“Damnation!” Left alone with her, Hawth, who had risen as Kate left the room, took two long strides to loom over Mrs. Warrender’s chair. “A Dower House indeed! What’s wrong with mine, pray?”
“I’ve been very happy there.” She looked up at him pleadingly. “But you must see, my lord, without Kate … You’ve had more than your share of gossip and scandal as it is. And …” She stopped, horror-struck at what she had been about to say.
“Am like to have more. Goddamn that son of yours, ma’am.”
“Poor little Susan,” she said. “I’m ashamed, my lord. I …” She sniffed and smiled up at him. “I know you hate to see a woman crying. But I must just tell you once how ashamed I am. Of Chris. Of my son.”
“Not your fault,” he said. “That husband of yours. Ma’am, shall I tell you just once what I thought of him?”
“No. Please don’t.” She managed a watery smile. “I’d much rather not hear it.”
“Gallant.” He bent over her and she could smell wine, and the cigars he smoked. “And like you. So you propose to dwindle into a mother-in-law, Mrs.—damnation, what’s your name?”
“You didn’t know? Susan,” she said.
“Susan, by God! Well, Susan, are you really going to leave me and my remaining children to the tender mercies of my Cousin Lintott?”
“What else can I do, my lord?”
“You know as well as I do. For God’s sake, stop calling me ‘my lord’ and say you’ll marry me. Make an honest man of me at last. Take me over, Susan. Make me over? I’m not much of a bargain, I know, and I know you do. I’m a bad tempered brute. I drink. I smoke. I swear. I doubt I can change, but, by God, I can try. I’m tired of myself, Susan. Please—”
“Because you need a housekeeper?”
“No, damn you. Because I need a wife. Because I love you! And didn’t even know it till last night. When George Warren told me he was engaged, he said I was going to lose my housekeeper. You. I thought it was you. That I’d lost you. God, what a fool. You’ve every right to laugh at me. I’ve made a proper idiot of myself, have I not, proposing for your daughter. I just didn’t understand …”
“I’m not laughing at you,” she said.
“No, by God, you’re not.” He put a gentle hand under her chin and tilted it up. “You’re trying not to cry. My darling love, cry if you want to, but, before you start, just say you’ll marry me.”
“Oh, Mark.” She met his gaze steadily. “I ought not to.”
“You call me Mark as if you always had.”
“Well, I did once.”
“What?”
She smiled up at him a little wryly. “You’ve quite forgotten. I thought you had. I … couldn’t. Do you remember a party your grandmother gave? Bastille year. At the Dower House. We danced. We laughed. We walked out into the garden. It was moonlight. You kissed me. And then the next thing I heard you had gone on the grand tour. I married Mr. Warrender next year.”
“Dear God! That was you? My nameless girl. ‘Call me Susan,’ you said. Susan with the golden hair. But you disappeared; vanished like a night shadow. What happened?”
She laughed ruefully. “My hostess had the headache. We had to leave early. I couldn’t see you anywhere. To say goodbye … to explain. What could I do?”
“And so I lost you! A hostess’s headache! I waited, Susan. For you … for the supper dance you promised me. It seemed like hours, standing there, feeling the fool I looked. In the end, I joined the other young bucks; drank myself stupid. I was to start on my grand tour next day, When I woke; head like a sawmill; the carriage was at the door. And—idiot—I got in and drove away. Infatuation, I told myself, as my head cleared. An unknown jilt; absurd; I’d forget you. I never did.”
“You didn’t recognise me when we met.” Her smile took the sting from the words.
“Drowned in your widow’s weeds! Besides, when I lost you, I banished you—did my best to. A haunt from the past. Lost … best forgotten. I tried very hard. But”—he leaned down towards her—“I called my daughter Susan.”
“Poor child.”
“We are not.” Very gently, very firmly, he lifted her out of her chair. “We are not going to discuss our children.”
“No, do let’s not.” She smiled up at him mistily. “Oh, Mark!”
Miss Lintott’s tea had been cold and her toast burned. Dressing angrily and early, she hurried downstairs to give a piece of her mind to the housekeeper. Opening the dining room door: “Good God,” she said. “Have you taken leave of your senses, cousin?”
His arms still firmly round her, the Earl of Hawth stopped kissing his housekeeper and smiled over her head at the intruder. “No, just come to them,” he told her.
Author’s Note
I must plead guilty to some liberties with history in this book. The Luddites were a phenomenon of the north, not the south, but since their leader “Ned Ludd” was himself a fiction, I do not feel that I have stretched fact too far in letting him make a brief, first appearance in my imaginary county of Glinde. As for his identity with Bellingham, it is Lord Hawth that suggests it, not I. The Luddite riots were real enough, but Napoleon did not take advantage of them to attempt an invasion in England’s bad winter of 1811-1812. It was probably just as well. The more I invesiigated, the more I found myself inclined to believe in the organised, attempt at revolution that I thought I had invented. History is stranger than fiction after all.
A Note on the Author
Jane Aiken Hodge was born in Massachusetts to Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Conrad Aiken, and his first wife, writer Jessie McDonald. Hodge was 3 years old when her family moved to Great Britain, settling in Rye, East Sussex, where her younger sister, Joan, who would become a novelist and a children’s writer, was born.
From 1935, Jane Hodge read English at Somerville College, Oxford University, and in 1938 she took a second degree in English at Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. She was a civil servant, and also worked for Time magazine, before returning to the UK in 1947. Her works of fiction include historical novels and contemporary detective novels. In 1972 she renounced her United States citizenship and became a British subject.
Discover books by Jane Aiken Hodge published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JaneAikenHodge
A Death in Two Parts
Leading Lady
Polonaise
Rebel Heiress
Strangers in Company
Wide Is the Water
Last Act
Red Sky at Night Lovers’ Delight
For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been
removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain
references to missing images.
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,
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First published in Great Britain 1977 by Fawcett Crest Books
Copyright © 1977 by Jane Aiken Hodge
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eISBN: 9781448213115
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