by Mary Balogh
But Justin preferred the back with the stables and carriage house and paddock off to one side and herb and vegetable gardens half hidden behind borders of flowers destined for the urns and vases inside the house— it was filled with them. Behind the gardens were tall trees with rhododendron and azalea bushes blooming beneath them. Captain was back there, sniffing and marking out his new territory. He was more reconciled to the stables as a temporary home than he had been at the start. The groom, who had very little else to do, was lavishing a great deal of time and attention upon him, it seemed.
Justin stood on the cobbled pathway between the two halves of the garden, gazing back toward the trees. Yesterday, after talking with Miss Vane, he had repeated his invitation to Maria to come to Everleigh with him when he returned there next week, keeping alive the myth that he was asking her rather than telling her. It was her home, after all, he had reminded her. It was where she had lived until after her father—their father— died when she was fourteen. It was unfortunate that circumstances had prevented her from taking her proper place in society when she turned eighteen. But it was not by any means too late. She was only twenty now, and she was both the daughter and the sister of an earl. He would take her to London next spring for the Season and see to it that she had a suitable female to sponsor and chaperon her. In the meanwhile he would provide some company and entertainment for her during what remained of the summer and through the winter. There would be old acquaintances to renew, new ones to be made.
He had fumbled his way onward, without any help from his sister.
“No, thank you, Brandon,” she had said when he had finished making his case. “I will stay here with Melanie. She and our neighbors are all the company I need or want.”
It had been a lengthy speech for her. He suspected she was refusing the life he offered just because she had a grudge against him. She was twenty, for the love of God. It did not seem to him that there could be any robust social life to be found here.
He would have to force the issue, of course, and he suspected she knew it. He was going to have to insist, though he did wonder why. If she was content to stay here, shut away from society, gradually seeing her youth dwindle, nursing whatever grievance she had against him specifically and perhaps the world in general, then why not allow her to do so? She was a rational being and no longer a child, after all. And Miss Vane, who would probably remain in her employment if Maria stayed here, did offer her some respectability.
He could not do it. He could not allow Maria to remain here. He felt responsible for her. He was responsible for her.
He wondered again what her mother had told her about him. And their father before he died. Though he very much doubted their father had told her anything. Certainly not the truth— or the truth as he had perceived it. And his father had never told lies. He might have closed up like a clam, but he would rather have done that than utter an untruth. It had been one thing upon which he had always been firm and inflexible. Had the countess told her daughter the truth? Justin very much doubted that too. So what had she said to make Maria hate him so much?
There was no doubt that she did hate him. Without passion. The worst kind of hatred.
Could his stepmother not simply have told her that he had gone away, as young men will, to explore the world and sow some wild oats before it became necessary to settle down? Maria might still have ended up hating him, but surely with passion. She would be raging against him for neglecting and abandoning her. For not even saying goodbye.
Of course that explanation, if her mother had given it, would no longer have sufficed when, six years ago, he had not returned home after their father’s death. He had not returned, in fact, until well after he had given the command that the countess remove here to Prospect Hall.
Captain was dashing down the path toward him, woofing, and Justin became aware of the sound of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels.
“Sit, Cap,” he said, and his dog obeyed, but not without looking reproachfully at him, all panting intelligence and eagerness to be gone to investigate this new excitement.
The carriage did not come along the side of the house to the stables. It must have stopped at the front of the house, then. The groom was striding out of the stables and going in that direction. Maria had a visitor— her first since his arrival.
He stayed where he was for a few minutes. The last thing he felt like doing was being sociable to a stranger. However, he was the owner of Prospect Hall. He was Maria’s brother and guardian. It would not do for her visitor to discover that he had remained skulking back here throughout the visit. He turned and strode off toward the stables, where he left Captain in his stall— it was spread with fresh straw and the water bowl had been filled, he saw— and nodded to the groom, who was leading a horse and gig toward the stables.
Justin let himself into the house by the front door. There were two hats on the side table, a tall-crowned man’s hat and a fashionable bonnet with matching kid gloves. A couple, then. There was no sign of any servant. He proceeded to the sitting room and let himself in without knocking. Conversation, which had sounded cheerful and lively, stopped abruptly as the four occupants of the room, all still on their feet, turned to look at him.
The visitors were a man and a woman, both young, probably in their middle twenties, both smartly dressed in what he recognized as the first stare of fashion. The man was tall, dark, slim, and elegant. The woman was his feminine counterpart. And extremely, vividly lovely. There was a moment, a fraction of a moment, when he did not recognize her. Then he did. Perhaps it was the startled look upon her face, quickly suppressed.
“The Earl of Brandon,” Maria said by way of introduction, without adding any explanation of his relationship to her. But perhaps they knew? Surely they did, in fact. “Viscount Watley, Brandon. And Lady Estelle Lamarr.”
Not husband and wife, then. But he would have known it anyway. They were clearly brother and sister. No. More than that. There was something about them … They were somehow like two halves of a whole, masculine and feminine in perfect balance with each other. He would bet his fortune on it that they were twins.
