The Unlikely Rivals

by Megan Daniel

  THE WRONG MAN TO BE RIGHT FOR HER

  Men had never been a problem for Saskia. She had successfully evaded their entreaties for all of her young womanhood. But now she had reached the ripe old age of twenty-one, and they were closing in around her.

  There was Mr. Kneighley, the loquacious curate who uttered words of adoration in a torrent that Saskia couldn’t turn off.

  There was Captain Durr ant, the gallant seaman who set full sail after her with all charm blazing to make her his prize.

  And then, of course, there was Derek Rowbridge, who clearly wouldn’t even dream of desiring her, just as she couldn’t conceive of considering him . . .

  . . . until the unthinkable happened, and two hearts ruled by cool heads went out of control. . . .

  The

  Unlikely Rivals

  The

  Unlikely Rivals

  by

  Megan Daniel

  For Marilyn—sister, comrade,

  and best of friends.

  Chapter One

  Magdalena's hands were raw and bleeding as they clung to their tenuous hold on the rock. Her foot groped gingerly for a firmer foothold on the crumbling, narrow ledge. If only she could stop trembling sol

  She froze in terror as the pounding hooves approached. Had he followed her so easily then? She mustn’t even breathe lest she declare her presence to the mustachioed ogre. She heard him dismount, the jingling of his heavy spurs like thunder over her head. The blackness of the night was like a cloak, hiding her from his probing eyes, but still she tried to flatten herself further against the sheer, unyielding cliff face. A picture flashed through her agonized mind, her battered body crashing onto the ugly rock so far below. Even that was preferable to what surely awaited her if Count Almendoro discovered her.

  “Achoo! Drat this pen,” muttered Cornelia Crawley, scratching her tickled nose. She reset the spectacles that had been knocked askew by the sneeze, tucked an errant silver-blond curl under her cap, and resolutely dipped her quill in the standish again and applied herself to her work.

  Suddenly her foothold was gone. The ledge had crumbled below her, sending a shower of rock crashing into the gorge. The footsteps above her stopped dead at the sound, and Magdalena, now clinging desperately, sent up a silent prayer.

  A scream came. Magdalena realized it was herself. A hand like steel closed round her wrist. The Count’s voice, like oiled ice, spoke.

  “Such a pity, my dear Magdalena, if such perfect beauty were wasted on the rocks. I’ve a much better fate in mind for it.”

  “Achoo!” It was no good. The spell was broken. How pleasant it would be, thought Cornelia Crawley, if someday she could afford a good right-wing quill. These left- wings she used were undoubtedly far cheaper, but they did tickle her poor nose unmercifully, and she feared she was growing just the tiniest bit cross-eyed from having to peer around the end of the feather as it curled up into her face.

  She stared vacantly at the fading green damask draperies at her elbow, trying to recapture the creative impulse, but it had apparently flown out the window, traversed the gay little garden, and quite disappeared. She chewed the end of her already mangled left-wing quill.

  It was with something very like relief that she heard a gentle tapping at the door. “Come in, come in,” she cried, dropping the long, curved plume onto the Queen Anne desk and spraying her work with inky freckles.

  The door creaked open a bit, and a golden mop of curls peeked around it. Below the curls was a pair of large, limpid eyes of a quite startling blue, twinkling over a perfect upturned bow of a mouth.

  “Mama?” came the musical voice. “You’re not too terribly busy, are you?” The girl tripped lightly into the room and gave her mother a happy hug, sending the lady’s spectacles quite charmingly askew once again. “Saskia has the most interesting news to tell you. May we come in?”

  Before any answer could be vouchsafed to this question—which was, in any case, rather a rhetorical one as the asker was already in the room—a second young lady entered in the wake of the first

  “Trixl You know you mustn’t disturb Mama when she's working. Come away, do.”

  “But, Saskia, it’s such very exciting news! I’m sure Mama will want to hear it at once. You do want to hear it don’t you, dearest Mama?” she pleaded prettily.

