The Earl's Marriage Bargain

by Louise Allen

  Just at the point where she was about to get to her feet and follow him he came out, stood for a moment with one hand on the door jamb, then strode off.

  As she picked her way over the tussocky grass she wondered what had kept him in there for so long. Was he in retreat, not just from the demands of the household and the wedding preparations, but from her, the woman he did not love but was committed to marrying? It was an unpleasant thought.

  Despite the unsettling reflections, she smiled at the detail of the little building as she came closer. There was tracery in the single window and some miniature grotesques carved under the roof—snarling beasts, strange foliage and comical characters pulling faces.

  It was dimly lit inside, the sunshine filtered through a drapery of cobwebs over the window, and she wondered afresh what had detained Ivo. There was nothing to see, nowhere to sit. Perhaps he was checking its condition. She glanced down and saw marks on the dusty floor as though someone had scooped up a handful of dry dirt. Scooped it up and... She turned slowly, studying the little room. He had spread it on the window ledge.

  Jane went outside, picked up a handful of grass and used it to sweep the ledge clear. Underneath were words carved into the soft stone. They stood out, white and sharp as though someone had just cleaned them with a knife, and she realised that was what Ivo must have been doing. Cleaning them and then covering them up. She almost brushed the dust back across them, some instinct telling her to leave well alone, not give in to curiosity, but the temptation was too great.

  Daphne, naiad of the stream,

  Beauty like sunlight,

  Love me for ever as I love you.

  Ivo

  Underneath in a different hand, was D.P. and a roughly scratched heart.

  Her immediate thought as she stood there was, This is why he did not want me walking down here. This was their special place.

  Then all the hints and comments that she had been trying to ignore, pretending to herself not to understand, or consoling herself with the thought that it was all in the past, became clear. Lord Westhaven did not want her to expect love because Ivo’s heart was already given. His aunt’s jibes had been directed at Jane as much as at Ivo—she was being compared with the golden-haired beauty whom Ivo loved.

  He had tried to save Daphne from the consequences of her elopement and she had responded by almost having him killed. The sense of betrayal must be even more acute if he still loved her. And Jane thought he must do.

  She walked out of the hermitage and back the way she had come, blind now to the butterflies and the flowers, the scent of haymaking and the warmth of the sun. She sat on the bottom step out of the ha-ha, hidden from the house, and hugged her knees for comfort.

  Ivo had loved—did love—Daphne, had tried to save her from making a dreadful mistake and had failed. In the process she, Jane, had been compromised and, being Ivo, he had proposed to her. Protectiveness seemed engrained in his character. But he had denied loving anyone else, she had asked him. She closed her eyes and thought back to the orchard and his proposal and her question.

  ‘I am not promised to anyone. You have my word on it,’ he had said. ‘There is no one who has hopes of me, upon my honour.’

  But that was not what she had asked him and he had not answered her, had avoided mentioning his own feelings. He had spoken the truth, but only part of the truth. If he had loved Daphne once but no longer, then, surely, he would have said so?

  If he no longer loved her, would he not have obliterated that inscription? It must have been vivid in his memory, because he had reacted instantly to dampen her interest in the hermitage, to give her reasons not to walk there. Perhaps he had gone to remove it, but could not bear to, so had covered it. Buried it. She shivered despite the heat.

  Daphne was lost to him now, she was married, however unsatisfactory that marriage might be. From what the lawyers had said there was no possibility of an annulment and divorce was appallingly difficult even if both parties wanted it. As it was, neither of them did.

  Jane blinked and looked up to find that it was raining out of a cloudless sky. Then she realised that the moisture on her face was tears.

  What are you crying about? she asked herself angrily, swiping at her cheeks with the back of her hand. You knew he did not love you.

  But you did not know he loved someone else, a harsh little inner voice whispered.

  Perhaps he had fallen out of love when he had discovered that Daphne was faithless, had had him beaten, might have caused his death.

  But love was not like that. Shakespeare had written, ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove,’ and the man from Stratford seemed to know about love. Ivo might fall out of love with Daphne, but that would not happen until he saw her with different eyes and realised that he had loved someone different from the woman she had become.

  Which left Jane with a question. Did she marry a man who loved another woman or call off the wedding? Her bones ached as she stood up and plodded up the steps to the lawn again, ached as though she had been ill. She put back her shoulders and made herself walk firmly.

  I am strong, she told herself. I will not weep. I will think this through and make a decision.

  She found herself by the gate into the rear yard that led to the service area and pushed it open. The yard was large and cobbled with a pump in the centre and a range of outbuildings—a wood store, an ash heap, two doors with crescents and stars cut out of them—the privies, she guessed—and some kind of workshop. Outside that was a bench and a small boy perched there, feet swinging, a row of shoes on one side of him and another row, shining and clean, on the other.

  His freckled face was screwed up in concentration as he worked blacking into the shoe he was holding and the tip of his tongue stuck out. Jane sat on a stool next to the chopping block outside the wood store and pulled out her sketchbook. Drawing helped her clear her mind and it certainly needed clarification now. After a minute she picked up the stool and moved to get a better view of the lad’s face. He was about eleven, she guessed, on the first rung of the servant hierarchy. Hall boy next, then under-footman.

