“I know all too well,” she said. He was by no means the first impecunious gentleman who’d come calling. She’d had no trouble rejecting any of the others. But he, the most desperate of them all—and the least conciliatory—had stolen her heart. Or run over it like the human locomotive he was. “I’m sorry. But you never gave me time to think. You were always there.”
His gaze shot to hers and held it, challenging her, as he always did. “Of course I was always there. The competition was ferocious.”
“The competition for my fortune.”
“You’ve a dowry of two hundred thousand pounds,” he said. “If you think no man takes that into consideration—no man, that is, past the age of puppyish blind devotion—”
“I should never accuse you of blind devotion, my lord.”
“If you want me to tell you I would have courted you even had you been penniless, I’m sorry to shatter your girlish dreams,” he said. “I can’t afford sentiment. I thought you understood I wasn’t in a position to let my heart dictate to my head.”
And if you had been in such a position?
But she knew the answer to that one. He would never have come near Miss Findley of Little Etford had his father not died six months ago and left him stupendously deep in debt.
“I did understand,” she said. “And I won’t pretend I saw no advantages to myself from the connection. Prestige for my family. Advancement for Philip in whatever profession he chose. And you were so assiduous in your courting.” He had laid siege to her heart, as his ancestors had once upon a time laid siege to the castles and lands they wanted. “Then there were Mama and Papa, so strongly in your favor. Between your wooing and their pointing out your numerous perfections, you seemed to be there, every waking minute. And you can be overwhelming, my lord.”
Overwhelming in every way. Not simply his manner, the absolute self-assurance of an aristocrat of ancient pedigree. There was his personality, so compelling that he made everyone else about him seem like figures in a mist. There was as well the rampant masculinity, in the way he spoke, the way he moved . . . and the way he looked. He was tall and powerfully built, with nothing soft about him, in physique or features. His face was by no means conventionally handsome. His features were too strong: the sharp angles of cheekbones and jaw, the bold, patrician nose, the hard mouth and mocking eyes.
The combination, for her, had proved nothing short of devastating.
“Don’t be absurd,” he said. “Nothing overwhelms you.”
“So I flattered myself,” she said. “But since you returned to London—”
“—to prepare for our wedding—”
“—and reconcile the queen to your marrying the daughter of a man of commerce—”
“Her Majesty doesn’t give a damn who I marry,” he said. “She’s too starry-eyed over her beautiful Albert.”
The Queen of England would be marrying for love.
And Barbara Findley, an ordinary mortal whose grandfather had been an innkeeper, could not.
“The point is, your personality is so forceful that one is swept along in your wake,” she said. “And so I couldn’t think clearly until you were gone. And then I thought about all the advantages . . . but it wasn’t . . . enough. I realized I couldn’t be happy.”
He stared at her for a moment, his dark eyes telling her nothing. Then he let out a sigh. “I see,” he said.
“Do you?” she said.
“Yes, of course.”
His gaze having turned to the letter in his hand, Rothwick didn’t see the despairing look she sent him.
He couldn’t decide what to do with the letter. Crumpling it into a ball and throwing it on the fire seemed excessively dramatic.
He had been still trying to dry out, this time at the parlor fire, when she’d flown into the room, in the way she always did, so full of life, and seemingly so glad to see him. He’d heard the rustle of petticoats, and his pounding heart had skipped in pleasure. When he’d turned to look, the murky day seemed to brighten in the radiance of her. It wasn’t merely her copper-bright hair, a mass of ill-behaved ringlets. It wasn’t simply her luminous skin with its light dusting of golden freckles or the intelligence sparkling in her green eyes. It was all those things, yes, and more: She always seemed lit from within.
He’d almost stepped toward her, to take her hand . . . to touch her cheek . . . to touch . . .
