by Mary Balogh
“Thank you,” he said. And, after a few silent moments, “Have you always been a recluse, Miss Heyden?”
“No,” she said. “As the owner of a thriving business, I do not merely sit at home all year long, gathering in the profits while other people make the plans and the decisions and do the work. I learned the business from my uncle and spent long hours with him at the workshop with the artisans and in the offices with the administrative and creative staff. I am a businesswoman in more than just name.”
Her uncle and aunt had indulged many of her whims and respected her basic freedom, but they had been very insistent that she be properly educated—something she had certainly not been to the age of ten. They had hired Miss Briggs, an elderly governess who had appeared to be a cuddly old dear. In some ways she was, but she had also imposed a challenging academic curriculum upon her pupil and not only encouraged excellence but somehow insisted upon it. Miss Briggs had also taught manners and deportment and elocution and social skills, like making polite conversation with strangers. She had finally been let go the day after Wren’s eighteenth birthday with a comfortable pension and a small thatched cottage, to which Wren’s uncle had gone to the expense of bringing her beloved sister from halfway across the country to live with her.
Wren’s real education, though—or what she considered her real education—had come at the hands of her uncle himself. One day when she was twelve he had realized after taking her with him to the glassworks that a passion for his life’s work had been sparked in her. I could hardly get a word in edgewise all the way home, he had told Aunt Megan later. And I lost count of the number of questions she asked after the first thirty-nine. We have a young prodigy here, Meg.
“Did you live with your aunt and uncle all your life until their passing?” the Earl of Riverdale asked.
“Since I was ten,” she said. “My aunt took me to his home in London—that was before he sold it—and they were married a week later.”
“You have his name,” he said.
“They adopted me,” she told him. She had not been sure it was a legal adoption until after her uncle’s death, when she had found the certificate among his papers. Her father’s signature had been upon it—a stomach-churning shock at the time.
There was another short silence. Perhaps he was waiting for a further explanation. “You have a way,” he said at last, “of turning your eyes toward me as you speak but not your face. It must be hard on your eyes. Will you not turn your head too? I saw the left side of your face when I visited you, and if you will recall, I did not run from the room screaming or grimace horribly or have a fit of the vapors.”
She wanted to laugh at the unexpectedness of his words, but turned her face toward him instead. Would she ever be able to do it with ease? But would there be another occasion? She was still not at all sure she wished to continue with this—or that he did.
“It really is not horrible, you know,” he said, after letting his eyes roam over her face. “I can understand that it makes you self-conscious. I can understand that as a young lady you must lament what you consider a serious blemish to your looks. But it is not altogether unsightly. Anyone looking at you will of course notice it immediately. Some will even avoid any further acquaintance with you. Those are people who do not deserve your regard anyway. Most people, however, will surely look and then overlook. Though I noticed the first time and have noticed again now, I would be willing to wager that after seeing you a few more times I will not even see the blemish any longer. You will simply be you.”
Will, he had said, not would. He expected to see her again, then? She drew a slow breath. Her uncle used to say much the same thing as Lord Riverdale had just said. What birthmark? he used to say if ever it was referred to, and then he would pretend to start with surprise as he looked at her and noticed it. And sometimes he would ask her to look at him full face, and he would frown as he glanced from one side of her face to the other and say something like Ah yes, the purple marks are on the left side. I could not remember.
“And what about before you were ten?” the earl asked when she said nothing. “Did your parents die?”
“My life began when I was ten, Lord Riverdale,” she said. “I do not remember what came before.”
He looked steadily at her, a slight frown between his brows. He did not press the question further, however.
It was time to turn the tables on him, since it seemed she could not simply curl up in a ball on the floor and she would not give in to the panic that still clawed at her insides. “And what about your life before you inherited your title?” she asked. She knew some basic facts, but not details.
“It was a dull but happy life—dull to talk about, happy enough to live,” he told her. “I had both parents until seven years ago, and I have one sister, of whom I am dearly fond. Not all people are so fortunate in their siblings. My father was devoted to his hounds and his horses and the hunt. He was hearty and well liked, and rather impecunious, I am afraid. It took me a good five years after his passing to set Riddings Park on a firm financial footing again. By that time my sister had been released from an unfortunate marriage by the untimely passing of her husband and was living with my mother and me again, and I was settling into the life I expected to continue with very few changes until my demise. There was only one slight bump of unease on my horizon, and that was the fact that I was heir to a twenty-year-old boy earl, who could not be expected to marry and produce an heir of his own for a number of years. But it seemed a slight worry. Harry was a healthy and basically decent lad. You took the trouble to learn some facts about me. You no doubt know exactly what happened to bring my worries to fruition.”
“The young earl’s father had married his mother bigamously,” she said, “with the result that the earl was illegitimate and no longer eligible for the title. It passed to you instead. What was—or is—your relationship to him?”
