by Liz Carlyle
“Bentley,” she whispered. “Do you really think I’m beautiful? Desirable? Do you desire me…?”
She was doing this, he tried to remind himself, because she’d been hurt. Young women were like that. He’d seen it—and steered clear of it—often enough. Older women, the kind he always sought out, were wise enough to know that there was always another lover just around the corner who would soothe the sting of their wounded pride.
She pressed her body against his again.
“Sweetheart, don’t,” he warned. “Don’t do this. Don’t ever slip off into the dark with a man like me.”
She looked at him, half innocent, half seductress. “Don’t you want me?”
“Desperately.” Somehow he managed to give her a brotherly peck on the tip of her nose. “Madly. In the worst possible way. Now disappoint me, Freddie. Go up to bed. Alone.”
Praise for Liz Carlyle
No True Gentleman
“One of the year’s best historical romances.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Carlyle neatly balances passion and danger in this sizzling, sensual historical that should tempt fans of Amanda Quick and Mary Balogh.”
—Booklist
A Woman of Virtue
“Sensual and spellbinding…. Liz Carlyle weaves passion and intrigue with a master’s touch.”
—New York Times bestselling author Karen Robards
“With A Woman of Virtue, Liz Carlyle shows she deserves fan support from mystery aficionados as well as romance lovers.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“A Woman of Virtue is a beautifully written book…. I was mesmerized from the first page to the last.”
—The Old Book Barn Gazette
“I can’t recommend this author’s books highly enough; they are among my all-time favorites.”
—Romance Reviews Today
“The ever-talented Liz Carlyle brings us a romance that will appeal to amateur sleuth aficionados with its edge-of-the-seat suspense and a love story that merges seamlessly.”
—Romantic Times
A Woman Scorned
“Carlyle delivers great suspense and…sensual scenes.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fabulous! Regency-based novels could not be in better hands than those of Ms. Carlyle.”
—Affaire de Coeur
“A complex and beautifully written story.”
—Rendezvous
My False Heart
“My False Heart is a treat,romance readers will want to read this one and remember her name!”
—New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard
“My False Heart is a spellbinding tale of betrayal,intrigue, and the healing power of love, from one of tomorrow’s romance superstars.”
—America Online Romance Fiction Forum
Books by Liz Carlyle
No True Gentleman
A Woman of Virtue
Beauty Like the Night
A Woman Scorned
My False Heart
The Devil You Know
Tea for Two (anthology with Cathy Maxwell)
Available from Pocket Books
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
A Pocket Star Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Copyright © 2003 by S. T. Woodhouse
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-4638-9
ISBN-10: 0-7434-4638-0
POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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To my friend and editor,
Lauren McKenna
Thank you for your undying support and boundless enthusiasm.
Prologue
In which we Commence our Tale of Woe.
Do you believe in universal truths? Admonitions, beliefs, or even morality tales passed down through families like so much well-worn linen? The Bard once said that all the world’s a stage and we mortals merely players. If you subscribe to that, as many amongst us do, then the misbegotten life of Randolph Bentham Rutledge could have been termed a comedy to some and a tragedy to others, depending upon one’s point of view.
To his partners in debauchery, it was a comedy, so long as the money held out. To his wife, his children, and his debtors, it was a tragedy, and one with far too many curtain calls. But the gentleman himself (and one must use this term loosely) once laughingly declared that his life was really just one great farce, and it was appropriately titled The Rake’s Progress—or would have been, had the title not been snatched up by some proselytizing cartoonist who was most likely fated to sink into the swamp of literary obscurity.
The family saga really began long ago, some eighty years prior to the arrival of William the Conqueror, when an ambitious peasant from the market town of Chipping Campden heaped his worldly goods onto a creaky old ox-cart and set out on a journey deep into the countryside. Posterity knows not the reason for this adventure, taken as it was during a time when most Saxon peasants would live cradle to coffin in one place. But we know he did not go far—just twenty miles south as the crow flies—and yet the distance was to alter his family’s fortunes forever.
The traveler was called John of Campden. And legend says that when he reached the verdant valley of the River Coln, he paused on a swath of bottomland which rolled out to meet the wolds like a lush green carpet. There he unharnessed his ox, unloaded his cart, and sank the first of many spades deep into the fertile earth. And thus began his family’s climb toward that lofty stratum of blue-blooded rural gentry.
How a simple Saxon came by such a fine property, whether by honest labor, clever deceit, or perhaps even a shrewd marriage, we know not. But throughout the many centuries which followed, his descendants labored hard and long to build sturdy cottages, tidy villages, and powerful wool churches, so called because their every keystone and candlestick had been paid for by that common currency of the Cotswolds. Sheep.
