looked down to see George trotting beside me, his tongue lolling, carrying that branch in his mouth, his topknot flopping up and down. I did turn once I reached the corner.

The man wasn't there.

Well, what did I expect? That he would unfold a pair of wings and fly after me?

Snatch up both me and George and haul us off to a derelict old castle? No, he wasn't a monster, he wasn't bent on no good, but he was a man, I thought, too young, and too sure of himself. He was capable of things I couldn't bear to think about. But he'd made me laugh. Imagine.

We went home, George to eat not bacon, but rabbit stew for dinner and snore all night, and I to read some soul-wrenching poetry by Coleridge?The death-fires danced at night?and wonder if he had written that line inside a cloud of opium.

I forgot the man.

The second time I saw him, I didn't know who he was then either.

I was still swathed in black, and this time I even wore a black veil that half covered my face. When I came out of Hookham's bookshop, he was just standing there holding an open umbrella, for it had begun to drizzle. He wore a smile on his tanned face, aimed at me.

I stopped in my tracks. I wanted to ask him what in heaven's name he was doing here, beaming that brilliant smile at me, but what came out of my mouth was "How can you be so tanned when there hasn't been a hint of sun in over two days?"

The smile smoothed out, but it was still there, lurking, waiting to become a laugh. I knew it. "At least this time you've looked at my face, something you refused to do that first day we met in the park. I have some Spanish blood in me, something my father abhorred, but he fell in love with my mother, Isabella Maria, you see, and so I was born. I wonder what he would think of me now, so unlike a pure-blooded Englishman, all pale and pink-cheeked, were he still alive."

"Well, that does explain it," I said, nodded to him, and added, "Good day," and walked away. I wasn't really surprised when the rain suddenly came down thick and hard, because, after all, it was England. What I hadn't realized was that he was just behind me, the umbrella now held over my head.

Well, no hope for it. I turned again to face him. "Thank you for keeping me dry.

What are you doing here?"

"I saw you buying a book inside. It's raining. You don't have an umbrella. I plan to protect you from the harsh elements, see you to wherever you wish to go, and thus earn your undying gratitude."

"Excuse me," I said, looking up at that iron-gray sky. "Harsh elements? Are you mad? This is England."

And he threw back his head and laughed. He'd laughed at what I'd said. I tried to frown at him. He took a step closer, but I wasn't worried. There were at least a dozen people either hurrying through the rain or setting their umbrellas over their heads.

"Where may I escort you, Miss??"

I prepared to walk away again. He lightly touched his hand to my arm. I stopped dead, didn't move, just stood there, waiting to see what he'd do.

"Very well," he said slowly, eyeing me, and I knew he wanted to pull the veil off my face and stare me hard in the eyes. But, of course, he couldn't. He said, "I had hoped that George would prove a suitable chaperon and acquaintance to vouch for me that first time in the park. But he wasn't then, and he isn't, unfortunately, here now. If not a dog, then I must find a human acquaintance to introduce us properly. You are obviously a lady of rigid social code. Do you see anyone you know and trust walking by who would perhaps pause to introduce us properly?"

The urge to laugh was strong, too strong. It was wrong to want to laugh now, very wrong. Grandfather had been dead only a month. No, no laughter.

I stared at his beautifully fashioned cravat, then worked my way up to his chin.

He had a dimple in that stubborn-looking chin of his, and he was still smiling down at me, all white teeth and good humor. Since the rain was coming down at a fine clip now, I didn't step away from him. I didn't trust him an inch, nor that winsome smile of his, but I wasn't stupid. I didn't want to get soaked. "What do you want?"

"I want to know who you are so that I may meet your parents and all your siblings and the rest of your pets, and assure them that I'm not some devil-may-care rogue bent on ravishing their fair relative. I'd like take you for an ice at Gunthers. I'd like to take you riding. I'd like to make you laugh again."

All that, I thought, and knew it was impossible. "I have only one sibling?actually he's my cousin?and he's in Paris. He would shoot your head off if he saw you bothering me like this."

The man stopped smiling. "You mean bothering you as in keeping you from getting soaked down to your lovely slippers?"

"Well, not exactly."

"That's a beginning. Now, you're in mourning, deep mourning. Does that mean that everyone you chance to meet must be long in the mouth and sigh and prepare to hand you a handkerchief?"

He was hard with muscle, just like Peter. I recognized that even though he was dressed elegantly in riding clothes, which meant, of course, tight buckskins, a frilled white shirt, a jacket no man could get into without a lot of help, and highly polished black boots that came to his knees. A fine figure of a man, my grandfather would have said. "I don't want a handkerchief from you. As for you being long in the mouth, I don't think you have it in you. Your mouth is too busy laughing."

