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‘They thought they were doing the right thing for you,’ Mab soothed. ‘You were only just eighteen. What they did meant you could have your come-out two months later and no one any the wiser.’
‘Really? What, I wonder, was I supposed to say to the nice young men they expected to propose to me? So sorry, my lord, but I’m not a virgin. In fact, I’ve given birth. I could hide the one—I gather there are shabby tricks, straight out of the brothel—but did they hope I’d find a complete innocent who wouldn’t notice something amiss?’ She knew she sounded angry and bitter and those weren’t nice things, either of them. But she did not care. Being angry and bitter had got her through five London Seasons as the most notorious débutante of them all.
Scandal’s Virgin, they called her, which was an irony if ever she heard one. But Lady Laura Campion, daughter of the Earl of Hartland, had the reputation of being frivolous, flirtatious and outrageous. And, to the intense frustration of the men who pursued her and the chagrin of the matrons who decried her behaviour, no one was ever able to say she had taken that one fatal step to ruin.
Yes, she would drink champagne on the terrace at a ball. Yes, she would slip away into the shrubbery and allow kisses and caresses no innocent should allow. And, yes, she would wear gowns more suitable to a fast young matron, ride with careless abandon and dance four times in an evening with the same man, if the fancy took her.
Any other young woman after five Seasons would be considered to be on the shelf, unmarriageable, the subject of pity. But... No gentleman could ever claim she had given herself to him, despite the wagers in the betting books of every club in St James’s. No one had ever managed to catch her doing more than kissing a rake behind the rosebushes. And no one could deny that she was beautiful, amusing, loyal to her friends and the daughter of one of the richest and most influential of peers. Despite the nickname and the shocked glances from the chaperons’ corner, Scandal’s Virgin continued her apparently heedless way though the social whirl and no one guessed that her heart had shattered at the death of a lover and the loss of his child.
‘If the man loved you, he might not care,’ Mab ventured.
Laura snorted. She had hoped that, once. But observation soon taught her that men were hypocrites. That theoretical lovelorn suitor would care, for certain.
In January of 1815, just as she was preparing for yet another Season full of distractions to stop her thinking of the hollowness inside, her parents succumbed to the influenza. It was sudden, shocking and completely unexpected, but within ten days of the first fever they were gone. Laura, draped in black veils, retreated to Hartland Castle and the virtual solitude of mourning, interrupted by the occasional descent of Mr Bigelow, the lawyer, and letters from Cousin James, the new earl, apprising her of his efforts to sell out of the army and return home.
He was grateful, he wrote, that Cousin Laura continued to oversee things at the Castle and urged her to call upon whatever resources from the estate she saw fit to transform the Dower House into her new home.
Eventually she made herself order the work, advertised for a lady companion, failed to find one she liked, shrugged and decided to do without for the present. Mab was all the company she needed. Finally, a year after their deaths, she gritted her teeth and started to go through her parents’ personal possessions, the things that were not entailed with the estate.
Mab had fallen silent while she sat lost in memories. Now Laura was vaguely aware of her gathering together the tea things and stoking up the fire. ‘Why do you think Mama kept them?’ she asked abruptly.
‘The letters?’ Mab stirred a pot and shrugged. ‘No one thinks they are going to die suddenly and that someone else will go through their possessions, do they? And they had to do with her granddaughter, after all.’
The box had been inside a locked trunk under a stack of old accounts, dog-eared notebooks of recipes, bundles of bills for gowns going back years. Laura had almost ordered the whole thing taken down and burned unsorted and then she had seen a few sheets of music, so she dragged those out and put them aside.
Once her father had allowed an antiquarian to excavate an ancient mound on the estate and Laura thought of him as she dug her way down through paper layers of history, rescuing the music, smiling over a recipe for restoring greyed hair to a perfect state of natural glory and finally breaking a nail on the hard, iron-bound surface of a smaller chest.
It was locked, but she found the key on the chatelaine her mother had always kept about her. When the lid creaked open it revealed a neat bundle of letters. She began to set them aside for the fire unread, thinking they must be old love letters and recoiling from the ghosts of someone else’s old romance. She had enough spectres of her own. Then something about the handwriting caught her eye.
