Gayle Wilson

by Lady Sarah's Son

  “That he was yours?” he finished for her. “Not until I got a good look at his face. There wasn’t much doubt after that.” His smile was as natural as the one he had given Meg Randolph. And as impersonal.

  “No,” she said softly. “I don’t suppose there was.”

  She held his eyes a moment longer, reading nothing more than an old friendship within them. Then she slapped the reins on the pony’s broad rump and left the new earl of Wynfield standing alone in the lane.

  “She’s a good woman,” Meg Randolph said to him as he retrieved the hammer he had brought out from the Park. “I don’t care what anyone says.”

  .Justin turned, looking down into that broad freckled face. “What anyone says?” he repeated, his tone quizzical.

  Meg’s eyes widened, and then she closed her lips, almost as if she intended to deny them the chance to let any other unfortunate words escape.

  “Someone has been saying something about Lady Sarah?” he. prodded, still holding her eyes.

  “I didn’t mean nothing by that, my lord. I swear I didn’t.”

  Justin considered those words as carefully as he had the first ones, thinking about them in context with the rest. His eyes remained locked on Meg’s. As he watched, a flush crept under her cheeks, making her face even ruddier than normal.

  He knew there could be nothing more unseemly than to listen to his tenants’ gossip, especially since he was so new to his position. However, the fact that, whatever this was, dealt with Sarah meant he couldn’t let it alone. Seeing her today had aroused more memories, and more emotions, than he would want to admit, even to himself. And it had been their meeting, and their shared past, that had undoubtedly provoked Meg’s comment.

  “You must have meant something, Meg. I don’t think you can say something like that and then just leave it.”

  “I’m sorry, my lord. I know that you and she...” Meg paused, apparently thinking better of pursuing that line as well. When she took a breath, fueling her halting explanation, her next sentence was not about his and Sarah’s broken engagement.

  “I didn’t mean nothing bad about her, I swear,” Meg said. “And it don’t matter to me what the rest of them say. She’s a good woman. She’s had more to bear than most of us, and that’s the God’s truth. So...I don’t want you to think I’m judging her, my lord, even if there’s some around here who are more than willing to do that.”

  The red stain under her skin had deepened, and her lips were flattened again, her eyes determined, if wary. Justin knew he couldn’t question her any further. If he did, he’d be no better than those gossipmongers Meg had referred to.

  That didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t intend to get to the bottom of whatever she was talking about. Despite the fact Sarah’s letter had made it very clear four years ago that she wanted nothing further to do with him, Justin found that he couldn’t dismiss from his mind the strange notion that she needed his defense. Or his protection. Maybe Meg’s phrase had been responsible for that feeling.

  She’s had more to bear than most of us. Justin had no idea what that comment referred to, but he intended to find out. He wouldn’t do it, however, by questioning Meg Randolph. “You send word to the Park if you need anything else, Meg,” he said.

  “I will, my lord. And you forget what I said. My mouth runs away with me sometimes. Lady Sarah...” Again, Meg hesitated. “Whatever happened, a woman can understand it better than anyone, I guess. A woman that’s part-ways human, at least”

  Sarah didn’t understand all the emotions that were cutting up her peace that night. Although she hadn’t varied her day’s routine in any way after her meeting with the new earl, in the back of her mind had lurked an unaccustomed dissatisfaction. A sense of deep unhappiness with her life that she hadn’t openly acknowledged in years. Because, she thought, laying her needlework in her lap, what would be the point of admitting it?

  Andrew had already had his supper and been put to bed. Even her father was sleeping. Or at least his manservant hadn’t made an appearance, asking for her help in quieting the marquess. This was normally her favorite time of day, when the work was done and the whole house was silent and peaceful.

  And Sarah could not quite decide why, suddenly, she herself was so...unpeaceful. So dissatisfied with her situation, she thought again. Which was futile, of course.

  She picked up her sewing, determined to find gratification with the progress of the fire screen she was working. The pale, muted colors of the silks were still pleasing. This had been her own design, painstakingly created with her watercolors and then transferred to the canvas, but somehow tonight...

  Disgusted with herself, she gave up, laying the piece on the table beside her chair. She stood, stretching out her back like a cat. Her eyes were drawn to the reflection of that movement in the mirror over the mantel. She walked across to it and looked at the woman in the glass. Only then did she realize how long it had been since she had really studied her own reflection.

  There was nothing reassuring about doing so now. If she had found Justin changed by the long years that had intervened between their broken engagement and today, the same might very well be said for her. Her face was too thin, she acknowledged, touching her high cheekbones with the fingers of both hands. She looked tired. And there were faint lines across her forehead that she had never before noticed, she realized.

  Those were almost certainly the result of frowning perplexedly as she tried to figure out what she should do next. She had had a lot of experience worrying about that since her father had grown increasingly unable to see to his own affairs. More and more of the responsibility for them, and for looking after his properties, had fallen onto her shoulders. Now the weight of that responsibility was evident in her face.

