An Heir of Uncertainty

by Everett, Alyssa

  The butler’s face fell. “Mr. Gerald Vaughan? A most tragic development, sir. He cut his leg on a fence nail while out doing some rough shooting, and infection set in. Dr. Strickland wanted to take the leg off but Mr. Gerald wouldn’t allow it—‘never for such a scratch,’ he said, though both his lordship and Sir John did their best to make him see reason. By the time he relented, the doctor said it was too late.”

  “Ah. Thank you, Dyson.” Another senseless tragedy, though it wasn’t the first such death Win had seen. A captain under his command on the Peninsula had been similarly terrified of the knife, and had likewise delayed treatment too long.

  Win made his way to the study, feeling crack-brained for not only jumping at shadows, but also for wondering about the young man’s death. What did he suppose, that there was some great conspiracy afoot to eliminate the Radbourne title and family? That the same person who was menacing Lina had killed the earl’s brother? Accidents and illnesses happened all the time, and Lord Radbourne had died through his own recklessness.

  Then again, something was definitely amiss with the abbey’s account books. And no wonder, given that Lord Radbourne had been so cavalier about estate management that he’d feigned illness to avoid going over his own ledgers. How could the earl have been so irresponsible when he’d had so few claims on his time? What other responsibilities did he have, with a bailiff, a man of business and thirty thousand pounds a year?

  Win sat down at the desk. He would write to Mr. Niven and ask him to return at once. Perhaps the financial irregularities were somehow connected to the attacks on Lina.

  Win penned the message and scrawled his signature, frowning. How was he supposed to find the answers to the questions swirling around him when he couldn’t even make sense of his own personal life? If he lived to be a thousand, he would never understand why Lina had stolen into his room and kissed him if she didn’t even want her sister inviting him to dinner.

  He needed to put her out of his head. One exploratory kiss didn’t mean there was anything serious between them, especially when her child was liable to disinherit him. He mustn’t go making a fool of himself, imagining he belonged with a countess.

  Win was sanding the letter—an awkward task with one arm in a sling—when a shadow fell across the page.

  He looked up. Freddie stood in the study doorway, still in his hat and garrick, ruddy with the outdoor cold. He was covered in gray grit, and he had a strange look on his face.

  “Come with me,” he said, his usually monotone voice as grim as death. “There’s something you need to see.”

  * * *

  Lina wanted to reproach Cassie as soon as the colonel left. How could you ask him to dinner? You know very well we can’t use the dining room. Must we advertise the shabbiness of this house to everyone? But she was afraid to confront her sister when Cassie might well counter with questions of her own.

  Lina started for the drawing room. Cassie followed. Lina resisted the urge to change course in an effort to shake her off. Why should she feel defensive? She’d simply been to the abbey and back. As far as Cassie was concerned, she had nothing to explain or apologize for.

  But when she settled herself on the sofa, Cassie sat down next to her and said in her gentlest, most diplomatic tone, “You’re not developing a tendre for Colonel Vaughan, are you?”

  There it was. The very question she’d been dreading.

  Lina feigned surprise. “A tendre, for a near-stranger who hopes to disinherit my child? That would certainly be foolish.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No, of course not.” Lina reached for her needlework, mostly to avoid her sister’s eye. “Why on earth would you ask that?”

  “His manner toward you was different, when he was with you just now. He seemed...possessive.”

  “Nonsense. Besides, you were the one who invited him to dinner.”

  “Well, yes, but mostly for his brother’s sake.” Looking uncomfortable, Cassie picked at the edge of the sofa upholstery with a fingernail. “I don’t know how to say this, except—Lina, are you sure you’re not forgetting poor Radbourne?”

  Lina’s mouth dropped open. “Forgetting Edward?” She stared at her sister in shock. “How can you say such a thing? You sound like Sir John.”

  Cassie reddened. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to criticize. It’s just that you seemed so flustered when you came home last night, and then you went hurrying back to the abbey this morning...”

