From a recluse secluded in a castle…

…to his countess!

Cloistered away in a castle since birth, Madelyn Aylmer must now fulfill her eccentric father’s dying request: wed nobleman Jack Ransome! She has what Jack needs—land—and so he accepts their marriage of convenience and vows to introduce this sheltered innocent to society. But what Madelyn hadn’t expected was the way her body reacts to Jack, especially to his promise of a union filled with unbridled passion!

LOUISE ALLEN loves immersing herself in history. She finds landscapes and places evoke the past powerfully. Venice, Burgundy and the Greek islands are favourite destinations. Louise lives on the Norfolk coast and spends her spare time gardening, researching family history and travelling in search of inspiration.

Also by Louise Allen

Marrying His Cinderella Countess

The Earl’s Practical Marriage

A Lady in Need of an Heir

Convenient Christmas Brides

Least Likely to Marry a Duke

Lords of Disgrace miniseries

His Housekeeper’s Christmas Wish

His Christmas Countess

The Many Sins of Cris de Feaux

The Unexpected Marriage of Gabriel Stone

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Contracted as His Countess

Louise Allen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-08958-6

CONTRACTED AS HIS COUNTESS

© 2019 Melanie Hilton

Published in Great Britain 2019

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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For AJH for being a rock.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Author Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Extract

About the Publisher

Author Note

An interest in a revived Gothic style, harking back to the pointed arches and rich ornamentation of the Middle Ages, developed in the later eighteenth century as an element of the Romantic movement and as a reaction to the cool perfection of the Classical style.

Horace Walpole’s Gothic revival Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham was begun in 1749. William Thomas Beckford, the wildly eccentric art collector and author of Gothic novels, built his Fonthill Abbey—an enormous mansion in the style of a medieval abbey—between 1796 and 1813, and landowners began to litter their grounds with follies resembling ruined castles or monasteries.

I have based Madelyn’s father, Peregrine Aylmer, on some of the more eccentric Gothic enthusiasts of the time, although he would probably have had most in common with the Thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, whose wildly ambitious Eglinton Tournament cost him between thirty and forty thousand pounds in 1839. Despite the contestants training with lances for up to a year beforehand, the tournament was widely mocked and suffered from dreadful weather.

More soberly, the Gothic style flourished in the Victorian age as the most ‘suitable’ style for churches, and was the chosen architecture for both the rebuilt Houses of Parliament—completed 1870—and Tower Bridge—1894.

Peregrine Aylmer would have approved of both, I am certain.

Chapter One
Castle Beaupierre, the Kent countryside—10th July, 1816

Jack Ransome reined in his horse on the crest of the rise and looked down at a vision of the fourteenth century transported to the age of the Hanoverians. England was still littered with castles, large and small. Some were ruins, some were converted long ago into more or less comfortable houses, but none still fulfilled the function for which they had been built. Except, apparently, this one.

It helped, of course, if you were wealthy and more than slightly eccentric as the late Peregrine Aylmer had been. Then you could pour thousands of pounds and a lifetime of scholarship into creating your fantasy world.

Castle Beaupierre seemed to bask as it lay in the sunshine that reflected off the polished slate of the roofs, the walls of creamy, perfect stone. Jack tried to estimate the cost and time involved in cleaning and repairing those walls and roofs and failed utterly.

From the centre tower a great black flag stirred and lighter pennants fluttered, red and blue and gold, around it. The encircling moat, full of water, was home to perhaps a dozen swans gliding in pristine white formation past the drawbridge. Which was raised.

‘She invited me, Altair,’ Jack observed. The big black gelding flicked one ear and then cocked a hoof comfortably, settling down to wait. ‘The least she could do is lower the drawbridge. Perhaps I am supposed to send a page over in a rowing boat or have a herald trumpet my arrival. What is the etiquette for calling on people deluded enough to live in the Middle Ages?’

He gathered up the reins and sent the horse on at a walk down the slope towards the fairy-tale building. When they were halfway there the drawbridge began to creak slowly downwards until it reached his side of the moat with a dull thud. Someone was watching.

‘Which leaves me faced with a portcullis,’ Jack muttered. ‘What is the matter with the woman? Her father was the lunatic who wanted to play knights in armour and he’s been dead for almost a year.’ Hence, he supposed, the black flag. As he spoke there was a rattle of chains from inside the walls and the wood and iron grid creaked upwards.

Now, faced with vast double oak doors studded with sufficient metal knobs to repel a charging elephant, Jack felt both amusement and patience slide away. ‘I should have brought siege engines, obviously. If Mistress—Mistress, if you please!—Madelyn Aylmer wants me then she can open her confounded gates because I am not going to knock. I did not drag down to Kent in the middle of the Newmarket July race meeting to play games.’ He clicked his tongue at Altair, who stepped on to the bridge, pecked at the sudden hollow note under his hooves, then walked on. Finally, the great doors opened.

The shadows were deep as Jack rode through the high archway, the sunlight blinding in the courtyard beyond a second opening. Here he was in the killing ground, where attackers could be penned in and assaulted on all sides from above, and he felt a prickle of awareness run down his spine as he rode towards the light. Someone was watching him. Jack circled the horse and looked up and back to a window high in the wall, making no attempt to disguise his scrutiny. A flicker of white, the pale oval of a face, the flash of spun gold and the watcher was gone.

Serve her right if I keep going right back where I came from.

But this was a commission, which meant money, and at least Mistress Aylmer hadn’t expected him to dress up in medieval clothes for this meeting. Pride was all very well, but it was a hollow coin that bought neither bread nor horseshoes. Jack turned Altair back and rode into the courtyard where, finally, someone had come out to meet him.

It was a surprise that the servants were not dressed in tights and tabards, although the leather jerkin and breeches of the groom who took Altair’s reins and led him away had a timeless look to them and the black-coated individual who came forward could have come from any period in the past hundred years.

‘My—’

‘Mr Jack Ransome to see Miss Aylmer, by appointment.’

‘Mistress Madelyn will receive you in the Great Hall,’ the man responded with the same emphasis Jack had used and without a flicker of either amusement or annoyance. ‘This way, sir.’

Jack followed up stone steps, along passages hung with tapestries that glowed as bright, surely, as the day they had been made. Which was probably within the last twenty years, he reminded himself with a flash of cynicism. He suspected that appearances were all in this fantasy world.

The butler, if that was who he was, threw open double doors—more studded oak, of course—and stood aside for Jack to enter. They closed behind him with a dull thud.

The Great Hall was well named. Walter Scott would love it, Jack reflected. All it needed was a bearded bard in one corner reciting The Lay of the Last Minstrel. He preferred something with fewer draughts and more soft furnishings himself. The roof was a hammer-beam construction and he counted two, no, three fireplaces of the ox-roasting variety, sighed at the sight of a number of suits of armour and walked on past more tapestries.

At least there are no harps and minstrels…

At the far end was a long oak table that looked as though it had been built to support the ox once it had been roasted. On it was a carved wooden coffer. And there, standing behind the coffer, was a tall, slender figure in blue. The light from a high window caught golden sparks from her hair—the watcher at the gate, he guessed.

Jack walked towards his new client, boot heels striking on stone flags, the rushes that were strewn over the floor rustling as he went. The place must be an ice house in the winter, even with all the fires alight—and most of the heat would go straight up the chimneys. The local coal merchants must be rubbing their hands with joy.

Presumably Miss Aylmer thought to put him at a disadvantage by making him walk towards her for this distance. Jack kept a straight face and an easy pace and only produced a social smile when he was within six feet of the table. Strangely, now he was inside and had sight of his client, he felt his irritation increase.

Not that the woman in front of him was unpleasing to the eye, even if her appearance was decidedly unusual. She was wearing a gown of deep blue in some fine draped fabric, caught in under the bust with tightly intricate pleating at the front. The long sleeves belled out over her hands to the knuckles where the hems were embroidered with delicate floral work that matched the band beneath her breasts.

Gowns might be worn with a high waistline now, but this was quite definitely not a modern style. Nor would any woman over the age of fifteen wear her hair loose around her shoulders, and Miss Aylmer must be in her early twenties. The straight fall of pale gold was caught back with combs but otherwise unconfined, signalling, he assumed, her virginity. Some men might see that as a challenge, others as an affectation. Jack told himself to withhold judgement. The woman in front of him was, after all, about to offer him employment and mildly exasperated incomprehension was no reason to turn it down. He could always do with money.

‘Miss Aylmer.’

‘Lord Dersington.’ She did not smile or offer her hand. Her eyes were the blue-grey of a winter river in her pale face.

Jack found himself oddly short of breath. She was not pretty, or beautiful, but she had something…something he could not put a name to. An ethereal quality, a cool serenity as though she was looking through glass into another world. He thought of stone carvings of female saints he had seen in cathedrals. She had the same rather long nose and oval face and those eyes that looked tranquilly on the horrors of the world of sinners. Plain by modern standards, yet somehow lovely and utterly remote.

‘Will you not take a seat?’

