The Earl's Practical Marriage

‘In those letters Palgrave set out his intention for Laurel to inherit the land and property that is in trust, provided she marries within eighteen months of Palgrave’s death in accordance with the terms he set out. The balance of my debt to the estate would also transfer to her on her marriage—or, rather, to her husband. If she does not marry as directed then everything falls to the new Earl, with the exception of a generous dowry or allowance for Laurel, depending on whether she marries or not.’

Giles sat back, took a breath and summarised. He might as well have this clear in his head in all its horror. ‘So we are at the mercy of whoever Laurel decides to marry if we are unable to raise the money to buy back the land. Or if her marriage does not fulfil the requirements, then we are in debt to the new Earl.’ And at his mercy, or the husband’s, if either decided to call in the balance of the debt early. He kept that observation to himself.

‘Not exactly.’ His father looked at him with what Giles could have sworn was apprehension. ‘Laurel only gets the land and the debt if she marries the Earl of Revesby in the next five months.’

‘But I am the Earl of Revesby.’

‘Precisely.’

* * *

‘We are rather thin of company tonight,’ Phoebe complained after one sweeping assessment of the crowded room. ‘I had hoped for a greater variety of partners, and certainly more nearer your age for your first ball at the Assembly Rooms. Oh, dear, I am disappointed.’

‘It looks very well attended to me.’ Laurel suppressed a nervous qualm at the sight of so many people, all of them strangers and many of them discreetly curious. Because of being in mourning for her father it was over a year since she had attended even a small neighbourhood Assembly, one where she knew everyone. She never expected to be the local belle of the ball, she was too old for that and known to be devoted to raising Jamie, and she had not expected to be very conspicuous here. The veiled assessment, the polite curiosity and the more open interest of some of the younger gentlemen who were in attendance came as a surprise.

‘I do wish people would not gape so,’ she murmured, taking refuge behind her fan.

‘Whatever did you expect, dear?’ Phoebe was arch. ‘You are very attractive, your gown is elegant, if not perhaps in the very first stare of fashion, and you are a new young face where that is always welcome. As I said, the company is thin of many eligible gentlemen tonight, but we must not despair, I have every hope of finding just the man for you.’

‘I am not so young—and I meant it when I said I did not want to marry.’

‘Tish tosh! I cannot imagine why you believe yourself to be on the shelf, Laurel, or feel you have to be a recluse. I blame your stepmother entirely for putting such nonsense into your head.’

‘It is not that I do not want to be sociable, only that I am past the age—’

‘Look, dear, there are some chairs, right in the middle of the long wall. I will hurry and secure them. We will have an excellent view from there.’

And be most excellently on display ourselves, Laurel thought, reluctantly making her way through the throng.

Phoebe swept on and secured the chairs under the noses of two ladies wearing alarming toques, nodding with plumes.

‘Should I not give up my chair to one of them?’ Laurel whispered.

‘Certainly not. Those are the Pershing sisters and a more disobliging pair I have never met. Now, let me see who is here.’ She looked around, tutting when she failed to locate who she wanted. ‘I must find the Master of Ceremonies and introduce you so that he is certain to include you in all the invitations. And there is Lady Bessant.’ She waved. ‘She will come over soon, I have no doubt. Her son was widowed nine months ago. Such a nice man, so suitable. A trifle stolid, to be sure, but—Oh, and Mrs Terrington, who has three grandsons and two of them are passably intelligent. And over there—’

Laurel ignored the remarks about available men and tried to pay attention to everything else: this would be her new world and she must learn names and faces quickly. As she glanced around several of the younger ladies looked towards the door and some of the mamas came, very subtly, to attention.

An eligible gentleman is coming, Laurel thought with amusement. And then Giles entered, talking to a shorter man.

‘Ah, now there is Mr Gorridge, the Master of Ceremonies, just coming in with—oh, no, it is Lord Revesby again.’

‘And they are coming this way,’ Laurel said, with a sinking certainty that she was their objective.

‘My dear Lady Cary, you must forgive me for not calling earlier. I have only just heard of the arrival of Lady Laurel.’ The Master of Ceremonies was effusive, bowing over her hand, assuring her of his attention if he could be of the slightest service to such a distinguished new arrival in Bath.

