The Regency Season Collection: Part Two

Chapter Fourteen

So that was his last letter from Virginia; a couple of lines and a cryptic reference? Now he was supposed to do what Chloe least wanted him to do—dig into her sister’s past as carelessly as if excavating potatoes. Curse it; he’d always thought Virginia loved him, despite his faults and managing ways. Now she’d left him an impossible task and expected him to be happy at the end of it. Chloe would curse him up hill and down dale, then refuse to have anything more to do with him if he found out her sister had cavorted with a married man to beget her child.

How could he not suspect Verity’s father was an adulterer when he’d abandoned a seventeen-year-old girl to carry his bastard alone? If so, the damned rogue would have left no trace of himself in Daphne Thessaly’s life, except the unarguable fact of his child and who could prove one way or the other who her father was on the strength of hearsay and rumours? If Chloe didn’t get the truth from her sister, it couldn’t be uncovered when Lady Daphne Thessaly was ten years in her grave.

‘What if I can’t do it?’ he barked at Poulson when he came to a halt.

‘What if you cannot do what, my lord?’

Luke sought a reason for that confusion and found it in the challenge he’d offered to Virginia’s will and her damnable scheming.

‘This ludicrous quest I’ve been given,’ he snapped impatiently.

‘Oh, that’s simple enough. Then you must inform Lady Chloe you are not willing to carry out your task and she will subtract a quarter of the sum put aside to purchase a manor and estate for Mr James Winterley at the end of the twelve months, if enough of you complete your quests, and forward it to the Prince Regent.’

‘That’s devilish,’ he ground out, Virginia was giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

‘Perhaps the word ingenious describes it better, my lord.’

‘However you look at it, my great-aunt has me tied up so tight I’m surprised I’m not screaming. I’d give a great deal to see my brother decently occupied and financially independent of me. Happy is probably beyond him, but at least he deserves a chance to prove me wrong. James won’t accept a penny from me to set himself up in a new life, but such a bequest could change his life.’

‘Mr Winterley might surprise himself and everyone else if he had the means to do so,’ Mr Poulson suggested as if he thought there were hidden depths to one of the most notorious rakes of the ton as well as Tom Mantaigne. The lawyer shook his head as that idea played through it and he realised how much looking it demanded. ‘If he was better occupied, it would divert his resentment from your inheritance of the family lands and titles.’

‘What a fine prospect you do dangle before me,’ Luke said, wondering why James’s dislike still hurt after all these years of mutual distrust, ‘but it still begs the question whether I can do what Virginia asked me to.’

‘Lady Virginia had more faith in you than you do in yourself, Lord Farenze.’

‘I assume you don’t know what she asked, unless you managed to undo this letter and reseal it without leaving a single trace, Poulson, so pray don’t imagine you understand the task she set me until I come back and admit it can’t be done.’

‘I’m sure you won’t do that, Lord Farenze,’ the lawyer said with a smile Luke didn’t trust one bit.

The man eyed the legal documents he’d been working on to transfer the estate and various other pieces of property to their new owners, as if he could imagine nothing finer than burying himself in wheretofors and howsoevers until dinnertime and Luke sighed impatiently, then left him to it.

* * *

By the time Chloe left the library it was nearly dinner time and she was soon caught up in the rush and urgency when Cook burned her hand and the cook maid dropped a pint of cream on the kitchen floor. She felt a sadly neglectful mother by the time the family and their guests were all served and the kitchen was calm again and she was free to make her way upstairs to spend a few minutes with her daughter.

‘There you are, Mama,’ Verity exclaimed, looking up from the much-crossed and amended first attempt at an essay her headteacher had set her. ‘I was never more pleased to see you in my life,’ she admitted with a quaintly adult shrug and mischief in her bright blue eyes.

‘Because I am an exceptionally wonderful mother, or because you need help with whatever fiendish task Miss Thibett set you this time, my love?’

‘Both, of course,’ Verity said and Chloe wondered if her father had been a charmer as well—if so, it seemed little wonder poor Daphne had found him irresistible.

‘What have you been afflicted with, then?’

‘It’s geography, Mama,’ Verity said tragically, as if she had been asked to visit Hades and report on the scenery.

