A Passionate Deception

by Merry Farmer

  The rakish smile that spread across Lord Henry’s tempting lips took the breath right from her lungs. Of course, the air refused to rush back in for an entirely different reason when he answered, “For revenge, of course.”

  It was as if someone had handed her a beautiful rose, only for her to discover it was full of beetles.

  “Oh,” she said, shoulders dropping.

  Lord Henry was quick to see that he’d said the wrong thing. “Not out of malice,” he rushed to say, although Ellie had a hard time imagining how any sort of revenge could possibly not contain malice. “It’s just that my father needs to be shown that it’s disgraceful to treat his sons like commodities to be traded.”

  Ellie bit her lip uncertainly. “You have brothers in the same boat?”

  “I have one brother, my older brother and heir to Father’s title, Reese.”

  “And your father has arranged a marriage for him as well?”

  “To a German princess, of all things,” Lord Henry explained. “Princess Olympia von Cleves.”

  Ellie’s eyes went wide. “Wow. A real princess.”

  “Germany is full of them,” Lord Henry told her with a grin. “Father managed to pick out the one with the greatest prestige for poor Reese, who has been even less excited about his upcoming nuptials than I am. So it fell on my shoulders to marry for money.”

  “That’s awful.” The very idea made Ellie feel a little sick.

  “Which is exactly why it would be a lark to turn the tables on him,” Lord Henry went on.

  As much as Ellie felt sympathetic to everything Lord Henry and his brother were being put through, she still squirmed with unease over what he seemed to be suggesting. “Are…are you saying that you want to marry me…because I don’t have money?” And, she was sure, because she was nothing more than an American whore.

  “Don’t worry,” Lord Henry said, visibly enjoying the conversation and where it was going. “We wouldn’t have to go through with the marriage. But it would be jolly good fun to bring you home to Albany Court and to watch Father fawn all over you, only to reveal to him down the road that you’re a solid, working-class woman. We could prove to him that the kind of people he thinks of as less than human are just as charming and capable as German princesses.”

  As delighted as he seemed by the whole thing, Ellie’s mood was flattening by the second. “You want me to continue pretending to be Miss Mortimer,” she said, needing to state it all aloud. “You want me to go with you to your family’s country estate, to meet your parents, spend time with them, get your father to like me…and then you want to reveal that I’m a nothing, a nobody?”

  At last, a crack of conscience seemed to cut through the joy the idea obviously gave him. “Only to show him that there’s no such thing as a nobody, that everyone is a somebody. And only if you want to,” he said. “If you’re not completely committed to the idea, or if you find it repugnant in any way, of course we’ll let the whole thing drop. I’ll take you to your friends who own the shop, and we can part ways as friends.”

  Ellie leaned back against the velvet seat, staring straight forward. She wondered if Lord Henry had any idea of what he’d just dropped in her lap, wondered if he knew that, for the first time in her life, she was driving in splendor while wearing fine silk in a city that had been the stuff of dreams up until then. She wondered if he had any sort of concept of the difference between spending time as a rich woman or going on to struggle away as a working-class girl at Ram Singh’s store. He was offering her cozy featherbeds, sumptuous meals, and fancy clothes, like Miss Mortimer was used to, instead of rugged accommodations and uncertainty. And he was offering them to a woman who had worked her way up from the cribs in back of a saloon, where a woman couldn’t expect to live more than two years before the clap or childbirth got her, before she’d been found and saved by Bonnie.

  All she had to do was play a joke on a man she didn’t know, who was surely her better.

  “I wouldn’t ask this of you if my father didn’t truly deserve a taste of his own medicine,” Lord Henry said, as if sensing her hesitance. She sent him an uncertain look. “Think of this as an extended holiday for you,” he went on, perhaps reading her thoughts after all. “When are you ever going to get to have an experience like this?”

  “Never,” she answered truthfully. There seemed to be more reasons to go ahead with the ruse than to back out of it. That didn’t make it right, though. “What about your brother?” she asked. “And your mother.” She knew from everything Miss Mortimer had told her that Lady Howsden was still an influential part of Lord Howsden’s world.

