Unraveling the Earl

by Lynne Barron

  “Ah, leave off, Gilroy,” the boy whined, not a pretty sound at all. “The letter’s meant for Miss Georgie.”

  “Writing love letters to a betrothed lady,” the duke chided, pulling the missive from behind its apparent author’s back.

  “It’s not a love letter,” he protested. “And I didn’t write it, Georgie did.”

  “That’s Miss Buchanan to you.” Henry words were soft, the boy was her kinsman after all, the tone was a warning, the man had no business receiving letters from his betrothed.

  “It isn’t what you think,” McDougal said in a wheedling voice. “It’s just…well, Buchanan business.”

  “Buchanan business,” Mountjoy repeated, stepping back and unfolding the creased and frayed paper.

  “You are not going to read Georgie’s private correspondence.” Henry crossed the room to intercept the letter but the red-haired giant only circled around the perimeter and out of his grasp, head bent and lips moving.

  “Georgie…that is, Miss Buchanan will have my head this time for sure,” the pretty boy predicted.

  Mountjoy snickered and kept reading.

  McDougal wrung his hands.

  Henry spun around, keeping the duke and Georgie’s letter in his sights, curiosity nipping at his heels.

  “By God, if this isn’t vengeance worthy of a Buchanan,” Mountjoy whispered in unmistakable awe. “Battle well chosen, victory assured and deniability guaranteed. Damn, the lass is good.”

  “What the hell is in that letter?” Henry demanded as he set off in pursuit of his future cousin by marriage.

  “And the timing,” that cousin continued a tad breathlessly. “Even I wouldn’t suspect she was the culprit of so fiendish a plot. Hell, fancy pants, if I didn’t know George’s illegible scrawl I would put the blame squarely on your puny shoulders.”

  “That is not the reason I did not publish it.” Fancy pants puffed out his chest.

  “You didn’t publish the story?” Mountjoy finally lifted his head to spear the boy with a glittering glare.

  “I intended to,” he admitted, bravely meeting that hot glare. “And I would have if I hadn’t seen the notice of her wedding to his lordship laid out on the press waiting to be put to print.”

  “What’s that bit of spot-on-timing got to do with the price of tea in England?” Mountjoy demanded.

  Henry had had enough of the hints and clues and too few of the answers scrawled upon parchment. “Give me the damned letter.”

  In true Buchanan form, Mountjoy met him halfway, offering up the answers, be they fact or fabrication, without a care for the consequences.

  Henry made his way to the window, pushed back the lacy curtain and bent over the missive, two pages of tattered parchment, the ink faded and smudged but for one name squeezed into a space too small to contain all of the letters.

  Ethelred Brunhilde Octavia, Baroness Drummond.

  It wasn’t so much a letter as a list of facts. Names and dates and locations, scrawled across the page in a sloppy, slanting hand without benefit of punctuation, proper spelling or spacing.

  I never learned to write more than a few simple phrases but I can read the classics, balance a ledger down to the last penny and find Madagascar on a globe.

  It must have taken Georgie hours, days, sleepless nights to compose the missive.

  She’d likely carried it with her as she’d journeyed across the country, searching out clue after clue only to come up empty-handed, the blank space taunting her, haunting her.

  The story was as simple and as old as time.

  A young unmarried lady, a single glittering London Season, doors opened by a reigning matron, seduction at the hands of a notorious, penniless rake.

  A babe born in the country, hidden on a small estate, rescued by a grandmother, reunited with her true family at the castle of a duke.

  A fairytale, a gothic story, a ghost yarn told around a bonfire.

  The letter was unsigned, concluded with four rhyming lines that had been crossed out, but were etched in Henry’s brain.

  Hush my countess, Connie is near

  Husband’s a scoundrel, maiden is here

  Matron was lonely, Connie was there

  Until another, the halo will wear

  “By God. It truly was about vengeance all along.” Henry let loose a snort followed by a great rumbling chuckle and looked up to find Mountjoy towering over the pretty boy.

