by Mary Balogh
Estelle clamped her teeth together. Trust her brother to take his part. Men and their protective instincts!
“That is not quite what I came to ask of you,” the earl said. “Lady Estelle has perhaps misunderstood what I have said.”
“Indeed?” She raised her eyebrows.
“My sister must and will return to Everleigh Park with me,” Lord Brandon said. “There is no question of her remaining here. She has been told, in fact, that we will be leaving within a week. Unfortunately, however, Miss Vane will be unable to accompany us. Family concerns make it difficult for her to move farther away from her own home than she already is. So I am going to have not only an unwilling sister at Everleigh with me, but also a very lonely one. I have taken some steps to make my house a more welcoming place for her while she settles there after six years away and accepts it as her home again. But I do not know how those plans will work out. Being there will not be easy for her. She has never lived there without her mother. Or for very long without her father. She has not lived there with me since she was eight years old. I would be a great deal happier if I could arrange matters so that she could have someone familiar there in whom to confide and upon whom to lean, even if only for a short while. It is my hope that you— both of you— will be guests at Everleigh for a couple of weeks or so.”
Oh, heaven forbid! Estelle drew breath to speak.
“And how does Lady Maria feel about this?” Bertrand asked before she could.
“I have not asked her,” the earl admitted. “I decided to speak with you first. It is a great deal to ask.”
Indeed it was. Maria had been eight? He had been gone from home for six years, then, before his father died and he inherited the title.
Bertrand looked at Estelle, his eyebrows raised.
“We will need to talk this over,” she said. “Between ourselves.”
It would be intolerable. And Maria would surely not appreciate such interference in her affairs—Oh, by the way, Maria, when you go to Everleigh Park, against your will, with the brother you hate? Bert and I will be going too to spend a few weeks there as his guests. Will not that be fun? I can scarcely wait! But … Melanie Vane would not be going with her. She would be all alone— with her brother. That would be a blow indeed to poor Maria.
“We would also need to speak with Lady Maria,” Bertrand said. “She is Estelle’s friend and a close acquaintance of mine. Even if we should decide between ourselves that we are willing to accept your invitation for her sake, we would not be comfortable having her presented with a fait accompli. She may be your sister and ward, Brandon, and therefore subject to your commands, but she owes nothing to us.”
“Maria is indeed my friend,” Estelle said. “I would not do anything that concerns her behind her back, Lord Brandon. She may be a minor and a woman, but she … matters. As a person.”
The Earl of Brandon got to his feet. “I will say nothing of my visit here, then,” he said. “Until you have given me your answer, that is. May I expect it fairly soon?”
“You say you plan to leave here with your sister within the week,” Bertrand said. “We will give you our answer before then. In the meanwhile, it is altogether possible that we will call upon Lady Maria. If we do, we would appreciate a word alone with her.”
“You will have it.” The earl inclined his head and made his way toward the door. “Good day, Lady Estelle.”
Bertrand had got to his feet to follow him.
She murmured something as they left the room. She resented this, she thought as she stood up and stared at the door after it closed behind them. She deeply resented it. There was something between the Earl of Brandon and Maria. Something old and ugly. Her father had died just before she and her mother came here— sent from Everleigh Park, it seemed, by the command of the present earl. Just as he had been banished by his father six years before that— if the story she had heard was true, that was. Was there a connection? But even if there was, it could not have involved Maria. She had been eight years old.
Estelle tried to imagine what would happen if her own father were to die— horrid thought. She tried to imagine Bertrand sending their stepmother far away from Redcliffe. Banishing her. She could not picture it. Their stepmother was not their mother. No one could take her place even though she had died before their first birthday and they had no conscious memories of her. But both she and Bertrand adored their stepmother— they called her Mother— and she loved them. She was a very real part of their family unit. She would always have a home at Redcliffe, even if Bertrand moved there with a wife and family. Even if she chose to go and live with one of her three children instead of remaining at Redcliffe.
Maria had never offered any explanation of what had brought her and her mother here. Estelle felt for her now in her obvious distress over the arrival of her brother and could only imagine how she must be feeling about having to return with him— alone— to the home she had not seen in six years. Nevertheless, that was Maria’s business. She would adjust and cope somehow. She was a much stronger person than her physical appearance and her quiet demeanor suggested. Estelle very much resented being drawn into whatever secret passions lurked within that family story.
It was not her story. Or Bertrand’s. They had dealt with their own demons when they had reared their nasty heads. And they had emerged from the struggle stronger and happier. They had their father back in their lives, with the wonderful bonus of a stepmother. And now they really were contented together here at Elm Court, alone again after a busy spring and a round of family visits. Alone for the autumn and winter, they had been hoping, with the possible exception of Christmas.
Bertrand came back into the room.
“You do not want to go to Everleigh?” he asked.
“I really, really do not,” she told him.
“But … ?” He tipped his head to one side and regarded her closely. “You will have sleepless nights if we leave it at that without giving it another thought? Is that what your frown is telling me?”
