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TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
MILLS & BOON
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Prologue
Spring, 1817
‘Oh, damn and blast everything,’ Russell Chancellor, Lord Hadleigh, exclaimed aloud as he walked along Bruton Street, causing several passers-by to look at him in some alarm.
The more he thought about his current errand, the worse he felt. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t been thinking recently of breaking off his long connection with Caroline Fawcett, but he had hoped to do so gradually so that when the end came it would not be too much of a shock for her.
Instead, though, that very morning his father, the Earl of Bretford, had issued an ultimatum to him in such strong terms that there was no denying him—unless he were ready to find himself turned into the street, penniless, with only his title left to him and nothing else…
He had arrived home from the Coal Hole just before dawn, thoroughly out of sorts with himself, having drunk too much and, for once, gambled too much. He had scarcely had time to lay his throbbing head on the pillow before Pickering, his valet, was shaking him awake.
‘What the devil are you at, man?’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you know that I arrived home only an hour ago?’
‘Yes, m’lord, but your father sent for me not five minutes gone, saying that the matter he wished to discuss with you was urgent. He demanded that I inform you that he wishes to see you in his study immediately and will not brook any delay.’
‘Did he, indeed?’ Russell swung his legs out of bed, which set his poor head protesting in the most unkind way. ‘Have you any notion of what has brought this about?’
‘None, m’lord, except…’ and his valet hesitated.
‘Except what, Pickering? For God’s sake, have you caught my father’s habit of being unable to finish his sentences?’
‘No, m’lord, only that he seemed to be rather more angry with the way the world wags than usual.’
At this dire news, for his father’s foul temper was notorious throughout society, Russell gave a slight moan before allowing Pickering to help him to dress. On the way out of the room he caught sight of himself in the looking-glass on the tall-boy opposite to his bed, and decided that he looked more fit for the grave than enduring the roasting which he was sure his father was going to give him.
I’m over thirty years old and he treats me as though I were a boy in his teens, was his last unhappy thought before the footman opened the double doors to the study where his father was impatiently pacing the room. It was small wonder that the carpet was showing such visible signs of wear.
‘There you are, Hadleigh. By God, at the rate you’re going your rowdy life will soon begin to show on your face—’ He stopped abruptly before adding, ‘I never cease to wonder how unlike you are to your brother, Richard—’
He stopped again.
The sense of being second rate, a disappointment and a failure, was so strong in him that Russell could not prevent himself from filling the gap which his father had created.
‘I am not so far gone that I cannot remember my brother’s name, sir. Nor that I am somewhat surprised that you should send for me at this ungodly hour to tell me what I already know.’
At this weary piece of impudence his father’s face turned from red to purple.
‘You are pleased to be insolent, Hadleigh. I have had enough of you. You are so lost to everything but pleasure that I tremble to think of what might happen to the estate when I am called to my last rest and you inherit. Although there is no male entail attached to the estate, it has always been the custom of the Chancellors to pass it on to the elder son without a quibble. I, however, am beginning to quibble. Nay, more than that—’ He stopped again.
‘More than what, sir? I am all agog to learn the end of the sentence.’
Remembering his unpleasant riposte later, Russell flushed with shame. At the time his disgust with himself seemed to have translated itself into a disgust with everything.
‘It is this, Hadleigh. I am serving you with an ultimatum. I wish you to marry and settle down. To begin with, you are to dismiss that woman you have been keeping, immediately, this morning, if possible. I would have you marry some decent young woman—someone like your brother’s wife, Pandora. His judgement in marrying her is as sound as yours is faulty. If you refuse me in this, I shall immediately send for the lawyers and arrange matters so that Richard inherits everything but the title. I shall also at that point discontinue your allowance. You would then have to fend for yourself.
‘I am not, Hadleigh, about to condemn you out of hand. I shall give you three months to marry someone who will bring honour to our name, provide the Chancellor family with more male heirs, and settle down to bring honour to it yourself. Failing that, I shall turn you away.’
White to the lips, Russell asked, ‘Does Ritchie know of this, sir? After all, he has already provided you with a male heir.’
‘Indeed not. It would not be proper that he learn of it before you have had a chance to redeem yourself. As for him providing me with a male heir—you know as well as I do that a man of sense would wish to have as many grandsons as possible, the death rate among little boys being what it is.’
Ritchie had once said to Russell that he had lived in his older twin brother’s shadow all his life. The truth, he thought, was somewhat different: he had lived in Ritchie’s. Ritchie, who had become his father’s darling, Ritchie, the soldier-hero, the serious man, the man of duty. Ritchie, who had already fathered a son.
‘I wish I had been the younger twin of whom nothing was expected,’ burst from Russell’s lips almost without him willing the words.
