Lyons Gate
( The Bride - 9 )
Catherine Coulter
Jason Sherbrooke longs to breed and race his own horses, but it's a spirited woman who will claim his heart.
Catherine Coulter
Lyon's Gate
To Yngrid Flores Becker: you are a very special woman, and a delight. I am so pleased you are part of our family. So are Corky and Cleo.
CATHERINE
CHAPTER 1
Baltimore , Maryland April, 1835
Jason Sherbrooke knew it was time to go home when he rolled away from Lucinda Frothingale, stared into the fat ugly face of her pug, Horace, who growled at him, and suddenly, with no warning at all, saw his twin, eyes sheened with tears as he’d waved good-bye to Jason from the dock at the Eastbourne Harbor. Waved until the ship was too far away for Jason to see him. Jason felt tears choking his throat and an ache so deep he knew his heart was cracking clean in two.
Jason eyed the dog curled up against his mistress’s side, then turned onto his belly, listening to both Lucinda’s and Horace’s breathing. It was true, only moments before he’d felt sated all the way to his heels, and then suddenly he’d been flooded with that particular memory, and the pain of it. Now, just moments later, he was impatient, so restless he could barely keep still. He wanted, quite simply, to jump out of Lucinda’s warm bed and start swimming across the Atlantic.
After nearly five years, Jason Sherbrooke wanted to go home.
At eight o’clock that morning, Jason was seated at the big breakfast table in the Wyndham dining room. He looked at the two people who’d welcomed him into their home so many years before, and at their two boys and two girls who had all become very dear to him. He cleared his throat to get everyone’s attention. He prayed that lovely, fluent thoughts would flow flawlessly out of his mouth, which, naturally, didn’t happen. He said only, a lump in his throat the size of the Crack County racetrack, “It’s time.”
Jason didn’t realize he looked like a blind man who’d suddenly regained his sight. He was wondering why there were no more words, just those two that popped out of his mouth, hanging there in the Wyndham dining room.
James Wyndham, seeing the expression on Jason’s face, but not understanding it, raised a dark blond brow. “Time for what? You want to race Jessie again? Haven’t you had enough punishment at her hands, Jase? Even riding Dodger doesn’t give you all that much of an edge.”
Jason jumped at the familiar bait. “Like you’ve always said, James, she’s skinny, doesn’t weigh more than Constance here, and that’s why she usually beats us. It has nothing to do with skill.”
“Har har,” Jessie Wyndham said. “Both of you are pathetic, always trotting out the same tired old excuses. Now, the two of you have seen me ride Dodger-Jason’s own horse-we’re like the wind, so fast we blow your hair into your faces. All Jason can do when he rides Dodger is raise a slight breeze.”
That was an excellent slap to the head, Jason thought, and grinned at Jessie.
“Papa’s right,” seven-year-old Constance said. “Although,” she added, looking at her mother thoughtfully, “perhaps Mama does weigh a little bit more than I do. But Uncle Jason, you’re just like Papa, you’re too big to race, you nearly drag the horse down into the dirt. Jockeys have to be small. Even though Grandmother says it’s a disgrace, what with Mama out there aping men and not staying here in the parlor mending, she still remarks on how skinny Mama is even though she’s birthed four children, and that isn’t a bit fair.”
Jonathan Wyndham, the eldest of the Wyndham children at nearly eleven, nodded. “It was a bit rude of you to say it so starkly, Connie, and Grandmother shouldn’t speak so badly about Mother, but the fact remains that Mother is a female and females aren’t supposed to be racing against men.”
Jessie threw her slice of toast at her eldest son.
Jonathan laughed and ducked. “Mama, you know gentlemen can’t stand it when you beat them. Once I saw Papa nearly weep when you raced ahead of him at the last moment.”
“On the other hand,” Jason said, “everyone I know seems to think you were born on a horse’s back, you’re so good, and who cares if the best jockey in Baltimore has brea-er, never mind that.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking, Mama.”
“Dear Lord, I hope not,” Jason said.
