by Edith Layton
Arden said nothing as the coach slowed and came to a halt in the wide circular drive. He’d spoken little since they’d left the Ark, and Francesca and Julian, who sat to either side of him, exchanged a look at each other then. In that mutual look they’d seen as well as sensed that they both felt the same—as though they were in fact the bodyguards he’d jested about. For each felt the same sort of alert and edgy protectiveness toward Arden. His distraction and tension communicated itself to them, and seeing no danger, but feeling it all around them, they unconsciously closed ranks around him.
Roxanne had been only too glad to remain at the inn; the thought of meeting another bucolic gent, father to Arden or not, left her unmoved. But she’d have done anything Julian approved, and so his suggestion that she rest and repair her looks had worked so well there’d been no need for him to have issued it as the order he would have if she hadn’t complied. Though Arden himself hadn’t barred Roxanne, nor even seemed to note her existence since they’d left John Dahl’s farm, Julian decided that Arden’s life shouldn’t be open to her.
Francesca had said only, “Please, may I come?” and when Arden had nodded, had pleaded one moment to remove the dust from her clothes. She’d been as good as her word, and had returned to the common room as quickly as they themselves had after refreshing themselves. But Arden had done it all in silence, washing, changing his shirt, tying a new neckcloth, brushing back his thick and springy hair, all as if by rote, the way, Julian noted uneasily, he always did before he went into danger.
Now, in front of the great rambling gray manor house, Arden smiled at last. “My real father lives here,” he said. “Now, children, you’ll see why I’ve invented so many others for myself. Any of them would be preferable, actually”—he shrugged—“but a man can’t choose who pushes him into this life, any more than he can who pushes him out of it. Come along, then, if you wish. ‘The play’s the thing,’ but ‘judge not the play before the play is done…’” he quoted, “and if ‘the last act crowns the play,’ as they say,” he added on one last look to Julian, and one long, sad one to Francesca, “it ought to be, if nothing else, entertaining.”
And then because he could say no more, or do no more, and because he’d given his word that the beautiful dark lady could see and judge for herself, and as he trusted Julian to always do the kind, if not the right thing, he left his two guests to the hands of the fates, and girded himself. And left the coach at last.
“Sorry, Hopkins,” he said to the butler at the front door, “but I’ve guests today, so I won’t be coming in the servants’ entrance with all my brothers and sisters.”
“Good afternoon, Master Lyons, his lordship has been asking after you, it’s good to see you again, sir, it is,” the old man said, leaving off his official air, and, taking the hand Arden offered, and shaking it sincerely, added, “for myself as well as for his lordship, sir, believe me.”
“Thank you, Hopkins,” Arden said gently, but then, his voice growing cold, he added, “Please tell the earl that I’m arrived, but add that I’ve brought two friends: the Viscount Hazelton and the Honorable Miss Francesca Carlisle. And inform my father, if he’s still in good enough case to hear, that if they aren’t welcome, I shall judge that I’m not.”
“Oh, never fear, Arden,” a slurred voice said bitterly, “you could have come with a detachment of Spanish guerrillas or some of your London scum, and the old man would welcome you. He hangs on to life only in the expectation of seeing you. ‘He’ll never come,’ I told him. ‘Shut your gob,’ our lovely father spake, ‘he’ll come. I asked it of him.’ The old fiend’s a better judge of character than I thought. But then, he told me I was a worthless cur, and he’s the right of that too.”
“My lord,” Arden said, eyeing the tall thick-set older gentleman who stood in the doorway to the drawing room, watching them, the decanter in his hand verifying the state of the man who held it, “how are you keeping?”
“Oh, well, well, considering,” the man laughed. His thinning hair and blurring jawline gave as much mute testimony to his condition as the burgeoning belly the fashionable tight clothes he wore could scarcely conceal. He was some decade older than his guest, and tall, but not so broad as Arden; he was drunk, but not so foxed that he could not sneer and speak clearly as ever. He looked Arden up and down, ignoring the others, as he added, “Considering that I shall be an earl within hours, and then will be able to toss you out whenever I choose.”
“I don’t choose to be here now, my lord,” Arden said softly. “You, of all people, ought to know that.”
“So you say, dear brother-by-blow,” the gentleman laughed, “so they all say—all the stableboys and farmhands and kitchen help and ruff and scruff of the countryside my father has amused himself by dragging before his dying eyes in the last weeks. But they come, hat in hand, hoping for something, and it’s not his final blessing, I’ll swear. All his get, all his bastard sons. To show what a man he was? No, Arden-got-lightly, never think it, rather to show me how little he thinks of me.”
“And your brothers, Lord John and Lord Robert? And your sister, Lady Millicent?” Arden asked.
“John trembles. Robert prepares for the worst. Rightly so, they leave with the coffin, just as they fear. Millie has her own home, and much she cares. But the rest of you will clear out then too, my legitimate brothers as well as all you bastards, and none of you with anything but his final curse—that’s all he’s got for any of us. Although I, as firstborn, take the prize away—this house, his name, whatever’s left of his fortune,” the gentleman said.
