My Lord Winter

by Carola Dunn

  With any luck, Jane thought forlornly, she would take a chill and die.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Edmund woke with a groan and glared at Alfred through slitted eyes. “Go ’way,” he growled. The sunshine pouring between the opened curtains started a steam-engine pounding in his head.

  “Beg pardon, my lord, but you’re expecting Mr. Selwyn at ten. Will I tell Mr. Mason to say you’re not home?”

  “Selwyn! No, anyone else, but I won’t risk offending Selwyn.” He began to sit up, then sank back with another groan, his eyes shut tight. The Daventrys’ ball had been such a ghastly experience that he had overindulged in punch there and on his return home had retreated to the library with a bottle of brandy.

  “Just drink this down, my lord,” coaxed Alfred. “You’ll be right as a trivet in no time flat.”

  Venturing to part one pair of eyelids by a hairsbreadth, Edmund regarded the glass hovering above him. It contained a singularly revolting-looking, thick, brownish liquid, and the smell that wafted to his nostrils made his stomach heave. He hauled one leaden arm from the comforting warmth of the bedclothes and pinched his nose.

  “What the devil is it?”

  “A little remedy for what ails you.”

  “Where did you get it? I’ve never been top-heavy before in my life.”

  “I winkled the receipt out of Lord Danforth’s man years ago,” said Alfred complacently. “You never know when something like this’ll come in handy. Swears by it, he does. Drink it down quick and you won’t hardly notice the taste, my lord.”

  Nothing could possibly make him feel worse, Edmund decided. He sat up and swallowed the stuff in two gulps.

  For a moment it was touch and go whether he’d need the basin with which Albert had prudently armed himself. For another few minutes he was ready to accuse his faithful valet of murder. Then, miraculously, his head cleared.

  Unfortunately, the removal of the steam-engine left space for memories of the previous night. His aunt had paraded him around the ballroom, presenting him to bashful misses and their hopeful mamas. Though he had protested to Lady Wintringham that his dancing skills, never superior, were decidedly rusty, he had been unable to avoid asking several young ladies to stand up with him. Faced with his taciturnity, not one of them had attempted any conversational openings.

  Now, the next morning, it dawned on Edmund that what his aunt was looking for in the next Countess of Wintringham was not only birth and fortune but docility. The dowager had every intention of continuing to rule his household with an iron hand. The realization increased his determination to choose his own bride. He would seek out the liveliest girls, those with the spirit to resist her ladyship’s domination.

  Jane’s voice seemed to echo in his ears: “I am not really a bluestocking.” His own, answering: “Are you not? Pray don’t tell my aunt. She will be sadly disillusioned.” And Jane again, with a mischievous grin: “I would not disappoint her for the world.’’

  “My lord,” Alfred interrupted the imaginary voices, “your hot water. It’s half past nine.”

  He spent a pleasant couple of hours showing Selwyn some new acquisitions for his library and discussing his parliamentary speech with him. He had discovered that the lawyer brought new insights to the subjects that interested him. As he accompanied his departing guest into the front hall, he recalled his aunt’s mention of a secretary. Doubtless she had some impoverished relative in mind, who would be properly grateful to her for her recommendation.

  Rebelling, he said to Selwyn, “I’m thinking of hiring a secretary. I shall be glad of your suggestions if you know of anyone suitable.”

  “I’ll give the matter my consideration,” Selwyn promised, and took his leave.

  When Edmund turned away from the front door, Mason was lying in wait. “Her ladyship requests a word with your lordship in the drawing-room,” he announced. His manner held the merest touch of commiseration.

  Edmund repaired to the drawing-room.

  Lady Wintringham was seated at a small writing table in the window. Setting down her pen as he entered, she asked his opinion of his partners at the ball. She was most displeased to hear that he had formed no preference whatever for any of them.

  “I trust you do not mean to be over fastidious,” she snapped. “All the girls to whom I presented you are unexceptionable.”

  “And uninteresting.”

  “I daresay you cowed them into dullness with your proud demeanour.”

  “It was you who taught me, ma’am,” he said coldly, “that the Earl of Wintringham is required to bear himself with pride.”

