“Lydia?”
The widow Moira stood in the doorway, a few steps behind the girl, watching the child nervously.
“I found her in the garden my Lord,” Moira said hesitantly, “After you sent me to check on her. She said that she had felt too hot and wanted to walk in the dewy grass.”
“I saw a wolf,” the still pale Lydia said solemnly to her father, continuing from where Moira left off. “Just at the edge of the wood.”
“Oh?” James asked, becoming worried that, in his grief, he had started to hallucinate with all the talk of wolves and morning dew. He pinched himself, and was glad when it hurt.
“It wanted me to follow it,” Lydia continued dreamily, her face pale and covered with a sheen of sweat, despite the coldness of the night. “But I didn’t, I didn’t want to leave you and Mummy.”
“Don’t ever leave me Lydia,” the Earl said gravely, gathering his youngest daughter into his arms and hugging her close. His body was wracked with grief and sorrow, but there was one small beacon of light in all the gloom, and it was his youngest child. “Please don’t ever leave me Lydia.”
“I won’t,” the young girl replied, her violet eyes wide and solemn. “I won’t ever leave.”
“She has to leave James!”
Tabitha Linfield, Dowager Duchess of Blackmore, and elder sister of the Earl of Galway, stood glaring at her brother, her hands on her hips. Although she had only three years on her younger sibling, Tabitha had acquired an air of unquestionable authority during her two decades as a Duchess, and she wasn’t afraid of pulling rank on her little brother.
“She doesn’t want to leave Tibby,” James replied with a nonchalant shrug. The sixteen years since the death of his wife and two daughters had rendered the Earl unrecognizable. He had had taken the liberty of using grief as an excuse to give up his least favourite part of grooming, shaving, and he now sported an exceptionally long, grandfather-like, white beard. Tabitha wrinkled her nose as she surveyed it; it rather looked like it might be housing a family of lost birds. Grief had aged him in other ways, his shoulders were stooped and his smile, which had always been quick, was now mostly absent and just a shadow of what it had once been - except when he smiled at Lydia, only then did Tibby glimpse the younger brother she had lost.
“She thinks she doesn’t want to leave,” Tabitha continued, interrupting her brother with a glare, “Because you have been hiding her away from society all of her life. How can the girl know what she’s missing, when she’s stuck in the middle of nowhere, with only a crazed hermit for company?”
“I am not a hermit,” the Earl stuttered, affronted by the insult. “People visit with me all of the time.”
Tabitha bit her tongue, she knew what type of people her brother had taken up with since his wife’s passing: poets, painters, and Papists. His home had become a mecca for bohemians visiting Ireland, and he had earned himself a reputation as being quite mad. All this would have been fine if it wasn’t for Lydia; at the age of twenty she had never had a season and people were beginning to speak.
“What do I care what people say?” the Earl scoffed when his sister informed him of this fact. People had been discussing him for years, even his own solicitor sent him correspondences stating he was deranged for selling off his lands after his mother’s death and entailing the proceeds to Lydia.
“I know you have little regard for society,” Tibby snapped, “But what about Lydia? What will happen when you die, and you have left her alone and unmarried in a hostile country?”
The Irish had begun a series of rebellions in 1798, and to this day random acts of violence against the ruling classes occurred. James was quite lucky, in that his tenants were loyal, and despite his English origins the Earl was a vocal supporter of emancipation. Many of the Irish had absentee landlords settled on them - titled men who lived in London and had never once set foot on Irish soil - who employed vicious stewards to collect high rents. These agents often treated the tenants with contempt, whilst pilfering monies meant for developing the land. Unlike the wretched absentee landlords, James had invested large sums of money in the lands around Stockett House, building roads and bridges where needed - but the Irish political landscape was volatile, and his sister had a valid point: who would take care of Lydia when he was no longer there to do so himself?
“She will have every reprobate and second son throwing themselves at her for her fortune,” James huffed, though he was beginning to bend to his sisters’ will.
“On behalf of second sons everywhere,” Edward, Tibby’s youngest son, said with a winning smile, “I should take umbrage with that statement.”
