Reunited at the King's Court

by Helen Dickson

‘It would appear someone is in residence,’ Arlette said.

  ‘So it does. I’m curious as to who it can be.’

  Arlette turned her head and, reaching out, took his hand. ‘I never thought this moment would come,’ she said with feeling. ‘When I last saw Mayfield I was with you. I never thought we would return together. I feel that this is a special moment for us. It seems we have come full circle.’

  Leading their horses, they walked closer. The door opened and a man stepped out.

  ‘Thomas!’ Arlette gasped. ‘Oh, see, William. It’s Thomas.’

  Immediately she took to her feet and, holding her skirts high, she ran towards him. Thomas had clearly recognised her and, after a moment’s pause, he hurried to meet her halfway, lifting her off her feet into his arms and swinging her round before planting her in front of him and taking her face between his hands.

  ‘Arlette, I cannot believe it is you. Why—just look at you—all grown up.’ He hugged her again before looking beyond her to her companion. His mouth broke into a broad smile. ‘William? William, you made it.’ Breaking his sister’s embrace, he covered the distance between them, sweeping the taller man into his arms.

  ‘Arlette is my wife, Thomas,’ William proudly informed him when they finally drew apart. They had parted on the most wretched of days when they had been taken prisoner after Worcester and the feelings and memories this evoked moved them both. ‘We are on our way to Arlington Court, but we could not pass so close to Mayfield without coming here. We knew you were to return, but had no idea you would be here already and that you appear to have taken up residence.’

  ‘I arrived three weeks ago and, as you will see, there is much to do.’ He looked at his close friend who had his arm about his sister’s waist and burst out laughing, which lightened the moment. ‘Good Lord! Look at the two of you. Married! That is good news, indeed, but Arlette is still a girl to me.’

  ‘If you think that, then your eyesight is sadly impaired, Thomas,’ William said, giving him a brief, rakish smile. ‘Your sister is a beauty, a rare jewel and quite unique, and I strongly suspect that she has the courage to pit her will against any man—including me. I have also discovered she has a temper and an unpredictable disposition, is wilful and often argumentative.’ This earned him a mock scowl from his wife and amusement from Thomas.

  ‘That is our father’s fault. Being the youngest she was his pet. He indulged her every whim and allowed her far too much freedom.’ He gave his sister a hug to soften his words.

  ‘Before you say anything else, Thomas, it’s worth bearing in mind that I am now your brother-in-law.’

  Thomas grinned and winked. ‘Now that is something to celebrate, as well as your marriage. After so many bleak years and the end of the Commonwealth, it is time for celebrations. A new age is upon us. The King sits upon his throne and England is at peace. Whether Charles Stuart will be a good king only time will tell. But come inside. Constance, my wife, is just putting our son down for a nap.’

  They sat in the hall with the sun shining through the diamond-paned windows, lighting up the hall, and, with her brother’s presence, memories assailed Arlette, reminding her of happier times, a house that had held much laughter and love.

  ‘I can’t believe we’re here at last,’ she whispered.

  Reading her mind, Thomas smiled at her. ‘As soon as I arrived in Oxford, discovering the house had been sequestered and the family living in it deceased, I went to see our lawyer to lay claim to the estate and set things in motion to have it returned to our family.’

  ‘So is it official, Thomas?’ Arlette asked.

  ‘It is. The estate is back in our hands. Now,’ he said, looking towards the stairs and getting to his feet when a smiling young woman appeared, ‘here’s Constance.’

  Epilogue

  They had stayed at Mayfield Hall one week before setting off for Arlington Court. Arlette was overwhelmed when she saw Blanche again, much older but still the same loving woman who had been more like a mother to her in the past. Her nephew was an adorable child and, before leaving for Arlington Court, they promised to visit often.

  Arlington Court was a large, lovely old Tudor house with turrets and tall chimneys in the Warwickshire countryside. Arlette loved it at once and the turmoil of emotion and events of the past weeks were put behind them. The previous unwelcome occupant had moved back to London, hoping to escape the King’s retribution for being a man who had been one of those responsible for his father’s execution.

  Arlette settled down into her new home, knowing she had so much to look forward to.

  * * *

  Hester and Marian wrote often with news of London. Sir Ralph Crompton, who had married a wealthy widow close to his age, had turned his back on Richard after calling in the debt. Richard, whose business was thriving under the patronage of returned Royalists and the generous settlement William had given him on his marriage to Arlette, paid it in full. Hester and Marian were both delivered of their babies in the same week. Hester had a son and Marian a daughter James doted on. In the months that followed, to Arlette’s delight she conceived their first child. It soon became evident, after their son was born and then left babyhood behind, that he had inherited his father’s charm as well as his looks.

  William walked arm in arm with Arlette in the garden in the evening quiet, their young son running ahead of them on wobbly legs. Bees and insects hummed and butterflies flitted among the flowers. Apricots and pear trees espaliered against the warm brick hung with golden fruit. They spoke of many things—of their home and the King and their lives at Arlington Court. They spoke of their second child that was growing in Arlette and soon, before too long, they would go to Mayfield Hall to visit Thomas and Constance. Hester and Marian and their respective families were to join them. It was to be the first family gathering since Thomas had come home.