  She was momentarily taken aback, but rallied at once. “Of course, but a certain condescension is expected of a suitor. You are not the only eligible gentleman seeking a noble, well-dowered, conformable wife. Lady Chatterton informs me that you have already alienated Miss Chatterton and she will not force her daughter into marriage with a man she has taken in dislike.”

  “No doubt there are plenty of mothers who are less nice in their notions.” Even as he spoke, Edmund knew he would never wed a girl who had been coerced into accepting his hand. He did not bother to tell his aunt.

  She proceeded to give him directions as to how to make himself agreeable to a well-bred young lady. His mind wandered to Jane. He never had any difficulty making himself agreeable to her—but did she truly think him agreeable, or did she merely humour him because of his exalted station? Did she actually find their talk of books tedious? He heard her again: “I am not really a bluestocking.” He frowned.

  “Enough of that,” said Lady Wintringham hastily. “You will know how to go on. By the by, Mason tells me that your visitor this morning is a lawyer, and that he has come to the house several times. You are not thinking of changing lawyers, I suppose. The earls of Wintringham have been satisfied with the services of Thorpe and Morecambe for generations.”

  “Selwyn is not my lawyer,” said Edmund with a faint, sardonic smile, “he is my friend.”

  She stared at him, stunned. “Your friend! A lawyer cannot, in the nature of things, be friend to the Earl of Wintringham.”

  “He is an intelligent, cultivated man, knowledgeable about books, and I enjoy his company more than that of any of my so-called equals. I count his friendship an honour and a pleasure.”

  “Selwyn,” she mused. “The name is familiar. I have it—was he not one of our unwanted guests at the Abbey? I knew no good could come of permitting such riffraff to stay, and worse, to join the company. I suppose you are also on intimate terms with that encroaching midwife and the unspeakable cotton merchant. Ill-breeding will out.”

  Instead of his usual shame at her disparagement of his mother, Edmund found himself burning with anger. If he had learned nothing else from his acquaintance with the lawyer, the “encroaching midwife,” and her protégée, he had learned that inferior birth was no indicator of inferior worth.

  However, he did not dare mention Jane or Miss Gracechurch. They were within his aunt’s reach and he had no wish to expose them to her malice. Selwyn and the cotton merchant could take care of themselves. “I have not seen Ramsbottom since he left the Abbey,” he said evenly. “Doubtless he returned to Manchester long since. As for Selwyn, thank you for your suggestion. I shall most certainly offer him the family’s business at once. Old Thorpe is far too set in his ways, and Young Thorpe has a shifty eye I do not care for.”

  Lady Wintringham’s austere face turned an alarming shade of red as she mustered her resources for a blistering reproof. At that moment, Mason came in to announce that Lord Fitzgerald had called.

  “I shall join him at once,” said Edmund. “Is there anything else I can do for you, ma’am?”

  “No doubt you will do as you please,” she said icily. “I have made a list for you of the young ladies you danced with last night. A true gentleman calls to pay his respects the following day.”

  “Then I shall certainly do so, ma’am,” he said, taking the list. He bowed and excused hims
elf. Thank heaven she was leaving the following morning and would not return to London for at least a fortnight!

  * * * *

  Jane took no ill from her wetting but, beset by blue devils, she willingly obeyed Gracie’s order to keep to her apartment for the day. Donning a beruffled dressing gown of blue cambric, she reclined on the chaise longue in her sitting-room.

  On a low table beside her stood a basket of apricots from Lord Ryburgh’s succession houses, delivered that morning as a token of friendship, and the several volumes of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Edmund had described those, too, as a token of friendship when he gave them to her. How anxiously he had asked Gracie whether books were an acceptable gift from a gentleman to a lady, and then he had apologized that the set was nothing out of the ordinary, not a first edition. Jane had assured him, laughing, that she had not his obsession with first editions. The contents were more important to her than the date of publication.

  As she found her place in the first volume, she decided that the giver and his recollection of her tastes were even more important than the contents. Yet she had fled him last night as though he were her enemy.

