by Mary Brendan
‘I am not asking you for a fortune, Grandmama,’ Elizabeth sighed. ‘A few pounds would be very welcome. It would buy cloth for the women so they can make things to sell: pinafores, handkerchiefs…’
‘Had they not stolen such articles in the first place, they wouldn’t now be stitching scrappy rags to while away the time till their release!’
Elizabeth sprang to her feet and glared at her grandmother. ‘One mistake in their miserable lives—perhaps to put bread in their children’s mouths—and they should pay forever? I made a mistake once; have you forgotten that? I made a bad mistake. But I refuse to feel ashamed. I, too, was wrong for the right reasons. Some of those gentlemen you would like to see come a’courting are the worst immoral riffraff. If one or two of them still loiter about me, it is for far less honourable reasons than proposing marriage!’ Her small oval face flushed with anger, her fingers clenched. After staring stonily at each other for a moment, Elizabeth sighed and gestured apology.
‘I’m sorry Grandmama. I had not meant to shout. But…’ She dredged up a weak smile, reseating herself. ‘I have been meaning to ask you for some weeks now…’ She paused, striving for coaxing words to unlock her parsimonious grandmother’s purse. ‘The portion you have put by for my marriage is money likely to stay untouched. I shall not marry. But if you really intended it to benefit me, I beg you allow me just a small sum from it so that I can—’
‘You are right in one respect, miss,’ her grandmother interrupted tightly. ‘The money is for your benefit. If you think I will pass over some of my hard-earned cash—from the days when I worked dawn till dusk in your grandfather’s mercery—so you can then transfer it to such drabs as used to rob us blind the moment our backs were turned, you are much mistaken! Never a week went by but a pair of gloves, silk stockings, handkerchiefs and ribbon went missing from our first shop. And now you want me to support those miscreants’ descendants in their thievery?’
‘No, Grandmama,’ Elizabeth reasoned wearily. ‘So it can assist such poor wretches to perhaps gain employment, a little self-respect; to help them start a new life. Just one hundred pounds…please? It is my money and it would make such a difference to so many; children as well as their mothers.’
‘I’d as lief hand it straight to your husband to squander at dice.’
‘And the men you would see me wed would do exactly that!’ Elizabeth snapped bitterly. ‘Perhaps I shall wed the vicar after all, I’m sure I might persuade him to give it me straight back!’
‘Hah…you think I’ve not thought of that? No clergy. It states in the terms. Marry a clergyman and the dowry is forfeit.’
Elizabeth threw up her hands in despair. ‘I love you dearly, Grandmama, but your misanthropy disgusts me.’
‘And I love you dearly, granddaughter, but your misplaced charity disgusts me,’ was flung over a plump satin shoulder as Edwina quit the room.
Lady Rebecca Ramsden raised her glorious turquoise gaze from the paper and stared into space. It couldn’t be true! Luke surely would have said! She shook the page to straighten it, dipped her golden head and read the paragraph again. It was true! It was there in black and white! Springing from the chair, the paper clutched tightly in a hand, she sped for the door. Out in the hallway she gasped at their aged butler, ‘Have you seen my husband, Miles?’
‘Er, no, Miss Becky,’ Miles returned with a frown at his mistress’s agitation. Neither of them were in any way put out by him addressing her so informally. Miss Becky she had been prior to her marriage to Baron Ramsden and Miss Becky she was now to all old and trusted servants at Ramsden Manor, who had known her since childhood. Now approaching his seventy-seventh year, Miles would never think of her as anything else but little Miss Becky. In all other respects, Lady Ramsden was accorded every respect due to her station as the much-loved chatelaine of this grand house.
‘I expect he’s about the stables, putting young Master Troy through his paces on his pony,’ Miles added helpfully.
Rebecca had already reasoned that and, with a laughing wave of the crumpled Gazette, was off again. She ran in mellow late-afternoon sunlight towards the stables. ‘Luke!’ she called breathlessly as she hurtled into the cool, musty building.
Only a few young stable-hands, toiling at one end of the brick-and-timber building, were within. They looked curiously at her. ‘I think his lordship be in the barn wi’ young master. Right tired he were after his ride, m’lady. Practic’ly a’snoozin’ on his feet,’ the more gregarious of the grooms told her.
