Deadly Engagement: A Georgian Historical Mystery (Alec Halsey Crimance)

by Lucinda Brant

  “Shall I show you my technique?” she teased, tickling the end of Jacob Allenby’s snub nose with the pleated tip of her delicate gouache fan. She pouted. “Tiresome little merchant moralists must dream of rutting titled ladies. In your dreams is the only place you’re accorded the opportunity of entering society.”

  “I pity your offspring, my lady,” the merchant stated with undisguised loathing and put space between them.

  The lady’s hazel eyes went dead. She stared coolly over nurse’s shoulder at the girl in the bed, who continued to hug her knees tightly and whimper in pain. Just turned eighteen and with no prospect of future happiness. Good, her ladyship gloated, and recalled how the squire’s beautiful daughter had captivated society on her first public engagement.

  It had been at the Salt Hunt Ball, and the girl’s extraordinary beauty coupled with a refreshing natural modesty had caused a sensation amongst lords and ladies alike. Unsullied and brimming with naïve optimism, charming to all and sickeningly self-effacing, by the end of the evening she had received three proposals of marriage and two declarations of undying love. Embraced by Society, it was expected she would marry title and wealth.

  That very night her ladyship had found them together in the summerhouse down by the lake: the handsome nobleman in all his splendid, wide-backed nakedness and this beautiful eager virgin with her tumble of waist-length hair the color of midnight. They were blissfully riding to heaven together, as if they were the only two in the Garden of Eden. It had enraged her, but what had crushed her dreams and broken her heart was spying the ancestral betrothal necklace of the Earls of Salt Hendon around the girl’s white throat.

  The tragic consequences of the lovers’ unbridled lust could not have made her happier. But when she least expected it, in those rare moments when she permitted herself to smugly believe she had regained absolute control of the future, the image of those two heavenly lovers joined as one haunted her waking hours and turned her dreams to nightmares.

  “You, sir, have no idea to what lengths this mother has gone to secure her son’s future,” she stated dully and retreated into the shadows just as the girl let out one last guttural moan that filled the quiet of the airless bedchamber. “For God’s sake! How much more pathetic whining must I endure?” she growled, and threw her fan at the wallpaper in a temper. She slumped down on the horsehair sofa in a billow of blue velvet petticoats. “Allenby, have the wench examine her. She must’ve expelled the brat by now.”

  Nurse began to sob openly.

  “I wish there’d been another way, my dear,” Jacob Allenby apologized with real remorse. “You must understand that this is the best outcome for her, with the least pain.”

  He patted Nurse’s shoulder and then he, too, retreated into the shadows.

  Understand? Least pain? Nurse wanted to scream. How did any female recover from the loss of a child, be it from miscarriage, stillbirth, or taken away at birth? And Sir Felix would have had every right to take it away. Sent to an orphanage, it would never know its mother, never have a father. Best if the child was taken now, barely formed and unknowing, because giving birth to a bastard child was a sin, a stain for life. Her poor suffering darling Jane didn’t deserve such ignominy.

  “Please. Please, please, God. Please let my darling live,” Nurse whispered and buried her face in the bedclothes, squeezing the sponge so tightly that her fingernails dug into the flesh of her palm and drew blood. “Please, no more pain. No more suffering.”

  And as if in answer to her prays, an eerie stillness descended upon the bedchamber as the girl ceased to move and finally lay quiet amongst the down pillows in the middle of the narrow bed, the agony of the contractions abating and giving way to relief, emptiness and loss.

  Jane blinked at the guttering candle on the side table, tears staining her cheeks knowing that it was not just sweat from her painful exertions that bathed her exhausted body in cool wetness but blood, her blood, and the blood of her unborn child; life extinguished. Quiet sobbing made her turn her head. She touched Nurse’s lace cap, which instantly brought the woman’s tear stained face up with a jerk. Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “Silly. Don’t cry. There’s nothing to cry for now.”

  “Tom, do I have a dowry?” Jane asked her stepbrother, turning away from a window being hit hard with rain.

  Tom Allenby glanced uneasily at his mother, who was pouring him out a second dish of Bohea tea. “Dowry? Of course you have a dowry, Jane.”

