Have You Any Rogues? (15 page)

More to the point, he couldn’t let this calamity touch anyone else.

As it had Mr. Ludwick, his man of business. Roxley’s gut clenched every time he thought of the fellow—disappearing in the middle of the night with a good portion of Roxley’s money.

Yet Ludwick wasn’t the sort. And that was the problem. There was no explanation for his abrupt departure. None.

Further, the man’s vanishing act had been followed by the revelation of a string of soured investments. Wagers began going bad. Files for the Home Office stolen from his house. None of it truly connected, yet he couldn’t help feeling that there was a thread that tied it all together, winding its evil around his life.

But who was pulling it, and why, escaped Roxley entirely.

Sensing the earl’s hesitancy, Mr. Murray pressed his case, pulling out a now familiar document.

The mortgage on Foxgrove.

The one property of his that wasn’t entailed. The one with all the income that kept the Marshoms afloat. Without Foxgrove . . .

Mr. Murray ran a stubby, ink-stained finger over the deed. “I’ve always fancied a house in the country. How is this village? This Kempton?”

“Kempton, you ask?” Roxley replied, wrenching his gaze up from the man’s covetous reach on his property. “Oh, you won’t like it. Cursed, it is.”

Mr. Murray stilled at this, then burst out in a loud, braying laugh. “I was told to expect you to be a bit of a cut-up, but that! Cursed, he says.” He laughed again, more like brayed.

Good God, Roxley could only hope Murray’s daughter didn’t laugh like that. But to keep Foxgrove . . . to keep his family out of debtor’s prison, Roxley knew he could bear almost anything.

And if he did his utmost to make this mushroom’s daughter miserable for the next forty years, he’d never have to hear that sound again.

That was, if anything, a small condolence.

“I have a mind to drive down next week,” Mr. Murray was saying. “Probably needs renovations like the rest of the piles of stones you gentry keep.”

Roxley ruffled at this. For his residences were his pride and joy. As had been his infamous luck that had kept them in good order. “Yes, well, currently my Aunt Essex lives at Foxgrove and she would be most put out to have strangers arrive at her residence.”

“Isn’t really hers, now is it?” Mr. Murray pointed out, once again running his ugly fingers along the edge of the deed.

He didn’t even want to think about it. Aunt Essex forcibly removed from the house she’d lived in most of her life. She’d have no choice but to move permanently to London.

Into the earl’s house. And without the income from Foxgrove, Aunt Eleanor in Bath, and Aunts Ophelia and Oriel at the Cottage would soon be forced to follow. All of the Marshom spinsters together. In one house. His house.

Worse than that, he’d have failed them. When they had once rescued him in his darkest hours.

He must have twitched as Mr. Murray chuckled. “Got your attention now.”

“Mr. Murray, you had my full attention when you sent me the list of my debts you were holding. But what I don’t understand is, why have you chosen to invest in me?”

Now it was Mr. Murray’s turn to still, as if he wasn’t too sure which direction to turn. But he had an answer at the ready soon enough. “Always fancied my daughter a lady, and a countess seems the right place to start.”

Roxley nearly asked if the merchant was planning on sending him to an early grave, if only to climb the noble ladder again and gain a duke for his daughter the next time around.

“And,” Murray added, as if suddenly finding the rest of his answer, “your situation is not unknown.”

Roxley sighed. That was the truest thing the man had said since the earl had entered his study.

His fall from grace and rapid descent into debt had every tongue in London wagging. Hadn’t he once told Harry as much?

There are no secrets in the
ton.

So the word had spread quickly that the Earl of Roxley was up the River Tick.

Worse, to those who’d lost to him over the years, it was a just reward to watch. And since that was most everyone, the entire
ton
seemed delighted by his plummet.

“It’s my daughter or the poorhouse with your aunts, my lord.” Murray smiled as he folded his hands atop what was the ruin of Roxley’s fortunes. “The choice is yours.”

A
fter the earl departed Mr. Murray’s study, a door concealed by a bookcase opened, and a tall, darkly clad figure stepped out.

“I did as you instructed,” Mr. Murray hurried to say. “But he won’t agree to the marriage, my lord, until he meets my daughter.”