“Second cousin,” he said. “Harry and I share a great-grandfather, the venerable Stephen Westcott, Earl of Riverdale.”
“You did not want the title?” she asked.
“Why would I?” he asked in return. “It brought me duties and responsibilities and headaches in return for the dubious distinction of being called Earl of Riverdale and my lord instead of plain Alexander Westcott, which I always thought a rather distinguished name.”
Many men would have killed for such a title, she thought, even without a fortune to go with it. She was intrigued to discover that it meant little to him. The deference, even awe, with which his neighbors had treated him during tea was clearly not important to him. He would rather be back at his precious Riddings Park, where his life had been dull but happy enough, to use his own description.
Before she met him she had expected him to be a toplofty, conceited aristocrat—that was why he had been third on her list instead of first. She had expected it even more when she first set eyes upon him.
She realized suddenly how very alone they were in the close confines of his carriage, and she felt again all her unease at his gorgeous masculinity. For it was not just his perfect looks. There was something else about him that somehow caught at the breath in her throat and wrapped about her in an invisible but quite suffocating way. It was something she had never experienced before—but how could she have done?
“Did you ever consider marriage before you inherited the title?” she asked him.
He raised his eyebrows but did not answer immediately. “I did,” he said.
“And did you have anyone specific in mind?” She hoped the answer was no.
“No,” he said, and she did not believe he was lying.
“What were you looking for?” she asked him. “What sort of . . . qualities?” It was none of her business, of course, and his answer—if he did answer, that was—could only bring her pain or discomfort. He would hardly say he had been searching for a reclusive, awkward beanpole of a woman with a r
uined face and an unladylike involvement in business—and almost thirty years old, could he?
“None in particular,” he said. “I merely hoped to meet someone with whom I might expect to be comfortable.”
It seemed a strange answer from a man who looked as he did and had had so much to offer before he inherited Brambledean. “You did not look for love?” she asked him. “Or beauty?”
“I hoped for affection in my marriage, certainly,” he said. “But beauty as an end in itself? There are many kinds of beauty, many of them not immediately apparent.”
“And could you be comfortable with me?” she asked him. “Could you ever feel affection for me?” She would not ask, of course, if he could ever find her beautiful.
He gazed at her for so long that she had to make a very concerted effort not to turn her face away. Would this dreadful afternoon never end? “I can only be honest with you, Miss Heyden,” he said at last. “I do not know.”
Well, she had asked for it. Had she expected him to lie? At least he had been gentleman enough to give a diplomatic answer. If this journey did not end soon, she would surely scream. But she could not leave it alone. “My money would come at too high a price?” she asked.
“There is great pain behind those words,” he said. “It is your pain that makes me hesitate, Miss Heyden.”
She felt a little as though he had punched her in the stomach with a closed fist, so unexpected was his answer. What did he know about pain? Specifically her pain? “It is too unattractive a quality?” she asked with as much hauteur as she could muster. She turned her head away.
“Oh no,” he said. “Quite the contrary.”
She frowned in incomprehension. But he did not explain and there was no chance for further questions. At last, at last, the distance between Brambledean and Withington had been covered and his carriage was drawing to a halt outside her own door.
“May I call again?” he asked her.
She would have been a fool to allow it. She opened her mouth to say no. Her emotions were so raw she felt as though she had real, physical wounds. The privacy of her room still felt a million miles away. But the whole of her future life might be hanging in the balance—in the simple difference between yes and no.
Ah, this scheme of hers had seemed so full of hope and possibility when she had concocted it. How could she even have imagined that it was possible?
“Yes,” she said as she saw the coachman outside her door, waiting to open it on a signal from his employer.
Three
The thing was, Alexander thought as he made the same journey four days later, that old dreams had an annoying habit of lingering long after they had no practical place in his life.
He was not made for dreams, for he had always felt compelled to put duty and responsibility before personal inclination, and the two were not compatible. He had put away dreams almost seven years ago when his father died. He had worked tirelessly to set things to rights at Riddings Park even though he had been a very young man at the time. He had made the mistake of reviving those dreams a year or so ago when Riddings was finally prospering, but then he had had to start all over again with Brambledean Court.
This time, however, the task was far more daunting. There were people’s lives and livelihoods at stake. And the only way he could do it was by marrying for money. He had tried to think of other ways, but there were none. Any mortgage or loan would have to be repaid. Any hope of winning a large fortune at the races or the tables would be risky, to say the least. It might just as easily yield a huge loss. No, marriage it would have to be.
