by Mary Balogh
The memory was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat. The drizzling rain did not help.
The lake party was hurrying back to the house from the other direction, he could see. Fortunately, he had an excuse not to encounter them or have to mingle with them for a while.
“Captain,” he called. “The stables.”
And his dog, after turning to look at him as though to say, “What? Again?” nevertheless obediently changed direction. Justin followed him without a word to his companion, who held her course for the house.
Lord Brandon, I cannot think of anything whatsoever that would induce me even to consider marrying you.
Her rejection had been cutting in its brevity. And clear in its meaning beyond the shadow of any doubt.
So he had kissed her. Hard. On the mouth. With no finesse whatsoever.
He owed her an apology. At the very least. He had made one, in fact, but that was just before he kissed her. He owed her another. The trouble was that he did not want to get close enough to her for the next eternity or two to say anything at all. And he did not doubt she felt exactly the same way.
He settled Captain back at the stables, rubbing him down with a towel and cleaning his paws and underbelly. He fed him, though it was the wrong time to do so, and changed the water in his bowl, though what was already there had looked fresh.
His letter remained unanswered.
He was as far as ever from finding a countess. That list of his was quite blank. He did not know anyone.
He wanted desperately to go home. Which was laughable when he considered that the home for which he yearned was half of a poky, drafty loft in a small, dilapidated old cottage with a dreary view over a stone quarry through its windows.
Through one of its windows— the tiny square one under the eaves in the loft— Ricky was perhaps gazing at this very moment, watching for Justin even though July had come and gone and Justin had not come with it. Ricky understood simple facts. What he could not understand was changed facts or the reasons for them. He could not understand the difference between cancellation and postponement. One always had to be very specific with what one told him, for as far as Ricky was concerned, the things one told him were then facts written in stone. If they changed, he was not only disappointed; he was also distraught and quite inconsolable.
“It’s something you need to keep in mind next time you say you are coming here, Juss,” Wes Mort had dictated to Hilda, his woman, who had written the letter for him. Wes could both read and write— Justin had taught him by candlelight through one cold winter and beyond— but he was embarrassed by the slowness with which he read and the large, childish appearance of his handwriting.
Don’t tell Ricky you are coming back in July after you have finished all your stuff in London and then write to say you can’t come then after all but will come in the autumn instead, after harvest. Ricky don’t understand things like that, Juss. You said July but you didn’t come in July and now he is mortal down in the dumps. He don’t want to eat or sleep or even wash. He drags about, driving us mental, and he don’t smile no more. Hildy is threatening to leave me. (This is Hilda here, Justin. I am NOT threatening to go, how would my men do without me and where would I go anyhow, but poor Ricky is in a bad way.) In future when you are leaving here tell him goodbye and you will see him sometime when you can. I’m ready to pop you a good one and put another bend in your nose. Perhaps it will improve your looks. Come when you can, but make it soon or you may find Ricky looking after two lunatics here.
For four years Justin had lived in half that loft above Wes’s cottage. Ricky, Wes’s brother, lived in the other half. He was thirty years old now, a few years younger than Wes, and a big man, but he still had the mind of a four-or five-year-old. He was sweetness itself except when something frustrated him. Then he tended to mope and sulk and sigh and sometimes throw a tantrum. He had taken a liking to Justin from the start and considered himself Justin’s protector from all ills, real and imagined. Leaving him after a visit was never an easy thing to do.
Wes was a great bruiser of a man, all brawn and muscle and big heart— and sometimes big mouth. It was Wes who had broken Justin’s nose in a tavern brawl that had been more of a massacre than a fight between equals. Wes had jeered at him when he lay on the floor, blood pouring from his nose, eyes unfocused. He had spit to one side of him and commented that if Mr. La-di-da wanted to toughen up a bit so he could give a better account of himself in the future, he could come and work for him. In a stone quarry. His mouth had fallen open in astonishment when Justin had turned up on his doorstep two days later to inform him that here he was, reporting for work. Wes had grinned at him then.
“I did a good piece of work on that face, Mr. La-di-da,” he had said. “There is not a single part of it that is not still swollen. Except maybe your eyeballs. Even your ma wouldn’t know you.”
Justin had still been marveling that he had all his teeth. “If I can last out for a whole week of working for you,” he had told Wes grimly, “you can drop the La-di-da label. It is the way I talk. It is not going to change. My name is Justin. Justin Wiley.”
“Juss.” Ricky had been smiling sweetly from behind his brother’s shoulder. “Did you fall down and hurt yourself? Come in the house. Hildy has made some soup. Hildy’s soup is always the best. It will make you all better again.”
Wes was a foreman at the quarry. He had given Justin a job, and Justin had kept it for four years. For at least the first of those years he had been given all the hardest jobs, though that was merely a matter of degree. There was no easy job at the quarry.
And that was the home and the life for which he still sometimes found himself yearning. He had proved himself worthy of that life. He had gritted his teeth and refused to accept defeat and made himself fit in— until he no longer had to make the effort.
And now he had to find a way of sending a message that would comfort Ricky. And reassure him that he had not been forgotten. That he was still loved. And that Justin was safe even though Ricky was not here to protect him.
