Regency for all Seasons: A Regency Romance Collection

by Mary Lancaster

  “It wasn’t actually purloined… I gave it to him for the express purpose of bribing his brother-in-arms for information.”

  “Your cousin is many things, and he’s certainly made threats, but is he a murderer?”

  “I can’t answer that… not yet at any rate. And until I can, you will do whatever is necessary to avoid him. Now, go to sleep. I should have some answers by morning about this bequest my grandmother conned your family into making to you. Then we’ll know more where we stand.”

  Lilly laid down on the bed, and pulled the covers over her. “Thank you, Valentine.”

  “For what?”

  “For being a better man than anyone believes you to be,” she said.

  If he replied, she didn’t hear him. She’d already drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They were strolling arm-in-arm down Jermyn Street toward Duke Street and the endless parade of people using that route to reach Piccadilly and all the shopping beyond. Beside him, Lilly was in a far better frame of mind than she had been the night before. While breakfast had been a slightly tense affair, it appeared that she and his grandmother had reached an uneasy truce.

  “Where are we going?” she demanded.

  “We have to meet someone,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Your replacement,” he answered.

  She paused, her steps slightly out of rhythm with his for a moment. “I presume you mean as a companion and not a wife!”

  He laughed. “Certainly. I happened to encounter this particular woman in Whitechapel, while coming back from the same seedy warehouse where I’d observed my cousin and his compatriots. She offered invaluable assistance in providing the much-needed distraction I required in order to get away without being caught!”

  “If you encountered a woman on the streets of Whitechapel in the evening, then she is… well, suffice it to say, improper!” Lillian replied in a heated whisper.

  “In most cases that answer would be yes and I believe the term you are looking for is prostitute,” he replied, seemingly careless of the fact that several people around him gasped and one woman placed her hands firmly over the ears of the child walking next to her.

  “Really, Valentine! You enjoy being shocking!” she accused.

  He couldn’t bite back a grin at her scandalized tone. “Where’s my rule breaker now? Don’t go all buttoned up and straight-laced on me, Lilly. I couldn’t bear it!”

  “Well, your grandmother will not bear this! Have you considered what she will do when she finds out what this woman’s background is? And what of this poor woman? It’s terribly cruel to pull her out of such an environment only to toss her back into it in a matter of days or hours simply because the notion of your grandmother employing such a woman amuses you,” Lilly pointed out.

  “Trust me,” he implored. “She’s not in the common way, at least. She speaks very genteelly and whatever circumstances may have led her to Whitechapel, I’m convinced that she is not a fallen woman! I think this could be a good solution for everyone.”

  Val turned away just in time to see the woman in question. She was standing across the street from Fortnum and Mason, watching all the fashionably-dressed people going into and out of the store. “There she is,” he said, pointing her out to Lilly.

  He heard his wife’s gasp and surveyed the woman’s appearance once more to see what might have been so shocking. She stood on the corner, waiting to cross the street, with her hands clasped in front of her and her shoulders straight. Her pelisse was a bit shabby and worn, but not so much that anyone looking at it would have thought her out of place on those streets. Indeed, she might have been a governess or a servant dressed as she was. Even her bearing and posture was that of a lady. Which meant Lilly’s gasp was one of recognition and not surprise. “Do you know her?”

  “I do, indeed,” Lillian replied. “She worked at Millstead Abbey School when I was there so many years ago. What are the odds, Val, of her being the woman you ran into last night and being a past acquaintance of mine?”

  He frowned. “Limited. The odds are extraordinarily limited. I’d daresay impossible, even. And I think we need to find out precisely what she’s about.”

  As they approached the woman, her gaze was drawn to Lilly. In fact, she watched Lilly with a depth of emotion playing over her features that left Val utterly puzzled.

  “Who are you, Madam?” he demanded.

  She looked to Valentine and then back to Lillian and it was to his wife that she spoke. “When I was at the Millstead Abbey School, you knew me by the name of Anna Hartnett.”

  “I remember you,” Lilly said. “You were very kind to me… the only kind person in that whole wretched place. But then one day you were simply gone.”

  “Not one day,” the woman answered. “It was the day your father came to Millstead Abbey and dropped off your half-sister. That was the very day I was banished from there, sent off without a recommendation.”

  “What has my father to do with all of this?” Lilly asked.

  Val was watching the two women. It hadn’t been immediately obvious to him, but now, staring from one to the other, it could not have been more clear. There was a marked resemblance, one that left him all but speechless. Surely, it was not what he thought. But then the woman who had called herself Anna Hartnett looked at him and it was such a knowing, measuring gaze, that he knew instantly he was correct.

  “Let us go in and have some tea,” he said. “There’s a coffee shop just around the corner that should have a private parlor available.”

  The woman glanced down at her shabby pelisse, but then simply lifted her head high again. “Certainly. I think there is much to discuss, my lord.”

