Contracted as His Countess

by Louise Allen

  She wondered if she was supposed to ask how he removed them. Or where to. Madelyn resisted the temptation. She needed none of those services.

  Mr Ransome leaned back in the chair, crossed one booted leg over the other and raised an interrogative dark brow. ‘And what do you want me to do for you, Miss Aylmer?’

  Madelyn found she was not ready to tell him yet. She needed to find the courage first. Or perhaps she needed to bury her doubts about her father’s will even deeper. Her conscience was troubling her. ‘You know who I am, who my father was, why I live in a castle?’ she asked.

  She sensed rather than saw that she now had his full attention: he had studied his brief, it appeared. ‘Your father, Mr Peregrine Aylmer, was obsessed with two things, the Middle Ages and his lineage, not necessarily in that order. He inherited a large fortune and used it to restore this castle in order to create and immerse himself in a fantasy world which, I gather, he could well afford to do, given the size of his inheritance and, no doubt, his successful investments. He has recently died and you are his sole heir.’

  ‘Yes, that is all correct. There are no men of our name left. It derives from the Anglo-Saxon aethelmaer, which means famous noble. Our lineage stretches back beyond any recorded English kings, beyond any title of nobility surviving today.’

  ‘All families, even the humblest, could be traced to the beginning of time if only the records existed,’ said the man whose rejected title was a Tudor creation. She suspected that she knew the details of his family tree far better than he did. He shrugged. ‘We all go back to Adam. Some know more about their history—or the fantasies about it—than others, that is all.’

  ‘Our lineage is documented. All my father wanted was a son to hand the name down to, to continue the line, to continue his work. My mother died along with my infant brother six years ago. I have proved to be the only survivor of seven infants from two wives. He lost heart at that death.’

  ‘Is that when the obsession with this castle became intense?’ Ransome enquired coolly.

  ‘He was not obsessed,’ she protested. Father had been right, she had to believe that. Everyone was prejudiced against him. Even me, sometimes, she thought guiltily.

  She had meant to rattle Jack Ransome’s composure, but it seemed he had turned the tables on her. Madelyn lowered her voice, forced herself into her habitual calm. ‘Castle Beaupierre is a work of great scholarship, an artistic creation, bringing a lost world back. My father’s entire life was dedicated to that.’ Surely anyone could see it? Even she, knowing the cost, had no doubts about the results, and Jack Ransome was an educated man: he would understand what it had cost in time and money and devotion.

  ‘And were you a work of scholarship, a piece of art, to your father, Miss Aylmer?’

  I was a disappointment. A girl. Of course I was not a piece of art. I was... I am...a failure.

  ‘I naturally supported my father. He chose to live in an age of chivalry and beauty. A world set in the countryside of England, a world of craftsmanship. Not in a modern world of steam and speed and cities, of poverty and ugliness.’ She knew all the arguments by rote.

  ‘I see.’

  It was clearly a polite lie. The face of the man opposite her was set in a severe expression that probably hid either a sneer or a desire to laugh. The fine lines in the corners of his eyes made her think that laughter was a possibility. She had no desire to be a source of amusement to him—in fact, she dreaded it, although not as much as she feared his anger. There was so much to be frightened of, but she was not going to give way now.

  Madelyn controlled her breathing and made herself look steadily at Jack Ransome. Every report of him praised his intelligence, none spoke of irrational temper or violence, of ill-treatment of servants—not that he had many—or of either drunkenness or debauchery. He was in good health, a sportsman, which no doubt accounted for the breadth of his shoulders and the muscles revealed by tight breeches. He had turned his back on society, and in return society mocked him as Lackland or disapproved vehemently of his rejection of his title. But many of its members turned to him when they needed his help. He had friends, some unconventional by all reports, some very shady indeed.

  He was dangerous, reports said, but they were hazy about who he was a danger to, other than the aforementioned blackmailers, presumably. The judgement was that he was ruthless, but honest. Stubborn, difficult and self-contained.

  No one had reported on Jack Ransome’s looks, on that straight nose, on that firm, rather pointed jaw that gave him a slightly feline look. Certainly there had been no mention of a mouth that held the only hint of sensuous indulgence in that entire severe countenance. Other than those faint laughter lines...

  So far, so...acceptable.

  ‘You show no curiosity about why I have engaged your services, Lord... Mr Ransome.’

  ‘No doubt you will inform me in your own good time. Whether you decide to employ me or not, I will present your man of business with my fee for today and for the time I will spend travelling to and from Newmarket and for my expenses incurred en route. If you wish to expend that money on chit-chat, that is your prerogative, Miss Aylmer.’

  Very cool. Very professional, I suppose.

  Madelyn had no experience of dealing with professional men beyond Mr Lansing, her father’s steward and man of business, and he could hardly bring himself to communicate with her, he was so shocked to find himself answering to a woman. She had expected this man to show disapproval of her having no chaperon, but perhaps that was simply her lack of experience of the world beyond the castle walls, the place that held all her fears, her lost hopes.

