The Cinderella Countess

Once he had been free and unburdened. Now every man and his dog wanted a piece of him. Once the most reading he had done was to glance at the IOUs from the gambling tables where his luck never seemed to run out. Now it was writing reports, filling out forms and doing all the myriad other things a large and complicated estate required.

He had barely come up for air in weeks save in the bed of Susan Castleton, but that was now also lost to him. He couldn’t regret this even a bit, he thought, as he finished dressing and made his leave.

He’d spend the evening at White’s and when the place closed he’d go to Edward Tully’s town house. At least Derwent would understand his fading interest in a woman whom he, too, had once been intimate with.

* * *

‘You need to go abroad, Thorn, and escape your family.’ Edward’s words were said with the edge of strong cognac upon them.

‘Easy for you to say with your father still hale and hearty and an older brother who will take on the heavy mantle of the title.’

Edward laughed as he upended yet another glass of cognac and gestured to a servant going by to bring another bottle. ‘How are the marriage plans going?’

Lytton swore.

He’d confided in Lian and Edward about his intention to marry as a result of Lucy’s ill health, his own mortality staring him in the face. He now wished he hadn’t.

‘Wide hips and a passable face wasn’t it?’ Edward plainly saw a humour that Lytton himself did not. ‘The first girl you saw with both qualifications?’

‘I was drunk.’

‘More drunk than you are tonight?’

At that Lytton laughed. ‘More drunk and also happier, possibly.’

‘Well, Lian is happy and so is Shay. Perhaps a wife is the answer. A woman of substance. No shallow-brained ingénue or experienced courtesan.’

‘And where are those women?’ Lytton asked. ‘Shay found Celeste in the underbelly of Napoleon’s Paris and Lian’s Violet was thrown up from the greed of treason and lost gold.’

‘Stuart Townsend said he saw you this morning in a carriage with a woman he did not recognise, Thorn. He said she looked interesting?’

Lytton shook his head. For some reason he did not want to talk of Annabelle Smith. His whole family must have disappointed her today and he did not wish to continue the trend. He stayed silent.

‘And the fact that you will not speak of her makes it even more interesting.’

He stood. ‘I think I need to go home, Edward, and sleep. For a hundred years, if I only could.’

‘There’s a masked ball at the Seymours’ tomorrow evening. Come with me to that and blow away a few cobwebs.’

‘Perhaps I might. I will send you word in the morning.’

Outside the sky was clearer and the stars were out. A vibrant endless heaven, Lytton thought, enjoying the fresh air. He had meant to stay at Edward’s, but suddenly wanted to be home.

Annabelle Smith was due tomorrow again at the ungodly hour of nine and he did not want to miss seeing her. That thought worried him more than any other.

Chapter Three

This morning Belle did not take her basket. Instead she brought a book, tied in blue ribbon and inscribed. Rose stayed at home.

The Earl of Thornton was waiting for her in the entrance hall when she arrived at his town house. Today there was no other servant present and he took her coat and hat himself and hung them on the brass pegs to one side of the front door.

A gash across his temple was the first thing she noticed.

‘You have been hurt?’

‘Barely,’ he answered and swiped at his untidy fringe.

‘It looks like more than that to me, your lordship.’

‘Your patient is upstairs, Miss Smith.’

She smiled at the rebuke. ‘And your mother?’

‘Is behaving in her room.’

‘Did your sister eat anything yesterday?’

‘More than she has in weeks. She imagines you to be of the occult. A blooded witch, I think it was she called you.’

‘There is strength in such imagination.’

At that he laughed out loud and dipped into his pocket. A ten-pound note lay in his palm. ‘For you. You have done more in fifteen minutes for my sister than all the other physicians put together.’

‘Oh, I could hardly take that much, your lordship. Ten pounds is a fortune and more than many people in Whitechapel might make in a whole year.’

‘It is not for you, per se. I thought you told me yesterday you use your exorbitant fees for good in your parish.’