  “How could I publish her past right alongside her future that way?” Chester McDougal demanded. “I know I’ve only a drop of Buchanan blood and I’ve never understood the vendettas and whatnot the rest of you live by, but Georgie deserves a happy future, even if she’s hell-bent on sacrificing it to the past.”

  “Your mum’s sister’s daughter’s son in an honorable man. Both in words and deeds,” Henry said as he joined them.

  “I will not print it,” Chester said, puffing out his chest and standing proud and tall, if a bit gangly, before the two aristocrats. “I thought to burn it, but it belongs to Georgie and the last time I took something of hers, a barrel plowed over me. Now I’m not saying it was Georgie who rolled that barrel down the hill, I’m only saying as how I returned that ribbon and now I’ve returned the letter, so I hope I can stop looking over my shoulder every time I step foot outside my house.”

  “Is that why she tried to maim you, then?” Mountjoy asked. “Because you stole her ribbon?”

  “I was supposed to steal a peek under her skirts.” It was only the splotchy blush that tinted the pretty boy’s cheeks that saved him from a thrashing at Henry’s hands. “So’s I could prove once and for all she was really a girl. But there’s not a man alive can follow Georgie around for days and not fall head over heels for her charms. So I took the ribbon as a keepsake, only she got it in her head that frilly pink ribbon was the proof I’d been sent to find and took umbrage.”

  “You sent the newspaper to her tied in a pink ribbon,” Henry exclaimed as he recognized the significance of that ribbon. “No wonder she looked at the damn thing like it was a spider ready to crawl up her leg and bite her behind the knee.”

  “It was a gift,” Chester replied. “A betrothal gift.”

  “Don’t stop looking over your shoulder anytime soon,” Mountjoy suggested. “The lass will be mad as a wet cat, and twice as vicious, when she learns you didn’t publish the damn thing.”

  “No she won’t,” Henry tossed the words over his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Don’t bother having the banns read. We’ll be getting married in Scotland just as soon as I hold to my end of the most important bargain of my life.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Earl of Hastings ought to have known that the weather would conspire against him.

  Mother Nature was female, after all, and he’d been plagued by one stubborn female or another for most of his life.

  The sky was a soft blue, tinged only by the soot that perpetually hovered over London, when Henry set out for Joy on the Mount. A few fluffy white clouds were gathering to the north when he stopped to spend the first night of his journey at Hastings Hall.

  As his carriage turned onto the long lane that wound its way to Idyllwild two days later, clouds drifted overhead and a soft breeze ruffled the tall grass. After a night spent prowling around the small cottage, finding memories of Georgie in every room, he awoke in the morning to discover dew on the grass and a cold wind whipping through the trees.

  A light shower began to fall as he arrived in Lancaster, transforming into a steady rain just north of Ambleside. Distant thunder rumbled outside Penrith, lightning joining the fray in Carlisle, the skies finally opening up to a full-blown storm as the carriage crawled into Gretna Green.

  His coachman, James and the single groom he’d brought along for the journey lugged his heavy trunk from atop the coach into the crowded inn and up the stairs to a cramped chamber beneath the eaves while Henry followed behind with a smaller trunk.

  Tripping over a warped board, Henry dro
pped his burden and fell to one knee, leather-bound books tumbling across the floor.

  “Here, let me help you, my lord.” The coachman bent over, his back cracking, and lifted one slim volume.

  A dry and brittle pansy fell from between the pages, drifting down to land on the toe of Henry’s boot.

  “Thank you, James, I’ll take care of it,” Henry said. “See to the horses, if you will.”

  “Right you are,” James agreed, eying the faded pink bloom with something like suspicion as he backed out of the tiny room.

  Henry waited until the door closed before gathering up the books and carefully stowing them away in the trunk.

  He’d felt rather like a thief when he’d stepped into his mother’s chambers and closed the door behind him, shutting out the muffled sounds of the servants closing up Hastings Hall for the night.

