Contracted As His Countess

Chapter Two

Jack Ransome did get up then. He stood looking down at her while her heart thudded, one, two, three, four. Then he sat again, slowly.

Madelyn made herself focus on him and not on her own churning stomach. So, he was capable of being taken by surprise, of an unguarded reaction, however good he was at getting himself under control again.

‘Why?’

‘I have no desire to die a spinster, which means I must wed. And my father wished most particularly that I marry a man with bloodlines that can be traced back to before the Conquest, a man of impeccable breeding. He had intended approaching you with his proposition. And then he died.’

‘My title, for what it is worth, was granted by Henry the Eighth. The Ransome of the time had his favour for reasons I have never understood, but it was probably something thoroughly disreputable. His father had awarded us with a barony because my ancestor chose the right side at the Battle of Bosworth, but Henry the Eighth created the earldom.’

At least he hasn’t laughed in my face or walked out.

‘There are no titles of nobility left at that date from before the sixteenth century,’ she said. If he was interested she could lecture him on the subject all morning, but somehow she did not think he was. ‘The Tudors saw to that, because the aristocracy was too closely tied by blood to the Plantagenets and so many had as good a claim to the throne as theirs. But Father traced your lineage to Sieur Edmund fitzRanulf, who fought at Hastings, and the intermarriages since then were very satisfactory to him.’

‘They were very satisfactory to me, considering that I am the result of them,’ Ransome said drily. ‘Virtually all aristocrats have an ancestry that can be traced in this way, not to say hundreds, if not thousands, of gentry. The College of Heralds spends its time doing just that.’ He was humouring her, she could tell.

Earning his fee. We will see about that, she thought, stiffening her spine. She had begun now, how much worse could it get?

‘My father wished for an aristocratic connection. There are very few noblemen of ancient lineage who might be prevailed upon to wed me who are unmarried, of marriageable age, of good character and who are interested in women.’ He looked a question and she managed not to blush. ‘I do understand about that. There are, in fact, just seven of you at present who meet the criteria and who hold titles or are the heirs.’

‘Thank you for the most flattering offer, Miss Aylmer, but I am not available for stud purposes.’ Jack Ransome reached for his gloves.

He had kept his voice level, but the crude words were used as a weapon, the first betraying sign of an emotion besides surprise. He might well talk about pride—she had apparently pricked his painfully. The lines between his nose and the corners of his mouth were suddenly apparent, as though his whole face had stiffened.

Somehow Madelyn fought the urge to flee the room and shut herself in a turret for ten years, or however long it would take for them both to forget this conversation. But he was not the only one with verbal weapons at his disposal. ‘No? Not even if my marriage portion includes the entirety of your family’s lost lands and properties?’

Jack Ransome stared at her, his eyes unblinking, and she knew she had his full attention now as his pupils widened until the blue eyes darkened. ‘My father, grandfather and elder brother between them broke the entail ten years ago. Over the course of eight years—the time it took all three of them to die one way or another—my father and brother managed to sell or gamble away virtually everything. I sold the last few remaining acres to pay the debts. How do you propose to restore all of that to me?’

‘When my mother and brother died my father sought out the men who best fitted his criteria for me. He then made it his business to discover what was most likely to make the match acceptable to them. In most cases there was nothing that he could—’ she almost said use as a lever, but managed to bite her tongue in time ‘—identify.’

The other candidates came from families that seemed, as far as Peregrine Aylmer could discover, quite secure and likely to be wary of an alliance with Castle-Mad Aylmer’s daughter.

But Jack Ransome had inherited an empty title and so her father had become relentless in his pursuit of the scattered lands and properties. Relentless and ruthless, she feared, not above exerting pressure on whatever weaknesses he could find to secure a purchase. Antiquarian research had given him the skills to dig deep into family cupboards to discover the skeletons they held.

Madelyn pushed away the unsettling memories and made herself meet the dark gaze that seemed fixed on her face. ‘Father searched out every scrap of land, every building, of the lost Dersington estates and acquired them. He identified your brother first, but did not add him to the list because of his way of life. But then Lord Roderick died almost as soon as he had inherited the title and you inherited.’

She could remember her father returning home, crowing with delight, ordering all the banners to be flown from turrets and battlements in celebration. He had found the ideal candidate and one he could exert a hold over.