  Jane wasn’t so sure. When her father disowned her four years ago, he cut her off without a penny.

  “What is the amount?”

  Tom blinked. His discomfort increased. “Amount?”

  “Ten thousand pounds,” Lady Despard stated, a sulky glance at her stepdaughter. Annoyance showed itself in the rough way she handled the slices of seedy cake onto small blue and white Worcester porcelain plates. “Though why Tom feels the need to provide you with a dowry when you’re marrying the richest man in Wiltshire, I’ll never fathom. To a moneybags nobleman, ten thousand is but a drop in the Bristol River.”

  “Mamma,” Tom said in an under voice, close-shaven cheeks burning with color. “I believe I can spare Jane ten thousand when I am to inherit ten times that amount.” He regarded his stepsister with a hesitant smile. “It’s a fair dowry, isn’t it, Jane?”

  But Lady Despard was right. Ten thousand pounds wasn’t much of a dowry to bring to a marriage with a nobleman who reportedly had an income of thirty thousand pounds a year. Yet Jane hated to see her stepbrother miserable. Poor Tom. The terms of Jacob Allenby’s will had disturbed his well-ordered world.

  “Of course it’s a fair dowry, Tom. It is more than fair, it is very generous,” she answered kindly before retreating once more to the window with its view of London’s bleak winter skies and grey buildings. She wished for the sun to show itself, if but briefly, to melt the hard January frost. Tom could then take her riding about the Green Park. Somehow, she had to escape the confines of this unfamiliar townhouse crawling with nameless soft-footed servants.

  But there was no escaping tomorrow. Tomorrow she was to be married. Tomorrow she would be made a countess. Tomorrow she became respectable.

  Tom followed her across the drawing room to the window seat that overlooked busy Arlington Street and sat beside her. “Listen, Jane,” he said gruffly as he picked at a thread of a tapestry cushion. “You needn’t rush into this marriage just for my benefit. Attorneys for Uncle’s estate said there is still time…”

  “It’s perfectly all right, Tom,” Jane assured him with a soft smile, thin white hand covering his. “The sooner I’m married the sooner you inherit what is rightfully yours and can get on with your life. You have factories to run and workers who are relying on you to pay them their long overdue wages. It was wrong of Mr. Allenby to leave his manufacturing concerns and his estate to you without any monies for their upkeep. You shouldn’t be forced to foreclose, or to sell your birthright. Those poor souls who make your blue glass need to be paid so they can feed their families. Should they be made destitute all because your uncle willed his capital to me? You are his only male relative and you have an obligation to those who now work for you. We know why your uncle made you assets rich but cash poor, why he left his capital to me, because he hoped to force a union between us.”

  “Why not? Why not marry me, Jane?”

  “Because despite being my brother in law, you’ve been my little brother since I can remember and that will never change,” Jane explained kindly. “I love you as a sister loves a brother, and that is why I cannot marry you.”

  “But what of Uncle’s will?” Tom asked lamely, not forcing the argument because he knew she was right.

  “We have been over this with Mr. Allenby’s attorneys,” Jane answered patiently. “The will does not specifically mention that I must marry you, Tom, and so we are not obligated to do so. That was an oversight on your uncle’s part. The attorneys say that I may marry any man and the one hundred
thousand pounds will then be released in your favor.”

  “Any man?” Tom gave a huff of embarrassed anger. “But you are not marrying just any man, Jane. You are marrying the Earl of Salt Hendon! I cannot allow you to make such a sacrifice. It is not right. It is not right that in marrying him you are left destitute. Surely, something can be worked out. We just need time.”

  “Time? It has now been three months since Mr. Allenby died and you cannot keep putting off your creditors. How much do you owe, Tom? How long do you think you can go on before you must sell assets to meet your debts?” Jane forced herself to smile brightly. “Besides, is it such a sacrifice to be elevated from squire’s daughter to wife of the Earl of Salt Hendon? I shall be a countess!”

  “Wife of a nobleman who is marrying you because he gave his word to your dying father and feels honor-bound to do so,” Tom grumbled. “Not because he wants or loves you… Oh, Jane! Forgive me,” he apologized just as quickly, realizing his offence. “You know I didn’t mean…”

  “Don’t apologize for the truth, Tom. Yes, I am marrying a man who does not care two figs for me, but in doing so my conscience is clear.”

