The Scarred Earl

Persephone remembered why she found this man so annoying—he even outdid Jack, Rich and her second brother Marcus all rolled into one irritating being—and she itched to take him down a peg or ten.

‘You really have no idea how much,’ she drawled as if she really was a bored society beauty. ‘In a few weeks the Little Season will be on us and I can blithely skip off to town and leave others to open up a house that’s been unlived in, if not unloved, these ten years and more while I selfishly enjoy the social whirl as I deserve to.’

‘Being too frivolous to worry yourself over hiring suitable staff, supervising any redecoration and reupholstering found necessary, and any general interfering that will entail? Please don’t mistake me for a flat, Miss Seaborne. You will jump at such a golden opportunity to impose your iron will on your world, social whirl or no.’

‘Not as high as I might at the chance of reordering yours,’ she snapped, and if he had any illusion she meant for the better, he was more naive than he looked.

‘I have no desire to find the mouldering splendours of my ancient state rooms in the dungeons or on the nearest handy midden, so you’ll certainly never be asked to spruce up any of my houses.’

‘Why on earth would I want to?’ she asked with as much disgust as she could fit into so few words.

‘You tell me, my dear,’ he replied, and suddenly he was too close for comfort and even more impossible to ignore.

‘I suppose I might want to murder you in your bed.’

‘I sleep so lightly not even a sleek little hunting cat like you could slip into my bedroom without my knowing. You would be in far more danger than I if you ever tried it, Miss Seaborne, and it wouldn’t be murder I had on my mind.’

All she had intended was to make him see she disliked him, but he’d turned her words on her. She shivered with apprehension and something more disturbing as his softly muttered threat seemed to fill the air between them with false promise.

‘If I were such a discerning animal, I doubt I would look to you for comfort by night, or any other time of day, Lord Calvercombe. Cats of any sort are too wise and independent to need aught from such as you,’ she managed to say, as if the idea of purring under his stroking hand didn’t send a dart of something hot and uncomfortable shivering through her, as if her body had plans for Alex Forthin the rest of her didn’t want to know about.

He smiled blandly at her defensive words and she cursed the man for seeing too much, whatever he could physically see or not see. More civilised men would realise she wanted to be alone when they found her in this quiet garden. A true gentleman would turn and leave at first sight of her staring at the statue of her namesake at the heart of a garden intended to glorify spring and its goddess. As the garden was long past its best and waiting for next spring’s abundance to be astonishingly lovely again, why would he come in here if he didn’t want to speak to her? Yet now he was here, he infuriated her with his aloofness and looked as if he preferred her room to her company.

‘I wouldn’t believe anything you heard about me until you know me better than you do now, Miss Seaborne,’ he warned silkily.

‘Why on earth would I gather gossip about you?’

‘I can think of one very earthy reason,’ he said softly and suddenly there was a different danger in the air from the one that had frightened her earlier.

‘Then think again. I wouldn’t tangle with a bitter and disillusioned man like you if you came gilded and anointed by the gods,’ she told him militantly.

‘I wonder if your namesake argued with Hades before he bore her off to join his dark world?’ he mused with a nod at the artfully carved Persephone nearby.

It felt as if he was drily discussing classical mythology with a tutor at Oxford or Cambridge, except she was sure he’d never looked at one of them with lust in his fathomless deep-blue eyes. There was a spark of something more dangerous than mere need lurking in them to disrupt her peace of mind as well, and she struggled to free herself of a spell she was sure he hadn’t wrought deliberately, since he seemed to dislike her almost as bitterly as she did him.

‘Persephone’s mother raged after her daughter to wrest her from her dark lord and his underworld,’ she managed to argue, despite a fast-beating heart and this odd feeling of being cut off from the real world in here, with him.

She ought to turn and walk away, of course, but the reckless Seaborne spirit had got into her along with her fidgets, so she stood her ground and met look for look. Trying not to acknowledge a terrible heat had sprung to life deep inside her and was making her a stranger to herself; she reminded herself he was a stranger and would remain one if she had any sense.

