The Earl's Marriage Bargain

Chapter Three

There was a pain in his hand and Ivo looked down to see his knuckles white on the back rail of the chair. He unclenched his fingers. His grandfather’s house: exactly where he did not want to be and precisely where he should have gone on arriving back in England instead of haring off on that wild goose chase after Daphne Parris. Charles Parris’s wilful little sister. The girl he had grown up with, seen transform from a plain, sulky child into an exquisite young woman in front of his bedazzled eyes.

He had fallen in love, had proposed on the eve of his departure with Charles to join their regiment in France. She would wait, she had promised, if he would promise to come back to her. He was her hero, so gallant, so fine in his scarlet regimentals. She had been enchanting, that evening, so lovely in her wide-eyed admiration of him and he had felt like a demi-god, believing he could defeat Napoleon single-handed if she only wished it.

He had known her parents would think her too young for a formal betrothal and she had, too, but they could keep it a secret, she had agreed as they exchanged tokens—an enamelled heart on a chain for her, a lock of her hair for him. That white-blonde curl had been in the wallet he had lost in Knightsbridge.

Had he been arrogant to believe the love she had professed so ardently would last and that she would wait until the fighting ended? Deluded, perhaps. It seemed that he had misunderstood the depths of her feelings, but not his own, not as the war had dragged on across Spain.

His promise to Daphne had brought him through times when it would have been easier just to give in and die. And then Charles, dying of one enemy neither of them could defeat, had told him that news had reached him that Daphne intended to marry a rakehell baronet. Ivo must promise to stop her, Charles had pleaded. He was the only one who had known of the secret betrothal and he could not seem to grasp that his sister might actually jilt his best friend.

And Ivo did swear to it, reassuring Charles that it would all be well, even as he fought back the pain at Daphne’s betrayal, his mind reeling with the shock that she had changed so much and he had not been able, somehow, to sense it. He had promised Charles and he had failed.

He had told himself that it must be a misunderstanding, that she had lost faith in him somehow and that it could all be set right if only they could talk. That had kept him together, right up until the moment that they were face to face. After that… How were you supposed to feel when the woman you loved rejected you, sent men after you to beat that rejection into your thick skull? Did she hate him so much—or was this how a woman who married in defiance of friends and family and sacred promises reacted to defend that decision?

‘Why were you in that alehouse?’ Jane asked abruptly, jerking him out of the dark downward spiral of his thoughts. ‘Are you avoiding your grandfather?’

That is usually the most restful option…

‘I had made a promise to a friend. A dead friend.’

‘Oh. I am so sorry.’ She sat down again. ‘And that deathbed promise was what sent you into danger?’

‘Charles—that was my friend’s name—was worried about his younger sister. It seems he had every reason to be anxious, although at first I thought he was exaggerating because he was in a fever. I could not believe that Daphne would be so…foolish.’ So disloyal. ‘I tried to tell him he was worrying about nothing, tried to keep him calm but, when the story became clearer, I realised it was serious. She was being courted by a baronet with a wild reputation. I won’t name him, but Charles was convinced that he had no good intentions towards Daphne, who is well dowered and fatherless into the bargain. Besides, she was already promised to someone else.’ Someone who was not in England to protect her. Someone who had thought that a love could be kept alive for years on hasty, irregular letters scrawled by campfires.

‘Once news reached England of Charles’s death there would be no one to stop her or to warn off her seducer.’ Except the man who had blithely gone off to fight the French in the happy certainty that Miss Parris would sit at home patiently waiting for him.

‘And she would not heed her brother? Had he managed to write to her?’

‘He did—and received a letter in reply. She was certain it was love. The man to whom she had had an understanding was not there, she had grown tired of waiting for him because he would surely have come for her if his feelings were true. She felt neglected, I am certain.’

And I should have thought more about how young she was, how much she would need the reassurance of constant letters, not my scribbled notes when I had the time and the energy to think of that other world apart from the battlefield.

