Unraveling the Earl

by Lynne Barron

  “Well? Are you going to tell me the reason?” Beatrice demanded.

  “He is finished planting trees all over London,” Alice replied.

  “Trees?” Beatrice repeated.

  “I could make neither heads nor tails of it, but your brother said he’d struck a bargain that would have him planting trees in only one garden.”

  “That makes no sense whatsoever,” Beatrice said. “Henry has never planted trees in London or anywhere else for that matter.”

  “Good lord, Beatrice,” Alice drawled. “It is a metaphor.”

  “For what?”

  “Perhaps you ought to ask Miss Buchanan.”

  Georgie could no longer make out Henry’s shape in the dark corner, saw only the glimmer of Mrs. Fontaine’s silver gown sparkling in the candlelight.

  “Damn and blast.” Georgie surged to her feet and tossed her opera glasses to her abandoned chair.

  “You’d best hurry if you intend to keep any tilling of fertile land confined to your garden walls,” Alice taunted.

  “Gracious, you…that is…surely Henry and you have not…” Beatrice stammered.

  “Honestly, Bea you are as daft as a duck when you are carrying a babe,” Alice said. “It’s as if your brain leaks from your head in direct proportion to the expanding of your waistline.”

  “But they only just met,” her cousin retorted.

  “They have clearly known one another for quite some time,” Alice contradicted with a roll of her eyes. “Long enough to plant a few seedlings, at any rate.”

  “Hush, Alice.” Beatrice’s words were delivered by rote, her brow furrowed as she attempted to work it all out in her head.

  “Do you know, I have done the calculations and if I had a pound for every time someone told me to hush I could pay off the debts of every single gentleman in London,” Alice drawled.

  “And one or two of the married variety,” Georgie tossed out as she turned and fled from the box, leaving the two women laughing in her wake.

  Intermission was nearly over, the lights lowering as she wound her way between the ladies and gentlemen lingering in the hall.

  Damn it all.

  She was going to marry the too beautiful and too bloody sweet earl.

  There was no choice. If she were to be utterly and completely honest, a frightening endeavor for a woman who’d lived a lie for most of her life, the choice had been taken from her at Idyllwild while a tempest of biblical proportions raged. As the dry earth had soaked up the rain after the long drought, so too had Georgie’s barren heart soaked up Henry’s passion and adoration.

  If he hadn’t found her in Olivia’s parlor and carried her away into the night, she would have snuck into his house to have her wicked way with him. Even if she had to tie him to the bed to see it done.

  She could no more give him up than she could lop off her arm.

  “Foolish man,” she muttered, causing one dawdler to glance back at her before shifting out of the way.

  “Not you,” she called as she breezed by the man.

  “He is rather foolish,” the woman at his side replied with a smile.

  The short journey from Beatrice’s box to her brother’s was a veritable obstacle course. Georgie passed Lord Piedmont with a wave, squeezed between Lord and Lady Casterbury who were embroiled in a heated argument having to do with his whereabouts during the first act, and finally shoved a gangly dandy aside as she neared her destination.

  A line of ladies spilled into the corridor while still more jockeyed for position within, one pretty blonde woman with curves too generous for her tiny stature even elbowing a willowy redhead in the ribs in an attempt to squeeze through the melee.

  “Mercy Anne, you come away from there this instant,” a tall, slender woman ordered as she gripped the other woman’s arm.

  “I only want to peek inside, Mama.”

  “Absolutely not,” the lady forcibly turned her daughter away and nearly plowed into Georgie.

  “I beg your pardon,” the older woman exclaimed, stumbling back a step and freezing as their gazes collided.

  Eyes of bright blue stared back at Georgie from a face that was smooth and pale and lovely in a cold, contained sort of way. Her forehead was high and noble, her cheekbones elegantly angled and her nose a long, straight blade above thin lips and a pointy chin. Her golden hair was streaked with gray at the temples and wound atop her head in a coronet.