  With a little mental shake, Cornelia Crawley, Authoress, pushed away her manuscript, rubbed her ink- stained fingers on her already sad-looking smock, set her spectacles aright, and became Mrs. Cornelia van Houten, mother, all eagerness to hear her daughter’s news.

  Her interest was not in the least feigned. There were two things in the world that had the power to capture her attention. One was her work. Indeed, when fully immersed in the tribulations of one of her romantic heroines, the ceiling might fall in on her without her knowledge.

  The other consuming passion of this well-known Authoress of Gothick Tales was her children. She knew very well that they were all five quite superior specimens of the species, and though she might not have a perfectly clear understanding of the everyday necessities involved in running a household and raising a lively family, particularly on the meager funds provided by her novels, which were the family’s sole source of income, she was entirely convinced of the felicity that such children provided to their parent.

  "Well, my dears, and what is this extraordinary news?” she inquired.

  “I am sorry, Mama, for allowing Trix to disturb you when you’re working. It can easily wait for another time,” said Saskia van Houten in her clear, well-modu-

  lated voice, and she began to usher her younger sister from the cheerful, if somewhat shabby, room.

  “Nonsense, my darlings. I hope I am never too busy for my own children.”

  Saskia, who knew quite well that her mother was often very much too busy, or at least too lost in her work, to even be aware of another presence in the room, be it daughter, son, or gardener, gave her a shrewd look from the fine pansy-brown eyes that were the best feature in a long, rather angular face. Heroine Magdalena must be misbehaving today, she thought.

  “It’s a letter, Mama,” chirped Beatrix happily. “Quite the most extraordinary letter, from my Aunt Eccles. Only wait till you hear.”

  “Eccles? Eccles? Do you have an Aunt Eccles? Have I met her? Eccles . . . Hmmm.” She laid a finger alongside her nose in thought, leaving a rather pronounced ink spot where it touched.

  “She is your Aunt Eccles, too, Mama,” explained Saskia patiently. “You remember now, I'm sure. Lady Hester Eccles. She is your papa’s sister, and you have never met her because she has been traveling for years and years. You told us all about her.”

  Mrs. van Houten sat dumbly a moment, eyes focused on a point some four inches before her nose, and Saskia knew that she was thinking. “Ah, yes,” she exclaimed finally, and with a suddenness that made her bounce. “Lady Eccles, to be sure. My Aunt Eccles. Yes, yes, and how is she, dear? I hope she is well. A letter you say? How odd.”

  “Decidedly odd, I should think,” said Saskia matter- of-factly, “since she has never written to you in all your life, so far as I can tell. And why she should do so now...”

  "Yes, yes, I remember perfectly now,” continued her mother. “She lives in Arabia somewhere and consorts with sheiks and such.”

  “She lives in Bath,” corrected her eldest daughter

  gently. “And quite alone, as far as I can tell. But I do believe she is only recently returned to England.”

  “Well, well, in Bath you say? Extraordinary, quite extraordinary. I made quite sure she lived in Arabia. My Aunt Eccles in Bath. Hmimnm. Are you sure she didn’t mean Baghdad?”

  “Oh, Mama,” bubbled Beatrix. “Of course she is sure. And you will never
guess why she has written. Saskia is invited to come and see her!”

  “Rather say commanded,” replied her sister dryly. “It is a most odd letter, to be sure. She seems a somewhat eccentric woman. Why on earth she should wish me to visit her I cannot imagine.”

  “Eccentric?” said Mrs. van Houten. “Oh yes, I should think she is certainly eccentric,” she pronounced with the air of paying a high compliment. “I believe there is rather a strong strain of it in the family,” she added proudly. “And so you are going to Bath, dear. You must have a new gown, of course. That one is sadly dowdy. I can’t imagine why you are still wearing it.”