‘Only for half the year, remember?’ he argued. ‘Do you think she was content above ground and missing her lover until winter came back and she could join him? I suspect she couldn’t wait to lie in his arms again while the earth rested and she could escape the constant pleas and botheration of mere mortals.’

‘It’s just a myth, a neat story to entertain simple people and explain away the seasons without need for deep thought,’ she replied in a breathy voice so different from her usual tone that she scolded herself for being a fool and letting him unnerve her.

‘Persephone was a fertility goddess, Miss Seaborne. Her cult wove deep into the fabric of ancient Greek life and held her responsible for far more than a little extra daylight and the wearing of lighter clothing for a few months.’

‘I understood that Greece, being a Mediterranean land, enjoyed little change in climate between summer and winter, Lord Calvercombe,’ she said in as unemotional a tone as she could manage.

He was so close it seemed almost a crime not to touch his scarred face and explore the smooth firmness of the unmarred side. He seemed to be two facets of man: one smooth and bronzed and as perfect as man could be, the other battle-scarred, cynical and deeply marked by the terror and evil he must have met. Intriguing to find out how a young Apollo like Lieutenant Forthin had become bitterly reclusive Lord Calvercombe and if much of one remained in the other, despite his hardened exterior. Also incredibly dangerous to her peace of mind—she had enough to worry about without him fascinating and infuriating her by turns.

‘Tell the men of the mountains there’s no winter there when they battle feet of snow, Miss Seaborne, and all their kin and cattle crowd in the house for warmth and travellers and luckier souls stay by the sea to seek what warmth there is. Winter exists everywhere, Persephone, even if sometimes it lives only in the souls of men.’

‘How do you know?’ she had to ask softly, sensing the real Alexander Forthin beneath all the armour and scepticism and wanting to know him better.

‘I’ve seen it,’ he said, seeming continents away, lost in a bleak place where men carved their hatred of others on the faces of their captured enemies, either to extract their secrets, or for the twisted pleasure of torture itself.

Her fingers itched to soothe those silvery, healed scars of his and assure him he wasn’t at the mercy of merciless men any longer. He seemed to remember where he was and who he was talking to, and stepped away as though he could read her mind and her thoughts burned him.

‘You have a way of extracting secrets that could be a potent asset, Miss Persephone Seaborne,’ he accused, as if she had broken his solitude and peace after a hectic day, not the other way about.

‘It might indeed, if I wanted to know them in the first place,’ she said as icily as she could.

‘Touché, my dear,’ he said with a rueful smile that almost disarmed her.

‘Go away, Lord Calvercombe,’ she ordered coldly.

‘If only I could, Miss Seaborne,’ he said regretfully, ‘but something evil this way comes, to paraphrase those witches in Macbeth you probably know all about, given your erudite education. I can’t let it harm you whilst Jack is otherwise engaged.’

‘Why not?’ she said childishly. Though she was acutely disturbed to know he felt as if a dark blight was eating at the edges of Jack and Jessica’s glowing happiness as well, she was unwilling to acknowledge she and this apology for an Earl might have more in common than either of them desired.

‘I’ve seen what a man’s worst enemy is capable of, more often than I care to recall in India. Do you think you’re immune to the evil we humans do each other purely because you’re lovely, rich and well born? You could only cling to that belief for seconds after stepping on to a battlefield, unless you really are as impervious to the lives of mortals as yon stone depiction of your namesake,’ he told her, as if she were the unreasonable one and he temperate as a May morning.

‘No, I’m not so arrogant, whatever poor opinion you may have cobbled together from second-hand gossip and supposition. Nevertheless, I have a brother out in this wide and weary world somewhere and I fear deeply for him, Lord Calvercombe, despite my selfish, shallow and hard-hearted nature. If facing whatever threatens Rich is the only way to find out what happened to him, and why he either can’t or won’t come home, then I will face it. I certainly don’t need your help to do so.’

‘Then you really are a fool,’ he said harshly, and she couldn’t resist giving a shrug, as if his opinion didn’t matter.

‘Not fool enough to put faith in a man who sneaks about in the dark to meet his old friend as if he doesn’t trust him. Jack would welcome you joyfully if you came up his drive in rags with not a penny to your name.’

