White Regency 03 - White Knight

by Jaclyn Reding

  As she stood in the doorway to his study now, it could almost seem as if the things he’d said the previous night had never been spoken. The darkness and shadow that had closed in on her a handful of hours earlier had vanished in the light of day. The fire was naught but a gray pile of ash. No imprint of his body even remained in his chair. Still nothing could take away the memory of Christian’s hateful words to her—even now they echoed through her thoughts.

  Quite frankly, Grace, you could have been anyone…

  From the moment Grace had first seen Christian, staring up at him from where she had fallen at his feet in his dressing room the night of the Knighton ball, she had known in her heart that he was the one Nonny had spoken of to her, her perfect knight, the man she would love for the rest of her life. He could chide her for being a dreamer, but no dream had ever been so clear, so absolutely known. It had been just as Nonny had told her it would be—a realization that for as long as she might live, the man who would hold her heart would be Christian. Without question. Without doubt.

  Only Nonny hadn’t told her what she should do when her knight didn’t love her in return.

  Christian did not love her; he didn’t even like her. Knowing this didn’t lessen her love for him in any way, but with the dawning of the new day, her tears barely dried upon the linen of her pillow, came another realization, as clear as the certainty of her love for Christian.

  No matter how much she might love Christian, how much she might want him to love her in return, he never would.

  Only in the moment that he had spoken those words to her had Grace accepted the truth she had seen shadowing Christian’s eyes every day of their brief and unfortunate marriage. There had always been something— something odd, something so obviously missing. Only now did she know what it was. Christian had been forced to wed her by his grandfather, the duke, unhappily and unwillingly. Despite the fact that her uncle had arranged the match for Grace, ultimately, she had made the decision to become Christian’s wife. She had wanted it— heavens, she had thrown her all into it. She had never considered that Christian might not have been a willing participant. She had been so taken with the idea of spending the rest of her life with the handsome, charming man she had met at the Knighton ball, so lost to the myth of Nonny’s promises, she had never thought of what he might be thinking, what he might be feeling— or not feeling.

  Now that Grace realized the truth of the feelings he had tried so carefully to hide from her, she was left with but one more thought: How on earth she was going to spend the rest of her life living with him, seeing him, being near to him, knowing he had never wanted her in his life?

  It was the thought Grace had spent the early morning hours mulling through in her bedchamber. Over and over she saw Christian’s face lit by the fire in his study the night before, the dullness in his eyes as he has spoken those words. It left her feeling emptier inside than she had ever thought possible.

  Her parents had preferred to travel the world, leaving her behind to be raised by someone else, stopping for a visit now and again to remark on how much she’d grown as if it were more an obligation than a treat. Uncle Tedric, in the role of her guardian, had sought to dispose of her through the most lucrative and rapid means he could find. Even Nonny, who had been the sole constant in her life, had eventually gone and with her the only life Grace had ever known. And now Christian—Grace wondered if it was simply her lot in life to be forsaken and abandoned by those whom she loved, those who should have loved her.

  Much later that afternoon, near the supper hour, Grace sat in the parlor alone. The house was silent, for everyone else had gone out, and the atmosphere was as solemn as if the very walls realized the futility of her future. Her afternoon tea had grown cold in its pot on the table beside her. The book she had been attempting to read the past hour lay face down on the seat beside her. Christian hadn’t returned all day and, according to Forbes, he hadn’t said when or even if he’d return. For the barest of moments Grace had wondered that perhaps he might be off elsewhere, with someone else, someone whose presence hadn’t been forced upon him, someone he had chosen freely. Even though she knew it was a thing considered quite normal among the ton, the thought of Christian touching another woman so intimately, bestowing on someone else the only affection he had ever shown her, caused her throat to tighten even as tears came to her eyes.

  Grace pushed her troubled thoughts away and took up her book once again, Virgil’s Aeneid. She sought to distract herself with reading—anything to put a stop to the thoughts that had darkened the entirety of the day. Perhaps Virgil could offer some answers. She promptly opened to a single, telling line: ‘Fata viam invenient.’

  She whispered aloud its meaning in English. “Fate will find a way.”

  In the very next moment, there came a knocking at the door. Grace looked up from the page just as Forbes opened the door.

  “My lady, pardon my interruption, but there is a visitor for you. A Mr. Jenner.”

  “Jenner?” She shook her head. “I’m afraid I do not know such a person.”

  Forbes came forward to deliver the man’s card on a salver, bowing his head. “He presented this to me with his request to see you.”

  Grace took the card up, reading its inscription.

  Charles Jenner, Solicitor.

  “Perhaps you misheard him, Forbes. I would think, given his profession, he would need to speak with Lord Knighton, not me.”

  “He stated your name quite clearly, my lady. In fact he referred to you as the former Lady Grace Ledys of Ledysthorpe.”

  Curious, Grace asked Forbes to show the man in. At the very least, the visit would provide a diversion to the despondency that had shadowed the day. She set aside her book and teacup and stood to meet her caller.

