The Mysterious Heir (8 page)

“True,” his companion mused, “he is a dull dog.”

“A secretive one,” the Earl amended.

“But there's little Owen. Nice little lad,” Lord Beverly said valiantly.

The Earl barely repressed a shudder and drank off the rest of his claret. “Come fill the cup, old friend, and have done with championing that little article. I swear he gives me the chills. He looks an uncanny miniature of our dear Regent, curls, corpus, and all. A middle-aged child. I listen for the creak of stays every time he moves. Not that he moves much”—the Earl laughed, accepting another glass—“save to get himself another sweet.”

“But there's Isabel,” Lord Beverly tried again, sinking back to his chair. “She's up to all the rigs. Gay as a linnet.”

“And about as constant as one, too,” the Earl said with a tight smile. “And tonight, fastening on my every word, positively rapt with interest. I scarcely had a bite to eat, you know, she was watching my lips so closely. It's very difficult to eat properly when someone's watching your mouth as carefully as a cat watches a mouse hole,” he complained, draining off the rest of his glass quickly.

“You're sousing yourself into the sullens,” Lord Beverly complained, getting up nevertheless to refill the glass. “Isabel's only trying to let you know she's interested. Wouldn't be such a bad thing, either, a wife with a ready-made legal heir.”

“You forget,” the Earl said softly, “that Isabel was a good friend of Kitty's. Yes, a very good friend. I know Isabel a great deal better than she thinks. And I often wonder why it is that little Owen looks so very unlike his late brave captain of a father.”

A silence fell over the room, broken only by Lord Beverly's quiet comment: “You should not class Isabel with Kitty. That is all the past. It is over and done with.”

“I don't usually,” the Earl said, finishing his glass again, and now slurring his words only very slightly. “You of all people should know that. You, who used to be constantly on about my talking it out. But all this ado about heirs and marriage… It's very natural for me to think about my own dear departed wife again.”

“Kitty was…unique,” his friend said seriously.

“Well I know it,” the Earl answered, laying his head back. “And well you know it too, old friend. You were the only man in London to refuse her, I think. No, don't say a word. I know you too well, Bev. And know you never mentioned it for fear of giving me hurt. But she wouldn't have passed you by. Never. You are, after all, far comelier than most of the others. And more important, not to demean your manly graces, you were accessible. But do not worry. I knew you, at least, had turned her down.”

“I did,” Lord Beverly said simply, in quiet tones, fearing to break the strange mood that had come over his friend, for he never spoke of Kitty, and no friend ever dared to broach the subject to him. “And with a flea in her ear, too. I'm only glad that you knew it. Did she tell you?”

“Kitty?” The Earl laughed. “Oh, no. Never. She only said once, on the way to a ball, plucking the thought as though out of the ether, that she thought you preferred boys. It was her charming way of comprehending any rejection, so I knew. I had so many horns put upon my head, old dear, by that time, that it would have hardly mattered if she'd found room for one more antler. But I remember being glad then that you, at least, had said no.”

“Morgan,” Lord Beverly said after a quiet moment, rising
to see that his friend's eyes were slowly closing, and taking the glass from his unresisting hand, “you cannot judge all women by Kitty, you know.”

“I don't,” the Earl said in a barely audible voice. “I only wish I could. And then have done with them.”

5

“Country hours” may well have been what their host had specified, but most of the Earl's guests had their minds and bodies firmly set to London time. And so it was that when a lovely spring morning dawned there were a great many people abustle at Lyonshall, but in the main they were servants who had never had the habit or opportunity to sleep the day away. Their life-style marked them firmly as provincials, but much the dairy maids cared as they felt the dewy grass beneath their feet. The housemaids felt no social stigmata settle on their shoulders as they worried at the dust that had settled in the night, and the stablemen were too busy whistling and joshing with each other to fear that their being abroad so early on such a fine morning put them firmly beyond the social pale.

For as the sun rose higher in the sky, Lady Isabel sighed and snuggled deeper into her feather pillow; Lord Beverly tossed in restless sleep as his valet labored over a worrisome smudge on the fine leather of his master's left boot; Richard Courtney slept as a dead man, for he did not often have such leisure and had a great deal of catching up to do; and Anthony Courtney slumbered on as only the heedless young may do until something more interesting tempts them from their beds. Owen Courtney, however, already had one large blue eye open, as hunger had begun to nudge him into the world of reality.

But Elizabeth DeLisle had been awake for hours and she sat by her window and waited for the morning to blossom
into full day. She yearned to be up and about as was her wont to do at home. But Uncle had warned her that even if she were to whistle, or to scratch her buttock, no single act would point her out as a shopgirl more than if she rose before noon. But she was a shopgirl, she thought sadly. Yet obediently she sat pent in her room so as not to let the rest of the world know of her ignoble position and her charade. Elizabeth waited for the stroke of noon like a daylight Cinderella, so that she could spring up and be out at last.

She had settled herself in for a long morning and amused herself by watching the many servants of the house and grounds as they went cheerily about their business. But then her eyes widened as she spied the unmistakable figure of the Earl himself making his laborious way past her window toward the stables. Only moments later she saw the Earl, clearly this time, mounted upon a huge black horse, cantering into view upon the drive. She could clearly see that she had not been mistaken in thinking him an athlete. For the mount and rider were one, restless, graceful, and imperative. While she watched, the Earl looked toward the house, and seeing her at the window, raised his hand in slow salute before turning and galloping off in the direction of the near wood.

He had seen her awake and alert at this unfashionable hour, Elizabeth thought with dismay, turning too late from her window. She rose and walked with determination to her writing desk. For she had erred again, and Uncle must know, she vowed, as she reached for paper and ink. Uncle must know that I must go home, for Anthony is behaving just as he ought, all on his own. And it is I, she despaired, who will bring the whole scheme down around our ears.

