by Kelly Bowen
“Henrietta, I’m sorry.”
She paused by the door, her hand on the latch. “Would you have stolen from me if I’d been Beltram’s sister rather than his ruined housemaid?”
“To get free of that man, I’d have stolen from the bishop of London on Christmas Eve.”
Henrietta crossed back to Michael’s side, kissed his cheek, and remained for one moment standing next to him. “If there’s a child, I’ll tell you.”
She hadn’t agreed to marry him, but Michael was grateful for small mercies.
* * *
“There’s no room at the inn,” Henrietta said, crossing her fingers behind her back. “I’ve come home for a visit, and you will either make me welcome, or take yourself off elsewhere.”
Papa had aged significantly in ten years. His shoulders were stooped, his hair had thinned, and his clothing hung loosely on his frame. Henrietta steeled her heart against the changes in his appearance, because the jut of his chin and the cold in his eyes promised her no welcome. The housekeeper had tried to show her to the formal parlor, but Henrietta had scoffed at that bit of presumption and let herself into Papa’s library.
He stood in the doorway, still apparently unwilling to be in the same room with her. “Madam, you are not welcome in this house.” Even his voice had grown weaker.
“Too bad,” Henrietta retorted, “because I was born here, and I’ve nowhere else to go. The least you could do is ring for tea, Papa. Traveling up from London has taken days, all of them cold, and the dratted coaches nearly rattled my teeth from my head.”
“Your mother never liked—” He caught himself. “Be gone from this house. Immoral women must fend for themselves.”
Stubborn, but then, Henrietta had learned to be stubborn too. “I’ve given up being immoral. I content myself now with garden-variety wickedness. When I burn my finger, I use bad language. I forgot to say grace before breakfast today, but I was anticipating this joyous reunion. I haven’t had a duke in my bed for months, Papa.”
“Henrietta!”
Had his lips twitched?
“Well, I haven’t.” One handsome baron, for a few hours. That hardly mattered. “Unless you intend to scorn me for the rest of my life—or what remains of yours—then you will endure my company over the holidays.”
Please, Papa. Please… She’d tried pleading once before, and he’d not bothered to reply to her letter.
His gaze strayed to the portrait over the mantel. Mama’s likeness needed a good cleaning, something Henrietta’s brothers would never dare to suggest.
“There isn’t a single bed available at the inn?”
The inn had never once been full, in Henrietta’s experience. “Not that I know of. You’re letting out all the heat from the fire.”
He took two steps into the room and closed the door behind him. “You have grown bold, Henrietta Eloisa. I do not approve of bold women.”
“I do not approve of hard-hearted, cantankerous men.” Or thieves or liars.
Papa had always had a leonine quality, and his eyebrows had grown positively fierce. “I’ll not tolerate disrespect, Henrietta.”
“Then we understand each other, because neither will I.”
That earned her a definite twitch of the paternal lips, though she’d never been more serious.
Then Papa drew himself up, into a semblance of the imposing man he’d been in Henrietta’s childhood. “Tomorrow, you will find other accommodations. You may stay the night, but no longer.”
One night? He’d toss his own daughter out into the snow come morning? Henrietta was tempted to remonstrate with him, to air old grievances and trade recriminations until he admitted his share of responsibility for ten years of rejection.
She was sorry she’d disobeyed him and had apologized for her transgressions in writing. She was about to remind her father of those salient facts when she recalled Michael, apologizing with desperate sincerity in the cold morning sunshine.
“Thank you, Papa. I’ll have one of my trunks brought in and introduce my maid to your housekeeper.”
“You travel with a maid?”
“Of course, and I usually take my own coach and team, though on way up from Town I had a mishap.” I fell in love, but I’ll get over it.
He settled into the chair behind his desk, his movements slow and gingerly. “You have a coach and team. My daughter. Racketing about England in the dead of winter with her own…”
“And a maid too.”