He tried to keep those betraying emotions from his face and from Jane’s bright, interested gaze, and was fairly certain he succeeded. But was the fault his neglect of her—or a fundamental misunderstanding of Daphne’s character? Or had he mistaken the depth of her feelings for him in the first place?

‘Charles declared that he would ask for leave, just as soon as he could haul himself out of bed. He had no idea just how sick he was, I realised. He told me that he would go home, forbid the match. He was his sister’s guardian, after all, and he could not sit by and let her fall into the hands of a confirmed rakehell, even if she was prepared to break her engagement to the man he had expected her to marry.

‘Charles had tossed and turned, distressed that his sister could have betrayed his best friend, tormented by his inability to imagine why she had done so. “I must stop her,” he’d said, just before he sank into the final delirium. I promised to do what I could. I would have done so even without that promise. I had known her all the years she was growing up.’

I loved her. Despite everything I still…

‘But you were in the army—how could you get away?’ Jane leant forward, both elbows on the table among the cups and saucers. Her eyes were fixed on his face. She caught her lower lip between her teeth as though she was listening to some gripping tale of derring-do. Clearly she had no idea that this was even more personal than he was admitting.

‘I would have asked for leave, of course, but, in the event, the news of my father’s death reached me on the day we buried Charles. I had every good reason to hasten home to England and sell out and my colonel sent me on my way with his blessing. The Treaty of Fontainebleau had been signed, Napoleon was defeated, I could easily be spared.

‘I was too late: Daphne had already eloped from home with her dubious baronet. Her aunts were distraught, but finally received a letter from her four days ago. She was back from Scotland where they had married and had been for weeks. I found her in her new home, a crumbling old house just outside Kensington. Sir Clement was away from home and I thought that being abandoned with cobwebs and surly, unpaid servants while he dealt with unspecified business would be enough to bring her to her senses. I suggested that he was paying off his most pressing creditors with promises of Daphne’s money, but that got me a vase thrown at my head.’ He did not repeat to Jane the angry, defiant words she had thrown first. It was foolish of him to believe that such beauty was incapable of venting such spite and anger. He was shocked as well as hurt. What had happened to the laughing, clinging girl he had left behind?

‘Ouch,’ Jane sympathised.

‘I ducked,’ he said with a shrug, pride making him hide the personal hurt from her. ‘It hardly touched me. She was defiant and determined and she refused my offer to take her back to her aunts while the problem could be settled of how legal the marriage was. I told her that the courts might be able set aside the union, although it would take some time and money. I pointed out that she was still just under age, was abducted from her home and married without her brother’s permission.’ And he had managed it calmly, somehow hanging on to his temper, somehow refusing to let Daphne see how deeply this affected him. All he had achieved was to salvage a little empty pride.

‘How did she respond?’ Jane asked. ‘With another vase?’

‘No,’ he said wryly. ‘She laughed in my face and told me that she loved her husband, that she knew perfectly well he was a rakehell and that was what she wanted, not a dull husband like all her friends had married.’

Like me, the man she was promised to, the man who had dared put duty before her.

‘She wanted adventure, freedom—’

He sought for the least shocking way of translating Daphne’s frank admissions. ‘She had come to appreciate the joys of the marriage bed, she told me as she tugged on the bell pull and demanded that I leave. I could hardly abduct her myself, so I left to think over my tactics. I was aware that I was being followed, but thought no more of it than that she did not want to risk my return. An hour later, I was nursing a pint of ale and facing the fact that there was probably nothing I could do other than to report back to her aunts that she was not being held against her will and wanted to remain in the marriage. Then I was facing four large louts with clubs and brass knuckles.

‘It seems she felt that, to ensure I left her alone, I needed more convincing than her words could achieve. Or perhaps she feared that I would confront her husband. Whichever it was, she had sent her grooms to deal with me. You arrived in the midst of their very persuasive arguments for forgetting the whole thing and going away.’