But he wouldn’t, James had never met a man as affable as his young nephew. Edward had just finished at Oxford, and at his mother’s behest had escorted her to Dublin and then across the wild, misty countryside to Galway. He was a keen student of literature, and the Earl had thoroughly enjoyed spending brandy soaked evenings in his library with the young chap.
“No offense meant Edward,” James said apologetically, feeling rather bad for his nephew but standing by his statement. Fortunes drew fortune hunters, and those fortune hunters tended to be title-less younger siblings.
“None taken, Uncle.” Edward winked, snapping the book in his hand closed and laying it on the table before the Earl. The book was a bound, leather collection of love poems from the sixteenth century, and the Earl regarded the gold-embossed title ruefully.
“A life without love, Uncle,” young Edward said solemnly, “Is a life half lived.”
James cast a glance to the portrait above the fireplace, which depicted Kathryn and his three daughters in happier times. He himself had been blessed to know great love in his lifetime, who was he to deny Lydia the opportunity to experience same thing? His wife, ever the foil to his eccentricities, seemed to be scolding him with her gaze. Which of course was entirely ridiculous as it was just a portrait, but the Earl was a slave to ridiculous notions.
“Alright,” he grumbled, “She may go.”
Tabitha gave a smug smile, which faltered at the Earl’s next statement.
“But if you thought society was speaking of Lydia now, wait until they’ve actually met her.”
Lady Lydia Beaufort, a slip of a girl with violet eyes and a dreamy smile, was not what the ton had been expecting when they discovered that the last remaining daughter of the Mad Earl of Galway was in town. Her beauty was evident to all who met her; perfect, delicate features set against porcelain skin, and hair was as dark and lustrous as her late mother’s had been. Her beauty, as well as her connections - not to mention her vast fortune - made her set to be the star of the season. But there was just one problem: Lydia Beaufort had no intentions of being society’s darling.
Having grown up in a home with few rules - bar don’t die unexpectedly - she found the constraints that dictated a young lady’s life in London to be stifling and beyond the absurd, and she felt frustrated as everything she did brought her a lecture from her Aunt.
You must not walk alone in Green Park.
You must not discuss the plight of the poor ad nauseam, at a ball.
You must not blacken your eyelashes with coal soot.
In truth, the last piece of advice from her Aunt was quite sound; in an attempt to add a mysterious aura like that of the author Caro Lamb, Lydia had smeared soot onto her eyelashes and had spent the entirety of one of Lady Cowper’s balls stumbling blindly around the room. This, along with her predilection for saying the first thing that popped into her head without care to who was listening, meant that Lydia soon found herself the object of other ladies’ amusement and giggling. Any of the more eligible London bachelors gave her a wide berth, as her reputation as an oddity began to circulate. Bluestocking, a word often used when describing the Lady Beaufort, was near synonymous with the word Spinster. No man of means wanted a wife who read books; books corrupted gently bred women as surely as a rake would. But the second sons were harder to deter.
Her love of
poetry was well known, and Lydia soon lost count of the number of men who whispered, “She walks in beauty, like the night,” into her ear.
“Doesn’t anyone know any other works by Byron?” she asked in annoyance to her cousin, the Duke of Blackmore, after having to listen to another suitor whisper the quote in her ear, yet again. The floppy haired boys down from Oxford had, for months, been waging battle against her sanity by quoting the famous line to her, in hopes that she - and her fortune - would fall to their prowess
“I highly doubt it,” was Michael’s short response, not being one for wasting words that need not be spoken.
“Do you know what it’s like to be courted for your wealth?” Lydia despaired without thinking, then looked at her cousin suspiciously. The Duke was sure to be the target of any aspirational young upstart, yet at every ball she had seen him attend (which were few, if truth be told), the young ladies of the ton had appeared almost frightened of him, a few even squeaking in horror at the sight of him.
“Oh, I do,” Michael replied his eyes dancing kindly, “And don’t tell my mother this, but the solution to being left in peace is to be unquestionably rude.”
“Really?”
“Unquestionably,” the Duke stressed.