  A horrid thought struck her. “Ella!” she called, and the abigail came through from the bedchamber. “Ella, did your young man say why Lord Wintringham has suddenly begun to attend parties?”

  “It’s the old countess, my lady, she’s making him.” Ella avoided her gaze. “Alfie says his lordship’s got to find himself a wife or she’ll pick one for him and that’d be a fate worse’n death.”

  “Thank you,” said Jane faintly, staring unseeing at the page before her.

  She should have guessed that Lady Wintringham had not given up when Edmund rejected Lavinia. He was being forced to seek a bride! So proud a man would never stoop to wed a nobody like Miss Jane Brooke, and when he discovered she was Lady Jane, his anger would far outweigh considerations of birth and fortune.

  How could she bear to see him married to someone else? Even his friendship must inevitably be lost to her.

  She sought forgetfulness in the book he had given her. Insensibly, Boswell’s lively anecdotes drew her into the world of fifty years past. The sun peeked in at her west-facing window and soon flooded the room with golden afternoon light. The heartening notion crossed her mind that Edmund might go to balls just to mollify his aunt, as she allowed Ryburgh and Lord Charles to dance attendance upon her to keep her mother happy.

  Recalling that tomorrow he was to take her to the Tower to see the wild beasts and the Crown Jewels, she resolved to enjoy his company while she might and let the future take care of itself. By the time Ella brought up a tea tray, with her favourite gingerbread “as Cook made special acos you’re feeling poorly,” Jane was restored to something approaching her usual cheerfulness.

  Ella chaperoned her to the Tower next day. She and Edmund found as much entertainment in the maid’s naive wonder as in the jewels and the animals themselves.

  He did not mention the Daventrys’ ball, nor his plans to attend others. Was he deliberately concealing his intention of marrying? Jane hoped he was simply too kind to emphasize the supposed gulf between them, to make her long for fashionable pleasures he thought forever denied to her.

  As she dressed for Almack’s that night, she wished she was about to have the pleasure of waltzing in his arms. At the same time it was a relief to know, via Alfred and Ella, that the earl absolutely drew the line at attending the Marriage Mart.

  She knew also that he rode in Hyde Park early in the morning and avoided it at the hour of the fashionable promenade. Without qualms, therefore, she accepted Lord Charles’s invitation to join the afternoon parade in his tilbury one sunny day early in May.

  Lord Charles’s superb matched bays were a trifle frisky, and when they reached the Park he decided to steer clear of the crowds in Rotten Row. At a brisk trot, they rolled along the carriage drive that curved towards Tyburn, past the Serpentine and the entrance to the Ring. They had nearly reached the Cumberland Gate when a curricle rounded the bend a hundred yards or so ahead.

  Jane recognized it—or rather the blacks and their driver—at once: Lord Wintringham, with a young lady up beside him. She hastily lowered her frilly primrose muslin parasol in front of her face.

  “The sun is so dreadfully bright,” she exclaimed. “Pray let me down so that I may walk in the shade of the trees. Oh, quickly, please!”

  Surprised and alarmed, Lord Charles halted his team. Not waiting for assistance, Jane jumped down and darted into the narrow belt of trees separating the Park from the turnpike. Her back resolutely turned to the carriage drive, she paused under an elm and listened. Surely Edmund would not stop to investigate the odd behaviour of a stranger.

  Thudding hooves, the jingle of a bit, the crunch of wheels on gravel.

  Then Lord Charles’s aggrieved voice, approaching: “Deuced peculiar look My Lord Winter threw at me— like to freeze my vitals. Are you all right, ma’am? Quite a turn you gave me, dashing off like that, and the sun was behind us all along, not in your eyes.”

  “Was it?” Turning, she found him close behind her. “I beg your pardon, sir, of course you are right. I... The new foliage is so fresh and green, I had a sudden wish to stroll under the trees with you, who miss the countryside as much I do.”

  “Did you, by Jove!” he said, gratified, offering her his arm. She laid her hand on it and he set off at a long-legged stride between the tree trunks.

