A Matter of Class

by Mary Balogh

  Reggie swallowed, only to find that there was not one drop of saliva in his mouth.

  There was no telling yet how Havercroft would react to the proposition his father was clearly determined to make, but this match was already halfway made.

  If the other half did not fall into place, he might find himself permanently estranged from his father. And Lady Annabelle Ashton might—no, would—find herself ruined beyond repair.

  Reggie licked his lips with a dry tongue and prepared to argue. For the moment, it was all he could do.

  ~~~

  Lady Annabelle Ashton, who was renowned for the rose-petal complexion that complemented her very blond hair so becomingly, was now of a complexion that matched her hair. She was as pale as a ghost.

  It did not matter that Thomas Till had been the perfect gentleman throughout their escapade, that she had not been alone with him for very long at all, and that for most of that time she had been inside the carriage, and he up on the box driving it. It did not matter that he had never touched more than her hand as he helped her in and out of the carriage and then into the inn where they had been imprudent enough to stop for refreshments as well as a change of horses. It did not matter that he was gone from her life now, never to be a part of it again—or that she did not even know where he was. It did not matter that from the moment she had been apprehended, she had guarded the state of her heart with silent, stubborn dignity.

  None of it mattered as far as society was concerned. She was ruined anyway.

  For she and Thomas had committed an unpardonable indiscretion. They had been seen leaving the Bomford ball together—at least, she had been seen leaving in the middle of the ball with no chaperon except her father’s handsome new coachman. And they had been seen by half the inhabitants of Berkeley Square and half the servants at Havercroft House there when they had stopped for her to pick up her portmanteau from her bedchamber. Thomas had actually carried it downstairs for her and out the front doors. They had been seen by all the ostlers and grooms and indoor servants and a large number of travelers and other customers at the busy, fashionable inn where they had chosen to stop on their journey north.

  And, of course, though Thomas had only touched her hand at the inn while leading her to a table for refreshments, one of those touches had been with his lips in an extravagantly courtly gesture for all to see.

  Wearing his coachman’s livery, no less.

  Annabelle was disgraced. Ruined. For all time. Forever and ever, amen. There was no hope for her, short of a miracle. Her confidence, which she had always possessed in no small measure, had been shaken to the core.

  She would dwindle into a shriveled old maid—though spinster was the word her father had used, avoiding the whole concept of maidenhood. She would spend the rest of her life in sequestered obscurity, unwanted and unlamented.

  Untouchable.

  No man would ever have her now.

  Just last week, half the gentlemen of the ton would gladly have had her—the ones who were single, anyway. She was reputed to be a rare beauty.

  That was what she had been. Past tense.

  Now the whole of the male world of ton would turn their backs on her if she should be foolish enough to appear before them. The female world would do worse. They would sweep from the room, their skirts held close to their persons lest they brush inadvertently against air that had also brushed against her, their noses all but scraping the ceiling as they went.

  She was a pariah.

  And she had brought it all on herself. She had stepped quite deliberately over the brink, confident that her life would unfold as she had planned it to unfold.

  Now she could only feel a wave of panic clutching her stomach. She could no longer direct the course of her life. For the present at least she was totally at the mercy of outside forces, most notably her father.

  It was the most wretched feeling she could possibly imagine.

  She was not going to be sent back to Oakridge Park, the country home in Wiltshire where she had been brought up, her father’s principal seat. Even there she might contaminate the neighbors, who so respected her father. Instead she was to be sent into the outer darkness of Meadow Hall close to the Scottish border, a minor property of her father’s, which did not in any way live up to its name. Or so she had heard. She had never been there to see for herself. But that was about to change. It was where she was destined to spend the rest of her mortal days.

  Barring a miracle.

  She no longer believed in plans, no matter how carefully made. She was afraid to believe. She had been a fool.

  Her mother was not going to be allowed to go with her, even though she had wept and pleaded and cajoled and even lost her temper—a rare occurrence that had filled Annabelle with a terrible guilt. Mama ought not to be made to suffer. But of course she was suffering.

  At this precise moment, Annabelle was still in London, where she had been enjoying the entertainments of the Season before dashing off with Thomas Till. Though enjoying was not quite the right word. How could she enjoy herself when the man she loved could not similarly enjoy the same events and she could see him only rarely and under very clandestine circumstances? And how could she enjoy herself when she had been given strict orders to encourage the attentions of a man she loathed simply because he was rich enough to pay off Papa’s debts in exchange for her hand in marriage?

  Her father had been diligently courting the Marquess of Illingsworth for her all Season and had been confident of success. The marquess was only fourteen years older than she and only half a head shorter and only half bald. And he was besotted with her. She had nothing whatsoever to complain of—at least that’s what Papa had always said whenever she had complained.