Armed with this advice, Lydia spent the next few years making a sport of verbally sparring with the fortune hunters who sought her out.
“Would my lady care to dance?” a priggish young buck asked at Almack’s.
“My lady would rather eat a live chicken,” Lydia replied with a sniff.
Her newly acquired prickly demeanour soon meant that only those in most desperate financial straits - and a few fools who thought themselves in love - dared darken her door. The years passed and soon she was four and twenty, approaching the age at which she would come into her large fortune and leave London if she so desired.
“You can’t tell me that I did not try to give you the chance to find love,” Tibby reflected sadly, ignoring her niece’s dark look at the mention of the L word.
Who would risk their heart on something as foolish as love? Lydia thought dourly, when the only thing it brought was a lifetime of heartbreak and unhappiness. Just look at her father, she reasoned, trapped in the past and longing for the day he would be reunited with his wife and two daughters. People were mortal, and therefore no trust was to be placed in them, none what so ever. And there was no point in loving an English man, who thought that a wife was simply an adopted child, forbidden from doing anything remotely entertaining, or even taking a walk in the park unchaperoned. No, Lydia had had her fill of London life and was happy to plot her return to Ireland, that is until a blond-haired aristocrat arrived into her life.
Gabriel Livingstone, Marquess of Sutherland.
The best friend of her half cousin Sebastian, Lydia had no idea how she had missed the tall, loud creature during her four seasons in town. He wasn’t hard to overlook, what with his bright hair, constant chatter and a laugh that sounded off like a cannon booming whenever something amused him, which happened quite often when he was around her.
“Would my lady care to dance?” the Marquess had asked, at the first ball they had attended since their formal introduction.
“My lady would rather eat the disembowelled entrails of an ostrich,” Lydia responded dourly, hoping to deter him.
“Smashing,” undeterred the Marquess smiled wickedly, his tawny eyes dancing, “Give me five minutes and I’ll fetch some rope and a fork for the Lady Beaufort, though I can’t promise we’ll find an ostrich roaming around Belgravia.”
He was incredibly infuriating, but as her only two friends, Aurelia, and Isabella, married and Lydia’s final season was coming to an end, he was also her closest companion left in London. Loyal and amusing, she quickly became very fond of the Marquess, despite his endless good humour. She had never met a man so cheerful; it confounded belief.
“No one could possibly be in a good mood all of the time Lucifer,” she grumbled, adding her pet name for Gabriel - who she knew was no angel - to soften her complaints.
“Only around you Lydia,” was the flippant reply, “Your gallows humour and bleak outlook on nearly everything could only inspire the opposite emotion in a man. It’s a kind of stubbornness, more than cheerfulness itself.”
They were walking though the London Portrait Gallery, following a few steps behind the Dowager Duchess who was there to view a likeness of herself, that had been painted by one of her many admirers.
“I hope his romance skills are better than his painting skills,” the Marquess observed wryly behind his hand, as the gathered party were presented with a most unflattering portrait of the Dowager Duchess.
Lydia stifled a giggle; the muscles of her Aunt’s jaw were clenched, as she desperately tried to hold the forced smile upon her face. The crowd murmured platitudes to both Mr. Butler, the artist, and the Duchess, but Lydia could see that even they thought the rendition an abomination.
“If I painted a portrait of you,” the Marquess said thoughtfully as the party began to disperse, “I would paint you in the style of Mr. Serres.”
“But he paints ships,” Lydia replied with confusion; was she being compared to a twenty-ton vessel?
“Yes,” the Marquess gave a smile, that was not his normal, easy grin, but a rather pale shade of its usual form. “Great ships battling through stormy seas, a seemingly hopeless undertaking; but in the small shafts of light, Mr. Serres gives us glimpses of hope…”
Lydia remained silent as she contemplated his words. Was she the ship or the storm? She could not quite work out which, but the sudden softness in the Marquess’ eyes made her feel that she was all at sea herself. It seemed from his words that their relationship was bound to take a different course or sink completely. A thought which left the usually fearless Lady Beaufort feeling more than a little bit nervous.
