A Wedding for the Scandalous Heiress

by Elizabeth Beacon

  Wulf was tempted to whisk his sisters and mother off to stay at his own house on the wildest heath he could find near London and leave Carrowe House to the rats and the duns and the curious. Gresley would have no choice but to come and sort the poor old place out then, but it would look bad if they all ran away before the new Earl came to take up his responsibilities. Wulf paused at the bottom of the stairs and felt a sly glimmer of satisfaction at the neglect so obvious all around him now the Earl wasn’t here to brazen out the shabbiness of his London home as if this was how he liked it. Not much of an inheritance for his successor, was it? Gilding was flaking off any fine plasterwork still clinging to the damp marred walls and cracked ceilings. The odd paintings the old man hadn’t sold were so tattered or darkened by smoke and age not even the most optimistic collector was prepared to waste a few shillings to find out if a masterpiece lay under the gloom. Wulf couldn’t even remember what colour the curtains, cushions and carpets were in their youth because it was so long ago they should be in a museum, if they took the moth-eaten debris of past glories.

  Why wasn’t Gresley here sizing up the value of anything that had escaped his father’s careless eye and consigning the rest to the bonfire, though? Gresley could pretend he doted on his plump little wife all he liked, but Wulf knew money was his true passion. The new Countess of Carrowe’s grandfather had owned the richest plantation in Jamaica and a fleet of slave ships and now she held the purse strings at Haile Carr. If not for her fortune, Gresley would never have married her, so it didn’t ring true to stay away because she was feeling squeamish about her father-in-law’s murder, not when something might still be salvaged from the wreck of his father’s once-splendid assets. Perhaps the new Earl of Carrowe had the old ruin earmarked for a grand square and a few rows of neat town houses to bring him in a healthy income. Some enterprising architect could have ridden up to Haile Carr and be laying out his grandiose ideas to Gresley at this very moment.

  Wulf shook his head, managing to relax the grim set of his mouth and unclench his teeth. After being bullied, then ignored by his eldest half-brother as soon as he got too big to terrorise, Wulf always looked twice at Gresley’s motives. Maybe Gresley would be different now he was a true lord instead of a courtesy one. The sense of right and wrong Wulf had clung to even while being beaten for something he didn’t do in this very house as a boy forbade him to pass the blame for the Earl’s death on to Gresley simply because he wanted him to have it. Gresley’s natural cowardice explained his absence every bit as well as guilt might do, but if any of his kin must be guilty of murder, he’d prefer it to be Gresley. Better if it was a passing maniac or some habitual criminal with a grudge and a capital sentence hanging over him already, but if Wulf had to sacrifice a family member, Gresley would do nicely.

  ‘Ah, I’m so glad I have caught you at last, Mr FitzDevelin,’ Isabella Alstone’s dulcet tones greeted him brusquely from the shadows as if he ought to have been expecting her and he was deplorably late.

  He groaned and why wouldn’t he? She was the last person he wanted tangled up in this dark business. He had half-hoped she’d stay at Cravenhill Park to mop Gus’s brow, or join her other sister in Derbyshire and stay out of his way.

  ‘Are you now?’ he replied concisely.

  ‘Yes. We need to talk about your mother and your sisters,’ she told him with such determination he might have groaned again if it wouldn’t give too much away.

  ‘What have you done; locked them in a convenient attic?’

  Even in the gloom of a hall where the windows probably hadn’t been washed for a decade he saw her lips tighten. She seemed to be making an almost physical effort to hang on to her temper and he felt ashamed of himself for taunting her so absurdly when everything about his family was serious right now.

  ‘If you’re going to be difficult, at least do it where they can’t hear you,’ she said as if addressing a fractious child.

  He could see the aunt of a variety of hopeful nieces and nephews in her patient expression and badly wanted to kiss her so they could both forget to be practical for a few blissful moments. ‘The estate office is as neglected as the rest of this dust heap, but at least we won’t be disturbed in there,’ he said, waving her into the cobweb-decorated room behind what had once been the state rooms. If she was scared of spiders, she should have stayed away from Carrowe House.

