Lord Haven's Deception

by Donna Lea Simpson

  Ah, a tiny, secret voice whispered, but you have money! It was not a large fortune, but with careful husbandry it could last, especially living modestly as one would surely live as wife to a farmer.

  She realized suddenly that she didn’t even know where or how he lived, her knowledge of him was that sparse. Did he live with parents? Did he have his own cottage, as manager of Lord Haven’s vast holdings? Was that his position? She had just assumed from his intimate knowledge of every inch of the viscount’s property and every detail of his business that he was a farm manager or land steward.

  She didn’t think he was the kind of man who could live on his wife’s dowry. A man in his position could possibly expect to marry a merchant’s daughter, a young lady with a thousand pounds as her portion. But her dowry was many many times that. Would that offend him? And once she told him the truth, for she knew that it was inevitable that she must, would he think that marriage to the granddaughter of an earl would be beyond him? No man wanted to be less than his wife.

  And there was something else, something much more serious. When the whole truth came out, would he risk marrying the lady his master had already offered to wed? He would surely not hazard offending the man who held his livelihood in the palm of his blue-blooded hand. That was the plain and simple truth of the matter. She was being dishonest and unfair to him in not telling him the truth about who she was.

  Gerry had been talking for a while, telling her about the area, the valley of the Lesley, the town, something about the people. And she had asked a few questions just to show she was listening. But now they paused and he gestured to a log.

  “Would you like to sit for a few minutes?” he said.

  She gladly took a seat and he sat beside her, his thick muscled thigh pressed against her leg. The sun was warm on her face and she turned it up to the sky and closed her eyes. Gerry took her hand again, and they sat for a few minutes in silence.

  “Do you think to find work around here, Jenny?”

  Reality. He probably looked forward to a long courtship, if that was his aim at all, before he could afford to take a wife.

  “I hadn’t thought about it. I cannot stay with Mary long.” That, at least, was the truth. Her little house of cards was about to fall apart, she thought sadly. She was as good as betrothed to the viscount, Lord Haven, and never had that prospect seemed more bleak than that moment, sitting beside the one man in the world she could dream of marriage to without shuddering. Even willing as she was to abandon her family—her mother loved her, she knew, but she had never needed her, and now she had a husband to care for her—it did not change her relative position in life, nor Gerry’s.

  “I guess you can’t,” he said. “Stay at Mary’s too long, I mean.” He pulled a piece of new grass and chewed on the end. He squinted up at the sun. “Lunch soon. We should be getting back.” And with that he stood and offered her his hand, pulling her to her feet.

  They walked back slowly. Where the valley was warmed by the sun, the high moor was still very chilly. It was finally April and the wind whipped and scudded puffy clouds up one hill and down the other while the spring sunshine tried its best to provide some warmth. They stopped at the top of the fell. Her companion pointed to the hills in the distance, purplish on the horizon. “That, in the distance, is the Pennines. First road closed in the winter goes through there.”

  “What is that patch of different color,” Jenny asked, pointing to a large swath of the fell that was a different green than the grass around them.

  “That there is the heather; by summer it will be in full bloom. Lovely, it is, to walk among it in full bloom, and to fall down in it and smell the wonderful scent. It rises up on the breeze and perfumes the air.”

  Jenny gazed up at him. “You have a poet within you struggling to get out.”

  “Well, he’s not struggling very hard.” He chuckled, a rich warm sound. He put his arm over her shoulder when he noticed her shivering and held her close to his warm, sturdy frame. “We should get back.”

  “I suppose. I’m to help with churning butter this afternoon and I wouldn’t want to miss that.” She chuckled.

  He turned her to face him. “Jenny,” he said, a serious look on his face, “I have not known you long and you have not known me long, but . . . but I . . .” He faltered to a halt, shook his head and turned away, staring off into the distance. “I must get back. There are some things I have to do that cannot wait.”

  They walked the rest of the way back to the cottage—a fair piece in this countryside of long sloping moors—in silence. He left her at the gate, but then returned to her and bent over, brushing her lips with his own. “I’ll be back, my sweet Jenny. I will be back, and shortly, too.”