“I despise the fact that you know me so well, Bert,” she said. “How dare he present us with this dilemma?”
“You really have taken him in dislike,” he said, grinning at her. “Your heart is not in danger, is it, Stell?” He waggled his eyebrows.
“Oh! That is not even funny.” She grabbed a cushion from the love seat and hurled it at him.
He caught it in one hand.
“We will talk about it,” he said. “We do need to consider Lady Maria and what, if anything, we can do to help her. I know you have grown very fond of her, Stell, and I care what happens to her. But may we have a tea tray brought up first? I am starved. And parched.”
“And whose fault is that?” she asked.
Lady Estelle Lamarr had been hostile. Watley had been wary and careful in his response. He probably ought not to have called upon them, Justin thought as he rode back to Prospect Hall, Captain loping along beside his horse except when he paused to sniff at something that caught his interest and needed further attention or went dashing off to explore the unknown. He never went far. He had been trained not to do so. A raised voice or a whistle would bring him back in a moment. The dog never needed a leash.
Inviting them to Everleigh had probably not been a brilliant idea from the start. But he was feeling a bit desperate. Maria had been a burden upon his conscience for the past six years, the innocent victim of a situation that did not involve her. He had driven her from her home not long after she lost her father and when she was at an age at which girls were starting to look forward to being young ladies and stepping out into the world of fashion and parties and courtship. But at least she had been with her mother. That had no longer been so for more than a year now. She had lost both her parents by the time she was nineteen. Clearly she could not remain where she was.
The only real solution was for her to live at Everleigh, where she had been born and spent her childhood. Where her brother and guardian lived. Where she belonged. Yet he ha
d known from her clipped responses to all his letters, including the one in which he had asked if he might come for her mother’s funeral, that she would resist coming home. If she were younger, he could simply have had her fetched home after her mother’s death whether she liked it or not. If she were older, past the age of twenty-five, he would have had no further responsibility for her and would have been happy to allow her to remain at Prospect Hall as long as she wished and take full charge of her own life. But she was twenty, betwixt and between, and she was a burden to him.
Not a burden in the most obvious sense. Good God, he had loved her when she was a child, and love never did quite die. Especially when there was no good reason for it to do so. The fact that she obviously hated him now was not a reason. She had been a child— and she had probably been fed misleading, even purely false information about him throughout her girlhood. She would surely not resent him so bitterly just for leaving home, leaving her, without an explanation or a goodbye. He had tried to say goodbye. He had run up to the nursery, leaving his hastily gathered bundle in the hallway, but he had been waylaid outside the door and escorted ignominiously to the stables and then all the way to the gates of the park by two burly, wooden-faced footmen— who were no longer in his employ, he had been relieved to discover when he returned home five and a half years ago.
When he had learned that Miss Vane would not go with them to Everleigh, he had wondered how soon he could hire a replacement for her. He must still do so, of course, but it would take time, and then her newly employed companion would be a stranger to Maria for some time. In the meanwhile, how could he find someone who was familiar to her, someone to be with her for the crucial first weeks following her return home? His mind had alit upon the Lamarr twins. They were a handsome, well-bred pair and sufficiently older than his sister to provide some steadying influence— he had chosen to ignore that scene on the riverbank— but close enough to her in age to offer genuine companionship.
If they would agree to be guests in his home for a couple of weeks, that was.
Damnation but he was so inexperienced at this sort of thing, Justin thought in some frustration, slowing his horse as he approached the stone bridge over the river and glancing along the bank to his left as though he expected to see Lady Estelle Lamarr sitting there again, her loose hair touching the grass behind her as she tipped back her head. She had looked very fetching again this morning in her old, faded dress, which would have been shapeless had it not been for the curves of the woman beneath it, and her floppy straw hat, which had seen better days but was now at perhaps its most attractive. He had been almost disappointed when she stepped into the drawing room later, bareheaded, her hair twisted into an immaculate knot high on the back of her head, and wearing a dress that was in the latest mode.
Inexperienced and alone.
His aloneness would not weigh so heavily upon him, perhaps, if he had only himself to consider. His neighbors at Everleigh had not exactly welcomed him home with open arms when he had returned six months or so after his father’s death. He did not know what his father had told them, but it would hardly have been what he had perceived as the truth. He had always been an amiable but private man, keeping his business, especially as it related to his family, strictly to himself. His father’s second wife, on the other hand, would probably have had no such qualms, and goodness alone knew what stories she had told in the neighborhood and beyond. The neighbors had not openly shunned Justin, however, and he had had civil, if not warm, dealings with them in the years since.
It had been beyond his father’s power to cut him out of the inheritance, of course, as he had explained to his son in bitter tones during that final, terrible interview— the last time Justin saw him. But his father could and would—and did— forbid him to set foot upon Everleigh land or that of any of his other properties during the rest of his own natural life. He had cut Justin’s allowance as of that moment. If his son did not have a penny in his purse with which to remove himself elsewhere, then he would have to walk and beg for crusts of bread as he went.
