by Eve Pendle
…
Over the next few days, they settled into a pattern. She’d promised faux affection, and she delivered it. At breakfast and dinner, she was a model wife, inquiring about his day, but refusing to “intrude” in his work. The attentive listening and clever turns she made in conversation meant that he never heard anything about what she was doing. Their walks in the morning followed the same pattern as the first. Whenever he probed too deeply, she found a reason to curtail the walk. By Friday evening, Everett was utterly frustrated.
In addition to his inability to learn more about Grace, a letter had arrived that continued to niggle at him. Mr. Lawson, the man who held his brother’s debt, had finally given the explanation Everett had been asking for.
Mr. Lawson detailed the rise of his little tailor’s shop. Their diversification into smoking paraphernalia had been their downfall. That, and extending credit to one young lord. It hadn’t even been his brother who had run up the debts. Some friend of Peter’s had conned Mr. Lawson into extending him credit on expensive snuff boxes and cigar cases. This Lord Holmes had given them a gambling debt from his brother as payment and promised Lord Westbury was good for the money.
As a result, Mr. Lawson was not going to trust an aristocrat again. He threatened he would act if Everett didn’t pay immediately. The warning was only partial, as a peer couldn’t be sent to debtor’s prison, though bailiffs who might attempt to take items by force were not a good prospect. But he just couldn’t pay it off without the other half of Grace’s dowry.
After dinner, Everett came to the drawing room. John Footman served tea and Grace apologized and said she really did want to finish reading Eothen, because she was captivated by the East.
While Grace read, Everett stared at the space above the fireplace where a painting of his great-great grandparents ought to be. He and Grace had been married several days and they were in silence, sitting in matching leather chairs. What on earth had made him believe she would be amenable to being seduced? Somehow, in the blinkers of finding the money to keep the estate going, he had walked down the road of sacrificing everything else. The title ought to have a direct heir. He wanted a companion whom he loved and who adored him.
“Why did your father leave Henry to Lord Rayner’s guardianship?” He meant to provoke her. Grace’s words and actions were like a partly assembled gun, with fragments that appeared impossible to fit in with the rest. The Grace who shot questions at him he could manage. This little wife act was impossible.
“Pardon?” Grace didn’t look up from her book, sounding politely confused.
If he could break through her façade, maybe the woman in the ballroom would return. An indifferent, polite topic wouldn’t do. Not her mother. But she’d talked easily about her father’s business and he wondered about Henry.
“I want you to tell me about your father and Lord Rayner.” If he could understand the motivation of her father, perhaps he could better understand what drove her. Why would a canny businessman value rank so highly? For a self-made Englishman, it didn’t make sense.
“I don’t know anything about it.” She fiddled with the corner of her book.
“Enough.” Everett slammed his palm onto the chair arm. “Enough reticence and carefully organized conversation.”
She jerked her head up and stared at him, alarm flashing in her eyes for a second. Her jaw clenched. “As you wish.” She closed the book and discarded it onto the small table next to her chair. “First walks with you, now this. But a deal is a deal and I will uphold my side of it.”
“Your father and Lord Rayner,” he reminded her.
“You don’t feel it, do you?” She stood and walked toward him, circling his chair before she stopped at his side. She held out her hand toward him, and Everett felt his pulse leap at the mere hint that she might touch him, even through the layers of his shirt and coat. Instead, she held her hand two inches away and ran it down his shoulder and bicep. “It’s so warm and soft. It protects you so perfectly, you don’t even realize it’s there.”
Everett had no idea what she was talking about, but he was suddenly very aware she was there. As she stood over him, her skirts touched his trouser legs. He imagined off balancing her, bringing her down on top of him and taking her mouth with his own.
Grace’s gaze pushed his want further when he lifted his eyes to meet hers. She was blazing, the strength of her was aweing. “You have this cloak of privilege around you, and you don’t even realize it. It’s invisible and it’s so strong, it protects you from almost everything.”
She stroked her hand down next to his arm again, as though feeling the texture of the cloak she was talking about. “If you ask for something, it’ll happen. You have absolute belief in what you deserve and that it will be delivered.” Grace smiled wryly. “Why shouldn’t you? Everything you have ever wanted has arrived—even a rich and undemanding wife to bail out your precious estate. A lord can have everything he wants.”
Everett felt winded. He wanted to argue, say life hadn’t come easily to him, and even an earl’s son had problems. The description was uncomfortably accurate, but also had a sense of not being about him at all. That Grace was talking about some other lord. Lord Rayner, perhaps, although it was too early to suggest that. But he felt compelled to defend himself. “Not all lords abuse their power.”
“All lords do.” She shook her head. “You can’t help it. You don’t see how your power is woven with little threads taken from hundreds of people around you. Your power is stolen.”
His breath was thin in his chest. Her attack made him want to voice the stream of counterarguments in his head. But this truth, her fury was what he’d wanted.
