A Matter of Class

by Mary Balogh

  “One would hope,” the earl said, “you are not suggesting that I walk gladly into Mason arms.”

  Reggie smiled at the ludicrous image the words created in his mind. He sat down on the chair beside the earl’s.

  “Lady Annabelle will be included,” he said, “as soon as she is married to me. Oh, even before then. She is being included now. She will be accepted and loved wholeheartedly by a large group of generous people. She will have a warm and affectionate new family to add to her own.”

  “That,” Havercroft said with heavy scorn, “will be of huge benefit to her.”

  “Unconditional acceptance and affection are always a benefit,” Reggie said. “You must not worry that she will be unhappy. I do not believe she will be.”

  “I wish her joy in her new status in life,” Havercroft said.

  It was very difficult to like the man, Reggie thought, but he was Lady Annabelle Ashton’s father.

  “Will you come down to the library for a few minutes?” he asked, getting to his feet again. “It is quieter down there.”

  The noise in the drawing room was deafening as everyone tried to talk above everyone else, and almost everything that was said was deemed funny enough to draw great bellows and trills of laughter.

  It was a typical family reunion.

  Lady Annabelle was talking with Uncle Wilfred, who was as deaf as a post but in fine form. He must have just been dipping into his old stock of stories. She was laughing and dabbing a handkerchief to the corners of her eyes.

  Havercroft got to his feet without a word and followed Reggie from the room. The poor man must wish it were possible to make his escape entirely and slip from the house when no one was looking.

  Neither of them sat down in the library. Havercroft went to stand before the empty fireplace, a favorite spot with him in any room, it seemed, while Reggie crossed the room to look out the window onto the square beyond.

  “It is altogether possible,” he said, “that Lady Annabelle will be happy as a member of my broader family. They are not gentlefolk, but then neither was the coach man with whom she ran off a little while ago. Yet she preferred him to the Marquess of Illingsworth.”

  “I suppose,” Havercroft said, “you will be throwing that indiscretion in her teeth for the rest of her life, Mason. Only be thankful that you got what you wanted by hovering like a vulture at my door—a titled wife of the aristocracy.”

  Reggie turned to face him.

  “It is, admittedly,” he said, “what my father has always wanted. He always wanted to make a gentleman of me. He wanted me to consolidate what I acquired through education by marrying into the gentry class or higher. As far as I was concerned, I always hoped that when the time came eventually to think of marriage, I would be free to choose someone for whom I could care for a lifetime, someone who would care equally for me. Regardless of social class.”

  The earl’s lip curled.

  “And yet,” he said, “you were very ready to snap up Annabelle when she became available rather than lose everything your father has always lavished upon you.”

  “I grew up in a close, loving family,” Reggie said. “Both the inner circle of my parents and the larger circle of their families. I could not accept anything less for myself. This marriage between Lady Annabelle and myself has been arranged by our fathers for reasons of their own, and circumstances have forced us to accept it. But that does not mean we have to live in bitter hostility for the rest of our days. I am determined to work at cultivating an affection for your daughter, and I am not without hope that she will do the like for me. I am pleased by the fact that she has chosen to mingle with my family in the drawing room instead of sitting apart as my mother thought the three of you might wish to do.”

  Havercroft regarded him with pursed lips and cold eyes. He seemed to have nothing to say, however.

  “I am taking the liberty of guessing,” Reggie said, “that your daughter is dear to you. She must have hurt you immeasurably when she ran off with your coachman rather than be forced into marriage with Illingsworth. And I believe it must have hurt you to feel obliged to marry her to me. I am here to tell you, sir, that you need feel no more guilt over that. It is done, and we will make the best of it, Lady Annabelle and I. All things that happen in life, my grandmother once told me—all things—happen for a purpose. We will make the best of this marriage.”

  Havercroft stared at him.

  “The only grandchildren I can ever expect,” he said, “will bear the name of Mason. They will be his grandchildren too.”

  “Yes,” Reggie said.

  “And you have the gall to tell me that all things happen for a purpose?”

  “Yes,” Reggie said again.

  “I left a perfectly good cup of tea on the table beside my chair upstairs,” Havercroft said and strode off in the direction of the library door.

  Reggie followed him back upstairs. He had tried. It was all he could do at this juncture.

  His betrothed was talking with his mother and two of his aunts. She had color in her cheeks this afternoon. There was animation in her face. And his mother had been right about her pink muslin dress. She looked vividly lovely. He crossed the room toward her, winding his way in and out of groups of relatives and friends.

  “… make a list as soon as I go home,” she was saying, “and memorize it so that by my wedding day I will remember all your names.”

  “But not necessarily the faces that go with them,” Aunt Ada said with a deadpan expression.

  Lady Annabelle groaned and the others laughed.

  Reggie cupped her elbow in one hand, and she looked at him, startled. She had not seen him approach.

  “Have you had enough to eat?” he asked.

  “She has not had anything, Reginald,” Aunt Edith told him. “We have been keeping her too busy talking. And I must say, while I can get a word in edgewise, that you are a very fortunate young man indeed.”