  ‘How busy and full of life this place must have been once upon a time,’ she said after a cool look around dusty deed boxes and chaotic piles of faded and mouse-chewed paper scattered here, there and everywhere after several decades of lordly impatience when the Earl decided not to pay a secretary.

  ‘It’s quite busy with it now,’ he said as a giveaway scuttle in the corner of the room said some of those mice were still here.

  She didn’t even flinch. ‘My maid will have hysterics if I take this home with me,’ she told him calmly as she plucked a spider off her richly blue pelisse sleeve and put it on a tottering heap of official-looking parchment rolls.

  ‘You have strong nerves, Miss Alstone.’

  ‘Maybe, but I also have an aversion to being dismissed as a flighty female sure to bolt at the first sign of something I might not like the look or feel of, Mr FitzDevelin,’ she told him with a very straight look.

  ‘So I can’t terrify you with our furtive wildlife. Foolish and ungallant of me to try, I suppose, but I’ve always been very protective of my mother and little sisters.’

  ‘Good, it’s about time someone was.’

  ‘If you want us to have a civilised conversation, don’t throw accusations of neglect at Magnus. He’s not here to defend himself.’

  ‘I didn’t mean him. You know we badly wanted to get them away from here,’ she said and he could see the truth in her deepest of blue eyes as she refused to be swerved from her chosen subject.

  ‘You and your family?’

  ‘No, me and Magnus. That’s why we...’

  Her tongue had clearly taken her further than she’d meant to go. He knew a truth she hadn’t meant to let slip out when he heard it and, from her quick grimace and the frown knitting her brows, so did she.

  ‘That’s why you agreed to marry Magnus?’ he said incredulously. ‘You thought rescuing them was so important you were ready to wed my brother to do it?’

  ‘No, of course not. Magnus is a handsome and kindly gentleman with a keen sense of humour and he’d been a good friend since I made my come out. I had more reasons than I can count to say yes when he asked me to marry him.’

  ‘And they all dropped away barely a month before the wedding? They don’t sound like the sort of reasons I could ever risk marrying for.’

  ‘Two months and you’re not the marrying kind,’ she told him sternly.

  ‘Neither are you if you needed all those reasons to say yes to my brother.’

  ‘No, I really don’t think I am,’ she said rather sadly and stared at a dusty cobweb for a long moment before she seemed to recall who she was talking to. She shook her head impatiently and looked as if she wanted to be done with him and this shabby old wreck of a house now their conversation wasn’t going to plan.

  ‘But you wanted to be?’ he guessed.

  ‘I did; it was a mistake.’

  He’d been right the first time he set eyes on her, then; she really did have a generous and yearning heart under all that cool poise and perfection. She was gallant and impulsive and protective and would make some lucky child a wonderful mother one day. How wrong-headed of Magnus to think friendship and common interests were enough to build a good marriage on with a woman like her. He’d had their mother’s example of what happened when a passionate, loving woman married the wrong man in front of him all these years, yet Magnus still asked Isabella Alstone to marry him without loving her? Now Wulf was angry with his brother instead of himself or this unattainable woman he’d longed for all the way across a vast ocean and
back again. What the devil was Gus thinking of to tangle such an exceptional female up in a mess like this one, then turn himself into a shadow of his former self when she saw sense and refused to marry him? No, he suddenly knew it wasn’t her behind all the changes in his brother. There wasn’t that sort of intensity between them, so there must be something deeper and darker behind Magnus’s unhappiness than his broken engagement. At last he could see a malaise deeper than his brother’s physical ills behind Gus’s actions when he looked back over the last year or so and he wondered why he hadn’t seen it at the time. Of course, he’d spent six months of struggling with a malaise of his own, so could a woman be at the root of Magnus’s melancholy and irrational actions as well?