“I hope not too,” Jessie said. “No, don’t ask, enough said.”
Jonathan began picking toast crumbs off his jacket sleeve, and only his little sister Alice saw the wicked gleam in his lowered eyes. “Like I was saying, Mother, you’re a bruising rider, mean as a snake when you have to be, but still, isn’t a smartly mended sheet much more fulfilling for you, so-”
“I don’t have anything else to throw at you, Jon. Ah, look, this nice heavy fork just hopped into my hand.” Jessie aimed the fork at her son. “I suggest you retire from the fray or face very bad consequences.”
“I’m done,” Jonathan said, splaying his palms in open surrender, a huge grin on his face. “Retired, that’s me.”
“Time for what, Uncle Jathon?” four-year-old Alice asked, lisping charmingly. She was leaning toward him, and Jason knew that if they weren’t at the breakfast table, she’d have already crawled onto his lap and curled into him the way she’d done since she’d been six weeks old. When he didn’t immediately speak, his brain empty of words, huge tears shimmered in her beautiful eyes. “Thomething wrong, ithn’t it? You don’t like uth anymore. You want to shoot Mama because she beat you?”
Jason looked at that precious little face and sought for the right words, but what came out of his mouth was, “I love you all dearly. It’s not that at all. It’s-” And then the truth burst right out. “I want to go home. It’s time. I’m leaving Friday, on The Bold Venture, one of Genny and Alec Carrick’s ships.”
Instant and utter silence fell over the breakfast table. Everyone stared at him, including the Wyndham cook, Joshua, who was handing Jessie a fresh piece of toast. As for Lucy, their serving maid, she was so distracted by the awesomely beautiful young master Jason’s words that she was in danger of pouring coffee into Mr. Wyndham’s lap. James grabbed her hand just in time.
“Home?” said Alice. “But you are home, Uncle Jathon.”
He smiled at the little faerie, the very image of her mother, who’d been born after he’d arrived here in Baltimore. “No, sweetheart, this isn’t my home, although I’ve been here longer than you have. England is my home, where I was born, at a beautiful house called Northcliffe Hall. That’s where my family lives, where I spent twenty-five years of my life.”
“But you’re ours, Uncle Jason,” nine-year-old Benjamin Wyndham said even as he passed a crisp slice of bacon to Old Corker, the family hound, who’d been born within a week of Benjamin. “You don’t belong to them over in that foreign country anymore. Who cares about Northcliffe Hall anyway? We could name our house-make it sound all sorts of grand-if you wished us to.”
“We’re already named, bacon-brain,” Jon said to his brother. “We’re Wyndham Farm.”
“You’ve got quite a few cousins in England,” James Wyndham said to his son, but his eyes were searching Jason’s face. Then he smiled. “You know, it’s time for us to pay a visit to England as well. The months and years slip by, don’t they? Time simply marches forward, and so very quickly. Nearly five years. That’s amazing, Jase. It seems like yesterday we met you at the dock in the Inner Harbor and Jessie couldn’t take her eyes off of you, said you were even more beautiful than Alec Carrick, surely the most beautiful man God had ever created. She said you had an identical twin, and that meant there was another one like you. I’ll tell you, I was grateful she didn’t swoon.”
“You remember I said all that?” Jessi
e said, a dark red eyebrow cocked up.
“Certainly. I remember every word you’ve ever uttered, my sweet.”
Jessie made a gagging sound that reduced her four children to giggles.
James felt both immense sadness and joy in that moment. Evidently Jason had finally come to grips with the past.
“Uncle Jason is prettier than Aunt Glenda,” Constance said and grinned, showing a missing front tooth. “When she’s not staring at him, she’s looking in the mirror, trying to figure out how to make herself look more like him. I told her once to give up. She threw her hairbrush at me.”
James cleared his throat. “You’ll make your uncle Jason blush, Connie, so let’s move along. Marcus and the duchess were here last year, and North and Caroline Nightingale the year before. Yes, it’s our turn to go to England and visit with everyone, your family included, Jase. I want to see if my wife swoons when she meets your twin, and you’ve told the children so many stories about Hollis, I know they’re expecting him to deliver stone tablets to them. Ah, and your father and mother, of course.”