‘Oh, dear me, that’s certainly not your best subject,’ Chloe sympathised and wished she had more than a scratch education. ‘There must be some clue in one of Lady Virginia’s books or on one of the globes.’

‘I can’t find the Silk Road on a globe,’ Verity said with a pout that told Chloe she hadn’t tried very hard.

It was a trait that reminded Chloe of Daphne and, whilst she would always defend her sister fiercely if anyone else criticised her, she refused to let Verity grow up with the same belief she only needed to cry or bat her eyelashes to get unpleasant tasks done for her.

‘Then you will find it in the new atlas Lady Virginia purchased last year for times like this. Once you have a list of the countries it passes through you can look up the history and trade it carries in the books the last Lord Farenze collected about the more exotic corners of the world. You should be grateful to have such knowledge at your fingertips so you can answer your headmistress’s questions when you return to school next week.’

‘Oh, Mama, must I?’

‘Yes, Verity, you must.’

‘I thought you might help me. It would be so much more interesting than wading through a lot of dry-as-dust philosophising about the savage ways of peoples those dreary old travellers considered less civilised than their own kind on my own.’

‘You must have been looking in the wrong ones. Find a book by someone who loved exploring new places and meeting new people and read what he has to say instead of some person who probably never went to the places he wrote about. There must be writings like that in such a collection. Lady Virginia’s husband doesn’t sound the sort of man who was happy to be bored witless every time he picked up a book.’

‘Then I must plough through every book in the library to find out a few facts that will satisfy Miss Thibett I didn’t idle my time away this week?’

Chloe was tempted to snap an easy reply and go back to her housekeeping accounts. She knew an unsaid question about where her daughter now fitted into the world lay under her Verity’s fit of the sullens and she must set aside her not-very-tempting household accounts to deal with it.

‘You need an occupation, my love. Miss Thibett is a wise woman who knows far more about life than you do and she knows Lady Virginia stood in the place of a family for both of us. That is why she let you come home to say farewell to her ladyship. I was wrong to try to shield you from the pain of loss, my love, and your headmistress was right to let you grieve for the person who meant so much to you.’

Suddenly her daughter wasn’t a young lady, or the mischievous urchin who had torn about on her pony and worried her mama with daring exploits until Lady Virginia offered to send her to school. Chloe tried not to let her own tears flow as Verity turned into her arms to be comforted.

‘I miss her so much, Mama,’ she wailed and wept at long last.

‘I know you do, my darling,’ Chloe whispered into the springing gold curls making their escape bid from Verity’s fast-unravelling plait. ‘You have every right to cry at the loss of such a good friend. Lady Virginia loved you very dearly and I know how deeply you loved her back.’

For a while Verity wept as if her heart might break and Chloe rocked her gently, as she often had in her early years, when Daphne’s child sometimes went from happy little girl to a sobbing fury in the blink of an eye, as if she wept for all she had lost at birth. All Chloe could do back then was hold her until Verity calmed and slept, or Lady Virginia managed to divert the little girl from her woes with a joke or a funny story about her own misspent youth. This time there was no Virginia to make light of such woe and Chloe felt terribly alone and as bereft as Verity.

‘Where shall we go, Mama?’ the desperate question stuttered from Verity’s shaky lips as she battled dry sobs and looked tragic, as if all Chloe had been worrying about for the last weeks was crushing her, too.

‘Oh, my love,’ Chloe responded with tears backed up in her own throat as she realised she should have had this conversation with her daughter as soon as she came home. ‘I don’t know if we can stay here, but Lady Virginia left me a full year’s salary in return for a trifling charge she laid on me. I have enough saved to live comfortably on for a year or two after that, if I should choose not to look for a new post yet, and Lady Virginia left you an annuity, so you will never starve. Please don’t run away with the notion you’re an heiress, though, will you?’

‘Then I shall not. I love her even more though, now I know I shall be able to look after you one day, Mama, when you are too old to do it yourself.’

Chloe went from the edge of tears to fighting laughter. ‘We probably have a few years before I’m too bowed with age to work, darling,’ she said with a straight face.

‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’ Verity accused.

‘I’m sorry, love, but I’m not even eight and twenty yet. That might sound as if I could shake hands with Methuselah on equal terms to you, but I feel remarkably well preserved when my daughter is not making me out to be an ancient crone.’