  Saskia allowed her eyes to wander for only the smallest instant to the plain steel-blue calico dress she wore, no longer in its first, or even its second, season. But she shook off her frown of distaste at once. “You know, Mama, that we cannot afford any new gowns just now, and this one suits me well enough. And in any case, I’m not at all certain that I shall go to Bath. But here. Let me read you the letter. I hardly know what to make of it”

  “17 Royal Crescest Bath

  “My dear Miss van Houten

  “Having recently returned to the shores of Merrie Ould England, after some forty-odd years abroad, here to sink into my dotage and fade gently away, I am desirous of acquainting myself with the younger generation of our esteemed (or should I say notorious?) family. Despite your sadly heathen name, I believe you to be a bona-fide member of said family.

  “Though we have not met, I shall assume that my name is not unknown to you. You have most likely heard a great deal of nonsense about my exploits of past years, but you really must not believe all you hear. The truth is generally so much more amusing. I do hope you are not the sort of milk-and-water miss to be shocked by such things, for I adore to recount my adventures.

  “For the purpose of determining your personality and acquainting you with a service you may render me, the quite private particulars of which must wait until we meet face to face, you may call upon me at Bath. And, as a sop to my advanced age and peculiarity, at my convenience rather than your own. I shall expect you on the 17th, after two in the afternoon. A chaise will be sent for you on the previous day.

  “At the age of seventy-four it seems a bit presumptuous to sign myself as humble servant to what I can only assume to be a mere slip of a girl and probably silly into the bargain. I am, therefore,

  “Your aged and notorious aunt, Hester, Lady Eccles”

  “What do you make of it, Mama? I am sure it is quite the oddest letter I have ever received.”

  Cornelia van Houten did not reply but stared cross-eyed into space again. “Hmmm,” she muttered in her vague, murmuring way. “Arabia. I wonder if she has ever lived in a harem. I should quite like to know what life is like inside a harem. I must remember to ask her.” She reached for her pen, dipped it with a splash, scribbled a quick note to herself muttering, “Arabia, harem,” sneezed, then turned to her daughters once more.

  “Well, and so you are going to Bath,” she repeated. “And in a private chaise, too. Quite proper.”

  A tiny furrow creased Saskia’s brow. “I don’t like to

  leave you, Mama. Jannie is sure to try and slip you some of that mugwort she sets such store by but which always gives you the headache. And who will look after the twins?"

  “I will,” piped up Beatrix. “Of course, they don’t mind me as well as they do you, just because I’m only seventeen, but I will deal with them. And you can wear the cashmere shawl Tante Luce sent me last Christmas, and my new chip straw bonnet.”

  Saskia, fully appreciative of the enormity of these sacrifices on the part of her sister, smiled her thanks, but she was still uneasy at the thought of leaving, even for only a few days, a household that seemed to fall apart if she so much as spent the day in bed with a cold. The van Houten family, for all its good qualities, was not particularly noteworthy for its practicality and manageability. The source of Saskia’s hardheaded realism and common sense was a mystery to them all, but if they ever bothered to consider the matter they would have been thankful that at least one of them possessed sufficient stores of these qualities to keep them all from sinking-

  “It will be the very thing for you, of course,” her mother went on.

  “What do you mean, Mama?”

  “Your Aunt Eccles is disgustingly wealthy, I understand. One might even say she was rolling in sauce if one were inclined to be vulgar, which with all my failings I hope I have never been called. The Rowbridge family may have come under a bit of a cloud in its time, but at least we have never been that. Oh yes, she is most decidedly rolling in sauce.” She gave a great sigh, only very slightly tinged with the tiniest note of regret. “I fancy it comes from outliving three husbands.”

  “Obviously outliving only one does not suffice,” said Saskia dryly, but not without very real sadness behind her fine brown eyes.

  Beatrix looked at her sister. “I do wish you wouldn’t speak so—so coldly of poor Papa.”