Laurel murmured all the right things, agreed that she would certainly wish to subscribe to the concert programme, admitted to enjoying balls, confessed that she was not at all attracted by card play and made him laugh indulgently when she wrinkled her nose when he asked if she had tried the waters yet. And all the time she was aware of Giles seeming to fill her vision while he waited silently, a pace behind Mr Gorridge.

‘And you must allow me to introduce to you the Earl of Revesby, newly arrived in Bath, just as you are, Lady Laurel.’

‘Lord Revesby made himself known to me this morning,’ Laurel said with the coolest smile compatible with good manners. Whatever happened she must not make a scene, not here with all of Bath society watching. ‘We were childhood...acquaintances.’

‘Neighbours, of course.’ Mr Gorridge would have acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the aristocracy and gentry in order to perform his office, she realised. ‘But it has been some time, I think, since you last met, given that his lordship has been nobly and courageously serving his country in the Peninsula.’

‘Really? Nobly and courageously serving?’ Laurel arched her brows in polite surprise. ‘I understood that Lord Revesby had been ornamenting the Court at Lisbon. But perhaps that is more onerous than I had imagined. Possibly one had to wear a dangerous wig? Or elaborate Court livery?’

‘It had its moments, to say nothing of lethal wigs,’ Giles murmured. The Master of Ceremonies gave them both a nervous glance, apparently unsure whether these were witticisms, and bowed himself off to attend on a querulous dowager countess who was gesturing at him impatiently with her fan. ‘May I?’ Giles asked to join them.

Chapter Five

‘There is nowhere to sit,’ Laurel began.

Of course, with his luck, just then a chair beside them was vacated by a gentleman who was announcing to his wife that he was off to the card room before the orchestra began its infernal caterwauling.

Giles sat down without waiting for Laurel’s assent. On her far side Phoebe was clearly flustered at the sparking hostility. She said nothing though, perhaps as much at a loss as Laurel to know how to snub a perfectly respectable member of the ton in the middle of a Bath Assembly. A perfectly respectable, exceedingly handsome war hero, if Mr Gorridge’s remarks were to be believed.

‘We began on entirely the wrong foot this morning,’ Giles said, leaning forward so that he could address Phoebe across Laurel.

It gave the younger woman an excellent opportunity to admire the breadth of his shoulders and the crisp line of his recent haircut across the tanned skin of his nape. She told herself she could hardly avoid looking, not without turning away very rudely.

‘Ladies, I must apologise for approaching you directly the other day, and without an introduction. I imagine it must have been disconcerting to receive the impression that you were being, perhaps, stalked, Laurel.’ The expression in those blue eyes was perfectly serious.

Why is he being conciliatory? Laurel wondered. Why is he here at all? He could avoid me perfectly easily and that would be more comfortable for both of us.

When Phoebe uttered incoherent phrases about quite understanding and doubtless the best of motives and Laurel maintained her chilly silence, Giles added, ‘I can only excuse it because of the sense I had at that first meeting at Beckhampton that we were already acquainted, Lady Laurel.’

‘Acquainted? Certainly we were. I was apparently a hysterical girl and you... Words fail me.’

‘Oh, thank heavens for small mercies,’ Phoebe murmured beside her.

‘We must discuss that disaster in private,’ Giles said. ‘Neither of us can afford the appearance of a disagreement in public.’

‘We have no reason to discuss anything.’ Laurel wondered where the feeling of panic was coming from. She should send him on his way, firmly and coldly. They had nothing to discuss. Nothing. ‘We have no reason to meet, in public or in private.’

If only he wasn’t such a stranger and yet so familiar. The more she was close to him the more she heard the echoes of the past in his voice, saw it in those compelling eyes. And if only he wasn’t such an assertively male creature. Yet he was not behaving like his own father always had—loud, cheerfully dominating the world around him. Giles’s manner was perfectly controlled, his voice even, his movements elegant. He was being the perfect gentleman—or perhaps the perfect courtier she had assumed he had spent his time being in Lisbon. Only, perhaps not...

What had Mr Gorridge meant? Noble and courageous. Had Giles fought? But he hadn’t been in the army... Why was he even speaking to her?

