by Liz Carlyle
Waited for her to ask. As if that might absolve him.
“So who was Annie’s father?” she finally said.
“The man her father had betrothed her to,” he said. “He had become impatient, according to Maria, of waiting for what he’d been promised—what he felt he had paid for—so he came one day when her parents were out to ask her one last time. She refused him, she said, and he raped her. Then he hurled her love letters in her face—according to her mother—and told Maria that her duchess’s bastard could have the leavings, for hell would freeze over before he’d ask her again.”
“Dear God!” Kate drew an unsteady breath. “And her father did nothing?”
“She did not tell him,” said Edward, “or tell me, for that matter, until she found herself with child. By then the man had wed another. But what could her father have done? This neighbor practically owned him—his house, his farmland, Mr. Granger had mortgaged it all.”
“But that is dreadful!” Kate swallowed hard, her knuckles gone white now. “That poor girl. What did you do?”
“I wrote her and told her to claim the child was mine; to refuse to be swayed from that story,” he said. “It was madness, yes—but better, I thought, than the shame of having been raped. Wasn’t it? After all, it was my fault for interfering.”
“Oh, Edward! That simply is not so.”
“But I told her to hold fast no matter what,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Who was I, Kate, to tell her such a thing? I look back now, and realize that I barely knew her. I was just infatuated and angry. Petulant, really. It taught me well, Kate, that a man must be the master of his emotions, or they will bloody well master him. Worse, Maria had waited too long to tell me of the child. It took me weeks to get relieved of command and find a ship heading to England, and months to travel. And by the time I arrived …”
“By the time you arrived, she was gone,” Kate whispered hollowly. “She was dead, and there was only the child. And she had told everyone the child was yours.”
“Her parents knew it for a lie, of course,” he said with a shrug. “But they didn’t confirm or deny it. Instead, Granger maintained—and God help him, it’s remotely possible he was truthful—that Maria had been playing us both false. That she’d given herself to the man, trying to dangle us both, and he’d ruined her—with no ravishment involved—then refused to do the right thing to spite her.”
“Dear God!” said Kate. “But that is … that is … I have no words for what that is.”
“Try confusing,” Edward bitterly suggested. “Or the truth? Or a load of moonshine? Or was it just a weak and indebted man explaining away why he let his daughter be raped, and did nothing?”
“What did Mrs. Granger think?”
He shrugged. “She says she isn’t sure,” he admitted. “But she did have the love letters, so that much rings true. I challenged the man—tried to get at the truth—but he wouldn’t say. I slapped a glove in his face, but by then his own wife was with child. So in the end, I just shot him in the arm and went the hell back to London. He lived. Granger didn’t; he died, bitter and bankrupt, leaving Annie and his wife impoverished. That’s when I took over Annie’s care. Until then, I was not even permitted to see her.”
“Dear heaven,” asked Kate. “How does one take care of a child under such tragic circumstances?”
“I moved them to a village where no one would know about the scandal,” he said, “and bought a large cottage. I hired servants and a governess—it seemed the least I could do—and I told Mrs. Granger to tell people what she damned well pleased about me, and I honestly have no clear notion what she has said. I believe I’m called Annie’s godfather—a polite euphemism if ever there was one. I visit twice a year—though Mrs. Granger hates it, and truth be told, I hate it.”
“Do you?” Kate’s hand had snuck into his.
“The child knows nothing about me, and seems half afraid of me,” he said. “And Mrs. Granger refuses to let me tell Annie about her mother and me, or even tell her who her father is. People whisper behind her back, and the poor child hardly knows why. But she’s twelve, Kate. She’s not stupid. Arrangements must be made. Something must be done.”
“What a mess!” said Kate. “But … what sort of arrangements?”
“This.” Edward opened his arms expansively. “That’s what all this was for, Kate.”
“What, Heatherfields?”
“Yes, for Annie,” he said. “I had meant it to be a part of her dowry. A place that might help attract a decent husband when the time comes. Heatherfields, restored to its prime … just imagine it, Kate.”