  Jane was hard put to it to keep up without breaking into a run. “Pray go a little slower,” she panted. “At such a pace we cannot talk.”

  “Sorry. You’re such a Trojan, I almost forgot you’re a female.” As she blinked at this curious encomium, he stopped dead and turned to her. “No, that’s not how it is. Can’t forget something like that. You know, the marquis gave me permission to pay my addresses.”

  “The marquis? My father? When?”

  “A week—a fortnight ago.”

  “He never told me,” said Jane indignantly. “But then, I haven’t seen him to do more than pass the time of day in at least that long. He probably forgot.”

  Lord Charles persisted. “So there it is, will you marry me? Do me the honour, my hand and heart, and all that rot. Hope you’ll take it as said.”

  “No.”

  “What, you want the whole speech?” he asked in horror.

  “No, I mean, thank you but I shan’t marry you.”

  “Why not?”

  “We mustn’t keep your horses standing,” she replied evasively.

  “True, by Jove.” He turned around and set off back the way they had come, at a comparatively reasonable speed. “Didn’t I say you’re a Trojan? Ain’t many females would think of a fellow’s cattle at such a moment. We’d go on swimmingly together, I wager. Come on, say you’ll tie the knot?”

  There was a small-boyish appeal about him that Jane usually found hard to resist, but this time she was adamant. “No, we shall not suit, I assure you.”

  “No? Oh well, you may be right. There’s an heiress I’ve got my eye on,” he continued buoyantly. “Her father’s a Cit, but beggars can’t be choosers. Pretty little thing, too, but she ain’t got your elegance. Are you sure...?”

  “Quite sure,” said Jane, trying not to laugh.

  * * * *

  “And now my lady’s turned down that nice young gentleman, Lord Charles Newbury. Hark at the trumpets! Let’s go sit where we can see ’em.”

  “Not too close, or we won’t be able to talk. Look how the brass gleams in the sun. I bet them poor soldiers spend half their lives polishing. Would you have took Lord Charles, then, Ellie, if he’d asked you?”

  “Like a shot I would. His pa’s a duke, isn’t he?”

  “And if I asked you, Ellie love, would you take me?”

  “Oh, Alfie, are you popping the question?”

  “I am. I’ve growed that fond of you, girl, I’ve gone right off my feed. Well, will you?”

  “I’d like fine to marry you, Alf
ie, honest I would, only how could I leave my lady? My mam was her nurse and Pa’s her coachman, and me and Thomas has been wi’ Lady Jane since we was old enough to go into service.”

  “My lord’d take you on at the Abbey if I asked him, leastways till you was in the family way.”

  “Ooh, Alfie, you are a one! But I don’t know if I could stand to live at the Abbey, wi’ all the upper servants stuck-up as their mistress. His lordship, too, for all he’s come round a bit, I ’member how high and mighty he were when we turned up at the Abbey that day.”

  “You can’t blame him.”

  “What d’you mean? Why not?”

  “It’s the way her ladyship taught him. I’ve knowed him since he were in short coats, Ellie. Master Ned, just five years old, and me not much older, and Mrs. Neville hired me to keep an eye on him. He were that friendly and that bold he’d toddle off to the farms or the village all on his ownsome to visit. Everybody were that glad to see him, from the blacksmith to Lord Fitzgerald, as was our neighbour. Master Ned and young Master Fitz was playmates. And then, what with one thing and another, Master Ned’s heart were near to broke.”

  “What happened, Alfie?”

  “Come on, let’s walk a bit, and I’ll tell you.”

  * * * *

  Jane no longer took the air in Hyde Park. Invited to walk or drive with friends or a suitor, she would declare with a world-weary air that she much preferred Green Park or St. James’s Park, less frequented by those with pretensions to gentility.

  She no longer paid morning calls, except on the Fitzgeralds. One day Old Tom had driven her and Gracie up to Lady Bridges’ house only to see Lord Wintringham knocking on the door. They hurriedly drove on. How dreadful if she had already been ensconced in the Bridges’ drawing-room when he arrived! Ella’s Alfred could not possibly provide notice of his master’s unpredictable visits to the homes of eligible young ladies.