“That’s hardly necessary, is it, my lord?” asked Jane, exchanging an anxious look with Tom.
Salt put up his brows. “But as you must marry me, Miss Despard, I think it very necessary, don’t you?”
“I would be happy for your lordship to have a copy of my uncle’s will,” Tom agreed, a reassuring smile at Jane. “But that won’t be possible until after my sister becomes Lady Salt, as my attorney did not bring a copy with him.”
The Earl smiled thinly. “Oh, have no fear, Mr. Allenby, I mean to marry your sister, regardless of what is contained in Jacob Allenby’s will. I merely wish to satisfy my curiosity. Now, shall we get this tiresome business over with? I have a full afternoon of appointments and am expected in the House after dinner.”
The secretary and Tom Allenby exchanged a frowning look that did not go unnoticed by Jane. “What is it, Tom? Everything is in order, isn’t it?” she asked fretfully, and looked to the attorney for an answer, but it was Tom who spoke, and to the Earl.
“My lord, I have asked her to wait in the anteroom until I’ve had a chance to explain matters to you, but my mother—”
“No, Mr. Allenby. Lady Despard is not welcome,” Salt stated with extreme politeness, saying to his secretary in an under voice, “Get her out. Be damned if I’ll have that woman in here.”
“Yes, my lord,” agreed Arthur Ellis but remained where he was. “I will have Lady Despard escorted from the house at once.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, my lord,” the attorney apologized, clearing his throat, and bravely continued despite the Earl’s hard stare upon him. “Under the terms of Jacob Allenby’s will, Lady Despard is required to stand as witness to the marriage of Jane Katherine Despard or—”
“I won’t be dictated to by that merchant’s wishes, dead or alive! That’s an end to the matter. Parson, we’re wasting time,” Salt stated belligerently and strode back to his desk to find the special license, the little man in the full-bottom wig quick to flick open his leather-bound bible at the place that held his notes and then look round expectantly at the assembled company.
“Jane, she must be in attendance,” Tom whispered to Jane, a worried look directed at the scowling Earl, who was fossicking amongst the papers on his desk. “It’s the penultimate condition of Uncle Jacob’s will.”
“Pardon my inquisitiveness, Mr. Allenby,” enquired Sir Antony diffidently, “but if Lady Despard is not in attendance at your sister’s marriage…?”
“Tom’s inheritance will be delayed yet again. I cannot allow that to happen,” Jane said simply and pressed her stepbrother’s hand. “Don’t worry, Tom. I’ll speak to him.”
“Perhaps you should allow me, Miss Despard?” suggested Sir Antony with a smug smile of reassurance. “I have been known upon occasion to bring his lordship round to my way of thinking.”
“Thank you, my lord. But I will make him see reason,” Jane said firmly. “After all, he is just being stubborn for its own sake, and there is much more at stake here than any injury done to Lord Salt’s pride.”
Sir Antony bowed to her wishes and watched Jane approach the massive desk and its colossal owner, quizzing glass up to a magnified eye. “What an extraordinary young woman,” he said with approval. “Tiny but astonishingly tenacious.”
“I do not understand why you will not grant Lady Despard admittance when only yesterday you came face to face with her in your Arlington Street townhouse,” Jane reasoned calmly. “It’s for Tom’s benefit that I ask you to acquiesce to the request. And it is the last occasion you need ever see her. Though why such a silly vain creature should bother you is beyond my comprehension. Unless—”
“Miss Despard, you don’t know the first thing about—”
“—you don’t wish to own a connection with her because you took her to your bed and now wish to forget the liaison ever happened?”
Salt’s mouth dropped open and he could barely speak above a whisper.
“Is that what—is that what that overripe tart told you?”
