The Earl's Mistress

by Liz Carlyle

  I should be pleased, I daresay, to hear of your excellent good health. And I am—or so I tell myself. It would be selfish to wish otherwise. I will not be tempted to write again, but I shall remain, ever your devoted servant,

  Hepplewood

  Good God, what did that mean?

  Had he really hoped she was with child? And was he suggesting that, since she was not, and would therefore require nothing of him, he meant to move on?

  Had he simply given up?

  But given up on what? And what did it matter? A waning of his interest should feel like permission to breathe again. Wasn’t that precisely what she wished?

  Isabella set a hand to her heart, which had sunk into the pit of her stomach. Apparently, it was not what she wished.

  She had not realized until that moment how much she had invested in Lord Hepplewood’s promise, or how much she’d come to look forward to his letters, however veiled or stilted or demanding they might be; this, despite the fact that they had not bought her a moment’s peace.

  They had instead given her an excuse to rekindle a fantasy; a reason to let her mind wander back to the passion that burned between them, and to spin a dream of what could have been. She had saved each and every one—hidden them away amongst her nightgowns and chemises—including his first. The one he’d left for her at Greenwood, sending her away.

  No, she did not wish to be forgotten, she realized, her fingertips going to her mouth. And she did not wish to forget him. Because she was in love with the Earl of Hepplewood. The reality of it had been pressing in upon her for some days now.

  It was utter folly, of course. His intensity overwhelmed her. His dark edges frightened her. And yet she was in love with him, and his threat to pursue her had allowed her to go on hoping—though hoping for what, she scarcely knew.

  And now he had given up his pursuit. He had relinquished, apparently, the claim he’d so boldly laid to her. She was free to relax, to again focus the whole of her emotional energy on the children. So why did she feel so suddenly swamped with grief? What had she imagined would happen?

  That he would wait forever? That he had meant all the things he’d said?

  Yes, fool that she was, she nearly had.

  On a score of occasions—fitful, near-sleepless nights, all of them—she had arisen amidst her feverish dreams of him and gone to the window overlooking the street far below. Through the glass, at the most oblique angle, one could just make out the Brompton Road and the lamppost by the greengrocer’s shop.

  Three times she’d seen a man standing there in that pool of gauzy, mustard-colored light, simply staring up—or so it had felt—at her windows.

  The first time, on an especially rainy night, the man had worn a sweeping greatcoat with a scarf wrapped high against the damp. More recently, he’d been attired in an opera cloak that had swirled low about his calves, its claret-colored lining shimmering in the wind. Always he wore a hat tipped over his face.

  And always the same man. Tall and lean, with an aristocratic bearing. And each time, her heart would stop.

  Lord Hepplewood, she had imagined.

  This is not over, he had said. I will not let it be. You are mine. And I will wait you out, I swear to God.

  So Isabella had let herself believe, during those dark and quiet nights, that he was keeping his promise. That she was his. And that he, in his harsh and old-fashioned way, was simply guarding what was his.

  But she did not belong to anyone. She never had, really.

  Despite knowing this, Isabella had twice been obliged to stop herself from hurrying out her own front door, so intent had she been upon tossing on a cloak and hastening down the street.

  It meant nothing, she reminded herself now. It was just a man, loitering in the street after midnight. Besides, men made promises lightly and kept them rarely. Not a one of them had ever watched over her, guarded her back, or planned for her best interests—nor was one of them ever apt to. Isabella was on her own, she reminded herself, and always would be.

  As to the mysterious man across the street, he was probably some daring fellow waiting to bed the greengrocer’s wife, for she was a lively, buxom blonde, and her husband was often away in the wee hours to meet the market carts.

  “Bella?” Jemima’s sharp voice stirred her to the present. “Are you all right?”

  Isabella looked up to see her stepsister framed in the back door, her long, blonde braids swinging over her shoulders, her figure so thin the opening dwarfed her.

  “Oh, yes,” Isabella said, forcing a smile lest her face betray her. “I was woolgathering. Have you got the shelf dusted?”

