A Husband for Hartwell (The Lords of Bucknall Club Book 1)

by J. A. Rock

  Hartwell did remember. And it gave him some measure of hope to know Becca felt Balfour was wrong for Warry too.

  I hope Warry sees in time how wrong he is. I hope he regrets this horribly.

  And in nearly the same beat of his heart, he wished Warry was still tucked into the guest bed at Hartwell House where Hartwell could keep an eye on him. Make him smile. Keep him safe.

  Hyde Park was lovely. It being March, the ride was cool, and Warry wished he’d worn a scarf. The winter had not been a bad one, although the tail end of it was proving to linger, the pattern of generally bright and sunlit days marred occasionally by chilly, drizzly ones such as this. It had been several years since Town had seen what Warry’s father called a ‘real’ winter; winters these days seemed damper and more miserable rather than sharp and cold. Warry could remember visiting the frost fair several years ago, amazed at the story of an elephant being led over the frozen Thames, even if he hadn’t witnessed it himself. He’d bought hot chocolate and he and Becca had gone skating. Their parents had declared the other children too young, which had led to Charlotte wailing all the way home, but not even that had ruined Warry’s good spirits. He’d promised to take Charlotte to the next frost fair, but every winter since then had been too mild for the river to freeze over.

  There wasn’t much traffic on Rotten Row when Balfour drove the curricle over to that end of the Park so that they might watch the riders. A pair of gentlemen raced half-heartedly, though neither they nor their horses seemed much inclined to break a sweat. Warry feigned more interest than he felt, mostly to avoid looking at Balfour. Balfour had been polite and chivalrous from the moment Warry had climbed up into the curricle beside him, which seemed like nothing more than a cruel trick now that Warry had glimpsed the man’s true nature. A part of him would have preferred that Balfour acted like the monster he was.

  Instead, Balfour chatted about the weather, the latest news from the Continent, and the slow start to the Season that year. Although people had been coming to Town since just after Christmas, the Season had yet to really warm up. Why, there hadn’t even been any scandals as yet. Warry’s skin prickled when Balfour said that with a sly smile, because they both knew Balfour held the power to uncover one.

  “I do believe our match will be widely talked about,” Balfour remarked.

  “I suppose so,” Warry said carefully, uncertain of the man’s meaning.

  “Marriage can either be a very beautiful thing or a very ugly one.”

  Warry’s throat tightened with the implications of that statement.

  Balfour went on. “My father was courted by a Lord Bainbridge, many years ago. To hear him speak of it, Bainbridge was his one great love. He cares not at all for my mother. She destroyed his happiness, you see. She did it bit by bit, day by day. They had no other children. There was no other option available to me but to endure that household in all its misery. Such terrible things she would say to him. To me.”

  Warry gazed out at the people promenading. He did not want to feel anything for Balfour—the pain of the man’s betrayal was still too raw—but in spite of himself, he spared a moment’s pity for a small boy in a loveless household. His own upbringing had been full of kindness and indulgence, and he supposed it was unjust that some were granted such blessings and some were not—in the way he’d often thought it unjust that his mother adored him but seemed to find Becca wanting in everything but looks.

  “For years, it made me hard and bitter.” Balfour rapped on the curricle’s side as though to jerk himself from his reverie. He turned his gaze toward Warry, his grin false and strange. “But I have come to enjoy a rich social life and the symbols of status that come from being my own man rather than my father’s puppet or my mother’s target practice. I have even begun to believe once more in love. I’m no romantic, you understand, but I should very much like to have what my father had with Bainbridge. And Joseph—” he paused. “I have known since that first afternoon we spent together that you are capable of both feeling and giving this love.”

  Warry chewed his lip, wishing that Balfour’s flattery had no power over him. Wishing he did not sit there wondering if it was true. Did he have a rare and admirable capacity for love, and would there be others, if he could only get free of Balfour, who would see it?

  Perhaps I would have given it freely to you had you not trapped me, he wanted to say.