“Yes, a prospective husband might overlook a great deal for such a fine estate,” Kate mused, “and if he were a kind and good man …”
“Just so.” Edward fell silent a moment, then sighed again. “There. You know what I know, and good luck making any sense of it. As to Heatherfields …”
“Yes?” Kate encouraged.
He carefully considered his words. “I feel oddly reluctant now to part with it,” he said quietly. “I find the neighborhood … endearing. There are likely fifty other houses Annie might have. But only one, I fear, where my heart might happily settle.”
“Only one?” asked Kate softly.
Edward considered his next words a long, long while—though he had been considering them, he supposed, for an age now. He considered them so long, the cottage roof collapsed, falling in with a long, horrendous crack, followed by a shooting shower of sparks.
“Only one?” Kate said again. “I am content to sit here, mind you, until you find your answer.”
“Oh, Kate,” he said. “Oh, love.”
“Do not oh, Kate me,” she said tightly. “I’m the one who nearly died today. I’m the one who must now think of all the things she would have regretted never having done had that asinine Reggie managed to shoot me. Or poison me. Or bore me to death.”
He twisted himself around then, and caught her, drawing her between his legs until she rested back against him. Wrapping his arms around her, he set his chin on her head and together they watched the fire die out.
“You can do better, Kate,” he said warningly.
“Better than what?” she asked lightly, feigning ignorance, he knew, to torment him.
There might be a great many years of such torment ahead of him, he realized—if he were very, very fortunate.
He sighed, and kissed the top of her head. “I’m a man of uncertain bloodlines and dubious character,” he warned her. “My early years were spent bookmaking, calculating odds, and keeping the accounts in Hedge’s hell—”
“Not by your choice,” she interjected.
He laughed. “Keep polishing, but this one won’t shine,” he said. “I spent the last decade bankrupting England’s aristocracy and lining my pockets with their folly. I have not always been honest, but neither have I been dishonest. I am that most disdained of creatures, Kate—a man with a certain moral flexibility. I have kept loose company and looser women. I’m rich as Croesus, and hardly a ha’penny of it was got honestly.”
She sighed. “I know. But I have trouble reconciling all that with your marvelous green eyes and myriad other charms.”
“If I take up residence at Heatherfields, you may avail yourself of my myriad charms at will,” he suggested. “I will pledge them to you, my love, and you alone for all my days.”
“And you think that would not get round, hmm?” she said sharply, crooking her head back to glower at him. “That servants do not gossip? That there is some secret passageway to my bedchamber? I assure you, Edward, that there is not. No. I will not do it. I may not be a ravishing beauty or a highly skilled seductress, but I’m holding out for more.”
He gave a bark of laughter, and buried his face in her neck. “Kate, I love you so,” he said. “Do you love me?”
“Desperately, damn you,” she said impatiently. “I confessed as much some days ago.”
“I love it when you curse,” he said, the wo
rds muffled against her throat.
“I never did so before,” she said. “I wonder why the tendency has so lately come upon me?”
He laughed again, and let his lips slide down the long, pale turn of her neck. “Kate, my beautiful seductress, I will give up all my wicked ways and quit London and gaming both if—”
“Good,” she interjected. “You should. Wickedness is never rewarded, no matter what Aurélie says.”
He let one hand stray higher, cupping her warm, plump breast. “Never rewarded?” he murmured, lightly thumbing her nipple.
“Well … almost never,” she said a little breathlessly. “But there. I have interrupted you. I believe you were about to pledge your undying something-or-other.”
“I was about to ask you to be Mrs. Niall Edward Dagenham Quartermaine,” he said, “but then I realized you are Baroness d’Allenay, and will never be Mrs. anybody.”
She turned in his embrace. “Does that trouble you?” she asked gently.
