Ashton: Lord of Truth (Lonely Lords Book 13)

by Grace Burrowes

  Copyright © 2016 by Grace Burrowes

  Cover Design by Wax Creative, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Grace Burrowes Publishing.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Ashton: Lord of Truth is Published by Grace Burrowes Publishing

  21 Summit Avenue

  Hagerstown, MD 21740

  graceburrowes.com

  Ebook ISBN:978-1-941419-32-8

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Trouble With Dukes

  To those who are disappointed in love. Be of good cheer, for love is not disappointed in you.

  Chapter One

  “I am the bastard,” Ashton Fenwick said. “I am the charming, firstborn bastard, and I’m good at it. Now you want to wreck everything. Is this your idea of fraternal loyalty?”

  Ewan had the grace to look abashed. “As a matter of fact, it is. You will make a fine earl.”

  His rejoinder came in accents that were nearly Etonian—baby brother had attended public school—while the dialect of the Borders lurked beneath Ashton’s every syllable.

  Alyssa remained silent on the red velvet sofa, wearing her don’t make me cry expression. The absolute unfair hell of it was, when Ashton’s sister-in-law looked as she did now—eyes glistening, gaze resolute—he was nearly moved to tears himself.

  “I will make no sort of earl at all,” he said, pacing the length of the estate office. Because the estate belonged to the earl—not to Ashton—the chamber was spacious and the carpets thick enough to muffle his boot steps. “I stink of horses more often than not. I swear in at least four languages, I am ever so fond of a wee dram, and I am not the perishing, sodding, bedamned earl.”

  Ashton had raised his voice, a Scotsman’s prerogative when making a point to another hardheaded Scotsman.

  “You have enumerated at least three characteristics of the typical lordling,” Ewan said. “A titled man also, however, sires progeny on command, and that I have failed to do.”

  Ashton sent Alyssa an accusing glower. “I heard a sniffle. We’ll hae none o’ that snifflin’ in this discussion. A countess doesna sniffle.”

  “I don’t care if you’re the bloody Duke of Argyll,” Ewan retorted, marching up to Ashton. “You do not address my wife in such a fashion.”

  Ewan was an inch shorter than Ashton, probably the besetting disappointment of his lordship’s handsome life. Though Ewan was the younger brother, he’d been raised to become the earl, and his skill with a verbal command was impressive.

  “You even sound like an earl,” Ashton said, patting his brother’s lacy cravat. “You have earl hair, while I resemble a two-legged black bear.”

  One blond eyebrow lofted to an angle only a titled fellow could achieve. “Have you been drinking, Ash?”

  “Of course, I’ve been drinking. A wee dram makes life rosier, so I’ll just help myself to one now.” Ewan hadn’t offered him libation, because Ashton wasn’t quite a guest at the family seat, and yet, he wasn’t entirely family, despite being Ewan’s full brother.

  Alyssa exchanged a look with her husband that conveyed love, pleading, and more than a little pain. Ashton ignored that glance, filled two glasses with the best whisky the estate had to offer, downed both, then refilled them.

  “To the earl.” Ashton recited the toast he and his brother had been making for years.

  “To the earl,” Ewan echoed, his weary tone plucking at Ashton’s last nerve.

  “Why bring this up now?” Ashton asked. “You’ve sat on this information for months. Why do you choose now to ruin my future?”

  “You call immense wealth, prestige, influence, a life of security and ease ruin?” Ewan asked.

  The question was genuine, which made it that much more heartbreaking.

  “Ewan, you were raised to value all of this,” Ashton said, sweeping a hand in the direction of ornate pier glasses, intricate plasterwork, exquisite landscapes, and delicate gilt chairs each of which was worth more than Ashton’s best horse.

  “You were raised to value it as well,” Ewan retorted, setting his barely touched drink on the sideboard. “Most people would have the sense to value beauty, comfort, and security.”

  “Why value what you know you can never have? I was warned over and over by every tutor and headmaster that I had to make something of myself, that nothing would be handed to me.”

  “And yet, Ashton, you were given an education, a roof over your head, love, a place to call home, skills, and above all, freedom to follow your own direction. As the only legitimate heir, I was wrapped in cotton wool, chaperoned, and lectured until I was nearly mad with it.”

  Ewan strolled to the window—no pacing about for him—as if mesmerized by a view of southern Scotland he’d had nearly thirty years to study. Thanks to a river that changed course every hundred years or so, a portion of the estate touched into England. The previous earl had considered diverting the river to rectify that disgrace.

  “Tell him, Ewan.” Alyssa’s voice was husky, as if she’d already endured a bout of tears. “If you don’t, I will.”

  The whisky curdled in Ashton’s gut. “Is somebody ill?”

  He loved these people as only a lonely Scotsman could love his two extant immediate family members. Ashton and Ewan had lost one sister to influenza and another to a lung fever within weeks. If Ewan or Alyssa were unwell—

  “Not ill,” Ewan said. “But in a delicate condition, nonetheless.”

