Mr. Jardine hesitated, then shook his head. “It was just that sometimes he was less than sympathetic to the people living on those old plantations. I remember one case, the old Creole man had been there for years, struggling to survive. His family declared him mentally unsound, even had doctors sign the papers, and sold the place out from under him. Barwon came in to evict the old man, but he wouldn’t go. Maybe he was mad, but there was no need for Barwon to destroy him like he did. He brought in a gang of thugs to terrorize him, make his life such a misery that he just gave up and let them take him away. It seemed a cold way to accomplish the business. There were other instances—he replaced plantation workers who had been there for generations, it didn’t matter that they had no where else to go. He didn’t feel any compassion in that sort of situation—he was simply calculating how much money he could make. I…well, I wasn’t able to do that.”
“He sounds like a monster,” she said, with a shudder.
“No, just an able businessman. He seemed to think in straight lines, without the distraction of side issues like moral justice. But in fact he was kind enough when it didn’t affect his profits. There was a young Creole girl living wild on the same plantation as the old man, and he took her in. Adopted her, more or less. Yes, he could be very kind, and to those he loved he would do absolutely anything…will do absolutely anything, but only as long as they are loyal to him. Barwon will not tolerate those who wrong him. I am sure when he learned he was cuckolded and cheated by the woman he adored above all others, and deprived of a son of whom he thought the world, Barwon would strike out violently. I think that explains why he’s been on a campaign to destroy his wife’s good name and ruin Max. They hurt him, you see, and he needs to hurt them back. It’s Barwon’s way.”
Marietta could not easily forgive how Max had been treated. “I suppose we have to blame his wife,” she agreed, “but how can it be his son’s fault? Why must he suffer?”
“The laws of inheritance are clear—Harold will get everything and Max will be cut out.”
“It’s so unfair.”
“Cruel, yes, but it is fair. If Max is not Barwon’s son then he has no right to the title, property or fortune.”
“There is something about Harold Valland I do not trust. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was far from an innocent bystander.”
They were silent a moment.
“Someone,” said Marietta, her eyes fixed on the fire, “should do something about it.”
Mr. Jardine gave her a sharp look. “Miss Marietta, this is none of your affair. Do not think to meddle.”
“Who said anything about meddling?” Marietta said mildly, and sipped her tea.
A tap on the door saved her from further questioning by Mr. Jardine, and when Lil entered the library it was with a request from Vivianna for Marietta to come to her bedchamber.
Relieved, Marietta set down her cup and hurried out, but Lil lingered, exchanging some pleasantries with Lady Greentree’s secretary on her current life in London.
“Jacob Coachman’s heart is broken, you know that, Lil?” Mr. Jardine teased. “He will never be the same again.”
“Oh, go on with you!” cried Lil. “He’ll find someone else, you wait and see. Men, they’re all the same they are, apart from you, Mr. Jardine,” she added earnestly.
But Mr. Jardine did not seem to notice the admiring expression in her eyes or the quickening of her heart. He just smiled at her in his paternal way and told her to be a good girl, although he knew she was, and then went back to whatever it was he had been doing.
With a sigh, Lil left him to it. She had loved him for years, ever since she went to work for Lady Greentree at Greentree Manor. Even though she knew she was unworthy of such a gentleman, she could not help but wish things were different and Mr. Jardine would look at her as a man, and not a father.
Lil had grown up on the streets and through necessity, when she was far too young, had earned her keep by selling her body. Vivianna had found her in that state and “saved” her, and Lil had loved her for it ever since. Vivianna had given Lil the chance at a new life.
Lil was determined to deserve it.
She would never fall back into her old ways, she was far too respectable for that now. Indeed, she studied respectability as others might study music or art, and she was very careful in her every action. But she knew she would never be deserving enough for a wonderful man like Mr. Jardine. Besides, he loved Lady Greentree. It was sad that Lady Greentree still loved her husband, who had died many years ago in India. It was sad that Lady Greentree could not see that there was a man waiting for her, a flesh and blood man, right under her nose.
