Love's Promise (2 page)

“In a few days.”

“See that you do.” The Duke nodded, delighted to have gotten his way, but quickly, he sobered. “Now then, have you had a chance to talk with Phillip?”

“Yes.”

“And...?”

“He can’t help you. His father is determined to collect what you owe.”

“Dammit!” the Duke seethed.

Phillip Sinclair and Michael had been friends since they were boys, but their fathers were bitter enemies. Michael wasn’t certain what had initially caused their rift, but it was rumored that Phillip’s father—a notorious rake and scoundrel—had seduced one of the Duke’s mistresses.

Their animosity was legendary, and the Duke had been stupid enough to gamble for high stakes with the man, even though he was renowned as a cheat. The amount of the loss had been the final straw in the Duke’s fiscal house of cards.

If the debt wasn’t forgiven, the Duke would be bankrupt, which had to be prevented at all costs. Michael wasn’t concerned over the Duke’s predicament—his misery was deserved—but if the Duke was destroyed, others would be destroyed along with him.

Property would have to be sold, farms would lie fallow, and employees would be let go. Most terrible of all, Anne’s dowry would never be restored, so she could never marry and would be forever trapped in their father’s web. Michael couldn’t sentence her to such a dire fate.

He had his own money, and his own estate—Henley Hall—but his income was a drop in the bucket compared to the sums required to save those whom the Duke would abandon without a backward glance.

A wealthy wife was the solution, and the Duke should have been the one looking for a bride, but he never would. He believed that he could force the world to do his bidding, that credit could be perpetually extended and markers never called in.

“What about Rebecca Talbot?” the Duke inquired, honing in on the very topic Michael had just been pondering. “Her father asked me again. What should I say? Will you offer for her?”

Rebecca was a twenty-year-old beauty and heiress, whom everyone assumed Michael would marry. Though she was British in nationality, and her father an earl, she was descended from Russian royalty, her mother having been a princess in some small principality that Michael couldn’t pronounce.

She was also rich as Croesus, which elevated her far above the other available girls. He could wed her immediately, could have all of her pretty cash in his bank account the moment the ceremony was concluded, yet he chafed at the notion.

She had been his brother’s fiancée, and with John’s death, Michael felt as if he’d come in second in a race, or was the prize for second place.

Six months earlier, she wouldn’t have had him for a husband, but she was eager to be a duchess someday, so she’d changed her mind. It was infuriating, and Michael was tempted to refuse the match—merely to annoy her—but he couldn’t postpone matrimony as John had done either.

Michael was the Duke’s only remaining male child, so the dukedom was at stake. The family’s status and position was at risk by even the slightest action or inaction on Michael’s part.

“I’ll think about it while I’m gone,” he said, delaying the inevitable, “and upon my return, I’ll give you my answer.”

“If you spurn her, I’ll expect you to select an appropriate alternative and be wed by Yuletide.”

“I aim to please.”

Michael spun and left, and as he started down the hall, Anne was loitering in the shadows and watching for him.

“What is it?” he asked.

“If you steal that boy from his mother, I’ll never forgive you.”

“Anne, you’ve heard about their plight. Thomas will be better off living with us; he’ll have everything he needs. He’s John’s son! We agreed.”

“I understand that, Michael, but there’s a thoughtful way to do it, and there’s a malicious way to do it. Which will you choose, I wonder?”

“I will be as considerate as circumstances allow.”

He couldn’t promise much more than that. Despite how Anne yearned for a tender separation, Thomas was the only grandson of the Duke of Clarendon. As such, he couldn’t be permitted to wallow in poverty, and he had to be properly educated and reared as befitted his new station.

In the end, what the mother or the aunt wanted was irrelevant. Michael would do as the Duke had ordered, would do what was best for the family—and for Thomas. If that meant a bit of conniving or deceit, so be it.

He would have his way; he always did. In that, he and the Duke were exactly alike.

CHAPTER TWO

“Where are you off to now, Fanny?”

Frances Carrington, called Fanny by her family, glanced over at her sister, Camilla. Though Fanny was twenty and Camilla twenty-five, Camilla acted like a petulant adolescent, and Fanny often felt as if she was Camilla’s mother.

