Julian Haywood, the Earl of Apthorp, winced down another searing slug of brandy. To be sure, inebriation was not the most salubrious solution to his predicament. But a wallow in one’s cups might be forgiven when one had arisen from bed the most ascendant young politician in the House of Lords, and been reduced to an object of the nation’s mockery by twilight.
The shrill shouts of the gazetteers drifted up from the busy street below his town house window. They were calling him … he almost couldn’t bear to think of it …
Arsethorp.
Lord Arsethorp.
And that was the very least of it.
His most crucial piece of legislation had been delayed until the end of the month, when it would no doubt die of political toxicity, causing his debts to be called in and his mother and sister to be cast from their home. That is, if the humiliation of his ignominy didn’t kill them first.
Certainly, it had killed his hopes of finally proposing to the woman he had loved these past eight years. His prospects for matrimony were as dead as his political ambitions, for no parents who had read the previous evening’s Saints & Satyrs would allow their daughter within a hundred yards of him.
He couldn’t blame them.
If he had a daughter, he wouldn’t let her near him either.
Not because of the peccadilloes of which he’d been accused. The rumors were inaccurate—mostly—and in any case, he never took a lover who didn’t share in his enthusiasms.
No. He would forbid any woman from marrying him on grounds of his sheer, asinine stupidity. For only a fool would allow himself to be ruined twice.
The first time could be forgiven. He hadn’t known what he was doing when he’d staked the remnants of the family fortune on a pair of failing salt mines, and he’d spent a decade correcting that misstep. Proving he was not, in fact, incompetent. Building a coalition that would restore his own estate and the greater western Midlands to prosperity.
Now, for all his efforts, Westminster was covered in woodcuts of his flayed and reddened backside. He’d be lucky if he could afford to keep his holdings in another month of coal.
He poured more brandy in his cup. It splashed onto the table. He couldn’t even drown himself in drink properly.
“God’s elbow,” he muttered. A weak invective, for in his penitent years he’d eschewed cursing. “Dam-fucking-nation,” he tried again.
Yes. That was better.
More like how he felt: alit with wrath at whoever had exposed secrets that were supposed to be better protected than the royal jewels.
But mostly fury at himself. Because he was going to fail at a pursuit most men in his position seemed to scarcely need to try at. Again.
Faintly he heard a rapping at the kitchen door downstairs. That would be Tremont, his valet, with the effects he’d ordered sent here from his usual lodgings at his cousin Rosecroft’s house in Mayfair.
Tap tap.
“Becalm thyself,” he muttered. “No need to rush the gates of hell.”
He walked down the stairs to the cellar kitchen and threw open the shutters.
The face that greeted him through the window was not that of his valet.
It was one Lady Constance Stonewell.
No. Oh, dear God. No.
She waved, gestured for him to let her in, and darted beneath the eave to protect her elaborate silver-blond coiffure from the drizzle.
What was she doing here? Someone was going to see her alone in his garden, and then they would both be ruined.
He threw open the kitchen door, put a finger to his lips to urge her silence, pulled her inside, and scanned above the mossy garden walls for roving eyes.
The garden was quiet. The shutters of the house next door were closed.
Of course.
No one lived on the Strand anymore. At least not the kind of people who would recognize the sister of the Duke of Westmead.
He stepped back inside and shut the door behind him.
“Heavens, Apthorp, what is this place?” she asked, wrinkling her nose at the damp. “Tremont said you’d moved to Apthorp Hall. He didn’t mention it was abandoned.”
That was because he’d not found the force of will to inform Tremont that his new lodgings had stood unoccupied since 1742, and had the mouse droppings to prove it.
A large false widow spider lowered itself from a rusted iron chandelier above his head and dropped directly onto Constance’s gloved hand. She raised a pale, wry eyebrow and flicked it off. “Tell me, is it the ghosts that drew you here, or the spiders?”
He wanted to laugh, but if he did so, he would surely weep. And one did not weep in front of a woman like Lady Constance Stonewell.
God, she was a vision, with that ever-upturned mouth and those luminous blue eyes and hair as pale and silver as some fairy out of myth.
She leaned forward and touched his shoulder with a single, impossibly dainty finger. “Apthorp? Are you well?”
He found his voice. “You mustn’t be here. I’m going to find a litter to take you home.”
“No need, my coachman is waiting in the mews. I told him I’d be an hour. I need to speak to you. Have you somewhere more … tidy … where we might have a little chat?”
“Constance!” he said more forcefully than was polite. She was accustomed to his finest self—the one that was always a gentleman, no matter his true feelings. Perhaps his improper use of her Christian name would shock her into hearing him. “You must leave. Right now.”
In answer she craned her neck, leaned toward him, and sniffed. Her eyes lit up with that glow of mischief that made her such a divisive presence in the nation’s most aristocratic drawing rooms.
“Why, Lord Bore,” she said, with a sly smile. “Have you been drinking?”
“Not nearly as much as I’d like to,” he muttered. “Please, you have to leave.”
