by Mary Balogh
“Sit, Cap,” he said quietly, and leaned his back against the broad trunk of a tree. He crossed his arms over his chest and his boots at the ankles.
She saw his dog first and stopped abruptly.
“Oh,” she said, now spotting him. “Lord Brandon. You startled me.”
Captain, without any prompting, lifted one paw toward her. She came closer and shook it. Her gloves and the ribbons on her bonnet were a paler pink than her dress and spencer.
“Good day, Captain,” she said before looking up at him. “Did you command him not to attack me? Or is he not as fierce as he looks? Is he not a bloodhound, though? A hunter?”
“Even hunters do not dash about the countryside tearing to shreds children and maidens and grandmothers and other assorted persons who appear in their path,” he said. “It is possible to be amiable and gentle by nature and also deadly by training and upon command.”
“And Captain is amiable?” she said. “And gentle? His looks contradict that notion. I would guess you are not here communing with nature by accident, Lord Brandon.”
“I saw you in the rose garden,” he said. “Though I do not know why you came or what you spoke of with Maria. I did not eavesdrop on your conversation. She has been feeling depressed.”
“I daresay you would be too if you were about to be torn against your will from your home,” she said, and he felt his abdominal muscles tighten as he remembered just exactly how it did feel.
“Everleigh Park is Maria’s home, Lady Estelle,” he said. “Being here was always a temporary arrangement for her, though it has lasted for six years. May I walk with you?”
He could see her hesitate. “I cannot stop you, can I?” she said.
“Ah, but indeed you can,” he assured her. “A simple no would do it.” He was not going to have her tell herself and maybe her brother that he had forced his company upon her.
“I suppose it would.” She half smiled. “Yes, Lord Brandon, you may walk with me.”
He adjusted his stride to hers, though she was taller than he had realized and had long legs. He did not want his mind to dwell upon those legs at present, however. She was very slender, though not without enticingly feminine curves. Another detail he must ignore. He was good at self-discipline where women were concerned.
“Maria is displeased with you,” she said, “because you came to Elm Court to invite Bertrand and me to Everleigh Park without first consulting her.”
“It was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea,” he said. “If I had asked her first and then called upon you, she would have been displeased because she would surely have told me not to do it. If I called upon you— as I did— before asking her, then she would be annoyed that I had gone behind her back. As she is. I chose the option of the deep blue sea and invited the devil to do his worst. Maria is displeased with me full stop, Lady Estelle.”
She did not say anything else for a while as they came up to the bridge. She stopped in the middle of it and set a hand on the stone wall before looking at him briefly and then gazing downstream.
“You love her,” she surprised him by saying. She looked a bit surprised too, as though she had believed he must hate Maria just because Maria hated him.
He studied her face in profile. Perfect eyebrow and eyelashes, perfect nose and mouth and chin and neck. She was a true beauty, a fact that came close to irritating him. This was about Maria, not about him.
“I was fourteen when she was born,” he told her, turning his head to watch Captain, who was sniffing about in the grass on the other side and then loping in halfhearted pursuit of a butterfly he had disturbed. “An age at which one might expect a boy to be least interested in a baby in the house. She was born early and was unusually small and frail. Nobody said anything to me about her chances of survival, but I understood that she was not expected to live. She cried a great deal. I used to go up to the nursery when no one else was there with her except the nurse, and I would persuade the nurse to let me hold her and walk about with her and find a position in my arms for her that would stop the crying and lull her to sleep. I used to spread her fingers over one of mine and marvel at the perfection of them, even her nails. I willed her to live, but very shortly I came to understand that she did not need my strength or my will. She had enough of her own. She lived despite expectations to the contrary. She grew to be a thin and pale child and— in my estimation— tough. I spent a great deal of time with her until she was eight. And yes, Lady Estelle, I loved her. Make that present tense. Love does not die simply because of a long absence and changed circumstances.”
Lady Estelle stood very still, watching the water flow under the bridge.
“She says she will be happy to have us come to Everleigh Park as your guests,” she told him at last, turning to face him. “We will come, then.”
“Thank you,” he said, and found himself gazing into her eyes. They were brown, like his own, but not nearly as dark. “If you wish to accompany us when we go, there will be room in the carriage for you, and Watley too, unless he prefers to ride, as I will be doing. The carriage would be at your service whenever you wished to return home.”
“I believe it would be better,” she said, “for us to give both you and Maria a chance to settle for a few days before we arrive. It will also be more convenient if we travel in our own carriage.”
“As you wish.” He inclined his head.
This was perhaps the natural time and place to take his leave of her. There was nothing more to say, and he knew she did not like him.
“I will escort you within sight of your house,” he told her.
She gave him that half smile, which curved her lips but did not quite light her face. She led the way from the bridge, and Captain came dashing toward them to nudge her hand, not his. She smoothed a gloved hand over his large head, and he closed his eyes in momentary bliss before dashing off again.
“You have made a conquest,” he said.
Again that half smile.
“You will not be the only guests at Everleigh,” he told her. “My aunt, my mother’s sister, will be there too, with my uncle and cousins.”