He had the grace to blush as she spoke of the hurt her cousin had felt when Lord Calvercombe didn’t trust his generosity of spirit to face him by daylight. She recalled the June night when Alex Forthin met the Duke of Dettingham at midnight and they found more in the dark than either had bargained for.

Independent of each other, she and Jessica had stalked them in brilliant moonlight. Whilst Jess had met her match in the enchanted depths of the wilderness walk in full midsummer bloom on the way back that night, Persephone came away from her first sight of the man she remembered from Rich and Jack’s schooldays as fabulously handsome, if arrogant, with a vague sense of disappointment. He probably would have annoyed her even if she weren’t already furious that he could think any Seaborne would turn from his scars in disgust.

‘I was misinformed,’ he defended himself, but this wasn’t the time to find endearing his gruff reluctance to admit he was wrong. ‘The Duchess told me I was unfit to be seen by light of day.’

‘Jessica said that? No, she would never spout such rubbish, any more than she could revile you for a hurt that was none of your fault.’

‘That’s debatable,’ he said ruefully. Then, catching sight of her renewed fury at his dismissal of Jessica’s generosity of heart, as well as her extra sensitivity to society’s uneasy reaction to her own damaged leg, he held up his hand to stop her tirade. ‘I mean it’s a moot point that this was not my fault—’ he flicked an impatient finger at his damaged face and eye ‘—if I’d obeyed orders and not been an arrogant young idiot, I would never have been captured in the first place. Perhaps life would then have been very different for me if I’d done as I was bid, Miss Seaborne, but you leap keenly to the defence of relatives or friends others dare to criticise, do you not?’ he asked almost as if it were the first admirable quality he’d found in her and common justice made him admit it. ‘It was Jack’s grandmother, not his new wife, who informed me I should not bother him or the ladies of the house party he was hosting with my repulsive countenance. I can see for myself Jack and his Jessica will be likely targets for every enterprising beggar in the Marches, once word gets out how good and benevolent both are. Hopefully Jack’s to-hell-with-you manner will disguise it well enough for them to keep a few guineas in their coffers to feed their family when it comes along.’

‘I think it might manage that,’ she couldn’t help responding with a rueful smile at the idea of the fabulous wealth of the Seabornes being dissipated by her shrewd, if sometimes soft-hearted, cousin. ‘And can’t you see for yourself that’s just the sort of thing everyone expects the Dowager Duchess to say? If you haven’t realised by now that’s half the reason she goes on saying such things, then you’re a bigger fool than I thought you to be that night.’

‘She’s your grandmother,’ he replied as if that explained a great deal.

‘We all have our crosses to bear,’ she said lightly.

She refused to see any of herself in the famously rude old lady, who had terrorised her husband and both her sons and their wives as Duchess in power, until her husband died, annoying her more in death than he had in life. The Dowager Duchess had retired to the mansion in Hanover Square and a lofty house near Bath she had inherited from her nabob father, rather than yield precedence in her former domain to a mere daughter-in-law, or endure living in Ashburton Dower House for the rest of her days.

Since she had decamped for her own houses, the Dowager refused to discuss events at Ashburton, or Dettingham House in Grosvenor Square, much to her sons’ relief. Or at least she had until Jack was rumoured to have done away with Persephone’s brother Richard. Then the Duchess had decreed it was high time Jack wed and put that silly story down as the fairy tale it was by siring direct heirs to replace Rich in the succession. Persephone wondered if it annoyed her haughty grandmama that Jack then went about it in his own unique fashion and fell head over heels in love with Jessica Pendle. She surprised herself with the conclusion the Dowager was almost smug about that very outcome, as if she’d planned it all along, and learnt to distrust the wily old tyrant more than ever.

‘At least you are blessed with a close family,’ Lord Calvercombe interrupted her reverie and the uncomfortable notion her grandmother was omnipotent after all.

‘Sometimes that’s more a curse than a blessing,’ she said, trying not to feel sympathy for a man who was as alone as a powerful aristocrat could ever be.

‘I could certainly curse your brother up hill and down dale at times.’