“He’ll agree,” the man said with his usual supreme confidence.

A confidence that made Murray anxious. He didn’t like being part of all this. Blackmailing a member of the House of Lords. It was bad business all around.

But so was the man before him.

“I did as you said—” Mr. Murray repeated.

The man arched a dark brow and studied him. “Yes, you did. Perfectly.”

“Now the matter of that other issue . . .” The one that had brought Murray to the attention of this very dangerous stranger.

The man shook his head with a negligent toss of dismissal. “No. Not yet.”

“But I—” Then Murray stopped as the man’s brow arched upward.

Roxley’s last man of business, Ludwick, had gone missing. Never been found. Nor had Roxley’s money. Murray had known the man personally. Ludwick had always seemed an honest sort and certainly not the kind willing to embezzle a fortune and leave his wife and three children behind.

Murray looked up and met the other man’s gaze. A cold shiver ran down his spine, as if this fellow could read his thoughts, the questions behind his silence.

“Yes, you have done all I’ve asked,” the man assured him ever so smoothly. Like a knife in the dark sliding between one’s ribs. “You bought up all of Roxley’s debts and you’ve cornered him into this marriage”—he paused for a second—“to your delightful daughter. But our agreement will be concluded when he, and those accursed relations of his, are driven to ground and give me what is
mine
.”

The malice in that one single word left Murray with the uncomfortable feeling that he was about to soil his own drawers. He chose his next words carefully.

Very carefully.

“You must despise the earl quite a bit to go to all this trouble.” He waved a hand at the pile of notes on his desk—debts and misfortunes, Murray had no doubt, orchestrated by this deadly foe. “You must truly hate him, my lord.”

“Hate Roxley?” the man laughed. “How droll. In truth, I count him a friend.”

E
ight long months. Harriet tapped her slipper impatiently. Eight months since that unforgettable night at Owle Park and the even more memorable day which followed.

When she’d discovered Roxley had fled.

Deserted the house party.

Abandoned her.

She could continue to list his failings, but that, she’d discovered over the fall and winter that had followed with not a single word from him, hardly served.

It only reopened the wound that had torn her heart in half.

She did her best to hold the broken parts together, yet it was as if the wound was still fresh and new, filled with festering doubts.

Oh, why had she agreed to come to London?

As much as she wanted to know why Roxley had abandoned her—oh, bother, she
must
know—she wasn’t too sure she wanted to hear the truth.

But there had been Lady Essex, arriving at the Pottage and insisting that Harriet travel with her to London and Harriet’s mother happy to oblige.

The two of them had packed her traveling trunks and shoved her aboard the Marshom barouche before she’d had a chance to rally a decent objection.

Certainly the truth wasn’t an option.

Maman, Lady Essex, I have no desire to go to London and face the man who ruined me.
Oh, yes, that would have been well received.

So here she was, about to do just that—see Roxley—and whatever would she say to him?

Perhaps she could ask this Madame Sybille everyone was fawning over—a mentalist or some such nonsense. All Harriet knew was that the lady had all the matrons buzzing when she’d arrived tonight. Perhaps this mystic could read her future and reassure her that Roxley’s desertion was naught but a misunderstanding.

Harriet made an inelegant snort that drew a few censoring looks. Well, honestly, she didn’t need some charlatan’s advice, she needed help.

Glancing around, she pursed her lips. Where the devil was Tabitha? Or even Daphne, for that matter. They would know what to do.

Of course, that would also mean telling them . . . Harriet didn’t know if she could bear the shame of it.

And then, as if on cue, there was a ruffle of whispers through the crush of guests.

Harriet had to guess that not only was Tabitha here, but her infamous husband as well.

She glanced at the steps leading down into the ballroom to find the happily married Duchess of Preston standing with her arm linked in the crook of her husband’s elbow. Tabitha had defied all conventions and won the heart of the most unlikely of rakes.

Speaking of rakes, the duke and duchess had not arrived alone. Preston stepped aside and was joined at the entrance by his uncle, Lord Henry Seldon, who grinned at the matrons who regarded him and his bride with abject horror.