“Whom you will see to now,” Papa said. “Be off with you, Henrietta. I have much to do, and your brothers will want to know of your arrival. Send them each a note, lest they hear of your visit from some hostler or tavern maid.”
Be off with you, not five minutes after he’d stepped into the room. When Henrietta had taken herself away to London, he’d not spoken to her for ten years, now she was to be off with herself.
“You can write those notes to my brothers,” she said. “My travels have exhausted me, and I’m in need of a hot cup of tea. Shall I have a tray sent to you as well?”
Papa scowled at her as if she’d tripped over a chamber pot. “I prefer coffee.”
“Coffee, then. I’ll let the maid know.” If Henrietta brought him that tray, she might dump it over his head. “It’s good to be home, Papa.”
She left him in his comfy chair in his cozy study, before she started shouting. For Christmas, she’d longed to have his respect. They were speaking to each other, mostly civilly, and he’d granted her shelter from the elements, albeit temporarily.
That was a start, and more than she’d had from him for the previous decade.
* * *
Five days went by, during which Michael rehearsed enough apologies and grand speeches to fill every stage in Drury Lane. On Friday, he received a holiday greeting from Lord Heathgate that was positively chatty.
Heathgate, once the greatest rogue in Britain, maundered on about his daughters’ intrepid horsemanship and his sons’ matchless abilities at cricket. The paragraph regarding his lordship’s marchioness was so rife with tender sentiment that Michael had nearly pitched it into the rubbish bin.
Instead, he took himself for a long walk and ended up in the stables.
“You again,” Liam Logan said. “I’d thought by now you’d be traveling into Oxford to see those sisters of yours.”
Michael joined him at a half door to a coach horse’s stall. They still had the grays from the last inn Michael had stopped at with Henrietta.
“I thought by now my sisters might see fit to pay their brother a holiday visit,” Michael said. “But sitting on my rosy arse amid a bunch of dusty old books hasn’t lured my family into the countryside.”
“Then you’ll want to go into Oxford to purchase tokens for the Christmas baskets,” Logan said, reaching a gloved hand to the gelding nosing through a pile of hay.
“My staff has already seen to the baskets. Didn’t I give you leave for the holidays, Logan?”
The horse ignored Logan’s outstretched hand and instead gave Michael’s greatcoat a delicate sniff. Horse breath on the ear tickled, but Michael let the beast continue its investigations.
“That you did, sir, but here I am.”
“I won’t have much use for—”
The horse got its teeth around the lapel of Michael’s collar and tugged, hard. Michael was pulled up against the stall door, and—with a firm, toothy grasp of his coat—the horse merely regarded him. The domestic equine was blessed with large, expressive eyes, and in those eyes, Michael detected the same unimpressed and vaguely challenging sentiment Henrietta had once turned on him.
“Ach, now that’s enough,” Logan said, waving a hand in the horse’s face. “Be off with you.”
The same words Henrietta had used.
The horse, however, kept its grip of Michael’s greatcoat. If the beast could talk, it might have said, “I weigh nearly ten times what you do, my teeth could snap your arm, and my feet smash your toes. Ignore me at your peril.”
I’m to fetch Henrietta home to Inglemere, and to me. For ten years, Henrietta had bided in London, probably longing for her family to fetch her home, because that’s what families were supposed to do when one of their number strayed. The idea had not the solid ring of conviction, but the more delicate quality of a hope, a theory, a wish.
Which was a damned sight more encouraging than the cold toes and insomnia Michael had to show for the past week’s wanderings.
“Have the team put to,” Michael said, scratching the gelding’s ear. “We’re for Amblebank.”
The horse let him go.
“Thank God for that,” Logan said. “But you’d best change into some decent finery, my lord. The ladies are none too impressed with muddy boots.”
“I’m not calling on a lady,” Michael said. “But you’re right. The occasion calls for finery.”
And some reconnaissance. A comment Henrietta had made about her brothers had lodged in Michael’s memory, and the comment wanted further investigation. Henrietta’s family was merely gentry, not aristocracy, and life in the shires ran on more practical terms than in Mayfair.