Lil sighed again, and set off up the stairs after Marietta.
Chapter 6
Max drifted in and out of consciousness, rather like a aeronaught in a gas balloon. The doctor had given him laudanum, and although it helped him to sleep and heal, it was not a peaceful slumber. Once he thought he heard Harold in the room with him, and then, strangely, his father. “Get well, my son,” the duke said, and then his breath caught, as though the word had come from his lips unawares and he had realized all over again that Max was no longer his “son” but some stranger’s child foisted upon him.
Max and his father had never been close in the demonstrative way Max and his mother were close, but then his father was not the sort of man who could easily express his feelings. However, he had always believed his father loved him, and all the more since his mother had died. The duke had seemed genuinely proud of Max and the man he had become. Now all that was gone. The violent severing of the ties between them caused an ache inside Max’s chest very much like the wound in his head, except this one could never heal.
At the age of twenty-nine he had lost both his parents.
He wanted to hate his mother for what she had done, but he could not do that either. The duchess had been a kind, sweet lady. How could Max hate her? And—deep in his heart—how could he believe that she had really conceived him with another man and then married the duke? Deceived and lied and played a part. And yet the duke obviously believed his wife’s letter to be the truth, and Max, too, must accept the evidence, however much his heart rebelled against it.
Max tossed and turned in his enormous ducal bed, until eventually his mother’s face faded and his thoughts turned instead to a cool palm on his feverish skin, and blue eyes smiling down at him, and a soft lap pillowing his head during that appalling ride home in the coach.
Marietta Greentree.
What was it about the woman that got under his skin, despite his best efforts to keep her out? She was bossy and pert, and he wanted nothing more than to escape her clear, cool gaze and put a stop to her intrusion into his life. He had never asked for her help or her interference, and yet suddenly here she was, inside his world, and he didn’t know how to push her out again.
Not exactly sound economics…
Her voice echoed in his pounding head, and he smiled wryly at the memory of her reprimand. She had been right—he shouldn’t be spending money at Aphrodite’s Club when he couldn’t even pay his servants’ wages or the tradesmen who called constantly at his door, demanding he settle their accounts. What had he been thinking, to go there? Probably that he was miserable and alone and nothing would ever be the same again. Soon, he knew, he must make a final decision about his future.
Cornwall. That was where his mother’s family’s house was, where it had stood for generations. Max had only been to Blackwood once, when he was a boy; he barely remembered it, and what he did remember wasn’t encouraging. Grim, gray stone and small, dark windows that reflected no light, perched on a precarious cliff above an unfriendly sea. If he sold everything he had left he could then afford to move to Blackwood and live there frugally for forty or so years. Until he died.
Max shuddered in his fever. He would become the hermit of Blackwood House, the last of his line, forgotten except by the gossips who would not let his story die. The Disinherited Duke, that was w
hat they would call him, and shake their heads…
What was it Ian Keith had said? Something about this being Max’s chance to make a new life for himself, without the shackles of position or privilege. Max admitted that the thought of being cast adrift from his allotted place in the world was not comfortable. Perhaps he was running away to Cornwall, not because he had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, but because he had not been brought up to be anything but a duke. A gentleman did not dirty his hands with actual paid work. A gentleman preferred to keep his hands clean and slowly starve to death.
Maybe Ian was right. Time to put aside the worn out prejudices, time to think like a man and not a peer. Max searched his mind for something he could do, something he was good at, something he might enjoy. Farming? He could turn the land in Cornwall into a prosperous concern. He pictured himself toiling with his laborers over the stony ground growing things like…like mangel-wurzels, the sun warm on his back, the smell of the soil on his hands. But was it enough to sustain him and those dependent upon him?
Perhaps Marietta will come and stay with me.
The thought popped out of nowhere. He imagined Marietta with her fair curls and sparkling eyes tripping through Blackwood’s dismal corridors. Marietta, laughing in the candlelight over his pitiful homegrown meal and sipping the local cider. Marietta, in his bed at night, with the sea crashing below the cliffs outside his window, and her mouth hot and eager.