Under her left hand the stack of deeds felt as substantial as a pile of bricks. Under her right, the unfolded parchment crackled betrayingly and she forced her fingers to stillness. ‘Be grateful,’ he had told her. ‘I have found you a man free from his family’s vices and I have the shackles to bind him to you.’ She had known better than to protest that she did not want a husband who had to be coerced and shackled.

‘Your mother and brother died six years ago,’ Jack Ransome said blankly. ‘Six—I was twenty-one when he started looking, twenty-three when Roderick died. How did he know I would not marry someone else?’

‘Then your lost lands would remain in here.’ She gestured towards the chest. ‘They would be an incentive for whomever I did eventually marry. Collected together the Dersington properties make an impressive dower.’

It was an effort to keep her voice level and dispassionate, but Madelyn thought she was managing well enough. It was what she was required to do as a dutiful daughter, she reminded herself, yet again. As Jack Ransome was keeping his temper, she found her courage rising a little. ‘Look.’ She opened out the stiff folds and slid forward the large parchment under her right hand, her fingers spread, pinning it down at the centre. ‘The deeds to Dersington Mote and its estates.’

The document was more than five hundred years old, made from the skin of an entire young sheep. Battered seals hung from faded ribbons at the bottom, thick black writing covered it with legal Latin. The Ransomes had held the manor of Dersington since the time of the Conqueror, but their right to castellate—to build a defensible castle—had been granted by Edward II with this document. It gave them no title, not then, but it set out the boundaries and the extent of the land they held, their rights and obligations as lords of the seven manors that it comprised. It was the heart of Jack Ransome’s lost estates.

He stared down at it, his face unreadable. Then he put out his own right hand, laid it palm down on the parchment and drew it towards him.

Madelyn flattened her hand as she resisted the pull and his fingers slid between hers until they meshed. ‘It is quite genuine,’ she said.

‘I know. I can see the seals.’

She had studied them, translated the motto embossed on them. Quid enim meus fidelis. Faithful to what is mine.

There was a long pause. She had time to register that his hands were warm, to feel the very faintest tremor and the tension as he tried to control it, to hear the deep even breaths he took and guessed at the control he was having to exert not to tear it from her grasp.

‘Sell it to me.’

‘No. You could not afford it.’ Madelyn’s voice was almost steady. ‘Besides, I would sell all the lands and properties together, not just this one estate.’

His hands were shaking, try as he might to control it, and he suspected she could feel that also. Jack lifted his fingers from the parchment, away from contact with her cold touch, even though it felt as though the document would rip as he moved them. Just an illusion, of course. This was shock, he realised. A total, complete, unexpected shock, as though the massive stones beneath his feet had shifted.

‘So, you want to buy a husband, Miss Aylmer?’ he said, wanting to shake her poise, wanting to hit back in response to the thunderbolt she had just thrown at him.

‘Are not all marriages between people of breeding a matter of exchange?’ Madelyn Aylmer asked, so coolly that it was an effort to keep the masking smile on his lips. ‘They always have been, right down the ages. Titles for wealth, alliances for land, property for position. If this was the fourteenth century I would have been married off as a child for just those reasons. I cannot believe that the motives for aristocratic marriages are so different today. Or are you so resigned to your lost lands and status that you are hoping to make a love match?’

She was not used to fighting, Jack realised, pulling himself together with what felt like a physical effort. Under all that careful control, those pricking questions, Madelyn Aylmer was nervous and that was probably the only thing stopping him from losing his temper. Perhaps she was not even used to talking to men who were not her father or her own staff. If that was the case, then she had guts dealing with this alone, he had to admire her for that. She could have had no idea how he would react to her revelations. Somewhere at the back of his mind was a feeling of surprise that he was not shouting, was not overturning this great slab of a table in sheer shock and frustration.

He put his hands on the old oak, not touching the document, and let what had just happened sink in. He had been offered the chance to regain everything his father and brother Roderick had squandered, everything his sick, confused grandfather had allowed them to snatch. Everything. Land, property, status. The title. Pride.

No, that was wrong, he told himself as the words buzzed and rang through his brain. His pride, his self-esteem, did not rest on what he owned, but on what he did. He had fought that battle with himself in the months following his brother’s death in a drunken fall down the front steps of his club as he celebrated inheriting the title. It had taken almost a week to come to terms with what he had inherited: an empty title and a mountain of debts.