She chuckled as if he had made a splendid joke and remained planted where she stood.
It physically hurt to look at her, standing in this filthy kitchen with her laughing eyes in her beautiful yellow dress, her pale hair frizzing in the damp.
He had to save her.
“Come with me upstairs. If you take a sedan chair and keep the drapes pulled, no one will know you were here. I’ll send your carriage home.”
“Very well, if you insist. But first, I must speak with you.”
He drew a shaky breath. There was only one explanation for her resistance: she hadn’t heard the rumors. Which, in keeping with his luck, would make today the only time in history Lady Constance Stonewell was not the first to know every scrap of gossip on two continents.
He had to do the honorable thing. The miserable, but honorable, thing.
He had to tell her what was being said about him.
He drew up his last shred of dignity. “Lady Constance, I hope you will forgive me for speaking of improper matters, but you see, there has been a scandal. If anyone were to learn you were here, you’d be—”
“As ruined as you are?” she cut in dryly.
He sank back against the door. “So you know. Of course you do. Everyone knows.”
The amusement in her eyes faded. She looked up at the damp-stained ceiling and let out a shaky breath. “I know because I wrote the poem.”
She nodded stiffly, blinking, as though she couldn’t quite believe it herself.
His frantic desire to get her out of his house by any means necessary was suddenly replaced by a very still kind of quiet. A quiet that began in his bones and rose up through his blood. The kind of quiet the body undertook when the mind needed all the energy one possessed to make sense of what one had just heard.
A statement that could not—must not—be true.
He had never begged for anything in his life. He was far too proud.
But today, in this moment, he could only whisper a plea: “Tell me that I misheard you.”
Constance glanced up into his eyes, then quickly looked away. “I suspect you will be very cross with me,” she sa
id in a low voice.
Cross was not the word. He gripped the dusty table to keep from retching.
She walked around it to come closer, the butter yellow of her dress collecting gray strands of dust as the hem dragged across his dirty floorboards.
She was saying things as she approached him, speaking in an uncharacteristic high-pitched clip that he barely understood.
“Please trust I didn’t mean you any harm. It was only meant for the eyes of a few ladies. I was trying to avert disaster. But then, what is disastrous for Miss Bastian and what is disastrous for you are not quite the same, and in any case, I don’t know how it came to be in Saints & Satyrs. But you see, all is not lost because—”
She was rambling, but her incoherence hardly mattered. His heart was so cracked that had she said his own name, he would have struggled to understand her.
“Why are you here?” he croaked out.
He could hear the misery in his voice and didn’t care if she could hear it too, because for the first time in his life he did not care what she thought of him.
She turned, and looked at him, and her big blue eyes were soft and plaintive.
“To fix it,” she said.
And then, as if by magic, the light in her eyes hardened into the bright cobalt glint he had admired in them so many times: a look of fierce, glittering resolve.
“Lord Apthorp, I am here to do what integrity demands when one’s actions have, however inadvertently, ruined the reputation of another person. I have come to offer you my hand in marriage.”
The words came out in a guilty rush, despite the fact that Constance had written the speech that morning and practiced it all day. She’d hoped to be eloquent and sincere in her remarks. To say the sort of thing a serious-minded person with integrity and forethought might say, were she as much that sort of person as she wished to be.
Oh, how she wished she were more that sort of person. She did aspire to be honorable and wise. But it was so difficult, when one was temperamentally haphazard and secure in one’s convictions right up until the moment that one found oneself in one of these uncomfortable situations, when in retrospect a more cautious approach might have spared oneself a great deal of trouble.
And perhaps regret.
She chewed her lip and waited for Apthorp to react to her proposal.
She was not unaware that the concept of them marrying was absurd, but it was the only solution that might save them both, and they would not be the first aristocratic couple to embark upon a marriage of convenience for the sake of such salvation.
Besides, there was the chance, however slight, that his secret life revealed he was more intriguing than he let on. Perhaps she could inveigle him to join her among the ranks of people who lived wickedly and well without apology.
Or perhaps not.
After all, he was currently standing still and quiet with his eyes shut tight, like the very sight of her was hurting him.
Even in the darkness of his filthy cellar kitchen, his golden locks and symmetrical features made him seem more like a bronzed statue than a living, breathing man. He was so resplendently handsome it was ludicrous. And quite unfair.
Proximity to him had always made her feel windblown and rain-dampened and wretched, even on her most collected days. With his effortless beauty and courtly manners and perfect knowledge of the orders of precedence, he had always been everything she was not.
Though, looking at him in his ragged house, she was less sure.
He’d discarded the trim peruke he wore to Parliament, and his golden hair was short and mussed. The shadows beneath his eyes and at his jaw gave him an air of danger, despite the smoothness of his features. His linen shirt was open at the neck.
In all her years of knowing him—sharing a roof with him—she had never seen him quite like this. All … messy and undone.
Perhaps she should have ruined him ages ago, for in this state he was the single most compelling sight she’d ever seen.
His amber eyes shot open.
“Marry you?” he asked hoarsely. Like the words had been scraped from his throat.
