by Nichole Van
The Long Overachiever Version:
An international bestselling author, Nichole Van is an artist who feels life is too short to only have one obsession. In former lives, she has been a contemporary dancer, pianist, art historian, choreographer, culinary artist and English professor.
Most notably, however, Nichole is an acclaimed photographer, winning over thirty international accolades for her work, including Portrait of the Year from WPPI in 2007. (Think Oscars for wedding and portrait photographers.) Her unique photography style has been featured in many magazines, including Rangefinder and Professional Photographer. She is also the creative mind behind the popular website Flourish Emporium which provides resources for photographers.
All that said, Nichole has always been a writer at heart. With an MA in English, she taught technical writing at Brigham Young University for ten years and has written more technical manuals than she can quickly count. She decided in late 2013 to start writing fiction and has since become an Amazon #1 bestselling author. Additionally, she has won a RONE award, as well as been a Whitney Award Finalist several years running. Her late 2018 release, Seeing Miss Heartstone, won the Whitney Award Winner for Best Historical Romance.
In February 2017, Nichole, her husband and three crazy children moved from the Rocky Mountains in the USA to Scotland. They currently live near the coast of eastern Scotland in an eighteenth century country house. Nichole loves her pastoral country views while writing and enjoys long walks through fields and along beaches. She does not, however, have a fondness for haggis.
She is known as NicholeVan all over the web: Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. Visit http://www.NicholeVan.com to sign up for her author newsletter and be notified of new book releases. Additionally, you can see her photographic work at http://photography.nicholeV.com and http://www.nicholeV.com.
If you enjoyed this book, please leave a short review on Amazon.com. Wonderful reviews are the elixir of life for authors. Even better than dark chocolate.
Copyright
Loving a Lady © 2020 by Nichole Van Valkenburgh
Cover design © Nichole Van Valkenburgh
Interior design © Nichole Van Valkenburgh
Published by Fiorenza Publishing
Kindle Digital Edition 1.0
Loving a Lady is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
ISBN: 978-1-949863-06-2
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Suffering the Scot
Brotherhood of the Black Tartan Book 1
A Whitney Award Finalist 2019
Suffering the Scot
Chapter 1
Alsbourne, Sussex
March, 1819
Everyone knew it was an unmitigated disaster.
Some even deployed the adjectives “biblical” and “calamitous.”
For her part, Lady Jane Everard simply hoped to survive the afternoon without anyone drawing blood.
She took a sip of her tea, politely listening to the women buzzing around the drawing room. Her younger half-brother, the Honorable Mr. Peter Langston, sat beside her. The black mourning band around his upper arm spoke tellingly of their situation.
After six months of full-mourning for her stepfather, the late Earl of Hadley, Jane’s family had resumed afternoon at-home hours. Their neighbors had called upon them, ostensibly to lend support during their current hardship. Such concern only thinly veiled their delight in watching the Langstons of Hadley Park descend the social ladder.
Jane’s mother, the widowed Lady Hadley, sat across the room, holding court over the tea tray. Lady Hadley had overcome the death of two aristocratic husbands—a duke and an earl. A few venom-tongued busybodies would not defeat her.
Though Lady Hadley declared herself a devout Anglican, Jane believed her mother’s true religion was a fervent belief in her exalted station in life. The lady defended her social position with the ruthless tenacity of a medieval Crusader, carefully calibrated silences and chilly reserve being her weapons of choice.
“Gracious, what a disaster,” Lady Whitcomb declared, leaning to take a teacup from Lady Hadley. “You are scarcely out of full-mourning, and the new Lord Hadley is at your door.”
“Is it true what they say? That Lord Hadley is barely civilized?” Mrs. Smith asked, darting a glance up from her own cup.
“But, of course.” Lady Whitcomb tilted her head, her graying curls swaying with the motion. “He is an impoverished, coarse Scot, after all.”
Jane considered Lady Whitcomb’s opinion to be slightly redundant, as all Polite Society knew the word Scot already encompassed impoverished and coarse.
“You have the right of it.” Mrs. Burton tsked, accepting a teacup with a mournful shake of her head. “Rumor says Lord Hadley was raised in a crofter’s hut deep in the wilds of Scotland.”
The way Mrs. Burton pronounced Scotland imbued the word with a thousand years of history—the medieval battles between Robert the Bruce and King Edward, the horror of England suffering a succession of wastrel Scottish kings after Elizabeth’s glorious reign, the more recent Battle of Culloden and the current Highland Clearances, all threaded through with Scotland’s uncivilized behavior and loose understanding of decorum.
Lady Hadley did not react, proving again her ruthless control over her emotions. Jane followed suit, keeping her own expression polite, resting her cup and saucer on the table beside her before folding her hands in her lap with exacting precision.
Lady Hadley and her daughter were well-known for their exquisite manners. It was what made the current situation all the more horrific and, to be honest, horrifically delightful to those observing from the outside.
Peter, predictably, snorted.
Jane forgave him. What else could she do? Growing up, she and Peter had only had each other and that fact had not changed over the years. No matter what he did, she loved Peter more than anyone else in the world.