  She stood, glad of the table edge to steady herself, and he rose, too, a good head taller than she, despite her height. ‘Please. Sit.’ The lid of the coffer creaked open until it was stopped by a retaining chain, standing as a screen between Mr Ransome and its contents. Madelyn lifted out the rolls and bundles of paper and parchment that it contained and placed them on the table in a pile at her left hand, except for one which she partly opened out. She kept her right hand on that as she sat again.

  ‘What I require, Mr Ransome, is a husband.’ She had rehearsed this and now her voice hardly shook at all. In some strange way this situation went beyond shocking and frightening into a nightmare, and nightmares were not real. Father had left careful and exact instructions and she had always obeyed him, as she did now. Even so, she kept her gaze on the parchment that crackled under her palm.

  ‘Then I fear you have approached the wrong man. I do not act as a marriage broker.’ When she looked up, Mr Ransome shifted on the carved wooden chair as though to stand again.

  ‘You do not understand, of course. I have not made myself plain. I do not require you to find me a husband. I wish you to marry me. Yourself,’ she added, just in case that was not clear enough.

  Chapter Two

  Jack Ransome did get up then. He stood looking down at her while her heart thudded, one, two, three, four. Then he sat again, slowly.

  Madelyn made herself focus on him and not on her own churning stomach. So, he was capable of being taken by surprise, of an unguarded reaction, however good he was at getting himself under control again.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have no desire to die a spinster, which means I must wed. And my father wished most particularly that I marry a man with bloodlines that can be traced back to before the Conquest, a man of impeccable breeding. He had intended approaching you with his proposition. And then he died.’

  ‘My title, for what it is worth, was granted by Henry the Eighth. The Ransome of the time had his favour for reasons I have never understood, but it was probably something thoroughly disreputable. His father had awarded us with a barony because my ancestor chose the right side at the Battle of Bosworth, but Henry the Eighth created the earldom.’

  At least he hasn’t laughed in my face or walked out.

&n
bsp; ‘There are no titles of nobility left at that date from before the sixteenth century,’ she said. If he was interested she could lecture him on the subject all morning, but somehow she did not think he was. ‘The Tudors saw to that, because the aristocracy was too closely tied by blood to the Plantagenets and so many had as good a claim to the throne as theirs. But Father traced your lineage to Sieur Edmund fitzRanulf, who fought at Hastings, and the intermarriages since then were very satisfactory to him.’

  ‘They were very satisfactory to me, considering that I am the result of them,’ Ransome said drily. ‘Virtually all aristocrats have an ancestry that can be traced in this way, not to say hundreds, if not thousands, of gentry. The College of Heralds spends its time doing just that.’ He was humouring her, she could tell.

  Earning his fee. We will see about that, she thought, stiffening her spine. She had begun now, how much worse could it get?

  ‘My father wished for an aristocratic connection. There are very few noblemen of ancient lineage who might be prevailed upon to wed me who are unmarried, of marriageable age, of good character and who are interested in women.’ He looked a question and she managed not to blush. ‘I do understand about that. There are, in fact, just seven of you at present who meet the criteria and who hold titles or are the heirs.’

  ‘Thank you for the most flattering offer, Miss Aylmer, but I am not available for stud purposes.’ Jack Ransome reached for his gloves.

  He had kept his voice level, but the crude words were used as a weapon, the first betraying sign of an emotion besides surprise. He might well talk about pride—she had apparently pricked his painfully. The lines between his nose and the corners of his mouth were suddenly apparent, as though his whole face had stiffened.

  Somehow Madelyn fought the urge to flee the room and shut herself in a turret for ten years, or however long it would take for them both to forget this conversation. But he was not the only one with verbal weapons at his disposal. ‘No? Not even if my marriage portion includes the entirety of your family’s lost lands and properties?’

  Jack Ransome stared at her, his eyes unblinking, and she knew she had his full attention now as his pupils widened until the blue eyes darkened. ‘My father, grandfather and elder brother between them broke the entail ten years ago. Over the course of eight years—the time it took all three of them to die one way or another—my father and brother managed to sell or gamble away virtually everything. I sold the last few remaining acres to pay the debts. How do you propose to restore all of that to me?’

  ‘When my mother and brother died my father sought out the men who best fitted his criteria for me. He then made it his business to discover what was most likely to make the match acceptable to them. In most cases there was nothing that he could—’ she almost said use as a lever, but managed to bite her tongue in time ‘—identify.’

  The other candidates came from families that seemed, as far as Peregrine Aylmer could discover, quite secure and likely to be wary of an alliance with Castle-Mad Aylmer’s daughter.

  But Jack Ransome had inherited an empty title and so her father had become relentless in his pursuit of the scattered lands and properties. Relentless and ruthless, she feared, not above exerting pressure on whatever weaknesses he could find to secure a purchase. Antiquarian research had given him the skills to dig deep into family cupboards to discover the skeletons they held.

  Madelyn pushed away the unsettling memories and made herself meet the dark gaze that seemed fixed on her face. ‘Father searched out every scrap of land, every building, of the lost Dersington estates and acquired them. He identified your brother first, but did not add him to the list because of his way of life. But then Lord Roderick died almost as soon as he had inherited the title and you inherited.’

