Unraveling the Earl (38 page)

“Love, it’s time to wake up.”

“Not yet.” Georgie Tinsdale, the Countess of Hastings,
cracked one eye open and snuggled against her husband’s chest. Winter sunlight
streamed through the carriage window, glinting off the simple silver and
amethyst band Henry had placed on her finger the previous day.

“We’ll be arriving soon.” Henry brushed a kiss over her
forehead and gently removed her bent legs from his lap, carefully lowering her
feet to the floor.

“We can’t be at the inn yet,” Georgie grumbled, sitting up
and brushing at her wrinkled skirts.

“A slight detour.” Henry reached beneath the seat to
retrieve a small trunk.

Turning to the window, Georgie pressed close to the cold
glass, surprised and a bit awed by the vista of green and gold fields, tall
grass and scrub bent in the wind. Beyond the vast expanse of flat, rocky land,
copses of woods sprouted on gently rolling hills. Here and there small herds of
sheep grazed, the only sign of life for miles.

“We’ve taken a detour to explore the moors?” Georgie asked
in confusion as the carriage slowed and turned onto a narrow dirt lane.

“When Olivia’s first husband passed away, he left behind a
legacy of debt.” Henry’s voice held an odd note and Georgie turned to find him
holding a slim blue leather-bound book. “In order to set things to rights, she
chose to sell off all of the un-entailed properties of the Palmerton estate,
including those that made up her dowry.”

“I see,” Georgie replied, though she did not understand what
Olivia’s past financial difficulties had to do with their present detour over
the moors. “In truth, I don’t see at all.”

Henry flashed her quick smile, there and gone again. “One of
the properties I assisted her to sell was a small hunting lodge in Cumberland.
Bastion’s Cross came to Olivia through Mother and, I believe from my
grandmother before that and so on. I’m not entirely certain, as the first and
last I’d ever known of it was during the sale. Until I read Mother’s final
diary.”

“You read your mother’s diaries?” Georgie asked, surprised
and a bit befuddled, though not unpleasantly so.

“I ought to have read them months ago,” he replied with a
grimace.

“You weren’t prepared months ago,” Georgie soothed, reaching
up to brush of lock of hair from his brow.

“I don’t know that one is ever truly prepared to read one’s
mother’s private thoughts, especially a mother such as mine.”

“And?” Georgie prompted when he fell silent. “What did you
learn of your mother?”

“She enjoyed the company of ladies,” Henry replied with only
the faintest trace of a blush. “You were right about that.”

“Oh, Henry, that’s not what I’m asking.”

“Mother wasn’t always mad, you were right about that, as
well. There were times of laughter and joy in our family when I was a little
boy, picnics in the gazebo at Hastings Hall, visits to the nursery to tuck us
into bed, games of draughts on cold winter afternoons. I’d forgotten those
early years, overshadowed as they were by the constant manipulation and
bitterness that came later.”

“I’m sorry you had to suffer through those later years.”
Georgie had expected the answer but still her heart hurt for him. “Sorry your
mother was not the sort of mother she ought to have been.”

“I’m not sorry for any of it,” he replied, with a soft
laugh. “In fact if Mother were still alive I would buss her cheeks, never mind
the scolding I would get for smearing her powder or mussing her hair.”

Georgie only stared at him, confused and not a little
unsettled by his amusement.

“Don’t you see?” Henry asked. “If Mother hadn’t already been
a bit mad, she would not have made that wager and your father would not have
bedded Connie.”

“He might still have bedded her. He was a libertine of the
worst sort.”

“The very best sort,” he corrected, giving her the sweetest,
softest of smiles. “If he’d been an honorable man who steered clear of innocent
ladies, you would not have been born, Georgie. And I cannot imagine a world
without you in it.”

“Oh, Henry,” she breathed, blinking furiously.

“And what’s more, Mother spirited you away to a rickety
estate, hiding you from the world,” he continued, taking hold of her hands and
squeezing, his blue eyes bright. “She might have shared your mother’s identity
and sent you on your way rather than forcing you to follow her about Town. And
I never would have known you, never would have fallen under your spell.”

“You’ll have me crying again,” she warned with a wobbly
smile.

“We can’t have you arriving with puffy red eyes and splotchy
cheeks,” he teased.

“Oh, I like that. Splotchy cheeks, indeed,” Georgie
retorted, reaching for the strap dangling from the roof as the carriage jolted
over a rut in the lane. “And just where have we arrived?”

“At a rather rickety estate somewhere nearby to Bastion’s
Cross.”

“No,” Georgie breathed in shock as his words registered and
she whipped her head around to peer out the window.

The first thing she saw was the pig pen, its weathered
boards drooping from the thick wooden piles dug deep into the rich brown soil.
Some of the wood slats hung from frayed ropes while others were missing
altogether. And enormous sow lay in the mud with five or six fat little piglets
scrambling over one another to reach their mother’s teats.

In Georgie’s mind she saw herself on the day Lady Joy came
for her, a scrawny girl scrambling from the brown muck, her right leg dragging
behind her as she crawled through a narrow gap where one of the horizontal
slats of the fence had fallen to the ground.

Georgie swiveled her head about, taking in the overgrown
lawn and beyond a field of weeds where once had been barley and wheat, tall
seedy stalks billowing in the breeze. The barn had fallen in on itself,
weathered boards collapsed beneath the remnants of the roof. The river whence
she’d given the dilapidated farm its name, little more than a creek in reality,
sparkled in the distance.

The carriage rolled to a stop and Henry jumped to the
ground, turning to offer his hand.

“You should not…I cannot…Millie won’t…” Georgie stammered,
too shocked and horrified and panicky for tears.

“We made a bargain,” Henry replied, his voice soft yet oddly
fierce. “I promised to see you reunited with your mother and you promised to
marry me and save me. You’ve held to your end and I intend to hold to mine.”

“But…”

Henry ducked back into the carriage and gently scooped her
up, one hand beneath her knees, the other wrapped securely around her back.
Carefully he lowered her to the ground and turned her toward the house.

It was smaller than she remembered, years of neglect having
rendered it little more than a hovel, with two of the four upper-story windows
boarded up and a roof that had been patched with mud and grass where the slate
tiles had gone missing. The four windows of the lower story were grimy, the
paint peeling around the sills. There was no smoke rising from the listing
chimney. In fact the entire house and surrounding land had an air of
abandonment and Georgie wondered if only the pigs lived here.

Before she could decide whether the tight feeling in the
vicinity of her heart was relief or despair, the front door flew open and a
tiny woman with hair so pale as to appear silver in the sunlight was running
across the scraggly lawn.

“Georgie!” Millie Graham cried, her arms stretched wide
open, her faded gray dress tangling around her legs. “Georgie, you’ve come
home!”

With Henry’s hand warm on her back, Georgie took half a
dozen stumbling steps and met Millie on the edge of the lawn.

Then the Countess of Hastings was on her knees, crying and
begging her mother to forgive her in a show of mawkish sentiment so out of
character and bloody touching, her handsome earl blinked back tears.

“Damned dusty roads.”

Lynne Barron always wanted to be a writer, if only she could
decide what to write. Everyone told her write about what you know. It wasn't
until she married her extremely romantic and surprisingly sensual husband that
she was able to follow that advice. Lynne lives in Florida with her husband,
son, and a menagerie of rescued pets..

Lynne welcomes comments from readers. You can find her
website and email addresses on her
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at
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Unraveling the Earl

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Unraveling the Earl Copyright © 2014 Lynne Barron

Cover design by Allyse Leodra

Cover photography by Shutterstock

Electronic book publication October 2014

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