  People were broken in all sorts of ways. They sometimes use disagreeable methods to achieve their ends, but didn’t they all want essentially the same thing? To be loved? Could that brief flash of pity he’d felt for Balfour grow into forgiveness, and might they have a marriage that was at least civil? “My parents sometimes seem strangers to each other.” He didn’t know what else to say. “That is certainly not what I want for myself.”

  “Then I’m glad we’ve made this promise to one another.” Balfour smiled with sincere warmth as though that promise they had made to one another was not born of sickness on Balfour’s part and terror on Warry’s.

  Warry was wrung out with the effort of maintaining his composure by the time Balfour took him home to St. James’s Square. He entered the house, glad that Balfour hadn’t insisted on coming inside with him, and tried to make for his bedroom unseen.

  “Joseph?” his father’s voice rumbled as he crept down the passageway toward the stairs. “Is that you, my boy?”

  Warry backtracked to the doorway of his father’s library. It was a modest room, and nothing as grand at all as the library at Graythorpe, the family estate in Norfolk. His father, small and round, sat behind his desk and peered at Warry over the top of his spectacles.

  “It is you!” he said and rose to his feet. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “I was staying with Hartwell,” Warry said, glad of his father’s predilection for keeping the curtains closed, even on sunny days, and working by lamplight. He hoped the comfortable dimness of the room would hide his bruises.

  His father rounded the desk and approached him, staring up at him. He only came up to Warry’s shoulder. Becca always said how glad she was that she and Warry had inherited their looks from their mother’s side because their mother was tall and willowy, whereas their father bore an uncanny resemblance to the frogs that Becca liked to shove down fellows’ shirts. It was a terrible thing to say but wholly true, although Warry couldn’t help but think that if they’d both been a little shorter and a lot rounder, then perhaps neither of them would have caught Balfour’s eye. Being frog shaped seemed a small price to pay for that privilege.

  Earl Warrington peered up at him. “Are you wearing white paint?”

  “I…” Warry must not have washed his face as thoroughly as he’d thought.

  “I don’t understand fashion,” he said, and hmphed. “Lot of nonsense if you ask me. I expect it’s the done thing, is it? Did Morgan put you up to it? That boy has more frills than Beau Brummell’s cravat collection.” He pushed his spectacles further up his nose. “And look what happened to him!”

  “To Morgan?” Warry asked, thinking worriedly of his younger cousin. Morgan was a ludicrously beautiful young man, whose greatest ambition in life was to haunt the tailors’ shops in Jermyn Street and spend his entire fortune on hats. Warry was very fond of him despite all his silliness. “What’s happened to Morgan?”

  “No, to Brummell.” Earl Warrington snorted. “Though Morgan did visit earlier and talked my ear off about buttons.” He gave Warry a dark look. “Buttons. I had to foist him on your sisters in order to get any peace at all.”

  “Oh,” said Warry faintly.

  Earl Warrington returned to his desk and picked up a letter to peruse. “So, what were you doing staying at Hartwell’s? Becca said something about a library?”

  “Yes. Hartwell wanted some help in organising it.”

  “Ah!” His father set the letter aside and peered at Warry again. “And what do you think about this idea of Hartwell and Becca?”

  Warry’s heart skipped a beat. “It
’s a good match.”

  “Yes,” Earl Warrington said. He paused suddenly, his brows drawing together. “Though I always thought…” He jolted. “Never mind.”

  “You always thought what?” Warry felt suddenly hot in the dim little room.

  His father waved the question away. “No, no. It’s of no importance. And what about you, my boy? Have you met any young ladies you like the look of? Or are you going to be like your sister and spend ages dithering around?”

  “I…” Warry swallowed again, screwing his courage. “No young ladies, no.”

  His father’s expression sharpened.

  “But my friend…” How that word stung now! “My friend, Lord Balfour, has indicated a certain fondness for me that he believes would only grow stronger if we were to…to marry.”

  Earl Warrington sat back heavily into his chair. “Oh, Joseph…”

  Warry held his chin up with difficulty.