  * * *

  ‘You’re excited about going to Mayfield, Arlette, and naturally so,’ William said.

  ‘I cannot wait to see Hester and Marian. It seems so long since we left London. It will be a happy family gathering. The children will inject new life into the old place. And soon there will be another. Have you thought of whether you’d like a son or a daughter this time?’

  William’s gaze did a sweep of her expanding belly. ‘I haven’t given it serious thought. I’d like to have at least one of each. A daughter who looks like you would be nice.’

  They paused and looked proudly at their son and then faced each other. With the old glint in his eye and the familiar sardonic smile, William cupped her face in his hand and gently kissed her lips, a kiss filled with both promise and content. It filled her with a sweet melody, a blending harmony of memory and desire that defied the telling because words were not enough to capture or define.

  Arlette smiled. ‘I love you, William.’

  ‘And I you, my love. Never doubt it.’

  * * *

  If you enjoyed this story, why not

  check out these other great reads by

  Helen Dickson

  The Foundling Bride

  Carrying the Gentleman’s Secret

  A Vow for an Heiress

  The Governess’s Scandalous Marriage

  Keep reading for an excerpt from The Inconvenient Elmswood Marriage by Marguerite Kaye.

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  The Inconvenient Elmswood Marriage

  by Marguerite Kaye

  Prologue

  Elmswood Manor, Shropshire, April 1820

  Kate glanced nervously at the tarnished mantel clock. Like everything else around here it had seen better days. It told her that it was fifteen minutes to the allotted start time of what she hoped would be her life-changing appointment. One minute less than when she had last checked.

  She adjusted the blotter so that it sat perfectly in the middle of the desk, then straightened the ledger so that it sat square on the blotter. Next, she placed the annual accounts summary she had drawn up on top of the ledger. Finally, she ran a hand nervously over her hair, which she had pinned tightly up in an attempt to project a mature, businesslike demeanour, though her bedroom mirror had reflected something more reminiscent of a frightened rabbit. Then she glanced over at the clock again.

  It didn’t seem to have moved. Had it stopped? But she’d wound it up yesterday evening, as she did at the same time every night, as Papa had been in the habit of doing, and she could hear it ticking slowly and softly, just as it had always done.

  She felt sick. Was she really going to put her outrageous proposition to a virtual stranger? No, not outrageous. She mustn’t think of it in those terms or she’d come over as an irrational fantasist. It was actually a common-sense suggestion rooted in practicality, one she had evaluated from every angle in the long weeks spent awaiting this much-heralded return, while her future, her father’s security and the fate of every one of the estate’s tenants and those few staff that remained were left hanging in the balance.

  Pushing back the worn leather wing-backed chair, Kate edged out from behind the huge desk that dominated the Estate Office to risk a glance out of the window. The office was located at the far end of a row of outbuildings, behind what had once been the kitchen gardens, with an excellent view in all directions. If he was coming from the stables, walking around from the front entrance or any of the rooms that opened onto the terrace at the rear, she’d see him approach.

  And he would turn up, she reassured herself, he had asked for the appointment himself, hadn’t he?

  Though the appointment had actually been made with her father—for the new Lord Elmswood seemed to be uniquely unaware that his lands were being managed by his estate manager’s daughter.

  Kate returned to the desk and retrieved the note from under the blotter, but the brief informal scrawl told her nothing more than she already knew or had surmised.

  Sir,

  With regard to the settling of my late father’s estate, which I have perforce returned to England to oversee, I anticipate that I will have completed all necessary business with my lawyer in London by the sixteenth of this month. I will then travel to Shropshire, arriving at Elmswood on the seventeenth.

  I assume it will be convenient for you to meet with me on the eighteenth in the Estate Office at ten o’clock that morning, with a view to formally resolving the issue of your continued stewardship and any residual outstanding business.

  I would appreciate it if you could do everything possible to expedite matters, as I am extremely eager to return to my own pressing business abroad.

  Yours respectfully,

  Daniel Fairfax

  Fairfax, she noted. He didn’t use his new title. He had clearly returned reluctantly, for the briefest period possible. How would he feel, knowing he would never see his father again? There was no trace of any emotion in that note save impatience. Her own dear papa’s slow decline over the last few years had forced her to face the reality of his mortality, but she didn’t for a moment imagine that when the time came it would be anything other than a terrible blow to lose him. It seemed to be a very different matter for Daniel Fairfax, who could probably count on one hand the number of weeks he’d spent as an adult in his father’s company.

  He was twenty-eight years old. She’d known him—or of him—all her life, for, like him, she had been born on the estate, though, unlike him, she had never had any desire to live anywhere else. He was six years her senior. Though she knew from her father that he had been a sickly child, and educated at home as a little boy, by the time she’d been old enough to perch in front of Papa in the saddle as he rode around the estates on his regular inspections, or sit here in this office, drawing happily while he attended to estate business, Daniel Fairfax had been a boarder at a prestigious school.

