Yet what about his brother Julian, age fourteen, situated only a few miles from London? Perhaps . . . just perhaps he could meet him. Anonymously, of course.
Perhaps not. His resemblance to his father was astonishing, or so Rory and Moira, his wife, had told him. There was no way he could meet young Julian Ardmore without revealing the whole sorry tale.
“The family’s not always been so bloody English,” Rory O’Rourke had said. “Time was, they married Gaelic Irish without a blink. As well as those spawned by the Spanish sailors swum ashore from the Armada. Too bad the bastards didn’t beat Old Bess, but the least we could do was give them shelter. And that’s where they say the black Irish comes from.”
“Sure, and haven’t we been invaded by near every country you can think of?” declared Moira O’Rourke. “The old markiss, now, is all Ascendancy, as English as a cup of tea. And so is young Julian. But your da and y’rself, you’ve the Spanish black hair and Viking blue eyes. ’Tis not such a wonder when one considers how put upon the Irish have been,” she added indignantly, hands fisted on her well-rounded hips.
Terence had nodded politely, not quite taking it all in until he was back in his room at the inn later that night. He was the son of a noble Protestant house, his Irish heritage a mongrel mix of Celt, Norse, Anglo-Norman, and very likely Spanish. His father and grandfather lived in something grandly called Castle Kilbride.
Castle. Even though he’d had two years to come to terms with it since reading his mother’s letter, the idea was ludicrous. The father of Terence O’Rourke from the back streets of Dublin lived in a castle. Probably a tumble-down ruin like all the other Irish castles razed by both English and Irish during centuries of war. But the high stone wall his carriage was passing seemed in good repair, as was the gatehouse where the coachman pulled his team to a halt before a barrier of heavy wrought iron.
Terence smiled grimly at the shock still registering on the gatekeeper’s face as the carriage was allowed to enter the grounds of Castle Kilbride. When the old man peeked into the carriage, his jaw gaped. Evidently, Rory O’Rourke had told the truth. He was the image of his father.
Terence had always prided himself on his steady nerve. Not so this fine August morning. If he hadn’t known better, he’d think he was carriage-sick. His stomach churned, even as he felt a nearly overwhelming surge of excitement, the familiar call to battle. This time, with the extra rush of the very close and personal. After years of hate, he’d had to concede the present generation of O’Rourkes were likable, but as for the Marquess of Kilbride and his son, Lord Deverell . . .
Oh, yes, he looked forward to this meeting.
As the carriage rumbled across a stone bridge, Terence caught a glimpse of a shallow stream, with rocks poking above the surface here and there. Overhung by willows and other shrubbery, the water gurgled and sang as if it were welcoming a prodigal son, not a bastard enemy. The trees suddenly gave way to a sloping hillside, the stream at this point deliberately landscaped into a series of cascades descending from a reflecting pond directly in front of a . . . castle. It truly was. Not a sprawling Windsor or even a Hampton Court, but a castle nonetheless. A solid four-square building of stone with a round tower at each corner, the roof line of both house and towers castellated. Ivy had been allowed to take over one corner of the imposing structure. And at some time the windows had been widened, mullioned, and decoration added. But if the picturesque stream had ever been a moat, there was no sign of it. The water flowed peacefully out of the woods beside the house, into the reflecting pond, and down the slope. No attempt had been made to soften the fortress by adding Palladian columns or a portico. The entry door of formidable dark oak stood only one step above the flat stones of the front courtyard. Everywhere Terence looked, Castle Kilbride was in good repair. Apparently, the Ardmores did not lack for money.
The butler, not quite as stately as the ones Terence had known in London, took one look at the young man standing on the broad stone step outside, and his face turned white.
“I am Terence O’Rourke, here to see the Marquess of Kilbride and Earl Deverell,” Terence announced grandly, handing the middle-aged butler his card.
