A Wedding for the Scandalous Heiress

by Elizabeth Beacon

  ‘Brandy,’ Lord Shuttleworth ordered briskly when the little procession reached a clean if rather old-fashioned bedchamber. ‘The rest of you can go.’ His lordship added a few words of thanks for the grooms who had carried Magnus upstairs and now stepped back obediently.

  ‘You two as well,’ Sir Hugh Kenton told his offspring with a severe enough look to make them do as they were bid. ‘And no listening at doors,’ he added as they turned away.

  ‘He might, but I wouldn’t,’ Miss Sophia said with an accusing look at her little brother and a saintly expression Wulf didn’t believe for a moment.

  ‘If either of you even try it, I’ll tell your mother what you were up to this afternoon,’ their father threatened. From their slumped shoulders they really would go this time and Wulf was glad they hadn’t heard Magnus’s startling opening statement and didn’t realise what a fine, grisly story they were missing.

  ‘My brother will be best out of these clothes; it looks as if he slept in them before he set out to track me down,’ Wulf said, hoping to get Isabella out of the room as well.

  ‘Yes, that’s a good idea and here’s the brandy you ordered, Shuttleworth. One exhausted man against three of us—I think we can cope, don’t you?’ Sir Hugh said with a cool look at the female too stubborn to have left the room.

  ‘You’re trying to get rid of me, aren’t you?’ Isabella challenged him and Wulf realised he’d underestimated her yet again.

  ‘Yes, is it working?’ Shuttleworth asked blandly.

  ‘Considering I’m a single lady, I don’t see how it can’t. You two think you’re sharp as needles, though, don’t you?’

  ‘We are,’ Sir Hugh said modestly.

  Wulf pretended he was too busy pressing a brandy glass to his brother’s lips to hear the by-play and shrugged aside a ridiculous urge to beg her to stay.

  ‘It’s very annoying of you and I expect a full account of whatever goes on in this room later, so if you don’t want me to put Kate on your tail, you’d best give it to me as soon as you can,’ she threatened, then left the room with her nose in the air, snapping the door closed behind her to make her feelings plain.

  ‘She won’t tell Kate,’ Shuttleworth reassured himself out loud.

  ‘Especially if we fob her off with some plausible tale,’ Sir Hugh agreed.

  Wulf thought they looked uneasy about the chances of her complying with anything she didn’t want to comply with. ‘Never mind Miss Alstone; where’s the sawbones?’ he demanded and hoped a lady wouldn’t lower herself to listen at doors.

  * * *

  Isabella wouldn’t dream of doing anything as unladylike as putting her ear to the keyhole when she was far too likely to get caught. She racked her brains for a better way to find out what was being said in a closed room. If they thought hiding Magnus in the older part of the house would stop Kate finding out he was here, they didn’t know her sister as well as they thought and Isabella had to know why Magnus had galloped after his half-brother so hard he’d endangered his health even further. Her pulse thundered at the very thought someone might have told Magnus what she and his brother did at Haile Carr that night. No, that wasn’t possible—nobody knew about that but her and Wulf and he loved Magnus. He’d never hurt him even if he despised her. Not even, her uneasy conscience whispered, if he had truly set sail for America to avoid her and his own sense of treachery to his half-brother.

  She had to know what all this was about. If someone had seen and whispered about her and Wulf’s disgraceful encounter in the shadows at Haile Carr, she must decide now if she could deny her sins in public or dare to admit it and be pointed out as Wicked Miss Alstone for the rest of her days.

  Inspiration suddenly hit as to how she could get answers to her questions. The poor state of the floors and ceilings in the older parts of the house had been a theme running through Kate’s letters these last few months. Hopefully the carpenters had been put off thumping and hammering for a few weeks while the family assembled. Maybe their unfinished works could let her listen to what was being said by a pack of men who thought they knew best.

