by Mary Balogh
“Oh,” she said, blinking away tears, “but it was Viscount Lyngate who made me laugh.”
“Did he explain,” Katherine asked, “why he is in Throckbridge?”
“He did not,” Vanessa said. “But he did say something very peculiar. He asked me about the third Huxtable sister, having been presented only to the two of you. Did Papa-in-law mention my existence when he presented Viscount Lyngate to you last evening?”
“Not that I recall,” Margaret said, looking up from the pillowcase she was mending.
“He did not,” Katherine said decisively. “Perhaps he said something after they walked away from us, or when he was presenting Stephen. Did you answer him?”
“I told him I was the third sister,” Vanessa said. “And he commented that he had not been informed that one of us had been married. Then he changed the subject and asked me about Hedley”
“How peculiar indeed,” Katherine said.
“I wonder,” Vanessa said, “what Viscount Lyngate is doing in Throckbridge—if he is not just innocently passing through, that is. But he told Papa-in-law that he has business here. How did he know there were three Huxtable sisters? And why would that fact be of any interest whatsoever to him?”
“Idle curiosity, I daresay,” Margaret said. “Whatever does Stephen do to split the seams of every pillowcase I put on his bed?” She picked up another and tackled it with her needle and thread.
“Perhaps it was not idle curiosity,” Katherine said, jumping suddenly to her feet, her eyes fixed beyond the parlor window “He is coming here now They both are.” Her voice had risen to something resembling a squeak.
Margaret hastily set aside her mending and Vanessa turned her head sharply to look out the window and see that indeed Viscount Lyngate and Mr. Bowen were coming through the garden gate and proceeding up the path to the front door. Her father-in-law must have had an uncharacteristically short visit with them.
“I say!” They could hear Stephen clattering down the stairs, calling as he came, obviously glad of any excuse to escape from his books for a while. “Meg? We have visitors coming. Ah, are you here too, Nessie? I daresay the viscount was smitten with your charms last evening and has come to offer for you. I shall question him very sternly about his ability to support you before I give my consent.” He grinned and winked at her.
“Oh, dear,” Katherine said as a knock sounded at the door, “whatever does one say to a viscount?”
The two gentlemen had come here to Throckbridge, Vanessa realized suddenly in some shock, because of them. They were the business the viscount had spoken of. He had known of them before he came here, though he had not been informed that one of them had been married. What a strange and intriguing mystery this was! She was very glad she had come here this morning.
They waited for Mrs. Thrush to open the front door. And then they waited for the parlor door to open, as if they were presenting a silent tableau on a stage. After what was only a few moments but felt like several minutes, it opened and the two gentlemen were announced.
It was the viscount who entered first this time.
There was no concession to the country in his appearance this morning, Vanessa was quick to see. He wore a calf-length heavy greatcoat, which must have sported a dozen capes, a tall beaver hat, which he had already removed, tan leather gloves, which he was in the process of removing, and supple black leather boots, which must have cost a fortune. He looked larger, more imposing, more forbidding—and ten times more gorgeous—than he had appeared last evening as he glanced around the small parlor before bowing to Margaret. He was also frowning, as though this were a visit he did not relish. He looked far from joking and flirting this morning.
Why had he come here? Why on earth?
“Miss Huxtable,” he said. He turned to them each in turn. “Mrs. Dew? Miss Katherine? Huxtable?”
Mr. Bowen bowed to them all, smiling genially.
“Ladies? Huxtable?” he said.
Vanessa told herself quite deliberately, as she had the evening before, that she was not going to be awed by a fashionable greatcoat and costly boots and a title. Or by a darkly handsome, finely chiseled, frowning face. Gracious heavens, her father-in-law was not a nobody. He was a baronet!
She felt awed nonetheless. Viscount Lyngate looked quite out of place in Meg’s humble, not-quite-shabby parlor. He made it look many times smaller than usual. He seemed to have sucked half the air out of it.