“Everyone knows casual liaisons are quite commonplace amongst your kind, so it’s not as if you should be embarrassed in any way by her,” Jane added conversationally, ignoring the Earl’s angry blush. Jacob Allenby had made no secret of the Earl’s sinful connection with his family and as her stepmother was known to have had affairs with several of Wiltshire’s wealthy gentlemen, Jane had put two and two together. “She’s not likely to say anything about sharing your bed because she would not want to embarrass Tom. If you would tell me what you are searching for perhaps I could be of assistance?” she added in an abrupt change of subject. She watched him squint over the piles of documents he was moving and replacing in, what seemed to Jane, no particular order; knowing he was blind to the print, and that this would only increase his agitation and likely negative response to the attorney’s stipulation. When he glanced at her suspiciously, she added with a small, understanding smile, “Would it be such a burden for your noble nose to bear the weight of a pair of wire rimmed eyeglasses occasionally, my lord?”
“Special license,” he muttered self-consciously, ignoring her question and stepping aside to allow her greater access to the desk. “Thank you,” he murmured when she handed him a sheaf of parchment that had upon it the seal of the Archbishop of Canterbury. “Miss Despard, there are certain particulars concerning that woman that I will not discuss with you, or any other. It is a family matter and one I refuse to allow Jacob Allenby to wreak his revenge from beyond the grave.”
“Revenge?” Jane repeated, annoyed. “Is that all you can think about? I don’t pretend to know the first thing about the feud between the Earls of Salt Hendon and the Allenbys, although you have confirmed by your prejudice that my stepmother is somehow involved in that dispute. What I do know is that if you don’t permit her to stand as witness to my marriage, then my stepbrother, who is the innocent party in all of this, will have his future severely compromised, all because of some injury done your pride, and that I cannot allow.”
“And what do you intend to do about it, Miss Despard?” the Earl drawled. When Jane opened her mouth then shut it again on a lame argument he added, “I’m surprised Allenby didn’t take it upon himself to give you a one-sided explanation of the feud, as you like to call it, between the Allenbys and my family. Suffice for me to say that you have hit the proverbial nail on its head. Your stepmother played her part well in that little melodrama.” He held the special license under Jane’s chin. “As for my pride… Where that family is concerned I have none.”
“If Jacob Allenby’s will is not carried out to the letter, it is not only Tom’s future that will be compromised, but the people who rely on him for their very existences,” Jane argued. “Good, hard-working people who are employed in his factories. Surely you can relate to such a circumstance? There must be dozens of people who rely on you for their livelihoods, and if the numbers in your anteroom are anything to go by, there are dozens more waiting the opportunity to state their case in the hopes of gaining your patronage. I cannot believe that you, a gentleman, would willingly cause the ruin of a young man and those who depend upon him, and who has never done you a harm, all because of a feud you have with his mother’s family, but in which he played no part.”
The Earl stared down at her flushed face and at the intensity in her blue eyes and had to concede that her impassioned argument was sound and surprisingly selfless. That he should feel a twinge of envy that she exhibited such passion on behalf of her stepbrother astonished and annoyed him. It made him say flippantly,
“Very well put, Miss Despard. When it suits your purpose you expect me to adhere to gentlemanly principles, and yet you have accused me of conduct unbecoming in a gentleman.” He tickled her chin with the parchment. “Which is it to be?”
“I was not discussing your conduct towards me, my lord,” she replied with quiet dignity, twisting the betrothal ring between her fingers at her back.
He lifted a mobile eyebrow. “Miss Despar
d, you speak with such injured confidence that I beg you to provide proof of the accusation of which I stand accused.”
Jane’s blue eyes held his gaze. “Certainly. At the appropriate time and place. But this is not it. You have a room full of onlookers awaiting us. The sooner the ceremony is performed the sooner you can put this painful episode behind you and banish me to the backwater of your choosing. But you cannot do that, Tom cannot begin his life as an independent man of means, without Lady Despard’s presence at my marriage, regrettable as the circumstance is for us both.”
The Earl was laughingly skeptical. “So you are marrying me for Tom’s sake?”
Jane nodded, all contrition, gaze dropped to the diamond buckle in the tongue of his polished leather shoe. He had such large feet. “If there was any other way, I would gladly take it, my lord.”