“Brandon?” Watley inclined his head with easy courtesy and smiled. “Lady Maria’s brother, I believe?”
“Half brother,” Maria said.
Lady Estelle Lamarr acknowledged him with a nod of the head. No curtsy. Face like a mask.
And Justin, who might have said or done any number of things to set them all at their ease— like stepping forward with a smile of his own and an outstretched hand, for example, and some remark that would require a response— said and did nothing beyond making the pair a slight stiff bow.
Three
Well, that was awkward,” Bertrand said cheerfully as he guided the horse and gig through the gates and onto the road home, leaving Prospect Hall behind them. “Are you sure we stayed for only half an hour, Stell? It felt more like three and a half.”
“Poor Maria,” Estelle said. “She does not seem at all happy to see her brother, does she? Half brother, to be more accurate. I cannot say I blame her. I have rarely if ever met a more morose man.”
The only thing she might say in his favor was that he had made no mention of that ghastly encounter by the river the day before yesterday. Not by the merest twitching of an eyebrow had he betrayed any sign of recognition. Perhaps he really had not recognized her.
“What with Lady Maria sulking and Miss Vane playing the part of demure, near-mute companion and Brandon seemingly never having grasped the concept of making polite conversation, it was dashed hard going,” Bertrand said. “It is a good thing Miss Vane did at least open her mouth long enough to ask about Aunt Jane, Uncle Charles, and Ellen, and we were able to give an exhaustive account of their long-drawn-out departure. Lady Maria actually smiled when you described the prayer meeting.”
“It may be a little unfair to say she was sulking, Bert,” Estelle said. “I would say she was displaying a dignified sort of displeasure with her
half brother without being openly ill-mannered about it. They must have quarreled. Not just now, I mean. Years ago. We have always suspected it. How could we not when everyone hereabouts was eager enough to inform us two years ago when we came back to live at Elm Court that Lady Brandon and Maria had not chosen to move here after the late earl’s passing but had been commanded to come by the new earl? Neither of us puts a great deal of trust in unsubstantiated rumor, but it did seem troubling that the earl did not once come here in person while the countess lay dying. Yet she was his stepmother. Nor did he come afterward to comfort his sister or attend her mother’s funeral. Maria herself has never spoken a word about her life before she came here, or about why she and the countess came. She has never made mention of her brother— not in my hearing, anyway. None of it has been normal.”
“It is a bit strange that we had not set eyes upon him before today, either here or anywhere else,” Bertrand said. “He has had the title for a number of years now, and someone mentioned— it might have been Papa or Avery— that he has taken his place in the House of Lords. That means he must have been in London.”
“But never at any of the social events we attended,” she said. “I would not have forgotten that face if I had seen it before. It is really quite unpleasant. Almost menacing. I wonder how he broke his nose.”
Bertrand laughed. “That detail has escaped the notice of the gossips hereabouts,” he said as he slowed the horse and steered the gig skillfully over the stone bridge, having chosen the scenic route home, bumpy though the track was in parts. “It is amazing the breaking of the aristocratic nose does not have a story of its own. There are enough other stories to lift the hairs along the back of one’s neck and remind one to keep the doors locked at night.”
The stories about the wicked earl were still resurrected by the gossips whenever there was little other news to enliven conversation. He was said to have left home at the command of his father, the late earl, several years before he succeeded to the title. He was said to have indulged in every vice and debauchery known to mankind both before and after his banishment. It was even said that he had spent a few years at hard labor in some particularly notorious jail in the north of England. It was all wild conjecture, of course. No one had any hard facts or credible witnesses to substantiate the rumors. For the past six years he had been the Earl of Brandon and had apparently settled down to a life of sober respectability. Though no one was sure even of that, since he had never come here and no one had ever run into him in London or elsewhere.
“I suppose,” Bertrand added, “no one knew about the nose in order to invent a story to account for it. That will soon be rectified, I am sure. I am betting on a jail yard brawl.”
“Surely not all the stories we have been told can be untrue,” Estelle said. “Or can they? Having seen the man today and spent half an hour in his company, I must confess I am half inclined to believe everything. Including the prison story. He looks like a thoroughly bad lot. Yet poor Maria cannot even ask him to leave. He owns Prospect Hall. I wonder if he is her guardian. I suppose he must be, though she has never said. She is only twenty, after all.”
There was indeed a hardness to the look of him, and it was not just his broken nose. It was his dark hair and dark, unfathomable eyes, several shades darker than her own and Bertrand’s— chocolate without the cream— and his weather-bronzed, harsh-featured face. It was his massive size, which seemed to owe nothing at all to fat but everything to muscle. Not the sort of muscle acquired by participation in gentlemanly sports, however, but the sort that came from manual labor. He looked like an impostor in his elegant gentleman’s attire. He did not behave entirely like a gentleman either. He had no easy, sociable smiles, no conversation. Estelle was sure he had not strung more than five words together during their entire visit. He had not uttered a word of apology to her during their first encounter, though it must have been clear to him that his dog had scared her out of her wits.