At the end of that painful struggle with reality he knew he had made the right decision—he was not going to be Lord Dersington, pitied for his vanished inheritance, sneered at for pretending to a standing he could no longer support. He would be his own man, a new man. It had not stopped the sneers, of course, it had only increased them. If there was one thing his class hated, it was someone turning their back on inherited status. It devalued the entire concept.

Now he was being offered his birthright back and he could feel the weight of the generations it represented pressing down on him. As he stared at the parchment, something stirred deep in his soul, the flick of a dragon’s tail of possessiveness, of desire. This is mine by right.

Jack looked at the woman opposite him. He could say Yes, pick up those papers, live a new life. The life he had been destined to live. All that was required of him was to sacrifice his pride and to accept being a bought man. But there were two people in this equation.

What if Madelyn Aylmer was as eccentric as her father? She seemed to have lived cloistered in this place for years. What if she could not cope with the outside world that she had called a world of steam and speed and cities, of poverty and ugliness? But it was an exciting world, his world, full of scientific and technical advances, full of discoveries and possibilities. He was not going to turn his back on that to pander to the bizarre fancies of this woman. If she married him, then she was marrying a man of the nineteenth century and she was going to have to change and conform to his world, his time, not drag him back into her fantasies.

Every instinct screamed at him to snatch at what was being offered, but even so… He could not take advantage of a woman who, not to put too fine a point upon it, might not be in her right mind. ‘You are doing this because it is what your father wanted,’ Jack said, before common sense and self-interest could assert themselves. ‘Is it what you truly desire, to marry a man you do not know? You must forgive my frankness, Miss Aylmer, but I want children, an heir, and that involves, shall we say, intimacy.’

‘I want that, too.’ She was blushing now for the first time and with her pale skin he thought the effect was like a winter sunrise staining the snow pink. ‘I mean, I want children and I am quite well aware what that entails. I am not ignorant.’

‘All you know of me is my ancestry,’ Jack said in a last-ditch attempt to do the right thing.

The right thing for her, and perhaps for me, might well be to walk away from this. Do I really want to regain my pride in my heritage at the price of my pride as a man? Can I live with this woman?

She was not beautiful, she was probably almost as much of an eccentric antiquarian as her father and she appeared to have no society manners whatsoever.

A fine wife for an earl, he thought savagely. He was angry—he knew that in the same way that some part of his brain was aware he was drunk when he had overindulged with the brandy. Anger was no basis for making a decision of this importance.

To his surprise Madelyn Aylmer laughed. ‘Of course your ancestry is not all I know of you. Do you think I sit here like a maiden in a tower waiting for my prince to come and hack his way through the brambles that surround me and meanwhile I have no contact with the outside world? I am perfectly capable of employing my own enquiry agents. I know a great deal about you, Jack Ransome.’

‘You employed—who?’

‘On the advice of my man of business I used a Mr Burroughs of Great Queen Street and the Dawkins brothers of Tower Hill. And my legal advisers also made enquiries.’ The little smile that had seemed so tentative was suddenly sharp. ‘What is the matter, Mr Enquiry Agent Ransome? Do you not like it when the boot is on the other foot?’

‘Not so much,’ he admitted. She did not appear to be either feeble-minded or delusional. It seemed Miss Aylmer had a quick wit and perhaps a sense of humour. He tried to see that as a good thing and found his own sense of humour had utterly deserted him. ‘You were well advised. They know their business.’ Anyone who knew him could have told that tone signified danger—but then, she did not know him. Not at all, whatever information she had been given.

So, what had his competitors told her? That he was ruthless, although he kept within the law—mostly? That he had recently ended a very pleasant liaison with a wealthy widow two years older than himself? That he had no debts to worry about and gambled within his means, but that he could be reckless when it came to a sporting challenge? That he had a short fuse when it came to attacks on his honour and had met two men on Hampstead Heath at dawn as a result? He was damned if he was going to ask, because the infuriating female would probably hand him the reports to read. Whatever was in them, it had not been bad enough to turn her from this course.

Time to shift the balance of this interview—time to see whether he could tolerate this woman as his wife and to try to make a rational decision. Everything had its price and some costs were just too high to pay.

‘Have you made your come-out? Been presented at Court? What do you know of the world beyond that moat?’