Muddy brown ink, a hand that was not so much untutored as unpractised, and poor quality paper. These could not be billets-doux or family letters. Puzzled, Laura drew them out and began to read. Even now, knowing the truth, it was hard to withstand the emotional impact of what was revealed. Laura stood, left the kitchen for the back parlour of the little rented house and paced over the old Turkey carpet until her stomach stopped its roiling.
First, the joyful shock of discovering that her baby had not died. Then the monthly letters, three of them, from the farm in the Derbyshire Dales. The child was thriving, the money was arriving, the Brownes, who had just lost a newborn, were very grateful for a healthy babe to raise as their own and for his lordship’s generosity. And then, May the fifteenth 1810, the news that she had caught some fever, they knew not how, and had sickened rapidly. The little mite passed on peacefully in the early hours this morning, Mrs Browne wrote in her spiky hand. We will see her decently buried in the churchyard.
It had taken a day and a sleepless night to recover from the shock of hope snatched away just minutes after it had been given. The next morning, still stunned into a strange calm, Laura had ordered her bags packed and a carriage prepared. At least there would be a grave to visit, not the vague assurance that her child had been discreetly secreted amongst the coffins in the family vault, unnamed, unacknowledged.
When she and Mab had arrived at the solid little greystone farmhouse she simply walked straight in, her carefully rehearsed words all lost in the urgency of what she had to say.
‘I am Lady Laura Campion and I know the truth. Where is she?’ she had demanded of the thin, nervous woman who had backed away from her until she simply collapsed onto a chair and buried her face in her apron.
Her husband moved to stand between Laura and his sobbing wife. ‘He said no one would ever know. He said he was her cousin so it was only right she was with him.’
‘What?’ This made no sense. They had written that the child was dead...
‘He said no one would ever find out if we said she had died and we just kept our mouths shut.’ Browne shook his head, shocked and shamefaced. ‘I knew we never ought to have done it, but he offered so much money...’
‘She is not dead.’ It was a statement, not a question. Laura had stared at him, trying to make sense of it all. He? Cousin? ‘Tell me everything.’
A gentleman calling himself Lord Wykeham had come to the farm unannounced. He had known everything—who the baby’s mother was, who was paying them to look after her. He had shown them his card, they saw his carriage with the coat of arms on the door, they were convinced he was the earl he said he was. He had a respectable-looking woman and a wet nurse in the carriage and he had offered them money, more money than they could imagine ever having in their lives. All they had to do was to write to Lord Hartland and tell him the child was dead.
‘Babes die all the time,’ Mrs Browne had murmured, emerging from the shelter of her apron. ‘All ours did. Broke my heart...’ She mopped at her eyes. ‘I still had milk, you see. Her ladyship, your mother, made sure I could feed the little mite.’
They lived remotely in their distant dale. No one knew that they had a different child in the house, it had all been so simple and Wykeham had been so authoritative, so overwhelming. ‘You’ll want the money,’ Browne said, his weather-beaten face blank with stoical misery. ‘It was wrong, I know it, but the milk cow had died and the harvest was that bad and even with what your father was paying us...’
Laura had looked at the clean, scrubbed kitchen, the empty cradle by the fire, the grey hairs on Mrs Browne’s head. All her babies had died. ‘No, keep the money, forget there ever was a child or an earl in a carriage or me. Just give me his card.’
Now Laura took the dog-eared rectangle from her reticule and looked at it as she had done every day of the eight weeks it had taken her to track Wykeham down, organise her disguise, create a convincing story for her staff and neighbours.
She had wanted evidence she could hold in her hand of the man who had stolen her baby, stolen every day of her growing, her first tooth, her first steps, her first word. Piers’s cousin, the rich diplomat, Avery Falconer, Earl of Wykeham. Now she no longer needed a piece of pasteboard: she had seen him, that handsome, laughing, ruthless man her daughter called Papa. The calling card crumpled in her hand as Laura tried to think of a way to outwit him, the lying, arrogant thief.
* * *
‘Papa?’
‘Mmm?’ Saying yes was dangerous, he might have missed the whispered trick question. That was how the house had become infested with kittens.