He did not call himself by his title, Madelyn knew that, but it was important to see how he took aggravation. Well, it seemed, on the surface at least. She folded her hands demurely in front of her and willed them not to shake. ‘My lord—’

‘Jack Ransome,’ said the Fifth Earl of Dersington, perfectly pleasantly, as he pulled out a chair and waited for her to sit before he took it, three feet away across the board. ‘Simply Mr Ransome.’ He put his hat and gloves on the table and ran one hand through ruffled hair the colour of the ancient oak panelling in the castle’s dining room.

‘Why do you not use your title, sir?’

‘Because, as I am sure you are aware—unless you made no enquiries about me at all, which I cannot believe—I have neither lands, nor seat. What is an earl without land?’ He asked the question as though they were debating an academic point, not something so personal to him. But the blue eyes were unamused.

‘A landless earl is still an earl.’ It felt like pushing a chess piece forward. How would he respond?

‘The entire raison d’être of earls, and of all the rest of the aristocracy, was to support the Crown, to maintain retainers so they could put men in the field to fight. Of recent years the role has been one of governance and of economics. Men of title sit in the House of Lords to assist in the government and they contribute to the wealth of the country by the stewardship of its lands. I have no lands and therefore no retainers and no wealth. Therefore no power and, logically, no function as an aristocrat.’

‘You could still sit in the House of Lords,’ Madelyn pointed out, even more curious now she had heard the explanation from his own lips. They were firm lips, framing a mouth that did not seem designed for hesitation.

‘I choose not to waste my time in a place where I can only pretend to have a function. You may consider it pride, Miss Aylmer, and you may be right. My peers call me John Lackland, which conveys the measure of their lack of respect for my position, would you not say? I prefer to spend my time and energies on what I can achieve.’

‘King John lost all the English lands in France to earn the title Lackland. As far as I am aware you did nothing to deserve losing your birthright.’ She was used to dealing with difficult men and she had steeled herself to confront this one. He was not going to make her stop probing until she understood who she was dealing with—there was too much at stake.

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But that does not make me any less inclined to carry on as though I command rolling acres. I prefer reality and I dislike fantasy.’ Madelyn noticed that he did not glance around as he said it: clearly he expected her to be able to take his point. It seemed he despised her father’s creation.

‘I chose to make my own place in the world by my own efforts,’ Jack Ransome continued. ‘And I assume that is why you have summoned me, rather than to hold a discussion about my landholdings. Or lack of them.’

Best to stop probing before he got up and walked out on her, Madelyn concluded. Or loses his temper. She smoothed out a crease in the fabric across her knee until her fingers were steady and made herself continue. ‘You are an enquiry agent.’ She knew that, of course, but she was interested in how this man described himself.

‘I act on behalf of others, for payment. I cause things to happen, or I prevent them happening. Often that involves making enquiries,’ he said. The level, dark blue gaze held neither resentment nor impatience, but neither did he show pleasure at the invitation to talk about himself. A novelty in itself… He was intriguing and that helped steady her nerves.

‘If sons find themselves entangled with unsuitable women or being bear-led by some sharp, I disentangle them. If the suitor for a daughter’s hand seems just too good to be true, I establish his bona fides. If sensitive correspondence goes missing, or anonymous letters arrive, I’ll get to the bottom of it for you. If you want a safe escort somewhere, I will provide it. If you wish to disappear, I can arrange that. Or perhaps you are being blackmailed. I remove blackmailers.’

She wondered if she was supposed to ask how he removed them. Or where to. Madelyn resisted the temptation. She needed none of those services.

Mr Ransome leaned back in the chair, crossed one booted leg over the other and raised an interrogative dark brow. ‘And what do you want me to do for you, Miss Aylmer?’

Madelyn found she was not ready to tell him yet. She needed to find the courage first. Or perhaps she needed to bury her doubts about her father’s will even deeper. Her conscience was troubling her. ‘You know who I am, who my father was, why I live in a castle?’ she asked.

She sensed rather than saw that she now had his full attention: he had studied his brief, it appeared. ‘Your father, Mr Peregrine Aylmer, was obsessed with two things, the Middle Ages and his lineage, not necessarily in that order. He inherited a large fortune and used it to restore this castle in order to create and immerse himself in a fantasy world which, I gather, he could well afford to do, given the size of his inheritance and, no doubt, his successful investments. He has recently died and you are his sole heir.’

‘Yes, that is all correct. There are no men of our name left. It derives from the Anglo-Saxon aethelmaer, which means famous noble. Our lineage stretches back beyond any recorded English kings, beyond any title of nobility surviving today.’

‘All families, even the humblest, could be traced to the beginning of time if only the records existed,’ said the man whose rejected title was a Tudor creation. She suspected that she knew the details of his family tree far better than he did. He shrugged. ‘We all go back to Adam. Some know more about their history—or the fantasies about it—than others, that is all.’

‘Our lineage is documented. All my father wanted was a son to hand the name down to, to continue the line, to continue his work. My mother died along with my infant brother six years ago. I have proved to be the only survivor of seven infants from two wives. He lost heart at that death.’

‘Is that when the obsession with this castle became intense?’ Ransome enquired coolly.

‘He was not obsessed,’ she protested. Father had been right, she had to believe that. Everyone was prejudiced against him. Even me, sometimes, she thought guiltily.

She had meant to rattle Jack Ransome’s composure, but it seemed he had turned the tables on her. Madelyn lowered her voice, forced herself into her habitual calm. ‘Castle Beaupierre is a work of great scholarship, an artistic creation, bringing a lost world back. My father’s entire life was dedicated to that.’ Surely anyone could see it? Even she, knowing the cost, had no doubts about the results, and Jack Ransome was an educated man: he would understand what it had cost in time and money and devotion.

‘And were you a work of scholarship, a piece of art, to your father, Miss Aylmer?’

I was a disappointment. A girl. Of course I was not a piece of art. I was… I am…a failure.

‘I naturally supported my father. He chose to live in an age of chivalry and beauty. A world set in the countryside of England, a world of craftsmanship. Not in a modern world of steam and speed and cities, of poverty and ugliness.’ She knew all the arguments by rote.

‘I see.’

It was clearly a polite lie. The face of the man opposite her was set in a severe expression that probably hid either a sneer or a desire to laugh. The fine lines in the corners of his eyes made her think that laughter was a possibility. She had no desire to be a source of amusement to him—in fact, she dreaded it, although not as much as she feared his anger. There was so much to be frightened of, but she was not going to give way now.

Madelyn controlled her breathing and made herself look steadily at Jack Ransome. Every report of him praised his intelligence, none spoke of irrational temper or violence, of ill-treatment of servants—not that he had many—or of either drunkenness or debauchery. He was in good health, a sportsman, which no doubt accounted for the breadth of his shoulders and the muscles revealed by tight breeches. He had turned his back on society, and in return society mocked him as Lackland or disapproved vehemently of his rejection of his title. But many of its members turned to him when they needed his help. He had friends, some unconventional by all reports, some very shady indeed.

He was dangerous, reports said, but they were hazy about who he was a danger to, other than the aforementioned blackmailers, presumably. The judgement was that he was ruthless, but honest. Stubborn, difficult and self-contained.

No one had reported on Jack Ransome’s looks, on that straight nose, on that firm, rather pointed jaw that gave him a slightly feline look. Certainly there had been no mention of a mouth that held the only hint of sensuous indulgence in that entire severe countenance. Other than those faint laughter lines…

So far, so…acceptable.

‘You show no curiosity about why I have engaged your services, Lord… Mr Ransome.’

‘No doubt you will inform me in your own good time. Whether you decide to employ me or not, I will present your man of business with my fee for today and for the time I will spend travelling to and from Newmarket and for my expenses incurred en route. If you wish to expend that money on chit-chat, that is your prerogative, Miss Aylmer.’

Very cool. Very professional, I suppose.

Madelyn had no experience of dealing with professional men beyond Mr Lansing, her father’s steward and man of business, and he could hardly bring himself to communicate with her, he was so shocked to find himself answering to a woman. She had expected this man to show disapproval of her having no chaperon, but perhaps that was simply her lack of experience of the world beyond the castle walls, the place that held all her fears, her lost hopes.

She stood, glad of the table edge to steady herself, and he rose, too, a good head taller than she, despite her height. ‘Please. Sit.’ The lid of the coffer creaked open until it was stopped by a retaining chain, standing as a screen between Mr Ransome and its contents. Madelyn lifted out the rolls and bundles of paper and parchment that it contained and placed them on the table in a pile at her left hand, except for one which she partly opened out. She kept her right hand on that as she sat again.

‘What I require, Mr Ransome, is a husband.’ She had rehearsed this and now her voice hardly shook at all. In some strange way this situation went beyond shocking and frightening into a nightmare, and nightmares were not real. Father had left careful and exact instructions and she had always obeyed him, as she did now. Even so, she kept her gaze on the parchment that crackled under her palm.

‘Then I fear you have approached the wrong man. I do not act as a marriage broker.’ When she looked up, Mr Ransome shifted on the carved wooden chair as though to stand again.

‘You do not understand, of course. I have not made myself plain. I do not require you to find me a husband. I wish you to marry me. Yourself,’ she added, just in case that was not clear enough.

Chapter Two

Jack Ransome did get up then. He stood looking down at her while her heart thudded, one, two, three, four. Then he sat again, slowly.

