‘You seem to have given the matter some thought,’ she said, dazzled by the sudden rush of ideas.
‘In another life, I might have been a gentleman farmer,’ he said with a thoughtful smile. ‘I was told my grandfather did quite well planting tobacco. The land was the envy of the county.’
‘In Philadelphia?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘Maryland. Our house was not so great as this, of course. But from what I was told, it was large and beautiful.’
‘You do not know?’
‘That was before the revolution. Your army came and burned it to the ground. The money that was left was spent in the cause of patriotism.’
‘And I assume your family was rewarded for its loyalty?’ she said.
He laughed. ‘On the contrary. My father was orphaned and embittered. He had plenty of tales to tell about the time when life was better, but he did little to improve the situation that had been left to him.’
‘And what were you doing with yourself?’ she asked, remembering that he had called himself a feckless layabout. Perhaps he was, for playing chess for money did not sound like much of a job.
He shrugged. ‘Since I had no family money to begin with and could not afford to go to university, there were many paths that were closed to me. But I am not a fool and have made out the best I could. I have written and read things for the illiterate and set type for a printer. I wrote articles for the Daily Gazette. I tried my hand at soldiering, but that can hardly be called a job. When my country was invaded by yours, all men took up arms.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I played a banjo in a tavern. But not well. And travelled about for a bit with my chess set.’
Perhaps he was a wastrel. Though the jobs he had chosen sounded interesting, they were not what she’d expected from a man of such intelligence. ‘You aspired no further than that?’
He shrugged. ‘I am much better at finding things I do not enjoy than things I do. Thus far, it has not really mattered. I had no wife. No children to support. I have enjoyed my freedom. I always knew that the time would come when I needed to settle. But thus far?’ He shuddered. ‘I do not like to be tied to one place and am easily bored. When the challenge is gone, so am I.’
‘But that must change now that you mean to marry,’ she reminded him.
‘It had changed even before I left America,’ he said. ‘When my brother was alive, we pooled what money we had saved and borrowed more, planning to invest in sugar. My brother took our funds and travelled to the Caribbean. But before the plan could come to fruition, my brother was lost to us.’
‘Leaving you with the debts and his family to care for,’ she completed for him.
He nodded. ‘My family is not what you would call lucky.’
‘So you came to England to change your fortune,’ she said, oddly proud of his plans.
‘And found someone who has even more debts than I do,’ he added.
‘There are other jobs in England,’ she reminded him. ‘If you wish, I will help you forge what letters and references you might need to appear formally educated.’
‘You think I should lie about my past?’
She gave a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘When people are so easily deceived, it can be hard not to take advantage of them.’
He gave her an odd look. ‘Some day you will be the one who has been fooled. It will be interesting to see if you are still so forgiving.’
‘Should it happen, we shall see. But so far, it has not.’ She smiled and continued to plan his life to her own advantage.
‘And there is still Prudence to consider,’ he reminded her.
‘You could use the money you are seeking to bring her here, instead of returning to her,’ she said. ‘Now, with your understanding of the Earl’s current difficulties and your progressive ideas, you might make an excellent estate manager. Comstock Manor certainly needs one.’
If his plan was to marry another, he could never truly be hers. But it would be some consolation to have him close by, where they could see each other occasionally to play chess or discuss books. Because at some point in the last twenty-four hours, the idea that he might leave and never return had become unbearable.
‘There are several reasons that your plan will not work,’ he said in a gentle voice that made her think he knew far more about her feelings than she cared to admit. ‘The least of them is the time involved in arranging her passage. She is unmarried and increasing. Even if I could send her a ticket with a snap of my fingers, she is in no condition for a sea voyage.’
‘Of course,’ Charity said, trying to pretend sympathy for this stranger who had trapped her Potts into marriage.
‘And, of course, there will be certain complications involved in raising another man’s child.’
‘I should not think so,’ she said, considering. ‘It is not as if you have a great inheritance to consider or are worried about succession.’
‘I am discussing my feelings on the matter,’ he interrupted. ‘The situation will not be an easy one and I prefer to deal with it at home, rather than starting a new life and a family simultaneously.’
It did not matter that he might do well here, or that she wanted to keep him near. He wanted to return to America. Staying had never been part of his plan. ‘Of course,’ she said, smiling all the harder and pretending that it had been nothing more than an idle suggestion. ‘But if you truly want to go back home, you will need your share of the diamonds. Have you given any thought to how we might find the book we are looking for?’
He was watching her carefully. ‘Very little. I was rather distracted yesterday.’
He had not forgotten. He was being so casual this morning that she had begun to wonder if it had been some sort of wild dream. At the very least it must have been far less important to him than it had to her. But now that she was thinking of it, her nervousness had returned and she could hardly look him in the eye. Was she actually blushing? She could not remember ever doing it before, but her cheeks had grown so hot at the vague reference to what had occurred that she was sure they must be bright red.