Rebecca nodded in appreciation of the information and was gone. She pushed open the barn door and located her husband at once. Against the yellow straw his dark breeches, white cambric shirt and jet hair were a striking contrast. He looked up as a shaft of warm, mote-ridden sunlight bathed him. Earth-dark eyes locked on to his wife’s curvaceous figure, silhouetted by hazy golden light. He smiled slowly in that special intimate way that quickened her heart. A finger beckoned her in, moved to touch his lips, then indicated their small son, curled up on his side on soft straw close to his father.
Rebecca sank gracefully down onto her knees close to her husband. Even casually reclining on his side, dark head propped on a hand, one black knee raised, the powerful masculine lines of his body were immediately apparent. She shook the paper at him and hissed in an undertone, so as not to wake their sleeping son, ‘Why did you not tell me? Isn’t it wonderful news?’
Luke frowned at the paper, removed a stalk of sweet straw from between his even white teeth and said softly, ‘Whichever marriage you’ve seen announced…I’ve no knowledge of it, Rebecca. I’ve not yet read the paper today. And don’t be cross if I’m not about to be as enraptured as you at the prospect of some acquaintance’s impending nuptials.’
‘No…no, not a wedding!’ Rebecca chided in an excited squeak. Then her turquoise eyes were sparking mischief. ‘You’ve not seen it? Guess, then, what I have just read,’ she teased, standing up and whipping the paper behind her back, out of reach. ‘I promise it will interest you. It should delight you…’
‘Enough…I’m curious,’ her husband growled, snaking a powerful hair-roughened forearm about her slender blue silk figure to catch at the paper.
‘No! Guess!’
A peaty-brown gaze swerved to his son, then raised to his wife’s beautiful flushed complexion. His hands jerked her forward and his mouth approached a rounded hip close to his face. Slender fingers wound into long dark hair, holding his hot trailing mouth against her midriff as she insincerely discouraged, ‘Oh, Luke, not here…not now; Troy might wake and…’
‘Give me the paper, then,’ her husband whispered in a throaty growl against warm silk. ‘Or I’ll have no option but to wrestle it from you…’
Heat flooded Rebecca; her fingers tightened in his hair, but, with her eyes on her sleeping son’s profile, she again sank, with an expression of very ironic submission, to her knees.
Demurely she handed over the paper, pointing at a paragraph before resting back onto her heels and watching his face.
Luke Trelawney, Baron Ramsden, slowly pushed himself upright, a slow grin moving the lean dark planes of his handsome face. ‘I didn’t tell you, my love, because I didn’t know,’ he emphasised for Rebecca. ‘Only Ross would keep quiet the fact that he’s being gazetted as a peer of the realm.’
‘Viscount Stratton! How noble it sounds,’ Rebecca said on a musical laugh. ‘You had no idea?’ she quizzed her husband. ‘He had said nothing?’
‘Not a word. But then I’ve not seen him in six months. Neither, I imagine, has Mother or Katherine or Tristan.’
‘Oh, but it’s too bad of him, Luke! He really should have written to let his kin know of such an honour.’
‘Ross? Write a letter? My little brother is more likely to turn up unexpectedly after half a year’s absence than he is to pen a couple of lines.’
Rebecca flung her arms about her husband’s neck. ‘It’s such wonderful news. Viscount Stratton of Stratton Hall in the Cou
nty of Kent. Ross must be so proud.’
‘Is Uncle Ross coming soon?’ a small voice quavered from beside them.
Rebecca relinquished her husband to stroke her son’s silky black hair. ‘No, my love. But your uncle Ross is now a nobleman. The honour has been bestowed by the King. Uncle Ross is now a Viscount and will be Lord Stratton.’
Troy Trelawney looked singularly unimpressed by this news. He fully opened his sea-green eyes and looked at his mother from beneath black curly lashes. ‘Will Uncle Ross still play pirates with me?’ he asked with all the gravity of his six years. ‘Now he is so important?’
Rebecca stifled a laugh and looked helplessly at her husband. Luke gave his son a lop-sided smile. ‘I think that’s still very likely,’ he gently reassured Troy while a stray thought acknowledged that, at thirty-three, his recklessly intrepid brother still looked and acted like a dashing young buck. ‘Besides, if he doesn’t, then I shall.’
Again Troy Trelawney looked unimpressed. ‘But you’re not such a good Blackbeard, Papa, as Uncle Ross. He teaches me to fight with his sword. The one with the silver hilt, not a pretend wooden one…’
‘Now I think it’s time a certain sleepy man was snuggled up,’ Rebecca hastily interjected, on noticing her husband’s murderous look. Her brother-in-law might never live to enjoy his new rank.
