And she would write and tell George so. The opportunity for action gave Rosalyn courage. This was George’s problem and he must solve it. She would not go to Aunt Agatha’s docilely. She’d lived with the old tartar once before. A more petulant, difficult woman didn’t walk the face of the earth. Nor could Rosalyn leave Covey behind to live on parish charity—however, if Rosalyn had been a burden to Aunt Agatha, Covey would be even more so.
Rosalyn looked down at the deed in her right hand. How she wished she’d had the funds to purchase Maiden Hill for her own. If she owned it, she would never let it go….
The random thought took shape in her mind, and Rosalyn knew what she had to do.
Colin had never felt so awkward in his life. He’d driven all night from London, spurred on by the pride of ownership. He remembered Maiden Hill from his childhood. He’d always admired the house, even during his early, misspent youth. Now it was his.
He had expected the house to be occupied. Woodford had told him the estate had been maintained and there were obligations outstanding to the servants that Colin would have to settle. It hadn’t mattered. Colin wanted the estate.
However, this Rosalyn was anything but a servant, and he sensed matters were going to be very sticky—especially if there were a good number of people in the Valley who, like Mrs. Covington, remembered him from the days before Father Ruley had straightened him up.
“Lady Rosalyn is very upset,” Covey confided.
“I noticed,” he answered. So, she was Lady Rosalyn. This mess was getting worse by the minute. He cast an anxious eye on the staircase. Most of his hard-earned fortune was tied up in that deed, and he wanted it back the moment she came down the stairs. He also yearned to walk through the house, to inspect every nook and cranny. This was his house, a symbol of all he’d been working toward. He was a landowner.
“How is your husband?” he asked Mrs. Covington.
Her expression saddened. “Alfred passed away a month before my lady arrived at Maiden Hill. Her presence helped me with my loss. I hope I haven’t done anything terribly wrong by forgetting the letter?”
“It was bad news no matter when it was received,” he assured her.
She relaxed slightly. “Yes, you are right. Perhaps you would like to wait in the sitting room?” she suggested, as if remembering her social duties.
“I’ll wait here,” Colin answered.
His brother would be surprised Colin owned Maiden Hill. He would be surprised Colin had returned from France. Colin was not the best correspondent, although his brother, like all true clergymen, had written faithfully at least once a month.
Shifting his weight, Colin noticed signs of age and wear in the tight hallway. The tile in one corner was cracked and loose. The walls needed painting, and there was a water mark on the ceiling.
“Your brother is a fine man,” Covey said.
“He is.”
“He has a fine family, too.”
“Yes.”
“My favorite is Emma. Such a sweet child…but then there is the new baby, too.”
“Another baby?” Colin shook his head. “How many do they have?” Of course, Matt had written about the children, but only just this moment had they become real.
“Five, I believe. All handsome children.”
Five. Colin swallowed his opinion. At one time, Matt had been as ambitious as himself. Matt’s goal had been to ascend in the hierarchy of the Church, a vocation for which he’d been well suited. However, once he’d met Valerie, his aspirations had melted away, and he had, apparently, settled for a country parish and a horde of children.
It was too bad, really. Matt could have been a bishop.
“Lady Rosalyn,” he said, “she is what to Woodford?”
“Oh, they are cousins. Lord Woodford doesn’t write very often. I should have known the letter was important. I know I meant to give it to her. It seems of late I’d forget my head if it wasn’t attached.”
To that pronouncement, Colin had no opinion. However, Lady Rosalyn was a different story.
She was Quality. A true pearl of the first water, in spite of the fact that she appeared to be one of those who didn’t seem to care how she presented herself. Her dress was more suited to a chambermaid than a lady, and her hairstyle was too tight and dowdy for her age. Her hair was a dark brown, and her nose straight and aristocratic. He had no doubt all the Valley matrons, as he and his mates used to refer to the wives of the gentry, basked in her reflected haughtiness.