  “Mother will adore you,” Henry said with a shrug, his smile returning.

  “Wouldn’t it be cruel to disappoint her with falsehood then?”

  Lord Henry frowned as if he hadn’t considered that. He started to speak, closed his mouth, and hesitated. “Perhaps we could find a way to break the truth to her more gently,” he said. “And who knows. If she really takes to you, perhaps she could help you to find a respectable position as a lady’s maid, like you were supposed to be, amongst her circle of friends. She might even be able to find a suitable husband for you.”

  Ellie’s brow flew up, not so much out of excitement at the possibility, but with the wild notion that she wouldn’t want to marry anyone but Lord Henry himself. Of course, that was ridiculous. Back on the ship, she’d been worried about whether she would be able to convince the other servants in English society that she was a real lady’s maid. It would be infinitely more impossible to convince a marchioness that she was an heiress.

  “I would be truly grateful if you would join me in this subterfuge,” Lord Henry said.

  The genuineness in his tone, the impishness in his smile, and the fact that he was still the most handsome man Ellie had ever laid eyes on, even if his character wasn’t completely perfect, crumbled her resolve.

  “You promise that no one who doesn’t deserve it will get hurt by the whole thing?” she asked, including herself among that number.

  “I swear it,” he said, taking her hand in his.

  He didn’t seem like a wicked man. She could tell he was frustrated and impatient with his life, but she’d known bad men in her time, and Lord Henry didn’t have the same feeling of nastiness. Besides, there was something deeper in his dark eyes, something that made her heart melt in her chest.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Ellie’s conscience nagged her for the rest of the journey through London. It nagged her as Lord Henry pointed out the sites and talked to her about the political situation in England and how a group of lords in Parliament that his father hated were trying to craft and pass a bill that would protect the rights of women. It nagged her as they pulled to a stop in front of a stately, white stone home across from a lovely park in a place called Mayfair.

  It stopped nagging her the moment an imposing butler in a crisp suit opened the front door, and Lord Henry escorted her into the most opulent house she’d ever entered. The floors were marble and polished wood. The walls were decorated with stunning wallpaper and hung with more paintings than she’d ever seen in one place in her life. The furniture was delicate and refined, and upholstered with fabrics finer than any gown in Miss Mortimer’s collection. What was more, there was a team of maids and footmen who rushed to take care of her every need, from rose-scented water to wash up in, to tea and tiny cakes to take away the gnawing hunger of not having eaten since breakfast, to serving her and Lord Henry a feast fit for royalty as the two of them sat alone in a dining room that was longer then Bonnie’s entire establishment.

  “I don’t know how I’m going to convince everyone I’m an heiress if I’m going to be surrounded by beautiful, fine things like this,” she told Lord Henry as they started their supper with soup that the footman informed her had been made of turtles. Turtles! Who ever heard of turtle soup?

  Lord Henry laughed, sending her a fond look. “This is not
hing,” he said. “Wait until you see Albany Court.”

  His answer wasn’t reassuring, but it was hard to hold onto anxiety after slipping between cool, white sheets in a bed the size of a hay wagon that felt like sleeping on a cloud. Everything smelled wonderful, looked wonderful, tasted wonderful, and was wonderful. No wonder Miss Mortimer had turned into such a flighty flibbertigibbet. What puzzled Ellie was how she could give all of this up for John the porter.

  Breakfast the next morning was just as magnificent as supper had been, with two kinds of eggs, three kinds of sausages, and enough bacon to feed all of Bonnie’s girls. There was also tea, coffee, toast, and a kind of muffin that Lord Henry called a scone. He showed her how to slather the delicious morsels with thick cream and raspberry jam. One bite, and Ellie was in heaven.

  “I take it you’re feeling more kindly disposed toward our bit of trickery this morning?” Lord Henry asked as he helped her into the carriage after breakfast.

  It was a different carriage, larger and sturdier, and already loaded up with her things and a trunk that must have belonged to him.