Daphne’s happiness rather defied the oft-repeated admonitions to young ladies all over proper society that nothing good ever came of a runaway marriage.

The former Miss Daphne Dale, now Lady Henry, flaunted evidence quite to the contrary. For not only was she gowned in a most fetching silk, her slightly wicked smile said her runaway union was very satisfying . . .

Harriet sighed with relief, feeling as if part of her burden was lifted. She had missed her dear friends ever so much. With Tabitha and Daphne married and living in London and at their husbands’ various estates, Harriet had found herself alone in Kempton, the distant village where the three of them had grown up.

Of course, not even Kempton was the same. It had been decades since a Kempton spinster had even dared to marry, let alone the centuries that had passed since one had made a marriage that hadn’t ended with the bridegroom meeting a horrific and untimely ending.

Usually on his wedding night.

And for several months after Tabitha and Daphne had married, it seemed every miss in the village had held her breath waiting for some disaster to befall Lord Henry or the Duke of Preston, or, heaven forbid, their brides.

But when neither Tabitha nor Daphne had gone mad and dashed their husbands over the head with a fire poker, there had been an emergency meeting of the Society for the Temperance and Improvement of Kempton.

Rising to her feet, the most esteemed of all the spinsters, Lady Essex, declared the curse broken.

“However can that be?” Miss Theodosia Walding asked, pushing her spectacles back up onto her nose. A bluestocking through and through, Theodosia liked her facts.

“Love,” Lady Essex announced.

“True love,” Lavinia Tempest corrected, her twin sister, Louisa, nodding in agreement.

The rest of the spinsters, who of course had heard Lavinia—one always heard Lavinia before one saw her—sighed with delight, while Theodosia frowned. She found such a fickle emotion as love or as ethereal as “true love” rather impossible to believe.

Yet, wasn’t the proof before them? Tabitha and Daphne happily married. The curse must be ended and now it was time for all the spinsters, daughters and misses of Kempton to do what had been unthinkable before: prepare a glory box and make a match.

The rush at Mrs. Welling’s dress shop had been akin to a stampede.

Not that Harriet had gotten caught up in the furor.

No, Harriet Hathaway’s heart had been lost months earlier and all the evidence suggested he’d forsaken her.

No, he couldn’t have. Not Roxley, she told herself.

It was an endless refrain she couldn’t get out of her head.

He loves me. He loves me not.

She rose up on her tiptoes to look over Preston’s tall shoulders to see if his party included one more.

Roxley.

But to her chagrin, there was no sign of the earl. No hint of his devil-may-care smile, his perfectly cut Weston jacket, or that sly look of his that said he was working on the perfect quip to leave her laughing.

Bother! Where the devil was he? Harriet’s slipper tapped anew.

“Harriet!” Tabitha called out, rushing toward her and wrapping her into a big hug. They had been best friends since childhood, and had never been separated for so long. “How I have missed you.”

“And I you,” Harriet confessed. Unfolding herself from Tabitha’s warm embrace, she smiled at Daphne. “And you as well.”

“Truly, Harriet?” Daphne said, waving her off. “I doubt very much you’ve missed me chiding you about the mud on your hem.”

Harriet pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. Truly, she hadn’t missed Daphne’s exacting fashion standards. Still, she hugged her anyway, and to her surprise, Daphne hugged her back.

“I’ve missed you,” her friend confessed. “You and your horrible Miss Darby novels.”

Harriet dashed at the hot sting of tears that seemed to come out of nowhere. It wasn’t until this moment that she realized just how lonely Kempton had become without Tabitha at the vicarage and Daphne down the lane at Dale House.

How much she wanted to tell them . . . and yet couldn’t.

“The Miss Darby novels are not horrible,” she shot back, more out of habit than not. “I just got the latest one.
Miss Darby’s Reckless Bargain
. You
must
read it. Both of you. She’s been captured by a Barbary sultan, a prince actually, and he’s about to—” Harriet came to a stop as she found her friends pressing their lips together to keep from laughing over her earnest enthusiasm for her beloved Miss Darby.

Preston and Lord Henry, after exchanging a pair of befuddled glances, begged off and went to find where Lord Knolles kept something stronger than lemonade.