  Creeping up the elaborately carved staircase that indicated this had once been a more important part of the house was a lot easier than she expected. The drop cloths and drugget put down to protect finely carved and polished oak against work boots and the dust and dirt nobody could keep at bay on a worksite muffled the slight noises of creaking treads and settling timbers as she moved as if walking on eggshells. She must be even more wary once she was above the room they’d taken Magnus to. If news got about of his hasty visit, the gossips would poke and pry for a reason, so she should know what had brought him here and she had to admit to herself she was more than curious to know what had happened between Magnus and his half-brother.

  She grabbed the hem of her gown so she could tie it round her waist and keep her skirts out of the dust. At least ladies’ waists were lower and skirts wider now; the idea of trying to do this in a narrow column of cambric or muslin made her shudder for the contortions it would cost her. Mentally apologising to her maid for the state she was about to get her petticoats in, she glanced out of the nearest window to orient herself to the room below. She crept past three dusty and half-repaired attic rooms before halting at the doorway of the one where she could see the fountain court from the same angle she’d glimpsed from Magnus’s room. Yes, that was about right. Three sets of acute masculine ears would be directly underneath her, maybe even four if Magnus was less faint than he had been at first. Her maid would have more to scold about than dusty petticoats and Isabella sighed for her stockings as she removed her soft-soled shoes and stepped on to oak boards she was delighted to see in place over only half the floor. She held her breath as she measured every step like an acrobat. Maybe she should become a government spy, she decided when she got to the edge of the floorboards without more than a creak so slight it sounded like an old house settling. The gap was too wide to jump without giving herself away. If she wanted to hear more than the murmur she could pick out now, she would have to creep across bare joists and hope the laths were poorer or more worm-holed so she could hear through them. She quailed at the idea of stepping on a splinter or a nail and overbalancing and falling into the room below, or even being left suspended halfway with her legs sticking through. Listening hard to be certain they hadn’t heard her as she crept closer to the gap, she bent over it in the hope of catching what the men were saying. Ah, here was a piece of luck. The plaster was exposed below and she could see a crack and a few slivers of daylight through it. She edged along a beam that looked sound enough to get her closer. Her stockings were ruined already and she’d scraped her knees, but at least she could hear words now instead of just manly rumbles and grumbles.

  ‘Do you think your little demons have really gone this time, Kenton?’ she heard Edmund ask.

  ‘Aye, they soon get bored and it’s still a lovely day and their mother isn’t looking for them yet.’

  ‘Good, then we’d best get on before anyone else tries to find out your secrets, Haile,’ Edmund said almost as if he was joking.

  Isabella nodded emphatically at thin air. Yes, do get on with it. This position is uncomfortable in so many different ways.

  ‘The Earl—he’s stone-dead and he was murdered,’ she heard Magnus say and suddenly it didn’t matter she was perched up here like a chicken. Murder, no, surely that was impossible. Murder happened in newssheets and sensational ballads, not to people she knew.

  Chapter Six

  No, it’s a fever raging through him; Magnus is delirious. Even the Earl of Carrowe doesn’t deserve to die like that.

  Isabella shook her head in disbelief and all her blood seemed to rush to her head as Magnus’s words echoed in her ears like the crack of doom. Murder? Her ears were deceiving her or Magnus was raving. He was so torn and tortured by the awful situation he was caught up in that his mind had been turned.
Yes, that was it; he must be suffering from brain fever. She was praying the doctor would come and save his sanity before it was too late when his next muttered sentence disillusioned her.

  ‘I found my father done to death, Wulf. He was murdered, foully murdered,’ Magnus was saying and Wulf muttered something soothing she didn’t catch because she was too busy lingering on the gruff rumble of his voice like a besotted debutante while poor Magnus was in the grip of horror. ‘Foully murdered,’ he echoed his own words as if he couldn’t stop now he’d got to Wulf and told him his terrible news.

  ‘So you said,’ his brother said coolly. ‘Tell us where and how the Earl died, Gus, before the sawbones gets here and pours laudanum down your throat. We’ll not get even this much sense out of you for hours after that.’

