The Viscount's Unconventional Bride

She was an extraordinary woman. He had no idea why she had left home and assumed that foolish disguise. He had expected to have found that out long before now, to have exposed the girl for what she was and marched her back home to be chastised by her papa. Instead all he had learned was that she could use a sword, play whist and had the courage of a lion—and, rather than exposing her, he was going along with the game she was playing.

The trouble was he did not think it was a game; at the back of it all was something deadly serious. Courage she might have in abundance, but she was also afraid. He had seen it in her lovely eyes. He could not wait to get back to her and then, by hook or by crook, he would have it out of her.

Born in Singapore, Mary Nichols came to England when she was three, and has spent most of her life in different parts of East Anglia. She has been a radiographer, school secretary, information officer and industrial editor, as well as a writer. She has three grown-up children, and four grandchildren.

Recent novels by the same author:

RAGS-TO-RICHES BRIDE

THE EARL AND THE HOYDEN

CLAIMING THE ASHBROOKE HEIR

(part of The Secret Baby Bargain)

HONOURABLE DOCTOR,

IMPROPER ARRANGEMENT

THE CAPTAIN’S MYSTERIOUS LADY*

* Part of The Piccadilly Gentlemen’s Club mini-series

The Viscount’s Unconventional Bride

Mary Nichols

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Chapter One

May 1760

The Vicarage garden, though not large, was a haven of tranquillity. Its flower beds were bright with the colour of hollyhocks, sunflowers, larkspur and feverfew and redolent of the scent of roses, lavender and pinks. Louise had always loved it and, even as a small girl, she had enjoyed helping the gardener with sowing seeds and nurturing the plants. The old gardener was gone now, replaced by young Alfred Rayment, but she still liked to tend the garden and was never happier than when she was on her knees, clad in a plain round gown covered with a sacking apron, weeding or picking off the dead blooms.

Today was warm and sunny after a little rain the day before, and she had decided it was time to tackle the weeds in the narrow bed beneath her father’s study window. She had been working contentedly for some time when she heard voices through the open window.

‘Elizabeth, Louise will have to be told. She is no longer a child, she is a woman grown and old enough to understand.’ Louise clearly heard her father’s words, wondering what it was that occasioned them. He sounded unusually grim. Had she breached his strict code of conduct? Had she whispered to her brother Luke during his sermon on Sunday? Had he seen her riding astride which he did not consider at all ladylike? But if that had been the case, he would have summoned her to the study and rung a peal over her. She had never been in awe of him and could usually wind him round her thumb, so she would have been penitent and he would have smiled and forgiven her before letting her go. On so trivial a matter, he would not have had a discussion with her mother beforehand.

‘No.’ This was her mother’s voice, unusually resolute for her. ‘We left Moresdale to escape the past, to make a new beginning and I do not see why we should rake it up again now.’

‘My dear, I know it is distressing for you and will be for her, but she will soon recover. It is not as if we are rejecting her, or that we have ceased to love her, but she will want to marry soon and the gentleman she chooses will have to be told the truth.’

Louise had ceased to pull up the weeds; she was sitting back on her heels, her weeding fork idle in her gloved hand, trying desperately to understand what was being said, hardly daring to breathe for fear of betraying her presence. That they were speaking of her, she had no doubt, but the words they were uttering were incomprehensible. What truth? What past did they need to escape from? She had a vague recollection of moving to Chipping Barnet when she was very small, but her memory of where they had lived before that was hazy.

‘But why say anything at all?’ her mother asked.

‘Because it would be fraudulent for her to enter into a marriage with such a secret and aside from that, there is always the possibility of someone discovering it and telling her prospective husband. That would not do at all, you must see that. It would be despicable of us to allow him to learn it through a third party.’

‘Who will discover it? No one knows but you and I…’

‘And Catherine,’ he reminded her.

‘Catherine will never breathe a word about it. It is more than she dare do.’

‘Surely you do not think she has managed to keep it a secret from her husband all these years? Augustus Fellowes is no fool; he would likely know if Catherine was hiding something from him. And there may be others. I was not present when Louise was born and neither were you, so how do you know no one else knows?’

