The Return of Lord Conistone

‘You mean—’ Deb shivered ‘—he said nothing about me?’

‘Nothing at all’. Verena sighed. ‘Look, he will have gone already. Deb, you must forget him. You must be strong’. And so must I.

‘Oh, Verena’. Deborah flung herself into her arms, in a fresh storm of weeping.

And Verena did her best—an almost impossible task—to soothe her, then left her sister at last, returning to her own room to endure fresh heartbreak herself as she remembered how nearly two years ago she herself was fool enough to fall in love with Lucas, Lord Conistone.

In the early August of 1808, all of Hampshire was deluged by heavy rainfall, and the harvests were ruined. Verena’s father had gone away again on his travels—from which, in fact, he was never to return—and Verena, young as she was, found that their tenants and villagers were coming to her for help, since their mother, Lady Frances, could do nothing but bewail their troubles.

Verena had been supposed to be preparing for her come-out the following Season. The dressmaker had even completed part of her new wardrobe, of which the silk chemise was a sad relic. But instead of looking forward to parties and balls, she had found herself having to discuss their woeful finances with Mr Mayhew, her father’s attorney.

With Mr Mayhew’s help that summer she had dug deeper into the dwindling family coffers to save the home farm—save the estate, in fact; during discussions with the estate’s tenant farmers, she struggled to comprehend all the talk of crop rotation, winter fodder and seasonal plantings.

She still dreamed of going to London, with its theatres and fashionable parties. When her father returned, she told herself, everything would be as it should be once more! The last week of August seemed to echo her optimism, with days suddenly full of sunshine. Though Verena, riding back on an old pony from a meeting with some of the tenant farmers to discuss, of all things, the virtues of planting turnips as a fodder crop, knew that her return to Wycherley would be greeted by her mother with near hysterics.

‘Verena! You have been riding about the countryside like—a farmer’s wife! Oh, if any of our neighbours should see you!’

It was hot, it was beautiful outdoors, and the larks were singing above the meadows. And so, in a sudden impulse of rebellion, Verena had jumped off her pony near a haystack and let it amble towards some grass. Then, after pulling a crisp red apple and two books from her saddle bag, she sat with her back against the sweet-smelling hay.

With her spectacles perched at the end of her nose, she started on Miss Bonamy’s Young Lady’s Guide to Etiquette, a parting gift from a former extremely dull governess that her mother was always urging her to read. She tackled the first few pages. A young lady never rides out without a chaperon. A young lady always dresses demurely and protects her complexion from the sun.

‘Oh, fiddle!’ Verena had cried, and flung Miss Bonamy’s tome at the hayrick, turning instead, with almost equal lack of enthusiasm, to the treatise on agriculture that David, her brother-in-law, had lent her.

It was actually not as boring as she’d expected. She read through it, frowning at first, then with growing interest, until—

‘Oh!’

He was riding towards her along the track, and the sound of his horse’s hooves had made her start.

Lucas, Viscount Conistone. Of course, as she grew up she’d seen him from afar. Dreamed about him from afar, like her sisters, like most of the girls in the entire county, no doubt. She’d even met him occasionally, because her father had been a friend of his grandfather, the old Earl, and the Earl was her godfather. She dropped the treatise on turnips and dragged herself to her feet, snatching off her spectacles, pushing back her tumbled hair; then she just said, with utter gladness, ‘You’re safe! I was so afraid!’

He’d dismounted, and stood lightly holding his big horse’s reins, smiling down at her. He would be—yes, twenty-four years old, four years older than she was. He was hatless, and his thick black hair, a shade too long for fashion, framed a striking, aristocratic face that was tanned now by the sun. He wore just a loose cream shirt—no coat, in this heat—riding breeches and dusty leather boots.

‘Very much alive,’ he agreed heartily. ‘Did you hear news to the contrary, Miss Sheldon?’

She coloured. ‘They said you’d gone overseas, with the army. And I heard there were some terrible battles…’.

That was when he told her he was untouchable, and the bullets just flew past him. She wasn’t going to tell him that every time she read the news sheets, or overheard talk of the war, she thought of him.