“And welcome to it,” Arden replied softly.
“Ah, yes, you’ve funds now, I hear,” the gentleman said, and then, frowning, added, “You left in your pride and came back with a fortune. Get on with it then,” he said angrily, “and let me know when he gives notice to quit. I wouldn’t miss it for all the world,” he said, laughing again as he retreated to the library.
The staircase wrapped around the great hall, and as they ascended, Francesca gazed around herself. Without having heard any titles given, she’d have known she was in a noble house. Nothing they passed was new, but nothing, from the furniture to the myriad paintings hung upon the stretched-silk-covered walls, was anything but of the finest. Julian walked silently beside her, gazing around as well, as Arden took the stairs in their lead. But when they’d gone down a long hall studded with immobile footmen, and paused at last at a door, Arden knocked upon it, and absently took up Francesca’s hand. Then, as though startled from his interior musing by how cold that delicate hand was, he smiled down at her, and tucking her hand entirely within his, he placed it on his arm, and after they’d been bidden to enter, walked in with her, his warm palm still sheltering and keeping her as close as his own right hand.
It was a huge bedroom, dominated by the great canopied bed. The man who lay in the center of it would have been the focus of the room even if he weren’t propped up on several pillows, even if it weren’t for the doctor hovering near him, the tall, plain-faced woman seated at his bedside, and the servants grouped nearby, waiting for any order. He didn’t look as though he was dying. He was, or would be, tall, if he stood, for he took up a great deal of bed. His hair was white and his complexion, once tanned, was the yellowed shade such skin turns when the touch of air and sun fades from it. But there weren’t many wrinkles on the long aesthetic face, and he radiated command and awareness, and the bright eyes were alert and clever. And when they turned to the door, it could be seen, clearly, that they were the same glowing hazel as the pair that gazed steadily at him from the doorway.
“Arden!” the plain-faced woman said with apparent relief as she began to rise, and no sooner had Arden smiled and replied, “Millicent, my dear,” then, “Arden! My Lion!” the old gentleman cried, interrupting them, only his breathlessness between words giving the hint of his true state of health. “You’ve come.”
There was such glad welcome in the old face, such a world of joy and pleasure in
the hasty words, that both Julian and Francesca looked to each other again. This lean old gentleman was giving Arden the sweetest welcome any son could ask, and yet Arden looked down at him coldly as he entered the room, as if he gazed upon a serpent on a rock, not a sick old gentleman upon his pillows.
“I knew,” the old man said on a laugh as Arden didn’t reply, “that you’d want to be in at the kill, if only…if only”—he paused to get his breath—“to be sure I was done for. Wise lad.”
He nodded. “You know me well.”
And so he did, Arden thought, looking at his father, and wishing he could feel even so much as hate now, instead of this drear numbness. But he could summon up nothing but thoughts of the dead and all that was dead and gone as he looked upon the still-living man.
He’d come to this house and met this man decades ago, on the occasion of achieving his first full decade of life. But he’d known the man the moment he’d set eyes on him. For he’d seen him before, many times. This was the man who had watched him from his horse as he’d played in the street, this was the gentleman they all bowed down to in town, the one who asked the schoolmaster after him, the one who’d watched him with opaque eyes and not so much as a muscle twitching whenever he’d seen him about the town, about the woods, or on the road. This was the man who owned everything for miles about, in property or persons. This was the man they all said was his father, the one that had made his mama an outcast even among her rough fisherfolk kin, the one who’d made her bear the Earl of Oxwith yet another of his bastard children, so that she’d be grateful for the rest of her life to the man who’d wed her honestly, three years later. She’d been nineteen on her wedding day.
It seemed to Arden that he’d hated this man forever. He hated him for all the taunts from other children, despised him for all the other hapless children who’d been pointed out to him as his brothers as they worked in nearby fields or held the gentlemen’s horses, or swept out the stables, as well as for his three legitimate brothers whom he’d no right to address, and who’d never addressed him because they hated him perhaps even more in their turn. He’d hated him for every outsize thing about himself, for there were no such giants in his own house. The slight widower John Dahl had brought three children with him to his wedding, none Arden’s size, and his mama and John had yet more, none Arden’s size. Yet for all he hated him, he’d come here on his tenth birthday, to stand before him, his hat, before him, in his hand.
Arden’s mother had him dress in his finest, and she’d gone with him to the great house, and it was the first time for both. For she’d met her noble lover in the fields, and been wooed by him by the shore and by the hedges, and conceived their son in the forest, and had never set foot within doors with him in all the time they passed together. Now, eleven years and four legitimate children later, she would at last stand beneath a roof and speak with him, because she knew she had to do so.
John Dahl knew it too, although he’d cursed his own circumstances for it, and had slammed out of the little cottage the night before, and paced the night away, passing the night without his wife for the first time since they’d been married because of it. And all for his sake, Arden had thought in shame. And all despite his protests, for his mother was resolved.