  Jemima nodded and turned round. Hastily Isabella read her aunt’s letter. It was indeed nothing; talk of the goings-on at Thornhill, thoroughly laced with vaguely patronizing remarks followed by an insistent invitation to visit. But the words no longer stung, for they simply did not matter. None of it mattered.

  Thornhill was no longer her home.

  Lord Hepplewood was no longer her lover.

  It felt as if nothing in her life had changed, or was ever apt to.

  Ramming both letters deep into her smock’s pocket, Isabella inhaled a ragged breath, jerked to her feet, and returned to work.

  CHAPTER 11

  “His name, my lord, was Mr. George Flynt.”

  “Flynt?” Lord Hepplewood was closeted with Jervis in the library at Clarges Street on an especially sunny May afternoon, his gaze sweeping down paragraph after paragraph of legalese. “Not a family I know.”

  “The great-grandfather was called George also,” said his secretary, “and possibly another after that. It isn’t clear. Certainly there were grandsons called William and James. But I gather the Flynts were in the Canadian provinces at least six generations before them.”

  “So barely English at all, perhaps?” muttered Hepplewood.

  “Indeed, there was a vast amount of French and Red Indian blood in the family, I gather,” he said. “It tells a little, I think, in Mrs. Aldridge’s dark hair and remarkable face.”

  It did, thought Hepplewood, though nothing on earth could explain those haunting violet eyes. “What was the Flynt family’s origin?” he asked.

  “Minor gentry from Shropshire, it’s believed,” said Jervis. “You know how it is, sir. A second son of a second son, sent out to the colonies to make his fortune.”

  “And they seem to have managed,” said Hepplewood dryly. He tapped a finger on a line in the document. “So you think this might be the language causing the Flynts so much dyspepsia?”

  “It might be, sir,” said his secretary, “if the thing’s worth the paper it’s written on. Per stirpes is Latin meaning ‘by representation.’ Legally, it is a way of dividing assets equally amongst the branches of a family.”

  Hepplewood set the documents aside and pinched hard at the bridge of his nose. He’d begun this fool’s errand in some vain attempt to understand Isabella’s fears—and to winkle out the motivation behind the bits and pieces of Tafford’s threats. But by the time his clever secretary was done unearthing rumors and moldering old paperwork, Hepplewood was beginning to wonder where it would end.

  “Well done, Jervis,” he said, “though you’ve raised more questions than you’ve answered, perhaps.”

  “Shall I stay at it, sir? Back to Liverpool?”

  “By all means,” said Hepplewood. “And you suspect that the fellow who drew these documents is on his way to London?”

  “Oh, no, he’s long dead, I should think.”

  “But someone from the firm, I mean?” Hepplewood pressed.

  “The solicitors I found in Liverpool said the firm threatened as much,” reported his secretary, “but as they are no longer affiliated, it’s hard to say. I can go up the Ottawa Valley myself, sir, but it will take—”

  “—time,” Hepplewood supplied. “No. The trouble, I think, is in England—or will be. And England is where I’ll need you.”

  Just then, the library door burst in to adm
it a whirlwind of blonde ringlets and yellow muslin. “Papa!”

  “Whoa,” he said, rising from his desk. “What’s this? Is the house afire?”

  “Papa!” said Lissie again, her expression pleading, “may we go to the park with Harry and Bertie? May we? Pleaaase?”

  “Well, miss,” said Hepplewood, scooping her up in one arm, “Mr. Jervis and I are just—”

  “No, please, please, please!” said the child, flinging her arms around his neck.

  “Beg pardon, my lord.” Mrs. Seawell, her longtime nurse, appeared on the threshold, red-faced and panting. “Got away from me, milady did. Can’t think what’s got into her lately, sir—begging your pardon again, sir.”

  Hepplewood waved her back. “It’s perfectly all right, Seawell, we are finishing up here,” he said, hitching Lissie onto his hip. “Now, what’s all this about the park?”

  “Lady Keaton sent a note,” said Mrs. Seawell, bobbing a belated curtsy. “She means to take Mr. Henry and Mr. Bertram out at four on their ponies.”