  He put down the shoe and picked up its mate and Jane moved closer again. This time he saw her and shot to his feet, dropping his brush. ‘Miss?’

  ‘I’m sorry I startled you. Please sit down again. Lord Westhaven asked me to draw all the staff—did you know?’

  He shuffled back on to his seat again. ‘Mr Partridge said so, but I didn’t think it meant me, I’m only Boots.’

  ‘But that is a very important job, otherwise we would all have dirty shoes and that would be a disgrace. Just think what everyone would say if His Lordship went out in muddy boots!’

  ‘Cor, yes.’ He picked up his brush and began polishing again.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Jem Fletcher, miss. Me dad’s head groom.’

  Jane wrote Jem Fletcher, Boot Boy, in the corner of the page. ‘And you don’t want to be a groom, Jem?’

  ‘I likes horses,’ he said, ‘but I want to be like Mr Partridge, a butler in a really nobby house with a striped waistcoat and long tails, and sit at the head of the table in the Hall.’

  ‘That is very ambitious, Jem, but I am sure if you work hard you will achieve your ambition.’

  ‘That’s what me ma said and I reckons if you wants something bad enough and you do the work, you’ll get there.’ He nodded his head emphatically. ‘And Billy the hall boy is after the under-footman’s place at Colne Hall, so I reckons I’ve got a chance there if he gets it.’ He looked round, cautious. ‘Do you think I can, miss?’

  ‘Certainly I do. How would you like it if I put in a good word for you with Lord Kendall and tell him what a hard worker you are?’

  His eyes were round. ‘Yes, please, miss. Do you know him then, miss?’

  ‘I am going
to marry him,’ Jane said, suddenly certain.

  ‘If you wants something bad enough and you do the work, you’ll get there’ was not a bad motto and it might succeed in marriages as well as for ambitious small boys.

  ‘Oh, heck.’ Jem had gone pale. He got to his feet again, tugging at his forelock ‘Mr Partridge will have my hide.’

  ‘Nonsense. I will be talking to everyone and drawing them, too.’ She looked at the sketch and smiled. She was pleased with it and she thought she would pin it up in her bedchamber for when she felt low again. ‘Carry on polishing, Jem.’ As he worked she drew another study, then tore it off the pad and handed it to him. ‘Your mother might like that.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘You are very quiet, Jane,’ Ivo observed.

  They were sitting at either end of one of the sofas in the drawing room after dinner. Great-Aunt Honoria was dozing in the largest, most comfortable armchair with her feet up and Eunice was diligently working on the petit-point seat cover the Dowager fondly imagined was all her own work after she exhausted herself by setting half a dozen stitches in it before dropping off. His grandfather was playing chess with Ranwick, whose dubious pleasure it was to be invited after family dinners to be soundly thrashed by his employer and then to have his every move critically examined afterwards.

  ‘I am a little tired, that is all.’

  Her smile looked forced and he felt a pang of worry for her. Her life had been turned upside down within days and although most young women would have leapt at the chance to marry an earl—any earl—he knew that for Jane this was second best to independence and her art.

  ‘I went for a walk this afternoon and found it more draining than I had anticipated, so then I began work on my sketches with the boot boy, Jem.’

  ‘Walk? I did not see you.’ He cursed his own weakness in not obliterating that inscription, but it had seemed like the last nail in the coffin of his dead youthful dreams. He would go back tomorrow with hammer and chisel and do the job thoroughly. Unless Jane had already seen it.

  ‘I went into the park. That way.’ She gestured vaguely and Ivo released the breath he had not realised that he had been holding. She had gone in the opposite direction from the ice house and hermitage. ‘The grass was longer than I had thought and harder work, but I expect the exercise did me good.’

  ‘I will show you the best walks,’ he said. ‘The grounds staff scythe paths through the rough grass to make it easier. And we must begin our riding lessons.’

  ‘Later, I think,’ she said. ‘I have too much to think about without adding learning how to stay on a horse to the list.’

  ‘Yes, of course, it is not something to be rushed into. Tell me how the sketches are progressing. Is everyone being co-operative?’

  ‘So far, yes. I have drawn Jem, the boot boy—he is a very bright lad and he is exceedingly ambitious. Could you give him serious consideration for hall boy if Billy gets the footman’s post at... Colne Hall, is it? And I sketched Molly, the new scullery maid, who is homesick but being brave about it because she knows this is a good household and Mr Evans, the clerk, who found the whole thing very embarrassing because he is self-conscious about his ears.’

  ‘His ears?’ Ivo tried to recall what Evans looked like and realised he was having difficulty.

  ‘They stick out, so I am drawing him in half-profile and he is much more relaxed about it,’ she said. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘In half a day you have discovered the ambitions of the boot boy and the hall boy, consoled the scullery maid and set the clerk at ease. You are going to become a much-loved mistress of the house, that is clear.’ And he had not expected it and was now a trifle ashamed of himself. He had thought that Jane, not used to such a large staff, would have found the servants difficult to deal with and that she would be far too preoccupied with her art to give much thought to household management. He should have realised that to create a good portrait one must take an interest in the person you are painting. It was he who was too distracted to pay attention to the woman who would become his wife.