  “I know it, Aunt Edith,” he said, setting his free hand over his heart. “But right now I am going to escort my good fortune over to the tea tray so that she can eat and not fade quite away before I can even claim her as my wife.”

  “Go with him, my dear,” his mother said, patting her arm. “You can do with more fat on your bones.”

  Reggie bent his head to hers when they reached the tea tray, which no one was attending, presumably because all the guests had eaten and drunk their fill long ago.

  “I have been assuring your father,” he said, “that I intend to fall violently in love with you and live happily ever after with you.”

  “Have you indeed?” She looked haughtily at him.

  “And I suppose he fell on your neck and shed copious tears?”

  “Not quite,” he admitted. “And you have been making yourself agreeable to Masons and Cleggs and other assorted family members and friends?”

  “It is marginally more entertaining than sitting alone in a corner,” she said.

  “Is peace to be officially declared, then?” he asked. “It is probably time, is it not? Would you like one of these fairy cakes, or do they have too much cream to be eaten delicately? How about one of these currant cakes instead?”

  “Both, please,” she said and watched him while he placed them on a plate for her. “Peace does not necessarily mean total amity, only an end to the worst of hostilities. Yes, it may be declared. Cautiously. Everyone would be understandably skeptical if we were suddenly to fall passionately in love.”

  “Our mothers are happier than they were,” he said.

  “And your father,” she said. “But was he ever not happy?”

  “Before he heard of your plight and realized how he might use it to his advantage he was a mite annoyed with me,” he said. “I had a dashed lot of ill fortune at the tables and at the races, you know.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And you had to fill that room with boots and coats and other faradiddle.”

  “My valet would not enjoy hearing my lovingly starched neckc
loths lumped in with a whole host of other belongings as faradiddle,” he said.

  And then his eyes met hers, and he saw laughter in their depths. At the same moment she bit into the fairy cake and cream shot out of the sides, as he had known it would. He watched, fascinated, as she licked it off the corners of her mouth, leaning forward over her plate as she did so.

  Reggie felt an alarming rise in the already-warm temperature of the room, and a corresponding tightening in the area of his groin.

  To distract himself from lascivious thoughts, he looked down at her hand, which still held the fairy cake. He took it from her and set it on the plate, careful to hold it where there was only cake. And then, with totally brainless lack of forethought or memory of exactly where they were, he

  lifted her hand to his lips and licked the cream from the edge of her forefinger and sucked it off her thumb.

  He felt like a raging furnace.

  And cream had never tasted so delicious.

  “Oh.” She sounded breathless. And as if she were strangling.

  Reggie looked up into her face, and beyond her to a grinning cousin.

  He grinned back and took a napkin from the tray to dry her hand and wipe off the remains of the cream.

  “A stolen kiss on the balcony at our betrothal ball,” he said. “A little finger-sucking at your family tea. People might well conclude that I am a red-blooded male, Lady Annabelle.”

  “When in reality,” she said, “all you are is a man who does not know how to behave.”

  “Do I take it,” he asked her, “that you do not want to finish your cake? I did warn you. Indeed, I do believe our cook ought to be severely reprimanded for serving such unmanageable delights when we have company.”

  “Everyone has been remarking upon how delicious they are,” she said, taking up her plate again and biting into the remains of the cake.

  The cream oozed again, and again she licked it off her lips—looking steadily and defiantly into his eyes as she did so.

  Minx!

  “The weather has been a bit unsettled lately,” he said with cheerful politeness. “Will it settle eventually to sunshine or to rain, do you suppose?”

  8

  One Year Ago

  Reggie had not been home for more than three years. Not to his parents’ home, anyway. He had seen them several times in the meanwhile, though. They sometimes came to London when he was there, usually during the spring, when he enjoyed socializing with the friends he had made at school and university and with the sons and daughters of his parents’ friends, whom he had known all his life. And they often came to stay with him at Willows End, the home and estate that had been unofficially his since his twenty-first birthday.

  He liked being there. He loved the house, an old early-Georgian manor, and the park. And he liked pitching in with the work of the farm, getting his hands dirty with soil, acquiring an all-over sweat, pulling calves from distressed cows, shearing sheep. The farm was even turning a modest profit under his management.

  But he was back at home in Wiltshire at last. His mother had been rather poorly last winter. Although she was feeling much better by the time spring came, Reggie’s father had felt it unwise to take her to London during the spring or to Willows End during the summer. And so Reggie had come to see them in the early autumn, after the harvest was done.

  It was one of those weeks in October when one would have sworn it was still summer except that there was a different feel to the air and a different look to the sunlight, and the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn yellow.

  It was the middle of the afternoon on the third day of his visit, and he was strolling alone and aimlessly about the park, no particular destination in mind as he feasted his eyes on the landscape surrounding him and enjoyed the warmth. He ought to have come before now despite the fact that he had seen plenty of his parents in other places. This was where he had belonged all his life. It was where his roots were.