  *

  Lilly recalled a dozen instances where Miss Anna Hartnett had been all that was kind and loving to her. She’d tended scrapes and bruises, snuck her extra treats from the kitchen, and soothed her when she’d been ill. In retrospect, the amount of attention the woman had lavished on her while still managing to do her work at the school was nothing short of miraculous. It hadn’t lasted very long, less than a year. Had it not been for the presence of Willa and the bond that had formed between them almost instantly, no doubt the loss of Miss Hartnett would have left her utterly despondent as a child.

  Despite that, she found the woman’s presence under their current circumstances to be highly suspect. The sheer number of coincidences required for her to encounter Valentine while he was out engaging in his clandestine activities as an agent of the Crown, even if an unofficial one, was impossible to fathom. It was even more impossible to accept. There was clearly a connection somewhere and she wouldn’t be satisfied until she knew precisely what it was.

  Lillian stood apart from Miss Hartnett as Val engaged the private parlor for them and ordered refreshment. After a moment, they were shown into the small room and the door closed behind them. It was a cozy space, filled with well upholstered chairs and a small table, though it was certainly cramped.

  “Why are you here?” Lillian asked, as soon as the three of them were alone in the room.

  Miss Hartnett smiled. “You are certainly as direct as ever, Miss Burkhart.”

  “Lady Somers, Viscountess Seaburn,” Val corrected the woman. “Lillian and I were married only two days ago.”

  Miss Hartnett frowned. “If you were married two days ago, what on earth were you doing traipsing through Whitechapel?”

  “I think we’re entitled to ask the questions here more than you are, Madam,” Lillian interjected. “The confluence of fate and coincidence that would have to occur together to bring us back into one another’s circles of acquaintance are too impossible and too improbable to be borne! Who are you really?”

  Miss Hartnett raised her eyebrows. “That is a very pointed question, my lady. Think long and hard about whether or not you truly wish to have it answered.”

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Val said. “We’re in a bit a situation ourselves
and I have to think perhaps they overlap. You weren’t just a simple streetwalker as I originally thought. Nor are you simply a gently-bred woman fallen on hard times. I think you were there, in that precise location, for a reason. Why were you lingering near that particular warehouse last night?”

  Miss Hartnett inclined her head in acknowledgement of his assertion. “No, my lord, I am not now nor have I ever been a woman of ill repute… only a woman of poor judgment. As to my identity, the name that I abandoned years ago, at the same time I was forced to abandon my daughter whom I loved so dearly, was Elizabeth Ann Burkhart. And I do believe that I am now your mother-in-law.”

  Lillian stood so quickly that the chair she’d occupied rocked back and would have tumbled over had Val not righted it. Her breath was coming in pants and her palms were sweating. Her heart raced in her chest and she blinked rapidly as her vision began to darken around the edges. She would not faint. She had never fainted in her life. “You are not my mother. My mother is dead. She left me on my worthless father’s doorstep and drowned herself in the Thames!”

  She was still shaking when Val took her hand.

  “Whatever you decide to do when we leave here today, I will support you in it entirely. But for now, we must hear her out because there are things that have brought us all here together that we cannot ignore. Marchebanks is your cousin, and therefore he is her cousin… and he is the man who is responsible for the schemes Elsworth has fallen in with.”

  “But it’s lies… it’s all lies!” she insisted. It had to be lies. If not, everything she’d believed about her entire life was false. Still, she sat, sinking down into the chair and staring at the woman across from her with a fury that ran so deep she couldn’t even fathom where it had come from. Had it been trapped inside her all along?

  “You have every right to be angry,” the woman said. “I must start the story from the very beginning. It should offer a certain amount of illumination about Alfred Hazleton who is now Lord Marchebanks.”

  There was a knock on the door and a serving girl entered with a tea tray and sandwiches. She paused after taking only two steps into the room, the tension clearly palpable.

  “You may leave it on the table and we will serve ourselves,” Val instructed.

  The girl nodded, deposited the tray, and left hurriedly.

  “Go on, Miss… what should we call you?”

  “You may call me Miss Hartnett. That is the name I have used most frequently and I believe it is the one that your wife will be most comfortable with,” she said with a sad turn of her lips.

  Val poured tea for everyone. When he placed the cup in front of her, Lilly stared at it as if it were something foreign that she had no notion what to do with. Even as he added cream and sugar to it, just as she liked, it sat there untouched.

  “Go on, Miss Hartnett,” Lillian said. “Tell your story.”

  “I met William Satterly during my first season… but I thought him arrogant and he thought me beneath his notice. It was only later, in my second season, that he began to turn his attentions toward me. He was actually charming, and I found myself questioning if perhaps I had been hasty in my judgment. I didn’t know then that it was all a bet. That he had wagered my cousin that he could seduce me and my cousin, because he was always a terrible person and utterly without conscience, took that wager. Suffice it to say, I made several errors in judgment. Falling for him, trusting him, and allowing myself to be alone with him. He is not a man who takes no for an answer, regardless of how forcefully it is uttered.”

  Lilly flinched, recalling the very similar situation she’d found herself in with the son of the family she’d first worked for. But he’d been small and thin, a boy she could fairly easily get away from with the training that Effie had seen to for all of them. Miss Hartnett had likely had no such training.