Dear God! What is wrong with me!
Max’s eyes sprang open and he glared at poor Daniel, who had been bathing his face with cool water, and caused the coachman to start and drop the bowl.
“I-I’m sorry, my lord,” Daniel stammered.
Max blinked, and his frown smoothed away. He was injured and weak, that was what it was. Once his body recovered he would not need to think of Marietta again—she would be completely and utterly removed from his life. And that was how it should be. Max knew he was in no position to be thinking about a woman—any woman. Not when he could barely look after himself.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, Daniel,” he assured his anxious servant. “How long have I been in bed?”
“Two days, m’lord. The doctor’s been here every day, givin’ you somethin’ to make you sleep. He’ll be back this even, and Mr. Harold and Miss Susannah’ll be here, too.”
Max wished he could draw his tattered pride about him and send Harold and Susannah away, but he was not a fool and he knew he couldn’t manage on his own, not yet. When he was better, when he was able to get out of this wretched bed, then he would begin to set his plans in motion for the move to Cornwall. Besides, it wasn’t their fault he wasn’t his father’s son. He knew how guilty Harold felt about his sudden and unexpected good fortune; he knew how Susannah had suffered over the question of whether or not to reveal the truth, when she found the duchess’s incriminating letter. It had been Susannah, the nearest thing Max had to a sister, who had the task of sorting through his mother’s papers when she died. Susannah, the duke’s adopted daughter, and now Harold’s wife. She would make a beautiful Duchess of Barwon, Max told himself, trying to still the ache of loss inside. He was glad, really.
He and Harold and Susannah had been friends from childhood, and they had played rough and tumble games at Valland House, and grown up together, the two boys and Susannah the tomboy. It had been Harold who Susannah wed; Max had always looked upon her as a sister. Perhaps, too, Harold and Susannah had more in common—both had lost their parents at an early age, both were taken in by the duke and duchess, and loved as their own. Although Max could recall Susannah saying to him once, in her soft voice with the Creole accent she had never lost, “I know they love Harold and me, but they love you more, Max.”
“The young lady sent a note around this mornin’.”
Daniel’s voice startled Max back to the present.
“Young lady?” Did he mean Marietta? Max almost groaned aloud, except that Daniel was watching him, his pale eyes wide and guileless, like a dog hopeful of a crumb. He was like a big child, sometimes—he had an innocence of mind that made Max smile. Daniel must come with him to Cornwall. The Pomeroys were too elderly and he would do his best to set them up somewhere—he might even have to swallow his pride and ask Harold to take care of it—but Daniel must be with him.
“I said, sir, that the young lady—”
“And I heard you, Daniel. Very well, what did Miss Greentree have to say in her note?”
“I didn’t read it, m’lord. It’s here,” he picked up the thin envelope. “Do you want me to open it up for you?”
Max nodded in resignation. “Go on then. And read it, if you please. I don’t trust my eyesight just now.”
Daniel made much of opening the envelope. Inside it was a single sheet of crisp paper, which looked fragile in Daniel’s big hands. Pomeroy had taught Daniel to read. “She says: ‘I will be callin’ upon you at three o’clock this aft’noon.’ Then her name, Mary…etta Greentrees.”
“Marietta Greentree.” Max shifted in the bed and found his head did not hurt quite so much. “What is the time now, Daniel?”
“It hasn’t long turned one in the afternoon, m’lord. I heard the clock strike.”
Then she would be here in two hours. Suddenly Max knew he did not want her to see him like this, lying unwashed and miserable, exactly as she had left him. Damn the woman, what did she want from him? Not that he wasn’t grateful to her for sitting with him and caring for him, but she was far too disruptive to what peace of mind he had remaining.
“Fetch me warm water, soap, and a razor, Daniel,” Max said in a suddenly decisive voice. “I need to be shaved. And fetch Pomeroy, too,” he added. “He has the steadier hands, and I don’t want to look like a badly sliced side of beef when Miss Greentree arrives.”