“It’s so beautiful outside. I thought I’d walk to the village.”

“You just went yesterday,” Camilla complained. “I swear, you’re restless as a hen when the fox is lurking. What’s the matter with you?”

“The vicar’s wife is supposed to pay me for the mending I completed.”

“How can you take that old biddy’s charity?”

“It’s not
charity
. I worked hard on that sewing, and I won’t apologize for it.”

“Aren’t you a bloody saint?”

It was a constant quarrel between them. Camilla wouldn’t lift a finger to earn any money, despite how dire their situation, but she was quick to criticize when Fanny did anything that might alleviate some of their financial distress.

Fanny was galled at being forced to rely on the paltry coins the vicar’s wife doled out, especially when the sanctimonious woman enjoyed flaunting her elevated position and how it contrasted with Fanny’s reduced one.

For three decades, Fanny’s father had been the vicar. They’d lived in a fine house next to the church and had been respected members of the community, so when she knocked on the rear door of the parsonage, she felt like a supplicant or a beggar. She’d be invited in to see the new minister writing his sermons at what had been her father’s desk. His wife would be sitting on the sofa in what had been Fanny’s mother’s parlor.

At one humiliating point, Fanny had sold her mother’s wedding ring to the vicar in order to purchase food. He’d given the ring to his wife as a gift, and whenever Fanny stopped by, she cruelly waved it under Fanny’s nose.

The tonic was bitter to swallow, but in the past few years, she’d suffered so many indignities that one more hardly registered. She could tolerate the other woman’s condescension if it helped her support her nephew, Thomas.

“Camilla, please,” Fanny scolded. “Watch your language.”

Fanny gestured toward Thomas who was across the room at the dining table practicing his letters.

“He’s heard worse,” Camilla said.

“Yes, he has,” Fanny agreed, “but we needn’t broaden his base vocabulary.”

“Don’t tell me how to speak to my own boy.”

Fanny couldn’t win the argument, so she didn’t try.

“I’ll be back in a few hours. If she pays me as she promised, I’ll bring some stew meat with me.”

“Meat, bah!” Camilla sniped. “Fat and gristle is more like.”

Camilla was always angry that they couldn’t afford the quality of victuals that had been their typical fare in better times. Her sense of entitlement—as well as her gnawing hunger—made her surly.

Though she never said as much, she seemed to blame Fanny for their poverty, as if their father’s death and Camilla’s subsequent plunge to indigence had somehow been Fanny’s fault. Fanny was weary of defending herself over the calamities, and she was eager to be away.

She grabbed her shawl and bonnet, and she stood in front of the mirror, studying her reflection as she tied the bow under her chin.

With her slender torso, heart-shaped face, and bright green eyes, she recognized that she was attractive. Her hair was long and blond, an unusual shade of luxurious gold, the color of ripened wheat. Since they had no servants, she rarely styled it, finding it quicker to simply brush the lengthy tresses and pull them back with a ribbon.

But her looks didn’t matter, and she shouldn’t continue to pretend that they did. Her lack of a dowry insured there would be no husband, no family of her own. She’d never even had a beau, and circumstances had compelled her to accept that she never would.

Still, it was amusing to dream of a different life, one filled with pretty gowns and tons of delicious food, where there was no need to worry over the least little problem.

She wasn’t a woman prone to vanity, but there was no concealing the fact that her dress was shabby and plain, her bonnet tattered and torn. She couldn’t help but wish that she had a fashionable outfit to wear into the village, but cash was scarce and new clothes a frivolous extravagance.

She slipped out and hurried down the path to the lane, when Thomas called to her from their decrepit cottage.

“Aunt Fanny! May I come with you?”

Fanny spun around, smiling.

Thomas was an amazingly sweet and winsome child, and it was impossible to understand how he’d sprung from such an unpleasant mother. Luckily, he was nothing like her.

While Camilla was blond and blue-eyed, her face wasn’t flattering. Her eyes were too narrow, her nose too large, her chin too square. Previously, she’d been plump with good health, but her figure had gone to flab, and her forehead was creased with frown lines that were evidence of her dour temperament.