  “You’re imagining things. You know very well I spent hours yesterday looking after Julia Vaughan, and I only went back there this morning to inquire about the colonel’s injury. It seemed the least I could do, after he broke his arm coming to my rescue.”

  Cassie gnawed her bottom lip. “I believe you, but...please, be careful. I’m not saying anything happened between the two of you, and even if it did, I would never judge you. But I should hate for people to talk.”

  Lina stabbed her needle into her embroidery. “As if they haven’t talked about us our entire lives!”

  “True, but that had more to do with Mama’s conduct than our own. It may have been unfair, but at least we could console ourselves with the knowledge we were blameless.” Cassie looked down at her lap. “I’m afraid if Colonel Vaughan appears too familiar or too particular in his attentions, people may say you never truly cared for Radbourne, and I can scarcely imagine how painful that would be for you.”

  Lina remained silent, fuming, in part because she knew Cassie was right. That was exactly what people like Mr. Channing and Sir John would say.

  But the worst part, the part Lina hated to admit even to herself, was that they would be right. As happy as she’d been to marry Edward, she’d never truly been in love with him. Oh, she’d felt a powerful fondness for him and she’d done everything she could to make him happy and to be a good wife to him. She could rest easy on that score. But as for the vows she’d taken when they’d married, and her promise to love him—that had been a half-truth, a convenient fiction she’d agreed to for the sake of safety and security. She and Cassie had been alone in the world, with not a penny to their name. How else could she keep a roof over their heads, except by marrying Edward?

  Not that there’d been anything cold or calculating about it. Lina had tried with all her might to fall in love with him, even getting down on her knees in her bedroom at night and praying to God that he would make her feel the same yearning for Edward that Edward obviously felt for her. When that didn’t work, she’d gone to great lengths to ensure he never suspected she saw him as a cherished friend rather than the love of her life. But she’d known. She’d known and she’d despised herself for lying and pretending.

  Lina squeezed her eyes shut. She’d been determined not to end up like her mother, but at least her mother had never sold herself for money. Did it really matter that she’d gone through the formality of a wedding ceremony first?

  “Are you all right?” Cassie asked.

  Lina’s eyes flew open. “Yes, of course. Just tired. My condition—”

  Oh, good Lord, she sounded as if she’d been caught robbing the poor box. She swallowed hard and stared down at the scene she was supposed to be embroidering. As remorseful as she might feel about marrying for security rather than love, she could never admit the truth to Cassie. It would be an insult to Edward’s memory. Besides, Cassie would blame herself. After all, she’d been an added mouth to feed.

  It had been a dark time, that day three and a half years ago when Edward had come into their lives. Lina had been twenty-one and just emerging from mourning for her mother, looking after Colin, Fiona and Cassie, doing all she could to make ends meet. They ate potatoes every night with dinner because it was one of the few foods they could afford. Lina gave half of hers to Colin, who was seventeen and still growing, so most nights she went to bed hungry.

>   Every day she got thinner and thinner, and every night she fell asleep wondering how much longer she could go on before she’d have to swallow her pride and throw herself and her family on the charity of the parish.

  She could see only one honorable way out. What she needed was a husband.

  So she’d sold the tortoiseshell combs her mother had left her, told Cassie and Fiona that she’d saved the money from their grocery budget, and bought a ticket to the assembly in Malton.

  She had every right to take part. She might have been born on the wrong side of the blanket, but she was nevertheless a lady. She refused to cower at home, even if she did own only one serviceable gown and dancing slippers so old she’d worn holes in the toes. So what if the other young ladies in attendance gave her disdainful stares, and their mothers drew them aside as if Lina was somehow tainted? This was her only hope.

  She smiled at every unmarried man who came in, from middle-aged gentlemen to tenant farmers. Not one asked her to dance. She stood among the wallflowers, dying on the inside, pretending she didn’t care.

