Captain Durant's Countess

by Robinson, Maggie

  “What’s that nonsense you’re telling our daughter?”

  Maris looked up to see Reyn in the doorway. He was splattered with mud and blood, his cheeks chapped red from the cold.

  “How did it go?”

  Reyn grinned. “We have a fine colt.”

  “The second this week! Brutus must be proud.”

  “Not as proud as I am of our little filly. How is Miss Jane today? I won’t come in to see for myself.”

  “It’s too soon, but I think she is cutting a tooth.” Jane had been frantically chewing everything in sight, including Maris’s poor breasts.

  “Of course. She is advanced for her age. She takes after her mother.”

  “But is the image of her father.”

  “Poor monkey. Let’s hope the Durant nose skips a generation. Well, wife, I’ve been up all night and dead on my feet. I’ve ordered a bath in my dressing room. Do you think you might join me in a nap this morning once I clean myself up?”

  “A nap, Captain Durant?”

  “You say that as if I have an ulterior motive to get in bed with my wife.” He made a show of yawning. Maris wasn’t fooled a bit.

  “I confess I’m tired too. Jane was fussy last night.”

  “Excellent. I won’t be long.”

  “Good. Because I’m very tired.”

  “You are incorrigible, aren’t you?”

  Maris smiled. “I was instructed by a master.”

  Reyn disappeared down the hall, his whistling of a bawdy tune belying his exhaustion. She rang for Jane’s nursemaid, rose from the chaise, and went to her dressing table.

  “Damn.” There was a new silver hair poking up through the loose brown waves at her temple. She ripped it out and unbraided her hair, brushing it until her arm became weak. What was taking Reyn so long? She really was tired, and would relish falling asleep in her husband’s arms.

  When they finished loving each other.

  He’d been very silly after Jane was born. The poor man had got it into his head that she should never suffer through childbirth again. It had taken some convincing and a consultation with Dr. Crandall, but Reyn had resumed his marital rights a month ago. Maris had missed their intimacy more than she could have ever expressed. For a woman who had mostly lived within proper boundaries, she was afraid she had strayed into wanton territory.

  And was glad of it.

  She saw him behind her in the mirror, his hair damp and slicked back. He smelled of soap and man, no trace of horse. Reyn raised one wicked black eyebrow and held out a hand. Maris didn’t hesitate for a second.

  Third Epilogue

  September 1826

  It was better this way. Reyn stared gloomily into a glass of whiskey. Still his first, when it should have been at least his seventh. One for every hour of agony upstairs.

  He was a dog. A right bastard even if his parents had been married. Somehow he had been unable to keep his vow to himself. For the fourth time in five years, he was waiting for a new child to be born. Jane and her two brothers would shortly—God, if only it would be shortly—be joined in the nursery by another little Durant.

  This child would be the last of the line. Although she would clout him to say so, Maris was getting too old for this sort of thing. They would just have to be more careful in the future.

  Reyn snorted. Good luck with that. It seemed everything he touched resulted in fecundity. His horse farm was a great success. His laborers were building a new barn over at Merrywood even as he sat there not drinking his whiskey.

  Childbirth business did not seem to get any easier with practice for him, although Maris uttered not one word of complaint. It was she who had seduced him from his good intentions, and he had to say she made a wonderful mother, as she was wonderful at everything in their domestic sphere. At the age of four, Jane could read already, thanks to her mother’s lessons, with none of her father’s difficulty. It remained to be seen how Henry and Matthew would fare, but both seemed like bright little boys. Reyn was hopeful for their future.

  Perhaps he should go up. It was not his fault he’d fainted when Matthew was born. He’d missed breakfast and lunch and was simply hungry. Mrs. Lynch had banned him this time, but this was his home, after all. Surely he had a right to be present at the birth of his own child?

  “Reyn! Maris wants you.”

  His sister Ginny was at the door of his study, quite near the end of her own term. She had requested to be with Maris to know what to expect in two months. She and Arthur had finally been successful in conceiving. She looked none the worse for wear, but Reyn experienced his usual misgivings.