‘I beg to differ, Laurel. We are both going to be in Bath for the foreseeable future. I imagine neither of us wishes to lock ourselves away for fear of encountering the other and if our relationship appears strained when we do meet it will cause comment. People will begin to recall the whispers of an old scandal and that can do your standing in Bath no good. Neither would I relish it. It would interfere with my own plans.’

‘Lady Laurel, to you, my lord,’ she retorted and got a faint, mocking smile in return. It would serve him right, him and his plans, if she slapped his face as he deserved.

‘And might I enquire what those plans are, Lord Revesby?’ Phoebe, who had apparently got a grip on her flustered nerves, gave Laurel a reproving look. Not in public, it said.

‘Marriage, Lady Cary. One of the things that will assist my father’s recovery is my making a suitable match. He has been alone too long and he will enjoy having a family around him.’

‘You will be in London for the next Season, I imagine,’ Phoebe remarked.

Laurel wondered where her stomach had dropped to and why it should. Why did she care who Giles married? He was no longer the man she had thought him, if he ever had been. But a family? A brood of small Gileses.

‘Perhaps, Lady Cary, if it takes me so long to find the right bride. But this is June, the Season is over for this year and Bath has its charms, I find.’ He was not looking at the dance floor where quite a number of ladies of marriageable age were being led out by their partners for the opening set.

He was looking at her, Laurel realised. What? No!

Beside her Phoebe made a small sound. Before either of them could say anything a gentleman in his late forties stopped and bowed slightly. ‘Lady Cary, good evening. Might I crave the favour of an introduction to your companion?’

‘Of course, Sir Hugh. Laurel, my dear, Sir Hugh Troughton. Sir Hugh, my niece, Lady Laurel Knighton, who has given me the great pleasure of coming to share my house with me. Laurel, Sir Hugh was a colleague of my late husband’s in the War Office and is in Bath to accompany his sister who has been unwell. I do hope Miss Troughton is feeling a little better, sir.’

‘A very junior colleague,’ he said, bowing over Laurel’s hand. She rather liked his smile and the openness of his plain face under a thatch of brown hair just greying at the temples. ‘Thank you, Lady Cary, my sister is finding the fresh air and the waters very helpful. I expect we will be returning to town next week. And...’ He looked enquiringly at Giles.

‘Revesby.’ Giles stood up and offered his hand.

‘Delighted.’ Sir Hugh shook it energetically. ‘I had heard you were coming home.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I have had the pleasure of reading many of your despatches. Very useful indeed, as I am sure you are aware. I think there is a letter on its way asking you to come in to Whitehall for a debriefing at your earliest convenience.’

‘I am attending my father who is unwell, but I will give whatever help I can, naturally.’ Giles spoke equally quietly. ‘You will doubtless let me know if there is anything more urgent.’

‘Excellent. Now, mustn’t bore the ladies with this, er, diplomatic talk. Lady Cary, I do hope you will do me the honour of the second set? And Lady Laurel, the third?’

When they both agreed Giles said, ‘And perhaps I can hope for the reverse? Lady Laurel, the next set? And Lady Cary, the third?’

His tactics are excellent, Laurel thought, irritation vying with admiration. I have already accepted an offer to dance and therefore etiquette forbids me from refusing another gentleman, whoever he may be. If I wish to claim a strained ankle or exhaustion, I will have to wait until I have partnered him for at least one dance.

‘I would be delighted,’ she said, smiling at him.

‘Such sharp teeth you have, Laurel,’ he murmured. ‘I still have the scars.’

‘Where?’ she asked, startled. Beside her Phoebe and Sir Hugh were in earnest discussion of the best choice of physician for his sister.

‘On my right calf. Surely you recall. You must have been about ten and you were furious with me because I had climbed the apple tree at the Home Farm to fetch my kite and refused to pick apples for you. You bit the only part of me you could reach.’

‘Goodness, yes.’ A chuckle escaped her at the memory. ‘How I made you yell.’

‘You were a little savage.’ The way he said it sounded almost approving.

‘You were most disobliging. “It isn’t our tree. It would be theft,”’ she quoted. ‘Scrumping isn’t theft.’

‘Try telling that to Farmer Goodyear.’