‘That, Hadleigh, is what I complain of—your innate frivolity. I have no more to say to you, except that I expect you to do as I ask—or face the consequences. I have been corresponding with my friend, General Markham, whose only child is a daughter and consequently his heiress. He and I hope to arrange a match between the pair of you. He is giving a house-party at Markham Hall next week, and I would wish you to join it so that you might become acquainted with her. I hope you grasp that the matter is urgent. I am not prepared to allow you to continue your irresponsible way of life any longer.
‘You may leave. I want no verbal assurances from you, only deeds.’
His father sat down and began to write, lifting his head up only to say, ‘You know where the door is, Hadleigh. Kindly use it. I have no wish to see you again until you have done all that I have just asked of you.’
So, here he was, several hours later, about to give Caroline her congé, not as he had once imagined, at his wish, but at his father’s. If I had any courage at all I would have told him to go to the devil and set out to make my own fortune. But how? I am trained for nothing. I wanted to be a soldier. That was denied me. I was the heir, Ritchie was to be the soldier. I asked my father to allow me to manage our estates at Eddington in Northumberland, but was told that that was cousin Arthur Shaw’s job. What’s more, he said, he had no wish to deprive him of it in favour of an untrained, overgrown schoolboy.
Russell’s unhappy train of thought stopped at this point. He had no mind to revive for himself the misery which had resulted from his father’s other brutal interference in his life thirteen years ago. Not that that was entirely his father’s fault, but had he been kinder then…who knows, things might have been different.
No, I will not think of that…The past is dead and gone and that time will not return again. What time had done was to bring him to Caroline’s door before he was ready to face her. The unhappy truth was that he disliked the notion of telling her that he wished to end their liaison so much that he had continually put it off. Now his father had forced his hand and he must bite the bullet.
Somewhat to his surprise there was a hackney carriage standing in the street outside and Caroline’s little page was loading bags into its boot. He ran briskly up the steps, his door key in his hand and let himself in, calling her name with an urgency which surprised him. He was even more surprised when the drawing room door opened and Caroline, looking as lovely as ever, walked into the hall, dressed for the street and carrying a large leather bag.
‘You?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought that you had forgotten that I lived here. Have you any notion of how long it is since you last visited me?’
Shame struck Russell all over again. It was truly his day to feel like a cur! Oh, he would pay her off with a lump sum, but the cruel fact remained that he was casting her off.
‘Not lately, I know,’ he almost stammered. He had stammered as a boy until a tutor with a cane had banished it—lately it had begun to come back again.
‘True,’ she said, smiling at him coldly. ‘Well, I will relieve you of the need to visit me again. I have tired of your capriciousness and have decided to leave you. I was about to post you a letter informing you of my departure. Fortunately that will no longer be necessary since I can now tell you so in person.’
‘Leave me?’ he heard himself saying witlessly.
‘Yes, leave you. It has been borne in upon me for some time that you have tired of me and did not know how to tell me so. I entered on our liaison for the foolish reason that I was in love with you. Oh, I knew that you would never marry me, but you assured me that you had decided that you would never marry anyone. I stupidly believed that that meant that we could play house together until we became Darby and Joan. I am still in love with you, but I refuse to be a millstone around your neck. I have recently met a worthy merchant who has decided to make an honest woman of me. We are to marry next week.
‘And, no, I want no farewell presents from you of any kind. The one wish that I have to leave you with is that I hope that you may never suffer as I have done in loving someone as hopelessly as I have loved you. Farewell, Lord Hadleigh. Let us remember the happy days we had together and wish each other well. Now I must leave. The carriage, and my new life, awaits me.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not like this.’
‘You mean that you would have preferred to cast me off, and not me you?’
‘No,’ he said again, but, of course, she was right.
She reached up to pat his cheek with her gloved hand. ‘Remember me a little, is all I ask.’
With that she was gone, out of the house and out of his life.
The decision had been made for him, but Russell felt no better for that—only worse, seeing that this was the second occasion on which a woman had abandoned him. Between his father and his mistress he had been shown a vision of himself with all his shortcomings made plain. All that remained was for him to go to Markham Hall to court a woman whom he had no wish to marry in order to recover his father’s favour. Woman was perhaps a misnomer. He seemed to recall that Angelica Markham was only eighteen years old.
He arrived home to find that his father was out, so he could not inform him that his long-standing affair with Caroline Fawcett was over. At a loose end—as usual, he thought bitterly—he wandered into his father’s study, intending to ask his secretary, Mr Graves, when he would return. The secretary was not there, either. He began to leave, but something, he never knew quite what, led him to walk to the secretary’s tall desk, which stood before the window, to examine the papers on it.
