The Earl's Mistress

by Liz Carlyle

  She felt her heart skip a beat, but she did as he asked, turning in his embrace. “That sounds ominous,” she said, her gaze searching his face in the gloom. “What about?”

  He lifted his hand and tenderly tucked a loose curl behind her ear. “Things,” he said vaguely. “Questions you asked once before. By the brook. Isabella, I care for you. Very much. You know that, don’t you?”

  She laid a fingertip to his lips. “I don’t expect such words,” she said. “They . . . They complicate things.”

  “Words do not complicate things,” he said on a sigh, “but I may have done. I’ve been careless. Again and again. With you, I seem always to be careless.”

  Isabella understood then what he was speaking of, and she felt a chill of uncertainty. “It will be all right,” she said. “It has to be.”

  “Life doesn’t work that way, Isabella, and if you’re carrying my child—” He stopped and shook his head. “—we’ll need to marry. Perhaps that horrifies you. I don’t know. If it does, I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes flew wide. “Tony, you cannot marry me,” she said, rolling up onto her shoulder. “Think what you suggest. People will gossip. Fenster—he’s not dead, nor are his ugly rumors forgotten. And I’m a nobody. By choice. My heavens, I run a bookshop.”

  “Come, Isabella, do you think I give a damn what people say?” he said harshly. “Do you think Fenster’s poison means anything to me? You’ll marry me, and I’ll give you no choice.”

  She rolled back into the softness of the bed with a huff! “You may have had your wicked way with me tonight, Tony, but beyond the bed, don’t dare try to bully me. You’ll rue it, I promise.”

  He reached out and stroked her face tenderly. “Let’s not argue, love, over a problem we don’t yet have, hmm?” he said, gentling his tone. “But in the future—and don’t say, Isabella, we have none—in the future, I promise to take more care. I know better. I do know how not to conceive a child. But I have been selfish, and I have not put your well-being first.”

  Not knowing what else to say, Isabella tucked close and set her cheek against his chest. She could hear his heartbeat, strong and steady. He was strong and steady. She had slowly come to understand that he was more than just a tempting—perhaps even tortured—lover. There were devils that drove him to arrogance and anger and self-loathing, but there were better angels, too.

  “I will not die, Tony, bearing a child,” she reassured him. “Do you think I can’t see that’s what you fear? I know you don’t want that on your conscience. But if the worst happens, I will survive it. I am a survivor. I am not Felicity.”

  “Indeed, you are not,” he said certainly, “for she was delicate, and you are far from it. But the worst, Isabella? What is the worst, I wonder?”

  “Sometimes we don’t know the answer to that question until we are deep in it,” she said.

  He seemed to consider her response. “You once said, Isabella, that you thought I must hate myself,” he murmured, his lips pressed to the top of her head.

  “I meant only that you seemed bitter inside,” she said. “Beyond that, I spoke out of turn.”

  “But you may have spoken rightly,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’ve let myself become. Anne . . . Anne constantly lectures.”

  “Because she cares for you,” said Isabella. “Whatever may have happened between the two of you, Anne cares deeply. I can see that.”

  He gave a muted laugh. “She warned me last night I should marry you,” he said. “She threatened to find a man who would marry you if I did not. Would you try to do that, my dear? Marry someone else?”

  She did not fail to notice his use of the word try. “I don’t mean to marry anyone,” she said tightly. “I thank Anne for her kindness, but it’s not negotiable.”

  “Still determined to keep your bookshop, hmm?” he murmured, brushing his lips across her eyebrow.

  “I’m determined to survive,” she said, “and to look after my sisters. May we speak of something else? I really don’t wish to quarrel, Tony. Not after . . . last night. Not after what we shared.”

  For a time, he simply lay silently beside her, one arm propped behind his head, his harsh, handsome profile faintly limned by the approaching dawn. Isabella could feel his mind working and the ponderous weight of words left unsaid.

  She sat up, lit the lamp, and turned it low, wondering what next to do or to say.

  After a time, he stirred, as if from a dream. “May I answer your question, then?” he said, his voice oddly weary. “The one you asked days ago?”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “When we quarreled about Anne?”

