Unraveling the Earl (35 page)

“Your mum’s sister’s daughter’s son in an honorable man. Both
in words and deeds,” Henry said as he joined them.

“I will not print it,” Chester said, puffing out his chest
and standing proud and tall, if a bit gangly, before the two aristocrats. “I
thought to burn it, but it belongs to Georgie and the last time I took
something of hers, a barrel plowed over me. Now I’m not saying it was Georgie
who rolled that barrel down the hill, I’m only saying as how I returned that
ribbon and now I’ve returned the letter, so I hope I can stop looking over my
shoulder every time I step foot outside my house.”

“Is that why she tried to maim you, then?” Mountjoy asked.
“Because you stole her ribbon?”

“I was supposed to steal a peek under her skirts.” It was
only the splotchy blush that tinted the pretty boy’s cheeks that saved him from
a thrashing at Henry’s hands. “So’s I could prove once and for all she was
really a girl. But there’s not a man alive can follow Georgie around for days
and not fall head over heels for her charms. So I took the ribbon as a
keepsake, only she got it in her head that frilly pink ribbon was the proof I’d
been sent to find and took umbrage.”

“You sent the newspaper to her tied in a pink ribbon,” Henry
exclaimed as he recognized the significance of that ribbon. “No wonder she
looked at the damn thing like it was a spider ready to crawl up her leg and
bite her behind the knee.”

“It was a gift,” Chester replied. “A betrothal gift.”

“Don’t stop looking over your shoulder anytime soon,”
Mountjoy suggested. “The lass will be mad as a wet cat, and twice as vicious,
when she learns you didn’t publish the damn thing.”

“No she won’t,” Henry tossed the words over his shoulder as
he headed for the door. “Don’t bother having the banns read. We’ll be getting
married in Scotland just as soon as I hold to my end of the most important
bargain of my life.”

The Earl of Hastings ought to have known that the weather
would conspire against him.

Mother Nature was female, after all, and he’d been plagued
by one stubborn female or another for most of his life.

The sky was a soft blue, tinged only by the soot that
perpetually hovered over London, when Henry set out for Joy on the Mount. A few
fluffy white clouds were gathering to the north when he stopped to spend the
first night of his journey at Hastings Hall.

As his carriage turned onto the long lane that wound its way
to Idyllwild two days later, clouds drifted overhead and a soft breeze ruffled
the tall grass. After a night spent prowling around the small cottage, finding
memories of Georgie in every room, he awoke in the morning to discover dew on
the grass and a cold wind whipping through the trees.

A light shower began to fall as he arrived in Lancaster,
transforming into a steady rain just north of Ambleside. Distant thunder
rumbled outside Penrith, lightning joining the fray in Carlisle, the skies
finally opening up to a full-blown storm as the carriage crawled into Gretna
Green.

His coachman, James and the single groom he’d brought along
for the journey lugged his heavy trunk from atop the coach into the crowded inn
and up the stairs to a cramped chamber beneath the eaves while Henry followed
behind with a smaller trunk.

Tripping over a warped board, Henry dropped his burden and
fell to one knee, leather-bound books tumbling across the floor.

“Here, let me help you, my lord.” The coachman bent over,
his back cracking, and lifted one slim volume.

A dry and brittle pansy fell from between the pages,
drifting down to land on the toe of Henry’s boot.

“Thank you, James, I’ll take care of it,” Henry said. “See
to the horses, if you will.”

“Right you are,” James agreed, eying the faded pink bloom
with something like suspicion as he backed out of the tiny room.

Henry waited until the door closed before gathering up the
books and carefully stowing them away in the trunk.

He’d felt rather like a thief when he’d stepped into his
mother’s chambers and closed the door behind him, shutting out the muffled
sounds of the servants closing up Hastings Hall for the night.

The countess’s apartments had been chilly and eerily quiet,
shadows from the candelabra he’d held playing over the gray-blue walls and the
rows of miniatures lining the mantle and tables. He’d returned the portrait of
Connie to the nightstand beside the bed, smiling to think that he’d been asleep
in his bed across the hall, worn out from lovemaking, when Georgie had crept in
to borrow it.

He’d found the diaries neatly lined up on a shelf above his
mother’s desk, dozens of volumes chronically her life from girlhood until the
year prior to her death. It had been simple enough to tuck them into a small
trunk and wedge it under the seat of his carriage.

Not so simple to actually read the diaries. He’d eyed the
trunk for eight days without so much as opening the damned thing and in all
likelihood he would eye it for another eight days. It certainly seemed it would
take that long to reach Joy on the Mount if the weather did not turn.

The weather turned the next day. It turned from bad to
worse.