  ‘A mistake you don’t intend to repeat?’ he asked now, feeling guilty at the sudden thought that although he couldn’t have her in his bed, he didn’t want her in anyone else’s.

  ‘Indeed not.’

  When he rode to Cravenhill Park as if his life depended on persuading her to marry his brother, he’d almost hated her for the jealousy roaring through him at the thought of the union going ahead. He’d looked up to and loved Magnus all this life, but last year he left England so he wouldn’t be able to do everything in his power to seduce Gus’s bride-to-be away from him. Then Gus let her slip through his fingers as if she wasn’t the most magnificent female either of them had ever laid eyes on anyway, and if the idiot didn’t love her to distraction, he must be in love with someone else. Wulf couldn’t think of any other reason why a sane and vigorous man wouldn’t fall in love with her and Gus had certainly been one of those until whoever got her claws into him fixed them so deep she managed to blind Gus to Isabella’s extraordinary beauty.

  ‘How were you planning on helping my sisters?’ he prompted to get them away from the nerve-jangling topic of her being anywhere near a marriage bed with another man.

  ‘We made it a condition of the marriage settlements that they would live with us once we were married—’ she began.

  ‘The Earl must have been delighted,’ he interrupted, because they were on that thorny subject of marriage again, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d lose control and kiss her again to keep her quiet.

  ‘He was so overjoyed at the idea of getting his hands on part of my dowry he would have put them on a boat to China if I had asked him to.’

  ‘I’m amazed your brother-in-law was prepared to let him have access to even a penny of your fortune.’

  ‘He didn’t want to, but money didn’t feel important when your sisters were so firmly under the thumb of a brute and a bully. Anyway, I’m three and twenty and Kit can’t order me to do as I’m bid any more.’

  ‘Can anyone?’

  ‘Once upon a time they could, but never again.’

  Another reason why she had agreed to wed Magnus, Wulf realised with a bite of something like pity in his heart for the bewildered little girl she must have been once upon a time. She trusted his brother not to dominate her or terrify their children, because Magnus was too terrified as a child himself to inflict it on anyone else. What would it take to get her to trust any man with all of herself when she had such gaps and grief still stark in her memory? More than him, he admitted, frowning down at the moth-eaten scrap of carpet under their feet as if he hated it.

  ‘We have been in here alone long enough even if nobody else knows we’re here. I can call on you in Hanover Square to discuss this at a more suitable time, if we really must,’ he said in the hope they could forget continuing this conversation if he avoided her long enough. The less he had to do with her, the better, for both their sakes.

  ‘An outsider won’t know I’m not walking home from Bond Street or idling in the Park with my maid at this very moment. If you come to Ben and Charlotte’s house, one of them will have to be present for the sake of propriety and I prefer to do this without a listener.’

  ‘You trust me to behave like a gentleman, then?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do,’ she replied, looking surprised, and it felt like another burden on his already-braced shoulders instead of a compliment.

  ‘Very well, let’s get it over with before someone accuses us of having an assignation among the ruins,’ he tried to joke, although the idea of secretly meeting her anywhere made his heart thunder and his loins tighten so shamefully he was glad it was almost twilight in here.

  ‘At times I almost like you, Wulf FitzDevelin.’

  ‘Don’t, Isabella Alstone. I’m not a good man. Say your piece and go, before the rogue in me overcomes my bare half-share of gentleman.’

  ‘I suspect you underestimate yourself. Anyway, that’s by the by; my eldest sister and her husband wish you to know they will be very happy if your sisters agree to stay at Carnwood House. Obviously Mrs Shaw cannot uproot her whole family and stay there to chaperon us all until my sister gets back from Derbyshire, but Lady Carrowe can lend us countenance and my former engagement to your brother would be reason enough for us to share a home until you find a suitable alternative.’