In contrast, with his rosy cheeks and pert nose, Thomas’s features were so appealing that he resembled a cherub painted on a church ceiling. His hair wasn’t blond, though, as an angel’s might be, but a dark brown that was almost black, and his eyes were very blue, traits that Camilla claimed made him the spitting image of his aristocratic father, John Wainwright.

“No, darling,” Fanny said, “you can’t come. You have to finish your school work.”

“But I’ve been at it for an hour already.”

“Yes, and you need to do another two hours before you’re through. Don’t you want to grow up big and smart like your father and grandfather?”

“No. I want to be a dangerous pirate like Captain Jean Pierre, The French Terror.”

Jean Pierre was currently the scourge of the Seven Seas, and boys all over England were enthralled by tales of his violence, daring, and bravery.

“Jean Pierre attended school, too,” she maintained, having no idea if the vicious criminal had or not.

“He did?”

“Yes. He can read and write better than anyone.”

Thomas pondered this lie, then swallowed it.

“All right,” he ultimately grumbled, “but once you’re back, may we walk by the river?”

“Yes, we may.” She nodded to the cottage. “You go on now. Keep your mother company until I return.”

At the suggestion, he scowled, his distaste obvious, but he didn’t remark. He whipped away and went inside.

He was so obedient and clever, and he was astute enough to realize that his mother detested him. They both knew it; they occasionally skirted the edge of the issue, but there was no way Fanny could justify Camilla’s behavior.

At age sixteen, Camilla had accompanied their neighbors to London for the social season, but she had been poorly chaperoned. She’d thrived on the parties and gaiety, on the wickedness and immoral conduct. She’d fallen in with a bad crowd, had come home pregnant and in disgrace.

The scandal had ruined their family. Their father had been forced to surrender his position as the parish vicar, which had cost them their income and house and status. If that weren’t punishment enough, Camilla had refused to exhibit any remorse, which had shocked the town’s rural sensibilities, so they’d been shunned.

Even after the shame had killed their parents, Camilla still wasn’t sorry for the catastrophe she’d wrought. She’d loved John Wainwright and had relished her indecent life as his paramour. All these years later, she could talk of nothing but London, and if she’d had any notion of how to manage it, she’d move to the city and resume her decadent habits.

Thomas represented all that Camilla had lost. Not her parents. Not her home. Not her reputation. She wasn’t concerned about any of those things. No, she mourned the loss of the whirlwind that was London, and Thomas was living proof of how she’d failed to retain what she craved.

Fanny sighed, wishing she had the temerity to leave Camilla to stew in her own juice, but she never would.

They had been reared as sisters, but they weren’t blood relations. Fanny’s own birth mother had been a young girl, much like Camilla who’d been seduced by a great lord. As a tiny baby, Fanny had been left in a basket on the church steps, with a note requesting that she be placed with a good family.

The vicar and his wife had kept Fanny and raised her as their own daughter, so when her mother had begged Fanny—on her deathbed, no less—to watch over Camilla, it was a charge Fanny wouldn’t shirk.

She hurried on, wondering if there would be another letter in the morning post from pompous, horrid Michael Wainwright, which was the real reason she was walking to the village. His threats were aggravating in the extreme, and she often entertained herself by conjuring visions of the ugly, vile ogre he must be.

His last missive had imperiously informed her that they had begun legal proceedings to take Thomas, and Fanny was determined that they would never have him, although she hadn’t breathed a word of the situation to Camilla. She didn’t trust Camilla’s decisions regarding Thomas, and she was quite sure if the Wainwrights demanded custody, Camilla would be so flattered that she’d hand him over without batting an eye.

“Over my dead body,” Fanny muttered to herself, trudging on, murmuring oaths and prayers that she hoped would keep the Wainwrights at bay.

She approached the village, and her chores were swiftly completed. There was no new letter, and the vicar’s wife was out and had left her no money, so she wasn’t able to buy any food. Irked and disheartened, she started home, taking a shortcut through the woods.

At the stile in the fence, she climbed over and slid down the opposite side to follow the narrow trail that led back to the road. It was criss-crossed with blackberry brambles, and after a half-dozen strides, her skirt snagged on the thorns, snaring her as tightly as a rabbit in a trap.