So, yes, he did want to go down to Merton Tower because he wanted to lay his hands on the best legal advice. And the man who would know how to find it—if he was not already employing it—was his famously litigious grandfather. He could go back to London and waste time trying to find the right lawyers to help the aunts with what was, almost certainly, a hopeless cause or he could swallow his pride and ask the Marquess. And, faced with Daphne Parris’s welfare, his pride was unimportant. She was in the hands not just of a rakehell, but, it now seemed, one who employed violent brutes as his grooms.

‘If she has lain with him, then she may be with child already,’ Jane pointed out, with far less embarrassment than a single lady should be showing when discussing such a thing. ‘And even if she is not, then surely the fact that the marriage has been consummated will make any kind of annulment very difficult, especially as she would probably protest that she was entirely willing to go with him. And if it was possible to separate them despite that, her reputation would be in tatters.’ Her brow was creased with thought as she concentrated on the problem. If she was shocked by Daphne’s story, then she was hiding the fact.

‘Quite,’ he agreed. ‘But I promised Charles I would try.’

And I owe that laughing, reckless, charming friend of my childhood something. If only I could believe that some trace of her remains.

‘And you have tried and she now knows of someone who will help her if she does repent of the match,’ Jane said.

‘True.’ That had not occurred to him and it was some small consolation. Daphne had shown the spirit and determination to do what she had wanted and, surely, if she came to regret her actions she would show as much determination in escaping. ‘I do need to get to Bath,’ he admitted finally as he sat down. ‘If we are careful, then we should escape detection and a scandal of our own.’

To her credit, Jane Newnham showed neither disappointment in him for failing to extricate the deluded bride nor triumph at getting her own way and his escort. He was coming, reluctantly, to like his improbable rescuer.

‘That is a relief,’ she said. ‘I will feel so much more comfortable with your company on the road and I will not have to worry about you.’

It was a novelty, to have anyone to worry about him. His mother had died when he was five, he had no siblings and his father had appeared to believe that no Merton might be vulgar enough to be shot, skewered or blown up on a battlefield and, therefore, there was no cause for concern when his only son joined the army. Ivo wondered sometimes if the late Earl had ever seen him as anything other than the fulfilment of his duty. The title had been secured, tutors and instructors would look after the boy, there was nothing for him to trouble himself about.

As for his grandfather’s emotions, they had always been a mystery to him.

‘We will have our dinner soon. If we retire immediately after it, then we will be able to make an early start.’ Jane finished her tea and carried the tray to the sideboard.

‘It seems I have acquired a very managing sister,’ he said. He meant it for a joke and wondered at the shadow that seemed to cross her face.

‘It is about time I learned to manage and not be a mouse,’ she said, with no amusement in her voice at all. ‘I have accepted too much and not thought of alternatives.’ The alternatives she appeared to be thinking about did not seem to be making her very happy, judging by her frown.

That sudden seriousness was a pity, Ivo thought, leaning back in the chair and trying to find a position where his bruised ribs would allow him to breathe in comfort. Jane’s voice was pleasant, but nothing out of the ordinary until she was amused, when he found it made him want to smile, even when he did not know what the joke was.

There was clearly some difficult history behind that bitter remark, just as there was behind her quite impossible implication that she intended to earn her living from her art. He was curious, but he did not know her well enough to probe—she would, very rightly, snub curious questions. Still, pondering someone else’s concerns was a pleasant distraction from considerations of either his own future or the futility of attempting to save Daphne, the stubborn Lady Meredith, from herself. He flatly refused to let himself think any more tonight about his own feelings for Daphne.

The maid came in with a laden tray and began to set food out on the table. She was followed by the cellarman, cobwebs in his hair and on the vast baize apron he wore, and Ivo discussed what he recommended, received a frown from Jane when he ordered ratafia for her and added a light hock to his own order of claret.

‘I am resolved to ask for what I want and not meekly accept what is considered appropriate,’ she said a few minutes later, wrinkling her nose in distaste over the word as she ladled out steaming oxtail soup.

‘Are you used to drinking wine?’ he asked, suddenly wary. Jane was a handful sober, he winced inwardly at the thought of her a trifle high-flown.