A discordant note from a tuning violin jerked her out of the happy childhood memories back to the present. This was becoming far too cosy. Why Giles should be so amiable she could not imagine, not after those gritted-teeth remarks in the Pump Room. And surely that significant look when he had been speaking about marriage to Phoebe had only been to provoke her?

‘As Mr Goodyear went to his just reward eight years ago, that is unfortunately not possible,’ Laurel said, deliberately sounding both pious and humourless. She needed to stop being charmed by reminiscence into relaxing, because the man was after something, she was certain. Or up to no good. Vengeance served very, very cold, perhaps.

From the way his mouth twitched she was not convinced that Giles took her remark at face value, but he sat back and watched the dancers, leaving her to recover her equilibrium. She shifted a little in her seat so that she could watch his profile covertly. Now she was over the first shock of seeing him again she was able to find more traces of the youth she had known beneath the handsome skin of the man he had become. The shape of his jaw and his nose and the arch of his brows were recognisable as she studied him. His hair had lightened from a honey-brown into blond, perhaps from the sun, because his brows were darker, as were his lashes. Those blue eyes, of course...

But the sensual curve of his mouth, the way his skin was tight over the bones of his face, his height and the breadth of his shoulders... Where had they come from? He must top his father by four inches and he looked hard and fit without a surplus ounce on his body. That might be expert tailoring, of course, but she very much doubted it.

She had the sudden urge to reach out and touch those shoulders. She had not touched him on the Downs. There he had only brushed her lips with his as they shared a few fleeting breaths...

‘Have I a smudge on the end of my nose?’ Giles enquired without turning his head.

‘No. As you are very well aware I was studying how you have changed in appearance,’ she said calmly, refusing to blush over staring at a man. At this man. ‘I doubt your character has changed as much as your looks.’

‘You think not? Over nine years, in a foreign country and on the edge of a war?’ He did turn his head to look at her then. ‘Forgive me, but I think experience and life create many changes.’

‘Not in fundamental character,’ Laurel said firmly.

‘So you judge me to be as fundamentally unsatisfactory as the last time we met, despite having barely exchanged a dozen sentences with me?’

‘Undoubtedly you are. And older and more experienced, which makes it only worse.’

‘That is sauce for the goose, as well as for the gander,’ he murmured as the music for the last dance in the first set ended and a smattering of applause broke out. The dancers walked off the floor and Giles stood. ‘Our set, I think.’

It was surprisingly difficult to rise gracefully to her feet and take Giles’s outstretched hand. Her knees seemed to have turned to jelly, as though all the nerves she had been keeping out of her voice and her gestures had fled to the back of her legs. She managed it somehow without stumbling and placed her kid-gloved hand in his.

‘I did not look to see what this set is,’ she confessed for something to say as they took their places at the end of a long line of couples. However she felt about him she was a lady and she knew how to behave in public. It would embarrass and distress Aunt Phoebe if her antagonism was obvious to onlookers. Some kind of small talk had to be found.

‘It is various country dances, I think.’

The music began and Laurel recognised it as a severely modified version of an old tune, slowed down and with all the bounce taken out of it. The measures that had been put to it were unfamiliar, but it was slow enough to be able to follow easily.

‘Whoever set this has a cloth ear for music,’ Giles observed after a few minutes as they paused, waiting their turn to promenade down the line. ‘And it is slow enough to be a funeral dirge.’

When they came together after a few more measures Laurel remarked, ‘I would have thought that dancing at the Lisbon Court would have involved any number of very stately measures.’

Giles was striking enough in ordinary evening dress—black-silk breeches, white stockings, midnight-blue superfine tailcoat—but if the diplomatic corps wore full Court uniform at the Portuguese Court as they did at St James’s then he would have looked even more magnificent with heavy silver lace on his coat. He was also a graceful dancer with the muscular control to move well through slow turns and promenades. She had often noticed that the slower the dance the more a clumsy dancer was caught out.

‘You are correct. Court dances there are rather slow and old fashioned, unfortunately. Very mannered with much posturing. At first it was hard not to laugh at the sight of us all peacocking about. But Wellington wintered in Portugal and he liked to throw a ball at the drop of a cannonball. He expected all his young gentlemen to dance and he liked things lively.’