Justin had had his horse— his own personal possession— and enough money in his purse to get him to his aunt and uncle’s house sixty miles away with as many of his other possessions as he could carry with him. Aunt Betty Sharpe, always one of his favorite people in this world, was his mother’s younger sister. Uncle Rowan, her husband, was a favorite too. Justin had poured out his woes to them and the full truth—the only people to whom he had ever told it.
His uncle had wanted to intervene, but it had been out of the question. His aunt had wanted to open their home and their bounty to him and shelter him for the rest of his life. That was equally out of the question. He had stayed for a week, borrowed twenty pounds from his uncle— who had tried to insist that it be far more and that it be considered a gift— and left early one morning. He had paid back the loan within a year but had not gone back there or to London, where he might have found a few friends and some genteel employment, or to his aunts, his father’s sisters, who both lived in Cornwall. Instead he had ridden off into the unknown, a stranger in what he had soon come to see as a strange land. He had not returned home for six and a half years.
He had felt essentially alone ever since coming home, though perhaps that was his fault. He had felt— oddly— like a stranger in a strange land again.
He had friends— very close ones— but they were of a different world, and he chose to keep his two worlds separate and distinct. None of those friends ever came to Everleigh. He went to them, quite frequently and often for lengthy spells, but he had resisted the urge to stay, simply to disappear from his responsibilities as earl. During the past three years he had taken his place in the House of Lords as a peer of the realm and had been conscientious about attending when the House was in session. It had meant spending time in residence at his London home, though he had studiously avoided mingling with the ton or attending any of the various parties with which its members entertained themselves during the months of the Season. He had refused any invitations that had ever come his way.
His friends from long ago had fallen away. Or perhaps over the intervening years they had merely got on with their lives, as he had with his, and their paths had diverged so drastically that there was no longer any point of connection. He had some friendly acquaintances with whom he occasionally dined at one of the gentlemen’s clubs. And there were a few actual friends, though he saw them only when he was in London. One of them, come to think of it, had a connection with the Westcott family and therefore, no doubt through several twists and turns of family ties and half ties, with Watley and his sister. He had learned of that connection during the past week from a few visitors to Prospect Hall. Avery Archer, Duke of Netherby, had married a Westcott, had he not? And was not Netherby’s stepmother a Westcott too?
He was a bit of an intimidating man, Netherby. He was not the sort one slapped on the back and greeted with a dubious jest and a hearty guffaw. He was a man who exuded power and commanded universal respect despite the fact that he appeared to do nothing that would explain people’s awe of him. He was slight of build, languid of manner, and soft of voice, with eyelids that drooped almost habitually over his eyes, though the eyes beneath them were keen and observant. He had made the strange comment during his first private conversation with Justin that if he ever had a vital secret that he absolutely must confide to someone— “though I cannot imagine I ever would find myself in such a drastic or ridiculous situation”— he would surely feel confident in entrusting it to the Earl of Brandon.
Which was indeed a strange thing to say. What he had seen in Justin to provoke it, Justin did not know. But they had been friends ever since and occasionally dined together at White’s Club and even a couple of times at Archer House, the ducal town residence, in company with the duchess and the dowager duchess. He would not feel comfortable inviting Netherby to Everleigh to meet Maria, however. For one thing, he might scare her to death. The duke’s mere presence scared a lo
t of people. For another thing, his duchess was increasing with their fifth child.
Before leaving home to come here Justin had considered organizing some sort of house party, but he had modified the idea in favor of a family gathering. That sounded cozy and safe, though in reality, of course, it was anything but. There were three families to consider and no guarantee that any of them would come or that they would mingle comfortably together if they did. Or that Maria would mingle with any of them.
He had sent off letters inviting them all. Aunt Betty had replied immediately. She and Uncle Rowan would come. His cousins, their children, would come too— Doris with her husband, Martin Haig, and their two young children; Sidney and Ernest, aged thirty-two and twenty-eight respectively; and Rosie, aged nineteen and known fondly to the family as the afterthought. They were all strangers to Maria, and in no way related to her. They had not come to Everleigh at all after the wedding of Maria’s mother to Justin’s father. But they were good people, all of them, and would surely be kind to Maria. She ought to know them.
He had not heard from the others before leaving Everleigh to come here. There were his father’s two sisters, his aunts— and Maria’s. Aunt Augusta had married Peter Ormsbury, now Baron Crowther, and Aunt Felicity had married Harold, Peter’s brother. And there were Maria’s relatives— the brother and sisters of the late countess, her mother. Leonard Dickson had married Margaret— Justin did not know her maiden name. Patricia was married to Irwin Chandler. Sarah was married to Thomas Wickford. Justin knew no more about any of them except that all three men were apparently successful businessmen from Yorkshire. And there was Lady Maple, Maria’s great-aunt. Justin had invited them all to Everleigh even though Maria had never met any of them. Her mother had quarreled with them all soon after her marriage to his father. He had no idea how likely any of them were to accept his invitation, or how Maria would react if they did come.