‘I would and I do, but...’

He simply leaned forward to extract the velvet purse from the pocket of her coat on the peg and slid it inside before returning it. She could do nothing but concur.

‘Thank you. I shall send you receipts for exactly what I have spent each penny upon. Your lordship.’ She added this after a few seconds.

They had reached his sister’s sitting room now, the place where Rose had waited yesterday, and he stopped.

‘I think you would do better to see my sister alone today.’

Taking a breath, Belle nodded and went in.

This morning Lady Lucy was not hiding from her, but sitting in her bed gazing out of the window. She looked small and thin and pale.

‘I hear you ate both lunch and dinner?’

The girl turned to her, anger in her eyes.

‘As I am not used to being threatened, I deduced it good sense to eat something, Miss Smith. Just in case.’

‘Then you would not mind if I read to you, either?’ Pulling the ribbons from the book, Belle sat unbidden on the seat at the side of the bed and opened the first page.

Mary, the heroine of this fiction, was the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza, a gentle fashionable girl, with a kind of indolence in her temper which might be termed negative good nature...

* * *

Half an hour later she stopped.

‘Who wrote this?’

Belle was heartened by the question. ‘Mary Wollstonecraft. The writer truly believed that feminine imagination could transport women from cruel circumstance.’

Silence abounded, the tick of a clock in the corner all that could be heard in the room.

‘I want to gift this book to you, Miss Staines. I hope we might discuss its possibilities next time I meet with you.’

‘When would that be?’

‘On Wednesday. That should allow you some time to come up with an opinion. An opinion I would value,’ she added, seeing the dark uncertainty in golden eyes.

‘I am not sure.’

‘Eat and read, that is all I ask of you. Food for the body and for the mind.’

‘How do you know my brother, the Earl of Thornton?’

‘I don’t, really.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘He came to my house in Whitechapel and asked me to visit you.’

‘He paid you?’

‘Very well. More than I am worth, probably.’

‘Are you always so honest?’

‘I find facing life head on is the best possible way of escaping difficulty.’

‘My mother would not think that way.’

‘Sometimes one needs to find confidence inside without being swayed by the influence of others.’

‘You talk like Thorn. Do you know that? He cajoles everyone to do his bidding and he is so clever he can always find the words. Mama says he is like our father, but I do not think this is true. He is a thousand times better.’

‘You love him?’

‘Everyone does. But he is as unhappy as I am.’

Lord, this conversation was going in ways she had no idea of and Annabelle hoped with all her heart that the Earl of Thornton was not outside listening.

‘Why are you so unhappy?’

The least she could do was to bring the focus back on her patient.

‘I have become a mere nothing.’

The heroine’s words from the book. Lady Lucy had been listening after all.

Belle lowered her voice. ‘Motherhood is the furthest thing from nothing that I know of.’

Her patient started at that and blanched noticeably. ‘Have you told him? My brother?’

‘No.’

‘Please do not. I need to think...’

With care Belle placed her hand across thin fingers. ‘I give you my solemn oath that I shan’t speak of your condition to anyone.’

‘Thank you.’

When she looked away Belle rose, tucking the book into the folds of cloth on the bed so that it would not fall.

‘I will see you on Wednesday.’

Outside she found Lytton Staines where she had left him, a drink in hand.

‘I hope this visit will be as successful as your last.’

‘I shall see your sister again next week, your lordship. There will be no payment required.’

‘Miss Smith,’ he said, a sound of exasperation in the word.

‘Yes, your lordship.’

‘I am an earl. Ten pounds is nothing at all to me and I shall pay you exactly what I think you are worth.’

‘Are you made of money, then?’ For a second he stood so close she could feel the whisper of his breath against her cheek as he replied.

‘Yes.’

She almost liked his certainty and his arrogance at that moment. He was a man who valued honesty just as his sister had said and he was kind. Of all the attributes in people, that, to Annabelle, was the most important.

‘I will also accompany you home.’

