Captain Amberton's Inherited Bride

by Jenni Fletcher

  ‘I do when he insults you.’

  ‘I’ve only told her the truth.’ Harper jutted his chin out as if daring him to take a swing at it. ‘Or are you saying that you’d marry her without my money?’

  ‘What?’ He said the word at the same moment she did, though it was impossible to tell which of them sounded the most horrified.

  ‘I asked if you’d marry her for herself? Since you take such a keen interest.’

  Lance dropped his gaze to her face, but she was already looking away, arms folded around her waist as if she were trying to make herself look as small and unobtrusive as possible. Would he marry her? No. Of course not. He had absolutely no intention of shackling himself to any woman, no matter how attractive or intriguing he found her, though he could hardly say so without causing her further embarrassment. Better that than an engagement, however...

  ‘I’m about to return to my regiment, sir.’ He gave the first excuse that came into his head. ‘I’ve no provision for a wife.’

  ‘Ha!’ Harper’s face contorted with a look of malicious glee. ‘I thought not.’

  Somehow Lance resisted the urge to grab the older man by the lapels and throw him headfirst through the nearest window. What on earth was the matter with him? Every eye in the room was turned towards them, every ear honed to hear every word—even the orchestra had stopped playing to listen—and yet Harper seemed so determined to win their argument that he had no qualms about humiliating his daughter in public. Just how much of a monster was he?

  ‘What’s going on?’ His father burst upon them suddenly, trailing a defeated-looking Arthur behind him. ‘Lance, I told you to behave yourself.’

  ‘I was behaving myself.’

  He ran a hand through his hair, torn between exasperation and dull fury. How exactly had he found himself in this position, between two livid fathers, a silent brother and a tiny kitten of a woman who looked as though she wished the ground would open up and swallow her? Why the hell was he the one defending her?

  ‘He called me a liar.’ Harper’s tone was indignant.

  ‘And you called me a reprobate.’ Lance shot him a savage look. ‘I believe that makes us even.’

  ‘Apologise!’ His father’s voice was a hiss, bristling with rage. ‘Apologise to our guest right now.’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear my side of the story?’

  ‘Your side of the story is always the same. He called you a reprobate because that’s what you are. Now apologise or get out of my house this instant!’

  ‘Stop!’ It was Miss Harper who interrupted this time. ‘Please stop. It was all my fault. I overreacted, I’m sure.’

  ‘I doubt that, my dear.’ His father didn’t even bother to look at her. ‘You mustn’t distress yourself.’

  ‘But you mustn’t do this! Not because of me. It’s too awful.’

  ‘It’s no more than he deserves. This is the last straw, Lance.’

  ‘For you, too, Father.’ He didn’t wait another moment, turning his back and cutting a swathe through the dancers as he stormed towards the door. ‘Don’t expect me to set foot in this house ever again!’

  ‘Good!’ His father’s voice reverberated around the ballroom. ‘Because I wouldn’t let you in! You’re no son of mine any more!’

  Lance stopped in the doorway, opening his mouth to hurl one final parting shot, then closing it again as he caught sight of his brother. Arthur was standing off to one side, a picture of such abject misery that he was half tempted to march back across the room and drag him away with him, too. But he was going back to his regiment and Arthur...well, Arthur was going to marry Violet Harper.

  He took one last look at her face, at her big blue eyes made even bigger with shock. She was right about one thing. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t been so damned oversensitive, then he wouldn’t have had to run after her to apologise, wouldn’t have run into her father or stood up for her either, not that she’d thanked him for that! His lip curled contemptuously. From now on, he’d stick with the Cordelia Braithwaites of the world. Women like Violet Harper were more trouble than they were worth.

  He turned away, mentally consigning his father, Harper and the whole room, Arthur excepted, to the deepest, darkest region of Hades. As for Violet Harper, future sister-in-law or not, he earnestly hoped he never set eyes on her again.

  Chapter One

  March 1867—five years later

  The snow started to fall around midday.

  Violet tugged at the hood of her thin grey, woefully inadequate cloak and tipped her head back, sticking her tongue out to catch a flake on its tip. It melted at once, sending an icy trickle sliding down the back of her throat. Snow. She’d never been out in it before, had only ever watched it fall through a windowpane, and the new experience was invigorating.

  Nothing, not even bad weather, could dampen her spirits today. She ought to be frightened, sitting in the back of a rickety old cart rattling its way high over the moors, running away from her home, her few friends and everything else she’d ever known, but instead she felt exhilarated. Even the barren heather-and-gorse-filled wilderness didn’t intimidate her this morning, as it always had from a distance. Today it looked free and unconfined and alive, the way that she finally felt inside. In the space of a few hours, she’d travelled further than she ever had in the whole of her twenty-three years previously, not just in distance, but in herself, too. At long last, she’d taken charge of her own future, refusing to be the old, shrinking Violet any longer. For the first time in her life, she felt proud of herself.

  Not a bad accomplishment for her wedding day.

  ‘The mine’s just over that ridge!’ the driver’s boy called back to her. ‘Don’t worry about the weather, miss. We’ve ridden through worse.’

