by Sophia James
Gathering up her reticule, she opened the door, his man coming forward immediately to show her out. When she was gone Daniel crossed to his desk and sat down. The letter he had received at his lawyer’s today rustled and he brought the sheet from his pocket. Amethyst’s demands juxtaposed against those of Charlotte’s made him feel his life was taking a less-than-salutary course.
Lucien’s voice in the corridor had him flicking the missive into a drawer as he waited for his friend to come into the room.
‘Tell me that was not Lady Charlotte Mackay in the carriage I just saw pulling away, Daniel, for I thought that affair was long since over.’ As he dropped into the leather chair nearest the desk he reached out for the decanter, upturning a clean glass and pouring a generous libation.
‘It isn’t what you think. We are friends.’ As he said it he wondered if Charlotte and he were even that.
‘She’s poison, damn it. She betrayed you with Nigel and she could so easily do so again.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you?’
‘Lady Mackay will be returning to Scotland to live. She just came to say goodbye.’
‘She still loves you. You can see it in her eyes. My guess is that she came to beg forgiveness as she tried to inveigle her way back into your bed with money and sex. The cloak she wore was a surprise though, buttoned as it was to the neck. Not her usual style.’
Daniel finished his drink before he spoke. ‘Let it go, Luce. There is no purpose in flogging the past.’
‘Maybe not, but your present difficulties can be laid squarely at the feet of Lady Mackay and rumour has it that Goldsmith is calling in his loan. Can you pay him?’
Daniel shook his head, helping himself to more of the same smooth wine. ‘There are others as well. Nigel was busier than I had thought.’
‘Pity Amethyst Cameron turned out to be such a duplicitous liar. I liked her before that. Francis told me to tell you that you should follow him to America. By his accounts there is a fortune to be made there.’
‘I don’t have enough time left to find it.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Is finally terrified. In the past few days and for the first time ever she is cursing Nigel to a most uncomfortable afterlife.’
‘At least she is recognising he is the architect of much of the Montcliffe misfortune. I could sell Cosgrove Hall. It is mine outright to do as I want with and it should fetch something even in its dilapidated state. At least the land around is arable.’
Daniel smiled. ‘I thank you for that, Luce, but it would hardly cover the first loan that was presented.’
‘Marry a girl whose family is flush, then, a young debutante who’d fall in love with you in a second. That would do the trick.’
‘I think any chaperone would be hurrying such prospects away from me. There is a big difference in thinking a family on the verge of ruin and the knowing of it. Besides, I am too jaded to be tiptoeing around such innocence.’
And he was, Daniel thought in surprise. Even the idea of such a bride made him feel...nervous. He was thirty-four next birthday and he felt older than that again. He didn’t want a woman he could hardly speak to or one who would be running home to her mother every time the going got tough. Which it would. His leg was aching tonight and he knew very soon he’d need to get a surgeon to look at it properly.
‘Did you find out anything more of Gerald Whitely then? You mentioned that you were looking into it the last time we met.’
Daniel nodded. ‘He died in the bed of a prostitute, it seems. Two shots to the head and no one ever held accountable. His crooked schemes of business were apparently funded by the Camerons’ money.’
Lucien swore. One of the riper expressions remembered from army life.
‘My thoughts exactly.’
‘I can’t see Miss Cameron being enamoured with someone of that ilk even after all that has happened and I am sure she could not have condoned his scandalous get-rich deals, either. As an impartial viewer I would also like to say that for the first time in a long while you seemed happy when you were with her.’
The words rang in Daniel’s head like a death knell as he struggled to change the subject to something lighter. He hadn’t been happy in so long, that was the problem. He couldn’t remember a time when he had truly laughed or enjoyed something just for the fun of it.
A band of yellow roses in golden curls came to mind, and lips that turned up at each end even when she did not smile. After Nigel and Charlotte, honesty was the yardstick he had measured people by and Amethyst Cameron had failed that test miserably in the end.
If the Camerons sent back an agreement to his terms, would he still go through with it, knowing all that he did? Was Montcliffe Manor worth such a sacrifice?
Charlotte’s presence today had unsettled him, but so had his mother’s constant tears. The carrot of building up his own breeding stable also sat at the back of his mind. With luck and good management he could begin to prosper and in a couple of years he might be able to pay back much of the debt. Amethyst had come to him stipulating her own terms, after all, so she would not be clinging on to something unsustainable either.
A marriage of convenience and with many of the terms in his favour? He could build up his breeding stock and begin again. A new life with the freedom of money and time. But even that prospect failed to allow him any renewed hopefulness and his shattered right thigh hurt like hell.
Chapter Eight
She would be married in an hour. Again. In a house she had no notion of and in a dress hurriedly made, with little interest on her part for the end result.
She looked terrible, that much she could see, her eyes red and swollen and the eczema that had a tendency to appear when she was stressed staining her cheeks and the soft skin beneath her mouth.