‘It is not necessary. I am quite capable of getting myself back to Whitechapel.’

‘I know you are, but I would like to see you safe.’

‘Very well.’

She stepped back and he led the way downstairs, the wound on his left temple beginning to discolour. She would have offered to tend it, but something told her that he would decline such an invitation.

A rich man, a brother, a son, an earl. A man with mistresses and with enemies. A man of generosity and cleverness, too. So many things that she now knew of him as well as so many things she did not. She wondered just what he might think of her?

‘Is my sister going to recover, do you think?’

He asked her this as the carriage slid away from the curb. Today it travelled slowly and she thought the Earl had had some hand in that, for he had been speaking with the driver just before they left.

Instead of answering his question she found one of her own. ‘How did your father die?’

Her words were bare and shock ripped across his face.

‘Why do you wish to know that?’

‘Your sister said something that made me wonder.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said that you were a thousand times better than he was.’

‘Hell and damnation.’

She could not believe that she had heard the Earl swear in front of her and thought he might apologise for it, but instead he turned to look out of the window as he spoke again.

‘He killed himself.’

He had asked her if she was a religious woman once and said that he did not put much stock in prayers. But she could see it did mean something, after all, for shock was etched on his face. He believed his father consigned to hell just as his sister did. A permanent banishment. An unchangeable tragedy.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Two Christmases ago. He gambled, you see, and lost. At least when I sit at the tables, I win.’

‘What did he lose?’

‘Balmain, the Thornton family estate. I got it back for him by the luck of a full flush a week later and he was not thankful.’

‘The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.’

‘Words from the Bible?’

‘And from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.’

‘You are a mine of information, Miss Smith. From witchery or just plain and constant reading?’

‘What do you think?’ She couldn’t add his title, not even if her life had depended on it, for here in the carriage there was a sort of equality that simmered between them and an energy that she had never felt with another.

‘I think you watch people and listen with your heart.’

‘You do that, too, my lord.’

This time he only smiled.

* * *

Belle steeped medicines and pounded tinctures and she charged nothing to a hundred patients who could afford very little. She brought warm clothing and blankets for the babies and she found packs of cards and puzzles for those with time to while away at the very endings of their lives. She paid for shoes that were not scuffed to within an inch of their existence and found oranges and fish fresh from the stalls in the market on Whitechapel Road. She noted down everything, every small and tiny charge, and sent the Earl of Thornton her reckoning two days before she was due to visit next.

Within an hour she had a message back.

That’s the best ten pounds I have ever spent.

She was pleased for such an assurance. His handwriting was strong and flowing, the b’s and p’s were fluted in a way that made her smile. She brought the paper to her nose and breathed in, the scent of ink the only thing discernible.

What had she wanted it to smell like? Him?

Swallowing, she placed the note down carefully on her desk and crossed to the mirror, peering at herself once she was there.

She was not beautiful, nor perhaps even mildly pretty. Her hair was unremarkable and she had a tooth that did not sit at the same angle as the others. Her eyes were also far too blue to be restful.

She spoke well, she read widely and she helped others. These were her attributes. Searching her mind, she probed for the other distant truth that lay hidden well away from sense.

She wanted the Earl to like her. With more than respect. More than esteem. She was enough of a woman to have read the books on filial love, and on lust and on sexual endeavour. She had devoured Fanny Hill by John Cleland and read the compendium of poetry by the Earl of Rochester, clandestinely, under her bed sheets at night. The novel Justine had come into her hands through a bookseller in London for whom she had made medicines and she knew the erotic works of the Greek poets Strato and Sappho. She was no prude even if she was still a virgin.

But she was lonely.

She was also thirty-one, almost destitute, nameless, without family, and inclined to strange dreams at night that made her question her sanity come the morning.

The sum of being abandoned sat on her like a weight, altering worth and condemning certainty. No man had ever come near her in the way of a suitor. Did she repel them or was she simply repellent?