All the way back to the house, Estelle had been desperately hoping she would not meet anyone before she reached her room. She needed time to get her teeming thoughts and her battered emotions in order before she could even think of putting on her social face. She had just been proposed to and kissed by a man who gave her the shivers. And it was entirely her own fault. A cool No, thank you outside the house earlier when he had asked if she would like to see the summerhouse would have averted all of this. So why had she not said it?
But she had not done so and that was that. And she was not going to escape, it seemed. Even before the Earl of Brandon turned away toward the stables with his dog she both heard and saw the approach of the lake party. They were hurrying back to the house, apparently in great high spirits despite the lowering sky and the discomfort of the drizzle. So she had to don her social manner after all and greet them with answering smiles and laughter as they all dashed up the marble steps to the shelter of the portico and on into the great hall.
“You are not half as wet as we are, Lady Estelle,” Gillian Chandler observed, shaking droplets of water from her skirts. “We had that horrid rain in our faces all the way back. It did not have the courtesy to go around us.” She found her own words funny. So did everyone else.
“Those of us who wagered that there was rain in those clouds,” Mr. Frederick Ormsbury, one of the Cornish cousins, said, “ought not to have allowed ourselves to be overruled by those who insisted there was not. How much did we wager?”
“I believe that was nothing. The rain deniers were afraid to take us on,” Bertrand said to the loud amusement of all.
“Thank heaven for bonnets, I say,” Rosie Sharpe said. “Though I do wish I had not worn one of my favorites.”
“What we ought to have done,” her brother Mr. Ernest Sharpe said, “was jumped in the lake and gone for a swim. We were going to get wet anyway.”
“Ugh!” Maria said to more l
aughter.
Estelle, smiling brightly as she shook out her skirt, met her brother’s eyes. He held her look for a moment and raised his eyebrows. Was she in for a scold? For going off alone with the earl instead of staying with the main group? But he was their host. They were all at his home. She was twenty-five years old.
“You were wise, Lady Estelle, to go only as far as the summerhouse,” Angela Ormsbury said. “And you were even wiser to remain at the house, Mrs. Sharpe. Though we were all enjoying the walk exceedingly before the drizzle came on. That waterfall is breathtaking, just as Mama has always said it is.”
Mrs. Sharpe, the earl’s maternal aunt, had been waiting for them in the hall with her husband and was clucking and fussing over them and urging them to run up to their rooms to change their clothes before they caught their deaths. She had taken the liberty, she told Maria, of asking for hot chocolate and hot cider to be sent to the drawing room in half an hour’s time.
“I am so glad you did, Mrs. Sharpe,” Maria said.
“Fresh Chelsea buns straight out of the oven too,” Mr. Sharpe added. “Or so your housekeeper promised us, Maria.”
“And, Maria, dear,” Mrs. Sharpe said, “you must please call us Aunt Betty and Uncle Rowan. We are, after all, your stepaunt and -uncle, if there is such a relationship. Now, off you go. All of you.”
Even then Estelle could not fully escape. Maria slipped an arm through hers and they climbed the east staircase together while Bertrand came up behind them.
“I am sorry you felt obliged to go off to the summerhouse, Estelle, and missed the walk to the lake,” Maria said. “It was a lovely outing even if it did end prematurely with the rain. It was bad of Brandon to take you away.”
“You are enjoying the company of your guests, then?” Estelle asked.
“I have little choice,” Maria said. “They are here at my home, and it would be shockingly bad mannered of me to ignore them or treat them with disdain. And it is really not difficult to be civil. They are all very amiable. I do wonder, though, if I am being disloyal to Mama. They treated her dreadfully, you know, disowning her merely because they were jealous of her. She was so alone after Papa died and Brandon sent us away. None of them came to see her or even wrote to her.”
Estelle wondered if the late countess had written to them. But it was a subject best left alone.
“They have come now,” she said. “And it is surely a good thing that you are giving them a chance to make your acquaintance. They are your family, after all. Even Lord Brandon’s relatives on his mother’s side want to draw you into their fold and show some affection to you. They have asked to be called uncle and aunt.”
“Even Lady Maple turned against Mama,” Maria said, stopping outside her door while Bertrand went by with merely a smile for them and disappeared into his room.
“Maria,” Estelle said, taking one of her friend’s hands in both of her own. “Is it perhaps time you talked with your relatives? Asked them about what happened? It was all a long time ago, was it not? More than twenty years? They have come now to see you, and they all seem delighted to be here. Why not take the opportunity to mend some bridges, if it is possible? They are not even your bridges, are they? Talk to them. A great deal can be accomplished through frank, honest conversation. I know from personal experience. Bertrand and I were virtually estranged from our own father from the time of our mother’s death before we were one until we were seventeen. I will not burden you with details, but the whole thing got cleared up when we talked with one another eventually, honestly and from the heart.”
Maria smiled at her. “Perhaps I will do it,” she said. “Otherwise I fear we will all have a wonderful time here for a couple of weeks, and then everyone will go home, and nothing more will ever happen. Nothing will have been resolved, and nothing will have been accomplished. Though it does seem a bit disloyal.”