“How disappointing for you, Stell,” Bertrand said, turning his head to grin at her. “You were presented today with the unexpected opportunity of meeting someone new, a single gentleman, an earl no less, a man both eligible and below the age of sixty. But he does not fit your image of the perfect husband. He is missing a few attributes.”
“Make that all attributes,” she said.
“You cannot adjust your expectations?” he asked, still grinning.
“Alas, I cannot,” she said with a sigh. “I might forgive him for being tall and dark, but … No, Bert, it seems that I have become stuck in my ways in my old age. I must have blue eyes and a straight nose and a kindly manner.”
“Mere trivialities,” he said. “You are headed for eternal spinsterhood, Stell. Though I must confess I would not enjoy having a brother-in-law with such nonexistent conversation.”
“Oh, Bert,” she said. “Did you see his hands? They are huge. And callused.”
“It is what results from unraveling all those hemp ropes in jail,” he said. “But picture this, Stell. You could sit beside him on a love seat in your boudoir, rubbing a soothing salve into his hands while he entertains you with stories from his shady past. No? It does not sound like marital bliss to you? You do not think you could get more than two words at a time out of him?”
She punched him on the arm, and the gig swayed a bit drunkenly before he regained control of the ribbons. Estelle shrieked and her brother laughed.
But really, poor Maria! Exactly why had he come now, when he had never come before?
Estelle and Bertrand had called upon Maria two years ago, as they had upon all their neighbors, to make her acquaintance. She had been an eighteen-year-old then, thinner and paler even than she was now, but self-possessed and mature beyond her years and devoted to her severely ailing mother, whose declining health had already confined her to her own suite of rooms though she had not yet been totally bedridden. They had never met the countess, as she had stopped receiving visitors. The neighbors described her as a beautiful woman who always hated to be seen before she had spent hours with her maid making herself look perfect.
Maria had insisted upon caring for her mother herself, though it must have been an increasingly difficult task. She had dismissed a number of nurses who had come from an agency because they were not tender enough with their patient and caused her more distress than comfort. Or so Maria had claimed. Estelle had often wondered if it was in fact the countess herself who had sent them away. If it was, it had been extremely selfish of her. Though it was perhaps wrong to judge someone who had been very ill, when she, Estelle, had always enjoyed good health.
Estelle had returned to Prospect Hall at least once a week after that initial visit, at first out of pity for a young neighbor who must have been getting very little pleasure out of life, but then out of genuine friendship. If Maria was upstairs, tending the invalid, as she often was, Estelle would spend half an hour talking with Melanie Vane, the governess turned companion, a sensible woman who obviously felt a deep attachment to her charge. Though no, Miss Vane had said in answer to a question Bertrand had asked one day when he had been with Estelle, she did not help at all in the sickroom. Maria preferred to do all that needed doing herself.
By which Estelle had suspected that the countess preferred it. Or demanded it. Maria had never given the slightest hint of anything but total affection for and devotion to her mother, however.
Now, at the age of twenty, released from her duties in the sickroom and the year of her mourning at an end, Maria still looked fragile and probably appeared shy to anyone who did not know her. Actually she was neither, and Estelle was very fond of her. But she was still a minor, and there was something not quite proper about her living without the chaperonage of someone older than Melanie, who was close to Estelle in age. If the Earl of Brandon really was her guardian, then possibly he had plans for her. Marriage, perhaps. Did he have someone specific picked out for her? She would hate it if he did.
But there was nothing Estelle could do
about it.
The Reverend Mott and some of the more socially prominent local families called at Prospect Hall over the next week to pay their respects to the Earl of Brandon, having heard he was in residence and never having met him before. More than one of them slipped that last fact quite deliberately into conversation, it seemed to Justin, as though to reproach him for neglecting his duty— to the countess, perhaps. To his sister, probably. To them, maybe. His father had made a point of coming here once a year and staying a couple of weeks in order to inspect the property and call upon his neighbors and even entertain some of them. He had been an affable sort, Justin’s father, well liked and well respected wherever he went.
Justin accepted a couple of invitations to dine and took Maria with him. It was somewhat reassuring to discover that she had not been obliged to live here as a near hermit. There were a few genteel families with whom she could and did socialize, it seemed, though he did learn that during the final years of her mother’s illness and the year since her death she had not left the hall for anything except Sunday service at church, and not always even then.
There were very few young people of an age approximate to hers in the neighborhood. Most of the young ladies were either married or still in the schoolroom. Most of the young men were absent— at school or university or kicking their heels elsewhere— though their parents spoke fondly of them and their promising prospects. Justin had the feeling one or two of them might have been summoned home if the parents had been given advance notice of his coming. Maria was very eligible, after all.
But it was really quite improper for her to be here all alone except for Miss Vane, who was not herself much older than her charge. He could not in all conscience allow his sister to remain here. He had known that before he came, of course, but now it was glaringly obvious. She did not even look twenty. She could pass for a girl of sixteen. She was going to have to return to Everleigh with him, whether she liked it or not.