“Yes, m’lord.” Daniel, clearly relieved to have been spared, went to do his master’s bidding.
I’ll just tell her that I no longer require her kind interference, Max thought, as he lay waiting for Pomeroy, staring up at the canopy above his bed. Surely it can’t be that difficult? I’ve dealt with far more dangerous characters than her in my time.
Then why was he suddenly feeling so shaky? And what was that leap of his heart, at the thought of seeing her again?
There was a lighted lamp on the table by the bottom of the staircase, but it did little to dispel the shadows. Either the house in Bedford Square didn’t have gas or…maybe the bills hadn’t been paid recently. Again Marietta nodded sympathetically, as Mrs. Pomeroy continued to pour out her troubles, but half of her was thinking of other things. For instance, she pictured Max, feverishly tossing and turning in his canopied bed in this big, silent house that no longer belonged to him.
“’Tisn’t right, Miss. Master Max has always been the best of sons and he promised to be the best of dukes, too. Now he’s gone and lost everything. Not that I believe for a moment that Her Grace would ever have—” She bit down on her lip, as if she couldn’t bear to say it aloud. “Well, I just think it’s wrong,” she grumbled, as Pomeroy shuffled over to join them.
“Miss Greentree has come to see his lordship,” she informed her husband with a worried glance up the stairs. “Is he ready yet for visitors?”
Pomeroy looked particularly spick and span in his butler’s uniform of dark blue coat and white knee breeches, a powdered wig set upon his head and gloves upon his hands. “He’s all ready and waiting,” he informed them grandly. “Miss, if you would follow me…?”
As she followed Pomeroy, Marietta had plenty of time to look about her—he wasn’t very quick on the stairs—and notice that the ornate mirror that hung on the landing had been cleaned and polished, and that there was a vase of fresh flowers on the small table beneath it. She admitted she might have been somewhat distracted the other day, but she was sure the flowers weren’t there then, and the mirror wasn’t polished. In fact at that time the house gave off an air of forlorn neglect; now it was actually sparkling.
Puzzled, s
he let Pomeroy direct her down a wide corridor towards the archway that led into Max’s suite of rooms. More flowers, and a lit candelabra, making a pool of soft light. In the candlelight the furnishings glowed, and there was the unmistakable smell of lemon polish.
It wasn’t until she stepped inside Max’s bedchamber, and saw him propped up upon his pillows, still bandaged and pale, but freshly shaven, that Marietta realized what had happened. The spit and polish was in her honor, because Max and his servants could not bear to think that she should see them at less than their best.
Marietta felt tears sting her eyes and hurriedly blinked them away. It would never do for Max to see how affected she was; any weakness on her part could give him a reason to refuse the offer she was about to put to him.
“Miss Greentree,” he said, his voice a little husky but otherwise strong and scrupulously polite. He met Pomeroy’s eyes over her head. “Would you bring the tray up now, Pomeroy?”
“Very good, my lord.”
Marietta wanted to protest that the stairs were too steep and Pomeroy’s legs too old, and she didn’t need refreshment anyway, but again she stopped herself. What right had she to refuse their hospitality, for whatever reason, when it obviously meant so much to them?
The door closed behind the butler. The drapes were drawn, and despite the lamp on a chest of drawers, it was gloomy in here. She was tempted to throw back the window coverings and bring in the spring sunshine, but again she stopped herself. The light probably hurt Max’s eyes. As she walked toward him, she could see that he was also dressed for the occasion, at least from the waist upwards. He was wearing a clean, pressed white shirt with dark necktie, and, buttoned over the top, a red and purple brocade jacket. His hair was brushed and dampened, to flatten the exuberant curls above his clean bandage, while beneath it his handsome face appeared pale and gaunt.
“You look much better, Lord Roseby,” she said, suddenly uncharacteristically shy. She had begun to feel as if she knew Max, but this man seated before her was a stranger—an aristocratic stranger.
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