  Mr. Charles Jenner, solicitor, was a short man, stout, with spectacles that made his eyes appear quite a bit larger than they actually were. He was dressed as a member of his profession, brown frock coat over nankeen trousers, top hat, and square-toed shoes with high quarters lacing up the front. He stopped just after entering the room and smiled, bowing his head in greeting. “Good day, Lady Knighton. Thank you for consenting to see me without an appointment.”

  Grace nodded and motioned for him to sit, then lowered into the seat across from him. She asked Forbes to bring a fresh pot of tea and waited while Mr. Jenner removed a sheaf of papers from the satchel he carried with him.

  “Lady Knighton, I shan’t take up much of your time. I have come with some documents requiring your signature.”

  “Documents, sir? For me?”

  “Aye, my lady. It is for the transfer of the property.”

  Grace nodded then, her initial suspicions confirmed. “It is as I thought, Mr. Jenner. You should be meeting with my husband, Lord Knighton, or perhaps his solicitor. They have handled the particulars of my dower.”

  Mr. Jenner shook his head, shuffling through his papers. “Oh, no, my lady, it is not a dower property I speak of. I come about a family holding that has been held until now in trust for you. It was previously held by your grandmother, my previous employer, Lady Cholmeley. It was to become yours upon your marriage.”

  Grace was confused. “But I understood that all of the Ledys family holdings are entailed to my uncle, Tedric, Lord Cholmeley.”

  “Oh, this is not a Ledys holding, my lady. It is a MacRath property.”

  “MacRath? That was my grandmother’s family name.”

  “Aye, my lady. ‘Tis through her that you have received this, a gift of real property, to be transferred to you upon your marriage.”

  In all the times they had spoken of the future and Grace’s eventual marriage, Nonny had never once said anything to her of any property that would come to her. Obviously, she must have known of it. “Where is the property located, Mr. Jenner?”

  “Let me see.” He shuffled through his papers a bit more, “It is a Scottish property, called Skynegal. It is the ancestral home of your grandmother’s family on L
och Skynegal in the coastal north Highlands area of Wester Ross. Oh, and there is a letter for you here from your grandmother.”

  Grace took the folded parchment from Mr. Jenner. Her breath caught as she read her name written in the familiar script of her grandmother’s hand. She felt a strange sensation, not unlike a chill, that reached from her fingers around the letter.

  “Will you please excuse me a moment, Mr. Jenner? I should like to read my grandmother’s letter in private.”

  The man nodded and Grace thanked him, leaving the room. Forbes was just coming from the kitchen with the tea tray and she instructed him to serve their guest while she crossed the hall to Christian’s study and closed the door. She sat on a bench near the window and slipped her finger beneath the imprinted seal to open her grandmother’s letter. Her fingers trembled as she began to read the words contained within.

  My dearest child, if you are reading this letter then I have gone on to meet my loved ones in heaven. I hope you are not grieving, dear, because I have long waited for this time. I shall miss you. You have grown to be a lovely young woman, very much like myself at your age. You have been my only happiness since I lost my children, your father and mother, but I find myself growing more tired each year that passes. I welcome my eternal rest.

  Since I have charged Mr. Jenner with bringing you this letter, you have also just learned of Skynegal and your inheritance of it. The name of the estate is derived from the native Gaelic ‘Sgiathach’ which means the ‘winged’ castle, and when you first see it, you will understand why. I had hoped to one day take you there myself, to see my great-grandchildren running about the same hills I ran about as a child, but if that is not to be, then I must charge you with the task. Skynegal is my own gift to you. It was my home as a child and a very special place. ‘Twas here my own knight first came to me, where we first danced and where I knew he would be my only love.

  Not long after I married, Skynegal was left unoccupied. It was to have gone to your father and mother, and through them, to you, but as you know, that was not to be. Over the years, I have received news of the estate accounts and have done what I can to maintain it from afar. It is my dearest wish that you will do what I could not and use your special talents to see Skynegal restored to the special place it once was.

  There is an account of substantial size that has been set aside to enable you to bring this wish to pass. Skynegal is a part of you, my dearest—your past and your future. It is your heritage and it is now my gift to you. Trust that it is there you shall find what you are looking for.

  Now as ever… your dearest grandmother, Nonny.

  Grace folded the letter carefully, but didn’t immediately get up to leave. She turned to look out the window, staring at the street, watching the carriages and the people pass by. A bird chirped happily from a nearby elm. A dog barked. Moments passed as she listened to the sounds of life outside and thought over the words her grandmother had written to her.

  Trust that it is there you shall find what you are looking for …

  And in that moment, it all came clear to her. All of her life Grace had felt as if something were missing— some plan, a destiny that she was meant to fulfill. All her life she had known a niggling sense of searching, but she had never known what it was she was searching for. There had been an emptiness deep within her that at first she had attributed to the loss of her parents and then later to Nonny. When she had married Christian, she had thought that she could fill that emptiness with him, with being his wife, loving him, bearing his children, finally being a part of a family instead of someone left behind by memories of one. But perhaps that hadn’t been her purpose after all.

  Grace believed that for everything in life—from the fiercest lion to the tiniest mouse—there was a purpose. “Things happen for a reason,” Nonny had always said. “They take us further down the road we were meant by God to walk.”

