London Ladies (The Complete Series)

by Eaton, Jillian

  “Perfect.” Herring’s eyebrows waggled up and down. “I know a vicar in the next town. Friendly chap who will do anything for a bit of coin and a spot of good brandy. We can be married tomorrow. What do you say?”

  Amused, Dianna stopped and gracefully pivoted to face him. “I say your son was correct. You are an incorrigible flirt.”

  “And why not?” Herring demanded, giving the end of his cane an extra tap tap on the stone. “I am old, not dead, and the moment I stop appreciating a lovely woman you might as well put a gun to my head and throw dirt over my body.”

  Dianna hid her smile behind a gloved hand. “I doubt we would ever have to go to such extremes,” she chided gently. “Would you care to take another turn about the gardens?”

  Looking out across the flowers, Lord Herring’s expression suddenly turned wistful. “My Marie loved poppies. She would have loved this garden as well, but poppies were always her favorite. There was an entire field of them between our two estates. It’s where we would meet when we were young. Right in the middle where a small creek ran through. I’d help her across - I was much more nimble in those days, mind you - and she would always give me a poppy and call me her knight in shining armor.”

  Touched by the lovely story and the tears she saw glinting in the corners of Lord Herring’s eyes, Dianna rested her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Marie was your wife?” she asked softly, assuming the woman he spoke of so tenderly to be Harold’s mother.

  “No,” he said, catching her off guard. Procuring a white handkerchief from his pocket Lord Herring turned his head to the side and dabbed at his eyes. “But she should have been. I loved her as I have never loved another, but she went away to boarding school, and… and I didn’t wait,” he admitted gruffly. “To this day, it remains my biggest regret. But a young woman like you does not want to be bored with the tales of an old man like me.”

  “Oh no, you are not boring me,” Dianna protested. “Truly.”

  Neatly folding the handkerchief into a small, tidy square Lord Herring slipped it back into his pocket and twitched his shoulders, as though the melancholy that had descended upon him like a dark, heavy cloak could be physically shaken off. “Best to leave the past where it belongs. Besides, it is time for my afternoon nap. Need to keep up my energy if I am going to be chasing you about all week.”

  Her heart aching for the young, impatient boy he’d been, Dianna nevertheless managed a smile for the old man standing before her now. “Indeed. Would you like me to escort you to your room?”

  “No, no.” Gripping his cane firmly with one hand, Lord Herring waved her off with the other. “Go about your business. I shall see you at dinner.”

  “Until then,” Dianna said, watching him until he disappeared from sight. Finding her thoughts more troubled now than they had been inside the solarium, she began another turn around the gardens, but somewhere along the way abandoned the neatly tended stone walkway for a slightly overgrown path that twisted down towards a duck pond far beyond sight of the mansion.

  The last lingering traces of late morning dew clung to her skirts as she walked, darkening the hem of her yellow morning dress in an uneven line. Circling around the edge of the pond after pausing to coo at two white swans sunbathing on the shore, she continued into a nearby field with no clear destination in mind, only a pressing urge to distance herself, although from what and whom she wasn’t entirely certain.

  She supposed, in a way, she was trying to run from herself. From her thoughts. From her feelings. From anything that could cause pain or doubt. She wanted to quiet her mind. To forget, if only for a time, the memories that haunted her.

  Memories that had returned with Miles.

  As children they’d run together through fields much like this one. Or rather, Dianna corrected with the tiniest of smiles, Miles had run and she’d given chase, an annoying shadow he couldn’t seem to shake no matter how hard he tried.

  How carefree they’d been. How innocent. How happy. And how confident, she recalled. Or at least she had been. Confident in herself. Confident in Miles. Confident in their future together.

  She’d had their entire lives planned out for them by the time she was thirteen. When they would marry. Where they would live. How many children they would have. She had been so eager to begin their lives together, so ready to grow up and become an adult, that she’d forgotten to ask Miles what he thought of it all. Instead she’d naively assumed, and in the end had paid the ultimate price for her assumptions.