  She was shut up in her room, from which all books—except the Bible—and embroidery and painting and writing supplies had been ostentatiously removed lest she find some way of amusing herself and forgetting her plight. And the door had been locked from the outside so that she could be in no doubt that she was a prisoner at her father’s pleasure.

  She felt like the worst sort of criminal.

  Two days of incarceration had felt like two weeks or two months. Each hour had seemed a day long. Perhaps, Annabelle thought all too frequently, she had made the biggest mistake of her life when she fled with Thomas.

  And sometimes she thought there was no perhaps about it.

  The window of her bedchamber overlooked a small kitchen garden and a maze of stables and coach houses behind it. There was very little to look out upon and no way at all of knowing who—if anyone—rode into the square at the front of the house and maybe even stopped outside their door.

  Perhaps no one did.

  Perhaps no one ever would.

  The bottom threatened to fall out of her stomach. Oh, how she hated this helplessness. She had never been helpless. Quite the contrary.

  And then she heard the distant sound of the door knocker banging against the front door.

  It might be anyone, of course.

  Indeed, it almost undoubtedly was someone. Annabelle shocked herself by giggling aloud at the sad joke. She clapped one hand over her mouth.

  It was best not to hope. But how could one not hope? What else was there to live for?

  More than half an hour went by before the key scraped in the lock of her door and the door swung inward to reveal her father on the threshold, frowning sternly as usual, and her mother behind his right shoulder, smiling encouragement at her, tears in her eyes, her face pale and wan.

  Annabelle stood and clasped her hands at her waist.

  She felt slightly sick to the stomach. Guilt was a horrible feeling, and she was staring it in the face when she glanced at her mother. Apprehension was just as bad. What now? Was the carriage ready at the door to bear her off into outer darkness?

  “Well, miss,” her father said, stepping inside the room and seeming to half fill it with his tall, imposing figure. When he frowned, his great hooked nose made him look even more
like a bird of prey than usual.

  “You are to have better than you deserve.”

  Her mother nodded and dabbed at a spilled-over tear with one index finger.

  Annabelle said nothing.

  “I have been persuaded to lower my standards in order to restore at least a modicum of respectability to my family,” he said, “though it will be a long time before I will forgive you for forcing it upon me, Annabelle. My only consolation is that you will suffer more than your mother and I, and that you will deserve exactly what you get.”

  His lips stretched into a grimace that might have been intended as a smile. Not a smile of pleasure or amusement or affection, however.

  Gracious heaven, Annabelle thought, darting a glance at her mother, who was swiping at another tear, whatever did he mean? The Marquess of Illingsworth had not offered for her after all, had he? Had Papa never been close enough to him to smell his breath? Or to see his teeth? Had her bold bid for freedom really failed so utterly and so miserably? But Papa had lowered his standards?

  “I have just had a visit from Mason,” he said, clasping his hands at his back.

  Annabelle’s eyes widened. There was a sudden coldness in her head that threatened a fainting fit. It took a conscious physical effort to draw a breath into her lungs.

  “Mr. Mason?” she asked foolishly as though her father had spoken too quietly to be heard clearly.

  Mr. Mason was their neighbor at Oakridge. He was enormously wealthy and enormously… well, large. He was also, if her father was to be believed, enormously vulgar, uncouth, and any number of other unsavory, low things. In other words, he was not one of them. He was not a gentleman. He had made his fortune in coal and still had coal dust encrusted beneath his fingernails—according to Papa. And he had had the unmitigated gall to purchase the estate adjoining Papa’s when it was for sale many years ago. He had pulled down the old house and built an expensively vulgar mansion in its place and had set out to be amiable, to be accepted as an equal by no less a person than the Earl of Havercroft.

  He was an upstart—a dreadful thing to be if one’s family happened to have been of the nobility for countless generations back. Probably as far back as the Conquest.

  Mr. Mason had been Papa’s mortal enemy for as long as Annabelle could recall. She and Mama had not been allowed to acknowledge him or Mrs. Mason even when they were occasionally at church together. They had not been allowed even so much as to look at the Masons or to recognize that they existed. It would puff them up to unbearable proportions, Papa had always said, and encourage further impudence.

  Now Mr. Mason had come calling?

  “Did you admit him, Papa?” Annabelle asked.

  “I had him shown into Palmers office, not the visitors’ parlor,” he said. “But he would not state his business to anyone but me.”

  Mr. Palmer was Papa’s secretary.

  “I was obliged to see him,” her father said.

  Yes, of course he was. Mr. Mason was rich. And Papa was really quite frighteningly poor after losing all that money recently and spending so lavishly last summer.

  “He came to offer you marriage,” her father added.

  “Mr. Mason did?” she asked, her voice a distressed squeak.

  “Oh, Annabelle,” her mother said, speaking for the first time. “Mrs. Mason is still alive. It is Mr. Reginald Mason to whom you are to be married. Their son.”

  Annabelle went very still. If there was any more blood to drain out of her head, it did so at that moment. There was a slight ringing in her ears. The air in her nostrils felt cold. She clenched her hands, digging her fingernails painfully into her tingling palms, willing herself not to collapse in an insensible heap at their feet.

  “You think to marry me to Mr. Reginald Mason?” she asked, staring at her father.

  Because he was rich. Or his father was, anyway. There could be no other possible reason. Papa’s hatred of Mr. Mason was almost an obsession.