  “You know very well, Trix, that I adored Papa, as much as any of us. Maybe more. But you must own that he was like a child when it came to money matters, and he did not serve us very well by dying just when things were at their worst and leaving us with nothing at all to manage on.” It was that death that had caused the van Houtens to flee Amsterdam, leaving behind them a large pile of bills and a raging war, to live in this little comer of England.

  “Poor Papa,” sighed Beatrix.

  “Such a very handsome man he was,” sighed her mama.

  All three of them sank into a reverie, seeming to dwell on the myriad fine points of the late Pieter Maurits van Houten, financial speculator, sometime merchant and shipbuilder, beloved husband and father, with his round Dutch cheeks, his ever-present clay pipe, and his laughing blue eyes.

  But Saskia was not thinking of the beloved papa who had been dead for nearly three years. Her mind was more attuned to the worries of the present and the hopes for the future. “She’s very wealthy, you say?” she said at last. "Whatever do you suppose she wants of me? What service can I render her?”

  “It would seem quite obvious to me, my love,” said her mama with her usual blind optimism. “She wishes to make you her heiress, of course. You must know that my aunt has no children of her own, so what could be more natural? It does seem about time something good cam* of my having been born a Rowbridge.”

  Beatrix clapped her hands in delight and gave a squeal that set her lovely golden curls to dancing. “Oh, Saskia! Would it not be wonderful? Do you suppose it can be true?”

  “I can think of no reason at all why it should be,” she said calmly. She turned a gentle smile on her mother. "I’m afraid, Mama, that I am not one of your heroines for whom things always so conveniently turn right in the end.” She regarded her sister with an affectionate smile.

  “Now if it had been Trix, I just might have believed it If anyone was cut out for a heroine, it’s she. With those eyes! But whoever heard of a too tall, rather angular heroine, with hair of mousy brown and an overdeveloped streak of common sense?”

  “Nonsense,” exclaimed her mama. “All my children are particularly handsome. I quite pride myself on the fact. And besides, dearest” she added with an unwonted twinkle, “heiresses are always beautiful. Didn’t you know?”

  Saskia regarded her mother with respect for the rare flash of insight from one who generally suffered an almost impenetrable vagueness about the realities of life.

  “An heiress,” sighed Beatrix, drinking in the dream of grandeur that the word implied.

  “Wen, I am certainly no heiress,” said the practical Saskia. Nor am I at all likely to become one. And at my age it no longer matters much whether I am a beauty or not.”

  Pooh!” said Beatrix. “To hear you talk one would think you a positive ape-leader.”

  “Well, perhaps not yet,” laughed Saskia. “But at one- and-twenty I am scarcely in the first bloom of youth.” Pooh! repeated Beatrix and gave her sister a teasing
grin. Mr. Kneighley doesn’t seem to mind it a bit that you are practically in your dotage. And I daresay he has scarce noticed that you are a positive antidote.”

  A ripple of mirth she could not suppress escaped Saskia Mr. Kneighley is by far too wrapped up in admiring his own oratory to notice even the color of my hair. I daresay whatever admiration he feels for me has more to do with the flattering degree of attention with which I seem to be listening to him on Sunday mornings. I must look like I am listening when I am concentrating so very hard on staying awake. Poor Mr. Kneighley is a very good sort of man, I’m sure, but he is such a hopelessly prosy bore.”

  "Well, he shan’t have you, in any case,” said Beatrix with unusual emphasis. “You are far too good for him.

  And you shall go to Bath. Our aunt is sure to adore you. Don’t you agree, Mama?”

  The two girls looked expectantly toward their mother. But Cornelia van Houten was no longer with them. That particular look of concentration, a tiny frown appearing over the vaguely crossed eyes that focused on some inner muse, proclaimed quite clearly that Cornelia Crawley, Authoress, had returned in her stead.

  “Come, Trix,” whispered Saskia. “We shall leave Mama to her work. You can help me decide what to pack.”

  As the two girls walked softly from the room, the older woman reached for her pen and her notes and began to scribble: “Harem, eunuchs, camel’s milk ...”