“My lord? Mr. Bowen?” Margaret said with admirable composure as she indicated the two chairs that flanked the fireplace. “Won’t you have a seat? Will you bring a tray of tea, please, Mrs. Thrush?”
They all seated themselves as Mrs. Thrush, looking decidedly relieved at being dismissed, whisked herself out of sight.
Mr. Bowen complimented them on the picturesque appearance of the cottage. He guessed that the garden was a picture of color and beauty during the summer. He commended the village on the success of last evening’s assembly. He had spent a decidedly agreeable evening, he assured them.
Viscount Lyngate spoke again after the tray had been brought in and the tea poured.
“I am the bearer of news that concerns all of you,” he said. “I am afraid it is my sad duty to inform you all of the recent demise of the Earl of Merton.”
They all stared at him for a moment.
“That is sad news indeed,” Margaret said, breaking the silence, “and I am much obliged to you for bringing it in person, my lord. I believe we do have a connection with the earl’s family, though we have never had any communication with them. Our father discouraged any talk of them. Nessie may be better acquainted with the exact relationship.” She looked inquiringly at her sister.
Vanessa had spent a great deal of time with her paternal grandparents as a child and had always listened enthralled to their endless stories of their younger years while Margaret had been less interested.
“Our grandfather was a younger son of the Earl of Merton,” she said. “He was cut off from the family when they objected to his wild ways and his choice of our grandmother as his bride. He never saw them again. He used to tell me that our papa was first cousin to the current earl. Is it he who has just died, my lord? That would make us his first cousins once removed.”
“I say,” Stephen said, “that really is quite a close relationship. I had no idea, though I knew there was some connection. We are indeed obliged to you, my lord, for coming. Did the new earl ask you to find us? Is there some question of a family reconciliation?” He had brightened considerably.
“I am not sure I would want one,” Katherine said with some feeling, “if they all turned their backs on Grandpapa because he married Grandmama. We would not even exist if he had not.”
“I shall nevertheless write a letter of condolence to the new earl and his family,” Margaret said. “It is the civil thing to do. Would you not agree, Nessie? Perhaps you would take it with you when you go, my lord.”
“The earl who recently died was a mere boy of sixteen,” Viscount Lyngate explained. “He survived his father by only three years. I was his guardian and the executor of his estates after the demise of my own father last year. Unfortunately the boy was always in precarious health and was never expected to live to adulthood.”
“Ah, poor boy,” Vanessa murmured.
His keen, unsettlingly blue eyes rested on her for a moment and she leaned farther back in her chair.
“The young earl had no son, of course,” he said, turning back to Stephen, “and no brothers who could succeed him. No uncles either. The search for his successor moved back to his grandfather and his brother—your grandfather—and his descendants.”
“Oh, I say,” Stephen said as Vanessa pressed even farther back into her chair and Katherine’s hands came up to cover her cheeks.
Grandpapa had had only the one son—their father.
“It alit upon you, in fact,” Viscount Lyngate said. “I have come here to inform you, Huxtable, that you are now the Earl of Merton
and owner of Warren Hall in Hampshire among other properties, all of them prosperous, I am happy to report. My felicitations.”
Stephen merely stared at him. His face had turned a pasty white.
“A n earl?” Katherine whispered. “Stephen?”
Vanessa gripped the arms of her chair.
Margaret looked as if she were cast out of marble.
“Congratulations, lad,” Mr. Bowen said with hearty good humor as he rose to his feet to offer Stephen his hand.
Stephen surged to his feet to take it.
“It is unfortunate,” Viscount Lyngate continued, “that your upbringing has not prepared you for the life that is to be yours, Merton. There is much work involved and a large number of duties and responsibilities apart from just the glamour of possessing rank and fortune. You will need a great deal of training and education, all of which I will arrange and in which I will be pleased to involve myself. We will need to remove you to Warren Hall without further delay It is already February. It is to be hoped that by the time Easter has come and gone, you will be ready to make an appearance in London. The ton will be gathered there in large numbers, you will understand, for the Season and the parliamentary session. They will be waiting to make your acquaintance, young as you are. Can you be ready to leave tomorrow morning?”