  Despite the cool autumn air a sheen of perspiration soon dampened Dianna’s brow. Not accustomed to walking such great lengths, her legs quickly began to tire. Squinting across the circular meadow she spied a large willow tree at the far end, its leafy boughs nearly touching the ground.

  Not ready to go back yet, she marched determinedly across the field. Upon reaching the willow she shrugged out of the light shawl she’d donned before coming outside and spread it out across the grass, settling into a shady nook beneath the willow’s long sweeping branches.

  A light breeze rippled through the leaves, carrying with it a sweet symphony of birdsong. Resting first on her side and then her stomach, Dianna succumbed to the gentle sounds of nature as she pillowed her head on her arm, closed her eyes, and promptly fell asleep.

  Chapter Six

  Of all the people Miles Radnor thought might show up on his front doorstep at half past one in the afternoon, Charlotte Graystone was not one of them. Yet there she stood, hands on hips, head thrown back, amber eyes glaring daggers through the door as though she knew he was standing just on the other side of it.

  “RADNOR, GET OUT HERE THIS INSTANT!” she shouted, her raised voice instantly reminding him of the many times they’d quarreled in the past.

  As the two most important people in Dianna’s life, it was not surprising he and Charlotte had often butted heads. It didn’t help matters that Charlotte had always thought arranged marriages were hogwash. She’d never liked or trusted him, Miles recalled with a grimace, and he thought it rather safe to say her opinion of him had not improved in the past four years. He had known he would have to face her eventually… he just never planned on having to do it quite so soon.

  “Miles, who is that very loud woman at the door?” Sounding alarmed, Olivia Radnor stepped down off the bottom step of the curving staircase and hesitated in the middle of the foyer, green eyes - the one trait she’d passed onto both of her children - pinned to the door. “And why is she yelling your name?”

  A small woman in stature but a large one in temperament, Olivia lived her life according to a regimented set of rules she had absolutely no interest in bending, let alone breaking. She’d been a well behaved daughter, a good wife, and a kind - albeit controlling - mother. Miles knew he’d hurt her immensely when he left, and so he spoke gently to her now, walking across the wooden floor to take her arm.

  “A friend of Miss Dianna’s has come to call, Mother.”

  “Come to call?” A strict line of disapproval appeared between her thin brows. “At this hour? Absurd. I shall have Davies turn her away at once.”

  “RADNOR, I CAN HEAR YOU SPEAKING! OPEN THIS DOOR AT ONCE!”

  Olivia’s eyes widened. “Is that-”

  “Lady Charlotte Vanderley. Graystone now, I suppose,” he said, recalling that he’d heard sometime or rather that she had married an entrepreneur by the name of Gavin Graystone. As far as Miles knew the man was a commoner, but that apparently hadn’t stopped him from becoming one of the wealthiest men in all of England.

  “Do not let that woman in this house.” Not surprisingly, Olivia had never taken a liking to Charlotte. She’d found her too rebellious, and always hinted to anyone who would listen that she was a terrible influence on her son’s fiancée. Her opinion had only been confirmed when Miles left.

  The sort of mother who thought her only son could do no wrong, she’d never blamed him for leaving. In her mind Dianna had always been the one at fault, influenced by the very wo
man who was now demanding entry into her home.

  Miles glanced at the door. “She seems rather insistent.”

  A small understatement, given that it sounded as though Charlotte had picked up one of the stone frogs Olivia kept on either side of the front veranda - she positively adored the tiny green creatures - and begun beating it against the door.

  “I had better go see what she wants,” Miles decided, even though the last thing on earth he wanted to do was face Charlotte in the midst of a temper, especially when she was wielding a giant stone frog.

  “Miles-”

  “If it has anything to do with Dianna, I need to hear what she has to say.”

  Olivia took a step back. “Why would she be here in regards to Dianna?” Realization dawned on her narrow features, followed swiftly by thinly veiled annoyance. “You did not see her, did you Miles?”