  She heard Magnus chuckle and could even imagine him smiling weakly, so perhaps Wulf understood him after all. She was suddenly glad they were as close as they were. They, too, had shared a harsh childhood and deserved something more than bitter memories out of it. For some reason the old lord had only seemed to care about his two eldest children. After half a year of trying to avoid her future father-in-law, she’d concluded he blamed his younger children for the disaster his marriage turned into. Isabella shuddered at the thought of being imprisoned in such a marriage herself and wondered how Lady Carrowe stopped herself from murdering him long ago. No! She mustn’t even think such things. Tempted to rock back and forth on her beam to comfort herself, she shook her head at the very idea Lady Carrowe had put a knife into her husband. If she was going to do that, she would have done it when Wulf was born and the man denounced him.

  ‘He must have come back home that night after his usual debauch and we didn’t even know it,’ Magnus was saying. ‘We found him in the morning and by that time he was long gone, Wulf. He was sitting in the Small Drawing Room with his eyes wide open and staring at us as if he’d met the devil. Remember how it was called the Red Room before Mama had it painted white to try to make it seem less gloomy? Heaven knows it’s red again now,’ Magnus reported with a dash of hysteria in his deep voice again, as if he was remembering the sight of his murdered father and might truly run mad if they weren’t careful how they teased this terrible story out of him.

  Shivering like a greyhound in a thunderstorm now, Isabella felt her heart stutter at the terrible ring of truth in his words. Now she couldn’t shake off the awful image of the Earl staring into the pit of hell while his lifeblood drained out of him.

  ‘I have to suppose he was stabbed, then, since there was so much blood,’ his brother was saying as if they were discussing the weather.

  Isabella shook her head; how could Wulf be so calm about a soul being snuffed out so horribly? Even if it was the Earl’s. Surely he had a spark of pity in him for a life ended so violently? He’d be a lesser man if he didn’t and she didn’t want him to be somehow. He might be the most contrary, abrasive and downright annoying man she’d ever met and she was almost sure she didn’t like him, but she didn’t want him to be smaller than she’d thought when he stepped out of the shadows on that dratted terrace at Haile Carr.

  ‘Maybe he was, but we couldn’t see a knife,’ Magnus was saying more steadily now, so she must listen instead of thinking uncomfortable thoughts she could dwell on later. She would have tried to soothe and calm him, but Wulf obviously knew truths this brutal couldn’t be wrapped in clean linen. She supposed she ought to respect him for knowing better.

  ‘From what little I could see before Mama had hysterics and I had to carry her to her bedchamber, he could have been stabbed as well, Wulf,’ Magnus said, ‘but he had certainly been hit on the head. That plaster bust of Ovid he used to throw his hat on when he came home drunk was lying broken and bloody by his chair. The side of his head was beaten in and he was covered in his own gore.’

  ‘You’re certain it was him?’

  ‘Even I’m not fool enough to ride here on a maybe, Wulf, and before you ask me, yes, I made sure he was dead and didn’t leave Mama and the girls alone in that house with his corpse. The sight of him lying in his chair like butcher’s meat will haunt me to my dying day, so heaven knows what it’ll do to poor Theodora, who found him first and ran to get me. I have to get back to them instead of cosseting myself like a Bath breakdown, they need me.’

  ‘Lie back down, you idiot, you’re exhausted. I’ll look after them until you’re rested and fit to help—you’re too ill to be any use to them now, Gus. We’re both going to need our full strength to deal with what comes next. I’ve wished him dead in the past but never thought I’d see this day.’

  ‘Don’t say that, Wulf,’ Magnus said a little more strongly. ‘Someone might hear and think you had a hand in his murder. And think how happy he’d be to drag you down with him, even if he had to die to do it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Wulf admitted and Isabella could imagine him frowning. ‘Don’t expect me to pretend I’m sorry he’s gone, though,’ he added gruffly.

  ‘That’s too much to ask, but we’ll all be suspects now. You’d best keep a still tongue if you don’t want it to be more than an unproven suspicion we wanted him to die sooner rather than later.’