  Earl Warrington sighed and removed his spectacles and rubbed them against the cuff of his shirt. “Far be it for me to be as intractable as George—”

  George Hartwell, Warry realised, Duke of Ancaster and Hartwell’s father.

  “—but I must own to a little disappointment. You are a firstborn son. You will be Earl Warrington someday. It pains me to think that if you choose a marriage that is by design childless, you will have no son to pass the title on to.”

  “No. But it shall go to Thomas, and if not to him, then to Clarence.”

  Thomas and Clarence were his younger brothers. Thomas was fourteen. Everyone had assumed there would be no more children after Thomas, but Clarence had been rather a surprise. He was three now, a stubborn fat little dumpling with a bellow on him as loud as any costermonger’s.

  His father sighed again. “This Lord Balfour, does he…does he make you happy?”

  Warry’s composure nearly broke. He’d expected his father’s disapproval, not concern. He’d expected his father to be angry with him or at least annoyed, and it was a task of Herculean proportions to force out an answer in the face of what he knew to be his father’s love.

  “Yes,” he lied, trying to keep his voice from wavering. “He makes me happy.”

  Warry would have preferred to spend the rest of his life closeted away in his bedroom undisturbed, but it was not to be. It was the Season, after all, and the whole point of coming to London was to see and be seen. He had wondered, months ago in Graythorpe, if perhaps this Season he might find a spouse. He’d certainly never suspected the circumstances in which it would happen, though. He’d had vague and unformed ideas about catching someone’s gaze at a ball and discovering perhaps that they were as clumsy at dancing as he was and would much rather talk about botany, poetry, or the agricultural benefits of four-field crop rotation. He’d had fantasies of discussing these things late into the night at the Bucknall Club, drinking port with Hartwell perhaps, who would look at him with a spark of admiration in his eyes, having undergone some sort of miraculous transformation where he suddenly realised Warry wasn’t boring at all. Warry wasn’t sure what would have precipitated that transformation, but it was a fantasy, so it didn’t matter.

  He lay on his bed, not caring about wrinkling his clothes, and thought back to that time he’d kissed Hartwell. They’d been children still, and the kiss—prompted by Becca’s teasing and ended by the Duke of Ancaster’s outrage—had no right to still be seared into his memory the way it was. Although he had nothing else to judge it by, Warry was quite certain the kiss had been terrible, clumsy and awkward in its execution, but it caused a flutter in his belly just the same—both then and now—because he’d wanted it so very much.

  Thinking of doing the same with Balfour transformed that flutter into nausea.

  He sat up quickly as his door was rudely pushed open, and Becca sailed inside. She was still undoing her bonnet, the ribbons trailing.

  “What’s all this nonsense about you and Balfour?” she asked, her eyes flashing.

  “He…” Warry felt like a cornered animal. “He has expressed his interest.”

  “Of course he has,” Becca said. “You’re not terribly ugly in the right light.” The quirk of her mouth told him she was teasing, but then her expression grew serious again, full of concern. “But why on earth have you expressed it back?”

  Warry had no answer for her, but fortunately, Becca didn’t require one.

  “It’s the Marchlands’ ball tonight,” she said, and then, off his look, “Of course you forgot! But you must go. This is only your second Season, Warry. I’m sure you’ll find a paramour who isn’t as…” She hesitated for a moment, which was very unlike her. “Well, someone who will make a better companion for you.”

  “I will go,” he muttered. Balfour had made him promise he would.

  Becca sat on the edge of the bed, placing the bonnet beside her, and studied him. She seemed prepared to say something biting again, but then her gaze grew unbearably gentle. He would have turned away but for the fact that he had not seen that expression since he was a boy and had got battered in some scuffle or other with larger, stronger lads.

  She spoke softly. “I have not seen your smile since we arrived in London, save for the hour before the Gilmore rout. I have watched the light I have always sought in your eyes fade to nothing. You are my brother, and yet you suddenly seem a stranger. And worse, you have come to treat me as a stranger. That is not how we ought to be, Warry.”