  “Is she all right? Is the baby here?”

  “You may see for yourself once you stop asking such silly questions.” The little baggage stuck her tongue out at him.

  Reyn took the stairs two at a time. A baby was crying, the most beautiful sound in the world to his ears.

  Maris sat up in bed, her glossy hair tucked up under a nightcap. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled. One would never know she’d been writhing in agony for seven hours. “A girl this time, Reyn. Isn’t she pretty?”

  Reyn peeked at the tiny bundle lying in the cradle. She was clean and pink, and Reyn felt a spasm of guilt. Maris knew how the sight of blood and gore on his newborn babies absolutely terrified him. Odd that he was so adept when it came to equine infants.

  “She’s a beauty, like her mother.” Reyn sat on the bed, noting the sheets had been changed too. He was pathetic, he really was, but the idea of Maris in pain paralyzed him.

  There was a word for him—uxorious. He had come across it in a book he was making himself read, and had not known the meaning at first. It meant excessively devoted to one’s wife. Guilty as charged.

  She was radiant, and his heart swelled. “Thank you, Maris, for everything.”

  “I should be thanking you.” She grinned, looking half her age. “I can’t wait until I’m well enough so we can—”

  “No!” Reyn held up a hand in alarm. “Don’t say it! Don’t even think it!”

  “Have a picnic in the garden with the children? Surely you can have no objection to that. The leaves will be turning, and if everyone dresses warmly, we should be fine, even little Juliet. We can bring her along in a Moses basket. I do so love the fall.”

  Reyn shut his eyes. His wife surprised him daily with her cunning. He was very sure that was not what she had intended to say at all.

  Ah, well. He’d worry later. At the moment, he was going to kiss his countess.

  Did you miss the first book in Maggie’s LONDON LIST series?

  Lord Gray’s List

  From duchesses to chamber maids, everybody’s reading it. Each Tuesday, The London List appears, filled with gossip and scandal, offering job postings and matches for the lovelorn—and most enticing of all, telling the tales and selling the wares a more modest publication wouldn’t touch . . .

  The creation of Evangeline Ramsey, The London List saved her and her ailing father from destitution. But the paper has given Evie more than financial relief. As its publisher, she lives as a man, dressed in masculine garb, free to pursue and report whatever she likes—especially the latest disgraces besmirching Lord Benton Gray. It’s only fair that she hang his dirty laundry, given that it was his youthful ardor that put her off marriage for good . . .

  Lord Gray—Ben—isn’t about to stand by while all of London laughs at his peccadilloes week after week. But once he discovers that the publisher is none other than pretty Evie Ramsey with her curls lopped short, his worries turn to desires—and not a one of them fit to print . . .

  And don’t miss LADY ANNE’S LOVER, coming in August. Here’s a sneak peek!

  Wales, December 26, 1820

  Lady Imaculata Egremont had danced naked in a fountain. She’d eloped to France with a rackety gentleman she’d just as soon forget. She’d sold chestnuts on the street. There was no reason on earth why she could not pick up a dead mouse and dispose of it with her usual élan.
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  She fought back an unfortunate gag and told herself to stop breathing. To think of lilac bushes in her mother’s Dorset garden in the spring. Great purple masses of them, their heavy cones bursting into flower, gray-green leaves shivering in the warm breeze. She was not in Wales. It was not winter. She was not standing bent over a tiny desiccated body in a grim hallway that smelled like death.

  And gin.

  Somewhere her new employer must have spilled a vat of it and had probably joined the mouse. He certainly had not opened the door to her as she’d injured her hands pounding on it for a full five minutes on the misty doorstep. She’d finally taken the initiative—anyone would tell you Lady Imaculata was bold as brass—and pressed the latch herself, finding the door unlocked. If she were truly a housekeeper, she supposed she should have entered by way of the kitchen, but Lady Imaculata was an earl’s daughter, and some habits were hard to break.