  When she entered, singing one of the songs that Mary had taught her while they worked, she hoped he was coming back to ask her a question. Even though she knew deep in the furthest regions of her heart that she was courting disaster and heartache, she still couldn’t help hoping, wishing, praying. Until the very last second she would squeeze every drop of joy out of this country courtship, if that was what it was. If it fell down about her in a tangled mess of pain and sorrow—

  But she wouldn’t think of that just then, not with the feel of his lips on hers and the scent of his warm body still in her nostrils. There was always time for heartbreak and pain later. For now there was love blooming.

  Chapter Twelve

  Lady Mortimer, her pinched face twisted in her perpetual frown, glared at the viscount’s grandmother. “I do not know what you are asking?”

  “It’s simple enough; I just asked if the miniature you sent to us is considered a good likeness of Miss Dresden?” The dowager tapped her cane impatiently, wondering why this was such a difficult question for the pestilential old hen-wit. “Is that so hard to understand or answer?”

  Lady Mortimer drew herself up and sniffed, “Why, of course it is a good likeness. It is her very image! Why do you ask such insulting and imbecilic questions? I am inclined to believe that age has touched your mind.”

  The old lady chuckled. The one thing she appreciated about the bilious baroness was her willingness to belittle anybody and her absolute lack of compassion for the dowager’s infirm state. Sometimes it got just a trifle wearying to be deferred to by almost everyone when she was around, only to be dismissed as an ancient beldame with wandering wits in her absence. She knew how some of her household thought of her, but was powerless to change anything. It was frustrating. “I have lived long enough that I do not care who is insulted nor who thinks I am an imbecile. I care only for those close to me, and for them I would do anything.”

  “This is the most absurd household,” Lady Mortimer fumed, standing and pacing the drab carpet of the elderly dame’s sitting room. “Rachel and Lady Haven are, I think, the only two with any claim to gentility. Just look at that child, Pamela! She’s mad! I saw her out riding in breeches . . . breeches! And your grandson; he is a great idiotish lummox. And you—” The baroness paused and turned back to stare at the dowager. Her beady eyes sharpened and focused, intelligence snapping in their dark depths. “Why does it matter if Jane’s picture is accurate?”

  The old lady shrugged. “It doesn’t. I was just curious. Do you consider that she looks like your sister?”

  The baroness snorted. “Jane takes after Dresden’s side of the family! No gentility there at all; all the women plump, with serving-girl looks. No nobility. No breeding.”

  “But Dresden was the younger son of an earl!” The dowager sat forward on her chair, fascinated by the description of her proposed granddaughter-in-law to be. Lady Mortimer was only so candid because she had the impression that talking to the elderly dowager viscountess was harmless, of no more consequence than speaking to a chair or armoire.

  “A newer creation,” Lady Mortimer sniffed. “There is the whiff of the trades there in the not-too-distant past.”

  The elderly lady sat back, satisfied in some respects. The tiny painting of Miss
Dresden that had been sent on ahead of the girl was of a narrow-faced tight-lipped miss, but the baroness had just described her as favoring her father’s side of the family, on which side the women were all “plump, with serving-girl looks.” So to sum it up, the painting was as accurate as such works often were when done by an inferior artist, reflecting the prejudices of the painter and the prevailing notions of beauty of the age. It bore only a passing likeness to the girl, in all likelihood. To meet the original in person one might not be struck by a resemblance at all

  A tap at the door made both women stop and look.

  “What is it?” the elder lady asked imperiously. She had more to ask of the embittered baroness and she did not especially want interruptions.

  “Grand, have you seen—” It was Rachel, but as she poked her head into the room and scanned it, she saw Lady Mortimer. “Oh, my lady, you are just who we are looking for. You must come at once! Dreadful, dreadful news!”

  Lady Mortimer paled. “What is it? Is it Jane . . . have they found . . . ?”

  “I’d best let mother tell you. Come to the parlor, my lady, if you please.”