“Yes,” she said. “Maria told me. She has not met them before?” She doubtless knew the answer though she phrased it as a question.
“No,” he said. “After my father’s remarriage they felt it more tactful, I suppose, to stay away from Everleigh, though my father remained fond of them and they of him. I always adored them, and visited them every year. I believe you will like them. My uncle is all amiability and my aunt is … comfortable. It is the best word I can think of to describe her. Three of my cousins are closer to me in age than to Maria, though Rosie is younger than she by a year. I hope they can be friends.”
They did not proceed along the track to the road as he expected. Instead, she turned to walk along the riverbank. There was no well-defined path, but he supposed she knew where she was going and that it was safe. He walked between her and the river.
“I have also written to invite Maria’s aunts and uncle and their families from Yorkshire and a great-aunt,” he said. “Her mother’s siblings and aunt, that is. And our father’s sisters and their families, all of whom live in Cornwall. I had not yet heard from any of them before I left home. So there may be just a small gathering, or there could be quite a large one.”
“Lady Brandon was estranged from her family?” she asked. “And from her husband’s?” Again her words suggested that she knew the answer. Even if Maria had not spoken of them, though, she must have noticed that none of them had ever come to see her mother while she was sick or attended her funeral. At least, he assumed none of them had. He had never heard of any such visits.
“Family quarrels,” he said. “Unfortunately they afflict all too many families.”
He did not even know the exact cause of his stepmother’s estrangement from her own family, though he did know it had been from all of her siblings, not just one of them. They had been at their sister’s wedding to
his father, the only time Justin had met any of them. Soon after, however, they were all unwelcome at Everleigh, though Justin had never heard his father speak of having any disagreement with them. The same held true of his stepmother’s aunt, who had married a baronet when she was very young. She had introduced her niece to society— and to his father.
“And such quarrels often endure for too long a time,” Lady Estelle said. “I hope they will all come, Lord Brandon. It has occurred to me a number of times during the past two years, since Bertrand and I came back to live at Elm Court, that Maria is terribly alone.”
Was there accusation in those words?
“She is not quite alone any longer,” he said. “She has me.”
She slanted a glance his way as though to say that that might be no great asset to her friend. But she did not say it aloud, or anything else.
They walked side by side and in silence until Elm Court came into view as they rounded a bend in the river. He stopped to take his leave of her.
“We will be setting out four days from now,” he told her. “May I expect you and Viscount Watley to follow a couple of days after that?”
“We will leave a week from today,” she said.
“I will look forward to welcoming you to Everleigh Park, then,” he said, and held out a hand for hers.
He did not think she was going to take it. But after a moment’s hesitation she set her own in it and he clasped the warm, gloved slimness of her hand. She did not shiver, but it seemed to him that she came close. She raised her eyes to his.
“Thank you for the escort home,” she said. “One never knows what dangers and terrors might be lying in wait for an unwary woman walking alone.” And this time that half smile lurked in her eyes as well as at the corners of her lips and suggested mockery— or just amusement.
He watched her as she walked away, and Captain sat on his haunches beside him, everything drooping— ears, jowls, eyes in their folds of flesh. As though his best friend were deserting him, the ungrateful cur.
“It is sometimes hard to be disliked,” Justin said, realizing only after he had done so that he had spoken aloud. He was not much given to self-pity— not since leaving his aunt and uncle’s house early one morning more than twelve years ago, anyway. “Come on, Cap. Time to go home.”
Six
Justin rode all the way from East Sussex to Hertfordshire and Everleigh Park, leaving his carriage to his sister and her maid. It was no hardship. For years he had not set foot inside a carriage, and for a while even a ride in a cart or gig had been a luxury. The hardest aspect of this journey was the necessity of staying close to the carriage, of stopping more frequently than he would otherwise have done, for rest stops and refreshment at approximately regular intervals. He took his own meals separately whenever he could, in taprooms rather than dining rooms or private parlors.
There had been no hysterics when they left Prospect Hall. No arguments or dragging of heels. No tears, unless Maria had shed them privately or when she took her leave of Miss Vane, who would be leaving an hour or so after them by private chaise. Or when she walked for the last time in the rose garden. Or when she went with Miss Vane the day before their departure to the churchyard where her mother was buried. She was behaving, in fact, with a mature dignity, cool in her manner to him but not openly rebellious. She initiated no conversation, but she spoke in more than just monosyllables whenever he directed a question or a remark specifically to her.
“I have had the Chinese bedchamber in the east wing prepared for you at Everleigh,” he told her when he joined her for breakfast on the final morning before their arrival. “I am sure you would not wish to return to your old room on the nursery floor. I recall that you always loved being taken to the Chinese room to see the screens and the paper on the wall.”
Specifically, she had liked him to take her there because he had had the patience to wait, often by lying on the bed, his hands clasped behind his head, while she gazed at all the intricately stylized figures on the walls and screen and sometimes outlined them with a finger, though it was a rule that they were never to touch walls. She had also loved the Chinese fan, which she would wave with both hands before her face and then, leaning over him, before his face, giggling gleefully whenever she could raise the hair from his forehead and make him shut his eyes and wrinkle his nose.
