by Jane Ashford
“Fascinating. You are working with the principle of interference?”
Lord Alan nodded. “I have just set up an experiment to test it under rigidly defined conditions. Or I had, before all this began.” He looked rueful.
This made Bolton recall his original purpose. “I am surprised you can bear to be away from your work for so long,” he said.
“It is difficult,” the younger man answered.
“Why are you doing it then?” he asked bluntly.
“That is…somewhat complicated.”
Bolton waited.
“I was called to London by the regent.”
“Ariel told me about the supposed ghost.”
“Did she?”
Lord Alan had grown suddenly uncomfortable, Bolton thought. The resolution and authority with which he had begun this conversation were gone.
“I gave my word that I would help her look into her mother’s death,” he said.
“And you traveled down from London with her on this errand?”
“Of course.”
He left a short silence once again. “A father might be concerned about your intentions toward her,” he said then. “It is a rather unconventional association.”
To his surprise, his assured, aristocratic visitor flushed like an awkward schoolboy. At once, he looked angry at his own reaction. “I have no intentions toward her!”
“Ah.” Bolton raised his eyebrows in what he was sure was a very annoying way.
“I mean, it is not a question of…my sentiments toward Miss Harding… I would never harm her!”
“I see.”
“You don’t see anything,” was the heated reply. “You know nothing about her. You met her only two days ago.”
Jealousy, thought Daniel Bolton. That was very interesting. “True,” he conceded. “And yet I find I am all the more concerned because of my previous neglect.”
“Well, you haven’t any right to be,” Lord Alan snapped. “I can take very good care of…” He stopped, clenching his fists and looking utterly frustrated. It took him a moment to regain control of himself. When he had managed it, he said, “You must excuse me. There is something I must see to.” His tone was icy, and he did not wait for an answer before turning and leaving the room.
Extremely interesting, thought Bolton. He would have to observe these two more closely, though he had little doubt that he was right about the state of their feelings.
A sudden impulse made him raise his head and sit very still, then grin like the precocious boy he had once been. It was an outrageous idea, and yet…irresistible. Rising, he went to his writing table and penned a note to his friend the bishop at the great cathedral in Wells. He would have it delivered in the morning. And in the meantime, he would see what else he could stir up in the volatile situation he had uncovered. Having a daughter was really quite intriguing, he thought. He’d been a fool not to try it sooner.
* * *
The following afternoon Alan found Ivydene Manor curiously empty. Hannah had gone out somewhere with the housekeeper, Gladys, with whom she had struck up a friendship. There was no sign of Ariel’s father. In the stables, the men they had brought with them from London were accompanied only by a stable boy. “Where is Bolton?” Lord Alan asked them when he went out to inquire.
“He walked out this morning with a large basket,” said one of their men.
“He’ll be collecting plants then,” explained the stable boy. “He’s always goin’ into the fields and the woods lookin’ for new ’ens.”
“Without telling anyone?” demanded Alan.
The stable boy looked startled. “I reckon he tells Mrs. Moore.”
“The housekeeper is not here either,” Alan informed him.
The boy shrugged his ignorance.
Returning to the house, Alan saw Ariel walking through the garden toward the back gate, and he walked faster to catch up with her. “Where are you going?”
“Up the hill,” she replied a bit stiffly. “My father showed me a ruined chapel that I—”
“You shouldn’t go alone.”
She bridled at his tone.
“Why is there no one here?” he added before she could speak. “I find it extremely odd that Hannah, the housekeeper, and Bolton have all gone out without telling us.”
“Do you imagine that Hannah has joined some sort of conspiracy against us?” she said as she turned away.
“Of course not. But…”
Ariel opened the garden gate and stepped through.
“It’s just deuced odd,” he grumbled, following her onto the path that led uphill.
“Why do you dislike my father so?” demanded Ariel.
“I don’t dislike him,” he answered stiffly. “I scarcely know him.”
“Anyone can see his good qualities. He is so kind, and intelligent, and sympathetic.”
“Perhaps he exhibits these more to you than to others,” replied Alan dryly.
This silenced her.
“You’re happy, aren’t you?” he added then. “It means a great deal to you, finding your father.”
“Of course.”
“It changes things for you.”
“I like knowing I have a family. A place.”
“It makes other parts of your life less important,” he concluded and felt a heaviness descend over him like a stifling winter cloak.
“I don’t know about that,” objected Ariel.
“Perhaps it becomes the most important.”
She cocked her head to consider this. “It changes everything,” she agreed finally. “I don’t have to wonder anymore. And I’m no longer a…a nobody.” She hesitated, then said, “My father has told me that Ivydene will be mine one day.”
“So your future is settled,” he said bitterly.
Ariel frowned at his tone, as if she found something insulting in it. “Well, I am no longer an actress’s bastard child,” she answered.
“That is not what I—”
“You can be as haughty and distant as you wish. You are a duke’s son.”