“My father didn’t have a cloak like yours.” She paused and glowered at his coat sleeve, seemingly lost in thought. “He fought for every advantage, and watched when men no better than him, but of a higher class, achieved as much and more. He saw you can go farther, more easily, with the distinction of rank. It’s natural for a man to want something extra for his children. My father could give us wealth and he wanted to use it to buy something for us that he hadn’t had. He put Henry in Lord Rayner’s care because he thought Henry would have the best chance in life with the advocacy of a powerful, highborn gentleman.”
Grace was loyal and he admired that. Supporting her father’s decision, even when he’d forced her into a difficult situation. “But you disagree.”
“Yes.” She stared, eyes unseeing, at the curtains drawn across the window. “I know Lord Rayner can give Henry things that I can’t, but…not him.” She hesitated, seeming to struggle to find the right words. “I cannot allow my little brother to learn from him what is right and wrong.”
“And yourself? You know right from wrong. You could have married Lord Rayner and looked after Henry.”
“I’ve told you before.” Now she radiated with certainty and…was that anger? “That was out of the question.”
Interesting. Evasion before and now ire. He wondered what offense Lord Rayner had committed. Perhaps he hadn’t gone to church frequently enough for Grace’s exacting standards? But surely, she couldn’t be so petty. More likely he preferred the company of men, or some other irrelevant moral outcry that would upset the sensibilities of a resolute young woman.
“I suppose you think me selfish to not want to marry a man I neither love nor respect.” Her mouth was tight. “But I refuse to martyr myself by marrying Lord Rayner, when the result would be a totally powerless state after the marriage.”
Ah. Just a vague fear of a bad marriage. It seemed rather superficial to want love more than wanting to stay with family, but hadn’t he been cautious about marrying the wrong person? And as a man, all he had to be concerned about was a lack of conjugal bliss, not actual bodily harm. He was the owner, not the property.
“I can understand wanting love in your marriage.” He let his tone dip as he said the words and was gratified to see an answering visceral reaction in Grace. She flushed. This was where h
e would link the attraction between them with something more. “You know, love can grow in surprising places.”
Her neck stiffened and she sauntered away, looking deliberately around the room. Everett found he was anticipating her response.
“There are some leaks in this place, I concede. And there are holes in the curtains that let in light. Perhaps there are the prerequisites to grow something in this house.” She swung around to stare down at him. “But Everett, love is not a weed.”
“No, it’s a wildflower.” And perhaps she was right, he was trying too hard to cultivate something that would bloom if just allowed the space.
She bit her lip and turned away. “Good night.” Leaving the tea, forgotten and cooling on the table, she walked away.
“You are right,” Everett called as she opened the door. “I didn’t see my cloak of privilege. I did not know what it did for me, not really, and perhaps I never will. But I did know that it was there. I felt its weight. I felt the weight of the responsibility in that cloak settle upon me when my brother died, and I became earl. It might protect me, but it’s heavy, because I feel that I must hold it up constantly, so that others may share its shelter.”
There were never enough people in its shelter. Those whom he’d failed were always with him in the shadows.
Grace hesitated and tilted her head. He saw a thoughtful shimmer in her eyes before she nodded, then continued out.
Everett sat for a while longer after she left, trying to piece together her dislike of the aristocracy, her father’s respect for them, and Lord Rayner. But there was still something key he was missing. He didn’t shirk from a trial—Grace or any other. She was the most problematic female he’d met in his life. And God help him, he liked it.
Chapter Seven
Everett wasn’t overly familiar with women’s fashion, but when he stopped in the doorway of the morning room, even he noticed the difference. She had come to breakfast wearing a walking dress and boots. His heart pounded and a grin spread across his face. Not because she looked beautiful and desirable, the narrower skirts flattering her figure and the boots showing off the slim line of her ankle, though she did. But because after five days, she’d finally given an indication that she was not being strong-armed into walking with him. A walking dress was not just a dress, it was a concession that they walked out together in the morning.
Grace had her back to him, her food was to her side, forgotten. She was looking intently at the table. A letter? No. It took a moment to recognize she was reading the newspaper that Clarke had laid out for him. He hadn’t thought she read current affairs, given she hadn’t known about rinderpest. Over the last few days, he hadn’t seen her reading at the breakfast table with him, but then, the newspaper had been either in his hands or lying by his arm, out of her reach. But this morning he’d been delayed by a minor furor with the housemaids that Mrs. Bishop had wanted his advice about.
She was wholly focused as she read. A tendril of her dark hair had fallen over her face. Even as his arm moved spontaneously toward her, as if to reach and tuck it back himself, she smoothed it behind her ear. The bright morning light lit up the downy hairs on her bare arms and highlighted her cheekbones. In her orange dress, she looked like the sun itself, a sight so compelling that all things would orbit her.
Along with the unpleasant knowledge that he knew nothing about his wife, Everett had a moment of irrational envy. Her absorption was unlike anything he had seen from her toward him. Her brows nudged together in consternation, and he wondered what article she was reading. Certainly, she must be in the habit of reading the news, as when she turned the page, she held the paper out at arm’s length and flicked the page across with ease. There was a skill to reading an unwieldy broadsheet newspaper that was only gained with practice. This one small revelation fueled his desire, and breakfast could wait.