  Then Edward arrived—not quite eighteen, and freshly home from Oxford for the long vacation. He was a trifle spotty and a recent growth spurt had left him looking underfed, but as the premiere gentleman of rank at the assembly, he drew a great deal of interest. He opened the dancing with Mr. Channing’s daughter, a new bride. Then he was at liberty to choose his own partner for the second set—and he crossed the room to where Lina stood.

  Smiling, he bowed awkwardly. “Would you do me the honor of standing up with me?”

  As he awaited her reply, a puppyish look of expectancy on his face, she was torn between a selfish desire to dance with the young Earl of Radbourne and the awareness that she really ought to warn him about her background. “I don’t think you know who I am,” she hedged.

  He broke into a good-humored grin that made him look terribly young. “Oh, I know who you are. I just don’t see why it should keep me from dancing with the prettiest girl here.”

  “Thank you.” She nodded, feeling almost tearfully grateful. “Thank you, I’d like that.”

  He gave her his arm, and as he led her out to where the other dancers were taking their places for the set, he whispered, “I deserve a partner like you after doing my duty with that bluestocking Miss Channing.”

  He’d been drinking. He wasn’t foxed, exactly, but she could smell alcohol on his breath. Not that she blamed him. With every eye at the assembly on the two of them, she could’ve used a little liquid courage herself.

  “She’s not Miss Channing any more,” Lina reminded him. “Now she’s Mrs. Eldridge.”

  “I know, but a rose by any other name, eh?” He leaned in confidentially. “I hope I don’t step on your feet. I’ve had a nip or two.”

  “Yes, I suspected as much.”

  “Did you, by Jove?” His eyes widened in dismay. “I’m not making a fool of myself, am I?”

  “No, not at all. It was more a guess than a suspicion, really.”

  “Ah.” He relaxed visibly. “Good. Er...you won’t tell my uncle, will you? He’s rather an old stickler.”

  “No, I won’t tell Sir John.”

  The earl beamed his approval. “Thanks awfully.”

  She liked him. There was nothing threatening or insincere about him. He wasn’t some practiced charmer, out to sweep her off her feet like the rakes who’d preyed on her mother. He was just a very green, very amiable young man, not that different from her brother Colin.

  The musicians struck up a country dance. Lord Radbourne wasn’t a particularly accomplished dancer, though Lina couldn’t tell if he kept missing the steps because he’d never learned them properly or because of the nip he’d confessed to having. She managed to coax him through the figures without making it too obvious she was doing the leading.

  “I was sorry to hear your mother had died,” he said as they came together at the bottom of the set. “She was a jolly handsome woman.”

  Too handsome for her own good. “That’s most kind of you.”

  “And your father—Lord Horne’s younger son, I believe?”

  “Yes. We were never close, but I’m told he was killed at Waterloo.” The Honorable Francis Horne, except that Mr. Horne hadn’t been especially honorable. He’d deserted her mother before she was born, and gone into the army to escape the censure of having ruined a clergyman’s daughter. At the same time, Lord Horne had settled a small sum on Lina’s mother—so small it was gone before her next baby came along, fathered by the next scoundrel to promise her his undying devotion. Lina sometimes contemplated applying to the current Lord Horne, her father’s elder brother, in the hope he might offer some assistance. But there’d been bad blood between the two brothers, and besides, she’d rather starve than sink to actual begging.

  She and Lord Radbourne wove through the line of dancers and then, despite the earl’s hopes, he did step on her foot. Hard. He glanced down. “Oh, I’m dashed sor—”

  Lina hurried to tuck her foot back under the hem of her gown, but she wasn’t quite fast enough. She glanced down in the same instant he did, and saw what he must have seen—the shabby condition of her slippers, with one toenail poking through the pink kid.

  “That was my fault,” he said hastily—which was so patently true, she sensed he wasn’t so much acknowledging his own clumsiness as trying to cover for the pitiable state of her turnout. Even the dress she was wearing, a white muslin she’d spent hours embroidering with twining vines of honeysuckle, was badly outdated.

