“Do not make the mistake that I did,” Monica warned. “I have lived my life alone because one man played me false, but not all men are like Francis and Freddy, Harriet. Please consider that.”
Harriet was pensive. “I have not visited Cornwall in a very long time. I begin to think that the further I remove from Lord Westwood, the better.”
Monica looked shocked. “You would leave in the middle of the Season? What of your arrangement?”
“Lord Westwood has fulfilled the terms of our agreement rather too well,” Harriet said ruefully. “Indeed, I realize now that I knew little about this pull between men and women. I thought of it as an inconvenient distraction, a nuisance to be put in its place so I could carry on unfettered by men who wished to control me. I was wrong.”
She felt her face grow warm. “I wanted to arm myself so that I would never be vulnerable again. But I was the merest babe, Monica, the merest babe.” Harriet’s voice broke. “I have thrown all caution and common sense aside. This is beyond anything I had with Freddy. It is a passion — such a passion! — beyond my control.” Seeing Monica’s expression, Harriet halted. “I see I have shocked you.”
Her friend fished a lace handkerchief from the folds of her frock and handed it to her. She smiled gently. “Nay, you have but made me envious.”
Harriet took the handkerchief gratefully and blew her nose. “Lord Westwood controls me in a way no other man has done. Indeed, he threatens the very foundation of my independence.”
“Surely not,” her friend murmured.
“Oh, Monica, I am too embarrassed to say more,” Harriet said. “You and I have both been married, but this is beyond all imagining. It has shocked me to the core. I have behaved disgracefully, and to my everlasting shame, there is a part of me that wants no rescue. Don’t you see that I must save myself? ’Else he will consume me.”
Monica was silent for a long moment. “What I see is that you have encountered something most of us do not experience in a lifetime. And that you wish to run away from it because you are afraid of the cost.”
Harriet shook her head. “Pray, do not be harsh. I do only what I must.”
***
The next morning, Harriet’s father appeared surprised to see her, along with Heavenly, standing on the drive with a trunk and bandboxes as he prepared to depart for Cornwall. But he merely smiled and assisted her into his carriage without any inquisition.
Staring at the receding caravan of carriages, Monica shook her head in dismay and sank into a chair.
“Do not worry, Mother,” Eustace said. “Lady Harriet will right herself. She merely needs time to sort it all out.”
She eyed him fondly. Her son, it seemed, had acquired some wisdom beyond his years. “Perhaps you are right. Harriet is confused at the moment. We have Lord Westwood to thank for that. I hope he knows what he has wrought.”
“If you had seen him floor Hunt that night, you would have no doubts.” Eustace’s eyes gleamed. “Fond of her, he is.”
“I hope he is more than fond,” Monica groused. She was not sure whether she held the earl in charity. On the one hand, he was to blame for Harriet’s precarious emotional state. On the other, this bargain Harriet had seen fit to strike with the man had been wrongheaded from the outset. Lord Westwood’s behavior had, if nothing else, caused Harriet to recognize that fact. Sometimes one had to destroy the facade before constructing a decent house, Monica reflected. And Harriet had built a more impermeable façade than anyone she knew.
Moreover, for all that Lord Westwood’s behavior had chased her friend from London, it had not escaped Monica’s attention that Eustace’s revered Mr. Hunt was now merely “Hunt.” If the earl had accomplished that transformation, Monica decided, she was grateful.
It was not until the next morning that Lord Westwood came to call. He found Monica in the drawing room, where she was writing letters. Truth be told, Monica had intended to send a note round to the earl had he not presented himself today. As the cause of Harriet’s flight, he had every right to know what he had wrought — and an obligation, Monica hoped, to repair it.
He seemed shocked to hear of Harriet’s departure, a fact that delighted Monica, though she kept that to herself. But when Lord Westwood demanded to know where, precisely, the duke made his home, she hesitated.
“I know nothing of Cornwall, I’m afraid,” she said. “I only know the duke lives in a castle on the north coast.”