“S–Sir,” the poor man stammered, his eyes fixed on the name O’Rourke. Years of rigid training triumphed. “If you will follow me, Mr. O’Rourke, I will see if the gentlemen are at home.” After being led the length of the vast hall, Terence was shown to a chair as ornately carved as the chimney-piece of the great fireplace beside it. If a fire had been lit, Terence thought, he’d be as roasted as the ox it could easily accommodate. His lips curled in derision. The treatment given him by the butler was only a shade above a tradesman; a gentleman would have been asked to wait in an anteroom, not left in the drafty great hall.
The butler, holding Terence’s card by one corner, as if it were contaminated, placed it on a silver salver and strode off down a narrow corridor to the side of the great hall.
The Marquess of Kilbride and his son were in the earl’s study, spending the morning going over the estate accounts, a task neither enjoyed. At the moment they had paused for a glass of ale—Lord Deverell, a striking man of barely forty; his father, showing his age, hair white, shoulders stooped, a cane by his side.
Brodie, the butler, cleared his throat. “My lords . . . a young man has asked to see you both. He–ah–did not state the nature of his business.” No need to admit he’d been too shocked to ask. Brodie moved a few steps closer to Lord Deverell, lowered his voice. “You–ah–might wish to see the young man alone, my lord,” he confided. “He’s the image of yourself at that age. Exact to the lock of hair falling onto his forehead.”
“Stop mumbling!” the marquess roared from the depths of the leather chair behind his desk. “What young man? Here, you dolt, bring me his card!”
“Perhaps you might wish Lord Deverell to deal with him, my lord,” Brodie ventured.
“His name, man, his name!”
“O’Rourke, my lord. Terence O’Rourke.” Brodie delivered the card, then stood rigidly erect beside the desk, awaiting his instructions. The enmity between the Ardmores and the O’Rourkes went back more than twenty years, yet the old butler remembered it well. And the boy, from the look of him, was going to be nothing but trouble.
“May I, m’lord?” Deverell lifted the card from his father’s hand, which seemed to have frozen in place. Terence Michael O’Rourke, Tobias Brockman and Company, and an address in the heart of the City of London. Certainly not one of the local O’Rourkes. But it took a considerable shock to turn Brodie white as a sheet. The earl experienced a cool frisson of warning, almost as if a ghost had drifted by him. “And how old is this Mr. O’Rourke?” he asked.
“Not more than twenty, sir.” The butler and Deverell exchanged a significant look.
The ghost coalesced, taking on the chestnut hair and shining green eyes of Erin O’Rourke. Impossible!
“Hah!” the marquess croaked . “Damned whelp. Thought he was dead like his mother!”
Deverell turned and stared at his parent. “And what do you know about this Terence O’Rourke?” he demanded. “You told me Erin married a man in County Clare. So why is there a boy named O’Rourke wanting to see me?”
“Because you’re my father, as anyone with eyes can plainly see,” Terence declared from the doorway. He’d come to Castle Kilbride to talk, not to be left kicking his heels in the hall.
Here was the ghost, Deverell thought. The haunting spectacle of his youth. A handsome, vital young shade, returning his examination with freezing hostility, and far more dangerous than he himself had ever thought of being. “Your mother was Erin O’Rourke?” he asked.
“As if you didn’t know!”
Deverell shook his head, attempting to clear his wits. “I didn’t,” he said. “I swear it. When I came back from Oxford, I was told she’d married a man in County Clare. I didn’t know . . . I’ve never known.” His voice trailing away, Ardmore turned to his father. “But you knew, didn’t you? What
happened? Damn you, tell me what happened?”
Ignoring his son, the Earl of Kilbride fixed his eyes on his grandson. “I’ll tell you, boy, you’re far more the image of your father than his heir will ever be. But the fire I see in your eyes comes from the O’Rourkes. The Ardmores are easy-going, the whole lot of us. All too inclined to think things will work out for the best. Which seems to be our great failing.” He sighed, turning at last to his son. “Yes, I knew Patrick O’Rourke had thrown his daughter out, but marriage to the girl was out of the question, even if you were not far too young. I assumed she’d been provided for—the O’Rourkes were far from poor—so I did nothing. It seemed best to let her go. When you came home, I invented the tale about her marriage. Since shame of taking her maidenhead has stood between us and the O’Rourkes all these years, you never found out I’d lied. It’s as simple as that.”