  ‘And that makes you smile? I suppose the prospect of domestic harmony must appeal.’

  ‘It makes me smile because I am reminded once again what a very nice person you are and what a good decision I made in proposing to you, Miss Newnham.’ She blushed and laughed a little and he reached across and took her hand, needing to touch her, feeling a strange sense of peace steal over him.

  I have done the right thing asking her to marry me, he thought and found that the peace was disturbed by a tremor of desire.

  He wanted to kiss Jane, not because she needed reassuring, or convincing, but because he wanted to. Wanted rather more than kisses.

  Jane met his gaze and he saw it there, too, an awareness, a warmth. Her fingers tightened around his and her thumb moved over his knuckles.

  It was disturbing, this feeling. He was betraying Daphne by wanting another woman and yet Daphne was not his to desire any longer and she had made it more than plain she did not love him. He could not live like a monk all his life because he could not have the woman he loved and he should be a husband in all ways for Jane, not think of her as second best.

  She was still watching him, her head tipped a little to one side, those hazel eyes questioning. She was warm and soft and innocent, yet there was steel within those feminine curves and an untapped sensuality that made his blood heat.

  ‘Jane, shall we go outside and—?’

  ‘Ha! Checkmate again.’ His grandfather was crowing over the unfortunate Ranwick’s latest defeat at the chessboard. ‘Now, where you went wrong was in your third move. If you had only played—’

  ‘You must not be afraid of him. He shouts and he blusters, but inside he is really not so bad,’ he murmured, taking the opportunity to lean close.

  ‘I like him,’ Jane whispered back. ‘He is afraid of showing what he feels, that is all. It makes him gruff. He is so proud of you—did you realise?’

  ‘What, proud? No, you must be mistaken.’ Ivo laughed off the old hurt. ‘He was angry that I joined the army. Foolish romanticism, he called it. A youthful desire to play at chivalry.’

  ‘And that is why he can recite every battle and skirmish you have been involved in and the dates, I suppose? He knows every wound you suffered, has clippings of every mention in the London Gazette. He showed me and made quite certain that I knew I was marrying a gallant soldier, a hero.’

  Ivo found that his mouth was open and closed it abruptly. His grandfather had followed his career, thought him gallant?

  ‘I had no idea,’ he managed to murmur at last. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ He swallowed, reluctant to expose a weakness, yet knowing he owed her honesty. ‘It had hurt, I will not deny it. I never thought myself a hero, that is nonsense, I was simply doing my duty. But I thought he felt I was wasting my time, playing at soldiers.’

  ‘Rough games to play,’ Jane remarked, letting go of his hand. ‘I have seen the scars.’ She leaned forward, put one hand on his shoulder and kissed his cheek. ‘Goodnight, Ivo. I think I will sleep well tonight.’

  He stood, drawing her to her feet, and bent to kiss her on the lips. ‘So will I. Goodnight, Jane.’ She went over to speak to his grandfather and Ranwick, then bent to whisper to Cousin Eunice without waking his great-aunt.

  Yes, he would sleep well, he thought, opening the door for Jane and nodding to the footman on duty in the hall to send a maid upstairs. But first he was taking a lantern, hammer and chisel down to the hermitage and erasing all traces of that inscription.

  ‘Kendall!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Before you go up to bed, there is something in that proposal for the cottage repairs from Brownlow I want to talk through. Come into the study, will you.’

  * * *

  Jane sat up in bed, the day’s sketches spread out in front of her
. She was pleased with them and planned on catching some of the more senior members of the household the next day. She should be analysing these now, looking for weaknesses, but the lines kept blurring and reforming as Ivo’s face. The way he had been looking at her... The way he looked when she told him about his grandfather. Had he really had no inkling of how the old man saw him? It seemed not. Men were strange creatures, unwilling to talk about their feelings.

  He was never going to tell her about Daphne, she knew that, so she was going to have to make up her own mind whether she was prepared to go ahead with this marriage or not. Marrying a man who was not in love with you was quite a different thing from marrying one who was in love with someone else, she was certain. But he was never going to see Daphne again, surely—not after the violent way she had reacted to his well-meaning attempts to help her. Daphne was married, unavailable, and she, Jane, was here with him.

  Ivo liked her, he felt desire for her, although she understood from Verity and her own observations that men, the strange creatures, were quite capable of desiring women they were otherwise indifferent to, or did not even know. He was kind—he had shown her how precarious her unplanned ambitions were, but had done so without patronising her. He was brave and loyal, so he would make every effort, she was certain, to put thoughts of Daphne aside once they were married.

  She trusted him, Jane realised. She had from the beginning: a large, battered, unknown male who should have been threatening, even semi-conscious. But some instinct had made her trust and she was going to rely on that now. Trust and put the work in as her youthful advisor Jem had said.

  Marriage to Ivo would give her the freedom that wealth and status afforded a woman. It came at a price—she was not walking into this blindly. If she had mistaken the man, he could confine her in the rigid role of countess and mother, stop her painting, lock her in a gilded cage.