He muttered something she did not catch and strode to the door.
Eustace, who had come into the room in time to see the earl’s reaction, hastened after him. “Sir! Might I accompany you?”
Lord Westwood turned. “Your aid is always welcome, Eustace, but I fear my errand is rather personal. And should you not remain to assist your mother? Not the thing to leave in town her alone.”
Eustace squared his shoulders. “Quite right. I had forgotten my duty.”
Monica eyed her son. Was it her imagination, or did he stand a little taller after Lord Westwood reminded him of his responsibilities?
As for Lord Westwood, she was more heartened than she thought possible at the knowledge that he meant to hasten after Harriet. She would have wished him Godspeed, but the earl was halfway down the front steps before she thought of it. She hurried after him.
Lord Westwood bounded toward his waiting curricle, so intent on his mission that he failed to see another man approaching Lady Harriet’s front steps, and collided with him. The man landed in a heap on the cobblestones.
“My apologies.” Lord Westwood helped him to his feet. When it became apparent that the man was not injured, the earl was off, not sparing him a second glance.
Monica stared in amazement. The man Lord Westwood had knocked onto his posterior was none other than Cedric Gibbs.
He picked up his hat, shoved it on his head, and climbed the steps.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Running away, ain’t you?” Heavenly said sourly.
Harriet looked around the room in which she had lived as a child. The little painted vanity still sat next to the matching cheval glass. The window seat still afforded a marvelous view of the sea. The tall shelves that had held so many of her books still flanked the comfortable feather bed. The room had not changed.
And yet, she was a lifetime removed from the lonely girl she had been.
“Sure as fox flees the hound, you are running from Lord Westwood.”
“Nonsense,” Harriet said. “I merely wished to visit my father’s home.”
Heavenly hung one of Harriet’s gowns in the wardrobe. “You can tell yourself that. Don’t make it true.”
She turned and looked Harriet up and down. “I’ve seen you run circles around the likes of Squire Gibbs. I’ve seen you run that bakery, see to the mill repairs, and hold your own with them haughty swells in London and their outlandish talk. I’ve never seen you hide.”
Harriet sat down on the bed. “I am not running away.” But her voice lacked conviction, and Heavenly shook her head.
“Miss Harriet, you’ve been running away from men all your days, and that father of yours is partly to blame. But that don’t mean you have to keep doing it.”
“My father? But —”
“The man lives like a hermit. I don’t know what he sees in this drafty castle, but I do know that it is no place for you. I think you know it, too. Why, you married the first man who offered for you just to get away from here.”
“I loved Freddy!” Harriet protested.
Heavenly nodded. “His lordship was a right charming scamp, but he didn’t know how to love a woman any more than His Grace knew how to raise a daughter after the duchess died.” Heavenly scowled. “Him and his castle by the sea. A lonelier place I have never seen.”
“But it is beautiful here,” Harriet said, wondering why the view out the window failed to chase the chill the castle always brought to her bones.
“’Tis only beautiful for them that don’t let grief eat them alive,” Hea
venly retorted. Then her expression softened. “He never saw that his coldness was destroying you. Poor lass.”
“I do not know why I permit you to talk to me like this.” Harriet rubbed her eyes, willing away the tears.
“Somebody’s got to. You’ve had two cold men in your life, neither one of them capable of giving you what you need. I guess that’s why you shriveled up.”
Stung, Harriet shook her head in denial.
Heavenly shot her a knowing look. “Lord Westwood knows how to warm a woman’s heart, even a shriveled-up one, doesn’t he?”
“That is enough!” Harriet cried. “I am nothing to him, and he is nothing to me.”
Heavenly made an exasperated sound. “Lord Westwood is everything that Lord Worthington was not, and you know it.”
“I will not have this talk,” Harriet said fiercely, losing the fight against her tears.
