She stopped pacing and hugged herself round the middle, head bowed. He got to his feet, turned her round and laid his hands on her shoulders.
‘Will it be such a terrible fate, Lady Jayne?’ he asked her gently. ‘Don’t you think you could get used to being my wife? Could you not—’ he squeezed her shoulders ‘—make the best of it?’
It would not be the least bit terrible being married to him—if only he did not think it was a situation he had to get used to. Her lower lip began to tremble. She caught it between her teeth.
He made a strangled sound in his throat, before grating, ‘Now, now, don’t cry.’
He put his arms right round her awkwardly and she sagged against him in despair. It was a pathetic parody of the kind of embrace a man ought to give the woman to whom he had just become betrothed.
‘We have come to know each other pretty well over these past few weeks,’ he said in such a reasonable tone it made her want to scream with frustration. ‘I am sure we will be able to rub along tolerably well together, if only we put our minds to it.’
Rub along tolerably well? Oh, it hurt so much to hear his opinion of what their marriage would be like that it was actually growing hard to breathe.
She kept her face buried in the front of his waistcoat, since she could not bear to see the look of stoicism that must be on his face.
‘I know you are a brave girl,’ he said, running his hand up and down her spine in a soothing gesture. ‘I know you have experienced a bitter disappointment quite recently, and that it is too soon to talk of anything more than friendship between us. But we have become quite good friends over the past few weeks, have we not? We have learned that we can trust one another. At least I trust you, Lady Jayne. I know that once we are married you will stay true to your vows. And I promise you I will be faithful to mine.’
It was no consolation at all to hear him declare that he intended to stay faithful to his vows. It was the kind of thing an honourable man did. Stuck to vows made in church.
But she wanted him to love her so much he would not dream of looking at another woman.
‘We can make it work, this marriage of ours. I am sure we can. In fact, if you tell me what you want, I swear I will do all in my power to give it to you. What do you want from marriage?’
‘Me?’ She blinked up at him wide-eyed. Nobody had ever asked her what she wanted from marriage. Only insisted that it was her duty to marry well.
No wonder she couldn’t help loving him.
‘When Grandpapa sent me to Town to find a husband, I was so determined to thwart him that I never thought about what might actually tempt me into taking such a step. Though I have always known,’ she said on a surge of certainty, ‘what I don’t want. And that is to end up living in a state of open warfare, like my parents did.’
He frowned. ‘I have heard that your father was not the most pleasant of fellows.’
‘He was perfectly beastly to Mama. He despised her for her inability to give him the heir he felt she owed him. She became dreadfully ill, with all the miscarriages she had. As long as I can remember she was practically an invalid. But she refused to lie down and die, and leave him free to marry again. I’m sure it was only her hatred of him that kept her going. For she did not outlive him by more than a few weeks.’
‘That is appalling.’ God, what she must have suffered as a child. ‘I thought my own parents’ marriage had been a disaster, but that…’
‘Your parents’ marriage was unhappy?’
‘It was a pale imitation of your own parents’, in some ways. My father was an incorrigible womanizer and my mother soon grew to despise him. And, then… Well, because he adored my older brother, his firstborn and heir, she despised him, too. But for some reason she took a shine to my baby brother. Which made my father, in his turn, despise Charlie. So it wasn’t just the two of them involved in the battles, but the entire family.’
She noted he’d left himself out of the picture, and asked in a soft voice, ‘Which of them either loved or despised you, Richard?’
‘Me? Oh, neither of them bothered about me in the least,’ he informed her, in a matter-of-fact tone that she could tell concealed a world of hurt.
For she remembered him saying that nobody had come to his aid when he’d been so ill—and the look on his face when he’d told her about all those letters that had gone unanswered while he lay hovering between life and death.
‘They were quite wrong to treat you so,’ she said indignantly.
‘They were quite wrong to make my other brothers pawns in their ongoing war, as well. But never mind them. One thing I can certainly promise you. We won’t end up like any of our parents. I…I like you too much to ever treat you with the disrespect my father showed my mother. In fact, I…’ He took a deep breath.
Was now the time to tell her he loved her?
He hesitated. She’d said that having someone say the words gave them a kind of power over you. A kind of power she clearly didn’t like.
And she’d already had one man tell her he loved her and prove false.
Dammit, if he’d only paved the way for such a declaration he might have stood some chance she would believe him. But as things stood… He would hate doing anything that might make her look upon him with suspicion, instead of the trust that was blazing from her eyes right now. Besides, every time he’d tried to start telling her how he felt he’d made a complete mull of it. Making plans and barking orders at troops were a far cry from uttering words of love. Especially when he was so unfamiliar with the emotion. When it made him never sure whether he was on his head or his heels.
