“Of course,” the old woman said acidly. She moved slowly over to a table and sat in a straight-backed gilt chair. “It was too great a coincidence, a young lady of your description arriving at Mary’s just as Miss Dresden disappeared.”
“But no one else caught on?”
“They, meaning Haven and Pamela, chose to believe that Mary was telling the truth. No one could imagine why she would lie. I can think of a hundred reasons why she would lie.”
Jane frowned. She joined the woman at the enameled table, sitting opposite her and watching the expression, the sharp intelligence, flicker through watery blue eyes, eyes so like Haven’s, only rheumy with age. “Such as?”
“You could have told her the truth and offered to pay her. There is never enough money when one has a fatherless child to feed and clothe. Or perhaps she did not know about the missing Miss Dresden, and she thought she was hiding you from some sort of persecution. Or possibly—”
Jane sat back. “All right, I understand. For your interest, I think the last is the most true. She did not know about the missing Miss Dresden and I made sure Lord Haven—Gerry the farm manager, as I thought of him then—did not have a chance to tell her.”
“Ah. I did so want to know the exact reason. Curiosity is my failing, especially when it accompanies infirmity.” The old woman eyed her with a sharp look and raised her white eyebrows. “That must have made for an uncomfortable week. Lying to your hostess. Lying to your lover.”
“He is not my lover,” Jane shot back, stung into a hasty reply.
“Is he not? Then you are a fool,” she said, disdain in her quavery voice. “More than I even thought you to be.” The dowager squinted. “He does love you, you know. Do you love him?”
“Really, Lady Haven, you can hardly expect—”
“But I do expect you to answer me,” she said with a rap of her cane on the floor. “It is why I asked you here. In a few hours, when the household is awake, Haven’s mother and your aunt will decide what to do about you. You have made yourself notorious and they will, between them, decide on your fate. Should you marry Lord Haven? Have you made yourself unfit for him with this wild kidnap story and your disappearance? What scandal will ensue?”
Jane covered her face with her hands. It was true, every word of it. Lady Mortimer and Lady Haven, between them, would hold a council of war to determine her fate. But what should she do about it?
As if in answer to her thoughts, the old lady said, “Do not let them do it!”
Jane uncovered her face and gazed steadily at the old woman who faced her across the table, arthritis-knotted hands flat on the tabletop. “How do I stop them? They are two very determined women.”
“Are you a woman or a child?” The dowager’s tone was impatient, bracing. “Make up your mind what you want, and take it!” She put out her hand and closed it into a fist. “It is your life. Take what you want and be damned to the world. If you want Haven, take him.”
“Why are you saying this to me, my lady?”
There was silence for a moment, but then, “I think my grandson is in love with you. Again I ask, do you love him?”
“How can I know? He is not the same Gerry that I . . . that I f-fell in love with.”
“Idiot girl. Are you not the same young woman, though now you are Miss Jane Dresden and then you were plain Jenny, maidservant?”
Jane thought about it. Gerry had taken the chance of asking her to marry him after finding out that she was not who she said she was. But it was not the same! Was it? She shook her head, feeling like she had cobwebs forming, clouding her thoughts, bundling them up in a gauzy wrapping until she couldn’t sort out the truth.
“I don’t know. I don’t know!”
The dowager made an exclamation of disgust. “Then figure it out, or you will be coerced and bullied again into a life you are not sure of. Make your own decisions, young miss, or your life will never be your own.”
• • •
That advice stayed with Jane as she sat in the morning parlor awaiting, as she had been commanded, Lady Haven and Lady Mortimer’s presence. She was staring out the window, when she heard the door open and then close. She turned her head to see, staring at her, a young woman of surprising beauty and elegance. Her loveliness was spoiled only by a haughty look in her eyes and a proud tilt to her head.
“You are Miss Dresden,” the young woman said.
“I am. We met last night, but I do not believe I caught your name,” Jane said. “And you are . . . ?”