As if his thoughts had conjured her, there was a rustle of movement from the top of the stairs. Colin looked up expectantly and watched Lady Rosalyn walk down the stairs. He noticed two things—one, she held his deed in her hand, and the second, she had trim ankles. He suspected she was all leg.
He liked long legs, but usually on younger and more attractive women. It wasn’t as if Lady Rosalyn was ugly—she was far from that—however, there was something determinedly spinsterish about her. She’d placed herself on the shelf, not the world, and far be it for him to argue with her.
Still, he did notice that for such a rigid, conventional woman, she had surprisingly lush, full lips. They might or might not be kissable. He couldn’t tell because, at the moment, they were pressed together in anger.
As she reached the bottom stair, he saw that, in addition to the deed, she also held a crumpled letter. The correspondence from Woodford. Colin could have cursed the man, not only for his unfeeling incompetence but also for placing the mess in Colin’s lap.
“Lady Rosalyn, I know this is difficult—” Colin started.
Her angry gaze swept past him and went straight out the door. “Your horse is in my perennial bed again,” she interrupted as if he’d not spoken at all.
Colin turned, and, sure enough, Oscar was stomping all through the overturned earth, rooting with his nose for any shoots of green. Colin went out the door onto the front step. “Oscar, get out of there!”
The huge chestnut twitched an ear in Colin’s direction and then had the audacity to pretend he hadn’t heard as he kept rooting through the earth.
Colin turned to Lady Rosalyn. “Usually he is better mannered—” He stopped. This was no time to lie. “No, that’s not true. Oscar has the manners of a cow.”
“He looks a bit like a cow,” she observed icily.
“He’s good-sized and fairly ugly,” Colin answered, struggling to keep his own anger in check. “But he carried me well into French cannons and I forgive him much.”
For the first time since coming downstairs, Lady Rosalyn looked at him. Her eyes were a grayish green. Hostile eyes without guile framed by feminine, long black lashes.
“I don’t care if Wellington himself rode your horse to drive Napoleon out of France,” she said. “I-want-him-out-of-my-flower-bed.”
Her imperiousness sliced through him. No one talked down to Colin. Not anymore.
“Do you mean my flower bed?” he countered. “I know you are unhappy, Lady Rosalyn, but with all due respect, the deed says it all belongs to me now, and if Oscar wants to graze there, I give him leave to do so. We’ve traveled a long way together to arrive here.”
He anticipated a spate of temper. Or even feminine tears.
He hadn’t foreseen her slamming the door in his face.
The key in the inside lock turned. He was shut out.
Colin stood in disbelief. She’d locked him out with his own key—and she had the deed. She could sign it or cross things out and it would take him ages to regather the witnesses and correct it.
Bloody hell.
“Lady Rosalyn, open this door.”
For the past decade, whenever Colin had given an order, it had been instantly obeyed. His men had known better than to defy him.
Lady Rosalyn’s answer was obstinate silence.
Chapter Two
“What did you do after she slammed the door in your face?” his brother, the good Reverend Matthew Mandland, asked.
They stood by the hearth in the a
ll-too-cozy cottage that served as rectory for St. Mary Magdalene’s Church. The rugs were worn and the furniture, past its prime, but one knew this was a home.
Of course, there was no privacy in the small sitting room. Matt’s wife, Valerie, had ignored any of Colin’s hints that he wished to talk to her husband alone. She rocked the latest addition to the family—a baby girl named Sarah—while five-year-old Joseph charged through the room chasing his four-year-old sister, Emma, the one Mrs. Covington liked so much. The twosome disappeared in the kitchen only to turn and run back out again.
To top it all off, Colin’s night of travel and the euphoria of buying Maiden Hill were catching up with him. “What did I do?” he repeated, trying to hear himself think. “Well, since she had taken the key from me, I ordered her to open the door. She ignored me. I pounded on the door, but she would not let me in. Finally, I shouted at her and, frankly, made a fool of myself. Unfortunately, she had time to lock or bar all the doors to the house.”
Valerie shook her head. “Nothing ever comes of losing one’s temper, Colin. You of all people should know that.”