  Miles grimaced. He’d been hoping to avoid this very conversation, at least until he’d settled completely at Winfield and begun to make some amends. With his mother. With his sister. With his friends. And, most of all, with Dianna. Bending at the waist, he kissed his mother’s papery thin cheek. “You should not blame her, you know. It was not her fault.”

  Olivia remained unmoving, both in posture and in sentiment. “If she had been a better fiancée you would have stayed.”

  “If I had been a better man I never would have left,” he said flatly. There were many things he would tolerate, but listening to insults about Dianna was not one of them. “I am inviting Charlotte in, Mother. If her being here offends you then I suggest you stay out of the front parlor.”

  As a boy, Miles had often bended beneath the authoritative power Olivia wielded. She may have been small, but her influence was great, and she’d used it on him more times than he could count to get her way. Except he was no longer a boy. He was the Earl of Winfield, and he refused to allow himself to be so easily cowed. He would respect his mother. He would even listen to her. But the days of blind obedience were long since past.

  Tight lipped, Olivia drew away from him and a wall that had never existed between them before laid down its first layer of brick. “I will go see if your sister is awake. We have plans to see a dressmaker in town. I shall assume if you allow that woman entry into this house she will not be here when we return.”

  Miles raked a hand through his hair, pulling at the ends in silent frustration. He understood why his mother felt the way she did, but that did not mean he could condone her behavior. In the past he’d always sided with her against Charlotte, more out of habit and an innate need to please her than anything else. Now he merely wanted to hear what Charlotte had to say and his mother was taking it as a personal offense.

  Fickle creatures, women. If you pleased one, you only enraged the other. Could they not just leave him in peace to make his own damn decisions, as foolhardy as they’d been in the past? He may not have been the boy he was, but he also wasn’t the man he wanted to become. Not yet. Not until he’d made up for all of the pain he had caused. Not until his mother saw him for who he was, not who she wanted him to be. Not until his sister looked at him with love instead of distrust.

  Not until he had Dianna back.

  His father would have known what to do, and not for the first time Miles felt his death like a physical blow to the heart. The pain always came when it was least expected, drowning out anything and everything else.

  George Radnor had not an outwardly emotional man, but deep down he’d been a caring one. Unlike his wife, he had not been blind to the faults of his children, most specifically his only son and heir. Miles still had the letter his father had sent him a month after he left home. A letter that spoke of disapproval and regret, but also one that encouraged Miles to find himself, a sentiment he never knew his father had until he’d seen it written down on paper.

  He’d painstakingly composed his own response; a letter that took five pages and two full months to complete. But by the time it was finished he found himself in Madrid in the midst of a war that did not favor England, and sending any type of mail between the two countries proved impossible. So he’d kept the letter on his person, intending to deliver it by hand when he at last returned home, never guessing the Earl of Radnor would die of consumption before the year was out.

  He learned of his father’s passing in Egypt, and the guilt of not being there, coupled with the guilt he still felt from leaving Dianna, served to send him spiraling down into a drunken stupor from which he did not awaken for six months. It was unequivocally the darkest time of his travels abroad, and when he finally managed to claw his way back out of the hole he’d sunken into he vowed never to return to such a place ever again.

  “Miles, did you hear what I said?”

  His mother’s voice, sharp as a whip, brought him abruptly back to the present. “Yes,” he said with clipped nod. “I heard you.”

  Olivia sniffed. “We should be back in precisely two hours. I trust you will make certain our unwanted guest finds her way out well before then and if any other unwanted guests come to call I will be notified at once.”

  In other words, Miles thought grimly, Dianna Foxcroft is no longer welcome here.

  Olivia had always been a hard woman, but she’d never a bitter one. He wondered what had made her so in his absence. Was it his leaving? Her husband’s death? A combination of the two? Whatever the reason she was a woman changed from the one he’d known, and not for the better.