‘Excellent suggestion, darling,’ Luke murmured. ‘Tend to Troy first, though.’ In a lithe movement he was on his feet and tousling his son’s glossy raven hair with long fingers. ‘Come back here when he’s settled so we can enjoy the sunset?’ he quietly requested.
Rebecca took her son’s hand, picking stray straw stalks from his hair, before she met her husband’s gleaming dark eyes. She smiled, then murmured on a virginal blush that never ceased to enchant Luke, ‘Yes. I want to…’
Within fifteen minutes, Rebecca, Lady Ramsden, having seen her eldest son safely within the nursery and settled close to his sleeping infant brother, was again speeding over the vestibule flags, blue silk skirts scrunched in her palms, on her way to rejoin her husband.
‘Dinner is served in ten minutes, my lady,’ Judith called at her back as she rushed lightly past.
Rebecca came to a halt and spun about at her housekeeper’s words. ‘Oh…oh…’ She looked towards the open great doors. An orange ball was visible, dipping low on the horizon. ‘Lord Ramsden and I have…er…a few estate matters to discuss, Judith, while we…er…enjoy the sundown. Will dinner keep awhile?’
‘Twenty minutes?’ Judith offered on a smile.
Rebecca looked into middle distance and frowned, unsure.
‘Thirty?’ Judith amended neutrally. ‘I know these estate matters take time.’
‘Yes,’ Rebecca said. ‘Thirty. Thank you, Judith.’ She spun away and was gone in a flash of blue silk.
Judith looked after her and grinned. Eight years married, two handsome sons tucked up in the nursery, and still they pulled together like magnets. It was the longest honeymoon of any couple she’d ever known.
‘What’s that you’re fiddling with?’ Edwina barked at her companion as they rocked together in her cosy old coach en route to a private card evening with Mrs Farrow.
Evangeline Filbert held up her knitting so the light from a passing gas lamp illuminated it. ‘Stockings. I’ve finished ten pairs so far for Lizzie. She’s taking them tomorrow to Bridewell for the inmates.’
Edwina Sampson snatched the needles and threw them onto the seat. ‘Not you, too! Is everyone now with attics to let over these misbegotten felons?’
Evangeline looked mortified, her lips started to quiver.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t blub. Here.’ Edwina plonked the knitting back on her lap. ‘Finish a few more rows if you must. Just don’t blub or I shan’t again let you accompany me to m’friends. You shall sit at home alone.’
‘Oh, I like to come,’ Evangeline whispered. ‘Your friends are all so…so…’
‘Yes…?’ Edwina snarled. ‘So?’
‘Exciting. And glamorous. And thrilling,’ Evangeline expounded in wonder. She was a spinster of forty-three who had led a very quiet and careworn existence tending her ailing mother. When that lady—who had been a longstanding friend of Edwina Sampson’s—finally accepted the notice to quit delivered some years earlier, Edwina had kindly taken Evangeline under her wing. The arrangement suited them both: a few times a week Evangeline escaped boredom and solitude, and Edwina gained an unpaid and unaware companion to accompany her to some of the unconscionable venues she favoured.
Tonight their hostess was an exceedingly glamorous widow, fêted for being the Duke of Vermont’s current mistress. She was more notorious for cuckolding him quite openly with any lusty young buck who caught her eye. Still the ageing duke remained besotted. Mrs Farrow ran an exceedingly fine salon, Edwina judged, if a little demi-monde. Certainly more interesting than sitting with her granddaughter on the Heathcotes’ sofa and listening to young Sophie spout about the position of ploughs and bears and how the planets might form a conjunction and alter one’s fate.
Despite Maria Farrow being some twenty years her junior, the two women had a lot in common. They were common. But now Edwina had mighty connections: her late husband had hobnobbed with the gentry. Their beloved daughter had married an aristocrat. She had a beautiful granddaughter, sired by the late Marquess of Thorneycroft. Edwina frowned. What she really would have liked was a grandson. But her daughter had fallen foul of an icy winter before producing further children. It galled her greatly that, when the Marquess had remarried, desperate to produce an heir to prevent his detested cousin gaining the entailed estate on his demise, the sour-faced cat of a second wife had produced an heir within the first year of the nuptials.