A blemished bride.
An unwanted bride.
A second-hand bride.
A bride who would stand at the altar only because of a series of conditions that would allow her husband a separate life apart from hers. Montcliffe had signed such stipulations in haste, hadn’t he, the avenues of finding a solution to his own problems closing in.
Unlocking the golden cross that she wore around her neck, she laid it down on the bedside table.
‘I do not want you to be a part of this charade, Mama.’ Her neck seemed empty without the chain, though today her mother felt close.
Susannah Cameron had been a redhead, with a freckled skin and a verve for life that was uncompromising. She had risked the small loan her father had bequeathed to her when he had died as a down payment for the first of Robert’s boats. The best spend of my life, she had said to Robert again and again as Amethyst had grown, the love her parents shared a constant and joyous source of wonderment.
So different from this marriage, the ghost of Gerald Whitely surfacing in threat. ‘Daniel Wylde will turn out just like me,’ some spectral voice whispered. ‘The very same, you just wait, for you are cursed and marked.’
Swallowing, she turned away from the mirror. Her maid had helped her to dress, but had gone now to let those downstairs know that she was ready. Amethyst thought her hair looked nothing like it had when Lady Christine had threaded it with roses. Rather it was spiked and ill shaped, the golden band of her mother’s she had insisted on wearing seeming as out of kilter as her dress.
Pure white. She wondered if she should have worn the colour, but the seamstress had already begun on it when the thought occurred and so she had taken the path of least resistance and left it as it was. At least the veil would hide some of her defects. With care she pulled the gauze across her face and smiled, glad of the opaqueness and privacy.
A few moments later she entered the downstairs salon at Montcliffe, a room of huge proportion and elegance, though sparsely furnished.
Lord Daniel
Wylde was there, of course, and her father. Beside them stood the minister and an older woman.
Four people; two of whom she did not know. The conditions he had insisted upon. A small marriage. Uncelebrated. Forgettable.
‘We shall repair to the chapel for the ceremony.’ Daniel’s voice, but he neither took her hand nor looked at her directly, leaving it to her father to accompany her. The room appeared otherworldly through the gauze.
‘You look lovely, my dear,’ Robert said beneath his breath, and for the first time that day she smiled.
‘I think even you know that that is a lie, Papa.’
The house had been a revelation when she had first seen it the day before. It was huge for one thing and sombre for another. Not a house one would feel at home in, she had thought, and wondered at what sort of a childhood the manor might have provided for a young Daniel. Everything looked old and the faded spaces on the walls alluded to another long-ago time when Montcliffe Manor must have been magnificent.
The Earl had met them briefly here yesterday, outlining the planned ceremony in formal tones and then leaving. The same butler she remembered from the London town house had shown them to their rooms on the first storey and the dark furniture in each was as Spartan as the rest of the place.
She had not seen him since. Today he looked taller and as forbidding as his house. She wondered if she had truly ever known him, a stranger with whom she had shared a kiss.
The minister stood at the pulpit and gestured for them to come before him.
‘Who gives this woman in marriage?’ he asked gravely.
‘I do.’ Robert’s voice was guarded, as if he too wondered if they had not made an enormous mistake.
And then her arm was threaded with that of Daniel’s, superfine beneath her fingers and the outline of heavy muscle under the fabric.
Delivered.
Into a union that neither of them looked forward to and married under the solemn words of promise. Little words that meant both everything and nothing.
A ring was slipped on to the third finger of her left hand, the huge diamond glinting in the light and pulling at her skin.
‘I now pronounce you man and wife.’
And it was over, the older lady signing beneath their names, a legal witness along with her father to the nuptials.
Her husband’s full name was Daniel George Alexander Wylde. Something else she had not known about him.
Robert took her hand as she stepped back, his glance warm when he looked at the ring. ‘A substantial diamond,’ he said, and she knew that there were things he did not know about her either. The day was threaded with strangeness and juxtaposition. When Amethyst glanced up she saw Daniel watching her, his pale eyes hooded.
The wedding breakfast was set up in the blue salon to one end of the house and, once they were all seated, an awkwardness overcame everything. At least the minister was talking, his words running into each other in a never-ending stream. Otherwise there might have been silence as each player in this travesty sought their place within it.
A headache burned into her temples, the laudanum still in her system somewhere and making itself felt. Her father looked worried and thin, none of the certainty that had been there in the days leading up to this moment evident. She had no clue at all about Daniel’s frame of mind because an implacable mask crossed his face and his eyes were a flat distant green.
The food was lovely, a light soup and then chicken and beef with an array of sauces and roasted vegetables. A cake was presented, too, and it sat on the end of the table couched in a feigned joviality, two figures carved in icing upon it, their arms entwined around each other.
Amethyst drank deeply from her wine glass, something she seldom did, but the velvet-smooth red banished some of her worries. Then her groom stood to propose a toast.
‘To my bride. May this union be kind to us both.’