“Miss Rachel Neville, Haven’s sister.”
Ah, yes, Jane thought, the unpleasant sister. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Neville,” Jane said, standing and offering her hand.
The young lady took it but only briefly clutched it before dropping it again. “Are you going to marry my brother?”
Stunned, Jane did not know quite how to answer such an impertinent question—the family seemed expert in that area—and was saved when the butler opened the door, bowed and said, “Sir Colin Varens, to see the ladies.” He bowed again and exited as a young man came in, his homely face lighting to a glow when he found himself in the presence of Miss Neville.
“Miss Neville, what a pleasant surprise. I had not hoped . . . that is, I had not dared to hope—”
“What is it, Colin?”
His eyes wandered finally to Jane and he bowed before her, but his gaze was curious and just a shade bold. “Sir Colin Varens, at your service . . . Miss Dresden? Am I correct?”
“You are, sir,” Jane said, rising and dropping a brief curtsey.
Just then Lady Mortimer and Lady Haven swept into the room after Sir Colin. “We wish to speak with you alone, Jane,” Lady Mortimer said to her niece. “Come.”
“May I speak with you ladies first,” Sir Colin said, casting a sidelong glance at Jane.
“What is it, Sir Colin?” Lady Haven said impatiently.
He moved toward them and whispered something to her and Jane’s aunt. There was a hiss of displeasure and both women talked in low, furious voices at once. He shrugged and whispered again, and all three stopped and looked at Jane.
She moved uneasily under their unfriendly scrutiny. Jane could not like the calculation in her aunt’s eyes, but that moment Lady Mortimer moved away from the two others. Standing apart from them but facing her niece she declaimed, in a loud and ringing tone, “I did not know this before and it changes everything. Jane, you did not tell me that you had been compromised by his lordship, that he forced himself on you and that it was witnessed. I must demand, now, that the viscount make speedy plans to marry you and save your poor reputation!”
Chapter Seventeen
“No!”
The chatter in the room silenced with that one word from Jane.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Lady Mortimer said, glancing around uneasily at the others, then looking back at her niece. “You have no choice in the matter. Your reputation has been sullied and there is no alternative but that the man who ruined it should marry you.”
Jane felt a surge of strength as if that one word had unleashed her power. “No.” Yes, it was working; she felt a new boldness and fresh energy. “I will not marry Lord Haven simply out of social need. I will not marry him because you all want me to. I will not marry him because I should, or because I have nowhere else to go, or because I am getting old. I will not!”
“Very good,” Haven’s grandmother, who had come into the room unnoticed, said.
Lady Haven whirled and confronted her mother-in-law. “What do you mean, ‘very good’? Don’t you want Haven to marry?”
The old lady shrugged. “If he wants to. When he wants to. But I don’t want some girl marrying him just because they were caught in a compromising clinch.” She glanced over at Jane. “Although that does raise one or two interesting questions, my girl.”
Jane felt a blush rise.
“That ‘compromising clinch,’ as Grand so eloquently puts it, occurred when Miss Dresden h
ad already agreed to be my bride.” Haven’s voice, hard and unyielding, made the gathered assembly look toward the door. The viscount stood, legs apart, arms over his chest.
Jane felt a throb of emotion and it frightened her. She almost could not breathe, suffocated by an overwhelming excitement just at the sight of him. The night before, their heady lovemaking at the inn had revealed a new world to her, a new dimension to relations between man and woman. She knew that others were watching her, but her throat had constricted and she could not look away from Haven; he looked not at all like her gentle country swain. He was dressed in buff pantaloons and a charcoal coat of exquisite fit, with a perfectly tied cravat in a waterfall knot, a pearl stickpin in the folds. Somehow his shoulders seemed broader, his legs more muscular and his height more imposing. He was as intimidating as every Corinthian who had ever sneered at her in a London ballroom.