  ‘I doubt the gossips would agree with you and I’ve offered to have my mother and half-sisters live with me until her house is ready for them if they can’t bring themselves to stay here after what happened. According to her, that would be running away and she’s done too much of that already.’

  ‘She does seem quite resolute now his lordship is no longer here to belittle her at every step,’ Isabella told him, then frowned as if she’d said too much.

  ‘Don’t expect me to pretend he was anything more than a bully and a hypocrite, Isabella,’ he argued impatiently.

  ‘I won’t, then, but don’t call me Isabella.’

  ‘Very well, then, Miss Alstone,’ he said with a stiff bow.

  ‘My sins reflect on my sisters,’ she explained earnestly, as if she was afraid she’d hurt his feelings. If only that was all that was hurting right now, he’d be a mighty relieved man. ‘After her early experience with the gossips, Miranda is oversensitive to their spite,’ she went on as if she’d decided to confide in him and he really wished she wouldn’t. ‘I try hard not to give them any ammunition to snipe at her with and we came in here to discuss your sisters and not mine, didn’t we?’ she said as if he was the one who kept changing the subject.

  ‘My mother insists she will stay here until I persuade the tenants of her late father’s house in Hampstead to move out and my sisters won’t go without her. Develin House could fit into this barrack twenty times over, but it’s only half a century old and maybe they will find some peace at last when they live a little further from town.’

  ‘Is that the sum of your ambition for them?’

  ‘For now, yes. Money and rank matter less when you don’t have them.’

  ‘You don’t aspire for them to be happy?’

  ‘A society marriage won’t guarantee that,’ he said and forgot the barb in the tail of that clumsy comment until she coloured up, then paled as if he’d slapped her. ‘Society has never opened its arms to my younger sisters and now they’re penniless. If they tried to go about in polite society at the moment, they’d be fawned on for any morsel of gossip they might let drop if they are pushed hard enough,’ he went on earnestly, because he really hadn’t meant to take a tilt at her failed engagement to Magnus. ‘I don’t want that sort of attention on them, Miss Alstone, not when they’ve had to endure the after-effects of the Countess of Carrowe’s Scandal all their lives. Maybe that’s why Aline grew up impatient of sly questions and false friends and Dorrie is so protective of Theo she’s more likely to land a prospective beau a facer because he’s ignored her twin than simper at him as a good little debutante should. My sisters grew up with a father who despised them for being born female and a mother they love dearly but whose name was blasted by my existence before they were even born. Maybe half a year of publicly mourning the old devil whilst knowing he can never beat or intimidate them ever again will make them m
ore like the usual run of society ladies. They might even be comfortable enough with strangers to attend one of your sisters’ parties by the time the Little Season comes around again, if they happen to be invited.’

  ‘They will be. Meantime they need friends even if they decide not to marry,’ she said sagely and he sensed fellow feeling in her words and almost laughed out loud, although it really wasn’t all that funny.

  ‘And lovers if they do,’ he added to tease her, since she was being absurd. She could marry who she wanted, and when the Season began, suitors would swarm around Miss Alstone like bees to honey now she was free.

  ‘Indeed,’ she said too brightly. ‘Every young lady needs a choice of them.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he agreed blankly and bowed as if he was a gentleman, then held the door open for her to precede him. ‘I’m glad we have had this talk, but we should postpone any more of them until my family are settled elsewhere and you are suitably chaperoned,’ he said, the mental picture of her surrounded by eager beaux competing for a dance or even a smile having choked the life out of his sense of humour.

  ‘Anywhere would be better than this,’ she said with a severe look around the dusty and water-damaged marble hall.

  ‘Do you really think so?’ he replied, surprised when there were far worse places in his experience. Apparently he thought more of her than the usual sort of fine lady, so now he was in trouble twice over—he wanted to kiss her whenever they were in the same room, but he also admired her strong character, clever mind and her superb figure and shining beauty. He didn’t want to feel anything for her at all, but somehow he couldn’t help it.