He smiled, showing white teeth. “With that long face, I’m almost convinced,” he quipped. “Then for Tom’s sake you must do three things and I will do what is required of me: Sign that document poor Arthur returned to me without your signature; provide me with the evidence that proves me less than a gentleman, and tell me why you are marrying me for Tom’s sake.”
Jane sighed her defeat and turned to the desk as one about to mount the chopping block, but the Earl grabbed her wrist and spun her back to face him. “After the ceremony will suffice for the document and the explanation. But I will know now why you must marry me.”
Jane told him.
She wasn’t sure how he would respond to the news that she was marrying him for no other reason than to allow her stepbrother to inherit what was rightfully his and thus free him up to pay his workers their long overdue wages, but she certainly never expected him to react in the way he did.
“You could marry any man and immediately forfeit the hundred thousand pounds that by rights should have gone to your stepbrother?” he said in disbelief. “By not stipulating Tom by name that unscrupulous merchant was hoist by his own petard. How fitting!” He then burst into incredulous laughter, as if told a good joke.
If she had not been nonplussed by his reaction Jane would have delighted in his good humor because it stripped away his resentment, revealing the man she remembered and loved. She couldn’t help smiling.
The rest of the party assembled in the library breathed easier at this turn of events and the Earl remained in a surprisingly good humor throughout the ceremony, notwithstanding the presence of Lady Despard, who glowed with self-importance and had the satisfaction of knowing that the Earl had been forced to capitulate to her presence.
The ceremony concluded, the Earl bowed over his bride’s hand, and as he straightened he winked at Jane, though there was nothing playful in his demeanor, and his gaze held a menacing intent.
“Now Tom has his hundred thousand I want payment in kind,” he murmured near her ear. “I’ll be home late, but I expect my wife to be up waiting and ready to perform her wifely duty.”
~ ~ ~
THE NEW COUNTESS of Salt Hendon did not wait up for her husband. She was exhausted, emotionally and physically, from a day that seemed to go on forever. She had entered the bookroom thought by all in the anteroom to be just another petitioner, indeed a newly employed domestic in the Earl’s household, and left its warmth as the sixth Countess of Salt Hendon, feeling no different, yet immediately whisked off to a suite of rooms on the second floor that smelled of fresh paint, glue from newly hung wallpaper, and that teemed with industry. A dressmaker, a milliner, a corsetiere, a shoemaker, a number of seamstresses, and several assistants all toiled away at their various tasks, while workmen busied themselves with arranging beautifully carved mahogany furniture and hanging damask curtains around a new and enormous four-poster bed.
Jane had never seen a bed quite like it. She was told there was one other, its twin in fact, in the Earl’s bedchamber. The intricately carved mahogany posts stretched up to the ornately plastered ceiling and there was an elaborately carved headboard that incorporated the coat of arms of the House of Sinclair. Unlike the curtains about the Earl’s bed that were dark crimson velvet, Jane’s curtains were decidedly more feminine, being pale blue and yellow damask. A match for the curtains covering the sash windows and complementing the coverings on the chaise longue and the dressing table stool in the spacious closet.
The housekeeper apologized for the lack of a fire in the grates of the fireplaces in the closet and the bedchamber. A chimney sweep had been called to investigate what was blocking the flues, possibly old birds nests from the previous spring. Like most of the rooms and furniture on the second floor, this suite had never been used since the Earl’s purchase of the house some four years before. The only occupant on this floor was the Earl himself, but as he spent most of his time when Parliament was sitting at the Arlington Street townhouse he shared with Sir Antony Templestowe, this thoroughly modern and spacious mansion was sadly neglected.
Of course that would all change for the better now. The house was in desperate need of a mistress, opinioned the housekeeper with a kind smile at Jane, who blushed and quickly walked on into the next room, a pretty, light-filled sitting room fitted out in the Chinese manner, with peonies and stork wallpaper, matching silk curtains and a carved mahogany chinoiserie overmantle. The housekeeper hoped her ladyship would not object to being fitted for her gowns and necessaries in this room where there was a good fire in the grate. An ornate screen had been set up in a corner for just this purpose, and beside this screen, looking nervous and self-conscious, stood a young woman not much older, but considerably taller, than Jane. The young woman quickly bobbed a curtsey and was introduced by the housekeeper as her ladyship’s newly employed personal maid, Springer.