  Why had he always made excuses to himself not to come? He knew the reason, but his mind skirted about it as it always did. Besides, it was a stupid reason. One simply did not fall in love during the course of a single afternoon when one was twenty-one. In lust, yes, certainly. But not in love.

  It had merely been the attraction of the forbidden.

  His aimless steps had brought him, he could see, to that narrow stretch of the river he had always called the bridge. Or had his direction been aimless? Had he been making his way here all along? He ought not to cross over to the other side. It would be very embarrassing at his age to be caught and escorted off Oakridge land or, worse, hauled up before a magistrate for trespassing.

  He crossed anyway and strolled in the direction of the old oak tree. It was strange that they had always met there. Their meetings had not been numerous, though they had spanned many years. He would guess that the total number of times could almost be tallied on the fingers of his two hands with a few toes thrown in. But it had always been here. He had been eight the first time, twenty-one the last.

  And now again when he was twenty-four.

  He could scarcely believe the evidence of his own eyes. There she was, sitting on the grass beside the river, her knees drawn up to support an open book, her neck and face and the pages shaded by a straw-colored parasol.

  He could not even be sure that it was she since the parasol half hid her. But he knew it was. Who else could it be? Besides, there was something within him that felt it was she.

  She had not heard him. Neither had she seen him. He had approached the river from the opposite direction than usual, and there were not enough autumn leaves on the ground yet to crunch beneath his feet.

  He considered turning around and going back the way he had come. There was little to be gained from hailing her. He had seen her occasionally in London during the past three spring Seasons. She had made a hugely successful come-out, being both the daughter of the Earl of Havercroft and at least twice as beautiful as her nearest rival. She could have been married a dozen or more times during those years without moving out of the titled ranks. The fact that she had not married any of her many suitors was an indication that she knew she could be discriminating, that she knew she could wait until she met someone with whom she really wanted to spend the rest of her life.

  In three years the gulf between her and Reggie had widened immeasurably—though it had always been impossibly wide.

  He had never tried to come face to face with her. Or to speak with her. Or to attract her attention. Occasionally she had seen him. Their eyes had met, held for a few uncomfortable moments, and then broken contact. Sometimes it was she who looked away first, sometimes he.

  He took a few steps forward rather than back and rested one shoulder against the tree.

  She turned a page.

  “Is it a good book?” he asked.

  The parasol fell to the grass behind her. Her head turned sharply in his direction, and she stared at him with wide eyes, her eyebrows arched above them in surprise.

  Several seconds went by.

  “It is a very silly book, actually,’” she said. “Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Papa said I was never to read it because there are passages in it that are not suitable for a lady’s eyes. So of course I had to sneak it out of the library and read it for myself. But it is tedious and extremely silly. Mr. B—deserves to be hanged from the nearest tree by his thumbs, but I have the horrible suspicion that Pamela is going to be stupid enough to marry him.”

  “She is,” he said. “They are going to live happily ever after, as rakes and virtuous females invariably do when they marry7.”

  “Poppycock!” she said.

  “You have not a romantic bone in your body,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “I can remember the time when you flatly refused to be a damsel in distress and allow me to rescue you and gallop off with you on my trusty steed.”

  “Was I really such a sensible child?” she asked.

  The saucy preliminaries over with, they
stared at each other again.

  “Anna,” he said at last because he really could not think of anything else to say.

  “Reggie.”

  She closed her book then and set it down on the grass beside her before getting to her feet and coming toward him. She was wearing a pale blue dress and spencer and a pretty little straw bonnet.

  “I had not heard you were at home,” she said, gazing at his face as if to memorize his features. “I saw you at the Wellings’s ball in the spring. You danced with Miss Stockwood.”

  “You must be twenty-one,” he said. “You are dangerously close to being on the shelf, are you not?”

  “Perhaps no one will have me,” she said.

  “Or perhaps,” he said, “you will have no one. Are you waiting for someone special?”

  “Yes,” she smiled ruefully. “It is hard to find such a man. Have you started a search for a wife yet, Reggie? Are you finding it equally difficult?”

  “You have never found anyone you can love?” he asked her.

  “N—,” she started to shake her head, and then gazed deeper into his eyes and sighed. “Yes. Once.”

  He felt, ridiculously, as though she had just stabbed him with a knife.

  “It did not work out?” he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  “He did not love you in return?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, smiling. “No, he did not. He was young and carefree and wanted nothing more from me than a stolen kiss. Men are very different from women. And that is my profound observation for this year.”

  “Did he steal a kiss?” he asked, frowning.

  “To be honest,” she said, “I did not put up any fight.”

  “You wanted him to kiss you?” he asked her. “And you enjoyed it? You loved him?”

  “This old friend of yours can be very foolish, Reggie,” she said, and he felt a deep and quite ridiculous depression.

  “Well,” he said in sheer self-defense, allowing a slightly mocking smile to lift one corner of his mouth, “this is a blow to my pride, Anna. I thought your second kiss, the one given the day after your eighteenth birthday, was the one you would remember for the rest of your life.”