These thoughts of wanting more and wanting it with a man like the Earl of Thornton were witless and unwise.

He had only ever looked at her in the way of an oddity, a woman who did not fit into any of the boxes the men of the ton needed their women to inhabit.

Appearance was not important to her and yet she was drawn to Lord Thornton’s beautiful face with an ache. The wealth of a person was also a factor that had held no real weight. Yet the Earl’s pounds had paid for things she would never have been able to procure otherwise, things that eased the wretched life of those struggling with very survival.

A conundrum and a puzzle.

She should take heed of his mother’s warnings and make certain that she was soon gone from the lives of the Thorntons. Yet she couldn’t. Lady Lucy needed her and, if truth be told, so perhaps did the Earl. To make him happier. To bring a smile across the sadness in his eyes.

They were right, these poets and novelists of long ago. The erotic hopes of a body were hot and heady things. Her hands ran across her breasts, nipples standing hard and proud.

She was not immune after all to the charms of men. No, she shook her head and rephrased. Not men, but one man. The enigmatic and beautiful Earl of Thornton. She knew it was stupid. But there it was. Unarguable.

* * *

Lytton smiled at the letter Annabelle Smith had sent him. Fish and stockings, blankets and coats were not things he usually read of, but each item here had been qualified with the person who had received it and that was what made it fascinating reading.

A young child with a chest complaint that was ongoing, a housewife pregnant for the eighth time in one of the winding and narrow alleys off the Whitechapel Road. An old soldier without a leg who was nearing sixty and needed a pack of cards to fill in the hours of a lonely day.

Numbers had always been simple things for him and if his father had squandered the coffers of the Thorntons’, then he had refilled them ten times over. Easily. But these pounds that he had accrued also lacked depth, no story behind them save that of an investment.

His mother’s voice brought him from his thoughts and he watched as she came into the room, a book in hand.

‘Have you seen what your healer has left Lucy?’

He looked up and shook his head as the small tome with blue ribbons was delivered with force to his desk.

‘Mrs Mary Wollstonecraft writes that men and women need educational equality and is critical of conventional women. If one were to believe in her premises, where would society be? Washed up, I tell you, each wife and mother attending to her own needs and not to those of her husband and her children. Books like this are a disgrace, Thornton, and one you need to be aware of and forbid when the insidious opinion comes beneath your own roof, crawling into your sister’s consciousness.’

For a moment he looked at Cecelia and wondered when it was his mother had changed from a gentle parent into this one? The death of his father, he supposed. It could not have been easy for a woman who would listen so carefully to gossip.

‘Perhaps returning to Balmain would be a good thing for you? Lucy’s sickness has not been easy for any of us.’

‘You cannot think I might leave her? My God, she is still at death’s door.’

‘I think we both know that is not true. She is eating again and her countenance is rosier. Certainly, we have passed the point of no return and Miss Smith has done wonders for her.’

‘Wonders?’ The word was whispered. ‘It is witchcraft she has employed and who knows how long such things truly last?’

‘Being grateful might bolster hope, Mama. Miss Smith is a woman who is an accomplished healer and there is no more to it than that.’

‘She knows things.’

‘Pardon?’ Lytton looked up.

‘Lucy says that she can read her mind and find out exactly what she is thinking. She says it is unsettling.’

‘Yet she still wishes to meet her. She told me so this morning, so it cannot be too uncomfortable.’

‘Your father would not have allowed it. Such a one in the house. He would have told her to leave the moment she tried to inveigle herself in to our family affairs and sent her packing back to Whitechapel where she belongs.’

‘He is dead, Mama. And has been for a good year and a half.’

‘Someone shot him. Someone broke into Balmain and shot him. I know it.’

For a second horror slid down the back of his neck. His mother was going mad and he had not noticed. How long had she been like this? He had been so busy trying to save the estate he had given his mother’s mental state little thought but Lucy must have known as well as David and Prudence. No wonder his oldest sister had disappeared off abroad and his brother was playing up at school.