"Thank you."

"I hadn't really meant that as a compliment, it simply came out that way, by accident."

"I know."

"I am merely going about my business, not whining or begging for sympathy, or quivering my lips, and you just turn up like?

"Please don't make me a bad penny."

"Very well. You just turn up like mad Uncle Albert, whom we keep locked in the third-floor attic, but who periodically bribes the tweeney and escapes."

He laughed. He had a wonderful laugh, full and rich and heady. I hadn't heard a laugh like that in far too long, truth be told. Not since the first time I saw him in the park. Had I inadvertently been funny? I hadn't meant to be. Truly, there wasn't any more humor in my life. When I had thrown the first clods of earth on Grandfather's grave, I decided that twenty-one years of smiles and laughter were enough to grant any human being?more than enough. Grandfather had been in my life since I was ten, when my mother had died, my father had left the country, and Peter was at Eton. And Grandfather had loved to laugh. To my utter embarrassment, tears leaked out of my eyes and slid down my face.

They stuck to the wretched net veil. I pulled the veil back and wiped the back of my hand over my eyes. The tears kept coming. It was humiliating.

"I'm sorry," the man said. "Very sorry. Whom did you lose?"

"My grandfather."

"I lost mine five years ago. It was difficult. Actually, though, to be honest about it, it is my grandmother I miss the most of all of them. She loved me more than the sunsets in Ireland, she'd tell me. She was from Galway, you know, where she said the sunsets were the most beautiful in the world. Then, she said, she loved my grandfather so much, she willingly said good-bye to the sunsets, married him, and came to England. I never heard of her speak of the sunsets in Yorkshire."

For a moment I thought he was going to cry. I didn't want him to be nice, perhaps even to have an inkling about what I was feeling. I wanted him to be a man, and act like a man. That way I would know what he was without having to bother with his name. My tears dried up.

Then he offered me his left hand, since his right hand was still holding the umbrella over both of us. It was raining so hard it was as if we were enclosed in a small gray world, completely alone. I didn't like that, but I did like the umbrella. I wasn't even damp.

"No," I said, looking at his hand, which didn't even have a glove on it. Like his face, that hand was tanned. I wasn't about to touch that hand. It was large, the fingers blunt and strong. "No," I said again. "I don't want to meet you. I live with my companion, Miss Crislock, and we have no visitors, since we're in mourning."

"How long do you anticipate this blacking out of life?"

"Blacking out of life? I'm doing no such thing. I loved my grandfather. I miss him. I am respecting his memory. Also, truth be told, I am rather angry at him for dying and leaving me here alone, to go on without him, to have no one anymore for me. He shouldn't have died and left me. He was old, but he wasn't ill. Everything was fine until he went riding and his horse slipped in a patch of mud. He shot off his horse's back, hit his head against an oak tree, and fell unconscious. He never woke up. I protected him from the doctor, who wanted to bleed him every day, the idiot. I pleaded with Grandfather, I promised to let him eat all of Cook's apple tarts he wanted, I begged him not to leave me, to open his eyes and smile at me?even curse at me, something he enjoyed as much as laughter?but he didn't. I don't wish to be reminded just yet that life simply goes swimmingly on its way despite the fact that I have lost the single most important person in my life through an idiotic accident, and no one else cares."

"How can someone care if he can't even find out your name?"

"Good day, sir."

This time he didn't follow me. I was soaked within seconds. The veil stuck to my face like a second skin, and itched like sticking plaster. Blacking out of life.

What a ridiculous thing to say.

And cruel. He'd said it because I'd refused to tell him who I was. Men were hurtful. They thought only of themselves; the important things to them were those things that only they wanted and desired.

My grandfather had died. I was grieving. Who would not with a grandfather like him? I was not blacking out my life.

The third time I saw him I still had no idea who he was. He was speaking with a friend of my grandfather's, Theodore, Lord Anston, a gentleman who still covered his bald head with a thick curling coal-black wig, wore knee breeches everywhere?and not just to Almack's on Wednesday nights. He rode with his hounds in Hyde Park, chasing not foxes, but pretty ladies and their maids. My grandfather had once told me, laughing softly behind his hand, that Theo had even worn black satin knee breeches to a mill held out on Hounslow Heath. One of the fighters had been so startled at the sight that he'd dropped his hands for a moment and stared.

His opponent had knocked him flat.

Lord Anston grinned to display his own surprisingly perfect teeth, patted the man's shoulder, and thwacked his lion-headed cane on the flagstone. He was wearing black satin shoes with large silver buckles. He strolled, I thought, very gracefully for a man walking two inches off the ground.