‘That’s what age does to a person, Lady Virginia told me,’ Verity informed her with a solemn shake of her head, as if she saw through her mother’s ruse.

‘Lady Virginia was at least fifty years older than me, Verity love, and that was only what she admitted to. Her age varied every time someone was rude enough to try to find it out. I’m unlikely to follow Lady Virginia into the grave for a great many years yet and you must stop fretting about me.’

‘But what if you die in childbed, Mama? I can tell Lord Farenze wants to marry you and ladies die giving birth, particularly when they’re old.’

‘Why would Lord Farenze want to marry me?’ Chloe asked; shocked that her brain picked that rather than thinking how to reassure Verity ladies gave birth safely time after time at much more than seven and twenty.

‘Oh, Eve and I realised ages ago,’ her daughter said, as if it was so obvious she was amazed anyone could miss it.

‘I hope you kept that conclusion quiet then, as you couldn’t be more wrong.’

‘Bran and Miss Culdrose agree with us.’

‘And whatever would the rest of the household make of such a silly idea?’ Chloe asked faintly, dread at facing even the smallest scullery maid eating at her lest they were already speculating about it.

‘They think Mrs Winterley will put a stop to it, but Eve says her father takes no notice of what his stepmother says and even less of what she thinks.’

Chloe sighed and decided she could put off telling Verity the story of her own birth no longer, if only to scotch any false hopes of becoming Eve’s stepsister, but her niece’s eyes were red and tired after her crying bout and the sad tale of Daphne’s love affair must wait for another day.

‘Lord Farenze is a viscount; I am his housekeeper and lords do not marry servants. Forget such wild flights of fancy and get into bed, love. Your Miss Thibett would be the first to say you need a decent night’s sleep before you’re ready to face world trade and the laden caravans of gold, jewels, silk and spices that will be winding their way through far-off, exotic lands even as we speak.’

Her imagination caught by the idea of those processions of camels laden down with fine cloth and exquisite treasures, Verity allowed Chloe to walk her to her room and help her undress, then get into bed. Verity asked for a story and how to resist when she usually insisted on reading herself to sleep and this might be the last time Verity let her be her mother? Chloe dreaded telling her the tale of her birth and felt like crying herself by the time they wandered a little way along that ancient road in their imaginations and Verity’s eyes got heavier and heavier until she slept at last.

Chloe let her voice trail away, then gazed at her precious child as if she had to fill her mind with Verity as she was now. Tomorrow Verity might hate her for a pretence begun when nobody else cared enough about Daphne’s child to save her from death or a lonely life at the mercy of the parish.

Shaking her head to keep back the idea things were better as they were, Chloe went to her own room earlier than usual to struggle with the knot her life seemed tangled into all of a sudden. Someone had lit a fire for her and she knew exactly who had ordered it. Luke’s thoughtfulness at a time when he had hundreds of other things to think about made tears sting as she gazed into the glowing flames and wondered how he’d ever managed to fool anyone he was an unfeeling recluse.

She loved Luke Winterley and finally admitted to herself she had loved him far too long. The fact of it, fresh and vital in her heart as she knew it would be to her dying day, made her content and full of hope for all of a minute. Yet if she emerged from whatever fate her family had told the world she had met to wed my Lord Farenze, Verity would be exposed as the reason Lady Chloe was supposed to have died with her sister in the first place.

Her brothers would walk through fire rather than publically admit they’d let one sister give birth with only her twin to help her and a rapidly sobering midwife, then forced Chloe out to starve with her dead sister’s child after even that ordeal didn’t kill the poor little mite and they had to rid themselves of her by other means.

Chloe sat watching the fire with tears sliding down her cheeks as she bid farewell to a dream she hadn’t let herself know she had. She had Verity and a secure future many a woman left with a child to bring up alone would envy her. Verity’s future was secure as well and she ought to be dancing on air. Instead she must fight the heavy weight of grief and an urge to sob her heart out on the threadbare rug she had decreed good enough for her bedchamber, so at least nobody could accuse her of gilding her own nest.