Louise put her hand over her mouth to stop her cry of distress becoming audible. How could he say her mother was not present at her birth? It was nonsense. Unless…Unless…Oh, no! She would not, could not, believe that, but her mother’s next words confirmed her worst fear.

‘She has been so happy with us, to learn her parents are not really her parents at all will break her heart,’ she was saying. ‘I may not have given her birth, but I am as real as any mother. My feelings for her are the feelings of a mother. I am happy when she is happy, sad when she is sad, hurt when she is hurt, and this will undoubtedly hurt her. I don’t know how you can even think of doing it to her.’

A cool wind played about Louise’s hair, but it was not cold that made her shiver, but shock. She could hardly take it in. Papa, the man who had nurtured her from babyhood, praised her when she had been good, chided her when naughty, given her an education, clothed and fed her, loved her, was not her papa at all. And Mama, to whom she had turned with all her problems, which had somehow always been miraculously solved, was not her mama. It must also mean Matthew, Mark and Luke were not her brothers. They were older than she was. Did they know the truth, that she was…Who was she?

‘Elizabeth, I am a man of the cloth,’ her father went on. ‘I am supposed to set an example of honesty and rectitude, but, for your sake, I have harboured this secret all these years, but my conscience will not allow me to let her marry in ignorance. She could marry a nobleman…’ He wandered further from the window and Louise did not hear the end of his sentence.

‘Oh, Edward, she was never so puffed up as to hope for that. It was only Luke’s teasing when he said she should marry a viscount.’

‘Well, of course it was. I know that, but the truth…’ Again his voice was lost. He was evidently pacing back and forth.

‘Then can you not postpone speaking to her until she is ready to marry? Please leave her in ignorance a little longer, I beg of you.’

Louise did not hear his reply. She flung down the gardening fork, ripped off her apron and gloves and scrambled to her feet, her mind in turmoil. She did not know which way to turn and set off at a run down the garden path. But she was not thinking of the garden, not thinking of anything except the conversation she had just heard.

At the end of the path was an arbour of honeysuckle and pink climbing roses and here she flung herself on to a bench, too numb even for tears. She had lived all her life not knowing she was anything other than the beloved daughter of the Reverend Edward Vail and his wife, Elizabeth. And now it seemed that was a lie. She felt as if she had been broken into tiny little pieces, like a smashed vase dropped from a great height, never to be put together again.

She still could not take in what she had heard and wished with all her heart the last half-hour had never happened. If Papa and Mama were not her parents, who were? How did she come to be living with the Reverend? Had she been given away by her true parents? Whatever it was, it seemed it was a stigma that could possibly make a prospective husband reject her. She had often wondered why her own eyes were an unusual hazel flecked with green when all three brothers’ eyes were blue and her father’s were grey. The boys had fair hair, but hers was dark. Had she, along with her colouring, inherited some bad family trait she might pass on to her children? Even if that were so, how could any mother bring herself to give away her child?

Catherine. Catherine Fellowes. The name had burned itself into her brain. Was she her natural mother? Who was she? Where was she? From what she had heard, the woman was alive and afraid to divulge the truth, even to her husband. Did that mean Louise was not her husband’s child? It seemed the most likely explanation. How many people knew she was a…? What was she? A bastard? There, she had thought that dreaded word even if she had not said it aloud. She was a nobody without a name except the one given to her by the Reverend and his wife. Why had they taken her in? Why keep the secret from her?

Could she go on, living the life she had, helping her father teach the village children, helping her mother with good works, going out riding with Luke, the youngest of her brothers, the only one still living at home, going to social occasions, meeting her friends, looking forward to falling in love and being married one day, just as if she had never heard those words? It was impossible. From now on, she would look at everything and everyone with fresh eyes, as if she had never seen them before. The people around her, the comfortable old rectory, the church where her father preached and where the whole family worshipped, the servants, her friends, the villagers: all would look different.