‘I have not thought on the matter of the diamonds,’ he repeated, ignoring her flustered reaction. ‘But something tells me that you have.’ He looked even closer, as if he could read her like the book they searched for. ‘I think you know perfectly well where we should be looking and are keeping secrets from me.’ He made a coaxing gesture with one of his fingers. ‘Do, tell.’
They were fencing again, matching wits for their own amusement. Instantly, life became easier. She smiled and pinched her lips together, then shook her head. ‘Let us see if you can come to the same conclusion without my help. Come with me. We must visit the Blue Earl and see if he can tell you anything.’
Chapter Thirteen
Apparently, they had decided to pretend that nothing had happened between them. It was just as well, since he had no idea what to say to her that would not make parting from her more difficult.
Did you like it?
Of course she had. Women did not normally scream in that way without there being extreme pleasure or extreme pain. Had it been pain, she’d have asked him to stop. Instead, she had thrown back her head and bitten her lip in a way that made her mouth even more kissable.
But while she had been over the moon in ecstasy, the pain he had experienced was excruciating. He should have locked the door, wrapped her legs around his waist and spent himself where she had asked him to be. Instead, he had run, just as he’d run every other time that his life had not gone to plan. He had grabbed a candle from a hall sconce and walked the endless hallways of Comstock Manor until he was too tired to do anything but sleep.
But she looked well-rested and glowing with vitality. The pinched expression she’d worn when he’d met her had disappeared, as had her dowdy gowns and her brisk manner. The gown she was wearing today was quite fetching and bordered
on frivolous. She smiled more easily. She blushed. He had obviously done her good.
She had also decided to meddle in his future plans, which were immutable and not part of their bargain. The quicker they returned to treasure hunting, the sooner he could be away. But now she was talking nonsense to him, weighting her words as if there were some hidden meaning in them that any fool should be able to understand. ‘The Blue Earl,’ he said, then waited patiently for illumination.
‘I discovered that the diamonds were missing when I was a child,’ she said. ‘But I have only been looking for them for the last year or so.’
‘You began after your grandfather died,’ he said, cutting to the truth before she could tell him.
‘It was one of many things he did not want me meddling in,’ she replied.
‘The missing diamonds were supposed to be a secret between the Earl and his Countess,’ he said, then remembered that he could not possibly know something that Comstock had been told by the widow of his predecessor. ‘Or so I would assume.’
‘Very true,’ she said. ‘And you were right to begin your search in the study for the book that might hold answers. Until he died, he kept the materials I needed to find the truth in a locked cabinet in this room.’ Her smile turned smug. ‘Once he was gone, I picked the lock and moved it all to the library.’
‘Well done,’ he said.
‘I have been reading the diaries of the previous Comstocks and believe that the stones were hidden in the tenure of the Blue Earl, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Which means that the book that fits the code key you found must have been in the house at the time of his death in 1648.’
‘The Blue Earl?’ he said, still confused. ‘Would you care to elaborate, for those of us who have arrived late?’
‘It is easier if I show you,’ she said. ‘Come with me to the portrait gallery.’ She led him out of the study and to the huge hall that held the family portraits.
‘I have not been here since my sister rearranged the portraits,’ she admitted. ‘The one we will be examining has been gone from the house for several years.’
‘Gone where?’ he asked.
‘To a pawn shop in London,’ she admitted. ‘Grandmama sold it to pay the butcher’s bill. But my sister Hope got it back so the new Comstock will have all his ancestors to greet him, when he arrives.’
‘I am sure he will be grateful for that,’ Miles replied, feeling guilty again.
‘Reserve your opinion until after you have seen the picture,’ she said, opening the tall double doors to the gallery. The room they entered was at least forty feet long and lined on either side with full-length portraits of his predecessors, some wearing the ridiculous coronet that had been plopped on his head when he had been dragged to court to meet the Prince.
‘Let us work our way backwards, shall we?’ She looked up at the newest painting, of a middle-aged man in powdered wig and wide-cuffed coat. He had posed with eyes slightly downcast and seemed to be staring down from the wall in disapproval.
‘My grandfather.’ Charity gestured to a portrait at the end of the row. ‘He did not always look so stern. Unless he was looking at me, of course.’ She smiled as if it had not bothered her.
If that had been true, she would not mention it so often.
‘There is a painting of my grandmother in the town house in London. But since it is a nude, I have no intention of showing you.’
‘Thank you.’ He had met the Dowager in Bristol when he’d arrived. Though she was a handsome woman for her age, he had no desire to see so much of her.
There was a glass-topped table beneath the Earl’s portrait that contained a row of miniatures. ‘My father,’ Charity said, stroking a likeness of a man in a clergyman’s black coat and high collar. ‘That is my mother beside him. And Father’s two brothers. All lost.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said, remembering the diaries he had read in the study and the last Comstock’s account of the typhus epidemic that had taken his youngest son and orphaned three little girls.
‘It was a long time ago.’ She frowned. ‘I was barely out of leading strings when we were brought here after my parents died. I remember my uncles. But not them.’