And yet for all that he was still Gerry, the man she had fallen in love with the moment he had sat down by her side, beside the hearth in Mary’s cottage. Or was he? His expression was stormy at that moment, his brilliant blue eyes blazing with fury.
“If any one of you has a single thing to say about our behavior, then you will address me, not Miss Dresden!” he said. “She is perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing.”
A babble of voices, both Lady Mortimer and Lady Haven, along with Sir Colin and Rachel, erupted.
“They are already engaged,” Lady Mortimer said. “Lord Haven said so himself!”
“But that is not possible, or he would have—”
“I do not see what all the fuss—”
“But that is not what those in the vill—”
“Shut up!” Haven’s voice carried over all, and as silence fell the only sound was the dowager chuckling.
Jane, watching the viscount’s face, thought she could detect weariness in his expression along with something else. He glanced over at her, but then looked away again, fixing his gaze at the wall.
“We are not yet formally betrothed, though I may have thought so at the time of the embrace with which everyone is so concerned.”
“Not an embrace, old man,” the younger fellow said. “Heard you and Miss Dresden was rolling around on the bed like a couple of—”
“Shut your mouth!” Haven’s blue eyes blazed with azure fire. “Shut it this instant, Colin, or I shall be forced to shut it for you.” The words were hard and the tone was flinty.
The baronet paled, but the threat had the desired affect and he was silenced.
Haven glanced around the room. “Listen to me, all of you. Miss Dresden did not know who I was when she agreed to marry me and I am heartily sorry to have tricked her in such an underhanded way.” He looked directly at Jane. “Miss Dresden, will you walk with me? I think you will agree we have much to discuss.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. He gave one hard look back at those in the room. “This discussion is private, as is the decision of whether we shall marry or not.”
He guided her outside to a rose garden sheltered by a stone wall and strolled with her down a pathway paved in crushed limestone. Just as she feared, the clothes seemed to make him a different person, and she was torn in a thousand directions as to her feelings. On the one hand he had defended her right to make her own decisions . . . or had he? It had certainly sounded like it, but would he now present to her the very arguments the ones left back in the parlor would make, about propriety and decency? Or would he hold by his words that their decision was between them?
She found herself attracted to and yet at the same time repelled by his commanding aura, and thought she understood now what the girl who had known him in London meant by his dour air. He was uneasy and aloof. As she sat down on a bench he stood by the wall and gazed out, a brooding expression dimming his magnificent eyes. This was everything she had feared, the circumscribed life within the garden walls, the awkwardness of no conversation, the frosty distance between them. Already the memory of the sweet freedom of life in the cottage was beginning to fade, the hours of roaming on the fells and by the Lesley. How had she ever mistaken him for a farmer, she thought, examining him as he stood, staring off into the distance over the fells. He was every inch the nobleman.
He turned and caught her gaze. “I meant what I said, Je . . . uh, Miss Dresden. I will not have you badgered into this marriage. But I am yours if you so desire.”
She bridled. “What, to save my sullied reputation? I think not.”
“Not only for that,” he said, his voice gentler. “I thought we had established a . . . a relationship, a rapprochement.”
She looked at him sadly. “But that was when I was a servant girl and you were a farmer.”
“Are we so different then?”
Was that a note of appeal in his voice? She must be mistaken.
“Are we not who we were when we were just Jenny and Gerry?” he continued.
“No.” She spread her arms wide and indicated all around them, the old priory, magnificent in its age, the walled gardens, the stately landscaping. Trees tortured into boxy shapes, herbs in perfect round balls, an Elizabethan knot garden, impeccable in its straight lines. “This—all of this—makes us different, makes you different. I can see it in your manner, I can hear it in your voice.” She stood and walked quickly to the wall and indicated the wide world beyond. “And even in the village, you are his lordship, Viscount Haven, master of many. That is not the man I fell in lo—” She stopped abruptly, and her voice hushed. She stared out at the distant hills, closing her eyes to the spring breeze that swooped down from the fells. “Not the man I learned to care for.”