A cuckoo sang somewhere close at hand, its note repeating itself in her head long after it had flown away and could no longer be heard. ‘Cuckoo. Cuckoo.’ She was a cuckoo in the comfortable nest of the vicarage. Oh, it hurt; it hurt badly. The tears flowed at last, hot and blinding, streaming down her face unchecked.

She mopped them up until her handkerchief was sodden, but they ceased at last and gave way to anger. It was easier to be angry, anger did not hurt quite so much. She stood up and hurried purposefully back to the house, intent on confronting her parents and demanding an explanation, but they were nowhere to be found. Her father had been summoned to a sickbed and her mother had gone into the village, so she was told by Hetty, the parlourmaid. Even Luke was out, but she did not think she could confide in him, even though they were very close and he was the favourite among her three brothers, perhaps because he was nearest her own age. Apart from the servants, she was alone in the house.

She went up to her room, the pretty little room that had seen her grow from a tiny child to a beautiful woman, had seen her in all her moods, happy and sad, but never as miserable as she felt now. She sat on her bed, staring at the wall opposite her on which hung a picture of Christ surrounded by children and under it the text: Suffer the little children to come unto me. As a child she had loved that picture, but today its message seemed especially poignant. Papa had suffered her to come to him, but it seemed now as if he had changed his mind. Who was Catherine Fellowes? Where was she? The unknown woman seemed to be beckoning to her from the past. Come unto me.

Viscount Jonathan Leinster rode into London on the Edgware Road in leisurely fashion. It was a warm day and he was in no hurry, which was just as well because the crowds around the Tyburn gibbet were thicker than usual. He had just come from a dutiful visit to the family estate near Barnet and had endured the usual lecture from his father about venturing into matrimony and settling down to raise a brood of children. He would do that when he was good and ready and not before and certainly not with Dorothea Mantle, whom his parents had decided was eminently suitable. By suitable they meant she had the breeding, the social position and the dowry they considered necessary for the heir to an earl, and the Earl of Chastonbury at that. They took no account of her looks, disposition or standard of cleanliness, which, as far as he was concerned, made her eminently unsuitable.

He understood, though he did not see eye to eye with, their anxiety to have him married and produce the next heir, but their marriage did not set an example he wanted to follow. His mother had once told him it had been arranged by their respective fathers and she had dutifully accepted it. To everyone outside the family, they were a contented married couple, but they led separate lives with very little in common at all, except their parenthood of himself and his young sister, Arabella. His mother had not said it was a disaster, but he knew it was. His father had had a string of mistresses and his mother in desperation had taken lovers, none of which seemed to bring either of them any happiness. Belle had followed in her mother’s footsteps and married the man her father had chosen for her and that had been an even bigger disaster. Henry was fifteen years older than Belle, a cruel man who used his wife ill. Jonathan had advised her to leave him, but she had a horror of the scandal and preferred to endure the misery, especially as their mother had told her it was her duty to do so. Jonathan had sworn it would not happen to him; he would need to be very, very sure before he got himself leg-shackled. The visit had not been a success.

He reined in, not so much because he was interested in what was happening around the gibbet but because the crowds were so thick it was almost impossible to force a way through them. It was then he remembered this was the day Robert Shirley, the second Earl Ferrers, was to be hanged for murder, the first peer ever to suffer that fate; the usual capital punishment for a member of the nobility was to have his head severed from his body with a blow from an axe. His pleas to be sent to the Tower for execution had been in vain; he was to be treated like any other common criminal. Even thinking about it made the hairs on Jonathan’s neck stand on end and he felt as if his cravat were choking him. Not that he had ever killed anyone, except once, and that was in a duel and did not count. It was a fair fight and a long time ago, when he was a cabbage-head and had not yet learned to temper conquest with mercy.