Luke could condemn her thrift and look at her scratch bedchamber with offended distaste, but she had lived among the cast-offs of a bygone age most of her life and was used to making do. Carraway Court had been neglected and down at heel for as long as she could remember and the older servants would shake their heads and say how different it was in her grandfather’s day, before their mother wed her lord and he took all the rents, then left the Court to go to rack and ruin.

Even then they whispered of gambling and extravagant mistresses and how even an earl couldn’t bring such low company to his late wife’s home with her daughters in residence. Chloe wondered bitterly why her father and brothers cared so much about the family name when they blighted it so enthusiastically.

A sentence from Virginia’s letter slotted into her mind as if her mentor had whispered in her ear and a possible plan formed. Lady Tiverley was an amiable feather-head, but she was the daughter of a far richer and more respectable earl than Chloe’s father had ever been and moved in the highest social circles. If such a lady whispered the truth in a few well-placed ears, could Daphne and her romantically mysterious child become the heroines of such a sad tale? It was a faint hope and her heart beat like a marching drum at the idea she and Luke could love openly after all.

Then she remembered Daphne lying in that rough bed, dying and feverishly demanding that Chloe promised her never to love a man so recklessly. She wasn’t Daphne, or a vulnerable seventeen-year-old girl with no protector now, though. Anyone who wanted to take advantage of her would have to get past Luke Winterley first, even if he was the one wanting to take it. She smiled at the thought of him holding aloof from Farenze Lodge for so long, because she had said No and they each had a daughter who would be damaged if she didn’t. He could deny it as often as he pleased, but her love was a noble gentleman from the top of his midnight locks to the tip of his lordly boots and how could she not love him? It was admitting it she had trouble with.

First she must talk to Verity and insist Luke told his own daughter the truth about them as well. Lying in bed, torn between wild hopes and abject terror, the weight of four people’s hopes and dreams seemed to press her into the mattress. Even as the wonder of ‘perhaps’ made her heart lift with joy and her toes and a good many other places tingle with anticipation, Chloe couldn’t bring herself to believe her impossible fairytale might actually come true.

Fumbling Virginia’s letter from the pocket of her neatly discarded gown, she jumped back into bed and relit her candle. She had talked Verity to sleep; now she let Virginia do the same for her. Chloe was very glad in the morning that her candle had sat firmly in a night stick, since it had gutted without her even being aware she had gone to sleep with it alight and slept peacefully the whole night long.

Chapter Fifteen

‘I need to speak with you privately, Mrs Wheaton. Meet me in the Winter Garden in half an hour if you please,’ Luke demanded when he tracked down his housekeeper to the linen room, where she seemed to be having an urgent consultation with the head housemaid about torn sheets, of all things.

From the flash of temper in her magnificent eyes at his order he felt lucky he hadn’t come across her alone and she had to keep to her role in front of the maids. He smiled like a besotted idiot as he ran down the backstairs, as if it was what a viscount did, and went out to the stables to speak to Josiah Birtkin about travel arrangements and how this place could be kept safe and cautious whilst he was away. The thought of being parted from Chloe, Verity and Eve while he carried out Virginia’s quest added a bite of nerves to his elation as he finished his conversation and went to seek a far more crucial one.

* * *

It could be another clear morning, if only the mist would clear. Instead it hung about this sheltered valley and he wondered if he should have asked Chloe to meet him outside on a day when frost seemed to hang in the very air, waiting to crystallise their breath. The wintery statue at the heart of the place was still staring into the distance, but Luke resisted the urge to confide his thoughts to his unresponsive stone ears. Some things were so private they should only be said to the person concerned.

‘There you are,’ Chloe’s pleasantly husky voice observed from so close it made him start and her frown turned to a satisfied smile.

‘As you say,’ he drawled as annoyingly as he could manage and from the flags of colour burning across her cheeks he’d succeeded a bit too well in rousing her temper this time.

‘How dare you order me to meet you out here in the middle of my duties like this? What do you imagine the household will make of such a hole-and-corner encounter, Lord Farenze?’

‘That I wish to speak to you in private and can hardly do so inside with so many eager ears tuned to our every move, I expect,’ he replied with a shrug part of him knew was wrong when he was master and she was playing the upper servant.

‘Why would you need to be private with me?’ she demanded haughtily and Luke took a deep breath of frosty air and prepared to tell her.