Rain gave way to sleet as the carriage jostled along the
road to Moffat and Henry, so bored with his own tedious company he would have
perused a book of fashion plates had one been handy, gave up and reached for
the trunk.

The oldest volume was bound in red leather, the thin pages
beginning to yellow around the edges and filled with the careful, precise
penmanship of a young girl still in the schoolroom.

Twelve year old Lady Lydia wrote of the new mare her father
had brought home from London, a gray yearling she’d named Cassandra. She wrote
of her brother, Robert, ignoring her on a recent visit from university, of her
sister, Lucinda, shamelessly following one of the footmen around, of the
scorched pheasant Cook had served for dinner, of the new doll she’d purchased
in the village and of the pansies blooming in her mother’s gardens.

The following three years narratives were much the same but
for the dolls having been replaced by bonnets and dresses, Robert’s neglect
replaced by his taking sail for the continent, Lucinda’s infatuation with the
footman replaced with her growing affection for Viscount Easton’s handsome son.

Henry might have finished the entire stash of diaries in
one, perhaps two days time had they continued in the same light, easy vein. But
when he started in on the volume marking his mother’s sixteenth birthday, the
girlish ramblings gave way to the rather wistful, flowery prose of a young lady
in the throes of first love.

Miss Margaret Andover arrived at Hastings Hall this
morning, appearing from the mist swirling in the air, as if by magic, an angel
sent down from heaven.

Henry tossed the volume back into the trunk, slammed the lid
closed and shoved it back beneath the seat.

And almost succeeded in shoving the words from his mind.

Are you deaf as well as blind, then?

Georgie haunted him, the ghost of the girl she’d been, the
life she’d been forced to live, the schemes and seductions she’d undertaken to
become the woman she’d wanted to be, the woman he loved.

You were willfully blind.

So bloody true.

For all her talk of stretching, sidestepping and fleeing the
truth, Georgie had never lied to him, not even during that night in the chapel
when she’d twisted the truth into a sordid tale designed to drive him away.

Georgie was an open book, just as he’d told Alice all those
weeks ago.

Henry had not listened to the words she’d spoken, he had not
heard the words she’d left unsaid, nor had he opened his eyes to see her as she
truly was rather than as he’d imagined her to be.

That night as he tossed and turned on a lumpy straw mattress
in a dingy little inn on the outskirts of Moffat, Henry decided he’d been a
blind, bumbling idiot long enough.

The next day found him stretched out on the velvet seat as
the carriage slogged toward Douglas, the discarded diary propped against his
bent legs. He read two volumes devoted almost entirely to Miss Andover, sharing
in his mother’s struggles to comprehend the affection she felt for the pretty
governess, discovering the joy of her smile, the soft touch of her bare hand,
the beauty of the first kiss they shared, gentle and sweet.

On the road to Larkhill, he read of the perils and pitfalls
of a young lady’s first Season, the balls she attended, the gentlemen whose
attention she found repugnant and the first whispers of something improper in
the friendship between the debutant and her governess.

Between Larkhill and Bellshill he discovered that his mother
had been betrothed to his father, a man she barely knew, in order to hush up
the first breath of scandal. Her panic was palpable on paper, her fear of
discovery giving her words a frantic tone, one he recognized from later years
when she’d railed at Olivia, accusing her of courting ruin.

The next morning, the icy rain and wind slowed the horses to
a walk and by the time they straggled into Glasgow, Henry had learned that his
mother had refused to release his father from their betrothal for fear the news
would lend credence to the rumors swirling around her. It hadn’t mattered to
nineteen-year-old Lady Lydia that her fiancé loved another woman or that he had
no intention of giving her up.

The journey from Glasgow to Inchinnan should have taken a
mere three hours in good weather, instead it took ten and Henry spent the
majority of that time lost in the first years of his parents’ marriage. He
skipped over his mother’s startlingly lurid descriptions of the indignities she
was forced to submit to in the marriage bed as his parents struggled to produce
an heir, perused the florid accounts of the pretty debutants who captured her
attention, and swiped at his eyes as she detailed the early miscarriages and
the pain she felt upon learning that Mary Morgan had given her husband a
daughter.

Somewhere between Inchinnan and Ballowag the countess gave
birth to Olivia and fell into a terrible melancholy broken up by short bouts of
manic gaiety, only fully snapping out it when she realized she was once more
carrying a child. That child was Henry, the heir and the excuse she needed to
finally bar her husband from her bed. Her duty fulfilled she set about securing
her place among the highly respected and greatly feared matrons of Society,
quietly continuing to select one angel from each year’s crop of wallflowers,
one particular friend to satisfy her secret desires and ease the loneliness of
her marriage.