Colin bit his tongue and an urge to strangle her. Funny how he could have been away for a little over a decade, mastered his way to the top of his field, led men on the battlefield, and received commendations from Wellington himself, but when he returned to his family they talked to him as if he’d never left. They assumed he was the same wild seventeen-year-old of their memory.
He’d noticed they’d changed.
Couldn’t they see the same in him?
He picked up the poker and, resisting the urge to smash something with it, stirred the peat embers in the hearth. In a low voice intended for his brother alone, he said, “I’ve traveled all night, spent the better part of three hours cooling my heels on the porch of my house, and still don’t have the deed. I could hire a solicitor, but there must be a better way to get the damn deed back.”
“Lady Rosalyn doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to do,” Val answered patly. “And, please, watch your language.” She gave a pointed look at the children present.
Matt agreed. “Lady Rosalyn has the run of the Valley. We do exactly as she wishes.”
“What the bloody hell does that mean?” Colin demanded.
“Colin, the children,” Val said. “Here, Joseph, Emma, run outside and play.”
Waiting until the little ones left the room, Colin frowned an apology to his sister-in-law. “Sorry. Forgot myself.” He took a step closer to his brother. “What does that mean?” he demanded.
Matt reached for his tobacco on the mantel and began filling his pipe. Colin wondered irritably when his brother had turned so pokey, or did marriage do that to a man?
At last, Matt said, “We call Lady Rosalyn the Velvet Hammer. Few gainsay her. She is the power behind our humble little society. Until she came along, we were a bit of a boring lot.”
“Don’t misunderstand him,” Val hurried to add. “Lady Rosalyn does many good works, but she does things her way. We’ve all found it easier to go along. Of course, Mrs. Lovejoyce and her friends would like to dethrone her, but Lady Loftus adores her. For right now, Lady Rosalyn is in control of who does what and when.”
“Even of you, Val?” Colin couldn’t resist the dig.
His sister-in-law answered with complete honesty, “Oh, I’m not in anyone’s class. Not with the parish duties and the children giving me more to think about than flower beds and dances.”
“Lady Rosalyn came up from London,” Matt explained. “Had a Season there or two. I don’t know why she didn’t marry, and, the truth be known, we gentlemen were happier before she brought her Society ways to the Valley. However, the wives are content, and that is often all that matters.”
“Well, I’m not going to march to her tune,” Colin replied. “And as for doing things a certain way, I’m accustomed to doing things my way.”
“Exactly,” his brother agreed, lighting his pipe. “That’s why the two of you have a conflict.”
“We have a conflict because she wants to keep my house,” Colin stated, perturbed neither one of them seemed particularly upset by Lady Rosalyn’s flat-out larceny.
“Yes,” Val agreed, rising from her chair, Sarah asleep in her arms. “But you must have some empathy for the woman. Her life hasn’t been easy.”
“So hard she needs to keep things that don’t belong to her?” Colin wondered aloud.
“Hard enough that we should have more Christian understanding,” Val answered. “Isn’t that right, Matthew?”
Matt answered by raising his eyebrows, a noncommittal sign if ever there was one.
“How hard can it be to be born titled?” Colin countered. “If she’d been a cobbler’s son, she would have known a hard life. Matt and I have had to fight and scrape for everything we have.”
“Ah, but you have always known love,” Val soothed, as if it explained everything. She lowered the sleeping baby into her cradle.
Love?
Colin rolled his eyes. What was it with women? They believed everything poets scribbled.
Val caught his look. She stood with an impatient sound. “It’s true, Colin. Love is a valued commodity and one Christ taught. I firmly believe the lack of it is what is wrong with much of the world—including Napoleon’s problems.”
He opened his mouth to protest. He’d met Napoleon. A lack of love was not his problem—but Val shushed him with a wave of her hand. “Lady Rosalyn has spent most of her life orphaned and being handed off from one relative to another. Her mother created a terrible scandal by running away with her riding instructor, and her father drank himself to death of a lonely heart—”
“Is this what Lady Rosalyn told you?” Colin asked skeptically. The proud woman he’d met today did not strike him as the sort to exchange personal confidences.