  He sighed. “Yes, but my reticence wasn’t about Anne,” he said. “It’s about what I am, Isabella. My misjudgments. My mistakes. It . . . It does not cast me in a good light.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly, turning back into the bed.

  He cleared his throat. “Still, it does have to do with why Anne and I never married,” he admitted. “I owe you that, Isabella. I know I do. I owe you something of myself. But be warned, the tale is vile.”

  She drew the covers back up to her chin. “Anthony, were you unfaithful to Anne?”

  His mouth twisted bitterly. “Define unfaithful,” he said. “I did not treat Anne as I ought to have done, certainly. But she did not break my heart, Isabella. She did not.”

  For an instant, she hesitated. “Thank you,” she said, letting out her breath on a rush. “Thank you for telling me that.”

  “Oh, she stung my male pride, mind you,” he added, “but my heart has ever remained intact.”

  “Are you prideful? I had not noticed.” Then she sobered her words. “Yes, Tony, I should like to hear the truth of what happened.”

  He let out his breath very slowly. “I don’t want to tell you, to be honest. But it’s not right to refuse. Not . . . given what you and I have become. But the truth—and my role in it—well, it may disgust you. The sins of omission, Isabella, can sometimes do the worst amount of harm, no matter how we may lie to ourselves.”

  Isabella said nothing; she neither insisted he speak nor let him off the hook. After last night, she had the strangest feeling they needed to settle this—whatever this was—because something in their relationship had passed the point of no return. Still, before she stepped off so high a ledge, she needed to understand what had made him into that furious, foreboding man she’d met at Loughford.

  As a boy, he was a very sweet sort, Lady Petershaw had said. So very charming and kind—and so unflaggingly devoted to his lovers. . . .

  But what had happened to that sweet and charming boy? What had happened between Anthony and Anne to bring him to such a dark place? Isabella drew a deep breath and tried not to let her imagination run wild.

  He kissed her hair again, and she relaxed into his arms. She had the oddest feeling he did not wish to look her in the eye; as if he was already looking back at the past, perhaps.

  He finally turned toward her. “Yes, Anne and I had been brought up expecting we’d be betrothed,” he said, “and though we rarely spoke of it, we were not unhappy about it. I was older than Anne, but we were close. I looked after her—and after Diana, who was a little older than Anne. I lived many years, Isabella, content that my future was settled and that I was spoken for once Anne had grown up.”

  “But what happened to change that?”

  “Diana,” he said. “Diana . . . happened.”

  “Diana?” Isabella crooked her head to look at him, some snippet of Lady Petershaw’s gossip returning to the forefront of her mind. “And she was . . . a cousin, too, yes?”

  “On Father’s side,” he said, “not Mother’s. Though they treated her as family, Anne and Gwen and Bea shared no blood with Diana. Diana’s father was our estate agent, and they lived in a fine manor house at Loughford. You may have seen it, near the gates leading in from the village?”

  She nodded, her hair scrubbing the pillowslip. “I thought at first it was Loughford. Not many estate ag
ents have a home so grand.”

  “He was Father’s cousin,” Hepplewood repeated. “Edgar Jeffers. Edgar met my governess—more of a nurse, really, for I was honestly too young for a governess—and they married. But she died three years later, and Edgar had little use for Diana. He’d wanted a son, my father said. So when Diana was quite small, she more or less came to live with us.”

  “Like a little sister?”

  “Exactly like that,” he said. “But she never seemed entirely happy. I think she felt her father’s ambivalence keenly. So with my father’s blessing, Mamma took Diana under her wing and more or less raised her.”

  “How did you feel about that?” Isabella gently probed. “Were you jealous?”

  “No, I never felt my parents’ love was a finite thing.” He shook his head. “I was glad for Diana. I . . . pitied her, really. We all did—Gwen and Anne and I. I did not grasp until years later how very much she resented that pity, or how very much she had attached herself to me. It was as if Mamma and Father and I were all she had.”