‘If only you would find him safe and well while you did it, I might join you.’

‘Yet from what you said just now, you would put yourself in danger for him if there was any prospect you might find him by doing so, or did I mistake you?’

‘Yes, I would, but even when he makes me wish I was strong enough to shake him until his teeth rattled, I still love him. Richard is my big brother after all, Lord Calvercombe, and can’t help being annoying at the best of times.’

‘It doesn’t mean you have to love him for it, Miss Seaborne. I can’t recall any love ever existing to be lost between myself and my own half-brother, or between my father and his elder brother for that matter. Rivalry over an empty thing like a title, especially when the estates that goes with it are in the condition mine were after they all finished quarrelling over them, apparently transcends brotherly love so far as we Forthins are concerned.’

‘Being raised in such a nest of rivals, I suppose it is little wonder you don’t understand how deeply we Seabornes feel about each other, my lord. Your example proves how very lucky we are to do so, I suppose.’

‘Or that you are better and more generous people than we are.’

‘Far be it from me to suggest it,’ she said innocently, then wondered why there was a flash of some powerful emotion in his eyes, as if he had an impulse to do something very foolish indeed.

‘Perhaps it’s because my cousin Annabelle wasn’t born a Forthin that I loved her so much,’ he said almost as if he was reasoning something out loud, rather than confiding in her. ‘And why I must find her, or at least know what happened to her, while I was too far away to help. She is the only child of my cousin Alicia and her nautical husband, Captain de Morbaraye, and she came to live at Penbryn once she was considered in need of an education, while they carried on sailing the seven seas.’

‘Penbryn was your father’s house?’

She was interested because his precious Annabelle disappeared at the same time as her brother Richard. This discovery had provoked his midnight visit to Ashburton—and there was nothing personal about her memories of that night, she excused herself. She wasn’t intrigued by this complex and contrary man; she only needed to know Rich was alive and well, and if his search helped prove it then all well and good.

‘Penbryn was my mother’s home,’ he replied with a puzzled shake of his head and a distant look in his eyes as if trying to recall her. ‘It was probably only because she was heiress of Penbryn Castle that my father married her in the first place, since my uncle didn’t have a Welsh castle and it must have annoyed him to know his younger brother would live there with his second wife. You can probably only imagine how my brother hated me for inheriting the castle when he was the eldest son. In his own opinion, as well as that of the law, he should have had everything, although he had no blood ties to my late grandfather, the Earl of Tregaron, whatsoever.’

‘If the castle is yours, why did you join the army and leave it for India?’

‘Have we not discussed the fact I’m a fool already, Miss Seaborne?’ he asked with a wry smile that set her heart skipping all over again when it made him look boyish and almost lovable.

It should not be allowed. She could cope with him bitterly furious at life; could easily endure arrogant and aloof Lord Calvercombe with little more than an irrepressible flutter of girlish excitement; but the complex man underneath made her long for all sorts of things the Earl would never countenance.

‘My grandfather tied up my inheritance until I attained the age of five and twenty,’ he went on. ‘Since my legal guardian was to administer the trust and my brother became that guardian when my father died, I could not endure seeing him play ducks and drakes with my inheritance whilst I waited impatiently for that day. I decided I’d better put a few thousand miles between us, before I gave in to the urge to strangle him before he did more damage.’

‘How could the other trustees sit back and let him ruin your future?’

‘It was easier than arguing or taking him to law,’ he said ruefully.

‘Cowards,’ she muttered furiously and surprised some intense feeling in his eyes, before he clamped down on it and it was gone.

Chapter Three

Lord Calvercombe shrugged dismissively.

‘My brother is dead, Miss Seaborne. The law is quite strict in its refusal to prosecute dead men.’

‘At least he didn’t inherit the estates that go with your title,’ she said consolingly, but from his moue of distaste that wasn’t much of a blessing.

‘There was little my predecessors hadn’t already done to impoverish them. If not for the revenues from my grandfather’s estates that even my brother Farrant couldn’t quite dissipate during his five years of trusteeship, I would be in hock to every moneylender in Greek Street to pay the wages on my new estate, let alone redeem the mortgages.’ ‘How profligate of your predecessors,’ she said and wondered at so much wealth and power being so spectacularly wasted.