The dream, when he had allowed himself to indulge in it, had been the eternal one of the young and hopeful, he supposed—that vision of something more vividly wonderful and magical than anyone else had ever experienced, the grand passion and romance that had inspired the world’s most memorable poetry. It was a bit embarrassing to remember now. He probably would not have found any such love anyway. But there lingered even now a yearning for something different from what he could expect, some . . . passion. It was not to be, however. Life had other plans for him.
He gazed out at the flowering hedgerows, at the trees whose leaves were still a bright spring green, at the blue sky dotted with fluffs of white cloud, at the sun warming everything below but with the freshness of spring rather than the more somnolent heat of summer. He could smell the good nature smells of the countryside through the open window, and he could hear birds singing above the crunching sound of the carriage wheels and the clopping of the horses’ hooves. Life was good despite everything. He must remember that. One could easily miss its blessings when one wallowed in what might have been. Dreams were all very well in their place, but they must never be allowed to encroach upon reality.
He had been planning to go to London before Easter, though the parliamentary session and the accompanying social Season would not begin until after. The Season was often known as the great marriage mart, and he had planned to shop there this year for a rich wife—ghastly thought, ghastly terminology, ghastly reality. As though ladies were commodities. But all too often they were. He could expect to succeed. He was, after all, a peer of the realm and young. There was, of course, his relative poverty, but it really was only relative. A little over a year ago he had been Mr. Westcott of Riddings Park, a prosperous eligible bachelor. He had been dreading the marriage mart. Was it possible he could be spared the ordeal by finding a wealthy wife even before he got there?
He still did not know exactly why he was making this journey. And why did distances always seem to shorten when one did not particularly want to reach one’s destination? he wondered as the carriage turned onto the driveway to Withington House. Perhaps he ought not to have come again. There was something about Miss Heyden that repelled him. It was not her face. She could not help that, and he fully believed what he had told her, that he would soon become so accustomed to the birthmark that he would no longer notice it. It was not her height either, though the fact that she must have been close to six feet tall might have daunted many men. He was taller. No, it had nothing to do with her appearance.
What repelled him was, paradoxically, the very thing that had brought him back here. Her pain. It was very carefully guarded. It was veiled more heavily than her face was, in fact. It was encased in a coolly poised manner. But it screamed at him from the very depths of her, and he was both horrified and fascinated. He was horrified because he did not want to get drawn into it and because he suspected the pain could engulf her if her poise ever slipped. He was compelled by her, though, because she was human and he had been blessed or cursed with a compassion for human suffering.
But here he was, regardless of all the thoughts and doubts that had teemed through his mind and prevented him from properly enjoying his surroundings. It was too late now not to come. She would probably have heard his arrival, though he was not expected specifically today, and a groom was already coming from the stables. Perhaps she was out, though it seemed unlikely when she was a recluse.
She was not out. She was not in the drawing room either. She came to him there a couple of minutes after he had been shown in, her gray dress looking old and a bit rumpled, her hair twisted up into a simple and rather untidy knot high on the back of her head, her right cheek a bit flushed—and yes, he could see that detail because she wore no veil. She seemed a little breathless, a little bright eyed, and for the first time it struck him that she was more than coldly beautiful. She was rather pretty.
“Lord Riverdale,” she said.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I have taken you by surprise. Is this an inconvenient time?”
“No.” She came across the room and offered him her hand. “I was in the study adding up a long column of figures. I shall have to start again when I go back, but that is my fault for not subdividing the column and adding one section at a time. I did not expect that you would come again, and I was so engrossed
that I did not even hear your arrival. I hope I have not kept you waiting too long.”
“Not at all.” He took her hand in his and let his gaze linger on her. He had clearly surprised her, and it was taking her a few moments to don her accustomed armor. It was happening, though, before his eyes. Her breathing was being brought under control. The color was receding from her cheek and the sparkle from her eyes. Her manner was becoming cooler and more poised. It was a telling transformation.
Her eyes fell to their hands, and she removed her own. “Well?” she said. “Did you notice today?”
That she was not wearing a veil? But then he realized what she meant—though I noticed the last time and notice again now, I would be willing to wager that after seeing you a few more times I will not even see the blemish any longer. “Yes, I did,” he said. “But it is only the third time I have seen you. I have still not recoiled, however, or run screaming from the room.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “you are very desperate for my money.”
He drew a slow breath before allowing himself to reply. “And perhaps, Miss Heyden,” he said, “I will take my leave and allow you to start adding from the top of that column again.”
The color had flooded back into her cheek. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “I ought not to have said that.”
“Why did you?” he asked her. “Do you value yourself so little that you believe only your money gives you any worth at all?”
She was taking the question seriously, he could see. She was thinking about it. “Yes,” she said.
It was the moment at which he really ought to have taken his leave. It was a devastating answer, and it had not even been given in haste. He could not possibly take on such brokenness, even if she had all the riches in the world to offer. Good God, all because of an unsightly birthmark?