There was a small pile of them that contained the accounts and the other details of the family estate at Eddington. Moved, again by he knew not what, he began to inspect them, the accounts first.
When he was at Oxford he had discovered that he had a bent for mathematics. Where others of his age found the subject boring and spent more time either amusing themselves or preparing for a political life by concentrating on the classics, he had played with numbers. They had always fascinated him. He remembered Dr Beauregard saying…
No, forget that, forget everything to do with Dr Beauregard, particularly his daughter.
He could not, alas, forget what lay before him while he rapidly totted up the lines of figures. Now, having done so, he thought, nay, he was sure, that something was wrong. He added them up again, to reach the same answer and to turn back to an earlier sheet. He had just finished checking that when the door opened and Graves came in.
‘Ah, m’lord, were you looking for me, or your father?’
‘My father, but I find that I do have a question for you about these accounts.’
‘Indeed, m’lord. I wonder what you think that you have found.’
‘If I am not mistaken, Graves, there are some discrepancies here which I ought, perhaps, to discuss with you.’
Graves, who was well aware of the lack of consideration and respect which the Earl had for his heir, always addressed Russell in a manner which showed that he shared his master’s opinion of him. He shook his head and there was a slight hint of mockery in his answer.
‘I, too, have checked these figures and have discovered nothing untoward. I fear that you must be mistaken.’
‘I, however, fear that I am not,’ returned Russell in a voice which Graves had never heard before. ‘You will do me the courtesy—’
Graves did the unforgivable: he not only interrupted his superior, but refused to do as he had been ordered. ‘I am a busy man, m’lord. I have gone through these accounts and reports most carefully and find nothing wrong with them. May I suggest that you raise this matter with your father, who, I assure you, has the utmost faith in my ability and my integrity. He, too, always checks my work, and that done for him by Mr Arthur Shaw, his agent at Eddington, and so far all has been to his satisfaction.’
For a moment Russell was tempted to seize the impudent swine before him by his cravat and threaten to throttle him if he continued to refuse to discuss the matter. Only the thought that his father would be sure to take Graves’s part prevented him. Yes, he would speak to his father, but he knew full well that his answer would be the same as his secretary’s: a refusal to listen to what his son might have to say.
And so it proved.
His father had been quite jovial at dinner, so much so that over their port at the end Russell had felt able to lean forward and remark, ‘By chance, sir, I saw the accounts from our estate at Eddington. I thought that I detected evidence of something wrong there. I wonder if you would allow me to—’
He stopped. His father’s face was rapidly turning purple with anger, as it had done so often when he had been a boy, and his old helplessness in the face of that anger had returned to plague him.
‘Come, Hadleigh, what do you have to say to me that is so urgent that you see fit to badger me over a glass of port? Why do you hesitate? Pray continue.’
‘I was wondering, sir, whether you would allow me to go there and see if all is well. As I recall, neither you nor any other member of the family has visited Eddington, preferring our home in Norfolk instead. Perhaps it is time that one of us did. You are occupied in government, Ritchie is reorganising the estate he has inherited, so that leaves me.’
‘So it does, Hadleigh, and why in the world you think yourself fit to go to Eddington and trouble my good agent there is beyond me.’
‘But I am your heir. My name is Hadleigh, which is taken from a village not ten miles from Eddington and I have reason to believe, from looking at Mr Shaw’s reports, that it might be useful if I visited the land to which I owe my name.’
Russell knew, by the expression on his father’s face, that it was hopeless to continue: his final words confirmed that he was right.
‘Confine yourself to matters of which you might know something,’ his father almost snarled. ‘Arthur Shaw is a good, hard-working fellow—unlike yourself—and I will not have him distressed by your meddling in affairs with which you have nothing to do, and of which you know nothing. That is my last word to you, sir.’
Russell was tempted to try to continue to plead his case. Unfortunately his scrutiny of the accounts and reports had been cut short by Graves so that he had been unable to gather enough evidence to convince his father that he had right on his side. He was also dismally aware that even if he had his father would continue to snub him. To press the matter further might, he feared, result in him saying something unforgivable, but what would be the point of that in the face of his father’s intractability?
Fortunately he would shortly be out of the house for some little time, even if the errand he was sent on to Markham Hall was not one which he would have chosen. At least, while he was there, he might forget for a time that he was not only unloved, but also despised.
Mary Wardour moved a chess piece on the board which stood beside her before beginning to fill yet another sheet of papers with numbers and arcane signs. She was halfway down it before there was a respectful knock on the door.
She sighed. Gibbs, the butler, of course. What was it now? Was she never to have a whole afternoon of quiet and peace?
‘Come in,’ she called, laying down her quill pen on the stand before her.