  The countess’s apartments had been chilly and eerily quiet, shadows from the candelabra he’d held playing over the gray-blue walls and the rows of miniatures lining the mantle and tables. He’d returned the portrait of Connie to the nightstand beside the bed, smiling to think that he’d been asleep in his bed across the hall, worn out from lovemaking, when Georgie had crept in to borrow it.

  He’d found the diaries neatly lined up on a shelf above his mother’s desk, dozens of volumes chronically her life from girlhood until the year prior to her death. It had been simple enough to tuck them into a small trunk and wedge it under the seat of his carriage.

  Not so simple to actually read the diaries. He’d eyed the trunk for eight days without so much as opening the damned thing and in all likelihood he would eye it for another eight days. It certainly seemed it would take that long to reach Joy on the Mount if the weather did not turn.

  The weather turned the next day. It turned from bad to worse.

  Rain gave way to sleet as the carriage jostled along the road to Moffat and Henry, so bored with his own tedious company he would have perused a book of fashion plates had one been handy, gave up and reached for the trunk.

  The oldest volume was bound in red leather, the thin pages beginning to yellow around the edges and filled with the careful, precise penmanship of a young girl still in the schoolroom.

  Twelve year old Lady Lydia wrote of the new mare her father had brought home from London, a gray yearling she’d named Cassandra. She wrote of her brother, Robert, ignoring her on a recent visit from university, of her sister, Lucinda, shamelessly following one of the footmen around, of the scorched pheasant Cook had served for dinner, of the new doll she’d purchased in the village and of the pansies blooming in her mother’s gardens.

  The following three years narratives were much the same but for the dolls having been replaced by bonnets and dresses, Robert’s neglect replaced by his taking sail for the continent, Lucinda’s infatuation with the footman replaced with her growing affection for Viscount Easton’s handsome son.

  Henry might have finished the entire stash of diaries in one, perhaps two days time had they continued in the same light, easy vein. But when he started in on the volume marking his mother’s sixteenth birthday, the girlish ramblings gave way to the rather wistful, flowery prose of a young lady in the throes of first love.

  Miss Margaret Andover arrived at Hastings Hall this morning, appearing from the mist swirling in the air, as if by magic, an angel sent down from heaven.

  Henry tossed the volume back into the trunk, slammed the lid closed and shoved it back beneath the seat.

  And almost succeeded in shoving the words from his mind.

  Are you deaf as well as blind, then?

  Georgie haunted him, the ghost of the girl she’d been, the life she’d been forced to live, the schemes and seductions she’d undertaken to become the woman she’d wanted to be, the woman he loved.

  You were willfully blind.

  So bloody true.

  For all her talk of stretching, sidestepping and fleeing the truth, Georgie had never lied to him, not even during that night in the chapel when she’d twisted the truth into a sordid tale designed to drive him away.

  Georgie was an open book, just as he’d told Alice all those weeks ago.

  Henry had not listened to the words she’d spoken, he had not heard the words she’d left unsaid, nor had he opened his eyes to see her as she truly was rather than as he’d imagined her to be.

  That night as he tossed and turned on a lumpy straw mattress in a dingy little inn on the outskirts of Moffat, Henry decided he’d been a blind, bumbling idiot long enough.

  The next day found him stretched out on the velvet seat as the carriage slogged toward Douglas, the discarded diary propped against his bent legs. He read two volumes devoted almost entirely to Miss Andover, sharing in his mother’s struggles to comprehend the affection she felt for the pretty governess, discovering the joy of her smile, the soft touch of her bare hand, the beauty of the first kiss they shared, gentle and sweet.

  On the road to Larkhill, he read of the perils and pitfalls of a young lady’s first Season, the balls she attended, the gentlemen whose attention she found repugnant and the first whispers of something improper in the friendship between the debutant and her governess.

  Between Larkhill and Bellshill he discovered that his mother had been betrothed to his father, a man she barely knew, in order to hush up the first breath of scandal. Her panic was palpable on paper, her fear of discovery giving her words a frantic tone, one he recognized from later years when she’d railed at Olivia, accusing her of courting ruin.