Madelyn made herself focus on him and not on her own churning stomach. So, he was capable of being taken by surprise, of an unguarded reaction, however good he was at getting himself under control again.

‘Why?’

‘I have no desire to die a spinster, which means I must wed. And my father wished most particularly that I marry a man with bloodlines that can be traced back to before the Conquest, a man of impeccable breeding. He had intended approaching you with his proposition. And then he died.’

‘My title, for what it is worth, was granted by Henry the Eighth. The Ransome of the time had his favour for reasons I have never understood, but it was probably something thoroughly disreputable. His father had awarded us with a barony because my ancestor chose the right side at the Battle of Bosworth, but Henry the Eighth created the earldom.’

At least he hasn’t laughed in my face or walked out.

‘There are no titles of nobility left at that date from before the sixteenth century,’ she said. If he was interested she could lecture him on the subject all morning, but somehow she did not think he was. ‘The Tudors saw to that, because the aristocracy was too closely tied by blood to the Plantagenets and so many had as good a claim to the throne as theirs. But Father traced your lineage to Sieur Edmund fitzRanulf, who fought at Hastings, and the intermarriages since then were very satisfactory to him.’

‘They were very satisfactory to me, considering that I am the result of them,’ Ransome said drily. ‘Virtually all aristocrats have an ancestry that can be traced in this way, not to say hundreds, if not thousands, of gentry. The College of Heralds spends its time doing just that.’ He was humouring her, she could tell.

Earning his fee. We will see about that, she thought, stiffening her spine. She had begun now, how much worse could it get?

‘My father wished for an aristocratic connection. There are very few noblemen of ancient lineage who might be prevailed upon to wed me who are unmarried, of marriageable age, of good character and who are interested in women.’ He looked a question and she managed not to blush. ‘I do understand about that. There are, in fact, just seven of you at present who meet the criteria and who hold titles or are the heirs.’

‘Thank you for the most flattering offer, Miss Aylmer, but I am not available for stud purposes.’ Jack Ransome reached for his gloves.

He had kept his voice level, but the crude words were used as a weapon, the first betraying sign of an emotion besides surprise. He might well talk about pride—she had apparently pricked his painfully. The lines between his nose and the corners of his mouth were suddenly apparent, as though his whole face had stiffened.

Somehow Madelyn fought the urge to flee the room and shut herself in a turret for ten years, or however long it would take for them both to forget this conversation. But he was not the only one with verbal weapons at his disposal. ‘No? Not even if my marriage portion includes the entirety of your family’s lost lands and properties?’

Jack Ransome stared at her, his eyes unblinking, and she knew she had his full attention now as his pupils widened until the blue eyes darkened. ‘My father, grandfather and elder brother between them broke the entail ten years ago. Over the course of eight years—the time it took all three of them to die one way or another—my father and brother managed to sell or gamble away virtually everything. I sold the last few remaining acres to pay the debts. How do you propose to restore all of that to me?’

‘When my mother and brother died my father sought out the men who best fitted his criteria for me. He then made it his business to discover what was most likely to make the match acceptable to them. In most cases there was nothing that he could—’ she almost said use as a lever, but managed to bite her tongue in time ‘—identify.’

The other candidates came from families that seemed, as far as Peregrine Aylmer could discover, quite secure and likely to be wary of an alliance with Castle-Mad Aylmer’s daughter.

But Jack Ransome had inherited an empty title and so her father had become relentless in his pursuit of the scattered lands and properties. Relentless and ruthless, she feared, not above exerting pressure on whatever weaknesses he could find to secure a purchase. Antiquarian research had given him the skills to dig deep into family cupboards to discover the skeletons they held.

Madelyn pushed away the unsettling memories and made herself meet the dark gaze that seemed fixed on her face. ‘Father searched out every scrap of land, every building, of the lost Dersington estates and acquired them. He identified your brother first, but did not add him to the list because of his way of life. But then Lord Roderick died almost as soon as he had inherited the title and you inherited.’

She could remember her father returning home, crowing with delight, ordering all the banners to be flown from turrets and battlements in celebration. He had found the ideal candidate and one he could exert a hold over.

Under her left hand the stack of deeds felt as substantial as a pile of bricks. Under her right, the unfolded parchment crackled betrayingly and she forced her fingers to stillness. ‘Be grateful,’ he had told her. ‘I have found you a man free from his family’s vices and I have the shackles to bind him to you.’ She had known better than to protest that she did not want a husband who had to be coerced and shackled.

‘Your mother and brother died six years ago,’ Jack Ransome said blankly. ‘Six—I was twenty-one when he started looking, twenty-three when Roderick died. How did he know I would not marry someone else?’

‘Then your lost lands would remain in here.’ She gestured towards the chest. ‘They would be an incentive for whomever I did eventually marry. Collected together the Dersington properties make an impressive dower.’

It was an effort to keep her voice level and dispassionate, but Madelyn thought she was managing well enough. It was what she was required to do as a dutiful daughter, she reminded herself, yet again. As Jack Ransome was keeping his temper, she found her courage rising a little. ‘Look.’ She opened out the stiff folds and slid forward the large parchment under her right hand, her fingers spread, pinning it down at the centre. ‘The deeds to Dersington Mote and its estates.’

The document was more than five hundred years old, made from the skin of an entire young sheep. Battered seals hung from faded ribbons at the bottom, thick black writing covered it with legal Latin. The Ransomes had held the manor of Dersington since the time of the Conqueror, but their right to castellate—to build a defensible castle—had been granted by Edward II with this document. It gave them no title, not then, but it set out the boundaries and the extent of the land they held, their rights and obligations as lords of the seven manors that it comprised. It was the heart of Jack Ransome’s lost estates.

He stared down at it, his face unreadable. Then he put out his own right hand, laid it palm down on the parchment and drew it towards him.

Madelyn flattened her hand as she resisted the pull and his fingers slid between hers until they meshed. ‘It is quite genuine,’ she said.

‘I know. I can see the seals.’

She had studied them, translated the motto embossed on them. Quid enim meus fidelis. Faithful to what is mine.

There was a long pause. She had time to register that his hands were warm, to feel the very faintest tremor and the tension as he tried to control it, to hear the deep even breaths he took and guessed at the control he was having to exert not to tear it from her grasp.

‘Sell it to me.’

‘No. You could not afford it.’ Madelyn’s voice was almost steady. ‘Besides, I would sell all the lands and properties together, not just this one estate.’

His hands were shaking, try as he might to control it, and he suspected she could feel that also. Jack lifted his fingers from the parchment, away from contact with her cold touch, even though it felt as though the document would rip as he moved them. Just an illusion, of course. This was shock, he realised. A total, complete, unexpected shock, as though the massive stones beneath his feet had shifted.

‘So, you want to buy a husband, Miss Aylmer?’ he said, wanting to shake her poise, wanting to hit back in response to the thunderbolt she had just thrown at him.

‘Are not all marriages between people of breeding a matter of exchange?’ Madelyn Aylmer asked, so coolly that it was an effort to keep the masking smile on his lips. ‘They always have been, right down the ages. Titles for wealth, alliances for land, property for position. If this was the fourteenth century I would have been married off as a child for just those reasons. I cannot believe that the motives for aristocratic marriages are so different today. Or are you so resigned to your lost lands and status that you are hoping to make a love match?’

She was not used to fighting, Jack realised, pulling himself together with what felt like a physical effort. Under all that careful control, those pricking questions, Madelyn Aylmer was nervous and that was probably the only thing stopping him from losing his temper. Perhaps she was not even used to talking to men who were not her father or her own staff. If that was the case, then she had guts dealing with this alone, he had to admire her for that. She could have had no idea how he would react to her revelations. Somewhere at the back of his mind was a feeling of surprise that he was not shouting, was not overturning this great slab of a table in sheer shock and frustration.

He put his hands on the old oak, not touching the document, and let what had just happened sink in. He had been offered the chance to regain everything his father and brother Roderick had squandered, everything his sick, confused grandfather had allowed them to snatch. Everything. Land, property, status. The title. Pride.

No, that was wrong, he told himself as the words buzzed and rang through his brain. His pride, his self-esteem, did not rest on what he owned, but on what he did. He had fought that battle with himself in the months following his brother’s death in a drunken fall down the front steps of his club as he celebrated inheriting the title. It had taken almost a week to come to terms with what he had inherited: an empty title and a mountain of debts.

At the end of that painful struggle with reality he knew he had made the right decision—he was not going to be Lord Dersington, pitied for his vanished inheritance, sneered at for pretending to a standing he could no longer support. He would be his own man, a new man. It had not stopped the sneers, of course, it had only increased them. If there was one thing his class hated, it was someone turning their back on inherited status. It devalued the entire concept.

Now he was being offered his birthright back and he could feel the weight of the generations it represented pressing down on him. As he stared at the parchment, something stirred deep in his soul, the flick of a dragon’s tail of possessiveness, of desire. This is mine by right.

Jack looked at the woman opposite him. He could say Yes, pick up those papers, live a new life. The life he had been destined to live. All that was required of him was to sacrifice his pride and to accept being a bought man. But there were two people in this equation.