‘So I may ask you to marry me again, of course,’ he managed to say casually, as if it was what viscounts always did of a foggy morning, when they employed housekeepers as magnificent as this one.

‘Just like that?’ she demanded and he wondered if he’d miscalculated by stirring her into enough fury to be her true self instead of Mrs Wheaton.

‘No, not just like that,’ he said with a stern frown of his own. ‘After a decade of denial and deception—’ he heard her draw breath to annihilate him with negatives ‘—I’m done with pretending it doesn’t matter that we wasted ten years because I was too stupid to see past your disguise and my wife’s shoddy little love affairs to the woman you truly are, Chloe Thessaly.’

‘You can’t call me that here,’ she argued with a shocked look about in case old Winter at the centre of the garden might pass her identity on.

‘Nobody is in earshot and there are eight-foot-high hedges all about us, but are you ashamed of me then, my lady?’

‘Never that, my lord,’ she shot back so urgently he had to hide a satisfied grin.

‘Then when do you intend telling the world who you truly are?’

‘When the time seems right,’ she muttered crossly and shifted under his steady gaze. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she admitted with a heavy sigh. ‘Soon,’ she added as he continued to watch her as annoyingly as he could manage when all he really wanted to do was kiss her speechless and a lot more it was as well not to go into right now.

‘When Verity is of age, or has run off with the boot boy perhaps? Or when hell freezes over and I’m so old and grey even you don’t want me any longer?’

‘I shall always want you,’ she said unwarily and he couldn’t help his broad grin at the declaration he most wanted to hear on her lips.

‘Marry me, then,’ he managed to say before he could launch himself at her like a lovestruck maniac.

‘You could do so much better,’ she said, avoiding his eyes as she watched the stony statue as if he fascinated her and Luke found he could even be jealous of inanimate objects now.

‘I could ask nobody better suited to be my wife,’ he assured her as he cupped large hands about her face, so she had to look up and let him see the doubts and questions in her amazing violet-blue gaze, as well as the heat and longing that made his heartbeat thunder with exhilaration and desire. ‘I never met a woman I honoured so much or wanted so badly, Chloe,’ he told her shakily and hoped he had managed to put all he was feeling into his own gaze, for once. ‘You’ve made me into me again,’ he said and grimaced as all the words he couldn’t put together clogged up in his head. ‘I don’t have the right words. I’ve been trying not to admit it for a decade, but I love you and I won’t stop doing it, even if you walk away.’

‘I can’t marry you, Luke.’

* * *

Chloe let herself gaze up into his fascinatingly hot grey eyes and saw pain and anger there before he decided No wasn’t enough this time. It felt as if the frantic beat of her heart might choke her as she gazed up into all she’d ever wanted and had to say it anyway. Love was there in the flare of gold about his irises, the hidden depths of green at the heart of his gaze that looked back at her.

Luke, Lord Farenze, was finally showing her the tender places in his heart, the hopes and dreams in his complex mind and she was hurting him all over again. Tears swam in her eyes as she thought of the young man he’d been—scarred so badly when his dreams were trampled in the dust by his shrew of a wife. He needed her to love him back, and love him back she truly did, but it didn’t mean she could let him marry her and make Verity into a bastard again.

‘Why not?’ he breathed, so close she wondered how she could still be so cold.

‘I have a daughter,’ she said sadly.

The blighted hopes and dreams young Chloe once wept over so bitterly while missing stubborn, noble, infuriating Lord Farenze in her bed seemed as nothing, now she had to renounce everything mature Chloe wanted to give her lover.

‘Oh, Luke, don’t frown at me and shake your head. I know you’re a good man and I’m a coward, but I can’t let Verity grow up with Lady Daphne Thessaly’s shame blighting her life. You need a pristine wife with an innocent heart, not me.’

‘Why would I want a tame little tabby kitten when I can have a lioness who’d fight for our cubs with her last breath?’ he said with a refusal to be fobbed off that made temptation tug so powerfully she had to look away.

‘I am fighting for one of them now.’

‘No, you’re denying we could fight the world for her together. I won’t accept this as your final answer, Chloe Thessaly,’ he said with a determination that made her knees wobble and her breath come short. She loved him so much she felt herself weakening and turned to watch the foggy garden to stop herself admitting she would only ever be half-alive without him.