  “Well, if you won’t marry me, then marriage to a titled Lothario is better than you remaining unmarried,” her stepbrother said in an abrupt about face that widened Jane’s blue eyes. “Only a husband’s protection will fend off lecherous dogs. Living unmarried in a cottage on the estate was all well and good while Uncle Jacob was alive to protect you. But even he was powerless the one and only time you ventured beyond the park. You became fair game for every depraved scoundrel riding the Salt Hunt.” Tom squeezed her hand. “Uncle showed more restraint than I. I’d have shot those lascivious swine as let them take you for a harlot.”

  That humiliating incident had occurred two years ago but the memory remained painfully raw for Jane. What Tom did not know was that the lascivious swine of which he spoke were in truth the Earl of Salt Hendon and his friends. On the edge of the copse, with her basket of field mushrooms over her arm and dangling her bonnet by its silk ribbons, she had not immediately recognized the Earl astride his favorite hunter with a full beard upon his face and his light chestnut hair tumbled about his shoulders.

  He had brought his mount right up to her and stared down into her upturned face with something akin to mute stupefaction. Then, much to the delight of his boon companions, he exacted a landlord’s privilege for her trespass by dismounting, pulling her into a tight embrace and roughly kissing her full on the mouth. She had tried in vain to push him off but his arm about her waist was vise-like and he continued to crush her mouth under his, violating her with his tongue; he tasting of spirits and pepper. When he finally came up for air, his brown eyes searched her shocked face as if expecting some sort of revelation. It was only when she slapped his face hard that the spell was broken and he was brought to a sense of his surroundings. He released her with one vicious whispered word in her ear and a low mocking bow.

  Even now, two years on, remembering how pitilessly he had whispered that hateful word, Jane shuddered and swallowed. He could very well have stabbed her in the heart; such was the hurt that came with that one word: harlot.

  She smiled resignedly at her stepbrother, all of one and twenty years of age and with so much responsibility resting on his thin young shoulders.

  “But what else were they to think, Tom? I, an unmarried girl cast out of her father’s house, living under the protection of an old widower, they could not take me for anything less than a harlot.”

  “No! No, you’re not! Never say so!” he commanded, a glance across the room at his mother, who was pouring out more tea in her dish. “You made one tiny error of judgment, that’s all,” he continued. “For that you must suffer the consequences for the rest of your life? I say, a thousand times, no.”

  “Dearest Tom. You’ve always been my stalwart defender, though I don’t deserve such devotion,” she said in a rallying tone. “You cannot dismiss what I did as a tiny error of judgment. After all, that error caused my father to disown me and brand me a whore.” When Tom made an impatient gesture and looked away, she smiled reassuringly and touched his flushed cheek. “I cannot—I do not—hide from that. If your uncle had not taken me in, I would have ended up in a Bristol poorhouse, or worse, dead in a ditch. I will always be grateful to Mr. Allenby for giving me shelter.”

  “I’d have looked after you, Jane. Always.”

  “Yes, Tom. Of course.”

  But they both knew the unspoken truth of that lie. Jane’s father, Sir Felix Despard, would never have permitted Tom to interfere in a father’s justifiable punishment of a disobedient and disgraced daughter. The past four years had given Jane time to reflect on the folly of her impetuousness in allowing her heart to rule her head. The loss of her virtue and its tragic consequences had bestowed upon her father the right to cast her out of the family home, alone, friendless, and destitute. She had disgraced not only her good name but also her family’s honor. Jane did not blame her father for her disgrace, but she would never forgive him for what he had ordered done to her.

  Regardless of what her father, Jacob Allenby and others thought of her, she still believed in upholding the moral principles of fairness, honesty and taking responsibility for her actions. The predicament she had found herself in had not been of her father’s making, it had been hers and hers alone. But Tom would never understand. Her father and his Uncle Jacob had spared her stepbrother the whole sordid story, for which she was grateful. Tom was an earnest young man who saw the good in everyone. Jane hoped he always would.