  “Let’s just say that I’m going to have quite a lot to write home about,” she replied with a grin.

  Their journey out of London took them along a pleasant road that wound north through the countryside. Ellie was struck by how many things in England were different from where she had lived, both in Haskell and in Missouri growing up. England was just so green, the area they rode through so hilly. The houses that they passed in particular struck her. They were adorable, with dark orange tiled roofs or stuff that she recognized from childhood books as thatching. She was convinced she’d walked right into her own fairy tale.

  And then, just as the sun was dipping low in the sky and bathing everything in a golden light, they left the main road, drove down a lane for a while, passed through a huge gate, and proceeded up a tree-lined path.

  “Are we driving on white stones?” she asked, looking out the window.

  “We are,” Lord Henry laughed. “You should see the way they glow on nights with a full moon. Father had them installed specially to impress guests arriving for balls.”

  Ellie pulled away from the window to stare at him with raised eyebrows. “Wait, are you telling me this is your home? This is Albany Park?”

  Lord Henry’s smile widened. “It has been ever since we passed through the gate.”

  “But that was at least ten minutes ago. You can’t tell me that you own all of this, that this is your front yard.”

  “It is.” Lord Henry winked, then nodded past her to the window. “And that’s the family home.”

  Ellie turned from him, staring out the window as the carriage drove slightly to the side along a path that made a large circle in front of the biggest house she’d ever seen. It wasn’t a house, it was a palace. There was no other word for it. Her jaw dropped and her heart quivered in her chest as she looked out at four stories of elegance in the form of russet bricks and beige stonework. She counted no fewer than twelve enormous windows stretching away from the massive front door on one side and twelve on the other side, and four octagonal towers at the corner points of the building. There was no telling how deep the palace went. Aside from the garden in the circle that the path made in front of the house, complete with splashing fountain, she spotted two other gardens, one on each side of the palace.

  She had definitely stumbled into a fairy tale. But a sudden sense of overwhelming doom hit her. How long until the clock struck midnight and she turned back into an impoverished whore?

  “We’re here,” Lord Henry said in a cheery voice. Excitement rippled off of him. When a footman in a dazzling uniform opened the carriage door, he jumped out, then turned to hand Ellie down.

  Ellie was shaking as her feet touched the white stones. Her mouth had gone dry, and fear of a sort she’d never felt before filled her. The front door of Albany Court was reached by a large set of stairs, and lined up along and in front of them were no fewer than six maids in black uniforms with white aprons, and eight footmen, dressed like the one who had opened the carriage door. Worse still, at the top of the stairs stood another young woman dressed in silks and jewels, her chestnut brown hair piled in a fashionable style, a man who looked a little older than Lord Henry, but very much like him, and the most regal and stately-looking older couple she could imagine.

  The man who must have been Lord Howsden stood ramrod straight, his eyes narrowed, not a hair out of place in his stylish beard and sideburns. Ellie instantly believed everything Lord Henry had said about the man’s coldness and calculation. She knew how to size men up at a glance, and Lord Howsden was the sort she would have dreaded to bring up to her room at Bonnie’s.

  And she had to convince the man she was an heiress…and then reveal to him that she wasn’t.

  “This is a bad idea,” she whispered to Lord Henry. “I’m never going to be able to pull it off.”

  “Sure you will,” he assured her, taking her arm and holding it close, like he was actually fond of her. “Just endear yourself to my mother, and she’ll guide you through everything you need to know.”

  At least until I break her heart, Ellie thought to herself.

  It was too late to back out. Lord Henry escorted her up the grand stairs to meet his family. As he did, each of the servants either bowed or curtsied as she passed. At the top of the stairs, the man who had to be Henry’s brother, Lord Reese, smiled and greeted her with a warm handshake, but the woman by his side, who must have been the princess, fixed her with a cold smile, sized her up the way some of the girls at Bonnie’s did when a new girl, new competition, arrived, and barely said a word.

  “Mother, Father, I would like you to meet my fiancée,” Lord Henry introduced her to his parents at last. “Miss Helena Mortimer.”