‘I did not know you were coming home,’ she said simply.

He’d smiled down at her again. Since she’d last seen him—it was at a gathering of local families at Stancliffe Manor several years ago—he’d changed, become wider-shouldered, leaner, yet more powerful. His face, always handsome, was more angular, his features more defined. And there was something—some shadow—in his dark grey eyes that she was sure had not been there before. A soldier now. He would have lost friends in battles, she thought. He would have killed men.

Lucas said lightly, ‘Even my grandfather didn’t know I was returning till I turned up on his doorstep yesterday. I was intending to call on you all at Wycherley, but I’m glad to find you on your own’.

It means nothing, he means nothing, don’t be foolish….. She suddenly remembered, and her heart sank. She said, ‘You must have heard from your grandfather about—the matter with my father. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you’d decided not to call on us, my lord’.

His eyes were still gentle. ‘They had an argument, I’m afraid, as old friends will’.

‘It was more than an argument, I fear!’ she answered.

‘And your father’s away again? On his travels? ‘

‘Indeed, yes’.

‘And you—’ his eyes were scanning her, assessing her in a way that made her blush ‘—you, Verena, should be in London, surely, enjoying yourself, surrounded by flocks of admirers!’

At that moment, with Lucas smiling down at her, she would not have been anywhere else for the world. ‘Oh, there’s time enough for all that,’ she said airily.

‘Time enough, indeed. Though this…’. he picked up the book that lay where she had dropped it ‘.….is hardly everyday reading for a young lady’. He flicked through it, eyebrows tilting. ‘The cultivation of—turnips? ‘

She blushed hotly. He must think her a country clod, for no London lady of fashion would ever glance at such a thing!

‘It belongs to—someone else, and, yes, of course you are right, I wouldn’t dream of reading about—farming! Turnips!’ She laughed. ‘Ridiculous!’

He put his head on one side, not smiling back, and said seriously, ‘I have heard that since your father last went away, you’ve had to take on responsibility for the estate yourself, Verena’.

She bit her lip, then, ‘What nonsense people do talk!’ she declared. ‘Why, soon Mama and Deb and I will be going to London, and we will have such fun—going to the theatre, attending parties…’. She casually picked up her copy of the Miss Bonamy’s book and fanned her warm cheeks with it, so he should see it and consider her a lady.

He cut in, ‘I heard there was a bad harvest. And that you’re short of labourers to plant the winter crops’.

She was mortified. ‘It’s true that the summer rains did great damage. But by next spring all will be right again at Wycherley!’ I wish, I wish he hadn’t seen me like this, in my old print dress that must be flecked with dust and straw. He will be used to the company of such beautiful women, and I must look like a farm girl…..

He said suddenly, ‘I’m interested in the new ways of farming too. Everyone should be’.

‘Sh-should they?’

‘Indeed. Unfortunately, this war will go on and on, and it’s vital that every acre of English land should be made as productive as possible. But Turnip Townshend’s ideas are a little outdated now, you know! Have you come across Blake’s new harrow yet, I wonder? My grandfather’s agent has ordered one, for drilling seed in rows, rather than scattering. You could borrow it for Wycherley, I’m sure. Would you show me round your estate’s farms some time, Verena, and I’ll see how I can help?’

She was stunned. So he didn’t despise her after all, even though she was reduced to learning about turnips. He was actually offering to help her!

She realised the sun was beating down on her unruly hair, her cheeks; oh, Lord, her freckles would be coming back! She exclaimed, ‘The Earl, your grandfather, does not approve of my family at all, you know!’

He shrugged. ‘Then I shall tell him it’s a matter of neighbourliness and of mutual benefit. The Stancliffe estate can perhaps help Wycherley for now, but some day, in different circumstances, you might be able to help us!’

She could barely restrain an incredulous laugh. Stancliffe was a vast and rich ancestral home; its estate always ran at a profit, and it had a water-powered corn mill that minted money, David Parker said. Wycherley was paltry in comparison.

He touched her hand. A gesture of friendship, no more, but his long, lean fingers burned her; she felt that silken touch through every nerve ending.

‘Are you in a hurry now?’ he asked her suddenly.