If I'd moved more quickly, the man wouldn't have seen me, but I was looking at those shoes of Lord Anston's, wondering how they'd look on me; then I stared at a mud puddle not three feet away, mesmerized, because I knew he was going to step into it, and thus I didn't move in time. He was on me in the next two seconds, smiling that white-toothed smile of his as he said, "What? No George?

Poor fellow, he'll grow fat with lack of exercise."

"George suffers from an ague right now. He's improving, but it is still too soon to bring him out into the elements." There weren't really any elements to speak of, it being a bright sunny day, but the man merely nodded. He said, as would a wise man pontificating, "The ague is always a tricky business. I would keep George close until he's able to stick his tail up straight and lick your hand at the same time."

I smiled, damn him, seeing George and that flagpole tail of his at breakfast, wagging wildly when Mrs. Dooley had hand-fed him a good dozen salmon balls, all small and hand-rolled.

"I've got you now," he said, and I took a step back before I realized it wasn't at all necessary. He cocked his head to one side, in question, but I wasn't about to tell him that I didn't trust him or any other man any further than I could spit in that mud puddle some three feet away from me.

"Don't be afraid," he said finally, and he was frowning, perplexed, his head still cocked. "What I meant was if a man can make a woman laugh, she's his."

I was shaking my head when he added, smiling again now, "That was a jest, but not really. Lord Anston told me who you were. I told him not to scare you off by calling out to you. And he said, 'Eh, what, John? Scare off that Jameson girl?

Ha! Not a scared bone in that melodious little body of hers. She sings, you know, which makes for a melodious throat. Perhaps the melodiousness extends to the rest of her, but I don't really know anything else about her body. Maybe it's sweet, who knows?' Yes, that's exactly what Lord Anston said. He also said he'd known you since you were puking up milk on his shirt collar."

"It's possible," I said. "But I don't remember doing that. Lord Anston was a lifelong friend of my grandfather's. I play the pianoforte much better than I sing. My fingers are melodious, not my throat."

"He told me who you were. I must admit that it surprised me. How small the world shows itself sometimes. You're Peter Wilton's cousin. I've known Peter since we were boys at Eton. You're Andrea. Peter has spoken of you countless times."

"No," I said. "I'm not Andrea. You've made a dreadful, yet perfectly understandable, mistake. Mistakes happen. You will not dwell upon it. You will forget it by tomorrow. Good-bye. I wish you a good day."

I looked back when I reached the corner. He was standing there, just looking after me, his head still cocked in question. He raised his hand to me, then slowly lowered his arm and turned away.

It was the third time I'd seen him, and I still didn't know who he was. Just his first name: John. A common, ordinary name, but I knew he wasn't either of those things.

Knowing his first name was fine. I wouldn't ever know anything more about him. I knew to the soles of my slippers that he was dangerous.

Any man who wore laughter like a well-loved shirt was dangerous.

Chapter Two.

I was lying on one of Grandfather's beautiful Axminster carpets, my feet propped up on his big leather chair, reading about my hero, Lord Nelson. If only I had been aboard the Victory with him, to guard his back, I know that he would still be alive today. At least he had known he'd won the battle before he died. Now he was only a beloved memory, a part of history, a hero for the ages and the pages of books. But I'd wager anytime that he'd rather be here, with me, telling me his adventures, particularly the amorous ones involving Mrs. Hamilton. Ah, what wickedness, Grandfather would say. Not that I approved, but that was the way things were. I'd learned that at a very young age. It was infuriating, and it was despicable, but it was the way things were.

"A man's man he was," Grandfather had told me more times than I could remember.

"He didn't cater to incompetence, deplored the madness of the king, fought the ministry to get enough money, ships, and men to fight those damnable French, and he remained true to his country. I knew him well. I will never know another man with more guts and courage."

And, sometimes, when Grandfather was feeling a bit of the devil's encouragement, he would tell me how Lady Hamilton had wanted him, not Lord Nelson, but Grandfather had been married, more's the pity, and so she'd had to accept Lord Nelson. "He was short, you know, Andy. Dreadfully short, but he made up for it with brains. Sometimes his brains didn't help him, though. He couldn't seem to figure out how to keep the ladies happy, despite all those brains he had. Not to say that ladies are stupid?they're not. Just look at your grandmother; now, there was a lady who kept me at half-mast, her tongue and her brain worked so well together. Welloiled, both tongue and brain.

"No, what I mean is that Lord Nelson was always coming up with excellent new strategies, and never one of them involved how to make a lady happy."

I wanted to ask him where he got that precious theory. I wanted to tell him that men only wanted to make themselves happy. Once they had a woman in their power, why would they care?

"Andy, where the devil are you?"