  ‘Everyone knows I hated him, Gus. Shuttleworth and Kenton aren’t the sort of men to grasp the first straw of suspicion that drifts their way,’ Wulf argued and Isabella silently nodded her agreement.

  ‘FitzDevelin’s right, Haile—you’re going to need all the friends you can get, so you’d best not offend us,’ Edmund said, sounding as calm and steady as if these two unlikely visitors had called in to pass the time of day.

  ‘We need to leave as soon as we can so you keep you and yours safe from this grim business,’ Wulf added.

  ‘I can’t lie about like this when we’re needed at home,’ Isabella heard Magnus fretting and was glad he wasn’t absorbed in his own miserable situation for the moment, even if it was for such a terrible reason.

  ‘If we can borrow a carriage to get to London all the sooner, I’ll be grateful to you, Lord Shuttleworth. I shall send it back as soon as we can hire a decent vehicle and hopefully your family will hardly notice the horses have gone before they’re back again.’

  ‘You don’t know our families like we do if you think that, FitzDevelin, but you’re welcome to borrow my travelling carriage and a fast team the moment your brother is declared fit to travel. In the meantime, we three should prepare ourselves for a hard ride.’

  Edmund sounded doubtful about it even as he spoke. As well he might with Kate in such an advanced state of pregnancy, Isabella thought, wishing she was down there and allowed a say in their plans. She had been Magnus’s fiancée for half a year and knew the Countess of Carrowe and her younger daughters as well as any outsider. So she, too, must return to town only hours after she had arrived in the country. Edmund had to stay here with Kate, but there was nothing much Isabella could do to help her sister once Kate was in labour. A single lady wouldn’t be allowed into the room to hold her sister’s hand while she laboured with doctors, midwives and an experienced mother of six on hand.

  ‘Can’t stay here, must go back,’ she heard Magnus mutter distractedly.

  ‘You’re in no fit state to go anywhere,’ Sir Hugh Kenton argued briskly. ‘And there’s no question of you leaving your wife when she’s about to give birth either, Shuttleworth. I’m the best person to go back to town with FitzDevelin and your job will be to keep Haile here and his identity a secret until he’s fit to travel. I have experience of such dark matters and at least I can help FitzDevelin and the Countess untangle their affairs, so stop playing the dutiful lord, Edmund, and remember Kate needs you here.’

  Isabella recalled how scandal had dogged Hugh for years after he had been suspected of murdering his first wife. The Navy decided to dispense with his services so he became a merchant captain for Isabella’s brother-in-law Kit. He was still in Kit’s service when he met Louise in some wild and s
candalous manner they refused to discuss even now. As a result of his past, there was very little Hugh didn’t know about false witnesses and the sort of vicious rumours that could blacken an innocent man’s name. Of course he was the right person to help the Hailes, but so was she. Lady Carrowe was living in a broken-down, barely habitable mansion her husband had been plundering for years to fund his extravagant lifestyle. Then there were her younger daughters; their slender hopes of a decent marriage could be snuffed out by this latest scandal if it wasn’t handled very carefully. Isabella might as well make herself useful to the Haile girls and their mother and she was sure she could stay out of the way of Magnus and Wulf if she tried hard enough.

  ‘It’s true; I shouldn’t leave my wife,’ Edmund admitted at last, ‘but you’ll need help to get your family out of this mess without a great deal of scandal and danger, FitzDevelin. Don’t turn Kenton’s offer down because you’re too stiff-necked to accept help.’

  ‘I know a good deal about danger and my mother and sisters are used to scandal; they have me to thank for that,’ Wulf replied with bitter irony.

  It was true, though, wasn’t it? He’d lived where he wasn’t wanted until he was old enough to run away and at an age when he should have been dreaming of wild adventures rather than facing them daily as he fought to survive on the streets. He was a strong man and the Haile family needed one now more than ever; no wonder his brother had ridden here so frantically to fetch Wulf back. Feeling uncomfortably disloyal, she reminded herself Magnus had been through his own private hell and a long illness these last few months, so it was little wonder he was felled by this heavy blow on top of all the others.