“He shall not go wasted,” she’d said to John Dahl. She’d stood tall, and she was a sturdy red-headed lass, and even if her husband had not adored her he would have had to admire her. After five children and the years as a farmer’s wife, the only hint of the wild young sprite she’d been was in her wide dark eyes and flaming hair. But she still had a way about her, and dressed up a treat, and she knew her worth as she stood in her plain shoes and her best dress and planted her feet apart and looked straight at the smiling lord she’d given herself to all those years ago, not recognizing anything but the clever glinting hazel eyes now, and that perhaps only because she saw them each day in his son’s face. She was no longer the girl she’d been; he was, to her older eyes, now clearly what he’d always been—a cold and cynical gentleman who loved making love, and who took the same effort to strew children about the countryside that her own honest John took to set out his vegetable seed in the springtime fields. So, too, his harvest was for his pride, and to flaunt in his lady-wife’s eyes. That was why he received her here this day, and his lady locked herself away abovestairs, again, as she did every day until she died.
For the earl had found a way to make his indiscretions work for him years after he’d committed them. A parade of chance-got children came through his ancestral home, it was always open to them, so long as they came in the servants’ entrance and never looked him directly in the eye. The Countess of Oxwith would always regret her lack of appreciation of her husband’s marital favors.
Arden had watched his mother closely that day, both appalled and proud of her nervous but bold insistence.
“The schoolmaster says he’s taught him all he can. He can cipher and read and write. He’s sharp. And the schoolmaster says it would be a waste to let him linger on the vine. He’s got quality,” she persisted, her face flushed to the memory of the breathless, lovely child she’d been that brief summer, for she was unused to begging favors. She’d never asked him for anything since the boy had been born, and had sent back the money he’d sent to congratulate her for having him. The only thing she’d ever taken was the name he’d given her for the boy, for it was a good and clever one, and spoke of his unique history.
“Arden,” he’d said when he’d heard of the birth and sent his valet to look down upon the babe and verify his existence. “Arden, his lordship says,” the valet had reported tonelessly, “‘for the magical night in the forest.’” It had made no sense, but the sound of it was good. “Arden Lyons” it was, then, with her own decent family name to back it up.
But now she’d a favor to ask, for her pride was as nothing to the boy’s chances in life. She could neither read nor write, but the boy was a wonder at his lessons, and everyone knew it. Especially the earl, Arden thought, watching his father narrowly, remembering his long conferences with the schoolmaster of late.
“Well then, boy,” the earl had said at last, looking to Arden with great amusement as he said, seemingly amazed, “But ten? Only ten? Are you sure this one is mine, my dear? We met eleven years ago, and look at this great lump of a lad! Perhaps you’d been to the woods once before? Hmm?”
“Please, your lordship,” she’d said, red to her ears, and if she’d not needed his favor she’d have taken the boy and marched out, and if he’d not sworn to obey her, he’d have been gone from this room long before. “Please,” she said, “you know better than that.”
“Oh. Well. Do I?” the earl had said, laughing, showing all his white, strong teeth. “After all, a little shudder, a cry, a grimace—and as for other evidence, it might have been your time of month, mightn’t it?”
“Please! The boy,” she’d said, her lips tightening, holding Arden by his shoulder till her fingers dug into him, but the earl was still laughing, so she couldn’t give up yet.
“Well then, boy,” the earl said, never rising from his chair as he addressed him for the first time in his life, “here. Do you know that I am your father?”
“I’ve not told him—” she said, but he raised his hand as Arden said plainly, “I do now, your lordship.”
“Ah,” the earl said, hearing what lay beneath the civil words and growing genuinely interested. He looked at the tall, strongly built boy and gazed long at the cold glittering hazel eyes he so admired. “Your mama wants you to be well-educated. But what’s the sense of educating a bastard, or a farmer, I’d like to know? What do you want to achieve in your life?”
“I want to acquire a great deal of money, sir,” Arden answered evenly.
“A gentleman does not discuss money,” the earl chided.
“But I am not a gentleman, am I, your lordship?” he’d answered, taking in his flaming rage, tamping it down, smoothing it with keen reason, tempering it to cold, killing stee
l, as he’d learned to do.
“And what,” his father asked, smiling widely now, enormously entertained by the answer as well as by the control he saw, “do you hope to achieve with all that money?”
“Anything I wish, sir,” he’d replied steadily, staring unblinking at his father, “except, of course, be a gentleman.”
“Yes,” the earl said after a moment, “yes, the schoolmaster was right. He’ll go far. My word on it. And further with an education, I think. Leave the room, boy. Go to the kitchens. They’re used to entertaining my bastards there. I have to discuss some details with your mama. Some…delicious details that she may remember, do you think, my dear?” he’d asked her, and from the lazy tone of his voice and the look in his eye, Arden had known perhaps even before she had, and had known, in some fashion, that half the pleasure was in his knowing as well.
“No!” Arden had cried then, wild-eyed, losing his control, and then she’d known, and after a moment when her head had gone up as though she’d smelled fresh-spilled blood, she’d taken a deep breath, and turning to her son, cuffed him on the ear and said distinctly and loud, “Go now!”
“She’ll be back in an hour,” the earl had said slowly, softly, as he’d backed away from his mother. “Maybe two, eh, my love?”