But she didn’t want him to touch her. The letter ought to have made that clear to him. She was not the sort of girl to write such a letter merely to torment a man. Barbara Findley was many things: stubborn, exasperating, opinionated—to name only a few of her many less-than-biddable characteristics. But she was not coy or manipulative. She wouldn’t have written the letter if she hadn’t meant it.
Yet he’d refused to believe it. He’d told himself there had to be a mistake, a misunderstanding. He couldn’t have misjudged her feelings so completely.
He’d thought . . .
Well, he’d thought wrong, and that was that.
He didn’t see her put out her hand for the letter.
He carefully folded it up again and put it back in his breast pocket.
When he looked at her again, she was looking toward the windows.
“You can’t go back out in this,” she said. “You’d better stay the night.”
He looked that way, too, into the bleak afternoon.
Bleak. The color of his future.
Good God, now what would he do? His tenants. His servants. His indigent relatives, whose name was Legion.
What a fool he’d been. All the time he’d devoted . . .
And now . . .
He laughed. “Stay the night? Here? To rub salt in your mother’s wounds?” Not to mention his own. “Are you a glutton for punishment? I’m not.”
“That isn’t—”
“I’ll stay at the Swan.” He’d passed the coaching inn on the way. He should have stopped then. The pause would have given him time to think. And think again. But no. He had to be the fool rushing in. He had to be the madman believing he could make black come out white. “It’ll be easier to set out for London from there, and I can miss the crush when the world descends for the queen’s wedding.”
The day after tomorrow, Queen Victoria would wed her beloved Prince Albert. The Lord Mayor had asked the populace to suspend their usual activities in honor of the occasion—not that anybody needed the suggestion. Most of London would be pouring into the areas near both St. James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace as well as the royal parks, in hopes of catching a glimpse of the bride and groom.
Rothwick was among the privileged few with tickets to the ceremony, and he’d looked forward to hearing Barbara’s opinions of everything and everybody.
Today was the day she was to have come to London. He’d intended to show her his townhouse and tell her she might do whatever she wanted to it. He’d thought they’d talk about paint and furniture.
What a joke.
“Please convey my compliments to your parents,” he said so calmly. “And my regrets . . . that I’m unable to accept your invitation to stay. I’ll send a notice to the Gazette of our changed circumstances. Goodbye, Miss Findley.”
He bowed. And then, before he could be tempted to say anything more—and really, what was there to say?—he left.
Swan Inn, six o’clock
Barbara didn’t give herself time to think. She flung open the door to the private parlor. Heart racing and head high, she walked in.
Rothwick sprawled in a chair by the fire, long legs crossed at the ankles, one arm hanging over the back of the chair, the other holding a wine glass. His dark hair had dried in a tangle, and he hadn’t helped matters by raking his fingers through it. He’d taken off his coat and unbuttoned his waistcoat, but that was all. He’d let his clothes dry while on him. His neckcloth had deteriorated to a wrinkled lump, his shirtsleeves hung like limp rags from his broad shoulders, his trousers sagged at the knees, and his boots had acquired a crust
of dried muck.
She took in the sight in the instant before he looked up.
“Oh, Rothwick, you haven’t even changed out of your clothes,” she said.
He stared at her for a moment as though he didn’t recognize her. Then his dark eyes narrowed. “Not an apparition, it seems. No such luck. We’re done, Miss Findley. Didn’t you say so? Go away. Forgive me for not getting up, but I don’t want to encourage you. You shouldn’t have encouraged me, by the way—but it’s ungentlemanly to point that out.”
“You’re foxed,” she said.
“Am I? Good. I’ve been trying damn hard.”
This was what she got for hesitating and dithering. If she’d come sooner, he’d still be lucid. What could she expect to accomplish now? She wanted to go back out and close the door behind her and get started on the long process of making herself forget him.
But the image hung in her mind’s eye: the brief, unguarded moment when he’d looked at her letter and she’d seen . . . a something in his eyes that might have been grief. A degree more evident was the disappointment that drew down the corners of his firm mouth.