“Tomorrow morning?” Stephen said, releasing Mr. Bowen’s hand in order to stare at the viscount in some astonishment. “That soon? But I—”
“Tomorrow morning, my lord?” Margaret said more firmly. Vanessa recognized the thread of steel in her voice. “Alone?”
“It is necessary, Miss Huxtable,” the viscount explained. “We have already wasted several months discovering the new Merton’s whereabouts. Easter will—”
“He is seventeen,” Margaret said. “It is quite out of the question that he go with you alone. And tomorrow? It is impossible. There will be all sorts of preparations to make. The ton can wait to make his acquaintance.”
“I am well aware, ma’am—” the viscount began.
“Oh, I think you are not” Margaret told him while Vanessa and Katherine gazed from one to the other in silent fascination and Stephen lowered himself to his chair again, looking as if he might be on the verge of collapse. “My brother has never been more than a few miles from home, and yet you expect him to leave alone with you, a perfect stranger, tomorrow in order to live in a new home among people he has never met and enter upon a life that is totally unexpected and totally foreign to him?”
“Meg—” Stephen’s cheeks were suddenly flushed.
“When my father lay on his deathbed eight years ago,” Margaret said, holding up a staying hand but not removing her eyes from the viscount, “I made him a solemn promise that I would see all my siblings to adulthood and care for them until they were all old enough and able to care for themselves. I have always held that promise sacred. Stephen is going nowhere tomorrow and nowhere the next day or the day after that. Not alone anyway”
Viscount Lyngate raised his eyebrows and looked very haughty indeed.
“I do assure you, ma’am,” he said, impatience obvious in every line of his body, “that your brother will be very well cared for indeed under my guardianship. He is one of the wealthiest men in the land, and it is imperative—”
“Under your guardianship?” Margaret said. “I beg your pardon, my lord. Stephen is under my care even if it turns out that he is as rich as Croesus and the King of England.”
“Meg,” Stephen said, and pushed the fingers of one hand through his curls, which immediately restored themselves to their usual disorder. He looked horribly embarrassed. “I am seventeen, not seven. And I am the Earl of Merton unless this is some bizarre hoax. I had better go and find out what it is all about and learn how to do the job properly. It would be lowering to meet my peers and not have any idea how to go on. You have to agree with that.”
He looked at them all in turn.
“Stephen—” Margaret began.
But he raised a hand palm out and addressed the viscount.
“The thing is,” he said, “that we are a close-knit family, as you can see for yourself. I owe a great deal to all my sisters, but especially to Meg. Of course they must come with me if I go—which I daresay I will. They must come because I insist upon it. I will not go without them, in fact. What would I do rattling around in a large ancestral home on my own, anyway? I take it Warren Hall is large?”
The viscount inclined his head while Meg gazed at Stephen in some astonishment.
“And what sort of a wealthy, influential earl would I be,” Stephen continued, “if I left my sisters behind in a cottage like this when they have been prepared to sacrifice almost their last penny to send me to university later this year when I am eighteen? No, Lord Lyngate, Meg and Kate will go with me. And Nessie too if she wishes or can be persuaded. I daresay she would not enjoy being left at Rundle Park if we were all gone.”
They might all go without her? Vanessa thought, appalled. She might lose her whole family at once? Of course she would go with them.
“You must admit, Elliott,” Mr. Bowen said, “that it is a sensible suggestion. The boy has his mind made up, and he will have a steady home life if his sisters are with him. He is going to need it. And they are now the sisters of an earl. It would be more fitting for them to live at Warren Hall than here.”
Viscount Lyngate looked about the room with raised eyebrows and at each of them in turn.