What if Madelyn Aylmer was as eccentric as her father? She seemed to have lived cloistered in this place for years. What if she could not cope with the outside world that she had called a world of steam and speed and cities, of poverty and ugliness? But it was an exciting world, his world, full of scientific and technical advances, full of discoveries and possibilities. He was not going to turn his back on that to pander to the bizarre fancies of this woman. If she married him, then she was marrying a man of the nineteenth century and she was going to have to change and conform to his world, his time, not drag him back into her fantasies.

Every instinct screamed at him to snatch at what was being offered, but even so… He could not take advantage of a woman who, not to put too fine a point upon it, might not be in her right mind. ‘You are doing this because it is what your father wanted,’ Jack said, before common sense and self-interest could assert themselves. ‘Is it what you truly desire, to marry a man you do not know? You must forgive my frankness, Miss Aylmer, but I want children, an heir, and that involves, shall we say, intimacy.’

‘I want that, too.’ She was blushing now for the first time and with her pale skin he thought the effect was like a winter sunrise staining the snow pink. ‘I mean, I want children and I am quite well aware what that entails. I am not ignorant.’

‘All you know of me is my ancestry,’ Jack said in a last-ditch attempt to do the right thing.

The right thing for her, and perhaps for me, might well be to walk away from this. Do I really want to regain my pride in my heritage at the price of my pride as a man? Can I live with this woman?

She was not beautiful, she was probably almost as much of an eccentric antiquarian as her father and she appeared to have no society manners whatsoever.

A fine wife for an earl, he thought savagely. He was angry—he knew that in the same way that some part of his brain was aware he was drunk when he had overindulged with the brandy. Anger was no basis for making a decision of this importance.

To his surprise Madelyn Aylmer laughed. ‘Of course your ancestry is not all I know of you. Do you think I sit here like a maiden in a tower waiting for my prince to come and hack his way through the brambles that surround me and meanwhile I have no contact with the outside world? I am perfectly capable of employing my own enquiry agents. I know a great deal about you, Jack Ransome.’

‘You employed—who?’

‘On the advice of my man of business I used a Mr Burroughs of Great Queen Street and the Dawkins brothers of Tower Hill. And my legal advisers also made enquiries.’ The little smile that had seemed so tentative was suddenly sharp. ‘What is the matter, Mr Enquiry Agent Ransome? Do you not like it when the boot is on the other foot?’

‘Not so much,’ he admitted. She did not appear to be either feeble-minded or delusional. It seemed Miss Aylmer had a quick wit and perhaps a sense of humour. He tried to see that as a good thing and found his own sense of humour had utterly deserted him. ‘You were well advised. They know their business.’ Anyone who knew him could have told that tone signified danger—but then, she did not know him. Not at all, whatever information she had been given.

So, what had his competitors told her? That he was ruthless, although he kept within the law—mostly? That he had recently ended a very pleasant liaison with a wealthy widow two years older than himself? That he had no debts to worry about and gambled within his means, but that he could be reckless when it came to a sporting challenge? That he had a short fuse when it came to attacks on his honour and had met two men on Hampstead Heath at dawn as a result? He was damned if he was going to ask, because the infuriating female would probably hand him the reports to read. Whatever was in them, it had not been bad enough to turn her from this course.

Time to shift the balance of this interview—time to see whether he could tolerate this woman as his wife and to try to make a rational decision. Everything had its price and some costs were just too high to pay.

‘Have you made your come-out? Been presented at Court? What do you know of the world beyond that moat?’

Madelyn made a small, betraying movement, the smile quite gone as she rose to her feet. ‘Come into the garden,’ she said and walked away towards a small door in one corner before he could reply. ‘I think better outside. In the summer the Great Hall can feel rather like a vault.’

Jack strode after her and caught up in time to reach the door first and open it. ‘Is it better in the winter?’ he hazarded. ‘With fires and hounds and good food?’

‘Hounds? I agree, that would be authentic,’ she said, glancing back as though to reassure herself that he was following along the passageway. ‘We do have them, of course. But they are never allowed inside because of the tapestries. Do you like dogs?’

‘Yes, although I do not have any at the moment. You do not own one? I thought medieval maidens always had small white lapdogs or miniature greyhounds.’

‘I have an Italian greyhound called Mist. Father allowed that because she is very well behaved. She is shut up in case you did not tolerate dogs.’

‘And if I do not?’

‘I suppose I would have had to leave her here.’ For the first time he heard real uncertainty in her voice.

We are not following her careful script, Jack thought, wondering if she saw everything as a stage setting with each piece in its place, every character performing their preordained actions, reading from their script. If that was the case, then life outside these walls was going to come as a severe shock to Mistress Madelyn.

‘There would be no need,’ he said. ‘If we wed, that is. I like dogs. You were about to tell me…’ And then Madelyn opened the door at the end and he lost the thread of whatever he had been about to say and stood silent, staring.

‘Come in.’ Madelyn held out her hand, and he stepped out into paradise. He must have said the word aloud because she smiled. ‘Yes, that is what the Islamic gardens were called. A paradise. Technically this is a hortus conclusus. But you do not want a lecture. Wander, relax, think: that is what this place is for. I will send for refreshment before we talk further.’

By the time Jack had pulled himself together in the haze of perfume and colour and warmth, she had gone and the door was closed. He began to explore, still faintly bemused, strolling along grass paths between knee-high hazel hurdles that held back over-spilling colour. There were roses, ladies’ mantle, banks of herbs that were smothered in bees, banks of lavender where the buzzing was almost deafening.

He looked around and realised that this was the interior of the castle, walled on all sides, a sheltered suntrap. In the centre a circular pool held a fountain and he passed intricate knot gardens as he made his way towards it. A wave of lemon scent assaulted him as he brushed past a bushy green plant, then his feet were crushing thyme underfoot.

The fountain was surrounded by low grass banks, and he sat down, wondering if he was drunk on scent or whether he had been transported back five hundred years. He had to make a decision about the woman who dwelt in the middle of this fantasy and he was beginning to think that she had put a spell on him and that he was in no fit state to decide anything. Or perhaps it was simply shock.

The ends of the turf seats were marked by tall wooden posts painted in spiralling red and blue and white, each topped by some heraldic beast. He leaned back against the unicorn post, closed his eyes on the sun dazzle from the fountain and tried to think.

What do I want? What do I need? What would be the right thing to do?

Chapter Three

Jack Ransome was asleep in the midst of her garden when Madelyn returned, and she indulged herself for a moment, watching him relaxed in the sunlight. Long dark lashes lay on those high cheekbones, the deep blue eyes were shuttered, that expressive mouth relaxed. He appeared about as safe as a sleeping cat must look to a sparrow, she thought, gesturing to the maid to put down the tray on the turf seat a few feet away from him.

When she put one finger to her lips the girl flashed a smile in response and tiptoed away. Madelyn sat on the fountain rim and looked, not at Jack Ransome, but at her own reflection in the edge of the pool. Occasional water drops broke the image into fragments, but she knew what she was looking at well enough.

She was not attractive by the fashionable standards of the day—she understood that perfectly from the journals and newspapers and books she’d had brought to her in the months since her father’s death. She was too tall, far too blonde—brunettes were most admired, she gathered—and far, far, too pale. Pale skin was a sign of breeding, of course, but pink cheeks and rosebud mouths were admired. Her hair was straight, her bosom too lush, she had realised as she studied the portraits of fashionable beauties and scanned the fashion plates. She had no idea how to dress, what to do with her hair, how to behave. She had no conversation. The very thought of a crowd of people made her feel a little ill.

Fish began to rise at the sight of her, but she had brought nothing for them, so she trailed her fingers through the water, breaking up her reflection, sending them flickering away with a flash of sunlight on fin and scale.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Jack Ransome said from behind her. He had woken silently and picked up the conversation almost where they had left off.

Madelyn nodded without looking round. What else was she going to do? She was fitted for nothing but to live in a time long past and she knew she was not going to fall in love—that chance had gone two years ago. She might as well marry this handsome man who, by all accounts, was intelligent enough to keep her interested and who looked virile enough to give her children. He seemed chivalrous and thoughtful. At any rate he had not snatched at what she was offering without probing her own feelings first. And he appeared able to control his temper. She could cope with many things simply by enduring them, but blazing male anger terrified her.

Not that she was prepared to reveal her thoughts to him. It had not occurred to her before this meeting that an emotionless match might be easier than one where real passions were engaged, but now it seemed so much safer.

‘Yes, I am sure. I would not have sent for you otherwise.’ She turned and found him right beside her.

A poor choice of words, perhaps. His eyes narrowed. ‘If you marry me, you enter my world, you start living entirely in the year 1816. Do you understand? Clothes, style, home, manners.’

‘But this—’ Madelyn gestured around her ‘—I must tell you, it has been left in trust to my children. My husband would not be able to sell it, or to use the income for any other purpose than its maintenance or to control its management.’

Jack Ransome shrugged. ‘It is the Dersington lands that I want. All that I want. This would be maintained, of course, according to the provisions of the trust. But if it is to be one of our homes, then it must function as such and not as some medieval fantasy. I will not live in a museum. If I marry you and reclaim all my estates, then they will have priority for my time and attention until I am certain they are restored as I would wish. Do you understand?’