  And my hair, she thought in dismay, putting up her hand to touch a curling tendril that had escaped the tight knot into which she had secured it. Dressing her hair this way was, of course, eminently suitable for her life in the country. Far more practical than soft curls clustered around her face, she told herself, although she knew that was the latest style. That was the way the Simonson girls had come back from London wearing their hair, after their Season.

  This was far more practical, she told herself again, tucking in the wayward strand. But not nearly so becoming, she admitted. The style had even softened the Simonson sisters’ long faces. As it would her thin one. She had thought when she saw those curls that she would like to try the effect.

  And of course, neither Simonson sister had hair the color of sun-ripened wheat. That was the never-forgotten phrase Justin had used, more than five years ago, to describe hers. Now, with it pulled so tightly away from her face, its color seemed dull. Not nearly so vivid as the image those words had conveyed.

  Dull, she thought, watching her lips compress into a line. Dull and colorless. She pinched both cheeks, giving them a series of sharp nips with her fingers, designed to induce some rose into them. That was a trick she had learned from her Aunt Fanny the year she had introduced Sarah to the London ton. The year she and Justin had fallen in love.

  In love, she thought. Fallen in love. Whatever that meant. Thinking about her long-ago Season, she stared unseeingly into the mirror as the splotches of color along her cheekbones slowly faded, returning her face to the same paleness she had despised.

  What it meant to be in love, she told herself fiercely, fighting again the unaccustomed burn of tears, was that she had cared for a man too much to allow him to be tarred with the same scandal that had blackened her name and made her an outcast from her own society. A scandal that had not been of her making, but one for which she could offer no defense. Not without destroying her dead sister’s reputation and breaking the promise she had made to Amelia on her deathbed. So Justin Tolbert had been lost to her forever.

  Soon someone in the district would be cruel enough to repeat to him the explanation for Andrew’s birth they had long ago decided on. And then there would no longer be anything offered her i
n those beautiful hazel eyes. Not even friendship.

  “I thought that we might open the house,” the earl of Wynfield said to his butler at dinner that night. “I believe my mother had some kind of simple entertainment for the neighbors here at the end of every summer.”

  “Indeed she did, my lord,” Blevins agreed, placing a bowl of soup before the new earl.

  “I would wish the grounds to be in better shape, but people have been understanding. At least those to whom the estate owes no money have been,” Justin added.

  Blevins’s face was carefully expressionless, as befitted his position. Justin’s lips tilted, however. The spoonful of soup he lifted to his mouth hid that amusement.

  The enormous debts, which everyone in the district knew about, of course, had seldom been mentioned publicly—at least not to him. It was almost as if they were a secret scandal. A scandal, he thought, remembering again the real purpose for which he had introduced this topic.

  “I suppose there is a guest list of my mother’s about somewhere,” he said. “A list of those whom she always invited. Chattington and his wife, of course. Lord and Lady Fortley, I’m afraid. Brynmoor. And we must add Lady Sarah and whomever she married.” Sarah, the daughter of a marquess, would have retained her own title, of course, no matter whom she had married.

  Had Justin not been watching Blevins’s face, he might have missed the reaction. The butler’s lids flickered, the eyes themselves rising very quickly to Justin’s face, and then falling again, just as rapidly.

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard the man’s name,” the earl prodded softly, openly watching the old man this time.

  When the butler’s eyes lifted again, there was no attempt to hide what was in them. They met Justin’s and held a few seconds before he said, “Lady Sarah Spenser is unmarried, my lord.”

  His eyes fell again, and without any trace of haste in his studied movements, he replaced the lid on the tureen with a palsied hand and stepped back from the table.

  “Widowed?” Justin asked, but he had already seen the answer in Blevins’s face.

  “No, my lord,” the butler said, his tone without inflection. “Not widowed. Lady Sarah has, to my certain knowledge, never been married.”

  It was not until Justin was alone in his chamber that night that he allowed himself to consider what he had learned. By that time he had remembered the contempt with which the leader of the small gang of bullies had spat at the child called Andrew. And remembered the epithet he had used.

  Little bastard. Justin had assumed at the time that the word had been chosen to indicate a verbal contempt to match the gesture, but it had, apparently, been a literal indictment.

  Yet he could not understand how that could be. Gently reared young women of their class did not bear children out of wedlock. Knowing the hot-tempered marquess as he did, Justin felt the possibility that Brynmoor’s daughter had given birth to a bastard was almost unimaginable. Whatever man had been responsible for seducing one of his daughters would have been forced to marry her as soon as that pregnancy was discovered.

  There had always been well-born children who arrived too quickly after their parents’ hastily arranged marriages. But those marriages had taken place, and prior to the birth itself. And given the cloak of privacy that surrounded pregnancy and confinement, no one could be totally certain of the particulars of a birth, at least not until they were announced. There could be little doubt that such announcements were often delayed until the proper time.

  But if he were not Sarah’s son, then who the hell was the child who called her Maman, Justin wondered. A little boy whose face perfectly mirrored one that had been so beloved? A face Justin had once known better than his own, because it had been so often in his mind’s eye. The face of the woman who had once been his betrothed.