‘It must have been very hard for you,’ he said.
‘I was not alone. I had my sisters,’ she said, touching the next little paintings, which were of two stunning young ladies with a passing resemblance to the woman beside him.
‘And where is yours?’ he asked. If he wished for a remembrance from a lady, he’d have much preferred carrying Charity about in his pocket than Prudence.
‘I do not need a portrait to remind me of my appearance,’ she said, not looking up. ‘I have a mirror.’
‘You do not sit for a painting for yourself,’ he said. ‘You sit for the pleasure of others. Did your grandmother not wish you to do so?’
‘I refused,’ she said through tightened lips and walked down the row of pictures.
Though she did not like to speak of herself or explain her aversion to being painted, she was a font of family history, able to share anecdotes about each earl as she passed them.
Her words registered with him on a superficial level, names and dates, children and notable achievements. It appeared that the avid collector of erotic art was the brother of her great-grandfather, who had posed for his portrait in odd silk robes and a turban.
Miles stared at the faces in silence, looking for any similarity to himself. His looks must have come from his mother’s side of the family for he could find no trace of the Strickland features in his own. If his hope had been to feel a part of this family after seeing it all together, he was not to get his wish.
But he was painfully conscious of the blank wall beside the most recent Comstock. The family had left a place for his portrait there. Some day, if they managed to find an heir to take his place, that man’s progeny would be walking strangers down the row, pointing to the Eighth Earl, the one who had taken one look at the job before him and hightailed it back to America.
But what else could he do? If it had been the goal to reclaim his branch of the family tree and keep the Stricklands alive, it had been hopeless from the first. There was no way he could fulfil his promise to Ed and his obligations to an earldom. He was only marrying Pru to acknowledge her child as his. That meant that the next Comstock stood a fifty-fifty chance of being an American stranger with no ties to the family at all.
A man could not serve two masters. Deciding between a brother he’d loved and his recently sworn loyalty to the Crown had been no choice at all.
Without his realising it, they had come to a stop and she was staring at him expectantly. It took a moment to realise that she was awaiting his reaction to the portrait in front of them and not expecting the full confession that was on the tip of his tongue.
He turned and looked up at it.
‘My God.’
She was smiling. ‘It tends to have that effect on people. I should have warned you.’
‘Very true,’ he said faintly. The man in the picture looked more like a Shakespearean villain than a member of a noble family. It was difficult to estimate his height against the objects in the background, but he appeared to be shorter than average, a homunculus beside the tall and noble men around him. His wrists were thin where they protruded from his lace cuffs and his calves were bony in the silk hose beneath his breeches. His face was no better, decidedly lopsided so that one eye squinted and the other bulged. His red hair was sparse on his scalp, which was the same pale blue as the rest of his face.
‘Cyril Strickland. The Blue Earl.’
‘Aptly named,’ Miles replied, unable to look away.
‘If the family has a black sheep, it was him. Ugly, weak and not long for the world.’ She pulled the perforated sheet of paper that they’d found from a pocket in her skirts. ‘And, apparently, a duplicitous trickster who
wished for his family to suffer in poverty. But that was mostly omitted from the family record.’
He thought for a moment. ‘What was included in the aforementioned record? Anything that might give us a hint as to what he meant in leaving that key?’
‘Practically nothing was written about him,’ Charity said. ‘He inherited the title on the death of his older brother. A suspicious death, I might add. Averill Strickland was everything an earl ought to be: brave, handsome and beloved by tenants and servants alike.’
‘But not by his brother,’ Miles supplied.
‘One night, Averill went to bed healthy and woke up dead,’ Charity said.
‘And Cyril became the Earl of Comstock.’
‘But not for long,’ she supplied. ‘He was a sickly child and grew no stronger in adulthood. He was prone to megrims and fits, and had thinning hair...’
‘And the blue skin we see in the painting,’ he finished for her.
She nodded. ‘He died unmarried, within a year of taking the title. But I think he used what time he had to hide the family jewels and spite us all. There was much turmoil in the fighting between the Roundheads and the Royalists. If he thought that invasion was imminent, it probably made sense to keep the most valuable possessions hidden.’
‘Bastard,’ Miles said.
‘If he had been, we would not have had to deal with him,’ she replied.
‘Figuratively speaking,’ he added. ‘And you know nothing more of him?’
She shook her head. ‘There was no immediate family left to write his memorial or to retrieve what he had hidden. They had to hunt far afield to find an heir, just as they have done with the current Comstock.’
She stared thoughtfully at the picture. ‘Grandmama claimed to be impressed with the American. But she said he had been ill.’
‘Seasick,’ Miles said hurriedly. ‘It was a difficult crossing.’
She glanced sharply at him. ‘I thought you arrived separately.’
‘We travelled the same ocean,’ he insisted. ‘There is nothing delicate about Comstock’s constitution, if that is what you were implying.’
How Not to Marry an Earl Page 12