It was hard to control her reaction to that harsh demand, to the flat statement. But what mattered was fulfilling her father’s wish, of continuing the line. She had failed him by being a girl, she understood that. She looked at the man surrounded by her flowers, thought of the children they would have and nodded. ‘Yes, I understand.’

Some of the tension left the lean body so close to hers. Jack Ransome held out his hands, and she put hers, cool and wet, into his grasp and let herself be drawn to her feet.

‘A kiss to seal our bargain?’ he asked as her gaze locked with his.

He is still angry, she thought, momentarily daunted. He is not showing it, not shouting, but he hates the position I have put him in, he loathes being indebted to someone. The fact that he could control those feelings, still behave in a civilised manner, was almost more frightening than a display of temper would have been. Will he hate me also?

When Madelyn closed her eyes and leaned in towards him, he gathered her closer and then his lips brushed over hers, pressed, and she gave a little gasp as his tongue licked across, tasting. Then he lifted his head and she opened her eyes and found herself lost in the darkness and a heat that was more than anger.

Desire? For me? And then whatever it was had gone and he was smiling and stepping back, releasing her hands. It was her imagination, obviously. Imagination and inexperience. Or wishful thinking. Wishing for something she had not realised that she wanted any more.

‘I imagine the next step is for my lawyers to talk to yours. And you have trustees, I assume?’

‘Trustees, three of them. But they are bound closely by the conditions of my father’s will and cannot oppose this marriage. I will give you their various addresses before you leave, Mr Ransome.’

‘Thank you.’ He made no move to go. ‘Did your mother create this garden?’

‘Yes. When my brother died and she was… When she knew she would not get better, she asked me to continue looking after it. There are three gardeners. It takes a lot of maintenance.’

He glanced around. ‘I have seen very few servants.’

‘My father preferred them to stay out of sight as much as possible. One needs a large number to manage a castle and it proved impossible to keep them if he insisted on the correct period costume. He felt it spoiled the appearance of the castle to have them walking around in modern clothing.’

Jack Ransome did not try to hide his reaction to that. ‘Your father was obsessed, was he not?’

It was hard to deny it. ‘Perhaps. It was everything to him and he was a perfectionist. I suppose all true artists are.’

‘That must have been difficult for you if he expected the same standards from you at all times. Or are you as devoted to this as he was?’

‘This was how I was raised. I love this place and I would like to see it become a home, even if it has to change for that to happen.’ As soon as she said it she realised how revealing that choice of words was. Home. A house, an ordinary house, imperfect, comfortable. She loved this place, it was all she knew, but it was not a home, it was a statement. Jack Ransome gave her a fleeting look that might have held sympathy or perhaps pity. Or even exasperation at her sentimentality. Madelyn tipped up her chin and stared back.

‘How long ago did your mother die?’

‘A month after the baby.’ Yes, he was definitely feeling sorry for her. ‘I imagine you will want to be on your way, Mr Ransome. If you come with me, I will find you the addresses you will need.’

‘Will you not call me Jack now? We are betrothed, after all.’ He sounded more amused than seductive, although his voice was low and the tone intimate. He had suppressed his anger, it seemed, and now he was bent on humouring her, she supposed. That was better than she had feared: a man who simply snatched at what she was offering, took it—and her—and then disregarded her.

‘Very well. And you may call me Madelyn.’ Not that he would wait for permission.

It seemed to take a long time to find the addresses, to have his horse brought round, and she found herself without any conversation. Jack filled her awkward silences with polite remarks about the castle and its furnishings, questions about the armour, apparent interest in the problems of having tapestries woven when the Continent and its skilled craftsmen had been out of bounds until the last year. It was perhaps her imagination that he was tense with barely controlled impatience to be gone.

Madelyn supposed she answered sensibly enough, but she had no experience of making small talk. As he was drawing on his gloves Jack looked around again at the empty Great Hall. ‘You have a companion living with you, I suppose? An older relative, perhaps?’

‘No. I have no close relatives at all. I have my maids.’

‘Friends, then? I realise that you are still in mourning—’ he glanced, frowning, at her coloured gown ‘—but when you come up to London to buy your trousseau and so forth, you will need someone to show you how to go on. The year since your father’s death will be up very soon, will it not? I imagine by the time we have matters settled there can be no objection to you appearing in society before the wedding. London is very quiet at this time of year, of course.’

‘No. I mean, yes, I will be out of mourning shortly. I only wore black for a few days.’ There was no one to be shocked, after all, so why worry past the funeral? Draping herself in black to symbolise the emotions she felt was hypocritical, she had decided. Besides, white was the correct mourning colour for a lady of the upper classes in the Middle Ages, and she looked so frightful in white. ‘I have no… Father did not socialise in the area.’ He had fallen out with virtually all of their neighbours over one thing or another and those he had not upset regarded him as peculiar at best and a lunatic at worst.

‘That must have been lonely.’ He was feeling pity for her again.

Madelyn set her teeth and managed a smile. ‘One becomes used to it. And Father had numerous guests to stay.’ All male, of course, virtually all middle aged or elderly and equally obsessed with the Middle Ages. Probably society ladies in London would consider her eccentric, too, and would not care to be friends, but at least she would not be tied to these walls, however much she loved them. And one day there will be children, she told herself. She clung to that hope even as butterflies swarmed in her stomach at the thought of venturing into the world outside or to trusting herself to this stranger with the intelligent eyes and the lips that touched hers with the promise of intimacies that frightened her.

At last the groom led his horse into the courtyard and she had something safe to talk about. ‘What a lovely animal.’

‘Thank you. His name is Altair. He is Irish and has great stamina. Do you ride?’

‘Yes. I have a palfrey.’ He looked surprised by her choice of word. ‘She has an ambling gait, if you understand the term. They are rare nowadays, of course.’

‘I would be interested to see it. But does that mean you do not ride with a modern lady’s saddle?’

She nodded. ‘I suppose that is something else I must learn.’

‘Or you would attract a great deal of interest in Hyde Park. I believe the medieval side saddle involves sitting with your feet on a board?’

He surprised a laugh from her. ‘In the Middle Ages most women rode pillion or they rode as I do, astride.’

‘Not in Hyde Park you do not!’ The groom looked over and Jack dropped his voice. ‘Or anywhere else you might be seen. I will teach you to ride side saddle after we are married.’

‘Thank you.’ She suspected that would be far more limiting than she was used to and riding, along with her garden, was her great freedom, her escape. ‘But Catherine the Great of Russia rode astride, I believe.’

‘Catherine the Great did a number of things I would be alarmed to see my wife doing,’ he said. There was something in his voice that made her think that most of those things were thoroughly shocking and he had no intention of telling her about them. She would find a book and discover for herself.

‘I must be gone.’ Jack Ransome took her hand and raised it to his lips with a courtly gesture that took her aback. ‘Today has been a day of surprises, Madelyn.’

‘Pleasant ones?’ she asked, knowing what the true answer would be.

His eyes narrowed and she wondered if he thought she was trying to flirt. ‘Some of them. Cultivate your garden, my lady. I will write to you.’

Madelyn climbed to the top of the gatehouse tower and watched Jack ride away on his big horse. He took the far slope at an easy canter, sitting relaxed and very much at home in the saddle. She stood there, thinking for a long while after he had vanished from sight. That man was going to be her husband. She would lie with him, know that long, hard body. She would share the trivial day-to-day incidents of domestic life with him. She might grow old with him. She would come to know the real man behind that carefully controlled exterior.

The breeze strengthened, snapping the banners over her head, sending her hair whipping across her face. Madelyn shivered and went to find Mr Lansing, who had been her father’s employee and who was now, with quite clearly gritted teeth, working for her.

Her father had told her nothing of his affairs because, as he said, women’s brains were not made for such matters. She suspected that it was a question more of education and expectation than mental capacity and at first she had no expectation that Mr Lansing would think any differently.

She had been resigned to a state of ignorance, then, months after her father’s death, she heard the groom and the coachman discussing someone who had died in the village. His heir, it seemed, had been disgruntled to find the will left the dead man’s money and possessions to him, but only after the payment of his mortgages, debts and loans.

‘Which is a fair old amount,’ Tom, the coachman, had said. ‘Still, I don’t know why he was grumbling, it is how it is always worded.’

But there had been nothing about debts, loans or mortgages in her father’s will. She wondered about it for a few days and the wondering had turned to worry. What if there were debts? Loans and mortgages, she assumed, would be paid at their due time by Mr Lansing. But debts? It would be very like her father to neglect to pay local people until he absolutely had to.

Now she realised that she had to make certain. Lansing was at his desk, surrounded by ledgers. He put down his pen and stood up when she entered, very correct and polite, but she could tell he was repressing a sigh at the interruption.

‘Mr Lansing, did my father leave debts, loans and mortgages?’

‘Well, yes, Mistress Aylmer.’ He did not meet her gaze, but began to fiddle with his pen. ‘That is normal for any gentleman. Loans and mortgages assist with the flow of money…’

‘Yes, yes. But debts?’

‘There were some, yes,’ he said cautiously.

‘And they are still outstanding?’

‘Yes. It was the Master’s instructions that they were to be paid only on the threat of… I mean, not immediately.’