She shrugged and went into her room and closed the door. And finally Estelle was able to shut herself inside her own room. She set her back against the door and closed her eyes.
She had been kissed a number of times by a number of men. Some kisses had been pleasant. A few had not. But none of them— not one— had disturbed her as had that brief one in the summerhouse half an hour or so ago. None of them had shaken her to the core. And never before today had she realized that revulsion and attraction could be so similar that it was virtually impossible to distinguish the one from the other. The very look of him repulsed her. His touch made her shudder. But she was so powerfully attracted to him that she felt as though she might well be going out of her mind. He was not even handsome. Or charming. Or refined in manner. Or …
She shook her head and opened her eyes. She was damp and uncomfortable, and the thought of hot chocolate and even of a Chelsea bun, close as it must be to luncheon, was very tempting even though getting them would mean stepping into the drawing room with her social face back on. But she was going to have to do that soon enough anyway. She could not hide out here for the next two weeks.
Olga was in her dressing room and helped her out of the wet clothes and into dry ones. She also brushed and coiled Estelle’s hair, which had remained largely dry beneath her bonnet. Estelle was soon ready to leave her room, though she hoped fervently the Earl of Brandon would not be in the drawing room. Why would he not, though, when he had been away from his guests all morning so far?
Before she could leave, there was a tap on the door of her bedchamber and Bertrand let himself in without waiting for a summons. Estelle joined him there and shut the dressing room door.
The scold was not to be avoided, then, was it?
He stood against the door, his arms crossed over his chest, and looked steadily at Estelle while she smiled brightly.
“The lake and waterfall are lovely, are they?” she said. “I look forward to seeing them. The summerhouse is lovely too. There is a magnificent view to the southeast.”
He continued to gaze at her.
“What is it?” she asked a bit crossly.
“Just exactly what I was about to ask you,” he said. “What is it, Stell?”
Oh, that wretched twin connection.
“Nothing at all,” she said. “This is all going very well, is it not? I believe Maria is going to be fine without too much help from us.”
“Stell,” he said. “Did he say something or do something to upset you?”
“No, of course not,” she said. But naturally she went on to confess. “Oh, Bert, he asked me to marry him. And he kissed me.” She closed her eyes. “And a fine one I am for keeping my private business to myself. Why did there have to be two of us? Why not just one, like everyone else? Just me. Or just you.”
“It would not feel right, would it?” he said. “There would be something missing. Like half of oneself. Most people do not seem to feel it, of course. Only twins, and not even all of them. We are stuck with it. Tell me, do I need to slap a glove in his face?”
“No-o-o,” she said, and her voice came out on a bit of a wail.
“He is the Earl of Brandon,” he said. “He owns all this, and my guess is that there are pots of money with which to sustain it and a lavish lifestyle to boot. He is probably … what? Thirtyish? Not very much older than you. I saw him once at White’s Club in London when I went there with Papa. He was dining alone with Avery— the Duke of Netherby— and they seemed to be on the best of terms. Avery does not strike me as the sort who would dine with a villain or a boor.”
“Are you telling me that I ought to have accepted his proposal?” she asked.
“I take it you did not,” he said. “He is not your perfect someone, Stell?”
“He had a whole litany of very sensible reasons why I should accept his proposal,” she said. “The equality of our birth, et cetera. Oh, and my advanced age, which suggests I have been holding back for love but have not found it. Therefore, I ought to see the wisdom of forgetting about love and marrying for more sound reasons. Or something to that effect.”
“No!” His eyes laughed for a moment. “He is not a romantic, then?”
“Poof.” She made a gesture of disgust.
“But he kissed you.”
“It was horrible,” she said.
“Was it?” He tipped his head to one side and looked closely at her again. She hated it when he did that. She felt as though all her insides were laid bare to him. She felt sometimes that he knew her better than she knew herself.
“It was,” she assured him. “It was horrible.” She set the back of her hand over her mouth.
“Don’t start crying,” he said softly. “We are going to have to go down pretty soon or there will be no Chelsea buns left.”
“I am not going to cry,” she protested, and punched him in the chest.
“Good.” He stood back to open the door and offer his arm. “But I will say this for him, Stell, even if you are my sister. He has good taste.”
She laughed a bit shakily.
Ten
By the time Justin returned to the house and changed into dry clothes, his guests were gathering in the drawing room for hot drinks and light refreshments. Luncheon, his butler informed him, had been moved back half an hour at Lady Maria’s direction. The refreshments, Justin guessed, were not very light at all.
It seemed a merry enough gathering, he thought as he stood on the threshold of the room. Although almost all the younger people had fallen victim to the drizzle, which had now turned to rain, their spirits did not appear to have been dampened.
Chelsea buns, he saw as soon as he went to the sideboard to pour himself a cup of chocolate. Plump and fresh and glistening with a liberal glazing of some sugary substance. Definitely not light refreshments. Irresistible, nonetheless. He put one on a plate and looked around for a group to join. Lady Maple was up, he saw, despite the fact that she had announced quite firmly last evening that she never rose before noon. She was in the same armchair she had occupied last night. He crossed the room and seated himself close to her. He set his cup down on the table between them.