  “My God,” the lady whispered, what little color she possessed in her cheeks falling away as she swayed on her feet.

  “Mama, are you unwell?” The lady beside her, a girl of perhaps eighteen or nineteen who’d inherited her mother’s blonde hair and blue eyes but little else, looked from her mother to Georgie and back again.

  “Connie.” The name fell from Georgie’s lips on a tremulous breath.

  “Are you acquainted with one another?” the girl asked.

  “No.” Just the one word but it landed like an arrow of ice in Georgie’s chest, freezing the air in her lungs.

  “But she called you by—”

  “No, I say.” Connie stepped back, pulling her daughter with her. “Come away, Mercy.”

  Pivoting, mother and daughter brushed by Mrs. Fontaine as she departed Henry’s box.

  “Do you know that lady?” Georgie reached out to grasp her neighbor’s arm.

  “Baroness Drummond?” Mrs. Fontaine asked turning to look at the retreating ladies.

  “But what is her given name?”

  “Ethelred.”

  “Ethelred? You’re certain?” How could that be? Surely Georgie hadn’t mistaken the recognition she’d seen in the lady’s eyes.

  “Ethelred Brundile Octavia Drummond, nee Conrad,” Mrs. Fontaine assured her.

  “Conrad,” Georgie breathed.

  “Are you unwell, Miss Buchanan?” the auburn haired beauty asked, her voice soft and solicitous. “You look a bit peaked.”

  “I am fine.” The lie tripped off her tongue with ease.

  “Then I’ll leave you.” Mrs. Fontaine turned away as the orchestra began to play, the violins picking out the first notes of a melancholy melody.

  Georgie felt oddly connected to her surroundings, the music seeming to come from inside her head, the narrow hall to expand and contract with each breath she took, the soft lights to flicker as she blinked painfully dry eyes. It was as if she’d somehow become a part of the space, existed only because the walls and floor and roof existed. Or perhaps she had ceased to exist at all, was simply the ghost of a woman who’d once tread these halls.

  Georgie pondered the possibility as the music soared, the violins joined by horns and a drum that pounded out a pulse that perfectly matched the beat of her heart, eerily slow and steady. A ghost, yes, but not of these walls. She was the ghost of the girl who’d been abandoned at River’s End, the ghost of the lady she might have become had she not begun life as a lie, had all of the days that followed until this night not been built upon that lie.

  She’d met her mother, stood close enough to breathe in her scent, roses underlain with the sickly sweet stench of fruit left to rot in the sun. She’d seen the fine lines that feathered out from eyes that had held recognition, followed by shock and finally denial.

  That denial was but one more lie on top of the mountain of lies that made up the ghost of Georgie Buchanan.

  A trilling giggle followed by a bellowing laugh rose above the orchestra’s haunting melody and awakened Georgie from the strange numbness that had encapsulated her.

  Whipping around, she found Henry looking at her from within a circle of five or six women still remaining in his box. Gifting her with a slow lopsided smile, he cocked his head to the left as his eyes filled with tenderness.

  She tore her gaze from his, turned and fled down the hallway to the stairs at the back of the theater. With her skirts tangling around her legs, she took the steps at a near run, desperate to escape her past and a future that she could never claim as her own.

  Geor
gie had never given much thought to fate or karma or kismet, rather believing her destiny was her own to control, to scheme and strategize and seduce to her will.

  But something or someone, be it God or Lucifer, fortune or chance, blessing or curse, had sent her careening down the hallway at just that precise moment. Had she started out from Beatrice’s box a minute sooner she would have been at Henry’s side saving him from himself when Connie arrived to pull her daughter away from the fray. A minute later and mother and daughter would have already come and gone before she arrived at his harem of harlots.

  A single minute, one way or the other, and Georgie Buchanan would have been betrothed, honestly and truly betrothed for good or ill, to the Earl of Hastings.

  Pushing open the heavy door at the back of the theater, she stepped into a dark alley populated by a handful of gentlemen lounging against the wall and seated on wooden crates scattered about, all of them puffing on cigars or cheroots away from the accusing eyes of their wives and mothers.