  “It sounds as if you were,” said Isabella grimly. “And her father sounds unpleasant.”

  “No, just a bitter and chronic inebriate,” he replied. “In any case, when Diana was perhaps fourteen, Gwen began to tease her about my marrying Anne. Gwen could always sense a person’s vulnerabilities, and the teasing set Diana off somehow. She cried, and hid in our family suite at Burlingame for two days. Then she came to me and said that she wished to marry me—that she would die without me—and would I have her in place of Anne?”

  “Oh, my God,” said Isabella.

  “She seemed quite desperate, like someone drowning,” he said. “I told her that I was promised to Anne but that she was a part of our family and always would be.”

  “Did that placate her?”

  “A little, perhaps,” he said, “but my parents saw what was happening and sent me away to university. I hated it. I loved Loughford and just wanted to learn to manage the estate, for even then I could see it was flagging under Edgar’s management and Father’s neglect.”

  “Your father was busy serving the nation.”

  “Yes, well, that was the excuse we all used at the time,” he said a little bitterly. “In any case, I managed to get myself sent down—deliberate mischief, mostly—but Mamma just told me to go spend some time with Father in Clarges Street. But he was always in Whitehall, or at the Palace. And in London, there are all manner of vices to amuse a bored young man.”

  “I daresay,” murmured Isabella. “I wonder what Anne thought?”

  “Anne was still in the schoolroom,” he said on a harsh laugh, “whilst I was being educated, too—but in places like La Séductrice’s salons, or the gaming hells. I think I imagined that Anne’s good nature would eventually save me from myself.”

  “Dear heaven.” Apparently everything Lady Petershaw had told Isabella was quite true.

  “Anne soon came of age,” he went on, “but her mother was frail, so Mamma was asked to bring her out. And thinking Anne’s come-out a mere formality before our wedding, Mamma decided to launch Diana, too, though she was probably nineteen by then. My father had settled a dowry of twenty thousand on Diana, but she’d refused to have a Season two years running.”

  “She was . . . what? Holding out?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, “but this time, Mamma gave her no choice. So there we all were in Clarges Street, with Anne and Diana being dragged from one ball to another, and me hanging on the fringe, trying to look like a dutiful fiancé-in-waiting.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Hell,” he said. “Sir Philip Keaton took to snatching all Anne’s waltzes and giving me nasty, sidelong looks every time we crossed paths. One night in Pall Mall, he shoved me up against the door of the Athenaeum with his stick across my throat and told me I was nothing but a wastrel and a libertine, and not good enough to kiss Anne’s muddied hems—all of which was true, but I bloodied his nose for his insolence, then splintered the damned stick over his head. And Anne, to her credit, kept speaking of our marriage as if it were a done thing.”

  “But Diana, I expect, did not?”

  “No,” he murmured. “She played the wallflower and refused every man who approached. She began to . . . to throw herself at me in a way Anne never had. And I was vain and flattered and couldn’t bear to hurt her. Then one night Anne came into the salon and saw us kissing—I didn’t start it, but I was damned sure in the process of finishing it—and Anne just snapped. She told me to burn in hell, then she rousted Mamma out of bed and told her she was accepting Sir Philip Keaton’s suit.”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Devastated,” he said. “Ashamed. Like I’d let Anne down. But Anne . . . it was as if she’d got her freedom at last. Freedom from expectations. Freedom to pursue a man who was far more compatible with her than I could ever have been. She was . . . happy.”

  “And what of Diana?”

  “A week later, I said yes,” he answered. “Why not? Anne had given me up with scarcely a backward glance, and my young man’s pride was scalded.”

  “Oh, poor you,” said Isabella dryly.

  “Yes, yes, I know.” He rolled his eyes. “I was hot-tempered and used to being pursued by women. But by the time it all blew up—or rather, by the time I managed to blow it up—I just wanted to be settled. I just wanted to be married, and to go home to Loughford. So I went to Mamma and told her it was done.”

  “That what was done?”