Madelyn made a small, betraying movement, the smile quite gone as she rose to her feet. ‘Come into the garden,’ she said and walked away towards a small door in one corner before he could reply. ‘I think better outside. In the summer the Great Hall can feel rather like a vault.’

Jack strode after her and caught up in time to reach the door first and open it. ‘Is it better in the winter?’ he hazarded. ‘With fires and hounds and good food?’

‘Hounds? I agree, that would be authentic,’ she said, glancing back as though to reassure herself that he was following along the passageway. ‘We do have them, of course. But they are never allowed inside because of the tapestries. Do you like dogs?’

‘Yes, although I do not have any at the moment. You do not own one? I thought medieval maidens always had small white lapdogs or miniature greyhounds.’

‘I have an Italian greyhound called Mist. Father allowed that because she is very well behaved. She is shut up in case you did not tolerate dogs.’

‘And if I do not?’

‘I suppose I would have had to leave her here.’ For the first time he heard real uncertainty in her voice.

We are not following her careful script, Jack thought, wondering if she saw everything as a stage setting with each piece in its place, every character performing their preordained actions, reading from their script. If that was the case, then life outside these walls was going to come as a severe shock to Mistress Madelyn.

‘There would be no need,’ he said. ‘If we wed, that is. I like dogs. You were about to tell me…’ And then Madelyn opened the door at the end and he lost the thread of whatever he had been about to say and stood silent, staring.

‘Come in.’ Madelyn held out her hand, and he stepped out into paradise. He must have said the word aloud because she smiled. ‘Yes, that is what the Islamic gardens were called. A paradise. Technically this is a hortus conclusus. But you do not want a lecture. Wander, relax, think: that is what this place is for. I will send for refreshment before we talk further.’

By the time Jack had pulled himself together in the haze of perfume and colour and warmth, she had gone and the door was closed. He began to explore, still faintly bemused, strolling along grass paths between knee-high hazel hurdles that held back over-spilling colour. There were roses, ladies’ mantle, banks of herbs that were smothered in bees, banks of lavender where the buzzing was almost deafening.

He looked around and realised that this was the interior of the castle, walled on all sides, a sheltered suntrap. In the centre a circular pool held a fountain and he passed intricate knot gardens as he made his way towards it. A wave of lemon scent assaulted him as he brushed past a bushy green plant, then his feet were crushing thyme underfoot.

The fountain was surrounded by low grass banks, and he sat down, wondering if he was drunk on scent or whether he had been transported back five hundred years. He had to make a decision about the woman who dwelt in the middle of this fantasy and he was beginning to think that she had put a spell on him and that he was in no fit state to decide anything. Or perhaps it was simply shock.

The ends of the turf seats were marked by tall wooden posts painted in spiralling red and blue and white, each topped by some heraldic beast. He leaned back against the unicorn post, closed his eyes on the sun dazzle from the fountain and tried to think.

What do I want? What do I need? What would be the right thing to do?

Chapter Three

Jack Ransome was asleep in the midst of her garden when Madelyn returned, and she indulged herself for a moment, watching him relaxed in the sunlight. Long dark lashes lay on those high cheekbones, the deep blue eyes were shuttered, that expressive mouth relaxed. He appeared about as safe as a sleeping cat must look to a sparrow, she thought, gesturing to the maid to put down the tray on the turf seat a few feet away from him.

When she put one finger to her lips the girl flashed a smile in response and tiptoed away. Madelyn sat on the fountain rim and looked, not at Jack Ransome, but at her own reflection in the edge of the pool. Occasional water drops broke the image into fragments, but she knew what she was looking at well enough.

She was not attractive by the fashionable standards of the day—she understood that perfectly from the journals and newspapers and books she’d had brought to her in the months since her father’s death. She was too tall, far too blonde—brunettes were most admired, she gathered—and far, far, too pale. Pale skin was a sign of breeding, of course, but pink cheeks and rosebud mouths were admired. Her hair was straight, her bosom too lush, she had realised as she studied the portraits of fashionable beauties and scanned the fashion plates. She had no idea how to dress, what to do with her hair, how to behave. She had no conversation. The very thought of a crowd of people made her feel a little ill.

Fish began to rise at the sight of her, but she had brought nothing for them, so she trailed her fingers through the water, breaking up her reflection, sending them flickering away with a flash of sunlight on fin and scale.