  When she had been a child, Grace could recall having come dangerously close to losing her fingers when she’d been playing near some farm equipment. She had been reckless, racing about in the tool shed, upsetting an axe that had been leaning against a wall. But for some reason, when the axe had fallen, it buried its blade but a half inch from her fingers. Grace could recall having stared at the axe blade stuck in the ground so close to her hand and thinking how stupid she had been. For if her fingers had been but an inch further forward, she would have lost them and would never then have known her love of sketching, her joy at playing the pianoforte.

  There were other things, too. At a time when young girls played with dolls and tiny china tea sets, Grace had only been interested in building blocks. She had studied the engravings of the master architects—Wren, Adam, Inigo Jones. Later, when she had grown older and she had taken to sketching, it was not birds and flowers that filled her sketchbooks, but buildings, houses, churches— whatever structure that might have captured her eye. At ten years, when she might have been spending her daylight hours learning various dance steps and needlepoint stitches, Grace was designing a tree house. She spent hours planning it, sketching and then resketching it until it was just as it should have been, complete with sash windows and a dumbwaiter. With Nonny’s encouragement and the help of some of the estate workers, Grace saw that same tree house constructed atop a grand oak tree along the banks of the River Tees at Ledysthorpe. It had been Grace’s special place, where she had gone to dream and reflect while the birds had perched beside her. She remembered how she would look out from her treetop tower with the periscope her father had gifted her with, wishing for her parents to return off the North Sea, miraculously alive once again.

  All of her life, no matter how she’d tried, Grace had never been able to conform to the image of what she should have been—the accomplished lady able to sing sweeter than a bird and dance as if the wind was at her feet. She realized now she had spent all that time trying to be a person that in her heart she knew she could never be. It had taken her marriage to Christian, and her failure as his wife, for her to finally realize the truth she had been avoiding for as long as she could recall. Only now it was suddenly so clear.

  Use your special talents to see Skynegal restored.

  The words her grandmother had written were like the opening of a door, the door to her future. No more would she avoid it, refusing to heed the call. It was time she took charge of her life instead of blithely following the wrong but “proper” path.

  It was time Grace embraced her destiny.

  Grace left the study sometime later and returned to the parlor where Mr. Jenner still awaited. He looked up from his tea, his mouth crumbed with one of the cook’s lemon biscuits, and smiled.

  “Mr. Jenner, thank you for waiting. I am ready to sign the papers you have brought to me.”

  As the solicitor began setting out the documents for her, she went on, “After we are finished, I wonder if I might trouble you to stay a bit. There is a matter I should like to discuss with you.”

  “A matter, my lady?”

  “Yes. I should like to hire you, sir, to act as my personal solicitor for the estate of Skynegal. There is something I should like to do, but I must warn you it is a matter that will require some delicacy and a great deal of fortitude on your part, for there may be opposition from my husband. He is an influential man, sir. His grandfather, the Duke of Westover, is even more influential. I do not know you, sir,” Grace went on, “but I can see that my grandmother trusted you and that is enough to recommend you to me. Would you be willing to help me?”

  Mr. Jenner didn’t immediately respond. For a moment, Grace thought that he might refuse her. The Westovers were, after all, one of the most powerful families in England. Few would dare oppose them for fear of the reprisals. The longer the solicitor remained silent, the more Grace convinced herself he would decline.

  A few moments later, however, Mr. Jenner stood and extended his hand toward her. “I have always been a man inclined to a challenge, my lady. Serving your grandmother through the years I di
d was one of the greatest tasks of my professional life. She was a true and remarkable woman. You remind me of her somehow. Thus, I would be honored to be of service to you, my lady, in whatever capacity you seek.” Two days later, Grace was gone.

  Part Two

  Adieu, She cries!

  and waved her lily hand.

  — John Gay

  Chapter Nineteen

  Wester Ross, Scottish Highlands

  Skynegal Castle lay nestled inland off the Minch, a restless sea channel separating the Hebrides from the western Scottish coast amid a copse of oak and Caledonian pine in a small cove along the pebbled shores of Loch Skynegal. To some, this remote part of northwest Scotland was considered wild and primitive—far too uncivilized for the Bond Street set. But to Grace, it was as beautiful a land as she could have ever imagined, vividly splashed with blues, greens, purples, and pinks—majestic mountains and heather-swept hills flanking a landscape as colorful as any tartan.

  She had left London with her maid Liza nearly a fortnight earlier after leading the Knighton servants to believe she was going out on a visit to see her uncle, Lord Cholmeley. They would have found out soon after that she had never arrived at Cholmeley House. Instead she had taken a hackney coach to the offices of Mr. Jenner at Lincoln’s Inn and from there had gone to meet the post chaise that would start them on their journey.

  The two women had traveled first by land across the midlands of England to Liverpool, then north by sea, since few roads ran through the rocky Highland terrain, and none wider than a pony trail as far north as Wester Ross. It had been a tiresome journey and the weather had only hindered their progress, raining nearly every day since they’d left London. Yet despite her fatigue, Grace found herself standing on the deck of the small packet boat that would bring them to the close of their voyage, captivated by everything around them.