  The entire family—except for Haven himself—was assembled, but waited politely while Grand hobbled in following the baroness, and took a seat by the large windows that overlooked the terrace garden side of the old priory. Grand cast a look over at Pamela and saw the child wearing the gaudy pink dress her mother had recently ordered for her, a horrible confection of bows and lace that overwhelmed the girl’s slim, boyish figure. She sat stiffly in a chair near Sir Colin Varens, who stood, brow furrowed, posed by the hearth.

  “What is it? What is all this fuss about?” It was likely some overreaction on her daughter-in-law’s part, and she was already planning how to get Lady Mortimer alone again to question her for more details on Miss Jane Dresden. “Why must we all gather and wait the pronouncements of this self-important baby baronet?”

  Rachel giggled but Pamela shot her grandmother a hurt look, and so the dowager clamped her mouth shut. Soon she would make Pamela see that Varens was not good enough for her, but it would take time. The child idolized him.

  “Ma’am,” Varens said politely, turning to her. “I assure you I would not take your time for anything less than vital.” He turned toward the younger dowager Lady Haven, the viscount’s mother. “Where is Haven, by the way, my lady? He should be here.”

  She shrugged helplessly. “I can only assume that he is off looking for Miss Dresden.”

  The dowager held her tongue, annoyed that Varens, like so many others, passed her over because of her age, seeing her as a venerable object to be polite to, but not to consider of any aid. She could tell him where Haven was likely to be, but she wouldn’t. Nor would she tell them her own suspicions of the whereabouts of the girl. Let them all stew in their own juices, the pack of dolts!

  “What do you want to say, Sir Colin,” Rachel said, clearly bored by the wait. She played absently with a gold bracelet, letting the tiny bells attached tinkle and clank.

  Varens cast her a worshipful glance and said, “I will get to the point, Miss Neville. I have some disturbing news from the village. I was at the inn this morning, and—” He paused and held out a paper package to Lady Mortimer. “Ma’am . . . my lady, please look at this reticule and jewel bag and tell me if you recognize them.”

  Lady Mortimer took the package, slipped the string off of it and ripped it open; with a faint cry she let it drop from her hands. “It is Jane’s!”

  “I suspected as much,” Varens said. He cast a look at Rachel and straightened, looking very much aware that all eyes were now on him.

  Puffed up little toad, the elder dowager thought. What did Miss Dresden’s reticule prove?

  “But there is nothing in them!” Lady Mortimer continued, picking the items up and looking them over. She opened the reticule and shook the soft chamois sack. “There should be a small, embroidered purse with money in it in the reticule and . . . and Jane’s pearls should be in the jewel bag!”

  “There’s more,” Varens said. “A serving girl in the village has been seen wearing a brown carriage dress of good quality, a dress very much like the one purported to be Miss Dresden’s, if I am not mistaken. My housekeeper, Mrs. Farrell, says that one of our maids, a friend of the other girl’s, told her the wench will not say where she got it.”

  Lady Mortimer leaped to her feet. “Take me to the girl. I will beat it out of her! How would she get Jane’s dress if there was not—” Her face bleached and without another word she crumpled to the ground.

  “Useless nodcock,” the elder dowager said, her voice echoing in the shocked silence of the parlor.

  Lady Haven rose from her seat and started gabbling, twisting her hands together uncertainly.

  “Does that mean that Miss Dresden is dead?” Rachel asked plaintively.

  Varens knelt by Lady Mortimer and gently tapped her cheeks, trying to revive her, while Lady Haven regained her wits and shrieked out the door for the butler to get hartshorn. The baronet glanced up at Rachel and said, “No, Miss Neville, that does not necessarily follow, though I fear that is what Lady Mortimer has assumed. I would say the kidnappers have likely taken the young lady’s clothes and jewels and money and gave the dress to one of their doxies.” He colored at the information he had to impart.

  But Rachel did not seem perturbed. “Then I do not see what the fuss is about,” she said. “This tells us nothing new at all.” She left the room without another word.

  Lady Mortimer regained consciousness just as Haven strode into the room.

  “Where have you been, you idiot?” his mother howled.

  The dowager snapped, “Shut up, Lydia. You should have more respect for your son. Let the boy speak.”

