by Sophia James
‘You would ruin me?’
‘No, my lord, exactly the opposite. I wish to gift you three sums of twenty-five thousand pounds each year for the next three years and then the lump sum of one-hundred-and-fifty thousand pounds.’
A fortune. Daniel could barely believe the proportions of the offer, such riches unimaginable.
‘I would immediately sign over the town house in Grosvenor Square as an incentive for you to honour the terms. Then, whenever Amethyst instructs me to do so, a property I own to the north called Dunstan House, with a good deal of acreage about it, shall be endorsed into your care, as well.’
Stopping, the merchant faced him directly. Sweat had built on his brow and his cheeks were marked with a ruddy glow of much emotion. ‘There is one thing, however, that you must do for me in return, my lord. My only daughter Amethyst is now twenty-six, soon to be twenty-seven. She is a clever girl and a sensible one. She has worked alongside me for the last eight years and it is her surefootedness in business that has propelled my profits skywards.’
He waited as Daniel nodded before continuing.
‘Amethyst Amelia was educated under the capable tutelage of the Gaskell Street Presbyterian Church School and I paid the teachers handsomely to make sure that she acquired all the skills a woman of the classes above her might need to know. In short, she could fit into any social situation without disgracing herself.’
Daniel suddenly knew just where this conversation was leading to. A dowry. A bribe. The answer to his prayers for the selling of his soul.
‘You are single and available, my lord. You have two sisters who are in need of being launched into society, a mother who has fine taste in living and a grandfather who requires much in the way of medical attention. All continuing and long-term expenses. If you marry my daughter by the end of July, none of this will ever be a problem again and you will have the means to right the crumbling estate of Montcliffe once and for all.’
‘Get out, you bastard.’ Daniel’s anger made the words tremble. That a man he was beginning to respect and like should think of coming into his life to blackmail him into marrying his daughter. For that was what this was. Blackmail, even given the enormous amounts mooted.
But Cameron looked to be going nowhere. ‘I can understand your wrath and indeed, were I in your boots, I might have had exactly the same reaction. But I would ask you to think about it for at least a week. You have promised me your confidence and I expect that, for if a word of this gets out anywhere my daughter’s reputation will be ruined. Hence, as a show of my own gratitude for your discretion, I shall leave you the greys regardless of your final decision.’
‘I cannot accept them.’
‘Here is a document I have written up for your perusal and I earnestly hope to hear from you presently.’
With that he was gone, his glass emptied on the desk and a fat envelope left beside it. Daniel was in two minds as to what to do: send it back unopened with a curt message containing his lack of interest or open it up and see what was inside.
Curiosity won out.
The sheet before him was witnessed by a city lawyer whose qualifications seemed more than satisfactory. It was also signed by his daughter.
‘Damn. Damn. Damn.’ He whispered the words beneath his breath. The girl had been told of all this and still wanted the travesty? Finishing his brandy, he poured himself another as he read on, barely believing what was written.
He was to marry Amethyst Amelia Cameron before the month was finished on the condition that he have no relations with any other woman for two years afterwards.
Shocked to the core, he took a good swallow of the brandy. Amethyst Amelia Cameron would allow her father to sell her for the promise of what? Under the law any daughter could inherit money, chattels and unentailed property from a dying father and he obviously loved her. Besides, she had experience in the business and had turned profits for many a year. Cameron had told him that himself. So what was it that she would gain from such an arrangement? They barely knew each other and, even given she was from the trading classes, an heiress of her calibre could garner any number of titled aristocrats who were down on their purse.
As he was?
‘Hell!’ Daniel threw the parchment into a drawer and slammed it shut, but the promises festered even unseen, malevolent and beguiling.
How on earth had Cameron known so much about his financial difficulties? Would Goldsmith truly call in his brother’s loans against Montcliffe before he was ready for them? If he did that, Daniel would be forced to sell the town house, the manor, the surrounding farms and any chattels that would fetch something. Then the Wyldes would be homeless, moneylenders baying for their blood and all the claws unsheathed.
If it was just him, he might have been able to manage, but Cameron was perfectly correct; his sisters were young, his grandfather was old and his mother had always found her gratification in the position the earldom afforded them in society and had freely spent accordingly.
Standing, he walked to the window and looked out over the gardens, swearing as he saw the two greys tied to a post by the roadside and his butler near them, looking more than bewildered.
He had left them just as he’d said. It was begun already. Daniel turned to the doorway and hurried through it.
* * *
‘I think he took my proposal very well.’ Robert Cameron sipped at the sweet tea Amethyst had brought him and smiled.
‘You do?’
‘He is a good man with sound moral judgement and a love for his family.’
Amethyst bit into a ginger biscuit, wiping the crumbs away from her lips.
‘So he signed his name to the deed?’
‘Not quite.’
‘He didn’t sign it?’
Her father looked up. ‘He told me that I was a bastard for even suggesting such a thing and said that I should get out.’