He was silent for a moment, but then said, “I apologize for asking you to marry me without telling you the truth. It was wrong.”
“Yes, it was. I trusted you.”
“Why did you run from the inn? In the first place, I mean? Leaving the kidnap note and changing your clothes. What were you going to do? Where were you going to go?”
She leaned against the wall and gazed out over the landscape. Clouds rolled up over the fells and darkened the tops with their shadows. Taking in a long, deep breath, she expelled it slowly. “Did you ever wish you could just leave behind all of your worries? All of your cares? Did you ever long to just live, to just exist without anxiety?”
He leaned on the wall beside her and chuckled, a dry, unhappy sound. “I have often wished to do that. It is what I do when the world becomes too much. I go to see Mary and for a while I am just Gerry, her childhood friend.”
“Then you will understand that I have long felt that, but being a woman and a lady of a certain class, there is no retreat as there is for you. I am circumscribed by society to perform a certain role. I may marry, but only within my class. I may not work. I may not walk alone. I may not travel alone. I may not mingle and enjoy the company of those ‘beneath’ me.” She beat her fist on the rock top of the wall. “I may do nothing outside of the rigid expectations of a lady of my station! I may marry and bear my husband an heir, and that is all. Then, for the rest of my days I may do pretty stitchery, attend balls and routs, pay morning calls. I may entertain the vicar, take the water at Bath, sit in this prim and trim garden, and then descend into my dotage never having known one moment of freedom, of unfettered movement, of real conversation!” She closed her eyes. “And I long for freedom! I breathed the sweetness of it for such a very short time.”
Silence. She turned to look at him and his expression was thoughtful, but closed. She could not read his eyes. Couldn’t he say something? Had she shocked him so badly with her unladylike outburst?
“My trip up to Yorkshire was only to appease my mother,” she continued, looking away from him again. “She promised that if I at least came up here and gave it a try—that is, met you, and gave it an honest chance—that I could come home and she would never plague me to marry again. She promised . . . or at least . . .” She paused and sighed again. “No, I suppose she did not promise, but I understood that then we would be ab
le to get a little cottage together somewhere in the country and live a simpler life.”
“But there was a letter awaiting you at the Tippling Swan.”
She flashed him a look. So he knew about that. “Yes. I expect my aunt Mortimer has told you about that, for I know she received a letter from Mother, too, and it likely held the same hideous news. My mother married a horrible little toady of a man the moment my aunt and I were out of Bath. She never, ever intended that I should come back. She advised me to marry you, as that was my best opportunity at a ‘settlement.’ It was offered to me as my only option.”
“I’m sorry, Jenny.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said, looking up at him through a mist of tears. “That was not your doing, after all. I decided that I could not go through with it. I determined that I would go north to my old nanny’s cousin’s home in Scotland. Morag and I are friends and I know she would take me in. I had some money and my pearls. But I did not want to face my aunt—I’m a bit of a coward—so I crept to the laundry and s-stole a dress and wrote that ludicrous note.” She shook her head and sighed. “Idiotic. But then, in the stable yard . . . oh, those awful men! Is that what it is like for young women of that class?” she asked, looking back up at the viscount.
He grimaced and shrugged. “Barmaids and servant girls learn early to either fend off threats to their modesty or to allow the familiarity and make some extra money from it.”
“Oh. I did not know what to do. A man shouted and the one let go of me, but the other had hold of my dress and it tore. I lost my little purse full of money and my pearls, I think, just then. I ran. I had intended to go up the road a ways and stop the next stage, going north to Scotland. But I was afraid those dreadful men were following me and I thought to evade them, and then it started to get dark. I got lost. I must have wandered for hours, and it started to rain. When I found shelter, I crept in. I did not even realize there was a cottage nearby, or I would likely have gone to the door.”
Lord Haven's Deception Page 20