‘No, not at all,’ she lied. Really, there was a great deal to be done: the household accounts to be sorted, Cook’s monthly order for the stores to be cut back as much as possible, Turley’s laments about the leak in the roof of the north wing to be placated….

‘Then let’s ride together,’ said Lucas, Viscount Conistone, ‘now, around Wycherley’s farms. I know the harvest has been a bad one, but there’s time yet to remedy things’.

Her eyes were wide with wonder and surprise. ‘But—you’re home on leave. You must have so many things you’d rather be doing, my lord!’

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said rather quietly, ‘I haven’t’.

Her heart leapt; her soul sang. Quietly, wonderingly, she packed her things into her saddle bag. And as he helped her on to her pony, her thoughts were in utter turmoil. For she’d fallen head over heels in love, and her world was suddenly a different, a marvellous place.

And so, during those weeks of late August and September when the sun shone as if in apology for the dreadful early summer, Lord Lucas Conistone called for her almost daily and they would ride around the Wycherley and Stancliffe estates together, with either Turley or one of her sisters accompanying them as chaperon, talking about crops and harvesting.

Verena’s complexion became golden in the sun and her mother chided her to wear a wide-brimmed sunbonnet. But Lucas laughed at her headgear and told her that he disliked ladies with pallor; he told her also that her eyes were like amber in the sunlight. ‘You must have inherited your grandmother’s colouring,’ he said.

She didn’t even realise that he knew about her father’s Portuguese mother. ‘Her name was Lucia. And yes, I am told that I look like her,’ she said shyly.

‘Then she must have been beautiful’.

She was not used to being complimented on her looks. Her mother had always bemoaned the fact that she was not blonde and blue-eyed, like Deb and Izzy. Her heart thudded. ‘You are making fun of me. I’m sure I would never gain approval at Almack’s!’

‘No, because the others there would die of jealousy,’ he answered lightly. And he added, even more softly, ‘Minha querida’.

The Portuguese endearment—my dear one—went through her like an arrow. A light aside. A frivolous compliment, nothing more, she told herself swiftly.

She also had to damp down her mother’s excited speculation. ‘Lord Conistone has no intentions towards me whatsoever, Mama, I assure you! We are friends, nothing more’.

But it seemed truly marvellous to be Lucas’s friend as they rode together that September, talking about the agricultural improvements that were needed to feed a country at war. Though Lucas never talked about the war itself.

Of course, she always knew that soon he would have to go back. She knew that the harvest festival, in the fourth week of September, would be his last night at home; he was due to rejoin his regiment the next day, he had told her. But it was easy to believe, that warm, moonlit night, that the cruel war was a whole world away.

His friend Captain Alec Stewart, whose reputation as a high liver was just starting to gather pace, was there, too, and of course there was great excitement amongst the local girls when Alec and Lucas stayed on after the supper for the dancing. Yet Lucas danced with Verena nearly all evening. When she suggested that he should ask some of the others, he answered lightly, ‘How can I not dance with someone who is a student of Turnip Townshend? How could anyone else be my amber-eyed harvest maiden?’ Somehow he danced her away from the others, into the shadows offered by the outbuildings, and there, while the music still played, he kissed her.

She’d glimpsed his dark smile seconds before he lowered his head and brushed his lips against her own. His strong arms cradled her close and soft yearning had flooded her. Nothing less than a tremor shook her body as his warm, firm mouth caressed hers, and she felt his tongue lightly trace the parting of her lips, then flicker against her moist inner mouth.

Her hands were trapped, pressed flat against the hard wall of his chest. She could feel the heat of his skin through the fine lawn of his white shirt. Feel the ridges of sculpted male muscle under her fingertips. His hips and thighs were moulded to hers, so close she couldn’t help but be aware of his desire, hard and powerful, where he held her tight. For her. He wanted her….

Verena recognised her own answering desire at the pit of her stomach. Hazy, heated images filled her mind. The whispers she’d heard, about what women and men did together; her sister Pippa’s sighs of rapture as she hinted at nights in her new husband’s arms….