‘Papa, when may I go riding?’
Avery finished reading the letter through and scrawled his signature across the bottom. Sanders, his secretary, took it, dusted over the wet ink and passed the next document.
‘When I am satisfied that your new pony is steady enough.’ He looked back to the first sentence and tapped it with the end of the quill. ‘Sanders, that needs to be stronger. I want no doubt of my opposition to the proposal.’
‘I will redraft it, my lord. That is the last one.’ John Sanders gathered the documents up and took himself and his portfolio out. The third son of a rural dean, he was efficient, loyal, discreet and intelligent, the qualities that Avery insisted on with all his staff.
‘But, Papa...’
‘Miss Alice.’ The soft voice belonged to another member of his staff, one possessed of all those qualities and more. ‘His lordship is working. Come along, it is time for a glass of milk.’
‘I will see you before bedtime, sweetheart.’ Avery put down his pen and waited until Alice’s blue skirts had whisked out of the door. ‘Miss Blackstock, a word if you have a moment.’
‘My lord.’ The nurse waited, hands clasped at her waist, every hair in place, her head tipped slightly to one side while she waited to hear his pleasure. She was the daughter of his own childhood nurse and the only one of his staff who knew the full truth about Alice. Blackie, as Alice called her, had been with him when he had finally tracked the baby down to the remote Dales farm.
‘Please sit down. I think it may be time for Alice to have a governess, don’t you think? Not to usurp your position, but to start her on her first lessons. She is very bright.’ And impetuous. As her father had been.
‘Indeed, yes, my lord.’ Miss Blackstock sat placidly, but her eyes were bright and full of questions. ‘You’ll be advertising for someone soon, then? I’ll speak to Mrs Spence about doing out the schoolroom and finding a bedchamber and sitting room for the governess.’
‘If you would.’ Avery looked out over the rolling lawn to where the parkland began at the ha-ha. It was small but beautiful, this estate he had inherited from his cousin Piers and which he had signed over to Alice along with its incomes. He would do his utmost to give her all the standing in society that he could, and this place restored to prosperity as part of her dowry and an education with an excellent governess would be the start.
‘There is no hurry to arrange the accommodation here. However, will you ask her to arrange the same thing at the Berkeley Square house immediately?’
Miss Blackstock stared at him. ‘You are taking Miss Alice to London, my lord?’
‘I am. I intend staying there for the remainder of the Season.’ There was no reason why he should explain himself, even to an old retainer, but it would help if she understood. ‘I plan to marry.’
‘But, my lord...’ Miss Blackstock hesitated, then opted for frankness. ‘Might Miss Alice perhaps...discourage some of the ladies?’
‘Her existence, you mean?’ Avery shrugged. ‘I would not wish to marry a woman who thought less of me because of one, much-loved, child. Anyone who will not accept Alice is simply unacceptable themselves.’
‘It will certainly winnow the wheat from the chaff,’ the nurse murmured. ‘When will you go up to town, my lord?’
‘In two weeks. Late April.’ Wheat from the chaff, indeed. Avery’s lips twitched as the nurse shut the door behind her. It was a long time since he had been in London for the Season, it would be interesting to see what the quality of this year’s crop of young ladies was like.
Chapter Two
‘April in England. Can’t be bettered.’ The spaniel stopped and looked enquiringly at Avery. ‘You agree, Bet, I can tell. Go and flush a rabbit or two.’
The shotgun, broken open for safety, was snug in the crook of his arm, just in case he did spot one of the furry menaces heading for the kitchen garden, but it was really only an excuse for a walk while the sun was shining and the breeze was soft.
I’m getting middle-aged, he thought with a self-mocking grin. Thirty this year and enjoying the peace and quiet of the country. If I’m not careful I’ll turn into a country squire with a placid wife, a quiverful of children and the prospect of the annual sheep shearing for excitement.
After an adulthood spent in the capitals of Europe, in the midst of the cut and thrust of international diplomacy, he had thought he would be bored here, or that country life would bring back unpleasant memories of his childhood, but so far all he felt was relaxed. The parkland was in good order, the Home Farm and the tenant farms thrived, as his regular rides around the surrounding acres showed him. Piers would have been pleased, not that he had been much interested in farming. Army-mad, he had been since boyhood.