  The possibly dead Major Ripton-Jones had not sent any transportation to fetch her, either. She’d gotten off the mail coach in Hay on Wye foolishly hopeful, but in the end she’d arranged for a donkey cart herself to bump her along to Llanwyr, hoping her presence had not been noted by her father’s spies. She was still almost frozen from the long ride, and the temperature in Ripton Hall’s hall was not much warmer than outside. She was probably giving the dead mouse a run for its money with her own eau de bourrique.

  Lilacs. Think of lilacs. Her favorite flower. No donkeys or dead mice. It was abundantly clear why the old man had placed an advertisement for a housekeeper in The London List, and she hadn’t even gone ten paces down the dim and fragrant hallway. What would she find when she opened the closed doors? Alas, it was too late to run after the donkey cart.

  She may have been raised a lady, but Lady Imaculata was now Mrs. Anne Mont. Anne was her humble middle name, much more suitable for a housekeeper. What her parents had been thinking at her christening was a mystery for the ages. Anyone who named a child Imaculata was asking for trouble. Much like those named Chastity or Christian or Prudence, the Imaculatas of the world were bound to disappoint, and she had been no exception—in fact she had taken a toe or two over the edge of propriety so often she was at a perpetual tilt.

  As if a mere change of name would help her with the Herculean tasks at hand, she thought grimly. She’d need to reroute the Welsh equivalent of the Alpheus and Peneus rivers to wash away all this dirt and dust. She was very much afraid she’d gotten in over her head, and not for the first time.

  With determination, she set down her portmanteau and got to work. Anne Mont needed this job, at least until she turned twenty-one and became Imaculata Egremont again to come into her funds. Two years was not so very long to endure isolation and filth, and anyway, she’d fix the filth or die trying. She closed her eyes, gingerly scooped the dead mouse up with her handkerchief and tossed it out onto the frost-covered drive, the handkerchief right along with it. Let the poor mouse have its embroidered shroud. She couldn’t imagine ever blowing her nose delicately into it again, even if she knew how to do laundry. Mrs. Anne Mont didn’t have the first idea how to wash a handkerchief or anything else, but supposed that was one of the things a housekeeper would have to learn. The major was apt to have handkerchiefs and clothes now, wasn’t he?

  Her benefactress Evangeline Ramsey had pressed upon her an ancient copy of The Compleat Housewife before she left London, and Anne had plenty of time to read it and become dismayed on her journey west. The title page alone had been daunting—“Collection of several hundred of the most approved receipts, in cookery, pastry, confectionery, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made wines, cordials. And also bills of fare for every month of the year. To which is added, a collection of nearly two hundred family receipts of medicines; viz. drinks, syrups, salves, ointments, and many other things of sovereign and approved efficacy in most distempers, pains, aches, wounds, sores, etc. never before made publick in these parts; fit either for private families, or such publick-spirited gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor neighbours.” The author Eliza Smith must have been wonderfully efficient, but then she’d never had to deal with Major Ripton-Jones’s house and his dead and living pests. The major’s house was a dismal wreck and she would earn every bit of the pittance he’d promised to pay her.

  Anne batted the worst of the spiderwebs away with her wet black bonnet, hoping none of the spiders decided to take up residency in her hat. Satisfied she could now walk the gauntlet of the hallway, she opened a shut door. It revealed a monstrously large cold double drawing room, big enough to host a cotillion, badly furnished. Great swaths of cobwebs hung in every corner, Dust lay thick on every surface, windows were so smudged one could not see the frigid rain-washed fields beyond them. The fireplaces at either end were heaping-full of cold ashes. No one had sat on the mice-shredded satin sofas in a long while.

  Next was the monstrously large colder dining room, in worse repair—not a chair looked able to hold her weight, and she was quite a little thing. She could have written her name on the dust on the long dining table, if she could remember that she was Anne Mont now.

  The door at the end of the hall was locked, but she swore she smelled peat burning beyond it. And gin. She took a long sniff, filling her nose with the distinct aroma of drink and unwashed man.

  Definitely no lilacs.