Six centuries later—long after the Campdens had somehow lost a p and become the Camdens—yet another John came along with yet another grand plan. He used his wool money to build a fine manor house on the very site where legend held that his ancestor had stuck his first fateful spade into the earth. This house was built, as were all such houses of its time and place, of butter-brown stone, and it was so symmetrical, so exquisite, and so grandly and perfectly proportioned that the villagers stood in awe, as well they should have done. With its crenellated bays and steep, soaring roofs, and the parish church of St. Michael the Archangel standing quite literally in its shadow, Chalcote Court evoked the wealth, power, and influence which this ambitious family had so assiduously acquired.
But the tides of fortune and the wheels of history were destined to turn against the Camden family. When, almost two centuries later, another John Camden was born at Chalcote, he unwittingly brought with him a time of great uncertainty. Though there was no want of money, years of pox, plague, and civil unrest had somehow ripped entire branches from the family tree. And this last John Camden was an ill-fated fellow who had spent four decades, and almost as many wives, striving to beget an heir for a dying dynasty, until at last he gave himself a heart seizure in
the midst of one last thrust of the family sword.
He awoke some two days later in his vast, barrel-ceilinged bedchamber to see his twin daughters, Alice on the right and Agnes on the left, bent like sorrowful angels over what John Camden knew was to be his deathbed. The mattress was so narrow, and his daughters’ hair so soft and fluffy, that their heads quite literally brushed one another. Weak and disoriented, the old man fancied they were smothering him and waved them away. Being biddable girls, they leapt back at once. But, as luck would have it, Alice’s comb caught in Agnes’s hair, and they had a devil of a time getting themselves disentangled.
Watching the tussle in mute amazement, the old man suddenly decided it was a sign from God. With what strength his maker had left him, John Camden sent to Oxford for his solicitor. He drew a complicated will, one which tore a gaping wound down the middle of his heritage. The property which his family had held so proudly and so wholly for eight centuries was to be slashed in two. Alice, the elder by a quarter-hour, was to have the piece on which Chalcote stood. The more distant portion was to go to Agnes, a young woman more prudent than pleasant.
John Camden expressed but one dying wish: that his daughters’ progeny intermarry and thus reunite—or reentangle, if you will—the family estate. But, more importantly, none of the land was ever to leave the family’s possession. For if it did, he vowed his soul would never rest.
Alice moved quickly. During the very first week of her very first season, she caught the eye of a fellow who was thought by all who knew him to be the most attractive, and the most profligate, gentleman in all of England. Alice was rich, silly, and madly in love, and her wedding bells had scarce stopped ringing before Randolph Rutledge began laying waste to eight hundred years’ hard work.
By the time this miserable mistake of a marriage had produced three children, there was very little estate left to reunite, and John Camden’s ghost was nowhere to be seen. As for Agnes, she had moved on with her life, marrying well and building what amounted to a fully fortified castle on her half of the land. But, still vexed over Alice’s having got the famous family seat, Agnes barely acknowledged her disreputable brother-in-law’s existence—or her sister’s suffering.
“Well, we cannot very well sell the blasted thing,” said Randolph to his wife one rainy afternoon as he squinted through the parlor window into Chalcote’s forecourt. “No one with the sense God gave a goose would wish to live in this wet and dreary place.”
Alice let her head fall weakly against the back of her brocade divan. “But it is spring, Randolph,” she replied as she modestly shifted her nursing infant beneath his blanket. “Cam says one must be grateful for spring rain. Moreover, we cannot sell Chalcote, or even mortgage it, for Papa tied it all up. You knew when we married that all would go to Cam someday.”
“Oh, stop sniveling about someday, Alice,” said Randolph bitterly, flinging himself into a leather armchair. “Your perfect little prince shall have it all soon enough, I’ll wager, for if I cannot lay hands on some blunt soon, I’m apt to expire of boredom.”
Alice looked at him through weary eyes. “You might spend some time with Cam or Catherine,” she suggested, her gaze going to their children who were bent over a backgammon table in a distant corner. The young man sat with his long, booted legs stretched out beneath the table, while the girl dangled her feet above them. On the floor beside them sat one of a dozen copper pots. Caught up in the game, the children seemed oblivious to the annoying plop! plop! plop! of the leaky roof above their heads.
Randolph snorted, then turned on his wife. “M’dear, I would not think of interfering,” he snarled. “That dull yeoman farmer over there is all your doing. And I pray to God he’s the savior you think him, for this miserable excuse of an estate direly needs salvation. As to the chit, I reckon she’s a taking little thing, but…”
But she is just a girl.
This last disparagement hung unspoken. Alice Rutledge sighed again and, unable to resist the overwhelming fatigue which had plagued her since the birth, let her eyes drop shut. She must have dozed for a time—she often did so—and awakened to the sound of the babe’s flailing and squalling. Her breasts, it seemed, were always too soon emptied, and the child was forever wailing his frustration.
“Greedy little devil,” she heard Randolph say with a chortle. “Never enough, eh, my boy? Women are ever like that.”