  She could remember her father returning home, crowing with delight, ordering all the banners to be flown from turrets and battlements in celebration. He had found the ideal candidate and one he could exert a hold over.

  Under her left hand the stack of deeds felt as substantial as a pile of bricks. Under her right, the unfolded parchment crackled betrayingly and she forced her fingers to stillness. ‘Be grateful,’ he had told her. ‘I have found you a man free from his family’s vices and I have the shackles to bind him to you.’ She had known better than to protest that she did not want a husband who had to be coerced and shackled.

  ‘Your mother and brother died six years ago,’ Jack Ransome said blankly. ‘Six—I was twenty-one when he started looking, twenty-three when Roderick died. How did he know I would not marry someone else?’

  ‘Then your lost lands would remain in here.’ She gestured towards the chest. ‘They would be an incentive for whomever I did eventually marry. Collected together the Dersington properties make an impressive dower.’

  It was an effort to keep her voice level and dispassionate, but Madelyn thought she was managing well enough. It was what she was required to do as a dutiful daughter, she reminded herself, yet again. As Jack Ransome was keeping his temper, she found her courage rising a little. ‘Look.’ She opened out the stiff folds and slid forward the large parchment under her right hand, her fingers spread, pinning it down at the centre. ‘The deeds to Dersington Mote and its estates.’

  The document was more than five hundred years old, made from the skin of an entire young sheep. Battered seals hung from faded ribbons at the bottom, thick black writing covered it with legal Latin. The Ransomes had held the manor of Dersington since the time of the Conqueror, but their right to castellate—to build a defensible castle—had been granted by Edward II with this document. It gave them no title, not then, but it set out the boundaries and the extent of the land they held, their rights and obligations as lords of the seven manors that it comprised. It was the heart of Jack Ransome’s lost estates.

  He stared down at it, his face unreadable. Then he put out his own right hand, laid it palm down on the parchment and drew it towards him.

  Madelyn flattened her hand as she resisted the pull and his fingers slid between hers until they meshed. ‘It is quite genuine,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I can see the seals.’

  She had studied them, translated the motto embossed on them. Quid enim meus fidelis. Faithful to what is mine.

  There was a long pause. She had time to register that his hands were warm, to feel the very faintest tremor and the tension as he tried to control it, to hear the deep even breaths he took and guessed at the control he was having to exert not to tear it from her grasp.

  ‘Sell it to me.’

  ‘No. You could not afford it.’ Madelyn’s voice was almost steady. ‘Besides, I would sell all the lands and properties together, not just this one estate.’

  * * *

  His hands were shaking, try as he might to control it, and he suspected she could feel that also. Jack lifted his fingers from the parchment, away from contact with her cold touch, even though it felt as though the document would rip as he moved them. Just an illusion, of course. This was shock, he realised. A total, complete, unexpected shock, as though the massive stones beneath his feet had shifted.

  ‘So, you want to buy a husband, Miss Aylmer?’ he said, wanting to shake her poise, wanting to hit back in response to the thunderbolt she had just thrown at him.

  ‘Are not all marriages between people of breeding a matter of exchange?’ Madelyn Aylmer asked, so coolly that it was an effort to keep the masking smile on his lips. ‘They always have been, right down the ages. Titles for wealth, alliances for land, property for position. If this was the fourteenth century I would have been married off as a child for just those reasons. I cannot believe that the motives for aristocratic marriages are so different today. Or are you so resigned to your lost lands and status that you are hoping to make a love match?’

  She was not used to fighting, Jack realised, pulling himself together with what felt like a physical effort. Under all th
at careful control, those pricking questions, Madelyn Aylmer was nervous and that was probably the only thing stopping him from losing his temper. Perhaps she was not even used to talking to men who were not her father or her own staff. If that was the case, then she had guts dealing with this alone, he had to admire her for that. She could have had no idea how he would react to her revelations. Somewhere at the back of his mind was a feeling of surprise that he was not shouting, was not overturning this great slab of a table in sheer shock and frustration.

  He put his hands on the old oak, not touching the document, and let what had just happened sink in. He had been offered the chance to regain everything his father and brother Roderick had squandered, everything his sick, confused grandfather had allowed them to snatch. Everything. Land, property, status. The title. Pride.

  No, that was wrong, he told himself as the words buzzed and rang through his brain. His pride, his self-esteem, did not rest on what he owned, but on what he did. He had fought that battle with himself in the months following his brother’s death in a drunken fall down the front steps of his club as he celebrated inheriting the title. It had taken almost a week to come to terms with what he had inherited: an empty title and a mountain of debts.

  At the end of that painful struggle with reality he knew he had made the right decision—he was not going to be Lord Dersington, pitied for his vanished inheritance, sneered at for pretending to a standing he could no longer support. He would be his own man, a new man. It had not stopped the sneers, of course, it had only increased them. If there was one thing his class hated, it was someone turning their back on inherited status. It devalued the entire concept.

  Now he was being offered his birthright back and he could feel the weight of the generations it represented pressing down on him. As he stared at the parchment, something stirred deep in his soul, the flick of a dragon’s tail of possessiveness, of desire. This is mine by right.