“But they talk funny there,” said Benjamin. “Like Uncle Jason. I don’t want to go to this place.”
“Think of it as an adventure,” said his mother.
“Yes, that’s it exactly, Ben,” said Jason. He was thinking it would be an adventure for him as well as he sat back in his chair and laced his fingers over his lean belly. “All my family will welcome you as you welcomed me.” He paused, looked at James and Jessie, shrugged. “I want to go home. I’ll be thirty years old next January.”
“That’s still only twenty-nine so you’re not that old, Uncle Jason,” Benjamin said. “When you’re as old as Papa, then you can go back there.”
“Your father is only thirty-nine, not all that great an age,” Jessie said, then paused and blinked. “I’m nearly thirty-one, more than a year older than you, Jason. Good heavens, how the time leaps away from one.”
Jason said, “Do you know I have a pair of twin nephews nearly three years old now, and I’ve never seen them?”
“Yes,” Jessie said. “They look like their father, which means they look like you too.”
Jason nodded. “My brother wrote that meant yet another generation looked like my aunt Melissande.” James had written so amusingly about how it drove their father mad, that Jason easily pictured his twin’s smile and his father’s face as well. So many letters over the years, and he’d only begun really answering three years before. For the first two years he’d been here, he’d written acknowledgments, nothing important, nothing that really meant anything, if indeed anything did mean anything back then. But things had slowly begun to change. He’d begun to see behind the words in the letters that arrived weekly from his family, begun to feel again what they meant to him, and his letters had grown longer and, perhaps, richer, because he himself was now in them.
“Yes,” Jessie said. “We know. I feel we know all of your family very well indeed. It will be like seeing dear friends.”
Jason hadn’t realized that he’d spoken about his family all that much.
Alice said, “But none of your family have ever come here, Uncle Jathon. Why haven’t they come? Don’t they like you? Did they thend you away?”
“No, Alice, they all wanted to come to visit me. The truth is, I asked them not to come. And no, no one sent me away.” He paused a moment. “The truth is, I sent myself away.”
“But why?” Jonathan asked, sitting forward, hands on the table since he had no more bacon to slip to Old Corker.
Jason said slowly, “Some very bad things happened five years ago, Jon, and I was responsible for them. Only me.”
“You killed a man in a duel, Uncle Jason?” Ben asked, eyes shining, nearly ready to leap out of his chair.
“Sorry, Ben, no. What I did was worse. I brought evil to my family, and that evil nearly destroyed them.”
“You brought the Devil home, Uncle Jathon?”
“That’s close enough, Alice. Fact was, I couldn’t stay, couldn’t bring myself to find anything good in my life there. I couldn’t face all the people I’d endangered, and so I asked your parents if I could come here and learn all about running a stud farm.”
Jessie knew the children didn’t understand-not that she understood all that much herself-and, knowing they had a dozen questions to fire at him, she said quickly, “You’ve helped us more than we’ve taught you. And even though James and I have tried our best to fill up this blasted house”-she paused a moment, waving her hand to encompass her four children-“there was more than enough room for you.”
“Oh no,” Jason said. You’ve taught me endlessly.”
“Don’t be a dolt,” James said, then raised his hand when he saw that all four children wanted to speak at once. “No, no, children, be quiet. No more arguments to try to make your uncle Jason feel guilty about leaving you. He’s obviously made up his mind, and we will all respect his decision. You will not ask him any more questions. No, Jon, I see that busy brain of yours working hard. Let me repeat, you won’t ask questions and you won’t make him feel guilty about leaving.” He paused a moment, smiled toward Jason. “Besides, we’ll visit him in England. And you want to know something else? He’ll come back for visits. He won’t be able to help himself-he has to try again to beat your mother in a race.”