Michael dressed with care, explained the itinerary to Logan, and made only one brief stop on the way to Amblebank. Less than two hours after making the decision to go calling, he was standing in Josiah Whitlow’s study, sporting his best Bond Street tailoring and his most lordly air.
Henrietta’s father put Michael in mind of an aging eagle, his gaze sharp, the green of his eyes fading, his demeanor brusquely—almost rudely—proper.
“To what do I owe the honor of this call, my lord?” Whitlow asked.
“We’re neighbors, at a distance,” Michael said. “My estate lies about five miles east of Amblebank, and I’ve had occasion to meet your daughter.”
Whitlow stalked across the room and stood facing a portrait of a lovely young redhead. His gait was uneven, but energetic. “For ten years, I had no daughter.”
Whose fault was that? “And now?”
“I’ve sent her off to her brothers. She tarried here for five days, made lists for the housekeeper, the maids, the footmen, put together menus, hung blasted greenery and mistletoe from—she’s no longer here, and I doubt she will be ever again.”
Her name is Henrietta. Henrietta Eloisa Gaye Whitlow. “If you’ve driven her from her only home permanently, then you are a judgmental old fool who deserves to die of loneliness.”
Whitlow turned from the portrait, his magnificent scowl ruined by a suspicious glimmer in his eyes. “Do you think I haven’t died of loneliness, young man? Do you think I haven’t worried for the girl every day for the past ten years? And what business is it of yours? You seek to entice her back to wickedness, no doubt, as if coin can compensate a woman for discarding her honor.”
Michael advanced on Whitlow. “Your oldest was born six months after your wedding vows were spoken. Your first grandchild arrived five months after his parents’ union. I stopped at the church and leafed through the registries. If I’d had the time, I’d have gathered similar information on half your neighbors. Order a tea tray, Mr. Whitlow, and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re a hypocrite at best, and possibly a poor father as well.”
“You are a very presuming young man.”
Stubbornness must be a defining trait of the Whitlows, but the Brenners had clung to life itself on the strength of sheer stubbornness.
“I will not lie—ever again—and say that I’ve been entirely honorable where Henrietta is concerned, but I promised her I’d do what I could to atone for the wrong I’ve done. She seeks a rapprochement with her family, and I’ll see that she gets one.”
Whitlow hobbled over to the desk and dropped into the chair behind it. “I cannot condone immorality, you fool. So she sits down to Christmas dinner with us. If she takes up with the likes of you again, then I want no more to do with her. She deserves better than you strutting young popinjays with your coin and your arrogance. If she can’t see that, I’ll not stand by and smile while she waltzes with her own ruin.”
Michael’s father would have understood this version of love. I’ll shame you to your senses, the argument went. The difficulty was, two people could engage in a mutual contest of wills that had nothing of sense about it.
“Henrietta never wants to see me again,” Michael said. “And from everything she’s said, she feels similarly about the popinjays, dukes, and even the king.”
Whitlow put his head in his hands. “The king?”
“Turned him down with a smile. Wouldn’t do more than share his theater box for any amount of money.”
“Good God. My little hen… and the king.” Whitlow’s expression suggested he was horrified—and impressed. “She wasn’t just making talk about dukes, then?”
“She had her choice of the lot,” Michael said. “Dukes, princes, nabobs. She never had dealings with men who were married or engaged. Not ever, and she demanded absolute fidelity from her partners for the duration of any arrangement. The titled bachelors of London will go into a collective decline at her retirement, and she gave up all that power and money just so you could behave like a stubborn ass yet again. I’ll not have it.”
Whitlow produced a plain square of soft, white linen. “Who are you to have anything? Henrietta made choices. She was stubborn. You don’t know how stubborn. I had a match all picked out for her. A decent chap, settled, respectable. She flew into hysterics, and then she was gone.”
Michael appropriated the chair opposite Whitlow’s desk, because the man apparently lacked the manners even to offer a guest a seat.