  She gave him a dazzling smile and settled back against the crates bearing supplies up to the miners at Rosedale. The driver had promised to take her on to Helmsley afterwards, though she could only imagine what he and his boy must be thinking of her. Her friend Ianthe had vouched for them, both for their characters as well as their ability to keep a secret, but they must surely still be wondering why a lone gentlewoman would arrange to meet them at dawn on the outskirts of Whitby as if she were fleeing the clutches of some evil tyrant.

  Which in one sense, she supposed, she was.

  She’d been planning her escape for the past week, almost from the moment Mr Rowlinson had taken her aside after her father’s funeral, saying he preferred to communicate the terms of the will in private. It hadn’t taken her long to understand why. The lawyer had been apologetic as he’d read, watching her anxiously over the metal rim of his spectacles, though no amount of sympathetic looks could have mitigated the shock of those words. Looking back she felt strangely detached from the scene, as if it had been someone else sitting in her chair like some kind of black-clad statue, frozen in horror as her father bequeathed her in marriage to the heir of Amberton Castle.

  Bequeathed!

  In that moment she’d felt something harden inside her, as if all her feelings of grief and loss had crystallised into something else, something colder and darker. She didn’t know what the emotion was, if it even was an emotion at all. It felt more like the absence of one, an emptiness at the very centre of her being, as if her ability to feel anything had been suspended.

  She remembered laughing. She must have sounded hysterical because Mr Rowlinson had rushed to pour her a glass of brandy and, for the first time in her life, she’d accepted. Her father had never allowed her to touch any kind of alcohol, but she’d wanted to drink the whole bottle just to spite him.

  A few sips had put paid to that idea, making her cough and splutter and her head spin even more as she’d tried to understand how her father could have done such a thing to her. After so many years of obedience, of living her life in the shadows, tolerating his abuse and his insults, how could he
have arranged a marriage without even telling her—let alone asking her? Just when she’d thought she might finally be free.

  She ought to have known that he wouldn’t let her go so easily. He’d never allowed her to make any decisions of her own and now it seemed he intended to keep on controlling her life even after his death. The terms of the will were so strict that even Mr Rowlinson had faltered in reading them. Unconventional as it was to hold a wedding so soon after a funeral, her father’s words were as uncompromising and unyielding as ever. Unless she married the man of his choosing within one month of his burial, she would be disinherited, would lose her home and her fortune to a distant cousin in Lancashire. In short, she would be penniless.

  Unless she did as she was told.

  Her spinning thoughts had rushed back to the ball at Amberton Castle five years before, the one and only such event she’d ever attended. At least the will finally explained why her father had been so uncharacteristically keen for her to spend time with Arthur Amberton, not just at the ball, but on the monthly visits he’d made with his own father since.

  She’d been vaguely suspicious, especially when her father had started to drop hints about her future, even once going so far as to actually say he’d arranged a marriage for her, though she’d eventually concluded that it was some kind of cruel joke. After all, he was the one who’d always told her how small and unattractive she was, how only a fortune hunter would pretend to want her, how she was better off without a husband. It hadn’t made any sense that he would ever want her to marry.

  Besides which, there had never been anything in Arthur Amberton’s behaviour to suggest that he was remotely interested in her. He’d always looked as depressed on his visits as he had the first time they’d met at the ball. Their few conversations had been stilted and uncomfortable, their fathers watching over them like a pair of severe-looking owls. He’d never as much as hinted at a secret engagement, if he’d even known of it, though if he had, he couldn’t have made it any more obvious that he didn’t want to marry her. No more than she’d wanted to marry him.

  Though even he would have been preferable to the alternative...

  She pulled her hood tight around her face, oppressed by a wave of sadness. Arthur Amberton had been lost at sea seven months before, sailing his small boat along the North Yorkshire coast on a calm, late summer’s day. He’d gone out alone, without telling anyone where he was going, and his boat had been discovered by a fishing vessel the next day, intact and undamaged, though Arthur himself had been nowhere to be found. There’d been numerous theories—that he’d hit his head and fallen overboard, that he’d been attacked, that he’d gone for a swim and developed cramp—though no one had wanted to mention the obvious answer, that he’d taken his own life rather than live with his despair a day longer. Rather than marry her.

  Ironically, she’d been the one who’d insisted on keeping the news from her father. He’d been bedridden already by that point and she hadn’t wanted to distress him any further. She’d been half-afraid that Henry Amberton, Arthur’s father, might make an appearance, but the following day had brought further bad news. The father had suffered a fatal heart attack on being told about the empty boat. Father and son had died within twenty-four hours of each other, leaving a different heir to the estate.

  Captain Lancelot Edward Amberton, the new Viscount Scorborough.

  The very thought of him made her shudder, evoking the same feeling of stomach-churning embarrassment she’d felt at their first encounter. She’d been hopelessly naive, actually enjoying his company to begin with. She’d been excited and nervous about her first ball, all too vividly aware of the strange looks and whispered comments she knew her tiny size and extreme paleness attracted, but Captain Amberton had seemed not to notice.