He shook his head. He might have decided he was going to tell her how he felt today, but with everything that had happened since he’d made that decision he had a very strong suspicion that it might be counterproductive.
‘I admire you very much,’ he finished.
That was a start. She might not believe him if he blurted out some clumsy words that would, knowing him, be open to misinterpretation anyway. But if he demonstrated by the way he treated her, by the care he took of her, that she meant the world to him… After all, actions spoke louder than words. This building in which they stood was testimony to that. His grandfather had shown the wife his parents had chosen for him that he loved her by building this place just to keep the rain off her while she watched the progress of the canal being dug through the valley.
Since they were going to be married he had a lifetime to convince her of his utter sincerity by the way he pampered and cosseted her. His spirits lifted.
‘Now, you say you had not thought about what you wanted from marriage. But—forgive me if you find this an insensitive question—you would have married Lieutenant Kendell if you had been able to. So what was it about him that made you willing to flout all the rules?’
She blushed and lowered her head. When she looked back on her behaviour with regard to Harry it made her cringe. She had not loved him at all! Nor wanted to marry him—not once he had kissed her. But it would be too humiliating to admit that.
Though she did want to be able to tell Richard the whole truth one day. Perhaps after they’d been married a few months, and she’d had a chance to prove she wasn’t the silly girl she’d shown herself to be in all their dealings thus far.
‘You have to understand what my life has been like.’ For today, it would have to be enough to explain some of the steps that had led her into the tangle with Harry. ‘When I was a little girl, you
see, nobody much cared what I did as long as I stayed out of the way. So I ended up left in the care of a groom, mostly, haring about all over the estates. But then my parents died, and Grandpapa took me to Darvill Park. He was so shocked by my uncouth ways that he spent the next few years beating them all out of me.’
‘He beat you?’
‘No. Not physically. But I felt…trampled on. I was watched every moment of the day. And drilled relentlessly. And I was never allowed to mix with anyone he had not first approved. Eventually, after years and years of imprisonment on the estate, he thought he had succeeded in making me behave like a proper young lady, and allowed me to go to a few local assemblies. Well, he could hardly not! Not when other girls my age, from good families in the area, were going to them. It would have looked like failure. And Grandpapa never fails!
‘Anyway, Harry came and asked me to dance without first getting approval from my chaperone. He asked me if I wanted to. He looked so dashing in his uniform. I felt so daring when I said yes without checking first. And when Grandpapa forbade me to see him again, I…dug my heels in. You see, no matter how hard I tried, I never managed to please him. So I decided to stop trying.’
Richard flinched. God, he knew exactly what that felt like! The letters he’d written home when he’d first gone away to school that nobody had ever replied to. The creeping realisation that nobody cared where he was so long as he wasn’t underfoot.
‘I just could not stand it any more. The confinement. The rules and restrictions. I just had to make a stand over Harry. Do you see?’
‘Only too well.’
‘And then when Harry followed me to London I was completely overwhelmed by what I thought was his devotion. Nobody had cared so much for me before. Not my parents. Not my grandfather, who disapproved of everything about me. And I had never had any friends that I had chosen myself. But there was Harry, telling me he would risk everything to be with me, and I…I lost my head.’
Her shoulders slumped. ‘Of course, it turned out not to be me he wanted at all, but only my money. I do not know why I did not see that from the start.’
Richard hugged her. No wonder she had fallen prey so easily to a glib, personable fortune-hunter. Nobody else had ever shown her a scrap of affection. She had no means of telling the genuine from the counterfeit. He had almost made the same kind of mistake with Milly—although, having been an officer, he had a sight more experience of spotting a lie when it was told him.
‘My poor darling,’ he said.
He was glad now that he had not spoken words to her that had been used to deceive her in the past. It would be better to show her what real love was all about. Day by day, month by month, year by year, he would love her so wholeheartedly that it would wipe away all the years of hurt and neglect she had endured thus far. Seeing to her welfare, ensuring her happiness, would be his prime objective.
To his last dying breath.
Chapter Fifteen
When she got back to the house, Lady Jayne found a very tense-looking Lady Penrose waiting for her in her rooms. With some very surprising news.
‘My dear, your grandfather has arrived.’
‘How did he know that—?’
‘Oh, he did not know anything about last night—how could he? No, he came because he was angry to find, when he returned to Darvill Park, that you were not in London, waiting for him as instructed. He was quite furious when he got here…’
Her heart sank. ‘And now, of course, he must be even more angry…’
‘No! Far from it.’ Lady Penrose’s lips twitched with wry amusement. ‘The news that you are betrothed went a long way to appeasing him.’