  The air was warm and stagnant and filled with the haze of tobacco.

  “Have you a spare?” Georgie asked of a young man seated on an overturned ale keg.

  “Certainly,” he exclaimed, digging around in his breast pocket.

  “You’re Milton Smythe, aren’t you?” she asked of the stocky fellow.

  “At your service.” Milton bounded to his feet and waved to his vacated seat.

  Perching on the edge she took the slim cigarillo with a hand that shook and waited while he lit the tip before drawing the tobacco deep into her lungs.

  “Have we met?” He balanced on the balls of his feet and puffed out his chest.

  “We might have been brother and sister,” she answered with a smile that wobbled.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your mother looks like a cheerful sort of woman.”

  “Yes, yes she is.”

  “How long have your parents been married?” Silly, but she could not help the tiny spark of hope that flared.

  “Coming up on twenty-five years,” he answered after a pause.

  “Too bad. I think I would have liked you for a brother.”

  “Seeing as we aren’t brother and sister perhaps you might like me for something else?”

  Georgie laughed despite the pain and confusion and fury that had settled around her like a heavy cloak.

  “Can’t blame a bloke for trying,” he replied with a grin.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, George?”

  Milton jumped and spun around as the Duke of Mountjoy barreled through the door.

  “You’ve a Goddamn earl wanting to marry your scrawny ass,” Killjoy continued in his customarily snarling Scots burr. “And you’re out here flirting with this pimply faced boy!”

  “I…that is…she isn’t…we weren’t…” Milton stuttered as he circled around to place the barrel and Georgie between him and the bellowing behemoth.

  “Leave off scaring Milton,” Georgie ordered.

  “Milton, is it?” the duke asked.

  “At your service.”

  “Be gone, boy.”

  Georgie shook her head at the speed with which the boy obeyed the growled command. “One day you are going to come up against someone who is not afraid of you.”

  “I don’t remember your earl quaking in his boots when I found him in your bedchamber.” Killjoy reached for her cheroot and took a quick drag before blowing out three perfect smoke rings. “And quit changing the topic. You’re going to chase Hastings off with your surly temper fits and constant pouting.”

  “I am not pouting,” she protested. “And Lord Hastings has yet to see me in a temper.”

  “Then I pity the poor bloke,” he replied. “He hasn’t a clue he’s tying himself to a shrew.”

  “I never asked him to marry me,” she huffed out. “In fact, when you barged into my bedchamber uninvited I was in the process of telling him that he’d best go looking elsewhere if he had a mind to marry.”

  “Bastard’s lucky I didn’t kill him,” Killjoy groused. “Tying you to the bed like some halfpenny whore. Now I think on it, I might still kill him.”

  “He was proposing, if you must know.”

  “And he had to tie you up to do it?”

  “Hastings offered for me,” she insisted. “There was no need to engage him in fisticuffs.”

  “Offered?” he bellowed. “He should have been begging for your hand. You’re the daughter of a bloody duke!”

  “The unacknowledged daughter of a duke.”

  “He’d have acknowledged you if he’d lived long enough,” he argued. “And hell, I’ve acknowledged you as my cousin.”

  “Twice removed, a distant connection at best.”

  “Is that what has you running scared?”

  “I am not running.” Georgie tossed her hands in the air in frustration. “I’m here aren’t I?”

  “I won’t change my mind, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “If you leave that man standing at the altar, you won’t have a home to run away to.”

  “Lady Joy left her house to me,” she reminded him.

  “That might have been her wish but we both know I own it and you live there only on my sufferance. Besides, how would you pay the servants?”

  “I’ve her jewels.”

  “The family jewels belong to me, to be passed on to the future duchess.”

  “Where would you find a woman brave enough to marry you?” She’d only meant to tease but some new emotions, pain or confusion flashed in his eyes before he looked away. “Killjoy?”