  And who had apparently, only a few short months after she had thrown him over, borne another man’s child out of wedlock. Little bastard echoed again, along with Meg Randolph’s far kinder words. It don’t matter to me what the rest of them say. She’s a good woman. She’s had more to bear than most of us, and that’s the Lord’s truth.

  Whatever the truth, Justin thought, easing the leather harness of his artificial foot off his aching leg, it was not his business. He had more than enough troubles of his own, without borrowing those of a woman who, more than four years ago, had made it extremely clear exactly how she felt about him.

  Chapter Three

  After that meeting at the Randolphs, Sarah saw the earl of Wynfield a number of times during the next few weeks. She was never again close enough to speak to him. Or to have him speak to her. Which was just as well, she had told herself resolutely.

  Once he had been standing in the middle of the village green talking to Lord Fortley. He had been dressed that day in a manner befitting his station, and consequently, he had looked more like the Justin she remembered. He had not glanced up as she had been driven by in her father’s closed carriage.

  Sarah, however, had been unable to tear her eyes away, craning her neck in an attempt to prolong as long as possible that brief glimpse. And when she could no longer see him, she was beset by the same sense of loss and dissatisfaction that had haunted her after their previous meeting..

  To make things even worse, everywhere she went there was talk of the new earl. Talk about what he intended to do to save the estate. About what he was trying to do for his tenants. It seemed that the Randolphs’ cottage was not the only one to receive Wynfield’s personal attention. He had told her that was all he could afford to give them—the labor of his own hands. Despite the high regard that his willingness to work to improve his tenants’ lot was earning him in the district, it was surely, they all knew, too little and far too late.

  That was something else that was being discussed everywhere—exactly how desperate Wynfield’s plight really was. It was said he had tried to raise additional credit within the financial community. With the recession, however, there was little money to be had. And none of it would be made available to bail out an estate so deeply mired in mortgages and neglect that its future appeared hopeless.

  It was also rumored that the earl’s creditors were closing in, demanding payment of some kind for the longstanding debts. It was said, however, there was little left worth selling. His father and brother had seen to that, so it was only a matter of time until the lands that had belonged to the Wynfield family for more than two centuries would belong to someone else. Some outsider, the gossipers opined. Perhaps even one of the wealthy merchants the war had created.

  It was hard to think of Wynfield Park falling into the hands of someone who did not belong to the family. Or even to the district, Sarah thought. And given the current tendency to enclosure, it was harder to think of what might happen to the homes of the earl’s tenants if that dire forecast came to pass.

  Like everyone else, however, she could see no way out for Justin. Apparently having served his country long and valiantly had no monetary value at all, not even enough to hold the creditors at bay for a decent interval after his brother’s death.

  Sarah would have liked to believe her anger over that injustice had spawned the idea that grew in her head so quickly, once introduced, that it dominated almost her every waking moment. She knew, however, there was more to the recurrent thought than moral indignation. Especially when she heard the other whispers emanating from the ranks of the local gentry. There were heiresses aplenty in London, they said. Heiresses who were rich enough to save the Wynfield lands for the earl and who would be only too glad of the opportunity.

  “Not of his class, you understand,” Lady Fortley had said,.one brow arched suggestively. Everyone understood that no member of the peerage would allow his daughter to wed a man in such desperate straits, at least none who had any hopes at all of arranging a decent marriage. Wynfield’s only hope at this stage of the game, Lady Fortley had suggested, was to be found among the cits. They would be only too eager to align themselves with a nobleman, e
ven a crippled and penniless one.

  At those cruel words, Sarah had had to fight to maintain her composure, but she managed to sweep down the steps of the church without uttering a word in response to that outrageous suggestion. It was not until she was seated in the carriage, only half listening to Andrew’s chatter, that she realized what Lady Fortley had said was not so outrageous, after all.

  “Sarah,” Andrew said plaintively, tugging on her elbow.

  She focused her eyes obediently on his face, still mentally picturing Justin in the clutches of some socialclimbing nouveau riche heiress who would make his life a complete misery.

  “Is he never coming to church?” Andrew asked.

  She didn’t need to question whom he meant. Just as she was, Andrew seemed obsessed with the new earl. She would sometimes hear him at play, giving commands and strutting about the nursery in imitation of the kind of soldier he imagined his hero to be.

  And, without permission, Drew had more than once cut through the woods to pay a visit at the Park. Sarah had sternly forbidden him to attempt to see the earl again in that manner. Thankfully, Wynfield had not been at home during any of Andrew’s excursions. In his endless quest to find the means to save his inheritance, he was probably seldom at the estate, she realized.

  “Perhaps not,” she said.

  “Then someone should tell him he shall go to hell,” Andrew suggested with more than a hint of self-righteousness.

  In spite of the seriousness of the little boy’s expression, Sarah laughed. She wasn’t completely sure of the purity of Andrew’s motives in trying to save Wynfield from perdition.

  Just as she could no longer be sure of her own, she admitted. She hadn’t been, not since the moment the idea had first slipped into her consciousness.