  “You’re the best of brothers, Tom,” she said sincerely and swiftly kissed his cheek.

  But Tom did not feel he had earned such praise. He should have protected her.

  Sir Felix Despard of Despard Park, Wiltshire, had wanted an earl for a son-in-law at the very least, a duke if he could get it. But he had gone about it all the wrong way, ignoring his daughter’s sheltered upbringing and ignorance of the ways of Polite Society and pushed his only child out onto the marriage mart defenseless and left to her own devices. Tom never forgave his weak-minded and overly ambitious stepfather and he blamed him for the inevitable and very calculated seduction of his stepsister.

  Tom grabbed Jane’s hand.

  “If you had accepted any man but Lord Salt!” he said fiercely. “He always has this look on his face—hard to describe—as if someone has dared break wind under his noble nose. The way his nostrils quiver, I just want to burst out laughing. You may giggle, Jane, but God help me to keep a straight face if the rest of the Sinclair family have the same noble nostrils. His sister the Lady Caroline Sinclair is said to be worth in excess of forty thousand pounds and receives at least three marriage proposals a week. The Earl keeps her locked up in the country for fear of her eloping to Gretna with the first fortune hunter who makes up to her, because she is so naïve as to believe these fools have fallen in love with her and not her fortune.”

  “Oh dear, Tom, you make me quite faint with anticipation at meeting my future sister-in-law,” Jane said with an indulgent smile. “But how do you know this about Caroline Sinclair?”

  Tom pulled at the points of his silk waistcoat with a smile of smug satisfaction. “I have my sources, Jane. High placed sources at that.”

  “La, Tom, will you stop spreading idle gossip like an old maiden aunt!” Lady Despard lectured disapprovingly, though she had finally opened her ears hearing mention of the noble Sinclair family. She stood before the ornate looking glass above the fireplace. A fading beauty on the other side of forty, she preened herself in the reflection, gently patting into place her blonde powdered and pomaded upswept coiffure, adjusting one of the tiny bows scattered strategically amongst this greased confection. “Lady Caroline Sinclair is Wiltshire’s premier beauty and not yet eighteen so I’m not surprised Lord Salt keeps her locked up. Look what happened to you the one and only time you was let off the leash, Jane!”

  “Mamma.”

  “W
hat high placed sources, Tom?” Jane asked, ignoring her stepmother and hoping Tom would do the same.

  “Why do you never defend yourself against her petty taunts?” Tom whispered fiercely.

  “I cannot defend the indefensible,” Jane answered simply. When Tom continued to stare angrily at his mother, she touched the upturned close-fitting cuff of his velvet frockcoat. “Please, Tom. What sources?”

  “Do you remember Mr. Arthur Ellis who came to Despard Park just before your come out? It was a long time ago now but he was a very particular friend of mine up at Oxford. Thin, freckle-faced chap with big ears. No? You must remember Art! He spent the entire sennight gazing at you. Well, Art had the good fortune to obtain the post of secretary to Lord Salt. Who’d have thought it back then! Although, I wouldn’t call it good fortune to be appointed scribbler to a thin nosed iceberg. But in Art’s case, beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. His family are all terribly clever but odiously poor.”

  “But surely Mr. Ellis didn’t abuse his post as secretary and confide in you about Lady Caroline?”

  “Of course not,” Tom answered indignantly, feeling acute embarrassment for breaching his friend’s confidence. “I pressed Art to tell me about Lady Caroline because of Uncle’s startling bequest to her. Mamma and I do not understand in the least why a young lady my uncle never met in his entire life, who was the daughter of his estranged neighbor—”

  “A spoiled beauty worth in excess of forty thousand pounds,” reiterated Lady Despard.

  “—was bequeathed ten thousand pounds of Uncle’s money. It’s a mighty odd circumstance and one Uncle’s lawyers cannot fathom either. Can you blame me for being curious, Jane?”

  Jane could not. She did not pretend to understand the hatred between neighbors, merchant and noble, or what had caused the age-old feud between the Earls of Salt Hendon and the Allenbys. As for the merchant’s startling bequest to the Lady Caroline, it created more questions in Jane’s mind than she cared to speculate on and was glad that the butler chose that moment to interrupt.