  Ashton dropped onto the sofa beside Alyssa. “Now that’s a fine thing. You had me worried when I should be rejoicing. I’ve never been an uncle before, but I’m sure I’ll get the knack of it. Spoiling a wee niece or nephew is what uncles do best, and now that you’ve given me some warning—”

  Alyssa put her head in her hands. “Ewan, make him understand.”

  Ashton shut his mouth, because when Alyssa Jean MacDermott Fenwick took to pleading, the end times were surely nigh.

  “Alyssa has conceived before,” Ewan said, back to the room. “We’ve lost the child in the early days all three times. This time seems to be going better.”

  Currents swirled about the elegant office, entirely human currents of anxiety, hope, and heartbreak. Some forms of wealth, not even a title could buy.

  “Tell him the rest of it,” Alyssa said.

  “There has been talk,” Ewan went on, fiddling with the red velvet tie holding the curtains in their precise, elegant folds. “Mama’s old nurse has grown feeble-minded, and she wanders. Gunna found her way to the pub last summer and began reminiscing. Her sister, who is still quite sharp, didn’t contradict her, and the talk hasn’t gone away.”

  “We’re in Scotland,” Ashton said, patting Alyssa’s hand. Her fingers were cool, and now that he was n
ext her, she struck him as pale. “People will talk when they’re not vying for a spot on the sinner’s stool.”

  Alyssa winced at his reference to fornication, but without that particular vice, the stool at the front of the kirk would get a good deal less polishing by penitential backsides.

  “The problem, brother, is that the talk is true. Alyssa was in the attics rummaging among the nursery trunks, and she found Mama’s diary, from when Mama and Papa eloped.”

  “Diaries can be falsified.”

  Even as he spoke, Ashton felt the weight of doom closing in on him. A small Scots community thrived on gossip. In the nearby village of Auchterdingle, the elders still made mention of the mule that had given birth three years after the Forty-Five. The offspring had been named Jesus, and its arrival had been taken as a sign that Bonnie Prince Charlie’s triumphant return was imminent.

  That had been more than seventy years ago, and the miraculous mule was still frequently toasted. A potential scandal in the earl’s family would never, ever cease being a topic of speculation.

  “If I am legitimate,” Ashton observed, “which I am not, then Mama and Papa were married at the time I was born. Mama would have been sixteen, a mere girl by English standards, and Papa not much older.”

  “They were in love,” Ewan said, taking a seat at the estate desk. “And in Scotland, unlike England, a sixteen-year-old woman need not have her parents’ blessing to marry.”

  Ewan made a magnificent picture behind the oak monstrosity, all dapper and blond, but a troubled, magnificent picture.

  “I’ve been in love a time or two,” Ashton said. “Then I wake up with a sore head, and the affliction has passed.” He’d been infatuated countless times, until the infatuations had run together, into an abiding fondness for all of the ladies.

  Alyssa’s lips twitched, an encouraging sign.

  “Mama and Papa were passionately devoted,” Ewan went on. “Prior to your arrival—and prior their setting up a household out on the isle of Rothsay—they managed a quiet little wedding. By the time Mama’s family caught wind of her whereabouts, that household had three children. At that point, cousin Hugh and cousin Leith had gone to their rewards, and Papa had become the heir apparent. He went from being an unsuitable Scottish upstart to a Border lord’s heir.”

  And that Border lord had become increasingly wealthy as the years had gone by, to the extent that Papa had apparently become eligible in the eyes of the English side of the family.

  Alyssa rose and perched on the arm of Ewan’s chair. They were a striking couple—both tall, well-favored, and fair, and their marriage had been a love match. Ashton hoped it still was, but this business of the succession had apparently put a strain on the relationship.

  “Everybody was sure your papa would abandon his scandalous liaison with the Irish earl’s wayward daughter, and marry a proper Scotswoman,” Alyssa said, “one who’d bring wealth and standing to the union. Instead, after much argument with the old earl, your papa and your mama had public ceremony with her family in attendance. She was of age then even by English standards. Her family was relieved, for who else would marry a woman ruined by a Scottish rogue?”

  Such a romance belonged among Sir Walter Scott’s drivelings. “Why not reveal the earlier marriage before the public union began?” Ashton asked. Why deny Ashton and his sisters legitimacy when it might have made a difference?

  “If you’d been the legitimate heir, your mama’s English relations would have demanded to keep you in England,” Alyssa said, “to be raised among the civilized English. They’d plucked her from Ireland at a tender age, and she well recalled the pain of leaving her home. She wasn’t about to give you up or let you be separated from your sisters.”

  “Our father supported her decision,” Ewan said, “If you’d been in line for the title, the old earl would have sent you south without a qualm.”

  The old earl had believed in currying favor with the English, a sensible, if unpopular, approach. A Scottish heir raised among the English would have had all the advantages of a medieval fostering, from a political perspective.

  And might have received abominable treatment, even at the hands of his own relations.