As his carriage crawled up steeper and steeper hills, Henry
learned that the Countess of Hastings might have gone on in much the same
manner for years, carefully balancing her public persona and her private
predilections, had she not fallen in love with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed
debutant in the spring of ’10.

Miss Ethel Conrad had possessed neither fortune nor
connections.

High hopes for a bright future, she’d possessed in
abundance.

“Village of Loch Canon up ahead, my lord,” James hollered
through the small window between the driver’s bench and the interior of the
carriage.

Henry placed the journal on the seat beside him and lifted
the blind from the window.

The village of Loch Canon sprawled across a valley between
the banks of the loch from whence it got its name and the cloud-enshrouded
peaks of Ben Canon.

On a fine day the winding lanes were likely teeming with
bustling villagers, the surrounding hills dotted with children traipsing
through the glen from the cottages tucked into the shadow of the mountains,
dodging sheep and perhaps stopping to pick the purple heather that carpeted the
ground.

Unfortunately, the day could not be termed fine by any
stretch of the imagination. In fact, Henry hadn’t seen a fine day in so long
he’d nearly forgotten what one looked like.

The sky was pewter gray, freezing rain falling in sheets,
wind howling through the trees and the village streets empty but for a lone
figure bent low as he trudged through ankle-deep mud.

They were finally nearing their destination, the journey
that should have taken less than a week stretching into three, and damn if it
didn’t look like snow clouds were gathering over the mountains.

Snow in September, for pity sake.

“You want I should stop or keep going while we’ve still a
bit of light, my lord?” the coachman asked.

Henry snapped open a roughly drawn map and spread it over
his knees. Joy on the Mount was some five miles farther along, accessed only by
a narrow, twisting road through the mountains, a road Mountjoy had warned was
best undertaken in good light and fair weather.

Henry very much doubted the following day would bring
anything even faintly resembling either good light or fair weather, not if he
were to judge by those clouds.

“Have the horses got five miles left in them?” he asked,
swiping at the rainwater falling on the map from the open hatch.

“They’re middling fresh, what with the slow pace we’ve been
keeping since we last changed them,” James replied with surprisingly good cheer
considering he’d been out in the elements for days on end.

“Continue to Joy on the Mount.”

The decision made, the coachman slammed the window closed
and Henry carefully folded the map and tucked it away. Settling back on the
carriage seat, he picked up the small diary he’d abandoned and angled it to the
meager light of the lantern bolted to the carriage wall.

Connie birthed little George Buchanan and tasked Lady
Hastings with finding a home for the unwanted child. Promptly severing all
ties, she returned to her family and married the man chosen by her father.

Then that little ditty made the rounds and the countess took
no more angels under her wing. Shying away from any sort of affection or
companionship, abhorring her natural desires, isolated and bitter, she fell
into a sharp decline.

Henry pressed a damp handkerchief to his eyes and drew in a
ragged breath as his carriage rolled over a stone bridge. Relinquishing the
chillingly honest tale of his mother’s slow descent into madness, he lifted the
curtain and peered out the window. Twilight had fallen and the storm had moved
on, leaving behind a horizon blurred by muted orange light and a sky awash in
myriad shades of purple, from palest lavender to deepest indigo.

His carriage approached an immense raised portcullis, the
ends of the vertical bars sharpened to spikes. Two fat towers complete with
dozens of arrowslits flanked the gate. A crenellated stone wall rose from the
murky water of a moat and stretched out on either side as far as the eye could
see.

Beyond the wall, the castle rose, dark and majestic against
the backdrop of the setting sun. Tall round towers soared into the sky at
irregular intervals, some of them listing precariously, others standing
perfectly straight, proud sentinels of a bygone era. Ivy clung to the walls,
climbing over the battlements and curling around narrow windows built deep into
the stones.

This was the crumbling castle where Georgie had lived as
she’d grown from a wild child, more boy than girl, into the confident,
irreverent woman she was today?

Good God, it was enormous, a massive, medieval structure
built to defend against invasion, to support an entire clan of Buchanans. Tag
likely hadn’t exaggerated when she’d said Idyllwild Cottage would fit in the
great hall.

The bailey was a wide open space of gently rolling hills,
small cottages and lean-tos built flush against the inner walls. Dozens of men
hurried around, some carrying sacks over their shoulders while others herded
sheep across the muddy lawn. A handful of women clustered around a laundry
shed, stirring huge vats of boiling water and hanging garments on lines strewn
on wooden posts. Children scrambled about, helping and hindering the adults in
what appeared to be equal measure.