Damn you Lucifer, she thought with a scowl.
Chapter One
He was dressed impeccably; the heliotrope velvet that trimmed his tailcoat was matched exactly to the embroidered cloth of his cravat. His Hessian boots gleamed in the lamplight, as only boots that are polished by a footman can. He carried a cane, not out of necessity one could see, but for show; there was no one more fashionable in the city of London than Gabriel Livingstone, Marquess of Sutherland.
The young Marquess hummed a jaunty tune as he strolled through the soft evening towards Kings Street, where Almack’s assembly rooms were housed. Gabriel gave the impression of being a most cheerful sort of fellow – which he was – but the breadth of his shoulders, and the knowing gleam in his tawny eyes announced to the world that he was no soft touch. One could tell, just from a passing glance, that this was a man who was both feared and revered – and that it was entirely of his choosing which feeling he deigned to inspire.
Luckily for the assembled, genteel, masses in Almack’s, the Marquess of Sutherland was in a most delightful mood. He strolled nonchalant into the ball room, absently appreciating the splendour of the guests as they moved under the light of the crystal chandeliers. His presence drew a few curious glances, for he was not known to often frequent the rooms which acted as a gentrified marriage mart for the ton. He spotted a few Mamma’s whispering behind fans to their daughters whilst looking in his direction, but he ignored them. He was not here to find a simpering debutant to make his bride, he was there for another reason: and that reason was standing in a corner of the ball room, surrounded by a group of young bucks all braying for her attention.
Lady Lydia Beaufort.
Gabe smiled to himself as he took in her glum face and gloomy attire; a dress of soft lilac that could pass for grey – a nod to her Romantic sensibilities. For Lydia, a trip to Almack’s was akin to attending a funeral, and Gabe knew that she would happily have worn widow’s black, only that her formidable Aunt – the Dowager Duchess of Blackmore - would not allow her. He paused momentarily, in the middle of the crowded ballroom, to appreciate her beauty. He had become so accustomed to her c
ompany, and the delightful conversations - and not so delightful bickering - that they engaged in, that sometimes he near forgot just how stunning she was. Tonight, her beauty struck him to his very soul as he stood observing her from afar. For Lydia was beautiful, pale, and bright as the moon, with cat shaped eyes that sparkled as she spoke. Her beauty was all the more attractive because Gabriel could see the amusement that danced in her eyes and tugged at the corner of her luscious lips as she listened to her suitors speak. While Lydia adored portraying a desperately semi-tragic, Romantic aura to the outside world, inside Gabe knew her to be brimming over with humour and sarcasm. It was an entirely new phenomenon to the Marquess; he had never known that a woman could be so much fun with her clothes on. Tired of simply watching, Gabe sidled up to the rag tag group, taking in their conversation as he walked.
“We were hunting in Glenmorrell,” a young lad called Percy Hogarth, the second son of some unimportant Baron, was saying, his jowls quivering as he spoke. “When a stag, twice the size of my horse leapt out of nowhere, like a daemon fleeing hell.”
Gabriel raised his eyebrows incredulously; he was yet to meet a stag that size in all his years of hunting, in fact he was certain that a stag that size had never existed and that Percy was either telling tall tales - or that his horse was in fact, a Shetland Pony. And if it was, then Gabe pitied the poor pony as he took in Hogarth’s considerable girth.
“I shot it of course,” young Hogarth continued pompously, turning to Lydia to see if she was impressed. Gabe bit back a smile as he noted his friend yawning behind her hand; Lydia was never one to feign interest when there was none to be found. Hogarth’s face fell as he realised that the Lady Beaufort was less than impressed by his supposed heroics. Gabriel knew that as a second son Hogarth would have to marry into money, and for the last four seasons Lydia Beaufort had been the prize that every spare heir had aspired to, thanks to the stipend that her father had promised to her on her twenty-fifth birthday. However, her acerbic wit and general disdain for fortune hunters meant that she had remained – as she wished – unmarried. Greed unfortunately, meant that one rebuffed would-be suitor, was soon replaced by another. It was positively exhausting to witness.
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