It was Lucas who drew away. But he still held her hands. And whispered, ‘Verena. Remember this night, because I will’.

The sounds of music and merrymaking drifted through to her as if from a great distance. For a moment all she could do was gaze up at him. Every inch of her skin where he had touched her was aching with acute awareness, as she saw something so dark, so rawly male in his expression that it almost frightened her.

Then they were interrupted. A crowd of his friends were coming to see where he was. ‘Best get back to the others,’ Lucas said lightly. And it was over.

That kiss was nothing to him, she told herself. It was just an evening of joyous celebration, when everyone was dancing and drinking a little more than they should.

It was just a kiss. But later, as she prepared for bed, she looked at herself in the mirror; for the first time in her life she wished that she was a tantalising society beauty, from a wealthy family, because then, then, he might love her in return.

Love. She’d thought that being courted—being loved—would be sweet and pleasant—and easily resisted.

But no. What she felt for Lucas was a dark, a dangerous, a living thing. Her whole being throbbed with need. She longed to be in his arms, to feel his lips on hers, and more, for he’d awakened her body, and her heart.

Lucas called at Wycherley briefly before he left the next day. He was in uniform, and obviously in great haste, but he gave her the little music box. As she opened it, and the tender tune filled her heart, he took her hand and said, his eyes searching hers, ‘I’ll be away for a little while, Verena. Can I ask you something?’

She had been tormented by the knowledge that soon he would be sailing away to Portugal, to war with the French, to terrible danger. ‘Of course,’ she breathed. ‘Anything’.

‘Will you keep your trust in me, whatever you hear? Will you remember we are friends?’

Friends. Her heart plummeted, but she managed to say lightly, ‘Good friends indeed. And we owe you so much, Lucas! Next time you are home, you will see the Wycherley farms transformed!’

He nodded almost curtly. ‘As long as you yourself do not change, Verena. As long as you stay the same’. Then he took her hand and pressed his lips to it. She wanted to fling herself into his arms and cling to him and never let him go.

As he’d walked towards his waiting horse, he had turned to her once last time, as if he was about to say something else. But then he mounted up, gave a half-salute, and was gone.

She thought—everybody thought—that he’d gone back to the battlefields of the Peninsula. But news came a few weeks later that he’d resigned from the army and was instead living the high life in London with the Prince’s set. After that came whispers, too, of secret affaires with beautiful society women—and each piece of news about Lord Lucas Conistone stabbed Verena to the heart.

Still during that winter of anguish, there’d been no word from their father. And hard on the heels of the rumours about Lucas had come an ominous visit from Mr Mayhew, their father’s attorney. Verena’s mother had felt a migraine coming on, so it was Verena who had to listen to Mr Mayhew’s grave explanation that the loan on which Wycherley depended was being withdrawn, due, Mr Mayhew feared, to personal pressure on their bank from the Earl of Stancliffe, Lucas’s grandfather.

Verena had first thought, This must be a mistake. The Earl is my godfather. Despite his disagreement with my father, he cannot intend to harm us so! She wrote to the Earl that same day, explaining their predicament; and that was when she’d received the devastating answer:

The Earl of Stancliffe does not respond to begging letters. Especially when they are sent by a fortune-hunting harlot—yes, my grandson Lucas told me of your pitiful attempts to entrap him.

Verena had locked herself in her room on receiving that note, shaking with shock. She read it again and again, remembering every conversation, every look of Lucas’s, trying to make sense of it and failing.

She’d told Lucas that when he returned to Wycherley, he’d find it transformed; it was unrecognisable indeed, within months of his departure, for, by the January of 1809, the Sheldons, and the Wycherley estate, were starting to face the road to ruin.

Soon afterwards, the Earl made a ludicrously low offer for the entire estate, which Verena refused outright. Something would happen, she thought desperately. Her dear father would return, filling the house with his beloved presence, making everything all right….

Her father had been abroad for months, and still nothing whatsoever had been heard of him, though Verena took the gig or rode every fortnight to the shipping office in Portsmouth ten miles away to ask if there was any news.

And early in February 1809, during bitter winter weather, the news finally arrived. Sir Jack Sheldon would never be coming home again.