That was not an auspicious start.
“Yes. I know it may sound slightly unlikely, but it’s ingenious really. You see—”
“Constance,” he interrupted her. He looked directly into her eyes, in a way he did not often do when pontificating over breakfast or correcting her use of a fork.
He stared at her so intently she felt hot.
“Yes?”
“Stop.”
He said it so quietly that for a moment she was at a loss. She searched his face, which looked even more haunted, somehow, than it had when she’d arrived.
He noticed her examining him and abruptly turned his back on her.
“Join me upstairs. If you please.” He held out one of his long, elegant hands toward the staircase.
“Yes, of course.” She moved toward the steps with the relief of doing something, anything, to break the tension.
He marched after her slowly, deliberately, as though his feet were composed entirely of anger.
“That door on the left, if you would,” he said, in the tone an extremely well-bred pirate might use to direct a captive off a gangplank. A tone that implied “or else.”
She stepped into an upstairs parlor, dim with dirty leaded windows. Between the rain outside, the disrepair within, and the aura of hostility emanating from the only other person in the room, it was very grim indeed.
“Shall I light a candle?” she asked. “Have you any candles?”
The dilapidation of his ancestral house was difficult to reconcile with his fine tailoring and even finer manners. She’d known he lacked for money, but he always took such pains with his appearance—his tailoring, his snuffbox, his fine imported tea—that this evidence of his true circumstances shocked her. His home looked like it had not been updated since the Tudors ruled the City. In fact, she rather liked it for its faint whiff of the Medieval.
She could play up its romantic character and fill it with very good wine and very amusing people. Yes. She was beginning to see how this would work. The narrative she’d craft for their surprising match.
They would be interesting together.
Apthorp bent and retrieved a crumpled broadsheet from a pile on the sofa and held it up so she could see it. It was a copy of Saints & Satyrs.
She swallowed. She would rather not directly confront the evidence of the damage she had done. She would rather move right along to her brilliant plan for fixing it.
“Shall we discuss the terms of my offer?” she asked. “I think you will find it quite compelling.”
Some muscle in his face spasmed and he inhaled deeply, as if the idea of marrying her was so suffocating he required extra breath. “No need.”
Oh dear. She’d expected him to be annoyed at her, but the severity of his degree of pique was rather worse than she’d expected. She’d miscalculated. She should have led with an apology, then broached matrimony.
She widened her eyes and gave him her most doleful, sincere expression. “I’m so very sorry about this, Apthorp. Like I said, it was entirely an accident. I do hope you’ll let me make it up to you. If you’ll hear me out …”
She trailed off as he strode toward her, waving away her words. She had never noticed he was quite so tall. He held out a palm.
She stared at it, confused.
“Give me your hand. If you please.”
Tentatively, she obeyed. He lightly gripped her fingers and led her to the center of the room, stopping her before the ancient desk that dominated the front half of the parlor.
“Stand here,” he said, placing her like an actress on a stage.
He placed the crumpled gazette into her hands. “Read it,” he said quietly.
The calm in his tone made her nervous.
“Read it? What, to you?”
“Yes.” He turned and took a seat on a threadbare sofa opposite the desk and looked at her in a cold, stern way she h
ad never seen before.
His usual deferential bearing was nowhere to be found. He seemed as certain of his powers as an emperor.
“Go on.”
Her mouth went dry.
It had been one thing to write words of this nature. Reciting them aloud—in front of him, no less—was simply not a possibility. She did not handle embarrassment well. She would die of mortification, and her hopes of fixing this predicament were not high if her corpse was discovered in his parlor.
“I can’t.” She cleared her throat, which had begun to itch, and attempted to use his scruples against him. “It’s not appropriate. For a lady.”
He gave her a black, sardonic smile. Which she supposed she deserved, for he knew her well enough to know that she had never before much cared what was appropriate for ladies.
“If you can write it, Lady Constance, then I daresay you can read it.” His tone was as poisonous and liquid as toxin in a tin of treacle.
And he was right.
But that didn’t make it any easier. She drew a shaky breath.
“A Word of Warning about a Proper Lordling,” she began.
“Louder, please.”
She wanted to wring her hands. Instead, she squared her shoulders and cleared her throat and looked him directly in the eyes and bellowed “A WORD OF WARNING ABOUT A PROPER LORDLING” loud enough to be heard all the way in Southwark.
“By Princess Cosima Ballade,” she added primly. Kind of Mr. Evesham to give credit to her nom de guerre when stealing her work without permission.
Apthorp waved his wrist in the air, signaling for her to proceed.
“This week,” she began,
Princess Cosima must strike a chord
Of caution about a certain lord.
Marriage-minded ladies should be ’ware
That this man, who haunts the drawing rooms of St. James Square
—and indeed the halls of Parliament,
Where one notes with some lament
He is known to ramble on about the laws of decency
And the creek-heads of the Midland shires with equal frequency—
She winced. The verse was meaner than she remembered.
“Go on,” he ordered.
The Earl I Ruined Page 2