Summerton (Lady Eleanor Mysteries Book 1)
Page 1
Summerton
By
Becca St. John
He married for money, she wed by force ~
On the brink of losing everything, the Duke of Summerton fills the coffers by marrying heiress Caroline Howlett, but at what cost? She doesn't want his crumbling estate, or his title and what is he, as a man, without them. Before he can grasp this dilemma, something greater than doubt threatens their marriage.
When Caroline said she’d rather be dead than married to the duke, she hadn’t meant it literally. Forced into marriage by her guardian, Caroline doesn’t give a fig for the idle life of the aristocracy. She wants to run her father’s enterprises, and she will, once dead bodies stop getting in the way.
Aided by Summerton's widowed aunt, amateur sleuth Lady Eleanor, the Duke and his reluctant bride scramble to uncover just who is trying to kill them.
~Neither considered love part of the bargain
The Lady Eleanor Series ~ Historical romantic suspense with a touch of Gothic.
Summerton
Copyright 2015 Becca St. John
Cover Art Copyright 2015 Kelli Ann Morgan / Inspire Creative Services
Formatted by IRONHORSE Formatting
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
Our Ancestors
By marriage and birth, Inspiring grand lives
Guiding through a legacy of stories
You are loved, missed and honored
And to three fabulous women
Author, Beverley Gail Eikli
And readers extraordinaire: Liz Evans & Beverly Ross
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1 ~ The Bride
CHAPTER 2 ~ Diversions
CHAPTER 3 ~ Plans
CHAPTER 4 ~ First Day Welcome
CHAPTER 5 ~ Death Comes to St. Martins
CHAPTER 6 ~ Discontents
CHAPTER 7 ~ Getting to Know You and Yours
CHAPTER 8 ~ Eyes Opened
CHAPTER 9 ~ Congenial Company
CHAPTER 10 ~ Danger Lurks
CHAPTER 11 ~ Failed Search
CHAPTER 12 ~ Past into Present
CHAPTER 13 ~ Ancient Halls
CHAPTER 14 ~ Prisoners of All Sorts
CHAPTER 15 ~ News from Manchester
CHAPTER 16 ~ The Crypt
CHAPTER 17 ~ Motive Anyone?
CHAPTER 18 ~ Bridal Journey?
CHAPTER 19 ~ The Ambassador
CHAPTER 20 ~ Danger
CHAPTER 21 ~ Thresholds
CHAPTER 22 ~ Potions
CHAPTER 23 ~ Missing Pieces
CHAPTER 24 ~ 'Til Death Do Us Part
CHAPTER 25 ~ Vandals
CHAPTER 26 ~ Gentlemen, My Wife
CHAPTER 27 – Loose Ends
About Becca St. John
Other Titles by Becca St. John
CHAPTER 1 ~ The Bride
Alfred Henry Bertram Edgwater, Duke of Summerton, Earl of St. Martins, stood before the warm glow of the fire, studying the depths of his brandy. He sloshed it about in idle circular motions, coating the sides of the tumbler with rich amber.
A weak distraction, perhaps, but more suitable than pacing the room or indulging in his second occupation of the evening—glancing at the closed door to the duchess’s chambers.
His duchess’s chambers.
He could barely fathom it. Married.
It could have been worse, would have been if his bride had said no. Which she hadn’t. Every lady wished to be a duchess.
Still, he fretted over his choice of looks and wit over breeding. Of course there was the dowry and further, pounds per annum. He mustn’t forget the whole reason for the enterprise. He hoped to God he’d made the right choice.
He downed his drink in one swallow, chastising himself to be more circumspect. They had exchanged their vows, enjoyed a splendid wedding breakfast with a few guests. His man of affairs confirmed that the funds were in the bank before they’d even left London.
No need to rush the bedding. A promise was a promise and he’d made his. Wait for the lady’s maid to crack the door of the adjoining room, and signal he could enter.
He set his glass on the table. Best not to have another. Brandy was a foolish means of wasting time.
Earlier he’d found diversion in his study, checking over the itinerary for a bridal journey he already knew by heart. He’d tried to read a recent book on traveling through Italy, but he couldn’t concentrate.
Whatever doubts he held about this marriage—the taint of trade, a commoner for a wife—physical attraction was not one. Desire stifled all other diversions.
In the end, he left his study for his valet, Percy, before finally settling in the duke and duchess’s sitting room. The fire, flaming perfectly when he entered the room, had died down to glowing red coals surrounded by ash.
No one took that long to prepare for the night.
Surely, the maid had forgotten to leave the door ajar.
According to Percy, his bride’s bath had been emptied hours ago. He should tap on the door. Lightly. Except the duchess’s bedchamber was on the far side of the duchess’s sitting room, making it unlikely she’d hear it, and if she did, that he could hear her response.
Entering her sitting room wouldn’t, exactly, break the promise.