‘And you were one of his young gentlemen, were you?’ The more she heard the more she was convinced he had spent the past years in the thick of the Peninsular conflict, not lounging around at the Court exchanging pleasantries and diplomatic chit chat in the intervals between minuets. Which was both admirable and infuriating, because now she would have to admire him for it and, she acknowledged, she did not want to have to discover any good in him.

Not one scrap.

‘I would drop by, on occasion.’ His face was shuttered now, the smile simply a reflex on his lips. ‘I was not in the army, Laurel. I was attached to the diplomatic corps.’

And something else, he cannot deceive me with that offhand manner. Intelligence work, perhaps? Interesting that he does not want to talk about that time, let alone boast about it. Oh, dear, another admirable trait.

‘Thank goodness that is over,’ Laurel said as the violins scraped their last mournful note and the dancers exchanged courtesies. ‘Ah, this one is much better.’ It was a proper country dance with vigorous, cheerful music. ‘It is familiar,’ Laurel said as Giles caught her hands and spun her around. ‘But I cannot place it.’

‘Neither can I.’ They stood aside for the next couple to spin. ‘Yet somehow I associate it with you.’

‘With me?’ And suddenly, as Giles joined hands across the circle and spun another of the ladies, it came back to her. The smell of lush green spring grass crushed under dancing feet, the scent of the blackthorn blossom in the hedgerows glinting in the torchlight, the cold white light of the moon and everywhere laughter and the scrape of a fiddle, the thud of the tabor and the squeak of a penny whistle.

‘The village May Day fête,’ she blurted out as he came back to her side and she was whirled into the circle away from him.

She had been what? Fourteen? They had all gone to the fête during the day which had been delightful, even though Stepmama had not allowed her to buy the gilded trinket she wanted because it was ‘vulgar trash’. And equally she had forbidden Laurel to go to the dance in the evening. It would be an unseemly rustic romp, quite unsuitable for any young lady, even one who had not yet let down her hems and put up her hair. Laurel had bitten her lip against the tears of disappointment and nodded obediently, but she had opened her window wide that evening, had put on her nicest dress and had danced by herself in her room to the distant music on the warm air.

And then there had been a scraping sound against the sill and Giles’s head had risen slowly into view. ‘I say, are you decent, Laurel? Still dressed? Good. Come on, I’ve got the orchard ladder. We can go to the dance.’

She had not needed asking twice. They had scrambled down the rough rungs and run across the meadows, somehow hand in hand, although there was no reason for her to need any help. They danced all evening with other people, Laurel mainly with the other village girls of her age because none of the sons of tenants would risk the consequences of being found romping with the daughter of the big house.

And at the stalls set up around the green Giles had bought her the trinket she had yearned for. He slipped it in his pocket for safekeeping just as the musicians had struck up with the tune they were dancing to now and he caught her hands and pulled her into the measure. They had danced until they were breathless and, at the end, when all the lads pulled their partners into their arms and kissed them, he had kissed her, too. Just the innocent, friendly brush of his lips over hers for a fleeting second.

They had run back as the clock struck midnight like the best of fairy tales, still hand in hand, and when she put one foot on the first rung of the ladder Giles had kissed her again, just that same harmless, laughing caress, and she had laughed back and kissed the tip of his nose.

‘Your charm,’ he said, digging in his pocket.

‘Look after it for me,’ she had replied. ‘If Stepmama sees it she will know I have been to the fair.’ Then she had scrambled up the ladder and arrived in the bedchamber breathless. And in love.

Looking back on it now, Laurel knew her feelings had been entirely innocent of any physical desire. There had simply been the certainty that she was Giles’s and he was hers and that this was an entirely satisfactory and inevitable state of affairs. Instinctively she had known that this truth did not need to be put into words or expressed in any way, any more than one needed to comment that rain was wet or that sheep were woolly. And, of course, Giles understood it, too, that went without saying as well. One day, when she was older, the words would be said...

It had not been until two years later, when Giles had left England and she was in disgrace, that it had occurred to her to look properly at herself in the mirror, to look and see a gangly, skinny girl with a mass of unruly brown hair and eyes that seemed too big for a face that had the odd freckle and a threatening pimple and no discernible beauty whatsoever.