‘An occasional glass with meals,’ she said demurely. ‘Ratafia makes my teeth ache, it is so sweet.’

She caught her lower lip between her teeth as she concentrated on passing him his bowl of soup and Ivo watched her, speculating on just why she was so set against marriage. This business about setting up as an artist was obviously so much fantasy. His immediate reaction was to wonder if she had become tired of being a wallflower, but he could not believe that the gentlemen of her acquaintance would be so unappreciative of such an interesting young lady. No great beauty, of course, but perfectly passable and clearly equipped with the correct social graces when she chose to utilise them.

‘Your parents cannot approve of your desire to paint professionally,’ Ivo remarked when the business of passing bread rolls and butter was dealt with. ‘But they must be aware of your considerable talent.’

‘Young ladies learn to sketch and to paint in watercolour. Approved themes are landscape, children and rural scenes—provided the rustics inhabiting the landscape are picturesque and not squalidly poor. Serious figure painting or the use of oils is not considered suitable,’ she informed him. ‘Besides, they do not know of my ambitions.’

‘So how did you learn?’

‘I had a watercolour and drawing tutor. Then my friend Verity, the one who has married the Duke of Aylsham, held regular meetings for her friends at her home. Our parents believed we were gathering to read worthy texts. Instead we had an entire turret in the Bishop’s Palace to ourselves and our work.’ He must have shown his surprise at the word because she put down her spoon with some emphasis. ‘Female occupations may be work and just as serious as men’s interests. Verity is an antiquarian. I paint. Lucy is a pianist, Melissa is a novelist and Prudence is a Classical scholar. None of us has parents who approve of our passions except for Verity. The Bishop is also a scholar and encourages her work.’

‘I gather that not a great deal of reading was done in your reading circle.’

‘On occasion Melissa reads novels, Prudence reads Greek and Latin texts, Lucy reads music, Verity studies learned journals and I dip into the lives of painters. As far as our parents are concerned we study sermons and tracts together. Although the Bishop has retired—he had a stroke, poor man—he is still sent any manner of spiritual publications. Our parents are most impressed by the tone of the pamphlets we bring home.’

‘And the Bishop connives in this?’

‘He has no idea we are doing anything of which our parents would not approve and so he has been very generous in continuing to allow us to use Verity’s tower, even though she has married and left home. He can hear the pianoforte, of course, and he would admire my sketches of the garden. He knew Lucy borrows books from his library and that Melissa writes, but then, all young ladies do these things. As amateurs. Dabbling,’ she said with a suggestion of gritted teeth, ‘is encouraged, but Heaven forfend that we become serious.’

‘But you have left your remaining friends, and your tower of sanctuary, and are travelling to stay with a relative.’

‘Yes.’ She tore the bread roll in half with a vicious twist that made Ivo wince. ‘In disgrace.’

‘Might I ask for what reason? Not, I assume because of an unwise…er…friendship with a man, from what you have said about your views on marriage.’

‘Oh, it was a man,’ Jane said blithely. ‘Arnold the under-footman.’

Ivo froze, soup spoon halfway to his lips. ‘A footman?’

‘He has quite remarkable muscular development—apparently he boxes in his own time—and I wanted to draw him and he was perfectly willing to strip off for half a guinea.’

‘You were drawing him in the nu—? Nak—? Without clothes?’

‘Of course. That is, he was without clothes, I was not. But how else am I going to learn about male anatomy?’ she asked with sweet reasonableness.

Ivo dropped his spoon. Regrettably there was still soup in the bowl and the result was not helpful to his general appearance. ‘From books?’ he suggested, attempting to remedy matters with his napkin. ‘Prints of art works? Statues?’

‘It is not the same as real flesh and blood,’ Jane pointed out. ‘It was remarkably useful to see your back under tension, for example.’ His expression must have finally registered because she added, ‘Naturally, I will give you the drawing if you wish. I am aware that I was carried away by the opportunity and should have asked your permission first. But it was so useful to see your spine close to,’ she said wistfully.