“Thank you.” He did not expect her to say anything else, but she did. “And I liked the colored lamps there. I loved to go in the dusk and dark if someone was willing to light them for me.”
Almost always he had been that someone.
“Lady Estelle Lamarr will have the gold room next to yours,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said again.
They arrived home in the middle of the afternoon. It was a rather gray day, though they had at least avoided rain. And so, Justin thought, he was back to the cold magnificence of a stately house he had once loved as though it were an integral part of his very being. Now he hated it. But no, that was not quite true. Hated was too passionate a word. He felt nothing for Everleigh. Not even pride. Only a dull ache about the heart he had no wish to analyze.
He dismounted at the foot of the marble steps that led up beneath a broad portico to the great double doors of the house. He strode over to open the door of the carriage while Captain dashed off with happy woofs to greet a familiar groom who was approaching. Justin set down the steps before offering his hand to help Maria alight.
“Welcome home,” he said.
Both Phelps, the butler, and his wife, who was the housekeeper, had come out onto the portico, Phelps stiffly formal, his wife smiling and curtsying.
“Oh,” Maria cried, her face breaking into smiles. “Mrs. Phelps.” And she grasped the sides of her traveling dress and dashed up the marble steps to be enfolded in the embrace of a servant who had been with them forever. “You are still here. And Mr. Phelps too.”
Within minutes she and her maid had been borne off to the east wing and the Chinese bedchamber. It was the first time since she was a child, Justin thought as he went to the library even before going up to his own room, that he had seen Maria animated and smiling. She had scarcely spared a glance for him.
He checked his mail. There was a formidable pile of it on the large oak desk, or rather there were two piles. The larger pile consisted of letters concerning business his secretary had already been able to deal with. But even the smaller pile seemed alarmingly high.
Maria knew, of course, that the Lamarrs were coming. She had had to approve the invitation before they would accept. She knew too that his aunt and uncle Sharpe and his cousins— all four of them— were coming. She had made no open protest beyond a certain tightening of the lips when he told her. Her mother had wept when Justin’s father had wanted to invite them to Everleigh for Maria’s christening. They would hate Maria, she had protested between sobs, just as they resented her for marrying him and making him happy and helping him forget his first wife. At the time— Justin had been only fourteen— it had not struck him how inappropriate it was that she would make her complaint to his father in his hearing. He had felt only shock at the very notion that his father might forget his mother, who had been so very far superior to his stepmother in every imaginable way. Fortunately, perhaps, he had held his tongue and his father had said something soothing to his second wife. But he had not invited Aunt Betty and Uncle Rowan and the cousins to the christening, to Justin’s great disappointment. Or to any event ever again, in fact.
He had not told Maria of the other guests he had invited, for he had had no idea if any of them would come or, in the case of her mother’s relatives, even acknowledge his invitation. But they had responded to the letters he had written before leaving for Prospect Hall. And all except one had agreed to come. It felt more than a little overwhelming. It was also gratifying.
Sarah and Thomas Wickford, the late countess’s younger sister and her husband, expressed regret. They were about to set off for a tour of Scotland, including t
he Highlands, with a group of friends. But Leonard Dickson and Patricia Chandler, the late countess’s older brother and sister, would be delighted to come with their spouses and children, to meet their niece at last. Aunt Augusta and Aunt Felicity, sisters of Justin and Maria’s father, would come from Cornwall with the uncles and cousins. Lady Maple, Maria’s great-aunt, would be pleased to spend a couple of weeks at Everleigh Park to acquaint herself with her great-niece.
Justin shared the news with his sister when she joined him in the dining room for dinner. She did not react with the hysteria he had feared. She swallowed a mouthful of soup and set her spoon down beside the bowl.
“If I ever met my aunts and uncles and cousins on Papa’s side,” she said, “I do not remember. I do remember Papa telling me about them, though, and recounting stories of his childhood with his sisters. He used to make me laugh. But they lived far away in Cornwall and could not come here easily, he always used to say. Mama did not want to go there when Papa suggested it once. The sea air did not agree with her, and they lived close to the sea. I thought I would have liked to go, but it did not happen.”
Justin remembered that. Maria would have been five or six and was excited at the possibility of a holiday at the seaside. He would have liked to go too. He had been there a couple of times when his mother was still alive and had had great fun with his cousins, running barefoot on the beach, building sand forts, climbing rocks, bathing in the sea and being bowled over by incoming waves. Swallowing salt water and pulling gargoyle faces. He remembered his aunts and uncles and cousins coming to Everleigh too, but only once after his father’s remarriage, before Maria was born. His stepmother had complained afterward that her sisters-in-law had treated her condescendingly, as though she were a child of no account, and had not liked her.
“I have not met any of Mama’s family,” Maria continued, running a finger along the handle of her spoon but not picking it up again. “They were estranged from Mama. They were unkind to her.”