  Haven frowned at his grandmother. “Grand, it does not help for you to speak to Mother that way. What is all this fearful clatter about? I have never seen that man,” he said, referring to the butler, “move at a pace faster than a tortoise, but just now he was tearing up the stairs bellowing for hartshorn.”

  Varens, helping Lady Mortimer up to a chair, repeated what he had just imparted. “It doesn’t look good, Haven,” he finished.

  The viscount sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Colin, if you had waited . . . I have just been to the village myself. It seems that the servant in question . . .” He broke off and shook his head. “I spoke to the girl; she was terribly frightened by all of the commotion and your questioning, Varens. That explains her reticence before this. The truth of the matter is, she claims she ‘found’ the dress tied in a bundle and discarded in a hedge just outside of the inn. I’m not sure what that means, but I feel certain she was telling me the truth. It took a lot of courage for her to tell me that much.”

  “How does that make anything better?” Pamela said. “I still think Sir Colin did the right thing, to tell us what he had found out. We have to know what is going on. And there is the jewel bag and reticule—”

  “Where were they found, Colin?” Haven asked, cutting his sister off. “Barker was not around when I was there and no one else could tell me.”

  The baronet, still stinging from Haven’s rebuke, sullenly said, “Joseph Barker told me one of the maids found it in her room . . . that is, the room Miss Dresden was resting in before she was kidnapped. It was under the bed mattress. When the servants turned the mattress in their weekly cleaning, they found them.”

  “Well, then, it could not have been taken by the supposed kidnappers then, could it?” He frowned and glared down at the carpet. “There is no suggestion that she was taken from her room. All agree that she was last seen on the stairs leading to the kitchen. If these items were found in that room, then the only possible answer to that question is that Miss Dresden put them there herself, for whatever reason. I suppose by some stretch of the imagination one could argue that the kidnappers accosted Miss Dresden and forced her to take them back up to her room, where they proceeded to take the time to remove her money and jewels from their
coverings, but it does not hang together, to me. And I . . . I have her pearls, you know.” He drew them out of his pocket. “Or at least I believe them to be hers.”

  After the hubbub had died down and Haven had explained himself and his possession of the pearls, he turned to the baroness. “Tell me, Lady Mortimer, did Miss Dresden have any . . .” He paused and glanced away, squinting for a moment at the rococo carved hearth. “Any admirers, any beaux, any gentlemen who wished to marry her?”

  “Lord, no! The girl is a cabbage-headed little . . .” The baroness stopped and clamped her mouth closed. When she spoke again it was with her usual cultured tones. “That is, my niece is of impeccable virtue. What are you suggesting, Haven?”

  “I was wondering if the young lady might have preferred another gentleman, but have been convinced against her better judgment to come up here to meet me. If that was the case and she had an ardent suitor, he could have followed her and convinced her that the only thing to do was run away and get married.”

  “An elopement,” Pamela said, eyes wide. She clapped her hands. “How romantic!”

  “It is not romantic, bird-wit,” Varens said, his voice hard with spite. “It is immoral and mutton-headed.”

  Haven’s mother, looking faint, said, “Why would any girl want to marry some low fellow when she could have Viscount Haven?”

  Haven raised his eyebrows. “It should not surprise you, Mother. You have ever disparaged my personal attractions.”

  Grand snickered.

  Lady Haven colored. “Perhaps, but this is a defamation of your title and lineage, of which there cannot be two opinions.”

  “Perhaps there are,” he said dryly. “Perhaps there is more than one young lady in the world who does not wish to marry the eminent Viscount Haven. I’m not done looking into this, but I would have all of you keep one thing in mind.” He scanned those assembled, not excepting his grandmother, whom he dropped a wink at, however. “One: this information should stay in this room. I want no gossip about Miss Dresden should she have decided on an elopement. In fact, I think I would respect the girl more if I discovered that she made her own decisions about her future rather than being herded up to Yorkshire to marry a man she has never met. Two: we know nothing for sure at this point, not even that Miss Dresden left the inn willingly. I am assuming nothing. With this new theory in mind I will send out a rider to see if any coaches or carriages with a man and woman in them have been seen in the hours following Miss Dresden’s disappearance.”