Ivo reflected—inappropriately, given present company—that women had expressed appreciation of his body before now, but never in quite those terms and none of them had seemed remotely interested in his vertebrae. ‘Please, keep it,’ he said, dropping the napkin back into his lap. ‘Feel free.’

Jane looked up with such eagerness on her face that he was irrationally glad of the napkin’s coverage, even though there was the table between them. ‘I meant,’ he said repressively, as much for himself as for her, ‘feel free to keep the picture. Although not to draw any more of me.’ Her face fell. ‘Not in any absence of clothes, at any rate.’

The room was becoming remarkably hot and he wished he could mop his brow.

‘Thank you.’ Her smile was sudden, sunny, and he found himself smiling back despite the fact that she was going to prove a confounded nuisance and a worry he could well do without.

But she saved you from a much worse beating, his conscience reminded him.

The maid came in to clear the soup and Ivo changed the subject abruptly. Things were bad enough without informing the inn’s staff that his ‘sister’ drew men in the nude. ‘I suggest we stop at Newbury tomorrow night. That is about fifty miles. I imagine that you will not want to travel further in one day.’

A roast fowl and a carving knife were set in front of him along with a pie with a flaking golden crust. A dish with the rich aroma of cream and onions was placed in front of Jane. The maid deposited a bowl of vegetables in the middle of the table and made way for the cellarman with his bottles.

‘Fifty miles sounds quite far enough,’ Jane agreed. ‘We will be lucky to do it in six hours, I imagine, and with your injuries that is quite long enough to be bounced about in a chaise. Game pie or veal? They both look very good.’

‘Some of each, please. Would you care for some chicken?’

My goodness, we are both managing a very good appearance of gentility—me with my bruises and she with her scandalous intentions.

Jane cut into the pie, placed a generous portion on a plate, added a slice of veal and some sauce, leaving room for vegetables, and pushed the plate across the table, receiving a chicken wing and a slice of breast in return. She helped herself to peas and carrots, with a mental lecture on eating too much—there was apple pie still to come—and took a sustaining sip of wine, then another appreciative swallow.

‘I beg your pardon? I am afraid I missed that.’

‘I was merely moaning,’ she confessed. ‘With pleasure.’

Ivo narrowed his eyes at her. For some reason there was colour on his cheekbones. Perhaps the roast fowl had been very hot.

‘The wine,’ Jane explained. ‘Delicious.’ She waited while he added chicken and vegetables to his loaded plate—clearly the military habit of eating well when one had the opportunity had not left him. ‘I had not expected such good food. And the Pelican at Speenhamland, just outside Newbury, has a very good reputation, I believe, so we should eat well again tomorrow night.’

‘The Pelican is extortionately expensive.’ Ivo poured red wine into his own glass. ‘There is a rhyme that says it is called the Pelican because of its enormous bill.’

‘We can afford it,’ Jane said, with an airy wave of her wine glass. The hock was really exceedingly good and eating alone with a gentleman had all the pleasure of novelty.

‘You should be saving your resources. Naturally, I will repay you as soon as possible, but splashing your blunt around at the Pelican, as though we were Admiral Nelson—’

‘He is dead,’ Jane pointed out. Perhaps she would try a little of the game pie as well, it did smell delicious, and the food was just slipping down with the aid of the wine. It was so pleasant not to have Mama sending her warning looks down the table.

‘A lady eats like a dainty bird. A lady has the most refined appetite. A lady drinks half a glass of wine at the most…’

‘Do you think ladies should just peck at their food and not show an appetite?’

‘No.’ Ivo sounded definite. ‘For a start it is a waste of the effort the cooks have put into preparing the food and food should not be wasted. Going hungry is no joke. Besides, a lady with a healthy appetite for food usually has a healthy appetite for—’ He broke off, coughing. ‘Sorry, a crumb in my throat. For life, I was going to say.’

‘Are you all right? You have become quite pink.’

‘I am perfectly well, thank you.’ Ivo topped up his glass. ‘To get back to what we were discussing: Nelson might be dead, but everyone who is anyone calls at the Pelican.’