  She wanted to sink, her own self-consciousness compounded by his obvious embarrassment. Everyone else in the assembly room was dressed in something finer. It was one thing to be poor and unfashionable, and another to feel poor and unfashionable.

  But he made a quick recovery, pretending he’d seen nothing wrong. He glanced about them and said in a voice of determined small talk, “There’s a fine crowd here tonight. I was worried we might have rain.”

  She could have kissed him for his kindness. “Oh, I knew the weather would hold.”

  He cocked his head. “How’d you know that?”

  “The vicar’s horse was facing west this afternoon. ‘Tails pointing west, weather’s the best. Tails pointing east, weather’s the least.’”

  “‘Tails pointing west...’” He chuckled. “That’s clever.”

  It surprised her he’d never heard the saying before, and surprised her even more that he thought it clever. By the end of the set, she’d divined that though he was cheerful and friendly and good-natured, and though she’d enjoyed partnering him, he wasn’t the quickest-witted gentleman of her acquaintance.

  He asked for a second set. By then she’d managed to put the embarrassment of her worn slippers behind her, and she was able to laugh and even tease him a little about his graceless dancing and Sir John’s overzealous guardianship. They ended the set with the earl telling her, blushing faintly, that she had the loveliest eyes he’d ever seen in his life.

  She was pleased when he called at her family’s spartan little cottage the next day, even if she did have to hide the bare patch in the sofa upholstery by throwing her shawl over it.

  “I brought you these,” he said, holding up a brace of coneys as he entered. “For your dinner tonight. Shot them myself.”

  That won him her biggest, broadest smile yet. It was the sort of gift she could accept in good conscience, and still remain every inch a lady. “Thank you, Lord Radbourne.”

  She and her brother and sisters ate their fill that night for the first time in weeks.

  The earl rode over nearly every day after that. Despite knowing her mother’s history and having seen that she was as poor as a church mouse, he continued to treat her like a lady. Before the month was out she was calling him plain Radbourne, and by the end of August he was Edward. That was the mon
th Colin and Fiona died, and Edward kissed her for the first time even as he tried to comfort her. When September drew to a close and it was time for him to return to Oxford, he announced that he’d had quite enough dashed schooling and he wasn’t going back.

  Sir John Blessingame was furious. He ranted, raved, and cut off Edward’s allowance. He also blamed Lina—rightly enough, in all likelihood, though she nobly swallowed down all considerations of self-interest and urged Edward to finish his degree. She’d got by without his help before, she reminded him, and she could get by that way again.

  In the end, Edward was more loyal than scholarly. He stuck by his refusal to go—and he asked Lina to marry him.

  Oh, Edward... Lina’s needlework swam before her. She was supposed to be in mourning for him—her dear, sweet husband, who’d saved her from starvation. What a stupid, selfish thing she’d done, kissing Win. She’d known she would regret it.

  But it was too late to take it back now. The best she could hope for was to forget last night had ever happened.

  She drew a slow, measured breath and carefully added another stitch to the willow tree she was embroidering. “I’m sorry if I seemed prickly before, Cassie. Please don’t worry. I’m not going to give people any reason to talk.” She spoke with low, determined composure. “I’ll be more careful of the proprieties around Colonel Vaughan from now on.”

  “Thank you.” Cassie threw her an approving smile. “I knew you’d understand. I’m only thinking of your reputation.”

  Even the scene Lina was stitching felt like a reproach. It was a mourning piece, a needlework memorial featuring a statuesque widow in classical robes, weeping over a stone monument. Lina wagered the needlework widow had never crept into the bedroom of her dead husband’s successor and run her hands over his chest as they kissed. “I saw Dr. Strickland riding away,” she said, mostly to block the unwelcome image from her thoughts.

  “Yes, he was checking on Mr. Allison’s bad foot and stopped here to chat. He said I mustn’t worry about your fall in Malton, since there’s little danger for the baby.”