Chapter Four

Jack Sheldon was dead. And there was no body to bury, either. They were told he’d been exploring the snow-covered peaks on Portugal’s Spanish border when he fell into a raging mountain river and was swept away downstream, never to be found. Verena had been grief-stricken and, more than that, desperately afraid. She honestly did not see how they could go on.

The Earl of Stancliffe was in Bath when the news arrived, taking the waters for his health; they heard nothing from him, and after his insults Verena did not expect to. Then Lucas wrote to her, to send his condolences. She was horrified by his duplicity. She didn’t understand how he could pretend to care. She’d secretly fallen in love with a gallant hero, who’d asked her to trust him, when all the time he’d been planning to leave the army, and must also have betrayed her infatuation with him to his grandfather.

Of course she burned Lucas’s letter and did not reply. He wrote again. This time she did not even read it before destroying it.

Verena had her father’s letters for consolation. He was a compulsive writer, and as she leafed through them, with their vivid descriptions of the wild hills of his mother’s country where he’d felt so at home, she could almost hear Jack Sheldon’s loud voice, almost see his dancing dark eyes, which had glittered exultantly as he confided to her, on the night just before he left for the last time, that summer two years ago, that he had discovered a great secret, something that would make them all rich.

Oh, Papa. She hadn’t believed him. But how she missed him: his stories, and his zest, and his unquenchable optimism—and how secretly fearful she was as she faced life without him, under a mountain of burgeoning debt.

Lady Frances Sheldon was still determined to marry off her daughters, and wanted to take Verena and Deb to London as soon as the minimum period of mourning was over. Verena told her mother that they simply could not afford the expense of a London Season; Pippa, usually Verena’s staunch ally, was by then expecting her twins, so Verena took on the full brunt of her mother’s anger.

‘I would hate to think you are jealous of Deb’s prettiness, my dear,’ said Lady Frances.

‘Jealousy, piffle! I am not going to London, Mama!’ declared Verena. ‘And you should not either!’

But Lady Frances had insisted on taking Deb to London that autumn, for an extended stay with a rather foolish friend of hers, Lady Willoughby. Verena remained at Wycherley, trying to hold the estate together and to fend off their mounting debts. She was startled one afternoon to see a hired chaise rattling into the courtyard; when she’d hurried to see who it was, Deb and Lady Frances were climbing out.

‘Deb! Mama!’ Verena had cried. ‘I had not expected you back so soon!’

Lady Frances, hurrying towards the house, waved her hand dismissively. ‘The disappointments, Verena! Lady Willoughby is no true friend, and I’ve decided that I’ve had enough of her! Pray have tea sent up to my room while I recover from the journey!’

Deb, her pretty face clouded with ill humour, was about to follow, but Verena had barred her way. ‘Deb. What on earth’s happened?’

Deb had burst into tears.

Oh, Lord, Verena had thought, ordering the staring Turley to unload the luggage. ‘Deb. Come inside. Tell me everything’.

But Verena had rather wished she’d been spared at least some of the details when Deb told her in the parlour, between fits of tears and outbursts of anger, how she’d met Viscount Conistone at one of Lady Willoughby’s parties and that he had made severely improper advances.

Verena had been stunned. ‘No!’

Deb had started crying again. ‘Oh, yes! I thought I would be safe with Lucas! After all, last September you used to ride around the countryside with him, didn’t you, Verena? Often with only one of us for company, and no one said a thing! He—he took me into a side room, and gave me wine to drink—and then he attempted to kiss me, and murmured that we must meet, later! Oh, I would die if anyone else knew of my shame!’

Until then, there had always been the faint hope in Verena’s beleaguered heart that the stories she heard about Lucas were somehow false, and that the Earl’s comment that Lucas had called her a silly fortune-hunter was a wicked concoction.

But—this? For a start, what was Lucas doing at one of Lady Willoughby’s entertainments? He was part of the Carlton House set—he would never normally attend such a shabby affair! And—what did it matter? Any last hope had died within her. She’d felt cold, alone and afraid. ‘Deb. Deb, listen to me. Maybe Lord Conistone had been drinking—’