  He’d been confident, friendly and open, unlike any man she’d ever met before, seeming to embody the very freedom the ball represented. He’d come to her rescue when his father and brother had been arguing, encouraging her to talk when she felt tongue-tied and putting her at ease when she’d been too afraid to dance. She’d actually defied her father by dancing with him and she couldn’t deny how attractive she’d found him, far more so than his brother despite their being identical twins, with his carelessly swept-back chestnut hair, his broad, muscular frame, and the roguish glint in his eye that had made her want to smile, too. When he’d held her in his arms she’d felt a new and distinctly alarming sensation, a tremulous fluttering low in her abdomen, that had made her feel giddy and excited and awkward all at the same time.

  That was before she’d realised he’d been laughing at her, mocking her about the possibility of suitors, as if she’d ever have any. She’d felt self-conscious enough at the start of the evening, but then she’d earnestly wished herself back in the isolation of her own bedroom.

  Despite that humiliation, however, worse still had been the scene that had followed. Confusingly, he’d seemed to be standing up for her at first, though she’d felt compelled to defend her own father. The moment when he’d said he wouldn’t want to marry her had been one of the worst of her life. She could hardly have expected any other answer, but the words had still felt like a knife to the heart.

  Yet his subsequent banishment had seemed like her fault somehow. Too late, she’d tried to say something to help, but she hadn’t been able to stop it. He’d stormed away and the look he’d given her from the doorway had been anything but friendly. It had seemed more like he hated her.

  Her father had taken her aside afterwards, forbidding her to mention the name Lancelot Amberton in his hearing ever again, and she’d overheard enough of the subsequent gossip to understand why. What she’d thought was a hint of scandal about him was in fact the whole truth. He was exactly what her father had called him, a reprobate. A drunkard, a gambler, a notorious ladies’ man—and now the man that she was supposed to marry!

  Never in a thousand years would her father have intended to leave her at the mercy of such a man, but he’d made one significant mistake in writing his will. He hadn’t specified a name, simply stating the heir to the Amberton estate—and the new heir was Lance.

  She refused to even consider the possibility of marriage to him. He’d returned to Yorkshire a few months before, invalided out of the army a bare month after the deaths of his brother and father with a bullet wound to the leg, or so she’d heard, though he hadn’t been seen in Whitby at all. It was rumoured that he’d become a recluse, never venturing further than the walls of Amberton Castle.

  He hadn’t attended her father’s funeral either, hadn’t sent any flowers, nor so much as a card of sympathy. The only communication had come two days afterwards through Mr Rowlinson—a brief note to say that he intended to honour the terms of their fathers’ agreement, that he would meet and marry her exactly one week later, at ten o’clock on the tenth day of March, 1867.

  So she’d run away. He was the last man on earth she wanted to see, let alone to marry, and yet she was very much afraid that if she stayed then she would. After a lifetime of obedience, she wasn’t sure exactly how to assert herself, and Lancelot Amberton had struck her as the kind of man who knew exactly how to get what he wanted. And he wanted her fortune—that much she was sure of. It was the only possible motive he could have for wanting to marry her.

  In which case, she’d decided, all she needed to do was hide and wait for the terms of her father’s will to expire. Captain Amberton might make efforts to find her during that time, but once the month lapsed, he’d lose interest and she’d be safe. It would leave her almost penniless, all except for a small legacy left by her mother, but it would mean freedom, and surely even a life of poverty would be better than him.

  She’d confided her plans to her dearest friend in the world, Ianthe Felstone, and whilst she hadn’t approved, she had understood. After some initial reluctance they’d plotted her escape together.

  Ianthe had arranged for Violet to
join the supply run that left her husband Robert’s warehouse every two weeks for the Rosedale mines. Then she’d volunteered to go to Whitby station on the morning of the wedding, draped in a heavy black veil to catch the train to Pickering as a decoy. Even her eccentric Aunt Sophoria had been roped in. Ianthe had flatly refused to let her travel without a chaperon, so it was Sophoria that Violet was going to meet in Helmsley, from where they intended to travel to York.

  Nervous as she was, the thought of visiting such a large city with all its museums and art galleries and parks was thrilling. She’d resolved to make the most of her time there because afterwards...

  In all honesty, she had no idea about what she’d do afterwards, but she’d think of something. She’d escape first and think about the future later. She could be a governess or a companion, if anyone would take her, but there was one thing she was absolutely determined about, that she would never live under the control of any man, not ever, ever again. She wouldn’t be told what to do, nor how to think about herself or anything else either. From now on, she’d be free.

  She clenched her fists at the thought, then loosened them again quickly as the cart lurched forward suddenly and then down, giving an ear-splitting creak as it dropped to one side so forcefully that she toppled with it, banging her head against one of the crates. For a few seconds, the world seemed to spin and blur, the whirling snowflakes above turning rainbow-coloured, before she focused again on the boy’s face peering down at her.

  ‘Are you all right, miss?’

  Tentatively, she reached a hand to her temples. She felt slightly dazed, but otherwise unharmed. That was a relief. She wouldn’t get very far injured.

  ‘I think so.’ She took his proffered hand and clambered inelegantly over the front of the trap. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Pothole. One of the wheels has come loose from the axle.’