‘Oh. Of course.’ For as long as he’d had control of her life he had been training her to become a fitting wife for a man of high station. Lord Ledbury was exactly the kind of man of whom he would approve. Catching him would atone for any number of other transgressions. ‘Does he know…everything?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. That buffoon Lord Lavenham gave him the scurrilous version of events.’
‘And how did he take it?’
Lady Penrose sobered. ‘You will find out for yourself when you see him. He is waiting for you in Lord Lavenham’s study.’
Knowing that his temper would only increase the longer she kept him waiting, she hastily changed from her mud-spattered riding habit into a gown more becoming for a meeting with her formidable guardian.
Her heart was hammering as she made her way down the stairs, even though Lady Penrose was at her back, providing much welcome support.
She hesitated outside the door, making sure her emotional armour was in place before facing him. But when she went in the first person she saw was Richard. She did not know how he had managed to get there before her, but she was incredibly grateful that, for the first time in her life, she was not going to have to face her grandfather’s wrath alone.
Part of her wanted to run straight to his side. But she detested revealing any form of weakness to her grandfather. So she stiffened her spine and turned towards the chair upon which Lord Caxton was sitting. She dipped a curtsy and then, when he motioned her to approach, bent to bestow a dutiful kiss, as though she had nothing whatsoever to fear.
At the last moment he raised his hand to his face, as if he was suddenly recalling something. And that was when she noticed he had three nasty-looking gashes on his face. It looked like something, perhaps a cat, had raked its claws across his skin.
He turned his other cheek for her to kiss, and then, when she would have straightened up, grasped her hand in his. ‘Do you want to marry this young man? Will he be able to make you happy?’ he asked.
When she could not hide her astonishment that his first words were not a reproof, his expression turned wry.
‘What? Has it never occurred to you that your happiness is of great importance to me? It is all I have ever wanted for you.’ He grimaced. ‘All I ever wanted for all my girls. I dare say you think I have treated you harshly in the past. But you were such a wild little creature when you came to me. I thought my primary duty was to tame you. For there is a streak of rebelliousness in you to which, alas, the Vickery women seem particularly prone.’
Tears sprang to his eyes as he said in a quavering voice, ‘I was afraid that if I did not subdue it you would end up just like your aunt. And I could not have borne to lose you to some adventurer, as I lost her.’
She had never seen him looking so emotional. She had always thought him such a rigid disciplinarian. Yet all the time he had been concealing a deep abiding fear that she would turn out like her Aunt Aurora.
Her aunt’s elopement and subsequent estrangement had clearly cut him much deeper than he had ever let anyone suspect. She had always thought he refused to let her name be spoken because he was angry with her. But that was not the case at all. It was because it hurt too much.
Suddenly she understood him as she had never done before. Because he was acting in exactly the way she would have behaved. People accused her of being cold, because she could fix her expression into a mask that concealed what she was feeling. The more she hurt, the colder she looked. They had said she got that trait from her father. But now she saw how absurd it was for them to say that. He had never bothered to conceal his feelings. Particularly not the contempt he’d felt for her, nor the hatred he had borne for her mother. His pride had been of the kind that made him impervious to what anyone thought of him.
Her pride was the pride of the Vicke
rys, which made it an absolute necessity never to let anyone suspect they might have wounded her. She was a Vickery through and through, she realized on a wave of relief. Not a Chilcott after all.
For the very first time she felt a real connection with this proud old aristocrat sitting before her. And the minute she understood that she was far more like her grandfather than she’d ever suspected, she saw what her refusal to welcome his long-lost granddaughter back into the family must have done to him.
‘I am so sorry I did not obey your summons to meet my cousin, Lady Bowdon. I hope she was not offended.’
Or perhaps hurt. Oh, how ashamed she was of flouncing off in completely the opposite direction from where he’d ordered her, without considering what effect it would have on her poor cousin. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She might at least have written to Lady Bowdon. But she’d been so angry it just hadn’t occurred to her.
To her surprise, instead of following up her apology with a stinging rebuke, as was his wont, Lord Caxton smiled, a soft faraway look in his eyes.
‘We can make all right with an invitation to your wedding now. I cannot begin to express my relief that you have found a man of substance to marry. A man who will be able to care for you when I am gone.’
She caught a quick, searching look in his eyes which prompted her to say, ‘Yes, indeed he will.’ For had not Richard promised as much? He would do his best, he had told her, to make sure they never became enemies—which, considering the way this betrothal had come about, was much more than she deserved.
Her eyes flew to Richard’s. He was staring into a glass of what looked suspiciously like brandy with a wooden countenance.
‘You will be married from Darvill Park, of course,’ said Lord Caxton. ‘Lady Bowdon and her husband will come to stay beforehand, which will give us all time to get to know one another before the ceremony.’
An Escapade and an Engagement Page 23