  “I told her it was Diana or no one. That Diana needed me, and I loved her and wanted her happy. And why not Diana? An heir has to marry—or so they kept telling me. So after pitching a great row about how Diana wasn’t good enough for me, Mamma surrendered and went to my father and said that she was at her wit’s end keeping us apart, and permission had to be given.”

  “But your father refused?”

  “Vehemently.”

  “Why?”

  “Father simply said it would not do,” he answered. “But Mamma was convinced—rightly—that I meant my ultimatum. She set in on him relentlessly until, one day, there was a great, explosive row. Mamma came out of his study, utterly wild, and after a few short, ugly words to me, she went to her room and just started bawling—which I’d never seen in the whole of my life.”

  “Good Lord,” said Isabella. “Then what happened?”

  He shrugged wanly. “Essentially, nothing,” he said. “I spent a couple of years whoring, gaming, and steeping myself in dissolution, and Diana was relegated to being Mamma’s spinster companion at Burlingame. Diana’s father continued to drink. My father continued to politic. Loughford continued to deteriorate. Then one day Father died. And suddenly I was Hepplewood. Philip had to drag me out of a whorehouse in Covent Garden to tell me he was on his deathbed. Apt, I suppose.”

  “Tragic, I’d have said.”

  “In any case, Mamma said I’d better marry money quickly or Loughford was done for. I resented being slung about like some matrimonial prize, so to spite her, I settled on the daughter of a Midlands industrialist—a very uncouth man with enough money to buy all of Manchester.”

  “Felicity,” murmured Isabella.

  “Yes,” he said, “and then I dragged her up to Burlingame, where all the family was gathered to celebrate my cousin Royden’s betrothal, and I flung her in everyone’s face. Oh, and I seduced her and got her with child. Oh, and did I mention she was Anne’s best friend? That’s how we met.”

  The self-loathing was rich in his voice now, along with his sarcasm.

  “How did Diana take it?”

  He hesitated. “Very badly,” he finally whispered. “She tricked Felicity up to the observatory tower and tried to push the poor girl to her death. Until then, we’d all thought Diana merely introspective and a little odd. Turns out she was stark staring mad. A lot of other ugly things came to light that day, too. It was horrific, really.”

  “Dear God,” said Isabella. “Did . . . did they
imprison Diana?”

  He shook his head. “No, Royden had influence in the Home Office,” he said, “and covered it up. Felicity abandoned me, terrified, and ran home to her father. Gwen whisked Diana off to an insane asylum in France, but she withered away until cholera finally took her a couple of years ago.”

  Isabella lay perfectly still for a long time. “That’s an awful story,” she finally said. “No wonder you’d no wish to speak of it. You . . . you did not have to tell me all of it, you know.”

  “I felt I did,” he said a little tightly. “But I have not yet done so. I have not told you that it was my fault Diana went mad. That I had within my grasp the means to . . . to help her, and I did not use it. I did not. I drove her mad.”

  “There is no way, Anthony, that Diana’s actions are your fault,” she said firmly. “You did not lead her on. You were a good son, and when your parents refused permission, you accepted their choice and stayed away from her.”

  He laughed. “Oh, Isabella, you are so naive,” he said. “I was a bad son and a wastrel, and I would have married Diana to spite them. She was in love with me, and after being chased for damn near a decade, I was in lust with her.”

  Isabella felt her brow furrow. “But you did not marry her.”

  “No,” he said, “for I could not. Because of the thing Father told Mamma before she locked herself in her room and started crying.”

  “Yes? What?”

  “He admitted to Mamma the truth he’d hidden for nearly twenty years,” he said. “That Jane, my old governess, had been his mistress. And that Diana, you see, was actually my half sister.”

  Something inside Isabella went perfectly still. “I . . . beg your pardon?”

  He drew a long, steadying breath. “Father got Jane with child,” he said, “and so he manipulated Edgar into marrying her. That’s how Edgar won his position and fine house at Loughford. He was a professional cuckold.”

  Isabella felt suddenly nauseous. It must have told on her face.

  “You are disgusted,” he whispered.

  “I . . . I am not disgusted, Tony,” she whispered. “I am . . . sad.”