“This is what we all know,” Val declared. “The deacon’s wife, Mrs. Phillips, knew someone in London who knew of Lady Rosalyn’s parents and, well, the information is very reliable.”
“Rumor often is,” Colin murmured, tongue in cheek.
Val ignored him. “Maiden Hill is what Lady Rosalyn considers her first real home. She confided that to me once herself. You can’t expect her to give it up easily.”
Colin did feel a bit of sympathy. He knew how important home was, and he hated the fact that he was a soft touch for such a story.
He forced himself to be hard. The house was his. “She is her cousin’s obligation. He’s the head of the family. Woodford will take care of her.”
“He’s not done a good job of the matter so far, has he?” Val flashed back.
“Where do women find their logic?” Colin demanded in exasperation. “And what do you want me to do? Give her the house? Lose all my money and ignore my dreams?” He turned to his brother. “You remember Father Ruley’s plans for us?” The aging cleric had been a distant relative, as well as their generous benefactor. He’d financed both their educations and had held high hopes for both of them. He’d once done the same for their father and had been disappointed. “Look at us now. You are a country vicar and I’m—” He broke off, so frustrated that words failed him.
“A colonel,” Matt finished. “ ’Tis no small feat.”
“You think?” Colin said, unable to keep the self-derision out of his voice. “I’m not knighted, brother. I should have been for my service to my country, but I wasn’t.”
“A knighthood?” Val echoed. “You did aim high.”
“And why not?” Colin asked. “Any other man who had served as I had, who had endeavored, risked, and accomplished what I did would have been knighted.”
“Then why aren’t you?” she wondered.
“I spoke my mind,” he admitted. “I said what needed to be said for the good of my men. If I saw something that was wrong, I corrected it. When the men went into battle, I didn’t hide behind the lines, I marched with them. Wellington trusted me and used me well, but in the end, even he said I was my own wo
rst enemy.”
Matt met Colin’s gaze with understanding. “We both have a great deal of pride for a cobbler’s sons.”
“Well, I’m proud of you both,” Val said firmly. “You are men of integrity. I think well of you, Colin, for having courage and honesty. There was a time everyone feared you would have a noose around your neck.”
“You didn’t know me then, Val,” he said testily.
“The family told me,” she said, blithely dismissing his objection. Colin felt a touch of betrayal. From the moment Matt had met her, she had come between the two brothers. She was Matt’s confidante. His helpmate. The mother of his children and his partner.
And what of their parents? When they were alive, did they think more of her than their youngest son, who had been a trial? Especially when he’d lost all good sense for a while after Belinda Lovejoyce had rejected him and married another?
“I had high spirits,” Colin said soberly. “I wasn’t criminal.”
Val looked as if she had an opinion but was wisely keeping it to herself. She walked up to him and straightened the knot in his neck cloth. “What is important is that you have returned to the Valley. We need you here, don’t we, Matthew? The children shall come to know their uncle, and we’ll find you a lovely girl to marry.”
Colin looked to his brother, uncomfortable because he felt Val patronized him. “Why is it that women believe the solution to most problems is marriage?”
“Because a marriage based on love is the secret to a well-lived life,” his sister-in-law answered for her husband. She gave Colin a sisterly pat on the shoulder and returned to her chair, picking up her darning.
There was that word again—love. Val’s mind only worked in one direction. Well, Colin had been in “love” before and a more uselessly extravagant, silly emotion did not exist…
“Loftus,” Matt piped in.
“The old lord?” Colin asked. “Is he still alive? I thought he would have broken his neck over a fence years ago.”
“He’s alive and still hunting,” Matt answered. “More than ever, in fact. Lady Loftus is so wrapped up in Valley routs and affairs she rarely nags him to take her to London anymore.”
The Seduction of an English Lady Page 2