“You chose one of your widowed friends, I’d guess. A man at least twice Henrietta’s age, with children not much younger than she. Her fate would have been to give up drudging for you and her brothers for the great boon of drudging for some middle-aged man and his children. What sixteen-year-old girl with any sense would be flattered by that arrangement?”
Elsewhere in the house, a door slammed, though Whitlow didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps he was hard of hearing as well as of heart.
“She was growing too rebellious,” he said. “I had to marry her off, or she’d… Sixteen isn’t too young to be engaged. I’d talked Charles into waiting until she was eighteen for the wedding, and that would have been in the agreements. Henrietta said in two years the damned man would probably have lost the last of his teeth. She cursed at me. My own daughter, cursing.”
“And because even cursing didn’t get your attention, she ran away rather than bow to a scheme that would only make her miserable. What else was she to do?”
Whitlow had had ten years to convince himself that he was the wronged party, and yet, Michael still saw a hint of guilt in his eyes.
“In time, she would have been a well-fixed widow,” Whitlow said. “Many women would have envied her that fate.”
“In twenty or thirty years? Assuming your friend and his children didn’t spend his every last groat first? You are blind, Whitlow, and Henrietta was too. She went to London, a complete innocent, a young girl who thought men were selfish, irascible, and high-handed, but not her enemies. She went into service, glad to have employment in the house of a titled family, prepared to work hard for a pittance.
“She had no inkling that her virtue was at risk. She’d been trained to wait on the men of her family, to see to their every need, to put their welfare before her own, and by God, you trained her well. She had no grasp of her own beauty, no sense of what men might do to possess it, or how to defend herself from them. That is your fault as well, and no other’s.”
Whitlow erupted from his chair, bracing his hands on his desk blotter. “How dare you lecture me about the daughter I raised in this very house? How dare you presume to make excuses for a girl who knew right from wrong as clearly as I know noon from midnight?”
“Better you should ask how dare her employer ruin her and suffer no consequences for his venery,” Michael said. “Read this.”
He tossed Beltram’s letter onto
the desk, where it sat like a glove thrown down to mark a challenge.
“What is it?”
“A letter to me from the man who destroyed your daughter’s good name, but not, fortunately, her self-respect. He plotted, he schemed, he lied, he charmed, and he made empty promises of matrimony. He behaved without a shred of honor and left Henrietta broken-hearted, ruined, and alone at the age of sixteen. She took the same risk her mother did—granted favors to a man promising matrimony. Her mother is enshrined over your mantel for that decision, while Henrietta was banished from your household.”
This was not the speech Michael had rehearsed, but he should have, for the recitation nearly broke his heart, while Whitlow appeared entirely unmoved.
“Henrietta’s failing was that she trusted the wrong man,” Michael went on more softly. “She trusted you to forgive her for straying into the wrong pair of arms, and in that, she erred. I’d guess she wrote to you, asking permission to come home, and you denied her. Read that letter, Whitlow.”
Whitlow subsided into his chair, regarding Beltram’s letter like the foul excrescence it was.
Michael rose and leaned across the desk. “Read it, or I’ll read it to you loudly enough that the whole house will hear me. Then I’ll read it in the tavern. I’ll read it to her brothers. I’ll read it in the church if I must, or the village square. I’ll read the damned thing in the House of Lords, and then all will know of your shame. Not hers. Beltram’s—and yours.”
Whitlow read the letter, then sat unmoving, his gaze on the portrait over the mantel.
“Will you apologize to your daughter, Whitlow?”
He nodded once, a tear trickling unchecked down his weathered cheek.
“Then I’ll wish you the joy of the season and take my leave.”
Chapter Six
I don’t regret a moment of the time I spent making Henrietta Whitlow what she is today, though she’s never thanked me for the effort I put forth, peeling her grip from the dust mop and rags of propriety. When our paths cross now, she adopts an air of subtly injured dignity, though I can’t imagine she’d ever want to go back to dreams of wedded contentment, or a quiet life in the shires.