“In time, yes,” he said. “But preferably not yet. They would all need to be educated and clothed and a thousand and one other things. They would all have to be presented at court and then to the ton. The task would be monumental.”
Vanessa drew a slow breath. If he had redeemed himself in her eyes just a fraction of a degree last evening while they danced, he had just plummeted to the depths again. He saw them—all of them, even Meg—as a monumental liability. A nuisance. Nobodies. Country bumpkins. She drew breath to speak.
But Stephen seemed not to have seen or heard anything amiss —or anything at all that the viscount had said. He had asserted himself, tested the wings of early manhood in light of the almost incredible announcement that had just been made to him. But he was still very much an exuberant boy too.
“I say.” He got to his feet again and beamed around on them all. “We are going to Warren Hall, Meg. You will have a come-out Season in London among the ton, Kate. And you will be back living with us, Nessie. Oh, this is famous!” He rubbed his hands together and then reached out to hug Katherine.
Vanessa could not spoil the moment for him. But when she glanced at Viscount Lyngate, not even trying to hide her annoyance, she found that he was looking back at her, his eyebrows raised.
She pressed her lips tightly together.
But then she did smile and even laugh as Stephen pulled her up from her chair, lifted her off her feet, and twirled her once about.
“This is famous!” he exclaimed again.
“Indeed it is,” she agreed fondly.
“We had better go over to Rundle Park,” he said, “to tell Sir Humphrey and Lady Dew And to the vicarage to tell the vicar. And to— Oh, Lord.” He sat down abruptly and turned pale again. “Oh, Lord.”
Viscount Lyngate got to his feet.
“We will leave you all to digest the news,” he said. “But we will return this afternoon to discuss some of the details. There is no time to delay”
Margaret had risen too.
“We will not delay, my lord,” she said firmly. “But you must not expect us to be ready to leave tomorrow or the next day or even the next. We will leave as soon as we are ready We have lived here in Throckbridge all our lives. We have roots here as deep as those you probably have in your home. You must give us time to pull them free.”
“Ma’am.” The viscount bowed to her.
He had come here, Vanessa realized, expecting to use his power and consequence to strike awe into them so that he could bear Stephen off to his new life tomorrow. Without
his sisters.
How foolish men were.
She smiled at Viscount Lyngate when he bowed to her. Country bumpkins, he would discover, were not necessarily as easy to handle as the minions he must be more accustomed to encounter and dominate.
But Stephen, she thought as the gentlemen stepped out of the room and then out of the house. Stephen was an earl.
The Earl of Merton.
“The Earl of Merton,” he said, echoing her thought. “Pinch me, someone.”
“Only if you will pinch me first,” Katherine told him.
“Oh, goodness me,” Margaret said, still on her feet and looking anxiously about the room. “Wherever am I to start?”
“At the beginning?” Vanessa suggested.
“If I only knew where that was,” Meg said, her voice close to a wail.
And then Stephen spoke up again, his color returned, his eyes burning with intensity.
“I say!” he said. “Do you realize what this means? It means that I don’t have to wait until after university and probably years after that before I can do everything I have dreamed of doing in life. I do not have to wait to support you all. I don’t have to wait even a single minute longer. I am the Earl of Merton. I own property I am a wealthy man. And I am going to give you all a grand new home and an even grander new life. And as for myself… Well.”
Clearly he was lost for words.
“Oh, Stephen,” Katherine said fondly.
Vanessa bit her upper lip.
Margaret burst into tears.
5
IT TOOK six days.
Six days of kicking their heels at a modest village inn. Six days of amusing themselves as best they could in a remote country village during February, when the sun did not once shine but a chilly rain drizzled down on their heads almost every time they decided to set foot out of doors. Six days of being wined and dined and called upon at all hours of the day by a persistently cheerful and hospitable Sir Humphrey Dew. Six days of observing the reactions of a sleepy English village to the astonishing news that one of their own had just inherited an earl’s title and property and fortune.