“I have not been—”
“My father is a respectable man who seems to care about me despite our long separation,” she added. “Of course that means a great deal.”
“I understand that. I simply think that you should go slowly and—”
“Oh, how could you understand anything about how I feel?” Ariel cried. “You have always known your status and been respected and admired. You have always had family around you. You can’t imagine what it’s like, making up stories about your father and enduring the petty gossip and malicious speculation of schoolgirls. You have no notion…” She broke off and started walking rapidly again.
Alan followed in silence. She was right, he thought. He never would really know what she had endured in this instance, or in many others. “I hope I have never appeared to feel any difference in our stations,” he said. “Because I do not.”
Ariel glanced at him, then looked at the ground. “No,” she said. “No, you didn’t. I beg your pardon. I did not mean—”
“No one in my family was ever allowed to become snobbish,” he added. “My mother despises that sort of thing.”
“They have been very kind to me,” acknowledged Ariel formally.
A silence fell. They walked along the wooded path side by side, sunlight slanting over them through the branches.
“What will you do now?” Alan asked at last.
“What do you mean?”
“Will you stay here?”
She threw him another quick glance. “As you wanted me to?”
“I?”
“You said that you would leave me here, if Daniel Bolton turned out to be my father.”
Something in the way she said the words “leave me” shook him. He tried
to read her expression, but she continued to gaze at the ground.
“My father has offered me a home,” she said then. “So, you see, you don’t have any responsibility to me any longer. You may cast off that burden with good conscience.”
“Burden,” he repeated, trying to work out what she really meant.
“Well, duty, or at any rate a promise you wish you hadn’t made. You can be free of it now.”
“You want me to go?” he asked.
She didn’t reply at once. He very much wanted to see her face, but she continued to hide it from him.
“You can do as you like!” Ariel said at last, and she turned to start down the path. “I don’t want to see the chapel after all. Let us return to the house.”
But Alan caught her arm and held her back, forcing her to look up at him. “I regret no promises I made,” he said.
Ariel looked pale and strained. “You are a man of your word,” she said, tugging at her arm to free it from his grasp.
He let her go. “Yes,” he acknowledged.
“It is very important to you.”
“Performing what I have said I will do? Yes.” He couldn’t understand why she harped on this point.
She gazed at him. They were very close together. “Or what others say you should do,” she added.
Alan shook his head. “I am not bound by—”
“Such as when you offered for me,” she interrupted.
She stood stock-still, gazing up at him with those mysterious dark eyes. What were they asking him? Alan wondered. He could not bear to hear her refuse him again. “I had taken unforgivable liberties,” he hazarded. “I am not the sort of man who—”
She stepped away from him. “I was there,” she said. “If they had been unforgivable, I would have mentioned the matter!” Turning, she started down the hill away from him.
He was right behind her. “I wanted to show you that I am not like the men you had been warned about,” he protested.
She stopped so suddenly that he nearly careened into her. Hands on hips, she said, “You think I am unable to tell the difference? Of course, a feeble intellect such as mine would not be capable of much discrimination, would it? Well, you have made your point. I am completely convinced that you are a man of honor, who does his duty no matter how difficult or distasteful it may be.”
“You are distorting what I—”
“I beg your pardon. Have I misunderstood again? It is so difficult for a mere female to comprehend your great mind.”
“Stop it!” He took hold of her shoulders and shook her slightly.
She glared up at him.
The small sounds of the forest faded from his consciousness. He could see nothing but her lovely face. Alan couldn’t stop himself. He pulled her hard against him and kissed her as if their lives depended on it.
Her lips were as sweet as he remembered. The contours of her body were as soft and arousing. There was nothing in the world that he wanted more, and when she relaxed in his embrace and opened her mouth to his, he pulled her even closer, exultation hot in his veins. He would never let her go again, he thought.
But this certainty was broken by the sound of someone clearing his throat, and then a polite, “Pardon me?”
Alan released Ariel, who swayed a little on her feet, and turned to find Daniel Bolton standing among the trees beside the path. The basket on his arm was overflowing with leaves and flowers. “I was on my way back to the house,” he said as Alan silently consigned him to perdition.
Alan and Ariel moved a step apart.
Bolton cleared his throat again. “I feel I must ask, er, what’s all this then?”
“I intend to marry your daughter,” declared Alan.
He said it like a knight throwing down a gauntlet, Daniel Bolton thought. But the way he glanced toward Ariel made it difficult to tell whom he was challenging. “Do you?” It was really quite gratifying, he thought, to have one’s conclusions so clearly confirmed. Time to test the rest of it. “And is she in agreement with this plan?”
Both men turned to Ariel. Bolton watched emotions shift across his daughter’s lovely face. “I must say, speaking as a father, that it appears to me—”
“You have no say in this,” declared Alan. “You have barely met. You have no right to interfere.”
“Still, I am her father,” was the calm objection.
“Whom she hasn’t seen in twenty years.”