In four long strides he faced the first barrier, hand hovering over the door lever. He withdrew it, uneasy for the hesitation. He was a duke, born and bred to be decisive, to have the last word.
That was the problem. He’d given her the last word. She had asked for his patience. Unlike her uncle, a doting old fool of a guardian, Summerton’s beautiful, biddable, bride had never asked for a thing before. Not anything in the whole of their brief courtship, or the six weeks of their engagement.
Mind you, in all that time, they’d seen little of each other and never shared a private word outside of one very short walk in the garden. Even that had been quickly interrupted. He sighed. The protection of innocence was a trying thing indeed.
Still, his impatience did him no credit. She was to be his wife, not his mistress. He’d do well to remember that. But how long could it take to brush out her hair? Arrange it in artful disarray? Don a wisp of a nightrail? Not this long, even if she wished to powder every inch of that delectable body of hers.
Restless, he took another tour past the long windows of his sitting room, pushed aside a heavy brocade curtain to find a world of silver and shadows. Eerie, even more so, for the constant howling that carried across the fields. Dog
s and wolves loved a full moon. Good time for seeding fields as well.
A flicker of light at the edge of the woods startled him. He looked back. Nothing. Probably a town boy signaling to his sweetheart in the Hall.
Affairs of the estate flitted through his thoughts, nothing strong enough to linger. His steward, Tom, had the farmers plowing tonight. They would later plant clover, contrary to generations of traditional crops.
He thought of the pretty little mare he had bought for his bride, all high strung and prancing about. Hopefully, it would not be too much for her.
He smiled. It faded.
He was a husband. Although his bride did not strike him as high strung, she was an innocent. He had a duty to ease her beyond any shy skittishness. Young girls could be wrought with unnecessary fears of the wedding night, especially when they didn’t have a mother to explain things.
Who knew what his bride had been told. Just like him, motherless from a young age. Missing whatever it was mothers provided. In this case, what to expect on a wedding night. Fears could escalate beyond reason. He’d heard of such scenarios.
It would do neither of them a bit of good to have her shivering and tearful beyond common sense. A bride’s nerves were no small factor.
Prodded by worry, he opened the double doors to her parlor, stepped over the threshold, listened for sobs. Nothing. No voices, no footsteps. Quiet.
The blasted maid had forgotten.
Without any more hesitation, he headed for his duchess’s bedchamber, fully prepared to give her maid a thorough set down if he found his bride’s head buried in the pillows, stifling the sound of weeping.
Calming a distraught wife was not in his plans this night.
He stepped past the fanciful, gilded furniture favored by women ages past, crossed the Aubusson carpet. Décor his bride might well change.
But not before the wedding night.
Once more, he hesitated at a doorway, miffed by his own reluctance to act. A loud crash and curse swiftly changed all that. Without the slightest qualm, he thrust the tall paneled door open, strode into the chamber, and stilled, too stunned by the unimaginable tableau to move.
Thank God for his bride’s lengthy preparations. A quick glance confirmed she was not there. No doubt still in her dressing room preparing for the wedding night.
Instead of his bride, he found a filthy little urchin bent over an overturned table in the bedchamber. A shattered vase, bruised rose petals, and broken stalks lay strewn at his soggy feet. The lad had a huge bundle, nearly as big as he was, slung over one shoulder. The fabric, the only clean thing about him, was no doubt from the stripped bed.
His bed linens. By God, the imp was stealing from his home using his sheets to carry it all off!
In less than a blink, Summerton took it all in, but that slight hesitation proved enough time for the boy, initially as frozen as Summerton, to act first. One moment they stared at each other, the next the nimble rascal raced straight for the open French windows leading to the balcony.
Summerton roared to life, shouting, “Stay where you are! We’ve trouble out here!” to his bride, and charged after the thief.
The raggedy young scamp tossed his bundle over the railing. Summerton cringed in anticipation of the clanking crash of priceless candlesticks and crystal. It landed with a soft thump, softer even than the boy’s final leap from the curlicues of stone.
He’d managed it all with agile deftness. Damn the imp. How many times had he climbed that wall?
Swift as a sparrow, the child abandoned his haul and pelted across the grounds, heading straight for the woods that surrounded St. Martins’ estates.
“George!” the duke bellowed for the nighttime groundskeeper, fully aware there was no hope for it. By the time George arrived, the rascal would be well and truly gone.
Alfred Henry Bertram Edgwater, Duke of Summerton, Earl of St. Martins, slipped off his finest damask dressing gown and stepped out of his Italian leather slippers to better scale the stonework. He, too, had practice, not with this particular wall but one very similar to it, having, after all, been a boy once himself. As out of practice as he was, he made good time.
Caught in the chase, he forgot his bride, that he even had one, other than to chastise his own foolishness in dithering over whether to enter her chamber or not.
“George!” Summerton shouted again for the man whose job it was to ensure nothing like this ever happened.