Gibbs entered, looking rather more solemn than usual. ‘A lady to see you, madam,’ he began, but got no further before the lady in question pushed urgently past him.
‘No fuss,’ she trilled. ‘I will announce myself. You may leave us.’
Mary gave an inward groan. Of all the people in the world who had to interrupt her just when she had thought that she was about to solve the tricky problem of the knight’s move, this particular woman was the last she would have welcomed.
‘Lady Leominster,’ she said, rising. ‘Pray be seated. I quite understand that your fame is such that you need no announcing.’
The Lady chose to interpret this as a compliment.
‘Oh,’ she declaimed, ‘and I am sure that you will be delighted to have a short rest from your labours. I am, I own, a little surprised that you should frowst indoors on such a fine sunny day. But no matter, I have come to reprimand you, you naughty thing. It is a godmother’s privilege, after all. You so seldom go into society these days that you are in danger of becoming that strange thing, a female hermit. This will never do. To that end I have prevailed on my cousin Markham to invite you to his grand house-party next week.’
Mary’s expression was so mutinous that she raised her gloved hand. ‘No, do not refuse me. It is high time that you married again.’
She put her head on one side and studied Mary’s face as though it were a fine painting brought out for her to admire.
‘Quite lovely,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, quite lovely. With that complexion, those dark eyes and even darker hair, any man would be proud to call you wife. And your fortune, of course. We mustn’t forget that.’
How many more of society’s taboos could the old trout ignore or break? Wasn’t it enough that she had burst into the room without so much as a by your leave when Gibbs must have assured her that the mistress was not at home?
‘Yes,’ said the Lady, and then, as though issuing an order from on high, ‘Yes, of course, you must marry again. Thirty is not such a great age for a widow.’
‘Heaven forbid,’ exclaimed Mary and goodness, where had that come from? After all, her marriage to Dr Henry Wardour had not been an unhappy one, despite the great difference in their ages and that it had been arranged between him and her father and presented to her as a fait accompli.
‘Do admit that it must have been off-putting’ exclaimed her tormentor, ‘to marry an old fellow like Dean Wardour. I suppose that is why you feel condemned to carry on his work.’ She waved a disparaging hand at Mary’s pile of papers and the chessboard, having ignored another taboo—that one did not raise such intimate matters as the nature of a couple’s married life with one of the partners in it.
She was so determined to make her point that she leaned over and struck Mary smartly on her writing hand with her glove before continuing with increased vigour. ‘It’s all very well for an old codger to trouble himself with such abstruse matters as mathematics. A handsome young man would soon give you other things than that to think about. All the more reason, then, to accept the General’s invitation.’
The only reason which Mary could think of which would make her accept the invitation was that it might enable her to dismiss the old harpy sitting opposite to her so that she could get back to continuing her late husband’s work—which was also her work.
‘How long would I be expected to remain at Markham Hall? Not too long, I trust.’ If that grudging acceptance made her sound nearly as elderly as her late husband, then so be it. Fortunately it seemed to please the harpy if her crocodile’s smile was any guide. And there’s a couple of mixed metaphors which would have set my late husband grieving if he had heard me utter them!
‘My dear, I am up in the boughs, I do assure you. I will inform the General myself that you will be delighted to renew your acquaintance with him and dear Angelica. You do remember dear Angelica, don’t you?’
If dear Angelica was the girl who had sulked and moped her way through her come-out party, which Mary had unwillingly attended only after another session of bullying from the formidable lady opposite to her, then Mary remembered dear Angelica.
‘Oh, yes, Lady Leominster. Of course I remember her.’
Who, indeed, could forget her tantrums? One could only pity the unfortunate man who might lead her to the altar. Fortunately again, the Lady took her utterance at face value, leaving Mary to regret being such a cat when thinking about, and speaking to, others, but happy that she was able to disguise her true feelings.
Her reward was a smacking kiss from the Lady, who rose and announced dramatically that she was off to persuade—by which she meant bully—her niece Phoebe Carstairs to visit Markham Hall as well. ‘Another gel who does not know what’s best for her,’ she sighed.
If I knew what was best for me, then I wouldn’t even consider putting a foot in Markham Hall, let alone visit it, was Mary’s rebellious thought before resuming her work with a brain that was now more concerned with how she was to endure a week of total inanity when she might be enjoying herself by finally getting this confounded white knight to behave itself.
The black knight had been much more obliging.
Chapter One
Markham Hall was a truly beautiful building. It dated back to early Tudor times and was a dream of rich crimson and gold bricks and mellowed stone. All the later improvements, designed to increase the comfort of the family and the family’s guests, had been added at the back so as not to spoil the illusion that the Hall was still an Early Tudor fortress that had been transformed into a mansion.