Read Online The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig - Free Book Online Page A

I’ve found no documents going further back than the sixteenth century. All of the stories about the Lansdownes at the Battle of Hastings and Agincourt come from an Elizabethan chronicle that purports to tell the history of the family. I rather doubt that it’s entirely accurate.’
    She looked at him so expectantly that Robert couldn’t quite bring himself to admit that he’d had no idea that they’d had any ancestors anywhere near Agincourt.
    ‘You don’t believe it, then?’ he heard himself asking, as if he had every idea what she were talking about.
    ‘Doesn’t it strike you as more than a little bit suspicious that there aren’t any mentions of us at all before the Tudors? The Elizabethans had a lamentable tendency of making up ancestors,’ she added confidingly. ‘Especially if they hadn’t any.’
    ‘Are you saying we’re nothing but upstarts?’
    ‘Not exactly upstarts,’ Charlotte hedged. ‘More …’
    ‘Opportunists,’ Robert provided. His father must have been a chip off the old block.
    ‘Adventurers,’ Charlotte corrected. She rolled the word off her tongue with obvious relish. ‘Elizabethan privateers sailing the high seas in search of Spanish gold.’
    ‘In other words, pirates.’
    ‘But very gentlemanly ones.’
    ‘Gentlemanly’ wasn’t quite the term Robert would have applied to the sort of person who boarded other people’s ships, but it seemed cruel to deprive his cousin of her romantic illusions.
    ‘Sir Nicholas Lansdowne was a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth’s,’ explained Charlotte. ‘It’s said that when Sir Walter Raleigh threw down his cloak for the queen, Sir Nicholas stepped in, swept her up in his arms, and carried her right over Sir Walter’s cloak.’
    ‘Thus keeping his own feet dry?’
    ‘ And the queen’s favour.’ Charlotte looked as pleased as though it were she who had trampled on Sir Walter’s cloak.
    ‘I’m surprised Sir Walter didn’t call him out.’
    ‘Oh, he did him one better. He hired a gang of bravadoes to set upon Sir Nicholas that very night.’
    ‘Don’t tell me. Sir Nicholas ran them all through and then sent a mocking note to their master.’
    Charlotte shook her head, a mischievous smile plucking at the corners of her lips. ‘No. He had too much sense for that. He crawled under a carriage, down a back alley, and took the next available ship to the West Indies.’
    Robert regarded her with bemused fascination. ‘Where did you learn all this?’ He couldn’t imagine the duchess blithely telling tales of the peccadilloes of her husband’s ancestors; other people’s ancestors, yes, but Dovedales, no.
    Tilting her head, Charlotte smiled reminiscently. ‘My father.’
    Robert felt his answering smile freeze on his face.
    His cousin didn’t seem to notice. She was a thousand miles away, in the golden haze of once upon a time. ‘He used to tell me bedtime stories about all the characters lurking in our family tree,’ she said fondly. ‘We do have some wonderful rogues to our credit. Or discredit, I suppose.’
    Discredit was one way of putting it. Every time she said ‘our,’ he felt the lash of it like a whip on his back. It didn’t seem right that he ought to be included in that ‘our,’ in that family history, when he had stumbled in off the sides, the collateral line of a collateral line, when he bore the title her father had borne so briefly, the title his own father had plotted and schemed and quite possibly murdered to acquire.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry that I’m here and he’s not.’
    Charlotte looked up at him in surprise. ‘It’s not your fault.’
    What could he say to that? It had felt like his fault. It still did. He remembered coming with his father to Girdings all those years ago, like vultures hunting out their prey. Only his father hadn’t bothered to wait until his prey was decently dead before descending on the carcass.
    He had never known whether their arrival had hastened