  “When I discovered I was with child, I told my mother and she was stricken with apoplexy and took to her bed. My father was ashamed of me. He disowned me and tossed me into the street. Not knowing what else to do, I went to the rooms that I knew William kept near his club and I knocked on the door and pleaded to speak with him. The doorman never let me in, but William did come out, and my cousin, Alfred, was there with him. The two of them came out together laughing uproariously and right in front of me, Alfred handed William a sovereign and called the wager his.”

  The woman paused, sipped her tea, and then continued. “My aunt, Margaret Hazleton, Lady Marchebanks, took me in, but it was made clear to me that I was there on her charity and her charity alone. I was a virtual prisoner in their home, hidden away in an attic room that wasn’t even fit for servants. When I gave birth to you—”

  “Not to me,” Lilly insisted. “You are not my mother. I have no mother.”

  Miss Hartnett nodded her head. “Very well. When I gave birth to my daughter, I did so alone, with only a housekeeper to attend me. And less than a week afterward, I was kicked out of their house and told to make my own way in the world. It was foolish, but I went back to William. I thought, despite everything he had done, that when he saw our daughter, he would have some of the feelings for her that I did. Because I had loved her instantly. More than I could have ever imagined loving anyone or anything. But while I lurked about his rooms, I heard him approach and he wasn’t alone. Alfred was with him and they were arguing about Alfred’s scheme to get a manufacturer to sell goods to the army and then steal them back. William might be a terrible man, but he is at least a patriot. They argued so fiercely that I was afraid to let my presence be known. So I left. I found a group of women in a hovel in Whitechapel. All of us had children, small infants, and all of us needed to earn a living. I slept on the floor with my daughter in my arms, and another woman cared for her in the day while I worked as a seamstress in a shop where I had once purchased my very own ballgowns.”

  Lilly listened to all of it and felt as if her entire world were shattering—as if she were shattering. But she couldn’t think about her mother, she couldn’t think about why she had done what she had or how she might have suffered. “What goods was Marchebanks selling and stealing back?”

  “It was general supplies then I believe. He’s moved on now and managed to get a few arms manufacturers in his pocket,” Miss Hartnett replied. “That is why you were following him, wasn’t it, my lord?”

  “I wasn’t following him,” Val admitted. “I was following my own troublesome cousin, Elsworth Somers. He did not have William Satterly’s patriotism to steer him clear of such schemes, it would seem.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more,” Lilly said. “I want to go home.”

  “I would say one thing more before you leave,” Miss Hartnett implored. “I did not abandon you on your father’s doorstep by choice. Alfred discovered that I had overheard their conversation because I, emboldened by desperation and the foolish belief that he would not do violence against his own kin, attempted to blackmail him into providing a place for me to live with you—with my daughter. I barely escaped with my life. And I knew the only person who might protect my daughter from him was William Satterly, but only if he was left with no other choice. I loitered outside their home for hours. I watched William enter and still I waited. It was only when I saw his mother’s carriage turn up the street that I knew what I had to do. I left my child, and a note, on their doorstep and I fled… not because I did not want her. Or because the burden of her was too much for me. I did so only because I knew I had to leave her behind in order for us both to live.”

  Lilly rose to her feet again. “I’ll wait for you at the doors. I can’t hear anything more.”

  “It’s the truth,” Miss Hartnett said.

  Lilly looked at her. “I believe that it is. But I can’t hear anything further now. I simply can’t.” With that, she turned and fled the small room.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Val stared at the woman before him and was torn. They both needed comfort and he was at a loss in terms of how to provide it to either of them. Ris
ing to his feet, he reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and retrieved a card that belonged to his man of affairs. He pressed it into her hand along with some coins. “Go to him first thing in the morning. I’ll have made arrangements by then for you to have a place to stay and adequate funds to see to your needs.”

  Miss Hartnett—no, Miss Elizabeth Burkhart—gave him a baleful stare. “I am not here for charity.”

  “I know that you are not. I don’t think you knew who I was last night and I certainly don’t think you knew who would be with me today.”

  The woman looked down at the card in her hand. “I thought she was dead. I lingered in Millstead, eking out a meager existence there as a maid of all work. But a fever swept through the area and the school. I went there in the days after and I begged the headmaster to let me see her. He told me she was among those who had perished. I didn’t know until two months ago, when the marriage of Wilhelmina Marks, her half-sister, was reported in the papers that my daughter yet lived. When she’s ready to hear that, will you tell her?”

  “When she is ready to hear it, you will be able to tell her,” Val offered kindly. “She is hurt and she is shocked to the very core of her being at this moment. But she longs for a family more than anything else in this world, I think. Given time to absorb this information, she will come around.”

  “I hope you are right. In the meantime, watch her carefully. Alfred is a devil, and I imagine your cousin is, as well.”

  Val nodded. “Do as I said. You cannot mend your relationship with her if she will have no notion where to find you.” With that, he walked out, leaving his wife’s mother behind in the small parlor.

  He found Lilly sitting at a table near the doors. She was staring out into the street as the rain trickled down. When he approached her, she looked up at him. “There’s a man outside watching us.”

  Val looked up and across the street. Standing in a doorway was Stavers, the brawler turned butler. “Wait here.”