Relaxed but randy, he amended. It was easy to maintain a mistress in the city and keep his home life separate, but a remote country manor and a small child were a combination guaranteed to impose chastity. And decency told him that setting up a London mistress at the same time as hunting for a wife was cynical.
Still thinking vaguely about sex, Avery rounded a group of four beeches and stopped dead. A dry branch cracked under his booted foot.
‘Oh!’ The woman in black sitting on the fallen trunk of the fifth tree jumped to her feet, turned and recoiled at the sight of him, her eyes wide in her pale face. He had an impression of fragility, as much of spirit as of form, although she was slender, perhaps too slender. Her eyes flickered down to the gun and then back to his face and her hands, ungloved and white against the dull sheen of her walking dress, clenched together at her waist.
‘I beg your pardon, madam. I had no intention of frightening you.’
‘I suspect I am trespassing.’ Her voice was attractive, despite her alarm, but there was a huskiness in it that made him think of tears. She was in mourning, he realised, not simply soberly clad, and there was a wedding ring on her finger. A widow. ‘I was told in the village that there was a public path across the estate, but I saw a deer and went closer and then I lost sight of the path... If you will direct me, I will take myself back and cease my illegality, my lord.’ Now she had recovered from the shock her tone was cool and steady.
‘You know who I am?’
The spaniel ran up, ears flapping, and sat at her feet. She bent to run her hand over its head with the confidence of a woman used to dogs, but her dark eyes were still on Avery. ‘They described you in the village, Lord Wykeham.’ There was nothing bold or flirtatious in her study of him, she might as well have been assessing the tree behind him, but heat jolted though him like a sudden lightning flash and was gone, leaving him oddly wary. His thoughts had been sensual, but this was as if a fellow duellist had lifted a sword in warning.
‘You have the advantage of me, madam,’ he said, and knew his diplomatic mask was firmly in place.
‘Caroline Jordan. Mrs Jordan. I have taken Croft Cottage for a few months.’ She seemed quite composed, but then she was not a young girl to be flustered by a chance meeting with a stranger. She was a young matron, twenty-four perhaps, he hazarded. And a lady of breeding, to judge by her accent, her poise and the expensive sheen and cut of the black cloth. Standing there under the trees in her elegant blacks, she looked as much out of place as a polished jet necklace on a coal heap.
‘Then welcome to Westerwood, Mrs Jordan. You are indeed off the path, but I believe I can trust you not to kill my game or break down my fences. You are welcome to roam.’ Now what had possessed him to offer that?
‘Thank you, Lord Wykeham. Perhaps you would be so kind as to point me in the direction of the path back towards my cottage.’ She moved and again he was conscious of a stab of awareness, and this time it was most certainly sensual, even though she had done nothing flirtatious. A disturbing woman, one who was aware of her feminine allure and confident in it to the point where she felt no need to exert it, he surmised. Yet her eyes held a chill that was more than aloofness. Perhaps she was completely unaware of the impact that she made.
‘It falls along my own route, if you care to walk with me.’ He kept his voice as polite and reserved as her own as he skirted the fallen trunk, whistled to the dog and walked towards the path, trodden down by his own horse. He did not offer his arm.
‘Is it you who jumps this?’ she asked, with a gesture to the hoofprints dug deep in the turf in front of the trunk she had been sitting on. ‘Not an easy obstacle, I would judge.’
‘I have a hunter that takes it easily. You ride, ma’am?’ She kept pace with him, her stride long and free with something about it that suggested she would be athletic on horseback. And in other places, his inconvenient imagination whispered.
‘Before I was in mourning, yes.’ She did not glance at him as she spoke and Avery found himself wishing he could see the expression in her eyes, the movement of her mouth as she spoke, and not merely the profile presented to him, framed by the edge of her bonnet. Her nose, he decided, was slightly over-long, but her chin and cheekbones were delicately sculpted. Her cheek, pink with exercise, showed the only colour in her face beside the dark arch of her brow and the fringe of her lashes.