A tumbling house of cards, he ruminated, and walked across to Cecelia, taking her hand as he led her to a seat by the window.

‘I want you to go back to the country. I will bring Lucy up in a week or two and spend some weeks there as well. You need to rest, for this has all been more than trying for you.’

Unexpectedly his mother nodded. ‘Perhaps you are right. I could garden and tend to my flowers and walk a little. The glade is always beautiful at this time of the year. When Lucy returns we can follow quiet pursuits.’

Patting her hand, he was glad as she calmed. ‘The carriage will be readied in the early afternoon and the family physician will accompany you just to be certain. Everything will be arranged so that you will not have to worry again and your great friend Isabel will be thrilled to have you back.’

After his mother had gone Lytton did another hour’s work to see to all the details of her journey before picking up the book and wandering into Lucy’s room. He found her up in an armchair that was slanted towards the sun. She wore a thick nightdress tied at the waist and her feet were bare.

‘It is fine to see you up again.’

Her smile brightened when she noticed him and brightened further when she glanced at the book he was carrying. ‘Mama took it away.’

He handed it back to her. ‘The stuff of treason, she thinks.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I have not read it, but there are movements afoot to cast more light on the inequalities of women. A lot of it makes sense.’

She undid the blue ribbons and found a dog ear on the top of one page.

‘Listen to this.’

With exaggerated care she read a few pages to him, her voice trembling with the tale of the woman she spoke of. When she had finished she placed the opened book on her breast and looked over at him.

‘It is saying that women need to have their own opinions and they are just as valuable as any a man might have. The story is a sad one and one of deceit and lies as the heroine and her friend try to come to terms with their life in a madhouse. Miss Smith says she wants to hear my opinion on the trials of women when I see her next.’

‘Well, it seems that you certainly hold one. Do you like Miss Smith?’

‘I think at first she frightened me. But she is strong. She does not take nonsense easily.’

‘Nonsense like witchcraft?’

‘You have been speaking with Mama? I made the mistake of telling her that perhaps Miss Smith was a witch when I first saw her and she took up this thought and would not stop speaking of it. I didn’t realise how much anger she suddenly seems to be full of, though Prudence had warned me of it before she left.’ She hesitated for a moment and then continued. ‘I was wondering if I could ask Miss Smith to stay for morning tea when she comes. I know how busy she is, but the cook could make her famous scones and we have the raspberry jam from last year’s crop at Balmain.’

‘Of course. I won’t need the carriage so she can be taken home in it afterwards.’

‘Will you be here to join us?’

Lytton shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have a meeting in the city which is important.’

‘But if you can be here, would you?’

‘I will try.’

* * *

In the afternoon Lytton visited the Thornton family banker and was reassured by the state of the finances. He knew the numbers himself, of course, but since attaining the Earldom he had been very careful to check every detail of his investments. He did not trust anyone.

He had a family to look after, thousands of acres of land to tend, servants and workers to provide for. The days of being careless were over, he had accepted that on the death of his father.

The keeping of a mistress was a lot less persuasive than it had once been as well. Susan Castleton had sent him copious notes trying to win back his favours, but he had replied to none of them.

He had heard from Edward how his name had been slandered by her in society, but that was the least of his worries. After the weeks of his sister being so sick, to have a glimmer of light in the future was gratifying and he did owe it to the unusual Miss Annabelle Smith.

Her vibrant blue eyes watched him in memory and for just a second he wondered what it would be like to have her beneath him tumbling into his bed.

The shock of that brought him to a standstill. There was no way in the world that he could enjoy her like that. The next woman he bedded would have to be his wife and she would need credentials and breeding that were incomparable to become a countess.

Still, the vision of Annabelle Smith naked with her dark curtain of hair falling around them was hard to shake off. Was she a virgin? Had she any experience with the pleasures of the flesh? God, even that thought had him hardening, here in the street with the daylight of London all about him and myriad shoppers walking past.