‘But you left the greys?’
‘I did.’
‘And he has as yet not sent them back?’
‘He has not.’
‘Then it is a good omen.’
Robert frowned. ‘I hope so, Amethyst, I really do.’
Amethyst tried her hardest to smile. Papa had become thinner and thinner no matter what she might get their French chef to feed him and he had taken to striding about the house at night...watching. He was scared and those that might harm them for their money were becoming braver. The daylight attack near Tattersall’s had made her father paranoiac about any movement in their street, any unknown face around the warehouse. Nay, he was eating himself up with worry and she could allow it no longer.
Papa wanted her to be protected and he desperately wanted her to trust in a man again. With time running out for her father Amethyst had allowed him the choice of her groom. Said like that it sounded abhorrent, but nothing was ever as black and white as one might imagine and right now she wanted her father to smile.
‘We shall wait a week. If Lord Montcliffe has not come back to us by then with an answer, we will visit him together.’ She injected a jaunty positive note into her words but everything in her felt flat.
Gerald Whitely’s face shimmered in her memory. The feel of his anger was still there sometimes, just beyond touch, his angry words and then his endless seething silence. A relationship that had blinded sense and buried reason, one bad decision following another until there was nothing left of any of it.
Cold fingers closed over the cross at her throat. Her father was the one person who had stayed constant in her life and she would do whatever it took to see that he was happy. Anything at all.
‘Your mother made me promise to see you flourish, Amy. They were the last words she spoke to me as she slipped away and I had hoped that you would, but after Whitely...’ He stopped, his voice wavering and frighteningly thin. ‘Lord Montcliffe wil
l make you remember to laugh again. He loves horses and they love him back. Any man who can win the trust of an animal is a good man, an honest man, and I can see that in him when I look him in the eyes.’
She hoped her smile did not appear false as he held her hand, the dearness of the gesture so familiar.
‘Promise me you will try to give him all your heart, body and soul, Amethyst. No reservations. It is how your mama loved me and there is no defence for a man against a woman like that. Such strength only allows growth and wonder between a married couple and I know you have been saddened by love...’
She shook his words away, the reminder of bitterness unwanted. Her choice, cankered before it had even begun.
‘When death claimed Gerald Whitely, my love, I was not sorry. Sense tells me that you were not either.’
So he knew of that? Another shame. A further deceit that had not remained hidden.
‘It was the Cameron fortune Gerald was after, Papa. Perhaps Lord Montcliffe and he are not so unalike after all?’
But her father shook his head. ‘Whitely fashioned his own demise. Daniel Wylde is only trying to clean up after the mistakes of his brother and father and is doing so to protect the family he has left.’
‘A saint, then?’ She wished that the caustic undertone in her words was not quite so unmistakable.
‘Hardly. But he is the first man you have given a second glance to. The first man who has made you blush. Such attraction must account for something because it was the same with Susannah and me.’
Despite everything she smiled. ‘I imagine that Lord Montcliffe has that effect upon everybody whoever meets him, Papa. I was not claiming him for myself.’
‘Because you do not trust your judgements pertaining to the acquisition of a husband, given the last poor specimen?’
Her father had never before, in the year since his death, spoken of Gerald Whitely in this way. That thought alone lent mortification to her sinking raft of other emotions.
Failure. It ate at certainty like a large rat at a wedding feast. Once she had chosen so unwisely she felt at a loss to ever allow herself such a mandate again. Perhaps that was a part of the reason she did not rally against her father’s arguments. That and the yellowing shades of sickness that hung in the whites of his eyes.
Death held a myriad of hues. Gerald’s had been a pale and unholy grey when she had seen him laid out in the undertaker’s rooms. Her mother’s had been red-tinged, a rash of consequence marked into the very fabric of her skin and only fading hours after she had taken her final and hard-fought breath.
Amethyst’s nails dug deep into her thighs as she willed such thoughts aside. A long time ago she had been a happier person and a more optimistic one. Now all she could manage was the pretence of it.
It was easier to allow Papa the hope of joy in his final months, the illusion of better times, of children, of the ‘heart and body and soul’ love her father had felt for her mother and which he imagined was some sort of a God-given rite of passage. Once she had believed in such a thing as well, but no longer.
All she could muster now was a horror for anything that held the hint of intimacy.
Blemished. Damaged. Hurt.
Daniel Wylde would understand sooner or later the payment required for the Cameron fortune and she was sure he would feel every bit as cheated as she did. But at least Papa would go to his grave believing that his only daughter was safe and happy, the soldier earl he had chosen for her strong enough to ward off any threats of menace.
She leaned down and picked up a small coin from a collection on a plate, balancing it in her palm before flipping it over. If it shows heads this marriage will work and if it does not... When the coin fell to tails she chastised herself for playing such silly games.
* * *
When Daniel returned from an outing later in the day his mother was ensconced in the drawing room at the Montcliffe town house, a glass of his finest brandy in her hand and a thoughtful look upon her face.
