by Brenda Joyce
It was a terrible time. Her mother would see no one and Jane did not recognize the pale, gaunt woman who turned away from her. Her uncle, who was not really her uncle but the manager of the troupe, explained carefully to Jane that Daddy had gone to heaven. Jane knew about heaven, so now she demanded, “Tell him to come back!”
“I can’t, Jane,” Robert Gordon said softly. “But he is in heaven with God, and he is happy.”
“Has Daddy died?”
Robert hesitated, surprised, then stroked her hair. “Yes, angel. But don’t be afraid. One day you will see him again.”
Jane clutched his shirt. “I want to see him now!” she cried imperiously. “Tell him to wake up!”
“I can’t,” Robert said, agonized.
“Yes, you can,” she said, sobbing, desperate. “Mommy dies all the time, but she always wakes up to come home!”
At first Robert didn’t understand. Then he realized that she was thinking of her mother’s dramatic performances. “Honey, this time is different. Your mother only plays at going to heaven. Your daddy really has.”
Jane could not understand. She didn’t believe Robert. Her daddy would come back. She tried to tell her mother this, but Sandra only wept. Wept with her daughter in her arms, hugging her fiercely, as if Jane could ease her pain. And then one day Jane knew the truth. He wasn’t coming back—not ever.
Her mother came out of mourning after a year to take her place in the theater again. Her own personal tragedy had made her better than ever, the critics said. Her performances were haunting. No one who saw Sandra Barclay on the stage could ever forget her.
Sandra refused to send Jane away to school, but hired a tutor instead. Jane learned to read and write mostly in her mother’s dressing room, or sitting in the huge, empty auditorium, or, sometimes, from the study of her mother’s London town house in Chelsea. When Jane was ten her mother became very ill, and three months later she passed away. The doctors never had an explanation.
At ten Jane had been too old and too worldly not to understand exactly what had happened. This was no act. Her mother had died and was never coming back. Robert and her mother’s friends—actors, actresses, musicians, stagehands —would not leave her alone to grieve. Their grief was shared, and Jane found comfort from everybody. Robert soon gave her her first role as an actress to distract her. She played a little boy in the production of The Physician. She only had five lines, but—stepping out on the stage as someone else, becoming someone else, playing someone else for a thousand people—it was the most exciting event of her life.
And afterward, when she came to take her bow with the rest of the cast, the applause was thunderous. Jane, holding hands with an actress and actor, bowed again and again to the standing ovation. Her face was wreathed in smiles. Her heart was expanding to impossible dimensions.
Someone shouted, “It’s the Angel’s daughter! It’s Sandra’s girl!”
And the actress pushed her forward. “Take your own bow, Jane, they want you,” she cried. Jane found herself alone on the stage, bowing. The crowd went crazy for the little blue-eyed blonde.
“Angel, Angel!” they screamed, applauding wildly. She soon became London’s darling of the stage. They called her “Sandra’s Angel.”
“Jane, stop your daydreaming—we’re here!”
Jane jerked out of her sentimental memories at the sound of Matilda’s intrusive voice. She had tears in her eyes, both from joy and pain, and she brushed them away. She found herself staring at the dark-gray stones of the neo-Gothic manor looming before them. She had expected something dark and gloomy and menacing. She wasn’t disappointed. All that was missing was overgrown ivy—the creeping pink roses and the carefully tended lawns were incongruous to the dark, dismal castle. As her gaze traveled along the immense, turreted outline of Dragmore, she came to the south wing, jagged and blackened and gutted grotesquely from a fire. Apparently it had been left that way for years. An irreverent testimony to the past—or was it some sort of macabre reminder? Jane shivered, her heart lodging in her throat, as they entered the circular drive going round in front of the house. And then she saw him, standing in the ancient stone arch of the barbican, his body partly turned to them, tall and powerful and darkly forbidding. In that moment, as he stared at them, he appeared to be the resurrected ghost of one of his ancestors, an indomitable pagan lord from another time and place.
The Lord of Darkness.