‘I see.’ And she could, only too well. No wonder her father was a rich man if he never paid those he owed until the point of legal action. He had used loans and mortgages to make his money work all the harder, she supposed, but she was hazy about how that would function.

‘Well, Mr Lansing, my instructions are that all outstanding debts will be paid in full immediately. All future bills will be met within the month and all loans and mortgages will be repaid.’ The man’s jaw dropped. ‘I am getting married, Mr Lansing, and I wish to start married life with an absolutely clear slate.’

‘I… But, Mistress Aylmer, I would have to make some sales to meet those obligations at short notice. The debts are one thing, but the other obligations… It is very complex, you understand.’

‘No, I do not. There is this estate and there are the Dersington lands. It appears simple.’

‘Well…er…yes. Although there is also the… I mean, it will be necessary to sell out of funds, sell some property.’

‘I thought my father was a rich man.’ She turned to stare at him. Had Lansing been dipping into the money chests?

‘He was, he was, Mistress. But finance is a complex matter. Having cash sitting around is bad policy—it needs to be out there, working and earning.’ He was gabbling now. ‘This sort of demand at short notice—’

‘Do it, Mr Lansing. You will not sell any of the Dersington properties, you understand. It is Lord Dersington that I am to marry.’

‘I am certain His Lordship will not wish for anything hasty to be done. You do not quite understand—’

‘It seems quite clear to me. And I assume you are perfectly aware of the trust relating to this property. Are you telling me that what I am asking is impossible for some reason?’

‘No, Mistress Aylmer. But—’

‘Do you wish to retain your position, Mr Lansing? Because it seems to me that you are very reluctant to carry out my instructions. And I am your employer.’ Inwardly, she was quaking. What had come over her? In one day she had proposed to a complete stranger and now she was threatening someone who had been in her father’s employment for years. She never threatened anyone, not even the most careless kitchen maid.

‘Of course, Mistress Aylmer. It will be exactly as you order.’

The poor man has gone quite pale. I am as bad a bully as my father, it seems.

‘Thank you, Mr Lansing. That is very satisfactory,’ Madelyn said with a smile.

She left him mopping his brow with a vast spotted handkerchief. Now he was probably even more convinced that women were not capable of dealing with financial matters, but she did not care. She would not have unpaid debts to hardworking people on her conscience.

Chapter Four
15th August

The settlements having been agreed and signed, and given that your period of mourning has passed, I suggest that now would be the best time for you to come to London to acquire your trousseau and for us to make arrangements for the wedding.

Madelyn tapped one finger on the page as she looked out of the carriage window and tried to decide whether what she was feeling—besides plain panic, of course—was irritation or apprehension.

I have engaged the services of a companion for you.

Louisa, Lady Fairfield, is a widow in her thirties with admirable connections. I am sure you will find her of the greatest use as you accustom yourself to London life.

Of course what Lord Dersington really meant was as you are dragged kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century. That and, as you are remodelled so as not to embarrass me.

It was definitely panic churning inside her, she decided. And irritation with the bland euphemisms her betrothed was using and the way he was making decisions without consulting her.

If you would be so good as to inform me of a convenient date I will send a coach with outriders and the abigail that Lady Fairfield has found for you.

It was amazing how temper calmed nerves. Perhaps it was the novelty—she had never been allowed, or allowed herself, to lose her temper. Madelyn inhaled a long, calming breath, then let it go as she read on, even though she could probably have recited the letter by heart now.

Naturally, if the woman does not suit, then changes can be made when you reach here.

I am assuming that you will wish to reside at the Dersington town house in St James’s Square. Your man of business informs me that it has been maintained in good order, although it has not been occupied for some months. He assures me that the building will be prepared for your arrival and a full complement of staff engaged.

Trusting that this finds you in good health,

Yours,

J.R.

There really was nothing to take exception to, she told herself for perhaps the fiftieth time as the carriage rolled into Sittingbourne. She had agreed to marry the man and she had to learn how to go on in fashionable society. Everything he had done was correct, scrupulously so. That was probably what was so annoying, Madelyn concluded. That and her own naivety. Jack Ransome was not her lover, or her friend. He was not even an acquaintance and it was foolish to think of him as any of those things. This was an arranged marriage between strangers, organised by her father from beyond the grave. She should be grateful that her betrothed did not insult her with protestations of emotions he did not feel, or expect her to pretend reciprocal affection.

‘Miss Aylmer? Do you wish to go into the inn to take refreshment?’

That was another thing. Maud Harper, the abigail who had arrived with the carriage and its two outriders, two grooms and coachman, was perfect. Of course she was. Competent, tactful and highly skilled. Chosen to perform a transformation.

‘Thank you, Harper, no.’ Then she thought again. She did not want to use the facilities, but the maid perhaps did and would be too well trained to leave her mistress alone while she did so. ‘On the other hand, it would be sensible to take a cup of coffee and, er, so forth.’

They trooped into the George Inn, footman in front to open doors, Harper one step behind. Her new gown, sent down by the unknown Lady Fairfield, seemed insubstantial and far too flimsy; the unaccustomed stays were uncomfortable; the weight of her hair, plaited, crimped and caught up by some alchemy of Harper’s, was entirely wrong, leaving the nape of her neck cold and exposed. The image staring back at her from the mirror had seemed totally unfamiliar—nose too long, lashes too pale, bone structure lost against curls and frills.

The landlord remembered her esteemed father so there was much bowing and scraping even though the carriage was a hired vehicle, as were its horses, driver and grooms. She had wondered that the Earl had not sent his own carriage, then realised that he probably did not own one. It was interesting, she thought fleetingly, that he had not been spending her money in anticipation.

I am going to have to get used to this, too, Madelyn thought, sipping a cup of coffee she disliked but knew she was must learn to drink and pretend to enjoy. Is this what prisoners feel like when the gates swing open after years of captivity and their longed-for freedom proves to be a frightening new world? I want my garden. My moat. My walls. My safety.

It was not until the carriage had rolled over the drawbridge, sending echoes rumbling round the old walls, that she realised that over the past few months she had been free. Free of the fear of her father’s tempers, emancipated to do as she wished, to think as she wished. And she had not taken the opportunity to change anything, she realised with a pang of something close to anger with herself. She had been set at liberty and now she was closing the door of the cage again, of her own will.

Before, she had no control over any aspect of herself or life except for the thoughts in her head, but at least she knew her father, could predict his moods, his actions. Very soon she would be entirely at the mercy of a man who was alien to her. Jack Ransome might be an apparently considerate alien, but he could as well be from distant Japan for all she understood about his world. She doubted he was feeling kindly disposed towards the woman who would restore his lands at the price of his pride.

Lord Dersington had sent a punctilious letter every week enquiring after her health while telling her absolutely nothing about himself or what he was doing.

Other than constructing my new world, my new identity, of course.

Madelyn gave herself a mental shake, something that she was finding herself doing almost hourly. Either she could stay walled up in her castle or she could come out and learn to live in the real world, and it was wrong to fight the process to make her fit for that world. Ungrateful.

‘Shall I pour you another cup, Miss Aylmer?’

‘No, thank you, Harper.’ The cup rattled in the saucer as she put it down and there was a rushing sound in her ears.

What is the matter with me?

The room steadied after a moment and Madelyn stood up, managing a smile for the maid who was looking at her anxiously. ‘It is so stuffy in here. Shall we go?’

London appalled her. It was like an overturned ant heap with human-sized ants. Noisy, dirty, feral ants that seemed furiously busy, scurrying in all directions amid smoke and smells and crowded chaos. Harper seemed to be proud of what they were seeing out of the windows and kept up a running commentary. Madelyn forced herself to pay attention and to learn.

‘This is Blackfriars Bridge, ma’am. And there’s St Paul’s—you get ever such a good view of the dome from here. And now this is Fleet Street and here comes Temple Bar and we’re out of the City now, ma’am.’

The Strand, Northumberland House, Charing Cross… ‘There’s Whitehall, ma’am, with Westminster Abbey right down at the end of it and all the government offices and Parliament. Now we are in Pall Mall. Look, ma’am, here’s Carlton House where the Prince Regent lives. They say it’s ever so splendid inside, all gold. I expect you’ll be going to receptions there soon enough.’

Madelyn had a glimpse of white stone and a screen of pillared railings with a courtyard behind and a crowd peering in and then the carriage swung sharply to the right.

‘We’re almost there, ma’am. This is St James’s Square.’

There were fine tall houses, although so tight together it must surely be impossible to be ignorant of one’s neighbours’ business. In the centre was a railed, circular enclosure with some water inside that and a statue in the middle. There was no grass and it seemed very bleak. The throng of vehicles and pedestrians made it seem worse, somehow.

‘No gardens? I thought London squares had gardens.’

‘Not all of them, ma’am. But the house does, a fine big one at the back.’

The carriage came to a halt outside a house with a flight of steps up to a wide glossy black door that was opened so perfectly in time with their stopping that someone must have been watching out for them, Madelyn realised. Two footmen came down the steps, the carriage door was opened, she was handed out and bowed into the house by a rotund little man, all in black, with a striped waistcoat.