He shook his head, but his eyes, he knew, were sad. “Not in the least,” he said honestly. “It only troubles me that you’ll be saddled with all my bad baggage if we marry. Will you do it anyway, my girl? Will you have me for better if I jettison the worst? Society will talk, regardless. Upshaw will likely have an apoplectic fit. Your mother will lose all standing as the family’s most outrageous female. So all in all, my love, I daresay you’d be better served by simply using me for my myriad charms.”
She tightened her grip on his shoulders. “Edward,” she said seriously, “do you want to marry me?”
“More than anything,” he said fervently. “More than anything I have ever wanted in the whole of my life.”
“Then I accept your proposal,” she said, setting her lips to his.
And that, as they say, was that.
Drowning in his desire for Kate, Edward kissed her—deeply and possessively, for she was his. And he—heaven help her—was hers. Kate apparently agreed, for her arms left his shoulders and twined around his neck. Then her fingers plunged into his gold-brown hair, and somewhere in that process, Edward forgot he was supposed to be watching a building burn, while Kate forgot all sense of propriety.
And when at last they came apart, their breath coming a little fast and cravats and hairpins in a grave state of disorder, it was to the urgent realization that it might be best, after all, to seize Aurélie, and go straight down to Exeter at week’s end.
“But that,” Kate mused, shoving her last hairpin haphazardly into place, “will scarcely permit you time to shut up things in London.”
“Ah, there is that.” Edward’s hands fell from their task of restoring her bodice to order and began patting over his coat pockets. “But perhaps I shan’t have to.”
He found the letter from Peters that Anstruther had given him some hours earlier, tore it open, his eyes skimming the first sentence.
“Well, congratulate me, my love,” he said, lifting his gaze to hers. “The Quartermaine Club is no more, and we will shortly be several thousand pounds richer.”
Kate’s eyes rounded hugely. “How is this?”
His gaze softened to hers. “I sold it,” he said, “to my second in command. I knew, my dear, that no matter what became of you and me, I had to get out of that business. I knew that, so far as you and I went … well, that not even a friendship between us would do if I kept on. I knew what had to be done.”
“My friendship—just my friendship—is worth that to you?” she said, blinking her eyes a little rapidly.
He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it. “Your friendship is everything to me, Kate,” he said. “And it is part and parcel to why we are going to have an utterly splendid, utterly happy marriage.”
She preened a little at that, and drew back with eyes that had warmed to a brilliant, glowing silver. “Several thousand pounds of ill-got gains!” she said musingly. “That should buy me one incredibly magnificent wedding gift.”
“Which is precisely”—here he paused to kiss the tip of her nose—“what I had in mind.”
“I have always fancied rubies,” she said, “and platinum.”
“Hmm,” he said as if considering it. “Might not a sapphire do as well? They are both corundum, you know.”
“Why, I like sapphires very well indeed!” she declared.
“Excellent,” he said. “One appreciates a little flexibility in one’s wife. Now, up with you, Lady d’Allenay. After all, you have a dinner party to host—and perhaps, if you dare risk Upshaw’s apoplexy—an important announcement to make?”
EPILOGUE
The Wentworth Weddings
In the end, due to an avalanche of logistical issues, real estate transactions, and family dramas—and despite a vast amount of impatience—Katherine, Baroness d’Allenay, and Mr. Niall Edward Dagenham Quartermaine announced their intent to be married; not immediately, but in late November.
It being widely assumed that wicked Ned Quartermaine had deliberately debauched the poor country mouse—the lady being, after all, a land-rich heiress, and the gentleman no sort of gentleman at all—their scandalous betrothal was immediately the talk of all London.
For all of a fortnight.
Then, most obligingly, the Earl of Brendle’s heir fled to Gretna Green to marry his mother’s allegedly pregnant lady’s maid, only to get himself held up along the Great North Road by the maid’s highwayman of a husband, whereupon the couple held the young lordling for ransom—thus trumping any scandal the Wentworth ladies might stir up.
Lord Upshaw breathed a sigh of relief, and sent the Earl of Brendle his condolences.