A grandson-in-law was still an option, despite dear Lizzie’s protestations that she had no wish to wed. A decade had passed since that fateful midsummer evening when she’d been compromised. When all was said and done, it had been no more than a silly little slip.
Chapter Two
‘It’s hot enough to roast an ox in here, Maria!’ Edwina expostulated with her friend, feverishly fanning her sanguine complexion.
‘Lawks, Edwina, but you’ll have to make do with the veal pies,’ Maria quipped. ‘Spitting an ox, even for you, dearest, is totally too…mediaeval.’
Edwina gave her comrade a playfully indignant knock with her fan.
‘The blaze in the hearth is for his Grace’s benefit,’ Maria confided, inclining her auburn coiffure in the direction of a sparse-pated, august gentleman engaged in a rubber of whist at a nearby table. ‘Charlie, bless him, is keen to keep me warm since he discovered that young Carstairs had over-nighted here last week. I pleaded it was so chilly in my chamber I was doomed to freeze to death a’bed lest a hot-blooded member of the regiment slide in and warm me. Next day, a forest of logs had sprouted in the gutter outside.’
Edwina chuckled, then gestured with her glass. ‘What in heaven’s name is this foul potion? Has he spent so much on your fires that the wine cellar’s gone begging? It tastes like infant’s cordial.’
‘His Grace is keen for sober company tonight.’ Maria sighed. ‘Yesterday, I over-imbibed and he couldn’t wake me. Not that it mattered to me. I’d as lief the old goat got on with it while I’m unconscious.’
Edwina smothered a guffaw. Maria floated daintily away to greet some new arrivals, a vision of virginal loveliness with her alabaster skin and fiery tresses, and her willowy body draped in white muslin.
Edwina inclined her head at some acquaintances and smiled serenely, but she was vexed. Her enjoyment had been spoiled before it had begun, yet the company, the food and the music seemed as fine as ever. Even the stifling heat was just bearable. It was another matter which had dampened her humour.
On drawing up outside Maria’s modish address, she had noticed Alice Penney’s carriage stopping at a house along the street. Mrs Penney had made a point of loitering and simpering very deliberately in her direction on alighting from he
r barouche. Now Edwina could concentrate on little else but what that snide look signified. She’d concluded a wager was won: Harry Pettifer was to quit her service for pastures new. His resignation letter might, even now, be awaiting her, and she felt irritably inclined to rush home to discover if her gloomy prediction was correct.
With her lace fan whizzing before her ruddy countenance, Edwina was oblivious to Evangeline huddled in a corner seat, needles flying through the wool in her lap. Knitting her brows, she marched towards doors that led to a terrace, seeking refreshing night air. She stalked over stone flags to the iron balustrade that overlooked the lawns, gripping at it as though she’d reshape it with her bare hands.
‘You look fit to do battle, Mrs Sampson,’ drawled a voice from one side of her. ‘Have you been sucking lemons to perfect that sour look?’
Edwina’s brow smoothed, her eyes peeked sideways as she grinned in delight. But, despite that husky baritone sounding so familiar, it probably wasn’t who she’d thought. Having clawed back some awesome fortune for the King’s hungry coffers by confiscating a shipload of smuggled gold bullion destined for the continent, her favourite scoundrel, so she’d learned, was now much in favour with Georgy Porgy and very welcome at court.
The new Viscount Stratton was unlikely to be sitting alone in the dark on a mature courtesan’s terrace, even if the lady did run a damn fine salon and her aristocratic lover was present tonight. Edwina didn’t imagine the Duke of Vermont and Viscount Stratton were chums: there was a score or more years’ difference in their ages and a vast discrepancy in their energy. Stratton was always up to carriage racing, pugilism and cavorting with enthusiastic strumpets; his Grace sometimes left unfinished a game of whist and a brief romp with an indifferent woman. Were it indeed the Viscount, even as plain Mr Trelawney, there would be an ambitious young female loitering somewhere hereabouts, keen to turn his head.
A cigar glowed in the night to one side of her. Edwina raised her lorgnette strung on the pearls that were lost in the folds of her neck. ‘Is that you, Trelawney? Slumming this evening, are you? Taking a little break from the Carlton House Set? Must I curtsy?’ Edwina ribbed. She chuckled delightedly as a tall, dark and exceedingly handsome man pushed to his feet from the stone bench he’d been resting on and strolled into the shaft of weak light filtering through the french doors.