  “I came along a few years later,” Ewan went on. “By that time, Papa was in command of his own household and could keep me here in Scotland. Nonetheless, Uncle took much too long to die, the earlier marriage had not been revealed, and you were being raised as a by-blow, though in our parents’ household, not among English strangers.”

  “Ewan’s legitimacy was unassailable,” Alyssa said, “while yours was shrouded in secrecy and family squabbling. Had I not found your mother’s diary, we would have pensioned Gunna off to the Midlands and dismissed her maunderings as fancy.”

  “Unfind the diary, then.” Ashton loved his brother dearly, but a title sometimes deprived a man of common sense. Marriage records on Rothsay were likely to fall into the sea before anybody stumbled upon them.

  “I’ll not unfind the diary,” Alyssa said, shoving away from her husband’s side. “There’s been enough dissembling and drama. I won’t have my son’s inheritance questioned when some meddling cousin unearths church records or finds an old diary from the English side of the family years from now.”

  The English were forever causing trouble, that was true enough.

  “I thought you liked being the earl and countess.” Ewan and Alyssa excelled at being titled. They were gracious, generous, handsome, Scottish when it mattered, and diplomatic when an Englishman was underfoot. “You’ve made the earldom look like no burden a’tall, though I know that’s not so.”

  Being the earl was work, and Ashton suspected being the countess was no less effort. The estate was huge, covering woodlands, pasture, land in cultivation, crofts, sheep ranges, lochs, streams, three villages, and—thank the generosity of the Almighty—a distillery. The earldom also involved rights pertaining to fishing, forestry, quarrying, land use, Border regulations, local administration, church functions… the demands were endless.

  The English tenants expected all the blessings and perquisites of English law, the Scottish tenants wanted only Scottish traditions and legalities.

  And yet, Ewan was popular among all of the local folk and the neighboring titles.

  “You’ll make a fine earl,” Ewan said again, though he sounded as if he were reciting a prayer rather than expressing confidence in his older brother.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking.” Ashton abandoned the sofa and spared a scowl for the portrait of their father over the mantel. “You are the earl, Ewan. You can foist the title off on me, but twenty years from now, when not a soul cares which of us is legitimate, you will still be his lordship, and I will still be ‘the by-blow.’”

  “Then you will be the by-blow earl,” Ewan said, rising to slip an arm around Alyssa’s waist. “My wife needs peace and quiet. She needs freedom from worry and to know that her children will not be tormented with old secrets. I need for my wife to be happy, and thus you need to be the earl.”

  Now there was some miserable logic.

  “I need to get drunk, and this discussion is not over.” Ashton strode from the room, intent on making a dramatic exit. The door had slammed behind him with gratifying finality, when he thought of the most sensible course of all. He’d destroy the diary. How hard could that be?

  He turned on his heel, prepared to announce this brilliant solution to his dunderheaded brother, but immediately outside the door, a sound caught his ear.

  Sobbing. Loud, upset, female sobbing, and a man’s quieter, conciliatory tones. Alyssa wasn’t given to dramatics or manipulation, and she was in a delicate condition.

  She was also genuinely miserable and upset, because of him.

  Ashton leaned his forehead against the solid oak door. “I don’t want the bloody, fecking, miserable, sodding, bedamned, rubbishing, blighted title.” He wanted to hike into the village, flirt the tavern maids and old women into good spirits, jest with the
village lads, and enjoy an argument with the blacksmith over a few wee drams.

  Alyssa’s unhappiness crested higher, along with a few sharp words. Without warning, the door opened, and there she stood, her face tear-streaked. Ewan was at her side, his eyes full of pleading and worry.

  A brother in trouble and a damsel in distress. Alyssa was also mad as hell, and at Ashton. His brother’s ire, he might have withstood, but Alyssa’s fury and disappointment were unendurable.

  For an interminable moment, Ashton struggled against conscience and against the inevitable. When had being the bastard become so easy and comfortable? So integral to who he was?

  Alyssa glowered at him, her lashes wet with tears.

  “I’ll be the earl,” Ashton said, brushing his thumb over her damp cheek, “but I need one thing from the two of you.”

  “Anything.” Ewan wrapped his arms about his wife. “We’ll support you in every possible way. You’ve only to tell us, and we’ll do it.”

  That was not an earl talking, that was a besotted husband and a very worried prospective papa.

  “You,”—Ashton tapped Alyssa’s nose—“will have sons. You will have nothing but sons, and they will be great, strapping bairnies whom I will spoil without limit, and one of those boys will be my heir. Understand?”

  She nodded, a hint of a smile peeking through her tears.

  “We’ll do our best,” Ewan said, cuddling his wife closer. “We’ll do our very best for you, Ashton. My word on it.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.” Ashton closed the door, because the people he loved most in the whole world had presented such a picture of marital intimacy as to make a bachelor brother blush.

  He took his walk to the village, all the while assuring himself that nothing needed to change. Ewan and Alyssa’s children would inherit the whole mess, Ewan would manage the earldom, and Ashton would be free to flirt with tavern maids and old women.