Even before the scandal, however, it had been decided the Bellecombe ceremony would be a small, intimate affair in the castle’s private chapel. This seemed a good plan until Kate made the mistake of secretly inviting Isabel, Lady Keltonbrooke.
The starry-eyed bride then compounded this covert act—after pleading, not inaccurately, a general ignorance of her intended’s kith and kin—with a vague and somewhat airy encouragement that Lady Keltonbrooke might bring with her whatever members of Edward’s family as could be persuaded to attend.
Lady Keltonbrooke, having lived long enough in high society to know how to read between the lines, at once laid aside the letter and took up her own pen with a steely look in her eye. She had hardly dipped it in the inkpot, however, when her butler appeared bearing the calling card of Louisa, Lady Upshaw, on a silver tray.
If one doyenne of society is meddlesome, two constitute a coup d’état. And then, as the late and little-lamented Alfred Hedge might have said, they were off to the races.
By the time their guest list was finished, the train tickets arranged, the bedchambers aired and the joints laid on to roast, the wedding guests seemed destined to spill into the castle’s inner bailey. Finally, the enterprising Shearns simply drove their hay wagon over to St. Michael’s and began purloining pews, which Tom and Ike then shoved higgledy-piggledy around the chapel’s edges.
The near-farcical logistics of cramming eighty-seven wedding guests cheek-by-jowl into a space meant for forty was exceeded only by the confusion that held forth at the altar. The primary cause of the November delay appeared at the back of the chapel attired in a bridal ensemble of ice-blue tulle and satin purpose-made by the illustrious modiste Madame Odette of rue Saint-Honore, Paris.
In her hair Aurélie Wentworth wore pearls twined with blue forget-me-nots, and on her face she wore the unmistakable, self-satisfied smile of a woman who had finally got her way around a recalcitrant man.
The bride was escorted up the aisle by her upright and saintly brother-in-law, Lord Upshaw, who had been assured by the firm-handed Anstruther that, would the poor man bear but one more scandal in Aurélie’s name, her antics would be put permanently at an end.
After this show of feminine radiance and ruthless determination came something of an anticlimax. Lady d’Allenay, in plain, cream-colored silk, came up the aisle on the arm of her faithful steward
. An awkward dance then followed as Anstruther passed Kate off to London’s worst rascal, Ned Quartermaine, then wedged his rather imposing frame around the extra pews to squeeze himself in on his intended bride’s right.
Lord Upshaw simply sat down to mop his bald brow with the fervent prayer that these two would, indeed, be the last of the Wentworth weddings he need ever concern himself with.
And at long last, the Reverend Mr. Richard Burnham—no stranger to scandal himself—was able to say, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here …”
AN HOUR LATER, Kate found herself standing in the middle of Bellecombe’s grand ballroom, one hand resting on her new husband’s arm. “Good heavens, you could be twins!” she murmured, her gaze focused some distance away.
“There is a marked resemblance,” Edward acknowledged, his eyes drifting over their increasingly exuberant crowd of guests.
Due to the presence of Aurélie’s friends, the wedding breakfast was fast becoming a wedding supper, if not something worse. Kate’s attention, however, was focused on the Duke of Dunthorpe.
A restrained, almost grim man, the duke was not quite as tall as his younger brother, nor did he possess that lean, catlike grace which made Edward look so faintly dangerous. But in his hair and in his features and even in the intense green of his eyes, there was not a whit of difference between the two.
Just then, Jasper appeared with a tray of champagne. Edward snared two glasses, then turned with a muted smile to press one into his wife’s hand. She took it, and looked up at him a little pleadingly.
“I do hope you aren’t aggravated with me, Edward,” she said, “for it is only—what?—one very smallish aunt, your estranged brother, and a few odd cousins who’ve turned up unexpectedly. Do say again that you’re not angry.”
His smile warmed. “No, my feelings for you, my love, turn in an altogether different direction,” he said suggestively. “I am, however, a little put out at Aunt Isabel, for this was all her doing, she claims, and none of yours.”