‘Partridge?’ That was the name of her new butler, according to Mr Lansing who had written to the best London agency to secure the staff. Given the cosy shape of this man his name seemed all too appropriate.

‘Miss Aylmer. Welcome home.’

Home? I suppose it must become that. This is the beginning of my new life.

She blinked at the amount of gilding in the hall, the highly polished furniture, the torchères at the foot of the staircase. ‘It seems very…shiny.’ She had ordered the changes, of course, researched them meticulously as she had been taught by her father, but she had not expected how very bright everything would look.

‘Yes, Miss Aylmer. Your steward—Mr Lansing, is it not?—he told me that you wished the house renovated to the highest standard. He has directed a firm of decorators and upholsterers according to your instructions, and of course items have been arriving from Gillow’s and Heal’s, but I fear only the main rooms on the ground floor have been completed so far. The drawing room is here, ma’am. Tea will be served immediately.’

‘Thank—’ Crocodiles? Madelyn stopped dead on the threshold. ‘Oh, yes, of course. The Egyptian fashion.’ They seemed to be life-sized and somehow she had not imagined that. The totality of the objects she had studied in catalogues and from drawings were overwhelming when she saw them all assembled. She gazed round at more gilt, couches with scaly crocodile legs, lamp holders in the shape of turbaned figures and an array of what appeared to be miniature pagodas on the mantelpiece.

‘I understand that your orders were for the house to be redecorated in the latest style, Miss Aylmer.’ Partridge stared around him as though seeing the room for the first time, his feathers decidedly ruffled by her reaction. ‘Mr Lansing assures me that everything ordered is in the current mode.’

‘Oh, yes. It is. This is what I decided upon,’ she agreed faintly. It was hideous, she hated it and the light flooding in from the large windows made it all worse. Madelyn reminded herself that immersion in the Middle Ages was not going to be a fit preparation for appreciating contemporary style. ‘This is following the Prince Regent’s taste, I understand.’ She knew a little of that. Her father—who would be turning in his grave if he had any idea of what she had perpetrated here—had ranted about it for what had seemed like weeks after attending a reception at Carlton House. That had been followed by a letter from a fellow medievalist who was in shock after an ill-advised visit to the Pavilion at Brighton.

‘A hideous cacophony of styles, no research, gimcrack fakery’ had been the mildest of her father’s opinions.

But if this was the mode then she would have to accustom herself to it and at least Jack could not fault her for allowing the house to be neglected, or for skimping on her research and on the quality of the objects ordered. Not that the house had been allowed to fall into any kind of disrepair. There had been a succession of highly respectable tenants, Mr Lansing had assured her, just as there were with all of the Dersington properties her father had acquired that were fit to be rented out.

All the tenancies were on short leases, but this house had been let furnished and would have seemed hopelessly outdated now, she was sure. There were still the other floors to be dealt with, of course, but perhaps Jack would tolerate that if the public rooms were acceptable.

The tea tray arrived, shortly followed by Harper to announce that hot water could be taken up the moment Miss Aylmer expressed a wish to bathe. The maid had been tight-lipped over the facilities at the castle, although Madelyn was not sure what the woman expected. Her mother had, after all, made one of her rare protests when her husband had wanted to use the medieval garderobes—draughty little turrets with an alcove equipped with a plank seat with a hole and a long drop to the moat below. Mama had insisted on an earth closet in the inner court, although baths had to be taken in large wooden vats that were lined with linen sheets before the water was poured in.

‘I will take a bath in half an hour,’ she told Harper. ‘First I will finish my tea and write a note to…’ How would Jack want to be addressed now? Was he using his title yet? ‘To Lady Fairfield to let her know I have arrived. Do you have her direction?’

‘A footman went as soon as you arrived, Miss Aylmer. Mr Ransome’s orders.’

That answered her question as far as the staff were concerned, although she had no idea when he would make a general announcement that he was accepting the title.

Madelyn pushed down the feeling of resentment at being managed and told herself it was a thoughtful gesture and showed her betrothed’s concern. She put down her cup, jumped at the sound of the door knocker and winced as the spindly table rocked on its faux bamboo legs.

‘What the hell?’ demanded a voice from the hall.

‘Sir.’ Partridge’s fluting tones carried clearly through the half-open door. ‘Miss Aylmer—’

‘Miss Aylmer had better be at home, because I want to talk to her. Now.’ Jack’s voice was unmistakable, even through the anger.

As the cab rattled along Piccadilly towards St James’s Street, Jack decided that he had reason to be pleased with himself. He had managed to secure the assistance of an excellent companion and social tutor for Madelyn and the staff for the London house had been appointed through Madelyn’s man of business, Lansing.

With the wedding he would begin to use the title and he saw no problem with that, other than the inevitable gossip. His claim had been ratified by both the House of Lords and the College of Heralds on the death of his brother and he could expect nothing but approval now that he was finally accepting it.

None of the arrangements had been problematic—the difficult thing was not demanding the keys and taking possession of the house in St James’s Square the moment he arrived back in London. It was not his yet, he had reminded himself more than once over the past weeks as the temptation built like a dull ache.

The family seat, Dersington Mote, was in Suffolk. It was ancient and should have been the place he yearned for, he supposed. But he’d had a miserable childhood there, one he was in no hurry to remember. As his grandfather became older and more confused the old man was happier in the London house, which was smaller, warmer, a little faded and old fashioned, but a home where he was less disorientated by the world. With his mother dead, his grandparents had taken their younger grandson to live with them, and Jack had loved the house. The Earl might be vague about who he was most of the time, but he was invariably kind and Jack’s grandmother was indulgent to a boy who would sit and listen for hours to her read out loud or tell stories.

Now it would be his again. He could almost feel the worn leather of the desktop in the study under his fingers, smell the familiar scent of lemon and beeswax polish, pipe smoke and his grandmother’s lavender soap.

Soon he would set foot in that room for the first time in more than six years. When his grandparents died his father made the house his London base and Jack had removed himself before he was thrown out. First he wanted to drop into Brooks’s where his post was directed when he was out of town. He had been accepted as a member years ago, before his father died and, despite the fact that most of his fellow members considered that he was letting them all down by refusing to use the title, he ignored the dark looks and mutterings for the sake of convenience. The wives of the members were concerned only that he, landless, did not flirt with their impressionable daughters who should be making good matches, or lure their sons into the kind of dissipation his brother and father had been infamous for. They generally ignored him, omitted him from their guest lists and pretended the aristocratic black sheep did not exist.

It was ironic, he had thought in the early days when the snubs and whispers had hurt. His father and brother had been frivolous, spendthrift, indolent wastrels, but they were accepted. Jack had neither the taste, nor the time and money, for indiscriminate wenching, reckless gambling or drinking himself into a stupor, but he was the one looked down on.

His fellow aristocrats might despise him, but they did not shun his talents for solving problems on their behalf. He had spent the past week in Lincolnshire, concluding the last commission he intended taking, and wondered if he would miss the work. Not the tedium, of which there was plenty, but the puzzle of solving a problem and the occasional excitement, even danger. This last case had involved the plausible gentleman who had insinuated his way into the life of a certain young viscount, much to the alarm of his trustees The man had put up a satisfactory fight when confronted by Jack and the officers of the law armed with a warrant for his arrest on forgery charges and it had been a pleasure to let off some of his tight-wound emotions.

Jack was absently rubbing his bruised knuckles as the carriage turned down St James’s Street and pulled up outside the club. Yes, some things he’d miss. Earls were supposed to be respectable these days, on the surface at least.

‘Mr Ransome.’ The hall porter opened the door for him. ‘There is post awaiting you in the office, sir. Would you like it now, sir, or when you leave?’

‘Now, thank you.’ Jack tipped the man, then carried the correspondence through to the library. With a twinge of amusement he recognised the need to clear away everything to give himself a fresh start.

An hour later a plump little butler flung the door open with a flourish as Jack made himself walk slowly up the steps. ‘Sir. Welcome. I am Partridge.’

Jack stepped inside, took a deep breath, looked around. ‘What the hell?’

Chapter Five

‘Sir? Miss Aylmer—’

Jack looked around the hall and almost turned right around again. It was the wrong house, surely? But there was the famous twisted ironwork of the staircase, the foliage and hidden birds he had searched for and delighted in as a child.

‘Miss Aylmer had better be at home because I want to talk to her. Now. What the devil is this? It looks like a damned bordello designed for Prinny and his cronies.’

Partridge took a step back and then, bravely, held his ground. ‘The redecoration of this floor has just been completed, Mr Ransome. The house had been let furnished for some time—it required modernising so Miss Aylmer gave instructions. No expense or effort has been spared, I assure you.’

Jack strode past him to the end of the hall and stopped, one hand on the study door, his stomach churning. This was the heart of the house for him, the place where his grandfather had sat behind the battered old desk that had been his own father’s, reading and rereading his familiar books, shutting out the reality of the baffling world outside. Jack would sit in the armchair in the corner, his feet not reaching the floor, and listen to the old man’s rambling stories while his grandmother sat sewing, watching the two loves of her life.

The door opened at a push. He took one look and spun round to the butler. ‘Where is the furniture? The books? Where is the damn desk?’

‘Mr Ransome—’ The butler was positively wringing his hands.