That said . . . snorting was decidedly ill-mannered.
Jane surreptitiously nudged Peter with her foot, a silent reproof.
“Indeed,” Mrs. Burton replied. “Given the Earldom of Hadley’s history with Scotland, the situation is decidedly . . .”
“Ironic?” Lady Whitcomb supplied, mouth pursing into a simpering moue before sipping her tea. “That the hunter has become the hunted?”
Lady Hadley replied with a taut smile.
The facts were decidedly ironic, Jane supposed.
The first Earl of Hadley had been raised to the peerage for, Invaluable services to the Crown in assisting His Majesty’s troops to defeat the unruly Scottish rebellion at Culloden. In short, the first Earl had been a celebrated English war hero noted for his savagery in dealing with wild Scottish rebels.
However, his grandson, Henry—born to be the third Earl of Hadley—did not view Scots in quite the same fashion. So much so that, while on a hunting trip in the Highlands, Henry had abruptly married an impoverished local lass. (Lass was the kindest way Jane could describe the woman. Others used more colorful words, the politest of which were trollop and light-skirt.)
Horrified at finding himself with a low-born, Scottish daughter-in-law, the old earl had cut Henry off without a farthing and never spoke to his son again. If it had been within his power, the old earl would have even barred Henry from eventually succeeding to the title. Fortunately, Fate listened, and Henry had died before his father.
So it was now Henry’s son, Andrew Langston—the Scottish lass’s offspring and therefore uneducated, crude, and completely unfit—who had become the third Earl of Hadley. The very sort of Scot the first Earl of Hadley had valiantly tried to
exterminate.
Irony, indeed.
“They say Lord Hadley is a veritable savage.” Lady Whitcomb practically quivered in delicious excitement, her pinched face narrowing further. “He certainly doesn’t mix in polite company. There has never been a whisper of him at any ton event.” She arched her eyebrows before biting into a buttery biscuit. “My cousin, Lord Wanleigh, stated as much in his most recent letter.”
Lady Whitcomb’s cousin was the aging Marquess of Wanleigh—a fact no one was allowed to forget. Jane had never met the man, but she often wondered if he was as pompous in person as he sounded on paper.
“And why should the new Lord Hadley have mingled with Polite Society? Savages don’t attend balls.” Mrs. Burton pronounced her words with zealous conviction. Jane was quite sure fealty had been sworn with less fervor.
Peter angled himself fractionally closer to Jane, snorting again. “Of course savages attend balls,” he muttered under his breath.
Jane concentrated on not smiling.
Do not react.
She pressed her fingernail into her palm, pressing hard enough to feel a bite of pain but never breaking the skin.
Peter leaned into her ear, clearly undeterred. “One must be nearly feral to survive the London Season. Cannibalism is the ton’s modus operandi. We thrive on devouring our own—”
Jane barely swallowed back the laughter climbing her throat. She shot Peter a quelling side-glance.
“Hush.” She managed to say the word without moving her lips, for all the good it did.
Peter was determined to win this round.
It was a game they played. Peter said outrageous things, and Jane bravely refrained from reacting beyond a discreet pinch or sotto voce reprimand. Abruptly smiling, frowning, smirking, eye rolling, or heaven forbid, giggling would earn Jane a dressing down from their mother after guests departed.
After all, she had an image to maintain.
Ladies never indulge in broad emotions, Jane, Lady Hadley would say. Emotion, if it must be shown, should be conveyed through a raised eyebrow or slight tonal inflection. Nothing more.
Peter, of course, had no such constraints. He could make faces all he wished, and their mother would never say a word. Facts he well knew.
Thankfully, Peter obeyed Jane’s quiet reprimand and sat back, crossing his arms, his black armband straining from the movement. But the smile lurking on his lips promised more harassing torment.
Her brother knew her polite, elegant manners were studiously learned; a facade she carefully donned. Unladylike behavior and rowdy thoughts lurked just beneath her polished veneer, defaults she constantly strove to quash.
In true younger brother fashion, he delighted in reminding her of these facts. Over and over again. Endlessly.
Jane forced herself to focus by pressing another fingernail into her palm, leaving a clear half-moon shape. It was a habit born years ago. She had found that the small pain channeled her emotions, keeping them off her expression. After a particularly trying afternoon, her palm would look like fish scales, the markings taking an hour or more to fade.
“However will you manage, Lady Hadley?” Mrs. Burton tsked, reaching for a biscuit. “A coarse, bawdy Highlander as the Earl of Hadley—”
“Oh, a Highlander.” Mrs. Smith’s gaze went wide and a little dreamy-eyed. “Like one of the heroes of a Walter Scott novel?”
“No, Martha. The man is not to be fictionalized,” Lady Whitcomb admonished, much as one might reprimand an overly-eager poodle for jumping up on the furniture. “I shan’t permit you to romanticize the severity of this situation.”
“Hear, hear. The new Lord Hadley certainly does not belong to the Church of England.” Mrs. Burton nibbled her biscuit daintily, obviously enjoying the conversation immensely. “More likely he is a pagan heathen.”