Fueled by fury that anyone would deign to steal from him, Summerton didn’t feel the sharp edge of stone or the prick of thistles. He didn’t hear George’s shouts, or the barks of dogs let loose. He didn’t even hear his own breathing. Determined to outdistance the scamp, he used his one advantage. Long legs. His little adversary did not have them, but Summerton did. As they closed in on the woods, he neared the boy and sprang, tackling the lad with a hard flying leap.
Their ‘umphs’ mingled. Summerton cursed the squirming boy—“Damn you, you little wastrel!”—as he wrestled to subdue him, avoiding some, but not all, of his determined kicks and pummeling fists.
“Stop it!” Summerton commanded, as he flipped the child over, sending his cap flying. A cloud of thick golden hair escaped with a billowing scent of lavender.
A familiar sensual fragrance, one Summerton was particularly fond of, but he had never been quite so finely attuned to it as now.
With this absconder.
For the second time that evening, both Summerton and his prey stilled, frozen as ice on a pond that teemed with life below the frigid surface.
“Caroline?” Incredulity blunted his words. “Caroline?” This couldn’t be possible. It made no sense.
Up until eight that very morning, he had been the most eligible bachelor in the whole of England, failing finances be damned.
No, not the whole of England. The whole of the British Empire.
Every matchmaker, persistent mama, and giggling young lady of the ton had vied for his attention. He had been a veritable catch. A man chased from ballroom to country party to ballroom.
He was not some besotted fool left staring at the soot-streaked features of a fleeing bride.
Their movements mirrored each other, chests rising, falling, gulping breaths after the effort of the chase. Fury fanned like a blacksmith’s bellows.
She had only needed to say no.
“What the bloody hell are you doing?” He slid off her, placing himself between her and the Hall before anyone could spot them. As he reached for the fallen cap, a massive bloodhound clambered up and wedged between them to slobber kisses all over Caroline’s face.
Summerton recoiled, even as Caroline twisted and wrapped her arms around the beast. Those sobs Summerton had so feared surfaced as she buried her head in the plentiful folds of the dog’s neck.
“Seigneur Baver, Seigneur Baver! You are alive,” she wailed.
Summerton snorted. Lord Drool? Well-named. He swiped at a string of slobber that ran along his arm.
But why would she imagine her dog dead? Of course the bloody animal was alive. All the bloody animals she’d collected over the years were alive and faring very well, eating grain and meat in his stables.
Where had she thought they’d gotten off to?
Caroline pulled back, eyes on the dog, asking him, as if Summerton, who was perfectly capable of answering her question, wasn’t right there beside her. “How did you find me?”
“With his nose,” Summerton said, as he thrust her cap at her. “Put this on.” And he held up his hand to ward off George, who’d just rounded the far corner of the Hall with half a dozen baying dogs on leads.
Caroline jammed her hair under the cap, filling the floppy fabric as completely as straw filled a rag doll. Summerton watched her as he tried to tamp down anger with reason.
No, she hadn’t needed to marry him. If there’d been a lover, surely she would have wed the other man instead. Unless, of course, the cad was already married, in which case marriage would give her the freedom for a
n affair.
Fear of the wedding night, indeed! He never should have waited to enter her rooms.
He’d start were they’d left off.
“All your animals are here, Caroline.”
Ah, that got her. Frozen as still as when he’d first found her surrounded by shards of broken vase.
“Every last one of your wounded, limping, hungry mongrels, as well as a three-legged cat, a mischievous fox the gamekeeper wants to shoot, and a number of nags so old, they’d starve out to pasture. Digger, the head groomsman, hired a new stable boy whose sole job is to hand-feed them gruel three times a day.” She was definitely paying attention. He relaxed.
“And what else?” He lounged back as if he had all the time in the world, eyeing his runaway bride, her eyes wide, wary. Resting his wrist on his raised knee, he idly tapped his fingers, drawing out the moment, giving her time to respond. She didn’t. He pretended to search his memory. “Ah, yes!” He held up a finger, making his point. His wayward bride blinked.
“Mustn’t forget the talking bird, which, undoubtedly, once belonged to a sailor.”
She gasped.
“I tried to banish it to the servants’ area. Cook is still blushing and Mrs. Beechum, whom you will find as accommodating as any housekeeper, finally sent it to the stables in a desperate attempt to protect the young maids from its verbiage.”
He’d done quite a bit for this young woman. The problem was, she obviously had no notion he’d done anything at all.
The whole enterprise of taking on her collection of useless pets, which her uncle had suggested, was to be a surprise. At first it had seemed perfectly reasonable. What problem could a few comforting pets pose? Only there were far more than a few, and none of them were in any way comfortable. He’d regretted taking them on more than once.
“Where did you think they’d gotten off to?” he asked his silent bride. “Or had you not even noticed their absence?”