And yes, it was most likely the money he was disappointed about, but there was only one way to be sure.
“I should never have expected this of you,” she said. “Getting drunk after being jilted. Could you not do something less clichéd?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “A sharp-tongued wench it is. You’d have been the devil to live with. I’m well out of it.”
“You’re not the most accommodating individual yourself,” she said. “You come storming into a place—fee, fie, foe, fum—knocking aside any small, annoying things that get in the way. Like people.”
“If you refer to those pests who were sniffing at your skirts, that’s exactly what one does with vermin.”
“In my world, those are eligible men,” she said. “But they haven’t titles—”
“Or a shilling to their name—”
“Neither have you,” she said.
“But I’m an aristocratic debtor,” he said. He waved his wine glass in the air. “No, better than that—a peer. They can’t imprison me for debt. I should have ignored it, the way my father did. Trouble is . . .” He brought the glass close to his face, swayed the glass a little, and watched the wine slosh against its sides. “Trouble is, the houses are falling down. On my head. Plaster.” He looked up at the ceiling of the inn parlor. “Sitting there at home, drinking a little wine, minding my own business, and down come little bits of the ceiling.”
He drank, set down the glass on the table at his elbow, and refilled it from one of the bottles crowding its surface. “Is that what put you off?” he said. “Everything falling to pieces? But it isn’t every room. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“You told me,” she said. He’d described the state of his houses and properties with a disarmingly matter-of-fact wit. Everyone said he was an overbearing, conceited, arrogant bastard. But she thought he was charming, and funny, too. And she found his sarcasm sweet. He was nothing like any other man she’d ever met, and she’d met scores. From the time she was seventeen, they’d been descending upon Little Etford to try their luck at winning her heart—and the ridiculous marriage portion her father had saddled her with.
All in hopes of this.
A title.
And of all the men, all the well-behaved, eager-to-please men, she had to fall in love with him.
“Very well,” he said, nodding. “No hard feelings. But it’s damned inconvenient, Barbara. You might have told me sooner.”
“So that you could have courted someone else.”
“Of course. I had a list.” He drank, then refilled the glass. “My aunts made it. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No.”
“Gad, I thought I told you everything. So easy to talk to.”
That’s what she’d thought, too: He was so easy to talk to—though of course nobody in Little Etford would believe that.
“After we’d learned precisely how my sire had left matters, my aunts compiled a list of suitable females,” he said. He set down the glass, pushed some of the bottles out of his way—leaving one teetering near the table’s edge—and with one long index finger he made as though to write on the stained table. “Here is Miss So and So, the daughter of a Brighton jeweler. Fifty thousand pounds. Here is Miss This and That, the daughter of a physician. Seventy-five thousand. Ah, here is Miss Findley. Two hundred thousand. Let me at her, I said. Let me at Miss Findley. I don’t care if she’s snaggle-toothed, squinty, and flatulent.”
“I know it wasn’t easy for you,” she said.
He shrugged. “Men go to war and chance having their heads blown off. All I had to do was find a rich girl to wed. Not a problem. I’ve never been squeamish.”
“Yet it must have hurt your pride to be obliged to come to a provincial nothing of a place, to a public assembly, no less,” she said. She’d ached for him, for what it must have cost such a man to be forced by circumstances to stoop so low.
“It hurt my brain,” he said. “I felt as though I’d traveled to Madagascar or Outer Mongolia, to observe the quaint customs of the natives. I was all amazed to hear you speak English . . . of a sort.”
Was that what she’d seen in his face when he’d been introduced to her? Amazement? Was that what had made his dark eyes warm and had softened the taut set of his mouth into a hint of a smile?
“But there you were,” he said. “Three and twenty, with such a fortune, and still unwed. Impossible, thought I. The chit must have a wooden leg. Or perhaps she runs mad at odd times, and howls at the full moon. But there you were.”