  Her elderly employer was behind it, most likely, and he was snoring. He must have doused the room in alcohol—she may as well have been outside a ginhouse. Anne damned her new friend Evangeline Ramsey and her newspaper The London List with an extremely naughty oath for sending her here to the back of beyond to cater to a drunken old man.

  But, Anne reminded herself, Major Ripton-Jones was better than her father, and if he wasn’t, she would bean him on the head with a kettle if she could find one in the kitchen. If she could find the kitchen.

  Everyone thought her papa was a saint. If they only knew what he had tried to do with his only child once the candles were blown out, they would soon change their mind.

  Anne was still a virgin. Her father had attempted but not succeeded in getting very far. Nor had the rackety gentleman she’d run off to France with, although he’d tried to alter her not-quite-innocent state before they had gotten to an altar. She’d actually been relieved when the private detective her father had hired found them, even if she had punched poor Mr. Mulgrew in the nose.

  She had faced her demons for the past four years, at first wondering what it was about her that brought the devil to her doorstep. Her father, she knew, blamed her for his unnatural lust and beat her for it. He had looked at her oddly after her mother died, when she was so lost in grief and had turned to him for comfort. But when he’d finally taken her in his arms, it was not as a father, but a man. Anne had been shocked and confused, then sick with fear. She supposed she could have countered him in any number of ways—leaping to her death from the roof, chewing up some foxglove, shooting herself—or better yet, him—with her pearl-handled pistol.

  She had done none of those things. Instead, she had fought him off and made herself a byword of scandal from the moment of her debut, and had the newspaper clippings to prove it. As a debutante she had been very naughty indeed. Lady Imaculata had sought low, even subterranean society in order to escape her father’s predatory attentions, thinking that he’d let her have her mother’s fortune and wash his hands of her if she misbehaved sufficiently. But no matter what foolish—and sometimes dangerous—thing she’d done, he had kept her a prisoner.

  So fiery, flame-haired Lady Imaculata Egremont was no more. In her place was frowsy brunette Anne Mont, reluctant and incompetent housekeeper. Anne had noted some of the brown color had rubbed off on her pillows as she’d spent the night in coaching houses. Whatever elixir Evangeline had used on her was fading fast. Unless she could find some Atkinson’s Vegetable Dye, she’d have to confess to the major that he’d hired a red-headed imposter. Maybe the old man was so blind he’d never notice. If he could bear to live i
n his current squalor, appearances could not possibly matter to him.

  Anne gathered her courage and used her most confident voice. She was a good mimic, and it was necessary for the major to think he had hired a forthright woman rather than a foolish, inexperienced girl. She had played a part or two in her time. Surely she could convince an old sot that she was a housekeeper, even if she didn’t know how to remove mouse excrescence from a handkerchief.

  “Major Ripton-Jones! It is Mrs. Mont, your new housekeeper. Please open the door so we may become acquainted.”

  The string of muffled words coming from behind the door that her governess would have forbidden did not shock her. Anne had said them anyway for maximum shock value, as often as possible, and actually just a few minutes ago. Stepping back, she lifted her chin and awaited her employer’s displeasure at being torn from his inebriated slumber.

  The door was wrenched open by a towering scarecrow of a man, bearded, shaggy-haired, disreputably dressed, indubitably drunk.

  And one-armed. His dirty linen shirtsleeve hung empty, flapping a bit as he had listed toward the doorframe.

  He wasn’t old. Not old at all. There was a little gray in his beard—though that could very well be dust—but he could not have been much above thirty years old.

  “Good afternoon,” Anne had said briskly, masking her surprise and keeping her chin high. She was bound to get a crick in her neck if she had to address him for any length of time. “I believe Mi-uh, Mr. Ramsey from The London List sent word to you that I was coming.”

  He looked down at her, way down as he was so very tall, with blood-shot blue eyes. “You can’t be the housekeeper.”

  He did not slur a word, although his breath nearly knocked her over. She would light no matches anywhere near him or he’d go up like a Guy Fawkes effigy.

  “I can indeed, sir. I have a reference from Lady Pennington.” She pulled the forged letter from her reticule.