  The next morning, the icy rain and wind slowed the horses to a walk and by the time they straggled into Glasgow, Henry had learned that his mother had refused to release his father from their betrothal for fear the news would lend credence to the rumors swirling around her. It hadn’t mattered to nineteen-year-old Lady Lydia that her fiancé loved another woman or that he had no intention of giving her up.

  The journey from Glasgow to Inchinnan should have taken a mere three hours in good weather, instead it took ten and Henry spent the majority of that time lost in the first years of his parents’ marriage. He skipped over his mother’s startlingly lurid descriptions of the indignities she was forced to submit to in the marriage bed as his parents struggled to produce an heir, perused the florid accounts of the pretty debutants who captured her attention, and swiped at his eyes as she detailed the early miscarriages and the pain she felt upon learning that Mary Morgan had given her husband a daughter.

  Somewhere between Inchinnan and Ballowag the countess gave birth to Olivia and fell into a terrible melancholy broken up by short bouts of manic gaiety, only fully snapping out it when she realized she was once more carrying a child. That child was Henry, the heir and the excuse she needed to finally bar her husband from her bed. Her duty fulfilled she set about securing her place among the highly respected and greatly feared matrons of Society, quietly continuing to select one angel from each year’s crop of wallflowers, one particular friend to satisfy her secret desires and ease the loneliness of her marriage.

  As his carriage crawled up steeper and steeper hills, Henry learned that the Countess of Hastings might have gone on in much the same manner for years, carefully balancing her public persona and her private predilections, had she not fallen in love with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed debutant in the spring of ’10.

  Miss Ethel Conrad had possessed neither fortune nor connections.

  High hopes for a bright future, she’d possessed in abundance.

  “Village of Loch Canon up ahead, my lord,” James hollered through the small window between the driver’s bench and the interior of the carriage.

  Henry placed the journal on the seat beside him and lifted the blind from the window.

  The village of Loch Canon sprawled across a valley between the banks of the loch from whence it got its name and the cloud-enshrouded peaks of Ben Canon.

  On a fine day the winding lanes were likely teeming with bustling villagers, the surrounding hills dotted with children traipsing throug
h the glen from the cottages tucked into the shadow of the mountains, dodging sheep and perhaps stopping to pick the purple heather that carpeted the ground.

  Unfortunately, the day could not be termed fine by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Henry hadn’t seen a fine day in so long he’d nearly forgotten what one looked like.

  The sky was pewter gray, freezing rain falling in sheets, wind howling through the trees and the village streets empty but for a lone figure bent low as he trudged through ankle-deep mud.

  They were finally nearing their destination, the journey that should have taken less than a week stretching into three, and damn if it didn’t look like snow clouds were gathering over the mountains.

  Snow in September, for pity sake.

  “You want I should stop or keep going while we’ve still a bit of light, my lord?” the coachman asked.

  Henry snapped open a roughly drawn map and spread it over his knees. Joy on the Mount was some five miles farther along, accessed only by a narrow, twisting road through the mountains, a road Mountjoy had warned was best undertaken in good light and fair weather.

  Henry very much doubted the following day would bring anything even faintly resembling either good light or fair weather, not if he were to judge by those clouds.

  “Have the horses got five miles left in them?” he asked, swiping at the rainwater falling on the map from the open hatch.

  “They’re middling fresh, what with the slow pace we’ve been keeping since we last changed them,” James replied with surprisingly good cheer considering he’d been out in the elements for days on end.

  “Continue to Joy on the Mount.”

  The decision made, the coachman slammed the window closed and Henry carefully folded the map and tucked it away. Settling back on the carriage seat, he picked up the small diary he’d abandoned and angled it to the meager light of the lantern bolted to the carriage wall.

  Connie birthed little George Buchanan and tasked Lady Hastings with finding a home for the unwanted child. Promptly severing all ties, she returned to her family and married the man chosen by her father.