‘Is something wrong?’ enquired a voice behind him.

The author of all this. He turned so sharply that Madelyn took a step back. Then she stopped, met his furious gaze, chin up, blue-grey eyes steady. There was the smallest furrow between her brows, but otherwise her face was expressionless. He saw her swallow, hard.

‘This.’ Jack swept his hand round in a gesture to encompass the entire hideous gilded mess. ‘This abomination.’

‘I instructed Mr Lansing to refurnish in the most modern taste. Is this not correct in some way? I carried out the most extensive research on what was fashionable.’

‘It is hideous. Appalling.’

‘I know nothing about fashionable interiors, but—’

‘That much, Miss Aylmer, is evident. You ordered this? Have you no taste whatsoever?’ She opened her mouth, but he swept on. ‘Where are the original contents?’

‘Partridge?’ She said it calmly enough, but her eyes were wide now and her cheeks white.

‘Everything was moved to the upper floors, Miss Aylmer. As I said, only this floor has been completed and there were sufficient rooms to store everything until we had orders about its disposal.’

‘Nothing will be disposed of except for this…this tawdry rubbish. Get whoever was responsible for the decoration and the furnishings back here, have it all reinstated as it was. Starting with the study.’

‘Mr Ransome, if I might have a word?’

And a knife in my back by the sound of it.

A faint tremor underneath the taut words made him stop, breathe. Jack had his anger under control by the time he turned back to her. ‘Of course, Miss Aylmer.’ He followed her into the drawing room, winced at the crocodile couch and closed the door.

Madelyn sank down on to a hard, upright chair, her back perfectly straight, her head up. Her hair had been curled, crimped and piled up, leaving her neck naked and vulnerable.

She looks like a plucked bird, he thought.

Lady Fairfield was presumably responsible for the eau-de-Nil travelling dress she was wearing. Neither the hair style or the gown suited her and she seemed unlike herself, as though she was dressing up. For some reason that only increased his bad humour. He had not realised his wife-to-be was quite so plain, quite so awkward.

‘Where am I to reside while this work is carried out?’ she asked. Somehow, she was keeping her voice steady, but the hem of her gown moved. He assumed she was controlling anger with an effort, trembling with indignation. He did not care. Let her have a shouting match if that was what she wanted.

‘They can do it room by room. I imagine that will not discommode you too much. There are enough apartments on this floor to provide alternative dining and drawing rooms and I assume you can manage without the use of the study.’ He sat down on something that appeared to have been looted from a pharaoh’s tomb. At least sitting on it he did not have to look at the thing.

‘Certainly I can. I regret that my assumption that you would wish your London house to be in the latest mode was so far misplaced.’

Anger at the shock at finding everything so changed was subsiding into a roiling stomach and a strong desire to down half a bottle of brandy. He hadn’t felt this bad since his grandfather died, he realised. It was like losing him all over again.

Jack looked across at his betrothed and felt a pang of guilt. This was still Madelyn’s house and she was trying to do the right thing. Probably, at this moment, she was wondering what she had done to promise herself to such an angry man.

‘I apologise for swearing. You meant it for the best, no doubt.’ He was a gentleman, he reminded himself. He should not take out his disappointment and temper on a lady, even if she was the cause of that disappointment.

She turned that wide blue-grey gaze on him, and he found he could manage to get the scowl off his face if he really tried. ‘This was my home, but why I should imagine it would stay unchanged for so many years I do not know.’ It was an explanation and, he supposed, a poor sort of apology.

‘Your home? But I had assumed that Dersington Mote would be the house that was of chief importance to you.’

‘That was where my father and brother lived. My mother died when I was ten and my grandparents did not think it was the right place for a child.’ That had been on the day when his grandmother had arrived to find he had a black eye and bruised cheek as a result of disturbing his father by crying at night over the loss of his mother. He tipped his head back against the hard, uncomfortable upholstery, closed his eyes and wondered why he felt so weary.

‘Your father’s parents?’ When he nodded she said, ‘But did they not live at the country house?’

‘My grandfather became confused with age. This smaller house was easier for him and, in London, my grandmother was closer to her friends who supported her.’

‘Oh, I understand now.’ There was a rustle of fabric, and he blinked. Madelyn was sitting on the footstool by his knees, hands clasped in her lap, ruffled skirts pooling around her. ‘I will speak to the workmen myself, make certain everything is just as you want it again.’ The faint scent of old roses and warm female drifted up.

‘You have a great deal of experience making certain that the men in your life have exactly the surroundings they desire, haven’t you?’ He found he was irrationally irritated by that. That was what ladies did, after all. The household was their kingdom but they were managing it for their husbands, fathers and, sometimes, brothers.

‘Yes.’ She tipped her head to one side, clearly puzzled at this sudden change of mood. Those ugly curls bobbed, but the movement sent up another disturbing waft of fragrance, a memory of her secret garden behind the massive stone walls. ‘But not men. There has only ever been my father to please.’

‘And what do you want? Where do you want to live? How do you want to live?’

‘Me?’ The suggestion that she might express a preference made her rock back on the stool as though to get him into better focus. ‘What is the point of wondering that? If I want children, a family, then I have no choice in the matter.’

‘Take this house, for example. We both agree we hate this.’ He rapped his knuckles on the gilded scales of the arm chair.

‘Yes,’ Madelyn agreed warily.

‘I want the study back how I remember it, I want this Egyptian nonsense gone. But there is no reason why we cannot decide on the rest of the house together.’

‘Truly? But if this is not the mode, then I have no idea about other possibilities. And what if we disagree?’ She hesitated, bit her lip. ‘Then it would be your decision, of course.’

‘No. Then we discuss it. Compromise, perhaps.’

It was as though he had handed any other woman of his acquaintance a very large diamond. ‘Oh, yes.’ Her face lit up with an unguarded smile that had him smiling back.

Jack caught her by the shoulders and bent his head until he could feel the warmth of her breath on his lips. ‘Oh, yes?’

Madelyn nodded, felt the warmth of the blush rising, although she kept her gaze locked with Jack’s, only closing her eyes as he came close. Jack tasted of something that she remembered from the castle garden—something indefinably spicy—and perhaps of his recent anger as well, and her lips parted immediately as he stroked his tongue over them.

Had he pulled her up or had she risen into his arms? She wasn’t sure, but she was there now, on his lap, arms twined around his neck, his body warm and hard and exciting under her hands.

And then the door opened and shut again with a click that sent her toppling off, bouncing onto the stool, then the carpet, in an ungainly tangle of limbs. Jack reached for her, she felt his hand curl around one silk-stockinged ankle, then he let go and ended up sprawled on the floor next to her.

Madelyn struggled to sit up, impeded by the unfamiliar stays that jabbed in her ribs. Jack flopped back on the thick gold and black carpet and laughed. ‘I think we have scandalised our new butler.’ He rolled over onto one elbow and looked at her, apparently more than happy to continue where they had just left off.

Scandalised, Madelyn scrambled to her feet. ‘I will open the door.’ She knew she was pink-faced with embarrassment. How she was going to face Partridge…

‘Leave it.’ Jack spoke so sharply that she stopped dead, turned and sat in the nearest straight-backed chair, chin up, struggling to get her breath under control. She knew she was shaking, then it dawned on her that it was not only fear that he was losing his temper and would shout at her. There was this alarming urge to give free rein to all the things inside her that were fighting to be expressed. She had no practice in showing her feelings, let alone in losing her temper, but it seemed she was going to begin learning now.

Jack stayed where he was, quite at ease cross-legged on the floor. ‘Really, Madelyn, there is no need to be so bourgeois about it. This is our house, or rather, yours and—’

‘Yes,’ she said steadily, ignoring the distracting sight of tight breeches straining over his muscles. ‘It is mine, just at the moment. And they are my servants. And whatever else I may be, I am not a bourgeois.’ It was amazing that she could speak so clearly, she thought, as though watching herself from afar. Any moment now he will stand up and he will shout—or worse—and I will dissolve…

‘I did not say you were, but the servants should conform to your standards, not you to theirs. It is not their place to be shocked.’ He was not shouting. Yet.

Emboldened, Madelyn shot back, ‘I see that you have adapted again quickly to the behaviour of the ton, Lord Dersington.’ She was shaking and she was appalled to realise that part of that was because of unsatisfied desire. She wanted to be rolling about on the floor with this man, which was appalling. What was he doing to her? She had never felt like this before, not even with Richard, the man she had dreamed of marrying…

‘I have never been out of society. The ton might have been shocked by my refusal to use my title, I might be disapproved of, snubbed and gossiped about, but I have hardly been existing in some back slum. And I am not going to bicker over this. You are about to become the Countess of Dersington. You will set standards and if you choose to make love to your husband on the drawing-room carpet, then you will do so and the staff will have to learn to be discreet about it.’

‘Very well. I will set some standards now.’ Madelyn stood up and Jack rose, too. Clearly, whatever she thought of him, he was not going to sprawl on the floor when a lady was on her feet. ‘I do not choose to have my husband tumble me like a milkmaid in a haystack.’ She had the door open before he could reach it. ‘I will have these rooms restored to their former state. I doubt I will be receiving anyone at all until that is done.’

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