“But you knew,” his son accused.
“Young Rory came to me more than a decade later, told me he thought I should know. You were well married, the O’Rourke girl dead, the boy disappeared. I saw no reason to mention it.”
“What a pair you are!” Terence mocked. “Ascendancy to the core. Despoil a fine Irish girl of good family and sweep it under the carpet. Forget about it, it’s of no consequence. No matter she and her child near starved while she tried to make an honest living, that she was finally forced into selling herself on the streets of Dublin, that the boy was left orphaned and abandoned when he was eight and as like to died or been forced to sell himself as well!”
“Good God!” Deverell protested. “You can’t think I wouldn’t have done something if I had known!”
“I think you never tried. Neither one of you fine gentlemen ever gave a tinker’s damn about Erin O’Rourke.” Terence swung on his grandfather. “You didn’t, did you, grandda?”
The Marquess of Kilbride slammed his wrinkled blue-veined hand onto his desk. “You’re a bastard, boy, plain and simple. A foolish mistake of my son’s youth. Your mother was dead to the O’Rourkes the day she left home. Therefore you never existed. You are a nonentity born to a woman as foolish as my son.” He picked up his cane, brandishing it like a sword. “You have no claim on me or my family. Not a penny of my money will you get, d’y’ hear? Not a penny!”
Incredibly, Terence smiled, for this was what he’d come to hear. The battle lines had been drawn. The Ardmores were indeed the enemy.
“Shut up, old man!” Deverell cried. “I admit to being a shallow flibbertygibbet playing at lord of the manor. But this is Erin’s child and mine. I loved her and should never have believed she’d leave me. I’m guilty of being a fool,” he said to Terence, “but not of betraying her. I’m worthless, boy, but I’m glad to call you son. Ask what you will of me, I’ll try to provide.”
“Provide!” snorted the earl. “You can’t provide for yourself, you spendthrift ninny. What can you do for your bastard?”
Terence looked at them both, shaking his head. “I’ve no need of money,” he said. “I merely wished to see what you looked like and tell you what I thought of you both.” Slowly, he examined his father from the top of his black waves of hair down to the matching shine on his boots. “I suppose I believe you,” he granted, “but abandoning a woman you say you loved without so much as lifting a finger to make inquiries is nearly as bad as what my dear grandda has done.”
As Terence spoke, he deliberately broadened his speech, dropping into the shanty Irish he had used on the streets of Dublin. “I’ll be leaving now, but when I’m able to buy and sell you both, perhaps I’ll be back. A grand estate like this might do me fine. Then again, ’tis only an Irish title, not thought much of in England, I can tell you. So perhaps I’ll find me a manor in Sussex where I’ll live like a king and never think of me pur Irish relations and their few rocky acres in County Wicklow.”
While his father stared in admiration and his grandfather turned purple, Terence proffered a grand, if derisive, bow and stalked out of the room. Brodie, who had been listening outside the open door, did not even try to show the young man out, merely watching, awestruck, as Terence O’Rourke strode down the corridor, through the great hall and out the front door, slamming the heavy oak loudly behind him.
And now, exactly eight years later, he was on his way to the Americas. Exiled because of a woman with blonde curls, amber eyes, and the voice of an angel. A girl as grateful to Tobias Brockman as he himself. A girl who knew her place, recognized her duty.
As did he.
The wedding of Elizabeth Mary Brockman to Rodney Rexford d’Arcy Trevelyan Renfrew, Viscount Monterne, was the grandest wedding to be seen in London since the marriage of the Princess Charlotte. Crowds lined every inch of Hanover Square, making it difficult for the carriages of the wedding party to get through to St. George’s. Many were as anxious to get a look at the Merchant Midas as they were at the bride and groom and all their fine friends.
The bride was glorious in a gown of pale peach silk sewn with thousands of pearls and a train so long it required four small girls to keep it off the ground. The groom, in black satin tailcoat and fitted black trousers, sported a vest of gray silk embroidered in silver. A bishop presided, and the feast to follow would have left the guests groaning, if most of them had not been too tipsy to notice their overindulgence. A grand time was had by all, Jack agreed late that night in response to Tobias’s triumph. A fine send-off for Lord and Lady Monterne.