Alice forced open her eyes. Her husband was bent low over her divan, his hands reaching out for the child. She had not the strength to refuse him, and so, as she often did, Alice simply let the babe be pulled from her grasp. Arms waving eagerly, the child went to his father with a happy gurgle.
In short order, Randolph had soothed the babe by bouncing him enthusiastically on one knee whilst singing a coarse tavern ditty. Alice forced her eyes open and thrust out her hands to snatch back the child. “Stop it, Randolph!” she demanded. “That is excessively vulgar. I shan’t have him exposed to your disgusting habits.”
Still bouncing the happy child on his knee, Randolph shot her a sour, quelling look. “Oh, shut up, Alice,” he said. “This one is mine, do you hear? The choirboy and the chit you’ve already ruined, but this one—ha! Just look at his eyes! Look at that grin! By God, this one has my spirit and my appetites.”
“I pray not,” snapped Alice.
Randolph threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Alice, you may as well surrender him gracefully. You’ve had your way with the other two, but this chubby little devil has my name and my nature, and I shall do with him just as I please.” And then, quite deliberately, he let his eyes run over her. “Besides, m’dear,” he added, a little too cheerfully, “I don’t think you’ve the strength to stop me.”
Alice let her hands drop away empty. Empty like the whole of her life. The only good which had come of it was her children, Camden, Catherine, and the baby. And Randolph was right. Damn him to hell, but he was right. Her days on this earth were numbered, and she knew it with a fearful certainty. And then what? Dear God, then what?
In Cam she had instilled a rigid self-discipline which would ensure that he would always do the right thing. And Catherine’s sweet nature and simple beauty would eventually win her a good husband, one who would take her away from all this. But the baby, her sweet little Bentley, what would become of him when she was gone? The grief and fear swallowed her up again, and Alice’s eternal wellspring of tears burst forth.
Chapter One
In which Mrs. Weyden’s warnings go Unheeded.
“Tout vient à celui qui sait attendre,” muttered Frederica d’Avillez. Her tone made it sound more like a curse than a proverb. It was, she supposed, just a remnant of some long-ago French lesson which now kept repeating itself over and over in her head until it became maddening, rather like that big green and yellow bird she’d once seen swinging on a wire in a Piccadilly shop window. All comes to him who knows how to wait. What a bloody stupid saying. And an egregious lie, too.
At the stable door, she stared grimly into the night for a long, uncertain moment, then forced back her shoulders and marched off in the direction of the terraced gardens. As she paced, Frederica tapped her crop impatiently against her thigh, the muted sting somehow keeping her tears at bay, much as her silly proverb had done for the last several months. The words had given her hope during a miserable come-out season in London. And they had sustained her at home here in Essex while she anxiously awaited Johnny’s return from his grand tour.
Well, much good her patience had done her! She should have gone to Scotland with Zoë and the little ones. Instead, she was stuck here with Aunt Winnie and the menfolk, and she and Johnny were done for. Ruthlessly, Frederica shoved a bough of hemlock from her face and pushed on through the shimmering moonlight, her riding boots digging hard into the gravel as she hit the garden path. Here, at the bottom terrace, the gardens were allowed to grow thick and natural. High above in the distance, someone had left a lantern burning by the back door. Frederica should have found it welcomin
g, but she didn’t.
The night was cool but not damp, the air thick with the scent of freshly turned earth. She drew in another steadying breath, and a sudden sense of despair almost overwhelmed her. It drew at her lungs and wracked her shoulders, but she fought it down and picked up her stride. Anger was a better emotion. And she was angry. Spitefully so. The fierce desire to hurt someone was almost frightening. She had come home from London for no good reason. She had been mistaken. Despite all his whispered pleas and smoldering glances, Johnny Ellows, it seemed, had not meant to marry her at all.
Abruptly, she jerked to a halt, scarcely seeing the next flight of steps which loomed up in the moonlight ahead. How could she have been so mistaken? How could she have been so stupid?
Because she was a silly little girl.
Well, the truth hurt, did it not? Things were no different here at home than they had been in London. The surroundings were just more familiar. Society, and apparently even the rural gentry, could always find cause to look down on her. Suddenly, Frederica felt as inadequate in Essex as she had in town. At that thought, something inside her snapped. As if it possessed a will of its own, Frederica’s riding crop struck a whacking good blow at the next swag of evergreen, sending snippets of foliage spinning into the night. Unleashing her rage felt oddly satisfying. She was tired of being so perfect, so placid, so bloody damned…restrained. So, again and again, she thrashed at the greenery which verged on the paths and steps, all the while making her way briskly up the terraces.
“He loves me not!” she hissed, striking a blow at the juniper on her left. “Not! And not! And not!” A row of bare-branched forsythia fell victim, dry twigs splintering hither and yon. Stems of yew twirled wildly off into the darkness. The sharp tang of evergreen surrounded her, and still she pushed on, venting her wrath on whatever shrub the moonlight spilt over. The hot press of tears threatened. Oh, Johnny! She had thought…he had said…