He turned away to stare into the fire. “There you were.” He shook his head. “And here you are. Why?”
It was easier to talk to the back of his head than to look into those midnight eyes. “I owed you an explanation, as you said.”
“You explained sufficiently,” he said. “I’m destitute, not stupid. I’ve worked it out. I mowed you down, like the Juggernaut. Sorry about that. I was in a panic, you see. Couldn’t let you get away. But you did. You got away.” Still without turning he waved the wine glass, and wine sloshed over the rim. He didn’t seem to notice. His big shoulders slumped. “Go away now, Miss Findley,” he muttered. “I’m growing maudlin, and that’s a mood best enjoyed in solitude.”
“Yes, I’m going,” she said. Her eyes filled, and she blinked hard. She had to swallow hard, too, to go on. “It’s stupid, I know, but I wanted us to be in love, you see. Like the queen and her prince. Royal marriages are always arranged. It’s politics and money and power and alliances. They never marry for love, do they? But I thought, if she didn’t have to settle for less, why should an ordinary woman, who hadn’t a single drop of blue blood in her veins? That’s what I thought.”
She waited.
She heard a sound. It was faint but unmistakable.
He was snoring.
She started toward him, and put her hand out, to touch his head, wishing she could make go away all the trouble he carried in there. But she couldn’t. She drew her hand back and went out, closing the door quietly behind her.
9 February 1840
Nine o’clock in the morning
The road was slick and muddy after the rain, but he’d ridden like a madman through yesterday’s storm. Why not ride madly now?
He rode on, toward the house.
I wanted us to be in love.
He didn’t remember stumbling to bed but he must have done, because he’d woken this morning in the bedchamber he’d hired. The first thing he noticed was the silence, the end of the rain’s drumming. And the second thing was his aching head and her voice in it—saying something about the queen and her prince and wanting to be in love.
He’d told himself he dreamed it, and he was a maudlin imbecile for dreaming it, and he’d dressed and set out for London. He’d traveled a few paces along the stretch of the Old North Road past the entrance to the Swan’s stable yard. Then he’d turne
d his horse in the other direction, like a moonstruck boy, to chase a dream.
Halfway to the house, reason gained the upper hand.
Wasn’t that drunken display enough?
How much more pathetic do you want to look?
He drew his horse to a halt, and was preparing to turn when he heard approaching hoof beats.
At first he saw nobody, but the hoof beats grew louder, and a moment later, the horse and rider came round the turning.
He recognized the cloak streaming out behind her, the handsome green cloak that enhanced her delicate skin tone and deepened the green of her eyes.
He recognized the ease and grace with which she rode, and her headlong pace—the way she did everything, it seemed: bursting into a room, telling him he was drunk, refusing to tiptoe about his poverty, mocking his high-handed ways.
But I do love you, he should have said. How could I help it? How could you not see?
He saw the bird swoop down, aiming, probably, for some tiny creature scurrying in the ditch. Her mare shied and reared, and everything inside him froze. A heartbeat later, he was in motion, racing toward her, but not fast enough. He saw her struggle to control her mount, but something else—a slippery patch of ground, or some other distraction nearby—panicked the creature. He watched helplessly as it reared again, throwing Barbara down. Then he couldn’t breathe.
An eternity later he was dismounting, then sinking into the muddy road beside her crumpled form. He caught her up in his arms. Her head sagged against his forearm. Her face was white.
“No,” he said. “No.” He pulled her close, burying her face against his heart, a great lump of fear in his chest.
She must wake up. The longer she remained unconscious, the greater the danger. Or was it too late? Was she breathing? He put his fingers to her neck, to her wrist, but his hands were shaking. He couldn’t tell if what he felt was a pulse or his own trembling.
“You must wake up,” he said in the dictatorial tones she would have labeled fee, fie, foe, fum. “I won’t have any of this . . . swooning. I won’t—drat you, Barbara, you must wake up.”
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