And, miles away on the main road into the West Country, Elizabeth Brockman Renfrew, now Lady Monterne, felt a shiver run up her spine, and wondered at what she had done.
PART III
Chapter Eleven
Even before their well-sprung coach rumbled its way out of London, Lord Monterne untied the ribbons on his wife’s high-poke bonnet and tossed the shimmering blue velvet creation, lined in white silk, onto the opposite seat. His smile, far beyond cat-that-ate-the-cream, sent a delicious shiver up Beth’s spine. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known this moment was coming—the moment when they would finally be alone, irrevocably tied by the laws of God and man. They were well acquainted now, had indulged in perhaps a bit more exploration of each other than many young couples, so why did fear underlie her eagerness to discover all there was to know about marriage?
All brides felt this way, she told herself, as her knees quivered in time to her racing pulse. That must be it. No matter how willing, when nip came to tuck, brides froze. Terrified by the unknown.
But there was no unknown. Terence’s drawings, his cool explicit words, had been exact. A man and a woman became one. And she knew exactly how.
Which, after all, explained why she was terrified. Not all the drawings in the world could convince her it was physically possible. Particularly not after she’d seen, and felt, how large a man could grow. Rodney had put her hand there more than once. Even masked by the fine wool knit of his trousers, the size of his rod had stunned her. Though by the third time he encouraged her to touch him, only two weeks earlier, she’d recovered enough from her initial shock to catch a hint of the power a woman could wield. When her fingers took hold, instead of pulling back . . . when she began a tentative exploration, Rodney had sucked in his breath and groaned before pinning her hands behind her back.
“You have no idea, do you, my pet?” he’d murmured. “What a pleasure it will be to teach you, but we will wait until after the knot is firmly tied.”
In the embarrassment of the moment Beth had merely thought what a fine gentleman he was to protect her from her own natural curiosity. Only later in the quiet of her bedroom did she wonder if Rodney was, instead, protecting his own interests. If his concern was more for what Tobias Brockman or Jack Harding might think if she told them, rather than for her reputation or the laws of propriety. And what if it were? Common sense in a husband was a quality to be valued. Tildy and Terence had warned her that most young men would take what they could get, anywhere, any time.
But Terence had not. And he could have had every last bit of her
. All that she had, even those secret places still waiting to be discovered.
Had he refused because of Papa? Or simply because he did not want her? The heartbreak of the one was nearly as bad as the other.
Well, she could survive quite well without him, of course she could. What young woman would be foolish enough to want a sharp-eyed Irish street urchin when she could have Rodney Rexford d’Arcy Trevelyan Renfrew, heir to an earldom?
And now it was over, the knot tied as tight as an anchor cable. No impediments, legal or moral, no family glowering in the background. Just the two of them traveling through a rapidly darkening countryside, the interior of the coach dimly lit by oil lamps, Rodney reaching for a bucket of champagne nestled against the far door. Deftly, he popped the cork.
“I can’t,” Beth demurred. “I am already swimming in wine!”
“It is a requirement that all brides should be tipsy,” Rodney assured her blandly as he took out a flask and poured something into the bubbling liquid in the glass.
“What’s that?” she demanded.
“A bit of brandy. Excellent with champagne.”
“No . . . really,” Beth protested.
Rodney smiled, a very superior smile which instantly put Beth on her mettle. “Consider me a doctor,” he said, “and this your prescription. A remedy traditionally guaranteed to assuage bridal palpitations.”
No sense in telling him she didn’t care for champagne, that Terence teased her about her plebeian tastes. How could she be the Merchant Princess if she did not care for champagne? “The bubbles tickle my nose,” she’d told him. Terence laughed and told her not to breathe when she sipped.
Terence. No, she would not think of him! She would hold her breath, drink the champagne, and not think of him at all. Ever. She had a fine handsome husband whom she had promised to love and obey. She would do so.
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