Instead of being taken to the gallows in a plain black mourning coach, the noble lord was being allowed to take himself there in his own landau in a macabre procession that was driving the populace wild with excitement. It was headed by five coaches, all belonging to the Earl, so that as each appeared the crowd cheered it to the echo, only to be fooled because it was empty. The sixth, however, did contain the Earl, dressed in a white suit embroidered with silver. He was accompanied by the Sheriff of London and the Tower chaplain, with warders as outriders. Behind them came more coaches bearing the Lord High Steward, Masters in Chancery and twelve judges and behind these the Earl’s friends come to give him a good send off. London had never seen anything like it. What, Jonathan asked himself, had James been thinking of to call a meeting of the Club today of all days? It wasn’t as if they had had a hand in bringing the Earl to justice; he had needed no searching out and his action in cold-bloodedly shooting his steward had left him no defence.

Jonathan did not wait to see him hang and moved on, turning into Tyburn Lane and thence to Hyde Park Corner and into Piccadilly to the London mansion of Lord Trentham, a member of the government, who had given up a room in his house for the meetings of the Society for the Discovery and Apprehending of Criminals, popularly known as the Piccadilly Gentlemen’s Club. Here he found the others of the group gathered in a room set aside for the meeting.

Jonathan breezed into the room, bade everyone good day and made them a brief bow before subsiding into the only empty chair round the table. The place at the head of the table was occupied by Lord Drymore who, as Captain James Drymore, had founded the Society nine years before. On his left was Harry, Lord Portman, immensely rich, who pretended to be a macaroni, but was as astute as any man and whose particular interest was in coiners, men, and women too, who counterfeited coins of all denominations. Their exploits were becoming so widespread they were beginning to threaten the stability of the economy.

On James’s right was Sir Ashley Saunders, a one-time naval man and a confirmed bachelor, or so he maintained, whose chief concern was with the security of the realm. Both these men had been with James from the beginning and Jonathan had joined them soon afterwards. A newcomer was Alexander Carstairs, one-time cavalry captain and an expert on weaponry. And lastly, at the foot of the table was Sam Roker, who, though not ranked a gentleman, was admitted to the company on account of being James’s devoted servant and friend and very useful to have with you in a tight spot. Besides, he knew his way round the rookeries of the capital where thieves and cutthroats were wont to hole up.

They were all very different men, both in background and temperament, but they worked well as a team and Jonathan was pleased to be counted one of their number. Sometimes they were joined by Sir John Fielding, London’s Chief Magistrate. Blind as he was, he had a fearsome reputation and it was said he could recognise any number of thieves by the sound of their voices. Today he had other duties, probably to do with Earl Ferrers.

‘I am sorry I am late,’ Jonathan said. ‘But there’s no getting through the traffic today. I never saw such a sight. Ferrers has the whole capital in a ferment. You would never think he was riding to his death.’

‘At least that is one more criminal who has received his just deserts,’ Ash said. ‘And I, for one, am glad to see the law deal even-handedly, no matter what rank the accused holds. There should not be one law for the rich and another for the poor…’

‘We all concur in that,’ James said. ‘But can we get on? I intend to set off for Blackfen Manor tonight. Amy will soon be brought to bed with our fourth and I wish to be there when it happens, even if it is only pacing the corridors. Now, Ash, what have you to report?’

‘The City is quiet again after the latest onslaught of the mob, intent on pulling down the dwellings of the Irish labourers,’ Sir Ashley told them. ‘It was all stirred up by a building labourer who had been discharged as a troublemaker. He roused them to fury, but once I had him in custody and talked to his followers they dispersed and no real harm done, except a few bloody noses. But I will keep an eye on things.’

‘Good. What about you, Harry?’ James queried.

Harry stopped examining his beautifully manicured nails to answer him. ‘Jed Black has escaped from Newgate again. That man is as slippery as an eel and should have been hanged long ago.’

‘What’s his crime?’ Alex asked. Being new to the group, he did not know the story behind some of their operations.

‘He’s a notorious coiner and murderer,’ Harry explained. ‘Head of a gang. I had a hand in his arrest some weeks ago. He has a crafty lawyer who keeps finding reasons to delay his trial and he is not prepared to languish in prison when he has a lucrative operation waiting for him to return to it. He escaped once before and a devil of a job it was to track him down and have him taken up again. Now it’s all to do again.’