Oh, how the title suited him.
They said he had killed his wife.
3
It had to be she and he wasn’t pleased.
The earl was in the process of entering the manor. He paused at the sound of the carriage approaching, clearly discernible despite the frantic barking of the hounds. Vast irritation filled him, and he abruptly crossed the courtyard and stalked into the house, past the butler. “Show them in,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Which room shall I show them to, my lord?” Thomas asked politely. He was in his fifties, white-haired, balding, his face always bland. The earl thought that he could run around in a loincloth and moccasins with full Comanche warpaint and the old man wouldn’t bat an eye. Nick actually, secretly, liked him.
“How the hell would I know? You can take them to the stables for all I care.” The earl strode across the marbled foyer, oblivious to the fact that he was tracking mud and manure through. He began bounding up the curved mahogany stairs.
“Shall I serve them tea and crumpets?” Thomas called after him politely.
“Serve them spitted catfish heads,” he said with a growl.
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said.
The earl paused on the first landing, his hand turning white on the banister. His cold glance locked with Thomas’s bland one. He almost smiled. At least Thomas knew when to take him literally, unlike his wife’s man. That imbecile had actually served the closest thing he could find to catfish once upon a time, when the earl had been forced to host friends of Patricia’s in her absence. It was hard to say who had been more shocked, his guests or Nick, at the sight of the spitted, grilled fishheads served with the tea. Nick had actually laughed once he recovered. His wife, Patricia, had not found the episode the least bit amusing.
The earl stomped into the master suite. There was no valet there awaiting him; he did not have one. That had caused another, albeit minor, scandal, not that the earl cared. Until his wife’s death four years past he had suffered with a valet, which he found ridiculous. He was a grown man and he was capable of dressing himself. The lack of privacy bothered him as much as the inanity of it, and after the trial he had dismissed the valet immediately. He would have discharged two-thirds of the household staff as well, except that he worried about turning them out of their jobs. The earl was well aware that most agricultural laborers, when unemployed, moved to the towns, where there were jobs aplenty in the factories. He did not have the heart to consign these people, whom he knew, to such a cold, dismal fate. Born and raised on a west Texas ranch, for Nick such an existence was hell on earth.
His shirt was wet with sweat, and the earl removed it, flinging it to the floor. He had been working with the laborers building a new stone wall in one of the south meadows. He had enjoyed the task—gathering the rocks from the fields and adding them to the growing wall. Unlike some of his neighbors, whose acreage was going from corn to grass without grazing livestock, the earl was increasing the use of land on all fronts. The new meadow would be turned to hay to feed his increasing herds. He was aware that agriculture was in a precarious state—he sensed the beginning of its decline. He knew he must be careful, yet Dragmore, under his efficient policies, was thriving. Nick understood that to compete with the vastly cheaper American agriculture, he would have to increase Dragmore’s efficiency. It was a challenge, a task he threw his entire heart into, one that kept him going from dawn until dusk.
They were waiting.
The earl grimly buttoned a fresh shirt. He could not put it off. They were waiting. Not for the first t
ime, he regretted the day he had ever married Patricia Weston.
She heard him coming.
Jane took a breath. The wait had been unbearable. And very rude too. She had seen him turn his back on their carriage as they entered the drive. He hadn’t even remained to greet them as a host should. Now they had sat in the yellow parlor for a good half hour, and there was still no noble presence. Jane had scanned her environs out of sheer boredom and the need to occupy herself. She had instantly noted that the parlor appeared to not have been used in a long time—or cleaned, for that matter. While everything was in perfect order, there was a thick coat of dust everywhere, and cobwebs hung in the corners of the ceiling above the heavy brocade drapes. The walls were covered in faded, aging, quite garish gold damask. Cherubs and nymphs and God only knew what else flew above them, painted on the ceiling amid blue sky and puffy clouds. The room was the epitome of bad taste. Matilda was unperturbed, sipping her tea and eating three crumpets in rapid succession. Jane had tasted the tea—foul stuff. She preferred coffee as her mother had. As for the pastries—she would never be able to get one down.