  Her father’s smile was grim.

  “A coalminer’s son,” he said. “Expensively educated but with coal dust clogging his veins. A wild young rogue, with a reputation for unbridled extravagance and vicious depravity. And a mother and father who are vulgarity personified. Mason’s one consuming ambition is to wiggle his way into the ranks of the beau monde. And while he has not been able to accomplish that goal on his own account even after thirty years or more of trying, now at last he has seen an opportunity for his son and has not hesitated to seize it. You may be ruined, Annabelle, but you are still the daughter of the Earl of Havercroft. You are still Lady Annabelle Ashton. You are still a prize worth having to someone of Mason’s ilk. And he is prepared to pay very dearly indeed for such a soiled trophy.”

  Annabelle gathered her aristocratic dignity about her and raised disdainful eyebrow’s—as well as her nose and her chin. She even managed a hollow laugh.

  “I hope,” she said, “you sent him on his way faster than he came, Papa.”

  Her mother sniffled.

  Her father fixed her with a stony stare.

  “What I did” he said, “was accept the offer. I had no choice. You took away my choices. Mason will be coming again tomorrow with his son for the offer to be formally made—and accepted. By you.”

  The ringing in Annabelle’s ears was turning fuzzy. “I’ll not do it,” she whispered. “I’ll not do it. You cannot make me. I—love Thomas.”

  Her father’s voice was like thunder.

  “You will never mention that name in this house again,” he bellowed. “But you are quite right about one thing. I cannot force you. I can. however, send you to Meadow Hall tomorrow and have you earn your keep as a chambermaid. I cannot afford your keep there, heaven help me, and pay a chambermaid. You surely cannot believe that I am rejoicing over this humiliation, Annabelle. To have young Mason as my son-in-law? To have Mason as your father-in-law? To be beholden to him for saving me from my difficulties and you from ruin? To know that my peers will forever laugh behind their hands at me? You will listen to young Mason’s proposal tomorrow—and you will accept it.”

  “Oh, Annabelle,” her mother said, taking a step toward her. “He is a handsome young man. And only twenty-five. I daresay he is just sowing his wild oats, as young men do. I daresay he will—”

  Her voice trailed off. Her husband had turned on her.

  “And how, Ellen,” he asked coldly, “do you know what young Mason looks like?”

  It was an absurd question. Young Mr. Mason had sat within feet of them at church every Sunday when both families were at home in the country. He always leered when Annabelle glanced his way or raised an ironical eyebrow or pursed his lips in a suggestion of a kiss. He was, as her mother had just said, very handsome.

  “I will not marry him,” Annabelle said quickly. “I do not care how young or handsome he is or how respectable he may become at some time in the future. And I do not care how* much his father is prepared to pay. I will not do it.”

  She could hear her voice shaking.

  “They are to come at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” the earl said. “You have until then to change your mind, Annabelle. The alternative is a life of drudgery at Meadow Hall, provided I do not lose it. If you do not like the idea of marrying young Mason, you have only yourself to blame that it has become not only a possibility but a necessity.”

  Yes, she did have only herself to blame, Annabelle admitted to herself as he gestured her mother out of the room, followed her without another word, and closed the door behind them. She had made the plan and she had set it in motion, and—well, and here she was. She was to marry Reginald Mason instead of the Marquess of Illingsworth, if her father had his way.

  From the frying pan into the fire.

  She sank down onto a stool that was conveniently at hand and lowered her forehead to her knees.

  It was Reginald Mason instead of the Marquess of Illingsworth or her father’s utter ruin.

  Gracious heaven, it might have been anyone calling at
the house an hour ago. It might even have been the marquess calling to forgive her and make her an offer after all. Instead it had been Mr. Mason, come to purchase her for his son.

  2

  Seventeen Years Ago

  There were always strict rules.

  The child never doubted that she was loved even though her parents were often away in London for the Season or at a house party on the country estate of one of their numerous friends. She knew they loved her anyway, as did her elderly nurse, who had been Mama’s nurse once upon a time in the dim distant past. She was a happy, secure child.

  But of course there were rules, all of which were for her own good and intended to keep her from harm. She must never wander alone farther from the house than the kitchen gardens behind it, for example, or the parterre gardens before it. That particular rule was not terribly irksome since she could occupy herself smelling the flowers or talking to the gardeners or skipping along the graveled walks of the parterres or pretending she was in a maze and hopelessly lost and being stalked by a lion or a bear.

  It was a somewhat irksome rule, though, for she was an inquisitive as well as an imaginative child, and she often found herself standing still among the flowers or on a graveled walk wondering what lay beyond her little world apart from the driveway that led into the village. She really did not know the answer since Mama did not enjoy the outdoors—at least, not to take exercise in—and Nurse had elderly legs that no longer worked well enough to allow her to go exploring.

  Nurse also had an elderly tendency to nod off during the afternoons and to stay nodded off for a good, long time. The child had timed her once, watching the big hand on the clock in the nursery. It moved once completely around the face and almost halfway around again before Nurse awoke with a start and a snort and remarked that she must have dozed off for a moment.