“And here I thought you were a fighter.” Heavenly turned away, so that Harriet could not see the moisture in her own eyes.
***
A man could be forgiven, Elias thought, for thinking Cornwall the farthest end of the earth. Doubtless his view came from having ridden the better part of three days to get here. He had taken his best Arabian, but even so it was necessary to change horses, and the nags available on the road did not have the speed and endurance of his prized horseflesh. The roads themselves were rutted and rough. Elias took some comfort in that fact, because it likely meant that Harriet and her father had made even slower time in their carriage. He had no wish to find his betrothed well-ensconced in the fortress that he imagined the duke’s home to be.
In the military, one took a fortress not by making a direct run on the most fortified gates but by starting with a tactical maneuver, and then storming it on all flanks. Elias intended — what, exactly, did he intend?
In truth, Harriet Worthington was not his betrothed, nor did she wish to be, and she had every right to retreat to her father’s home. Elias had no standing by which to demand that she return with him. He could not very well tell the duke that he wished to make love to his daughter until she cried out the truth.
That stopped him. What truth? That she belonged to him, that she would never allow another man to claim her? That she would abandon all pretense and own him as hers?
Own him? God.
He had lost his mind. She had done this — with her pastries and her flirtations with revolutionaries, and her repeated claims that she needed no man to complete her. And if he had learned anything from the experience with Zephyr, it was that a man is most a fool when he is ready to accept the parson’s noose — which he almost certainly was not.
Why, then, was he here?
The setting certainly held little appeal, beyond a wild beauty that did little to mask the harshness. The north coast was raw and unforgiving. Sheer, high cliffs tumbled hundreds of feet onto beaches dotted with granite sea stacks. Not far away was a castle ruin rumored to have once been King Arthur’s stronghold. Elias did not hold with the legend, but he could well imagine that the rocky headlands, with their commanding views of ceaselessly turbulent seas, had given rise to mythic tales of nigh-invincible kings.
The duke’s castle was no less evocative a structure, he decided sometime later as he surveyed it from what passed for a road into the compound. The castle might have presided on the clifftop for hundreds of years and, from the look of that rugged granite, would last a few hundred more. Elias tried to imagine Harriet growing up in such a place, isolated and alone. The nearest neighbors looked to be a fishing village some distance away on a rocky beach.
No wonder she had been drawn to Freddy. His lively, irrepressible spirit represented nothing so much as rescue from the bleakness that surrounded her.
The road led him to some great iron gates that, fortunately, were open. Elias passed through them into a rough, deserted courtyard. He looped his nag’s reins around the ring of an ancient post and took stock of his surroundings. The castle itself soared more than a hundred feet above him. Two enormous doors pitted with age appeared to serve as the main entrance. Elias sounded a rusty iron doorknocker on one of them, and, after some minutes, the door swung open on its squeaky hinges. A solemn-looking footman stared at him with a slight air of puzzlement, as if the castle did not receive many visitors. The man led him through a darkened corridor illuminated with braces of candles that in no way cast sufficient light.
At last Elias presented himself in the drafty Great Hall that no manner of fire could warm. One wall bore an enormous coat of arms. On it were images of a dozen or more gold coins surrounding a double-headed eagle over an azure blaze. A rusty suit of armor stood in the corner, a shield at the ready, with a twelve-foot lance propped upright and next to it. He wondered why the duke had seen fit to raise his daughter in such a place.
Soon the duke entered the hall. The man did not seem surprised to see him. “So you have come,” was all he offered by way of greeting.
Brandy was called for. There was a prolonged silence as each man took the other’s measure. The only light was a ring of torches along the wall and a smoky oil lamp on the table between them. It added to the atmosphere of grim otherworldliness, a time out of time in which immortal knights and kings did battle under the watchful eyes of magicians and sorceresses. Harriet’s father might have been such a king in another life — or even in this one, for Elias had no trouble imagining the man in that suit of armor in the corner.
It was some time before the duke spoke.