‘That’s what happens when jealousy and pride come before love or duty. One branch of my family litigated against another, solely for the joy of a good argument so far as I can tell. The Seabornes have a more pragmatic approach to inheritance they would have done well to share.’

‘How odd that the first male heir born in the Duke’s bed becomes Duke in turn, God willing.’

‘So it would seem, Miss Seaborne.’

‘Your mother must have been furious at being caught in the midst of their quarrels and petty rivalry.’

‘My sainted mama ran off to Naples with a poet about a year after I was born and died of typhus fever in Rome a few years after that. I doubt she cared one way or the other what became of me. She clearly couldn’t abide my father, yet she left me in his so-called care when she ran off with her lover.’

He said it with such matter-of-fact composure Persephone might have wept for the lonely child he’d once been, if that child hadn’t grown into the latest Earl of Calvercombe, who clearly didn’t want or need anyone’s tears.

‘Who have you got left to argue with now then, my lord?’

‘That’s the beauty of it—apart from one childless and ancient great-uncle who refuses to have anything to do with me, or anyone else so far as I can tell, I am the last of my line. Apparently we Forthins have litigated one another into oblivion.’

‘I suppose there’s plenty of time to remedy that situation,’ she said, wondering why the idea of him setting up his nursery as soon as some poor innocent girl would marry him made her shiver in the enclosed warmth of her namesake’s garden on a hot, late-August afternoon.

‘No, we’ve run our race,’ he said, his expression closed and even a little bleak.

All sorts of unsuitable questions raced to spill off her tongue and he must have sensed them teetering there outrageously in an unmaidenly rush she somehow managed to contain. His austere expression gave way to the mocking grin she was beginning to loathe and any compassion she felt for the lonely man vanished like mist in the sun.

‘My captors made the mistake of saving that particular form of torture as their ultimate threat, but ran out of time or chance to carry it out, Miss Seaborne. You can restrain your unladylike imagination on that front at least.’

‘I have no idea what you mean,’ she said distantly.

‘Oh, come now, my dear. I prefer your open curiosity to the soulless propriety of most of your kind. Don’t disappoint me by becoming as mealy-mouthed as any other well-born single lady I would go well out of my way to avoid.’

‘If you shun such correct young women, I’d best polish up a suitably outraged expression and work harder on my simper.’

‘At least then I wouldn’t have to worry about you getting in the way while I search for my ward and your brother, even if it would be a crime against nature to meddle with your more strident character. I can’t imagine such a properly nurtured female squawking and swooning and disapproving her way about the countryside without an entire army of villains knowing she was on her way, so if you could arrange to become one as soon as may be I shall be enormously relieved.’

Tempted to flounce away and let him believe whatever he chose about her whilst she conducted her own investigation into Rich’s disappearance, she was held back by the frustrating certainty that a lady on her own would never get far with such a quest. She was too hedged about with constraints not to need a man of power on her side to forge through or round any obstacles thrown in their way.

‘Whatever your opinion of me, I’ll not rest until I know where my brother is and what has made him conceal himself so completely from those of us who love him, Lord Calvercombe. Despite all Richard has done to put his family off the notion of owning up to him, let alone loving him, we stubbornly insist on doing so,’ she told him with as much icy dignity as she could muster.

If not for the habit he had of watching her with cynical incredulity—as if he were about to have her stalked and captured to be displayed as a public curiosity—she might have turned and walked away, but as it was she didn’t trust him not to go straight to her mother and warn her that her daughter was intent on seeking out her errant eldest son, if only to get Persephone out of his way and carry on searching for Rich and his precious cousin Annabelle unopposed.

‘At least I now know I read you right in the first place,’ he muttered with a formidable frown to tell her he’d hoped he was wrong, for once in his life.

‘I’m a Seaborne—what else did you expect?’ she said scornfully.

‘Some common sense and a smidgeon of ladylike self-restraint to make you more endurable?’ he asked as if he already knew that was too much to ask.