Charles Morgan Courtney, seventh Earl of Auden, Viscount Louth and Baron Kitteredge, let his horse, Scimitar, of even more impressive pedigree, have his way and lost himself in the flow of motion and the steady rhythm of their passage. It was the mindless pleasure of speed and movement that he had sought this morning. So he neither smelled the cool spring scent of blossoms, nor noted the new green of his lands as the racing horse turned the forest to blur. Run, my
friend, he urged soundlessly, as I cannot, and I will follow anywhere.

It was only when he felt the tightly muscled body beneath him begin to blow with effort that he at last reined in and allowed Scimitar to pick his way aimlessly through the fields and meadows beyond sight of Lyonshall. But though the horse had worked out all its restless energy, Morgan Courtney felt locked and blocked within himself. He patted his mount absently. The animal could do no more, he thought, indeed no creature he could have ridden could run fast enough this morning to leave his thoughts behind.

Bev had assisted him to bed last night, he remembered. He never could seem to drink enough to bring complete oblivion and had given up trying for that long ago. How many bottles had the surgeon primed him with, all that time ago, as he waited for unconsciousness to overtake his patient so that he could begin to remove the shell lodged in his leg? There had been other patients groaning, and new ones being brought from the battlefield by the moment, and still after each long swallow of bad spirits, he had kept smiling tightly up toward the harried surgeon. Till at last the surgeon had shaken his head and sighed. “You're a sponge, lad. Sorry, but I'll have to go ahead anyway.”

And those days in London, in Scotland, and in Wales, all those glasses, those liters of fine aged liquors he had sought escape from Kitty in had no effect either. They were no more effective in sealing him off from the shrill pain of his life with her than the crude liquor had been in numbing him from the keen cutting of the surgeon's knife. In neither case had it even brought him the release of tears. “You're a brave lad,” the surgeon had said when he had finished. “You're a strong man,” Kitty's father had said when she was done. Neither was right, he thought as Scimitar now carried him even farther. It was only that he had never learned how to suffer correctly. For if he had, he thought, he would have wept and been done with it, gotten it out of his system. And then neither wound could still cause the pain that they did.

The leg was one thing he had learned to live with by living with it. The memory of Kitty was a thing he evaded and seldom allowed himself to recall. But when those years were brought back, as they now were by this travesty of a sudden search for an heir that he was embarked upon, her memory came back as fresh in its cruelty as though no time had elapsed since he had last laid eyes upon her living form. It had been seven years since the world had held her breathing presence. And seven years later, on a spring morning that he should have been celebrating as busily as the birds were, she yet lay like a shadow over his sun.

Scimitar paced his way slowly through a meadow as his master picked his way back through the thicket of years. Here, at Lyonshall, over a decade ago, there had been three male Courtneys. Each with a clear heritage to the title and a clear obligation to the land, not like the ill-assorted ragtag of males he had been forced by circumstances to invite to his home this year. His mama had died when he was an infant and his father, the sixth Earl, had been old since he had known him. But he was a capable and loving father to both his sons, Simon and Charles Morgan. Simon was the elder by twelve years and was to be the seventh in the long line of Earls that had held Lyonshall from time out of mind. But Simon was not a healthy man, for a fever as a child had damaged his heart. Father and elder son had both given young Morgan to understand that. Gently but firmly they had told him again and again that as his father was old and Simon not robust, there was every chance that he, the younger, would someday succeed to the title. But he had not wanted to hear it or know it. Simon was his loving brother and would live forever, and his father was immortal as the sun. He would not believe it.

When he was three-and-twenty they told him it was time to look about him for a wife, to ensure the succession. For Simon had taken none and never would, in the wisdom of his own treacherous body. So young Morgan agreed to be off to London for a season or two, not to find a wife as they asked, for he thought he needed none, but to find a taste of life. And he had, he thought now; he had found more than he bargained for.

In London, he had found Kitty.

Kitty Clairmont, the most beautiful creature to have ever met his roving eyes. She was not the toast of the season, nor even one of the leading incomparables. But she was a beauty and at eighteen had a following among the ardent young men in the ton. When he had seen her that night at Almack's, at first glance, she had driven him wild with the desire to make her his wife. He did not see it as his first taste of calf-love, for at three-and-twenty he had already lain with five women and thought himself an expert at love. No matter that three were females he had paid for and two were girls of the servant class, and none were relationships that lasted more than a night, or were expected to last beyond the rising of the sun. He was three-and-twenty and no one could have told him differently. His father and his brother were fast at Lyonshall and all his friends were of an age with him and knew no more of the true love for a woman than he. Indeed, some knew less and thought Morgan Courtney in his tall, straight, handsome form as worldly as he himself did.

When he saw her standing there, slender, slightly taller than average, with her clear pale olive skin and midnight hair and slow dark gypsy eyes, he thought she looked like a Madonna from one of the paintings that hung in the corridors of Lyonshall. When she danced with him and he felt her slim form against him and tried to look into those fathomless eyes, he felt she was some sort of seductive houri from his childhood books of
The Arabian Nights.
Though she spoke seldom and lowered her lashes when he gazed hungrily into her eyes, and never laughed or coquetted as more spectacular belles might do, he was lost to all reason. He would marry her, he must marry her, he could not live if he did not. And lost to all reason, he thought this was love.

She had no mother, but did have a strict father who had brought her to Town from their small holding in Wales. Her family was obscure, but of a good line, their fortune was established, and young Morgan Courtney could see no impediment. But he did see competition, and lived in a fever of anxiety each time he called at her town house and saw other young men awaiting an audience with her. She was strictly chaperoned and slow to speak, and though she seemed
to look kindly upon him, he did not know her feelings and that drove him to new heights of acquisitive passion.