  Hepplewood could feel Lissie quivering with excitement. “Ponies, Papa!” she said, setting her lips against his ear. “May we go? May we watch? May Bertie take me up? Please, Papa, please?”

  For a moment, he hesitated.

  Then, as he so often had of late, he relented. “We may go, but first I must finish with Mr. Jervis. He is a very busy man these days.”

  “May we go as soon as you are done?” she pressed. “I will sit here quietly.”

  “Somehow, I doubt that,” he said, managing to wriggle loose his pocket watch from behind her skirts. “Besides, Lissie, it is just now three,” he said. “We will be waiting a long while.”

  “I want to go,” said the girl, poking out a lip. “I want to go now.”

  “I am so sorry, sir.” Mrs. Seawell looked as if she expected to be thrashed.

  “Take her back to the schoolroom,” he said, coming round the desk to put Lissie down. “Pack up a blanket and enough toys to amuse her, and we will leave in ten minutes.”

  “And bread crumbs,” added Lissie, “for the ducks.”

  “Yes, poppet.” He nodded at the nurse. “Bread crumbs, please. Whatever Cook can spare.”

  “Yes!” said the child, running to the nurse as soon as she was set down again. “Nanny, I would like to take Pickles, too.”

  “I will help you find him in the toy chest, Lady Felicity,” said the nurse, pulling the door quietly shut.

  True to his word, Hepplewood was ready to step out the front door at ten past three, a blanket hooked through one elbow, his top hat in one hand, and a muslin sack stuffed with day-old bread in the other.

  Having exchanged her slippers for small, brown boots, Lissie was leading her red-and-blue dog by its string, its wooden head and tail bobbling up and down as it rolled across the glistening marble floor.

  On the front steps, Hepplewood put on his hat, and they set off together toward the Stanhope Gate. As his daughter waxed enthusiastically about the ponies, he glanced down at the small, white hand clasped in his, and his heart twisted in his chest a little.

  For the merest instant, he considered yielding to the instinct to snatch her up and settle her on his hip again—which he would do had they still been at home. But out in the greater world of London, Lissie had quickly come to associate that tender gesture with being a big baby—an aspersion her cousin Bertie, he gathered, had promptly cast upon her.

  Hepplewood had complained to Anne about it, of course. But she had snappishly advised him to stay out of it and let the children sort out their own troubles. Oddly, he had listened.

  His fatherly instincts thus thoroughly repressed—well, slightly repressed—he had stood by in silence when, just a week later, Lissie conked Bertie across the head with a battledore racquet. Anne remained calm and simply took all the racquets away.

  Hepplewood had quietly observed, and learnt, perhaps, a little something. That this was how children grew up—and that it was the very reason Anne wanted Lissie here.

  It was, after all, precisely how they had grown up, he and Diana with Gwen and Anne—playing and fighting and simply sorting life out with one another. Gwen—older, taller, and far more vicious—had beaten him blue more times than he cared to count. And she had, in some measure, taught him how to go on in life.

  No, he did not have this business of parenting down yet, but he felt it possibly within his grasp. After six weeks of steady practice, he no longer felt so thoroughly overwhelmed by it as he once had.

  More importantly, it was slowly dawning on him that Lissie was something more than just a fragile miniature of his dead wife; she was her own person—and far more forceful and spirited than Felicity had ever been.

  The park was fairly quiet at this time of day, most of the nannies having already pushed their perambulators home in time for tea, and society’s horse-and-carriage set not yet out in force for the afternoon gallivant. Still, he looked for a spot well above the Serpentine, and far from the major paths.

  “How is Pickles liking his life in London?” Hepplewood asked when the perfect patch of grass had been found not too far from the riding ring. “He is still happy here? He does not miss Loughford?”

  “Not very much,” said the child, plopping down on the blanket in a whoosh of muslin and petticoats. “He misses Grandmamma Heppy. But I told him she is in heaven now, and not coming back.”

  “No.” With one finger, he rolled the little dog back and forth between them. “No, Grandmamma is not coming back. I’m very sorry, Lissie.”