Peter huffed, quiet and low.
“Or, worse,” he whispered, “a Presbyterian.”
He nudged his foot against Jane’s.
I know you want to laugh, his movements said.
Jane pinched her lips, keeping her head determinedly faced toward their mother. You shall not defeat me.
She supposed most sisters would feel aggravation over such teasing. But Peter’s actions showed louder than anything that he understood, that he knew her.
And Jane adored being known. Being known meant she was loved, accepted just as she was.
Was it any wonder she loved Peter so thoroughly in return?
The ladies continued their gossip.
“Indeed,” Lady Whitcomb agreed. “A pagan Scotsman might do for a novel but place such a man in an English drawing room . . .” She drifted off, giving a violent shudder.
In that moment, Jane nearly pitied Lord Hadley. The man would be walking into a hornet’s nest of expectations and rigid etiquette rules he clearly did not understand, crofter’s hut or not. He was in for a brutal time of things.
Lady Hadley offered a restrained smile, expression politely arctic. “It has been a dreadful shock. Thankfully, we have the care of kind friends to buoy us up.”
Her mother delivered the words with dripping sweetness. Lady Whitcomb did not miss their venom, her lips pinching in response.
Jane longed to roll her eyes and lounge back in her chair, posture slumping.
She took another sip of tea instead.
The Langston family had already survived four Scottish kings, three German ones, and pink powdered wigs. It would surely outlast this catastrophe.
Jane herself was no stranger to disaster. Her father, the Duke of Montacute, had died when Jane was still a babe. When Jane was a toddler, her mother had remarried, this time to the widowed Earl of Hadley. Lord Hadley had not been a cruel stepfather to Jane. He had simply never acknowledged her existence beyond the occasional polite nod or word.
Jane might have taken offense at this, but the old earl treated everyone that way—his wife, relatives, his deceased son, Henry . . . even Peter, his only child with Jane’s mother. No one mourned when, after years of poor health, the earl had finally passed on six months ago. Only his lordship’s creditors and immediate family considered his death a calamity.
No, the true horror came in the aftermath of his lordship’s funeral.
Jane vividly remembered the palpable gasp in the room as the family solicitor politely informed them that the old earl had made a series of unwise investments, leaving the earldom heavily in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. Lady Hadley would receive her dower portion, as was legally required, but no other allowances had been made.
Peter, his lordship’s English second son—the spare, not the heir—had received nothing.
Instead, what little remained had been left to his lordship’s Scottish grandson, the new Lord Hadley.
Laws of primogeniture being what they were, the title had to pass to the eldest son of the eldest son—the Scot, Andrew Langston.
But . . . the ailing estates, lands, and investments were not currently entailed. Some portion of them—or all, quite frankly—could have been left to Peter. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, the old earl had utterly cut his second son from his will. The question was why?
The old earl had been ill for years before his death. Had he simply neglected to update his will in a timely fashion? Or, had he truly been so uncaring of Peter? Regardless of the old earl’s finances, to deny his son any inheritance whatsoever seemed excessively callous.
Peter had borne it all with a stoic, white-lipped silence—the same wretched, suppressed fury with which he greeted all information about the new Lord Hadley. Having spent her whole life concerned for her brother’s welfare, Jane found it physically painful to witness.
The disorderly heart of her—the inner wild self she kept contained and thoroughly battened down—raged at the injustice. That Jane wanted to raise the old earl from dead, just so she could send him to his Maker again. This time in a more painfully lingering fashion.
Of course, such thoughts merely underscored why she kept he
r inner self thoroughly contained. No one wanted a lady who behaved in such a fashion. Her past had proved this most cruelly.
“When do you anticipate his lordship’s arrival?” Mrs. Smith asked Lady Hadley, interrupting Jane’s thoughts.
Though Lord Hadley had immediately petitioned Parliament for a Writ of Summons, he had waited six months before making an appearance in Sussex.
The previous week after Sunday service, Mrs. Smith had the audacity to muse that it was to his lordship’s credit that he had waited until the family was out of full mourning before visiting them. She was immediately silenced.
“His man-of-affairs said to expect him in three weeks’ time,” Lady Hadley replied.
“The earl did not write you himself?” Lady Whitcomb was all astonishment.
“No.”
Silence greeted Lady Hadley’s curt response. Unspoken assumptions hung in the air—if Lord Hadley hadn’t written the letter himself, was his lordship even literate? However, he did employ a man-of-affairs, so perhaps opinion was divided on that score?
Smiling stiffly, Lady Hadley motioned toward the tea tray. “Would anyone care for another biscuit?”
Eventually the ladies rattled through their gossip about the new Lord Hadley and took their leave.
“Well, I cannot say I missed afternoon calls when we were in full mourning,” Peter said as the door closed on the last of them. He stood, walking over to the fireplace. “I’m quite sure my ears are bleeding from their lacerating witticisms.”
“You acquitted yourself well, Peter, as usual,” Lady Hadley smoothed her lavender skirts, before turning to Jane. “You were far too quiet, however, Jane. You need to speak more.”