‘Have you been procuring new horseflesh, Daniel? There is a pair of magnificent greys in your stable and I just wondered...’
‘They were a gift, Mother. I did not purchase them.’
‘A gift? From whom?’ The silk in the gown Janet, Lady Montcliffe, wore matched her eyes exactly, a deep sapphire blue. A new possession, he supposed, thinking of the demand for payment that would come across his desk before much longer.
He could have been truthful, could have simply stated that there was a possibility he would be married and that the greys had been a pre-wedding present, but something made him stop. Anger, he supposed, and shame and the fact that to voice such a thing might make it feel more real and true.
With the Camerons he felt removed from society. In their company the preposterous proposed union made a sort of skewed sense that it didn’t here in front of his mother.
When he didn’t answer, his mother remarked, ‘Charlotte Hughes is back from Scotland. I saw her today at the Bracewells and she asked after you. She is looking a picture of health and wealth and was sporting a necklace with an emerald attached to it the size of a walnut.’
‘I am no longer interested in Lady Mackay, Mama.’ He stressed her married name.
‘Well, she seemed more than interested in your whereabouts. She had heard of the fracas at La Corunna, of course, and was most concerned about the injury to your leg. There were tears in her eyes when I told her of it and such compassion is heartwarming.’
Daniel interrupted her. ‘Is that my French brandy you are drinking?’ Crossing to the cabinet, he found the bottle and frowned as he saw there was barely any left. His whole family had been falling apart for years. His mother with her drink, his brother with his gambling and his sisters with their brittle sense of entitlement and whining. Only his grandfather had seemed to hold it together, though his body was letting him down more and more often.
‘If you are going to lecture me about the evils of strong drink...’
Daniel shook his head. ‘This evening I cannot find the energy to do so. If you wish to kill yourself by small degrees with your misplaced grief for my brother’s stupidity...’
‘Nigel was a good boy...’
‘Who mortgaged the Montcliffe property to the hilt as a payment for his escalating gambling habit.’
‘He was trying to save the estate. He was trying to make everything right again,’ she insisted.
‘If you believe that, Mama, then you are as deluded as he was.’
His mother finished the glass of brandy and stood. ‘The military campaign in Spain and Portugal has made you different, Daniel. Harder. A man of distance and callousness and I do not like what you have become.’
The sound of screams on a march from Hell with winter eating up any hope for warmth. Dead soldiers stripped of clothes and boots by others needing cover in the middle of a relentless freeze, and hundreds of miles left to reach the coast and to safety. Aye, distance came easily with such memories.
‘In less than six months the Montcliffe properties will be bankrupt.’
He had not meant to say it like this, so baldly, and as his mother paled a compassion he had long since let go of spiked within.
‘I have tried to tell you before, Mother. I have tried to make you understand that Nigel finished what our father started, but I can no longer afford to say it kindly. The estate lies precariously on the edge of insolvency.’
‘You lie.’
‘The bank won’t lend the Montcliffe estate another penny and I have been warned that Goldsmith could call in one of Nigel’s outstanding loans before the end of this month.’
‘But Gwendolyn is to be presented in court and all the invitations to a soirée are written out. Besides, I have also just ordered several ball dresses from Madame Soulier. I cannot possibly curtail. If I do, others shall know of
our plight and we shall suffer a very public shaming. Why, I could not even bear such a thing.’
Turning, Daniel held his breath, the guilt of Nigel’s death eating at his equanimity. Years ago they had been close and he wondered if his time away from England in the army had left his brother exposed somehow. Lord knew his mother and sisters were unremitting in their demands. If he had been here, would he have been able to bolster Nigel’s will and made him stronger, allowing him a sounding board for good sense and bolder decisions in the economic welfare of Montcliffe?
Taking a deep breath, he faced his mother directly. ‘There is only one way that I can see of navigating the Montcliffe inheritances out of this conundrum.’
His mother wiped the tears from her eyes and looked up at him. He had never seen her appear quite as old and lined.
‘How?’
‘I can marry into money.’
‘Old money?’ Even under duress his mother remained a snob.
‘Or money earned from the toil of hard labour and lucky breaks.’
‘Trade?’ The word was whispered with all the undercurrents of a shout.
‘The alternative is bankruptcy,’ he reminded her grimly.
‘You have someone in mind?’
He could not say it, could not toss Amethyst Amelia Cameron’s name into the ring of fire his mother had so effortlessly conjured up, a sneer on her lips and distaste in her blue eyes.
‘Your father would be turning in his grave at such a suggestion. Marry one of the Stapleton girls, they would have you in a second, or the oldest Beaumont chit. She has made no secret of setting her cap at you.’
‘Enough, Mother.’
‘Charlotte Hughes, then, despite her foolish marriage. She has always loved you and you had strong feelings for her once. Besides, she is a lot more flush these days...’
‘Enough.’ This time he said it louder and she stopped.