She stared at the door, hearing the soft footfall, and then it swung open. Her gaze locked with his.
Her heart stopped, jolted by his presence, then began to beat anew.
Before she had just gotten a glimpse of blue-black hair and broad shoulders. Now she was ensnared by frosty silver eyes without the least bit of warmth in them. His presence was vast, threatening. So dark. He filled the doorway. He was bronzed the color of teakwood. It made his pale eyes startling, even eerie, in the harsh, high planes of his face. And he was big. Taller than Timothy, and filled out, broad of shoulder, his hips small but strong. Jane saw, shocked, that he wore only a linen shirt casually tucked into his breeches, no vest, no jacket, no tie, and it wasn’t even buttoned all the way. She could see the flat plane of his chest, a sprinkling of black hair. His breeches were pale, tight doeskin, covering large, powerful thighs and stained with dirt and grass. His boots were muddy. He was obviously the one who had tracked the filth into the house.
He was uncouth. He was a barbarian. He was everything they said. He was so dark, she understood now where he had gotten his name. And he was staring back at her.
This realization, that he was staring back as rudely as she had been staring, made her blush hotly, and she abruptly dropped her gaze to her lap. But she could still feel his, cold, menacing— yet somehow hot too.
“I am Jane’s aunt by marriage,” Matilda was saying. “I trust you received our letter?”
“I did.”
“I’m so sorry if I’ve given you a jolt, but with my dear husband passing on, I just can’t keep Jane, and you—”
“I have no time for a ward.”
His words were hard and curt, and Jane gasped in surprise. Their gazes met again. Color flooded her. His cold eyes slipped from her face to her waist, but so rapidly she thought she must have imagined it. He turned back to Matilda. “I am sorry,” he said. It was a dismissal.
Matilda stood, growing red, but not intimidated. “I cannot handle her alone. I am an old woman. She is a trying handful, she is impulsive, reckless, always in mischief. I am returning to the parsonage. Without Jane.”
“How much do you want?”
Matilda grew redder. “I didn’t come for money! But we cared for her for almost four years, since she was fourteen. If you have the charity to pass something on, I can use it. But I cannot handle Jane,” Matilda cried with obvious conviction. “If you don’t take her I will toss her out onto the streets!”
Silence greeted this. Both pairs of eyes turned to Jane. Jane was too hurt by Matilda’s words to be enthused with the prospect of escaping both unwanted guardians, for if neither one wanted her, this was her chance. “It’s all right,” she bravely said, attempting a fragile smile. “I will go to London. I have friends there.”
“Friends! Bah!” Matilda spat. “That theater trash your mother was a part of!”
The earl wasn’t listening to Matilda. He was staring at Jane. She had the voice of an angel. He liked this situation less and less with every passing moment. He hadn’t expected this—beauty and innocence and those big blue eyes. And—she was a child. To send her to London alone would be to doom her to a life of prostitution. The factories if she was lucky. He cursed aloud. “Damn Patricia.”
Matilda gasped. Jane’s big eyes went bigger, like saucers. He looked at Matilda. He did not care what these two thought—he had long since ceased to care what anyone thought of him. Not since the trial had he given a damn about gossip. “Are you certain there are no other Westons?” But even as he spoke, he knew that, with his wife’s death, there was no one else on the Weston side to take the girl in. “What about her mother’s family?”
“There is no one but you and me,” Matilda said firmly. And then, angrily, she proceeded to tell him about Jane’s last escapade. The earl’s expression did not change, but he stared again at Jane. “Abigail Smith almost had a heart attack,” Matilda finished triumphantly. “How can I control the likes of her? I’m an old woman!”
He did not think the offense serious; in fact, had he not been so angry about the entire situation, he might have been momentarily amused. Grimly he said, “I am not equipped for this. I know nothing about raising a girl.”
“You have a son,” Matilda pointed out, smiling now, sensing victory. “He has a governess. Jane will fit right in. And, my lord, in your position you can find her a husband, quickly if you wish. Then Jane will be settled and everyone’s conscience will be relieved.”