‘Do what you can,’ James said. ‘The man is dangerous and must be brought to book.’

‘Ten to one he had accomplices on the outside and bribed the guard,’ Harry went on. ‘I plan to go to the gaol and question the warders and the man’s fellow prisoners.’

‘He’s too fly to go to ground in his usual haunts,’ Sam put in. ‘Do you want me to help?’

‘Yes, if it’s agreeable to you, James.’

‘By all means.’ James turned to Jonathan. ‘Jonathan, what about you?’

‘Acting on information received, I recovered most of Lord Besthorpe’s property and returned it to him and no harm done,’ Jonathan reported.

‘By that I suppose you mean you did not arrest the perpetrator?’

‘No. He was a skinny little urchin. Couldn’t bring myself to hand him in.’

James laughed, remembering how he had done the same thing himself years ago and saved Joseph Potton from a life of crime. The lad had grown into a fine upstanding young man who now worked for Jonathan.

‘The nipper was used by others to climb into a tiny window at his lordship’s house,’ Jonathan went on. ‘I came up with them while they were dividing the spoils and the men made good their escape, leaving the bratling to carry the can, but I will unearth them. The boy gave me their names in exchange for his freedom…’

It was then Luke Vail interrupted the meeting, having begged the man on the door to let him in. He doffed his hat, bowed to everyone, then addressed himself to Jonathan. ‘My lord, I need your help urgently. My sister, Louise, has disappeared. We, that is the family, are beside ourselves with worry. I heard you were a member of the Gentleman’s Club that likes to solve mysteries and it seemed to me you might consent to help find her.’

Jonathan studied him carefully. The young man was dressed in the sombre clothes of a cleric, which sat ill on his broad, athletic figure and youthful good looks. ‘I know you, do I not?’

‘Yes, my lord, I am Luke Vail. We were at the same school, though not in the same year. My father is the vicar of Chipping Barnet, hard by your father’s estate. I am to take up a curacy in Bedfordshire in two weeks.’

‘Louise, you say,’ Jonathan said. ‘I seem to remember seeing her once when I attended your father’s church. We go to St Saviour’s as a rule. She was a pretty little thing.’

‘She is not a little thing now, my lord, she is twenty and the apple of my father’s eye, being the only girl in the family.’

‘When did she disappear?’ James asked. ‘Under what circumstances?’

‘Yesterday afternoon when everyone was out of the house. My mother came home from shopping to find her missing. Her gardening apron and gloves and the little fork she used for weeding had been flung down on the flower bed and abandoned. It is not like her to be so untidy; she usually puts them away in the potting shed before she goes indoors. I questioned all the servants and our young gardener told me he had seen her running down the garden path as if the hounds of hell were after her—his words, not mine. He said she sat in the arbour at the bottom of the garden for some time, then suddenly got up and ran back into the house. Later he saw her leaving with a small portmanteau…’

‘She has run away with a lover, perhaps?’ Ash put in.

‘Certainly not!’ Luke was indignant. ‘She would not, even if such a person existed, which he does not.’

‘Did the gardener speak to her?’ Jonathan asked.

‘No, he said it was not his place to question the young mistress and she frequently went into the village carrying a basket of provisions or a bag of clothes and such like to be given to the poor families. She is well known for it and he thought nothing of it.’

‘Then has she gone visiting friends?’ James asked. ‘Have you enquired?’

‘Certainly I have. No one has seen her.’

‘Did you enquire if she had boarded a coach?’ James asked.

‘Yes, it was one of the first things I did. No one saw her and everyone knows her in the village, so if she had done such a thing it would have been noted. Her horse is still in the stable. I rode to my brother Matthew’s house about three miles distant, in case she had taken it into her head to visit him. She was not there nor had been. No one had seen her. I searched the roadside in both directions in case she had met with an accident, but to no avail. She had not been to Mark’s either. He is another brother and has a living near Rickmansworth, though how she would have gone to him I have no idea. Someone would have had to take her. He had seen nothing of her. We do not know what to do next. My mother is distraught.’