  Now he did turn away, fearful of the tightness in his chest and throat. “You’re being overly dramatic.”

  “No,” she said simply. “I am not.”

  He forced his gaze back to hers, his body so tense now that pain seared from his chest to his jaw.

  He did love her dearly. She had seemed many things to him over the years: a second mother, a confidante, a mild bully, a friend. Never a stranger.

  Perhaps if he told her about the letter…

  No.

  Yet, she would know what to do. She always did.

  But then why was she marrying Hartwell? If she truly knew her way out of any tight corner, then she would not be succumbing to their parents’ pressure to marry. She would not be laying claim to a man like Hartwell, whom she could not even love properly, when he belonged with someone like…

  Oh Lord, no.

  He stared into her bright blue eyes which were filled with confusion and disappointment. How would he even begin? The very word ‘letter’ felt dirty on his tongue, having seen the things she had written to Miss Lilley, the desire she had expressed so boldly and in such detail. Could he ever express such a desire to someone? It would be like letting a tiger loose from its cage to wreak havoc upon Society. He tried to imagine telling Hartwell which part of The Maiden Diaries he had liked best—for he had read all the volumes, in their entireties, more than once. His favourite was the scene in volume one, chapter twenty-one, where Lady Blossom asks Slyfeel to tup her and her stableboy both at once. The three of them tumble in the straw of an empty box stall. Slyfeel touches the stableboy in a place Warry had never thought one could ask another human to touch. There are pages describing the stableboy’s breathless whimpers, his pleas to continue. The pleasure that racks his body under Slyfeel’s sure touch.

  Just thinking about it set a desperate hunger racing through him, and just as quickly, shame ran ice cold through his veins, quelling that fire. He did not know if he envied Becca her boldness or despised her for her lack of propriety. She had always been so unconcerned with decorum. When he was a boy, a group of lads had taunted him for his interest in the types of sediment found in a nearby rock ledge. They’d pulled at him, slapped him, and one had thrown stones at him. When Becca saw this, she had raced toward them, picking up the largest branch she could find along the way and then using it as a sword in combat against the other boys, who had all tucked tail and run. He had been so grateful to her in that moment. He had felt such love.

  She reached out now, and her cool hand brushed back the hair from his forehead, revealin
g what he knew were the yellowing vestiges of his largest bruise. In a panic, he sat up, forcing her hand away. She seemed about to speak and then with a soft exhale, dropped her hand back to her lap.

  She would do anything for him. And he for her. Which was precisely why he could not tell her. He did not require his older sister to fight his battles for him anymore. He was responsible for this mess—he, and not she, despite her recklessness in putting such thoughts to paper—and he would rescue her from it.

  He straightened his rumpled clothes so that he might perhaps look slightly less like a boy in need of mothering. “If you cannot be happy for me,” he said coldly, “at least leave me alone. I wish to rest before the Marchland ball.”

  The hurt in her gaze gave him a rush of guilt and power in equal measures. She stood, her eyes narrowing ever so slightly, and offered the most economical of nods. “Whenever you are ready to tell me what pains you,” she said softly, “know that I will still love you.”

  Then she turned and left.

  Chapter 9

  “You look as if you’ve a plot to murder the paper hangings.”

  The voice was Gale’s, and Hartwell turned to face his friend.

  Gale’s countenance was weary as ever as he continued. “Please don’t. I have enough on my plate without another dastardly deed the ton will wish me to provide motive for.”

  “This is awful,” Hartwell growled. He gestured angrily to the great assembly room, decorated all in gauzy white so pristine one feared to retrieve a glass of punch, lest one spill it on some snowy drape or rug. “This place looks as though the cherubim were sick all over it. What is the meaning of this decoration?”

  “Well, according to the invitation, the theme is last days of winter. I don’t believe it was chosen with the express purpose of offending you, though I’m certain that is a bonus to the Marchlands, considering how you neglected to dance with their eldest daughter even once last Season.”