  “It will be all right,” said Lissie, stroking the dog. “Pickles must keep a stiff upper lip. That’s what Nanny says.”

  “Good advice,” he remarked.

  At that, she looked up at him, her lip drawn thin and tight across her teeth, then she burst into giggles. “See?” she said, falling sideways onto the blanket. “I can do it, too.”

  “You are silly,” he said, tapping the tip of her nose with his finger. “Sit up, Lissie, like a proper lady, and let’s talk.”

  “Yes, sirrrr,” she groaned, jerking upright, her curls shimmering in the sunlight.

  Hepplewood settled down on one hip beside her and stretched out his legs, propping himself up on his elbow. “Pickles does not miss having his own gardens to romp in?” he asked. “Or his huge toy chest and schoolroom? London is a little dirty, too.”

  She stared at the blanket and gave a short, swift shake of her head. “No, he likes it here,” she said. “Loughford is boorring.”

  At that, he laughed. “Is it?” he said doubtfully. “Who told you that? More of Bertie’s nonsense?”

  She looked up with a wide grin, her cheeks pleasantly pink from her walk. “No, Harry did,” she said on a spurting giggle. “He says only mushrooms like living in the country.”

  “Ah!” said Hepplewood. “Well, I advise you to make your own choices, miss, about what is or isn’t boring. You are a bright girl, and you needn’t listen to everything Harry and Bertie say.”

  Her gaze fell to the blanket again. “I just want to stay with you,” she said more somberly. “I want to stay where you are.”

  Hepplewood swallowed down a little knot of shame. “I want that, too,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, Lissie—if Pickles wants a romp in the country, we’ll take him back to Greenwood Farm. Just for a few days at a time. Then we can go up to Loughford for a long stay at Christmas. How would that suit?”

  Her smile returned in full force. “I like the farm,” she said. “I like Yardley’s cow.”

  He laughed and stretched out on the blanket, tipping his hat forward to shield his eyes. On her first day at Greenwood, Yardley had taken Lissie to help milk the cow—a miracle of nature that still seemed to astound her.

  How could she have lived her whole life on a vast, rural estate and not thoroughly grasp where milk came from? It was in part because Lissie had been coddled by his mother, fed a constant diet of shoulds and oughts regarding how gently bred girls should behave
and think.

  His mother had been a rigid and overweening woman, full of her own consequence and more concerned with what people thought than with happiness or anything remotely like spontaneity.

  She had not always been that way, he did not think. Life—particularly those last miserable years of her marriage to his father—had made the Countess of Hepplewood bitter.

  Nonetheless, he was at fault here, too. He had left his daughter too long in that frigid, judgmental world, telling himself Lissie was just a baby. That she needed a mother’s touch—and absent a mother, a grandmother. Which had been true, to a point.

  But Bertie, perhaps, had the right of it; Lissie was not a baby any longer.

  And Isabella was right, too. His daughter needed him, for he truly was all she had now that her mother and grandmother were dead. Not unless he let her go to her Grandmother Willet, and that he could not bear to do. It would break his heart—and under no circumstances would Lissie be permitted beyond his sphere of protection.

  So it was up to him. And in that, Anne had been right.

  Isabella. Mrs. Willet. Anne. Perhaps even Bertie . . .

  Did everyone see him for the inadequate father he was?

  Lissie, apparently, did not. She appeared to love him unreservedly. It seemed he had only to let her do so; to let down his guard and his guilt and accept that, in someone’s eyes, at least, he was neither inadequate nor selfish.

  Suddenly, he felt Lissie tugging upon his coat sleeve. “Papa, look at that girl!” she said urgently. “That girl has ducks! They are all coming up! May I go?”

  He peeked from beneath his hat brim to see a line of ducks marching up the hill from the Serpentine to surround a girl who, seen from this angle, might have been Lissie’s twin, save for ringlets a little more gold than cornsilk, and a dress that was, sadly, a good deal shabbier.

  He could see, too, a lady’s skirts swishing across the stubbled grass beside her as they waded into the surge of ducks. The creatures toddled all about them now, and the crumbs were flying.