‘Was it long ago, your bereavement?’ he ventured.
‘Some time, yes,’ she said in a tone of finality that defied him to question further.
Well, madam, if that is how you wish to play it, I will not trouble you further! He was not used to being snubbed by ladies, but perhaps it was shyness or grief. He was more used to diplomatic circles than London society and the ladies who inhabited those foreign outposts were no shrinking violets.
‘This is where our ways part.’ The path had converged with the ha-ha where the stone slabs set into its side provided a crude set of steps up to the lawn. Bet, the spaniel, was already scrambling up them. ‘If you take that path there...’ he pointed away towards the edge of the woods ‘...it will take you back to the lane that leads to the church.’
‘Thank you, my lord. Good day to you.’ She turned away as Bet gave a sharp yap of welcome. It made her start and stumble and Avery put out a hand to steady her.
‘Papa! There you are! You will be late for tea and we are having it on the lawn.’
Mrs Jordan turned to look at Alice as she stood on the brink of the drop and the movement brought her into the curve of Avery’s arm. He loosened his grip and for a moment she stood quite still where she was, so close that he could swear he heard her catch her breath. So close that a waft of lemon verbena teased his nostrils.
‘Ma’am? Are you all right? I apologise for my daughter’s abrupt manners.’
It seemed the widow had been holding her breath, for it came out now in a little gasp. ‘It is...nothing. I turned my ankle a trifle when I twisted around just now.’
‘Is the lady coming for tea, Papa?’
‘No...I...’
Damn it, she’s a stranger here, she’s in mourning, she knows no one, what’s the harm? ‘Would you care to join us, Mrs Jordan? Perhaps you should rest that ankle a little.’ When she still stood there, unspeaking, he added, ‘And we are eating outside.’ Just in case she thought he was a dangerous rake who employed children as a cover for his nefarious seductions. He was even more out of touch with country manners than he was with London ones.
‘Thank you, Lord Wykeham, I would enjoy that.’ She tipped up her head so she could look directly at the child above them. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, as serious as if she was addressing a duchess.
‘Good afternoon, ma’am.’ The girl—my daughter, Laura thought—bobbed a neat little curtsy. ‘I am Alice.’ She was bare-headed and dressed in a green cotton frock with a white apron that showed evidence of a busy day’s play.
‘Allow me,’ Lord Wykeham said before Laura could respond. ‘These steps are more secure than they look. If you take my hand as you climb, you will be quite safe.’
‘Thank you.’ She put her ungloved hand in his, her fingers closing around the slight roughness of the leather shooting gloves he wore. Her fictitious twisted ankle and the awkwardness a lady might be expected to show in climbing such an obstacle would account for her unsteadiness, she supposed, as she set foot on the first step.
* * *
As she reached the top Alice held out her hand, her warm little fingers gripping Laura’s. ‘Let me help.’
The shock went through her like a lightning strike. Laura tripped, fell to her knees and found her fingers were laced with Alice’s. ‘Oh!’ Tears welled in her eyes and she blinked them back as she fought the instinct to drag her daughter into her arms and run.
‘Your ankle must be more than just turned.’ That man was bending over her. She hunched her shoulder to exclude him from the moment. ‘Let go, Alice, and run and tell Peters to bring out a chair and a footstool for Mrs Jordan.’
Laura could have snarled at him as Alice loosed her grip and ran up the slope of the lawn. Somehow she turned the sound into a sob of pain.
‘Allow me.’ Before she could protest he swept her up into his arms and began to follow the child. ‘I will send for Dr Pearce.’
‘There is no need.’ The words emerged sounding quite normal. Laura tried to make herself relax as much as any lady held in the arms of a complete stranger might. She could not follow her instinct and hit out at him, slap his face, call him all the words that buzzed like furious hornets in her brain. ‘I am certain it will be better for a short rest.’
‘Even so, I will send for him.’
Not a man who accepted disagreement with his opinions, but then she already knew he was arrogant and ruthless.
‘Thank you, but, no.’
‘As you wish.’
I do. Does no one ever say no to you?
Laura dredged up some composure from somewhere and tried a tiny barb. ‘Lady Alice is a delightful child.’