  “Leave it alone, George,” he muttered. “Why don’t you want to marry Hastings? He seems a good chap and he’s got a mean left jab.”

  “A glowing recommendation, to be sure,” she drawled.

  “Are you worried he’ll continue to fuck anything in skirts?”

  “Not in the least,” she assured him.

  “Threatened his bollocks, did you?”

  “Did you?”

  “Damn right, I did.”

  Georgie reached out to clasp his hand and gave it a quick squeeze.

  “Why aren’t you happy, George?”

  “I’m happy.” Or she had been until she’d careened into a woman who smelled of spoiled fruit.

  “You’ve barely said three words to Hastings since we signed the marriage contract,” he pointed out. “He has called upon you every day this past week only to find you out and about, traipsing all over kingdom come doing God knows what. You’ve allowed the man to escort you only to one dinner with his family and that with Tatiana as chaperone.”

  “I distinctly remember you ordering me to cease dallying with the dandy until after the vows have been spoken,” she replied, sidestepping for all she was worth.

  “When have you ever paid a lick of attention to what I say?” he barked. “I’m not talking about sneaking him up to your chamber for a quick tumble. I’m talking about showing the man a bit of affection he doesn’t have to beg, buy or steal from you!”

  Georgie tossed her cheroot to the ground and rose to pace away from her cousin only to spin about and glare at him.

  “Tell me straight,” he ordered. “None of your lies and half-truths, no nifty sidestepping and no turning the question around on me. I saw you outside his box. Why didn’t you come in and send the lot of those hussies running for cover? What the fuck is wrong with you that you don’t want to marry the man?”

  “I’ve found Connie.” The words left Georgie in a rush as her vision blurred and she swayed, dizzy from the cheroot and too little sleep, no doubt.

  “You’ve seen her, spoken to her?” All the bluster left him and he ran a hand through his unruly red locks, leaving them standing up every which way.

  “She denied knowing me.” Georgie pressed her hands to her fluttering belly.

  “Perhaps she did not recognize you.”

  “She nearly fainted at the first sight of me.”

  Killjoy a
pproached her slowly and warily, as if she were a wild animal likely to strike. Or a woman on the verge of her first swoon.

  “I think I need to sit down.”

  “Damn it, George.” Hands the size of rams’ heads grasped her arms and Killjoy lowered her to the barrel. “You need to eat. You aren’t sleeping either, are you?”

  “Some,” she hedged as lights flickered before her eyes. “She looks exactly like the lady in the portrait. She’s taller than I imagined, slender and elegant. She has a daughter, a pretty little creature with her mother’s golden locks and bright blue eyes. Do you know what her name is?”

  “How would I know her name?” Killjoy brushed her hair back from her face in a gesture oddly gentle for so burly a man.

  “Baroness Ethelred Brunhilde Octavia Drummond.”

  “You, of all people, should have guessed she went by a pet name,” Killjoy muttered.

  “Not just a pet name,” Georgie replied on a fractured laugh. “A boy’s name. She was born Ethelred Brunhilde Octavia Conrad. She shortened her father’s surname, or perhaps Lady Hastings dubbed her Connie when she plucked her from that year’s crop of wallflowers.”

  “How did you learn her name?” Killjoy asked after a pause.

  “I asked Mrs. Fontaine as she left Henry’s box,” she replied. “I’ve been looking for her for more than a year and had the combined resources of the greatest families in England assisting in my search this past week. And I nearly plowed her over on my way to save his lordship and it is one of the women I thought to save him from who tells me her identity. It’s funny in a perverse sort of way.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “She knew,” Georgie whispered, dancing around his question lest he decide to step in and bungle her plans.

  “She knew what?” Killjoy asked.

  “Connie recognized me as my father’s daughter,” Georgie whispered on a broken sigh. “All these years I tried to convince myself she did not know she’d given birth to a girl. Until I read Lady Hastings’ diary I even tried to pin the blame on her. But Connie knew, she sent off that letter to my father to torment him with the knowledge he had a son he would never know.”