“Nineteen.”
“Be quiet,” said Ariel.
Looking surprised, the two men obeyed.
Ariel thought of the man she had glimpsed outside the cathedral at Wells, of the passion she had seen in his eyes as he played the pianoforte. But even more she considered the way he had just kissed her. She should have been relying on her own perceptions since the day he first touched her, she thought, and not on what he chose to say. She had had ample evidence that in matters of the heart he often didn’t know what he was talking about. Of course, he thought that he did. It might be quite difficult to convince him otherwise.
Her newfound father turned to her. “If you are going to be kissing young men in the forest—” Bolton began but then stopped.
Birds twittered unconcernedly in the ensuing silence.
Ariel took a deep breath. With the sense of taking a long step into the unknown, she answered, “Then I had best marry…him.”
“Ah.” Her father looked oddly satisfied. “That’s settled then?” He looked at Lord Alan.
The latter nodded strongly.
Bolton rubbed his hands together like a man who has finished some ticklish task. “You will be married from Ivydene.”
“I’ll ride up to Wells and get a special license,” Alan declared.
Daniel Bolton’s hazel eyes glinted. “Fortunately,” he replied with what was obviously a great deal of enjoyment, “I have already requested one from my old friend the bishop. It will arrive tomorrow.”
The two young people stared at him.
“You will allow me the great joy of standing up with you, I hope?” he said happily to Ariel.
* * *
The wedding of Ariel Bolton of Ivydene Manor, a woman who hadn’t existed a week ago, to Lord Alan Gresham, sixth son of the Duke of Langford, was a small affair, attended only by the bride’s father and a few servants.
It did not lack excitement, however. For just as the vows had been spoken and the clergyman had given them his final blessing, a commotion outside the windows drew most of those present to look out.
In the stable yard, a man in livery was climbing down from a lathered, exhausted horse. The rider looked worn out himself, but extremely determined.
“Isn’t that a royal courier?” wondered Daniel Bolton. “What can he be doing here?”
A muffled curse escaped Alan.
“What can he want?” wondered Ariel.
Without answering, Alan strode out of the room. In a moment he reappeared outside and approached the courier. The sun drew bright copper tints from his hair and glinted on the buttons of his blue coat. His movements had such ease and strength, Ariel thought. She watched him speak briefly with the messenger, and then the man handed over a sealed envelope before heading for the kitchen and some refreshment.
Alan returned to the house. Ariel waited for him to come back to the parlor, and when he didn’t appear, she and her father went in search of him. They discovered him finally in the study, frowning over an unfolded sheet of paper.
“What is it?” said Ariel, fearing some catastrophe.
“Nothing wrong in your family, I hope,” added Daniel Bolton.
Alan raised his eyes from the page. “The ghost is back at Carlton House,” he informed them with obvious irritation, “and the prince is…agitated.” He took another sheet of paper from the envelope that lay before him on the table and scanned i
t quickly. “The man I left in charge there says it cannot be the actors. They have been under close watch.” His frown deepened as he read on.
“What is it?” said Ariel.
“The incidents are growing more serious,” he replied. “A footman was pushed down the stairs by a ‘ghostly’ hand and broke his leg. And there have been other things as well.” Putting down the page, he sighed. “I am commanded to leave at once and deal with this matter.”
“I’ll go and pack,” said Ariel, starting to turn.
“There’s no need,” Alan told her. “I shall have to ride. The coach will be too slow. You can stay here, if you like, and visit with your father until I can settle this.”
“Of course I am coming with you,” she protested.
“I shall ride with the courier,” he pointed out. “You couldn’t keep the pace even if we had a mount for you.”
Knowing this was true, Ariel bit her lower lip. “Hannah and I will follow in the carriage then,” she declared.
“I would rather you stayed here,” said Alan. “These recent incidents sound…disturbing.”
“Do you intend to leave me practically at the altar?”
Daniel Bolton looked from his daughter to her new husband, hesitated, then silently slipped from the room.
“I believe that expression refers to those who do not show up for a wedding,” Alan replied dryly.
“You know what I mean. How can you think of leaving me?”
“It is for your own safety and—”
Ariel turned toward the door once again. “Hannah and I will set out as soon as we are packed,” she said.
“I see.” He let out a breath. “There is nothing more to be said in that case. And I have no time for arguments. I must be on the road.” Brushing past her, he left the room. Moments later she heard his voice in the stable yard calling for his horse to be saddled.
Was this what it meant to be married to him? Ariel’s fists clenched tighter. Had she made a terrible mistake?
She unclenched her fists. She had known this marriage was going to be a challenge, she reminded herself. She couldn’t abandon hope so soon. Straightening her shoulders, she went to find her husband.
He had already packed a small kit, she found. And his horse stood saddled and ready. The royal courier had reappeared and was telling the stable boy that he would pick up a fresh mount in Wells. Most of the household stood about as if watching a performance.