“Up the hill?” he asked a few minutes later when they walked out of the house, and he gestured toward the incline with the large oak, easily a hundred years old, on the brow of the hill. A small, rough path in the grass led upward. “The view is pretty from the top.” An ideal place to make her feel beautiful with a carefully placed compliment.
The sun trying to peek out from behind the clouds, making the day in turn warm and cool.
“No, thank you.” She adjusted her taupe-colored floaty shawl around her shoulders.
The lake again then, though they hadn’t managed yet to get all the way around on one of their walks. Their feet crunched on the gravel path. Some of the trees had grown quickly since he’d been away and required trimming. He would talk to the gardeners about pruning them back. Even Grace’s narrower walking dress was encroached on in places by the foliage. He didn’t want to allow her any more excuses to avoid his company. He’d learned that talking about her family invariably resulted in her finding a reason to cut short their walk. Any personal questions, really.
What would entice her? The rose garden perhaps, or a proposal to remodel the library. Could he engage her with the church or the parish poor? Did she ride? Aside from their walks, she seemed to spend her days reading and writing letters to her friends. He supposed he could arrange for—
“What did you do before you were earl? You were in the army, is that right?”
He almost stopped in surprise. “I was Lieutenant Colonel Hetherington.” She’d asked about him of all things, apropos of nothing. Almost as if she was finally permitting herself inquisitiveness.
“You must have had a commission.” When she turned her head to look at him, she was like the sun that the clouds covered. She was unbearably bright. “Was it not enough to cover your expenses?”
“I did.” Another of his blunders. “My father purchased me a coronet commission in the cavalry troop when I was seventeen.” He’d been promoted through merit subsequently, and the commission had been worth six thousand or so. Not enough to have solved the current crisis, though enough to help. “You might have heard about the Crimean war. It was—”
“Yes, I’ve heard of the Crimean war. ‘Half a league, half a league,’” she quoted Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade.
“Good.” Well, that was something. She wasn’t entirely ignorant. But then, there probably wasn’t a person in England who couldn’t quote that infamous poem. Thankfully, he and his men hadn’t been at the Battle of Balaclava, but not all of them had gone home. “You may not know, however, that the practice of purchasing commissions in the army came under fire, during and after that war.”
“I know that, too,” she snipped.
“There’s to be an inquiry about it.” There was understandably a lot of concern that the practice of buying one’s way into a job that had hundreds of people’s lives at stake, rather than promoting those who were qualified for the job, was not a sensible practice.
“The newspapers managed to report that as well.” Her eyes were wide with faux surprise.
He nodded. Grace read the newspaper and was sharp. He’d completely misunderstood her. She wasn’t the emotionless doll she had pretended to be over the last few days or the frivolous one he’d assumed she was before. He liked the bellicose, clever woman of last night and he intended to find out about her.
Though the pressing issue was what to tell Grace about his time in the army. He’d gained two promotions during Crimea and he could talk about that war without panic rising in his chest now. He’d remained a major, and content with his situation, until two years ago. He’d been offered the commission of the retiring lieutenant colonel. He was one of five majors who would be offered and had any other of the four been willing, able, and competent, he wouldn’t have purchased it. But one of the majors was a particularly nasty, ambitious, and callous man. Everett’s conscience wouldn’t allow the man to lead either himself or his men. Thus, he’d spent the last of his savings and the remaining allowance from when his father had been the earl on purchasing a commission he neither wanted nor enjoyed. Another duty executed because it was the antithesis of w
hat his father would have done. None of that mattered now.
“When I got the letter about Peter’s death, I—” He’d been as dazed as a man staggering around after battle, ears ringing with the sound of cannon fire. But he’d known he couldn’t allow his commission to fall into the hands of an idle man who would treat the lives of his men lightly. “This was before the rinderpest outbreak.”
It was before he’d known about Peter’s debts or that his father had reduced the estate to near breaking point, but for the entailed parts. “I had no reason to think I’d need the money, and so I did what I thought any earl ought to do. I gave my lieutenant colonel commission to a major under my command who had talent and dedication, but not the money to purchase it.”
“You gave away your commission out of an idealistic sense that the army ought to be meritocracy.” Her tone was inscrutable, her head tilted up to look at the canopy of leaves above their heads. The sun had broken through the clouds temporarily and the light was dappled and golden green. He had no idea whether she thought what he’d done was a good thing or not.
“No.” Idealism wasn’t part of it. “If I’d sold my commission, it would have been bought by a man not competent at his job. He wouldn’t have taken care of the men or made good decisions.” Despite that, some of the men had decided to come with him, including Thompson, who’d been a captain under Everett’s command. “I’ve seen the devastation poor command can do. You can recite the poem as well as I.”
“I understand.” She nodded and when she looked at him, there was a ferociousness in her eyes that made them vivid. “You did the right thing.”
A bullet of pride and relief careered through him.
“You couldn’t leave them with someone like Lo—” She stopped herself.
“Who?” Her rage was intriguing.