‘Virginia’s quest for me is to find out who Verity’s father was. I will do my best to do so, but after that I’ll wed you, whoever he turns out to be,’ he told her.

It sounded as much a threat as a promise, until he ran an impatient hand through his sable pelt of hair and let out a heartfelt sigh. ‘Lord above, but you’re a proud and stubborn wench, Lady Chloe Thessaly,’ he informed her with exasperation.

Chloe sighed at the angry intimacy of them here in this foggy garden and longed for a forever after to spend with him. She spared a thought for Virgil, begging Virginia to wed him rather than be his scandalous lover as she would have offered to be. They must have realised after two previous marriages bore no fruit there was a strong chance she was barren, but even that didn’t seem as huge a barrier to love and marriage as Verity’s future happiness was to her.

‘I’ll wed you or nobody,’ Luke told her so stubbornly she almost believed him and her unhappiness seemed about to double. ‘Although heaven only knows why I’d saddle myself with such a steely female for life,’ he grumbled.

‘How charming. You look very much like a grumpy mastiff denied a juicy bone right now, my Lord Farenze.’

‘What a sad pair we are then; you look like a queen about to have her head cut off,’ he replied, eyebrows raised and a challenge to deny it in his sharp look.

‘Nobody else would want us if they knew what a sorry pair we are,’ she agreed.

‘They’d better not want you, but if we’re not to be united in marital disharmony, I suppose I’d best be off about Virginia’s business,’ he told her with a look that said it was her fault. They could be married inside the week and have a wedding night before he went, if not a honeymoon on the way.

‘Wait for a better day,’ she urged, all the imaginings of a woman terrified that her lover might never come back taking shape in her mind.

‘If I wait out one more night under the same roof as you, Lady Chloe, I shall either run mad or break down your door from sheer frustration. I need to be gone, but first you have to tell me everything you can remember about your sister’s visit to Scotland all those years ago.’

‘I don’t know much, she never told me.’

‘Tell me what you do know, then, for it is sure to be more than I do.’

‘Daphne went off to our father’s Scottish estate to stay there with his sister while her husband was in Ireland, supposedly to be instructed how to go on in polite company, then make a début of some kind in Edinburgh society. My father was deep in debt by that time and had secretly agreed to marry her off to a pox-ridden but very wealthy old duke as soon as they could fool the world she chose such a fate of her own free will.

‘Papa was furious when his plan went awry and the old man wanted his money back and Daphne was sent home in disgrace. We were sent away so she could have Verity at a remote and tumbledown property on Bodmin Moor that my father had won in a card game and couldn’t sell, but Daphne still refused to tell me who her lover was. She said it was best I didn’t know, then I wouldn’t be embarrassed when I was presented and had to meet his relatives.’

‘He must come from a gently bred family at the very least then; she could have met one of the neighbours during her time on your father’s estate, I suppose, properly out or no,’ he said with a preoccupied frown.

Chloe thought fascination with his quest was already overtaking his frustration that she’d refused to marry him, but she put that grief aside for later and did her best to help him with what was probably an impossible task.

‘Daphne was desperate to escape marriage to that dreadful old reprobate, but she had always dreamt of a gallant hero who would come and rescue her from the lonely lives we lived at Carraway Court. I wouldn›t be surprised if she took any lover happy to have a sixteen-year-old girl in his bed in a desperate attempt to get herself with child and escape marriage to such a man.’

‘She was no older than my Eve when your father tried to sell his own child to the highest bidder, then? What sort of a father would consign his own child to a life of such misery and frustration?’

‘The Thessaly sort,’ Chloe said sadly, regretting the gaps in hers and Daphne’s lives and contrasting them with my Lord Farenze’s fierce love for his only child. ‘He was no sort of father at all and only wed my mother because she was heiress to the Carraway fortune. I don’t suppose he was faithful to her, or even particularly kind. Such a hard-hearted man can do a fearsome amount of damage to his children, so Daphne and I ought to have been grateful he favoured our brothers and despised us as mere girls, I suppose.’

‘He was your father and ought to have been proud of his spirited and beautiful daughters. But why did he send her to Scotland with his sister and not you?’