  “Mother, I…” But faced with her judgmental stare, the words Miles wanted to say welled up in his throat. His mother had already been through so much. Why put her through more? Nothing he could say would alter her opinion. He needed to learn to accept her as she was, just as she still needed to accept him. Not as the perfect son she thought him to be, but as one who had made mistakes that still needed to be atoned for. “I love you,” he said gruffly, pulling the words from a place deep inside of himself he rarely ventured.

  When her stiff upper lip wavered, Miles thought she might actually say the same, until she turned and marched away, her spine as rigid and unyielding as an oak.

  He watched her go, waiting until she’d reached the top of the stairs and disappeared from view before he crossed the foyer and, taking a quick moment to prepare himself for what waited on the other side, opened the door.

  “Bloody hell!” he exclaimed when a stone frog came sailing within an inch of his head, its mouth frozen in a wide, reptilian grin. “Mrs. Graystone would you, ah, mind putting down the frog and coming inside?”

  Chest heaving, amber eyes spitting fire, red hair a frenzied halo about her head, Charlotte slammed the stone frog she’d been yielding as a battering ram back down on its pedestal with unnecessary - albeit impressive - force. “Oh, do not Lady Graystone me you pompous ass. It’s Charlotte, the same as it has always been. Now where is she?” Shoving past him, she charged into the front foyer and spun in three rapid circles that lifted the hem of her rose colored gown to reveal trim calves encased in a pair of sturdy brown boots.

  “Well?” she said, her voice echoing off the vaulted ceiling once she’d completed her fourth - and apparently final - turn.

  Pinching the bridge of his nose as he closed the door, Miles silently willed Charlotte to lower her voice. The last thing he bloody well needed was to have his mother come storming in and demand Charlotte be thrown from the house, although the idea wasn’t completely without merit after nearly having his brains bashed in by a stone frog. Before that happened, however, he at least needed to know why she’d come knocking on his front door in the middle of the afternoon without any forewarning and who this ‘she’ was that Charlotte seemed so adamant on finding.

  “Would you care to accompany me into the parlor?” He gestured towards a room meticulously decorated in varying shades of blue off to their right. “I can have a tray of lemonade readied.” And scotch, he added silently. Lots and lots of scotch.

  “No I most certainly would not like to accompany you into the parlor.” Hand
s on hips, Charlotte sneered at him, making no attempt to disguise her disgust and loathing. “This is not a social call, Radnor.”

  Folding his arms across his chest, he gritted his teeth and prayed for patience. “Then why don’t you illuminate me as to why you are doing in my foyer when we both know you cannot stand the sight of me.”

  “Is Dianna here?” She jabbed a finger at his chest. “Do not lie to me Radnor, even though I know it is your specialty.”

  Caught on the first sentence, Miles ignored the second. “No. I have not seen her since last night at Ashburn.” His eyes narrowed as a tiny ping of alarm sounded inside his head. “Why?” he demanded. “Has something happened to her? Where is she?”

  Charlotte tilted her head to the side as she studied him, her unusually colored eyes unblinking. “You are telling the truth,” she decided at last. “You haven’t seen her. Pardon me.”

  He caught her wrist when she would have shoved past him a second time. When she made a sound of disbelief and went to yank her arm free he tightened his grip, fingers closing like steel bands. “If you think I am letting you leave here without an explanation you are sorely mistaken.”

  “I do not recall asking for your permission. Now release me this instant!”

  “Why did you come here? Has something happened to Dianna? Where is she? Where is she?” he growled when Charlotte remained stubbornly silent, her mouth pinched in an uncompromising line and her head turned to the side. On a muttered expletive Miles dropped her arm and stepped back, blocking the door with his body. “I will stand here all day if I must and you will tell me what is going on.”

  It was not an idle threat. If something had happened to Dianna… Recalling how upset she’d been when she ran from him last night, Miles cursed again. He should have gone after her. Should have made certain she was alright. Should have offered her comfort.