“But why didn’t you want your family to come thee you, Uncle Jathon?” Alice asked. She was sitting on a pile of six books so she could reach the table, the top one being a huge volume that held an article by Jason’s brother, James, Lord Hammersmith, on a huge orange ball of gasses that had glowed brightly in Venus’s acrid northern hemisphere three nights running the previous April.
Alice ’s father opened his mouth to scold her, but Jason said quickly, “No, it’s all right, James. That’s a good question, Alice, and I want to answer it. I want all of you to understand that my family didn’t want me to leave. They didn’t blame me for what happened. They should have, but they didn’t.”
“What did happen?” Jonathan asked and James Wyndham rolled his eyes.
“Just know that it was bad, Jon, that my father, Hollis, and my twin could have been killed, and that it was all my fault. Now, they all wanted to come, but you see…” He paused a moment, trying to find the right words. “The thing was, I wasn’t ready to see them. To look at them was to see my own blindness, I suppose.” Badly said, but close enough.
James said, “No more, children. No more.”
Jessie rose from her chair and clapped her hands. “That’s right, you will now hold your tongues, as impossible as I know that is. Uncle Jason has made up his mind. Leave him alone about this. All of you know what you’re supposed to do after breakfast, so go do it and no complaints, if you please. James, Jason, if you two gentlemen will come with me into the parlor.”
Jessie Wyndham faced her husband and the young man she’d come to love like a brother. “Now, Jason, it will be all right. I doubt the children will leave you alone, but feel free to tell them to shut their traps. That’s up to you. Now, it’s April the fourth. It will take you two weeks to get home. We will come to England to visit you in August. What do you think of that, James? Can we get away then?”
James nodded. “August it is. Funny how both your twin and I share the same name.”
Jason nodded. “It made me feel quite odd for a good six months saying my brother’s name to another man’s face.” He searched both their faces now, faces that had become so dear to him over the years. “I don’t know if I’ve really told you how very much you mean to me, you and the children. I am of no blood relation to you, but you didn’t hesitate to make me part of your family, to teach me. And you, Jessie, to beat the dirt off my heels in racing, laughing merrily all the while, no concern at all to the continued bruising of my fragile male self.”
“That’s because James has the biggest fragile male self in all of Baltimore, and yours is paltry in comparison.”
James said, “We won’t talk about h
uge female selves. Now, Jason, you became part of the family very quickly, but the rest of that is nonsense. Everything we had to teach you, you learned in the first year. You are magic with horses, they respond to you on an almost human level. It’s as if they know you’re there for them, that you will do whatever they need.” James shrugged. “It’s difficult to put into words, but I know any horse racing or breeding you do in England will be a success.”
Jason stared at him, nonplussed.
“That’s right, Jason,” Jessie said. “Now, when you go back, where do you plan to settle?”
“Near Eastbourne, near my father’s home, Northcliffe Hall. Since my father forced my grandmother to move into the Dower House five years ago, James and Corrie and their twins stayed on at Northcliffe.” He paused a moment, gave James a crooked smile. “So that you will understand why my grandmother’s absence from the great house made such a difference, let me say that knowing your mother, James, has made me feel like I never left my grandmother. Undoubtedly my grandmother’s removal was an unadulterated blessing. She was very unpleasant to my mother and to Corrie.”
“Oh dear,” Jessie said with some awe. “Your grandmother is like my mother-in-law?”
“Yes, but she never tried to be subtle like Wilhelmina. She was always a hammer, went after her victims with a good deal of enthusiasm.”
Jessie said matter-of-factly, “We are very grateful we only have to see her once a week. She’s always hated me, as if you didn’t guess that immediately, Jason. She says these horrible things, all thinly disguised to sound innocuous. Sometimes I just wish she’d shoot it all out, like your grandmother evidently does.”
James laughed. “Actually, you’d have to be a blockhead not to understand that you’re being insulted down to your toes.”
Jason said, “Like Wilhelmina, my grandmother hates every woman in the family. The only female she isn’t rude to is my aunt Melissande.” He paused a moment. “I desperately want to see my parents again. I want to see my brother and Corrie, and my nephews. And the funny thing is that it just came upon me early this morning-”
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