  As a result, for most of the year, Kate had been able to pretend that the grounds of Elmswood Manor belonged exclusively to her. When he came home for the school holidays she would catch the occasional glimpse of him, swimming in the lake or setting out on his pony from the stables, but those encounters had been rare. She’d had no idea what he did all day, or where he went, and his awareness of her had been confined to an absent, uninterested nod as he’d passed purposefully in the opposite direction. Though he was, in effect, like her, an only child, he’d seemed perfectly content in his own company. She couldn’t recall him ever having friends to stay, save once, and that hadn’t been a school friend but some sort of tutor.

  During the last school holiday he had spent at Elmswood he’d left, before it was over, when he was sixteen to Kate’s ten, not to return to school but to go to London to take up a position at the Admiralty. When he’d next returned, on reaching his majority, after an absence of five years, he had left both the Admiralty and his youth behind. The deeply tanned young man she had encountered one morning, staring grim-faced at the lake, had been a rather intimidating and fiercely attractive stranger who’d left Kate embarrassingly tongue-tied.

  Where he had been in the intervening years not even Papa knew, and it had only been after he’d left—a long time after he’d left—that Lord Elmswood had revealed his son was off ‘exploring the world’. And, the world being a very big place, it had seemed unlikely that he would return any time soon.

  ‘Any time soon’ had turned into never. If there had been letters, old Lord Elmswood had kept the contents to himself. On his death, it had seemed like a minor miracle when his lawyer had revealed that he knew how to contact the heir, and a miracle of considerably larger proportions when he’d sent word to Elmswood to inform Papa that the man himself had actually arrived in London.

  But, regardless of the fact that he’d inherited an estate and an earldom, Kate was willing to stake her life on Daniel Fairfax, nomadic explorer, heading back to his life of wandering the far-flung corners of the world as soon as he possibly could.

  In fact, she thought wryly, she was banking on him doing exactly that, even though she knew almost nothing of him. She was taking a leap of faith, but he was Lord Elmswood’s son, after all, and she’d heard nothing to suggest he was in any way of dubious character or unsavoury temperament. In any event, if her plan came to fruition she wouldn’t have to put that assumption to the test, since she was unlikely to see hide nor hair of him for the foreseeable future.

  ‘Excuse me, I have an appointment to meet Mr Wilson.’

  ‘Lord Elmswood!’ Kate scrabbled to her feet.

  Daniel Fairfax, for it was unmistakably he, stood in the doorway, eyeing her quizzically. ‘This is still the Estate Office, I assume?’

  ‘Yes, you are in the right place. I am Mr Wilson’s daughter, I—’

  Kate broke off, blushing. Dammit! Cool, calm and collected was what she needed to be, not a simpering miss! Daniel Fairfax might be a self-confident man of the world, and she might be a country hick, but she was a country hick who knew his estates like the back of her hand, and he needed her—even though he didn’t know it yet.

  ‘Lord Elmswood. You clearly don’t remember me. I am Kate Wilson. How do you do?’

  ‘Miss Wilson? Well, I never! The last time I clapped eyes on you, I’m sure you had pigtails and freckles.’

  ‘I
was almost fifteen the last time you were home, and I have not worn my hair in pigtails since I was ten.’

  ‘Really? Good Lord, that makes you—what?—twenty-two? How did that happen?’

  ‘By the simple process of aging. It affects us all, unfortunately.’

  ‘Well, the passing years have certainly done you no harm, if you don’t mind my saying so. I hardly recognised you.’

  ‘Since you have, in all the years I’ve lived here, barely acknowledged me,’ Kate retorted, flustered, ‘that is not really surprising. I’ve not changed so very much in seven years.’

  ‘You’re quite wrong. But I can see I’ve touched a nerve. I hadn’t thought myself rude, not even as a sulky youth, but clearly I was. Please accept my belated apologies.’

  ‘You were not rude. It’s not surprising that I barely registered with you, given that you were six years older than me and—’

  ‘I still am.’

  ‘The gap is more of a chasm when one is younger.’

  ‘True, but I apologise for my ill-mannered younger self all the same.’ Daniel Fairfax glanced at the clock. ‘I thought your father was expecting me? Didn’t he receive my note?’

  ‘He did,’ Kate said, belatedly remembering her carefully rehearsed plan for this meeting. ‘On behalf of my father and myself, Lord Elmswood, may I offer our condolences on your loss?’

  ‘You’ve already done so—or your father has, in a letter. I understand I have him to thank for organising the funeral too. I’m told it was very well-attended. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, but by the time I had word of my father’s accident he was already dead and buried, and it took me the best part of six weeks to get myself back to England. Is Mr Wilson intending to meet me this morning or not?’

  ‘I’m afraid he is indisposed, but I believe I can settle all the necessary business on his behalf.’

  ‘Without wishing to be rude, Miss Wilson, my business is with Elmswood’s estate manager. Perhaps it would be better for me to return when your father is feeling better—tomorrow, perhaps?’