The hollow thud of her heart made her feel sick and, as she lifted her hand to push back a falling curl, the diamond ring sliced a scratch right across her cheek. Her father used a snowy-white napkin to wipe away the blood.
* * *
How he hated this.
His new wife looked scared and lost, but he was too angry to understand anything other than retribution. Symbols. The blood, the diamond, the cake with its ridiculous illusion of happiness and joy. He felt none of it. Too few people at the table, too many lies left unsaid.
This wedding was a parody and the guest list reflected the fact. He had not told Lucien or Francis that he was getting married and his own family thought he had gone to Montcliffe Manor to recover from the events at the Herringworth ball. Recover? Like he had after La Corunna? In their ignorance he saw just how little they knew about him.
Robert Cameron was looking disappointed rather than furious and that annoyed him further. He had been coerced into this whole situation by a master. The timber merchant could not expect him to enjoy it.
The huge diamond on his wife’s finger was patently wrong and he saw now that part of the gold clasp had worn free from the stone it held. It had hurt her.
Yesterday he might have smiled at such a travesty, but today the short spikiness of her hair pulled at him somehow. She had threaded a gold headband through the curls in an effort to emulate what Christine Howard had once done, but it only added a poignant awkwardness and the scars on her wrist above the gaudy diamond were reddened. Like her face.
When he had raised the veil after the vows all he saw was skin that was rough and raw, her dark eyes taking in the fact that he was seeing her at her very worst.
But even like that she looked beautiful to him. He ground his teeth in rage.
Her father was speaking now to the small and mismatched group around the table, thin lines of sickness etched into his face.
‘I have always called Amethyst “my jewel” and I hope in the coming years you might see the truth in these words for yourself, Lord Montcliffe.’ He raised his glass and toasted. ‘To Lord and Lady Montcliffe. May their union be blessed with love and laughter.’
At least he had not intimated heirs. Breathing out, Daniel looked at the fob at his waist. Another few minutes and this would all be over.
* * *
Her groom kept checking the time, five minutes and then ten. The food was tasty and the conversation around the table increasingly more congenial, but he did not join in the talk and neither did she, the minister and her father doing most of it.
Unexpectedly the older woman next to her leant over and squeezed her hand. ‘I am Julia McBeth and when I was married I wondered what I was doing, but my Henry was the sweetest man a bride could want. Daniel Wylde is like that too, underneath. He is kind and good.’
She spoke quietly, but in her eyes there was a genuine concern.
‘I was the Earl’s governess when he was young. His mother was not the sort of woman who took to children easily, you understand, so the two boys became like the sons I could never have myself. I am a distant cousin from a branch of the family that invested unwisely, so the position here was a godsend at the time, and the boys made everything bearable. I left Montcliffe Manor when Nigel and Daniel were sent up to school, but kept in good contact with the boys afterwards.’
‘You must miss Nigel, then?’
‘Oh, I do, but he always needed his younger brother to keep him...stable. When Daniel went off to the Peninsular Campaign with General Moore I think Nigel lost his direction and could not get it back.
‘So he died before my husband returned?’
‘Just a day or so after, actually.’ The frown across her forehead alluded to something more, but Amethyst did not wish to ask about it. ‘My husband passed away three years ago and although I had been away from Montcliffe for a very long time Lord Montcliffe asked me back to stay. A goodness, that, for I had nowhere else to go and
I think he knew it.’
‘Do his mother and sisters ever come here?’
‘The Countess is a city woman. I doubt she has ever enjoyed the place and only a small handful of staff has been kept on which would not suit her at all. Certainly even as a young mother Lady Montcliffe left for London at the drop of a hat and for very long periods of time.’
‘Then it is most appropriate that you are here today, Mrs McBeth.’
‘Julia. Everyone calls me that and if you have need of an ear you know where to find me.’
‘Thank you.’ A slight happiness came through all the strange uncertainty as she was given a glimpse of the younger Daniel. A leader and kind with it. The sort of man that Gerald had never been.
* * *
When the meal finally came to an end the Earl of Montcliffe stood.
‘Might I have a word with you in private in the library, my lady?’ My lady? She was that to him now? So formal. So very polite.
‘Of course.’
She followed him down a dark corridor that opened up into a large and light room, a garden off to one side with double doors for access. Books lined each end, all leather-bound and well ordered.
Here was another thing then that she had discovered about him. He read.
‘Your lawyer gave me your handwritten note outlining the demands of this marriage. A marriage in name only, I am presuming, given your edict for separate lives.’
Did he want more? Looking up, she saw he did not.
‘For appearances’ sake would you be happy to inhabit the adjoining chamber to my own whilst here at Montcliffe Manor? It might stop any gossip that I would not wish to engender. The door between us would remain locked, the key on your side.’
She nodded.
‘Did your father read the conditions you wrote?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘His seemed to contradict your own.’
‘I think he hopes for much more than each of us would wish to give, my lord.’