“Oh, that name will never do, Mrs. Jenkins,” said Jane, a smile at the nervous woman who again bobbed a curtsey. “I once owned a beagle who answered to Springer. You must have a Christian name?”
“Anne. It’s Anne, my lady,” the maid shyly volunteered.
“Relation of Springer the butler at Arlington Street?”
Anne smiled. “Yes, my lady. That would be my father. He and my mother look after his lordship when he cares to stay at that address,” and received such a scowling look from the housekeeper for prattling on that she bobbed another curtsey saying, “Shall I fetch in the dressmaker, my lady? And there’s a jeweler come to fix your wedding band, and the shoemaker needs one of your shoes, if your ladyship wouldn’t mind… But perhaps your ladyship would care for a dish of tea first, before we begin the fittings?”
“Yes. Tea, and the jeweler. Thank you, Anne,” said Jane.
“If you don’t need me, my lady, I must get back to the kitchen,” apologized the housekeeper. “Cook needs me to finish up the arrangements for tomorrow’s dinner after his lordship’s tennis tournament, and what with a house full of guests—”
“A houseful? Here? Tomorrow?”
“Yes, my lady. His lordship said not to bother you with the arrangements,” explained the housekeeper, “on account of your ladyship having enough to do today. But if you would like to see the menu?”
Jane shook her head. “No. That will be all, Mrs. Jenkins. And thank you for all you’ve done to make me feel welcome.” And gave herself up into the hands of the dozen or so people employed by the Earl to ensure she had a wardrobe befitting a Countess come the arrival of the first guests for the annual Royal Tennis tournament and dinner.
By the time she was well and truly ready for sleep she had lost count of the number of gowns she had been pinned in and out of, and the yards and yards of silks, velvets, damasks, Chinese and Indian cottons and various other fine materials that were too numerous to remember. These wondrous and expensive materials were wrapped around her slim frame and over panniers that encased her slender hips then expertly tacked and trimmed and taken away to be sewn up by industrious seamstresses.
From behind the ornate dressing screen, the corsetiere and her two assistants laced her into various low cut stays and bodices until she thought her r
ibs were cracked. Some were of buckram and whalebone covered in silk and linen, others were embroidered, and many matched the petticoats and were to be worn to be seen. The two French female émigrées then presented for her selection diaphanous chemises, nightgowns with tiny pearl buttons and low cut necklines trimmed with satin bows and lace, exquisitely embroidered silk dressing gowns of matching fabrics and a mountain of silk stockings and garters, all, they assured her with knowing smiles, guaranteed to please husbands and lovers alike.
Jane blushed rosily, pulling the coverlet up to her chin, recalling their sly smiles and confidential giggles, as she had blushed in their company, and drifted off to sleep on the chaise longue in the cold bedchamber. She was not in her enormous new four poster bed because it lacked its new mattress of duck and geese feathers which had failed to arrive that day; an oversight the housekeeper could not apologize for enough, until Jane assured her she would be just as comfortable and warm if a bed was made up for her on the chaise.
The Earl found her here an hour later, in the glow of a guttering candelabrum.
The hum of voices and industry came from behind the sitting room door, where various tradesmen and women were only too happy to work by candlelight in shifts through the night to accommodate his wishes. The covers had slid to the floor, leaving Jane cold and curled up in a ball trying to find warmth in the thin linen nightshift that was bunched up around her knees, giving him an appreciative view of her slim stockinged ankles and slender feet.
With her hair braided in one long thick rope down her back, and dressed in a nightshift that covered her from throat to wrists, she looked absurdly youthful and untouched. In fact, she did not look a day older than his sister Caroline, who was all of seventeen and a half years of age, a comparison that froze his ardor better than a hipbath of cold water. Not that it had been his intention to disturb her so late. But he was curious to see how she had got on in her new surroundings, and if she had indeed waited up for him as he had ordered.
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