“I prefer my solitary state, but Harriet needs people and life,” he said at last, dispensing with preliminary pleasantries. “I could not give her that. One day I looked up and she had become a woman — like her mother.”
For a moment he seemed lost in thought. “I had not wanted children. I thought my Julia too frail, too slight for the physical ordeal of childbirth. But it was what she wanted, so I gave in. It was thus my fault she died, but God help me, I blamed Harriet as well. I have had years to regret that.”
Elias said nothing. Privately he thought the duke had taken too much guilt unto himself for what surely had been the vagaries of fate. But the guilt had long festered, and he suspected the man would never be dissuaded.
“I knew she wished for a Season,” the duke continued. “She deserved an introduction to society, the opportunity to meet people her own age. God knows, she got none of that here. And so I took her to London, and she met Worthington. She had no experience of men. She did not recognize what he was. She wanted him, and I knew that if I forbade the marriage, she would defy me.”
Elias tried to imagine Harriet, six years younger and achingly vulnerable, swept into Freddy’s aura without the protective armor she had since spent years devising. He saw a father who wanted desperately to assure her happiness, but did not know how.
“You protected her as best you could,” Elias said.
“No, I failed.” The duke’s brow darkened. “He had other women. I safeguarded her money, but I could do nothing about her heart.” He leveled a hard gaze at Elias. “And so you see, Westwood, there is nothing more important to me now than Harriet’s happiness. I see that you want her. You have come all this way, after all. But can you be the man she deserves?”
Elias did not immediately respond. Why was he here, if not for the woman who had caused such a strange madness to grow within him? Only one answer presented itself, and it was as good as any.
“As to that, sir, I do not know,” he said. “I only know I cannot do without her.”
The duke pondered that. “I had you investigated.”
Elias eyed him warily. “What did you learn?”
“That you do not fear work, that you have labored on your properties alongside your workers. That you are accorded an expert on spices, and particularly in the matter of appealing to English tastes. I myself enjoy good food, but I have had the benefit of my daughter’s skills. Most of England, however, has not. The country is ripe for a culinary adventure. You will do well.”
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The duke’s gaze settled on the coat of arms. “We do not practice primogeniture in Cornwall. One day all of this will be Harriet’s. That is another reason I had Freddy’s entail broken. My daughter will be a very rich woman and there will be none to lay a claim on any of her property.”
“I have no interest in your daughter’s money or possessions.”
The duke’s eyes narrowed assessingly. “Even if that is so, there are other difficulties. You travel for considerable periods of time out of the country. If you had a family, they would doubtless be alone a great deal.”
“Yes,” Elias said.
“You were engaged once,” the duke continued. “Standing at the altar at St. Paul’s, in fact, awaiting your bride.”
“Yes. She eloped with someone else.”
His Grace looked speculative. “An experience like that can sour a man. Why would you wish to risk marriage again?”
Elias sighed. Agreement or no, honesty compelled him to put a halt to the duke’s illusions. “I cannot pretend that I do wish it, sir. Indeed, I must be frank: I have no plans to wed. It cannot come as a surprise to you that your daughter feels likewise. Our betrothal is not what it seems. I cannot say more without her permission.”
The duke regarded him for a long moment. Elias knew his response was not what the man wanted to hear.
“I suppose it is no surprise,” the duke said at last. “She was hurt by Worthington’s betrayal, more deeply than I had imagined. More deeply, perhaps, than she understands. She would not wish to repeat such an experience.”
“Whatever happens, I will not betray her,” Elias said quietly.
“I would kill you if you did.”
In spite of himself, Elias smiled. “I would expect no less.”
***
“Good afternoon, my lord.” She entered her father’s drafty drawing room and moved to stand guardedly beside an upholstered chair. Her plain blue morning dress brought out the blue of her wary, unsmiling eyes. She did not look like the vibrant, confident woman Elias had come to know, the woman who had responded with such abandon when he made love to her.
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