Nick stared at Jane. She was seventeen, she was beautiful, she was a Weston. He knew very few details, other than that she was the old duke’s granddaughter. But these bare facts were enough. He could find her a husband easily. And his life would return to normal.
“Very well,” he said. “She can stay. And I will find her a husband immediately.”
“I don’t want to get married!” Jane cried.
Both heads whipped toward her. Matilda was furious, the earl surprised. His surprise faded to what appeared to be amusement, while Matilda became threatening. “What you want is of no concern,” she hissed. “Be quiet!”
Jane opened her mouth to protest—and met the earl’s intense gray stare. She swallowed her denials. She knew, in that instant, that what she wanted did not matter in the least. The earl would have his way—with them all.
4
Matilda had left.
Jane suddenly, abruptly, felt alone and abandoned. She managed a bright smile for the servant who had carried up her bags, and then he too was gone, closing the heavy rosewood door behind him. An immediate, heavy silence descended.
Jane felt it, the stabbing of hurt, of grief, of aloneness and homesickness. She swallowed the lump choking her and walked past the four-poster, silk-canopied bed to one of the crystal-paned windows. She looked outside.
The lawns stretched away in perfect lush harmony. The drive glittered like diamonds as it snaked through Dragmore, catching the reflection of the sun piercing through the heavy drizzle. Rolling hills, slick and wet, studded with sheep, cows, waving corn and wheat, undulated to the gray horizon. Heavy clouds scudded above. She could see the glimpse of a steeple—the chapel at Lessing, perhaps? And she wondered how much of all of this was Dragmore.
She was not going to get married.
She was going to become a famous actress, like her mother.
Jane turned away from the window, only to notice the black dust covering her hands from where she’d leaned on the sill. She frowned. He had an army of servants, she’d seen them, but what did they spend their time doing? Of course, it was no business of hers, and they had arrived suddenly, barely with any warning.
Had he really killed his wife?
There was a knock on the door, and Jane felt her spine stiffen, her heart freeze—thinking it was he. She was assailed with an image of his dark, harshly chiseled face and his pale, pale eyes, and then a maid poked her head in
, smiling. “Hello, mum, I’m Molly. He says you’re to take your meals with Chad and Randall in the nursery.”
A hot flush swept her. He would resign her to the nursery, would he? “And where is it?”
“It be just down the end of the hall.” The pretty, plump maid pointed. “Jake is bringing you some hot water for a bath and fresh tea. They be eatin’ at six, mum.”
Jane nodded. “All right, Molly, thank you. Please forget the tea, and bring me some coffee.” Molly’s eyes widened, but she nodded and backed out. Grimly Jane turned to face the full-length mirror standing in its walnut frame in a corner of the room. Did she appear such a child, then? She stared at herself, the crimson still staining her cheeks.
Jane was of less than average height and very petite. What she saw was her tiny figure and a white, triangular face that could have been that of some little lost urchin. Her cheekbones were high, her nose small and tipped, her lips too full for her small face. Her eyes were huge, wide now, and the bright blue of bluebells. In her plaid high-necked dress, which she wore without the customary bustle, and the blue bonnet, she looked like a twelve-year-old. Jane yanked off the bonnet and threw it onto an overstuffed chair. Piles of waving platinum hair the color of champagne spilled down her back. There was too much hair for her small frame.
And she still looked twelve.
There was no denying it, and Jane felt a sudden, intense frustration. She pictured him—the earl. The darkness, the intensity, the power. She could almost feel the heat of his presence behind her, and Jane hastily darted a glance over her shoulder. But of course the room was empty, of course she was alone. Yet she could still see him, still feel him, and something Jane could not define swept her. A frisson. Of fear … or excitement?
She turned to the mirror again. There was a bright flush upon her cheeks now. She stared. This was how he had seen her, in the frowsy, childish dress with the small, childish body. But she wasn’t a child. She was seventeen.