  Ellie swallowed, an anxious shock of electricity zipping down her spine. But of course she would have to use Miss Mortimer’s name. Lord Henry’s father was the one who set up the marriage, who knew Mr. Mortimer.

  “My dear, it is such a pleasure to meet you at last.” Lady Howsden stepped forward first, taking both of Ellie’s hands. She exuded warmth and goodness, which only made Ellie want to turn and run to avoid hurting the woman. “You poor thing, you’re shaking,” Lady Howsden said.

  “I’m nervous to meet you,” Ellie confessed, sending a sideways glance to Lord Henry.

  He looked back with a moment of hesitation, a flash of doubt in his eyes, as if he too were worried the ruse wasn’t such a great idea.

  “Whatever for?” Lady Howsden laughed, the sound like a mountain stream bubbling over rocks. “We’re to be family, you and I. There’s nothing to be nervous about.”

  “I just want to make a good impression,” Ellie said, praying that was the right answer.

  “Well, you have made a delightful impression on me.” Lady Howsden pivoted and rested a hand on the small of Ellie’s back as she presented her to Lord Howsden. “And I’m sure you’ve made a fine impression on Lord Howsden as well.” There was a distinct note of frostiness in her voice that left Ellie wondering if Lord and Lady Howsden got along when there weren’t people around.

  “Delighted to meet you at last,” Lord Howsden said in a gruff, impatient voice. “I trust your father is well?”

  Another wave of prickles broke out across Ellie’s skin. Lord Howsden knew Mr. Mortimer, but how well? Were they in contact? Would Mr. Mortimer send a telegram as soon as he found out his daughter had run off? How long did they really have before the entire ruse blew up in their faces?

  “I believe he is well,” Ellie said, conscious of her voice trembling along with the rest of her. She scrambled to remember everything Miss Mortimer had said about her family during the ocean voyage. “He and Mama were planning to head out to their seaside house on Long Island for a while after I departed. I haven’t been in touch with them.”

  “I’m certain that as soon as they’re done with their holiday, they’ll wire to ask after you,” Lady Howsden said wit
h a reassuring smile.

  Ellie dreaded the thought, but at least the Mortimers were away from home for a while. That might buy her time after all.

  “It’s a shame they couldn’t come over for the wedding,” Lord Reese said, joining the family circle they’d formed. Princess Olympia hung back, a sour scowl on her face.

  Again, Ellie scrambled to recall everything Miss Mortimer had told her. “Papa is very busy with his investments at the moment. They’re planning to visit in the spring, though.”

  “We’ll welcome them when they do,” Lord Howsden said. “Especially if they bring the remainder of your dowry with them.”

  “Thomas!” Lady Howsden hissed.

  “What?” Lord Howsden frowned right back at her. “The girl knows what this match is as well as the rest of us.”

  “Still,” Lady Howsden whispered. “You mustn’t speak of such things.”

  Lord Howsden sniffed. “Poole,” he called to one of the men in uniform who looked slightly older than the footmen. “Will supper be served soon?”

  “Momentarily, my lord,” the man answered with a deep bow.

  He must have been the butler, Mr. Poole, Ellie reasoned. And the older woman standing next to him must have been the housekeeper, Mrs. Abbott, the woman she’d been so anxious about impressing as Miss Mortimer’s maid. Mrs. Abbott smiled at her with deference now and stepped forward to say, “I thought you might like to freshen up before supper, miss. Betsy here can act as your maid, since you don’t seem to have one?”

  Ellie flushed with panic, but Henry rescued her with, “She does not. The silly girl ran off with one of the ship’s porters as soon as they docked.” He sent a teasing glance Ellie’s way.

  “How awful.” Lady Howsden shook her head. “But I’m sure Betsy will be happy to see to your every need.” She turned to one of the maids, who curtsied and sent Ellie a reassuring smile. “She’ll show you up to your room and help you with whatever you need.”

  “Thank you,” Ellie said, holding herself back from bowing to the woman the way she’d deferred to the guests at The Cattleman Hotel.