The Earl's Practical Marriage

Ouch. Phoebe’s elbows were sharp. ‘Who? Where? Oh.’ Goodness, indeed. The man who had just strolled into the room was tall, blond, tanned, beautifully barbered and elegantly attired—and all too familiar, despite his changed appearance. Laurel could not decide whether her blood was rushing to her face in a blush or draining to her toes in embarrassed alarm. Or possibly simply overheating with a dismaying and inconvenient physical attraction.

‘Why, that is the gentleman I told you about, the one who showed me the way over the Downs when the tree had blocked the road. Only then he looked as though he could scarcely afford a decent coat, let alone a pair of boots like that,’ she managed. ‘And he has had his hair cut. Phoebe? What is it?’

Her aunt was staring at the man as he came closer, her expression one of complete dismay. ‘The last person I would have expected to see in Bath... It must be him because, good heavens, he is the perfect image of his grandfather. I had no idea he was in the country. Of all the unfortunate things to have happened, I cannot believe you did not recognise him. Or perhaps not, if you had never met his grandfather because he has changed so much... With any luck he will not notice us.’

‘Phoebe, what are you talking about? That is not someone we know. Is it?’ The gentleman had seen them, she realised, and must have recognised her from yesterday. He began to make his way across the room towards them, this time with obvious intent. He kept his expression politely neutral, although as he came closer she saw a crease developing between his brows, so dark in contrast to his sun-bleached hair.

Phoebe made an abrupt gesture with her hand as though to ward him off. ‘Oh, dear, I wonder what is the right thing to do—’

‘Madam.’ He arrived in front of them before she could finish and made a slight bow. ‘Forgive me for approaching you without an introduction, but I believe I had the honour of being of some slight assistance to this lady yesterday and wished to enquire if she is quite recovered from her journey.’

‘You are Lord Revesby,’ Phoebe said, peering up at him like a flustered little bantam hen, not at all sure whether to ruffle her feathers at this fox in her hen coop or simply fly away cackling in alarm. ‘But why did you not introduce yourself to my niece when you met her yesterday, instead of waiting until now?’

‘Yes, I am Revesby, but I fear you have the advantage of me, madam. I did not introduce myself as she was alone save for the presence of her maid and I did not think it appropriate to make myself known to her.’ He seemed puzzled by Phoebe’s question, but Laurel could only admire the way he kept his tone polite and any sign of irritation hidden. He obviously had breeding. ‘I could not introduce myself to a lady with whom I had merely a chance encounter on the road.’

You could kiss her though.

Then she realised what Phoebe had called him. ‘Revesby? You are Giles Redmond?’ No wonder that hint of familiarity had been teasing at her. This was Giles. Her friend. Her nemesis. So changed. All grown up.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, looking squarely at her for the first time. She saw the recognition dawn on him even as she felt the dizziness of shock take her. He had not recognised her, any more than she had him. ‘Laurel? You are Lady Laurel Knighton?’

‘I am. What are you doing here?’ She would not faint and she would not raise her voice, even if the man who had ruined her life was standing in front of her. Why had she not recognised him yesterday? Laurel made herself focus. Stupid question. This was a man, not a boy. A man who had grown into those ears and feet and the nose. A man who had lost the scrawniness of youth to muscle and bone. Heavens only knew where the diffidence and the shyness had vanished to. But then those had been only the outward appearance—underneath it he had been someone different all the time, a juvenile libertine, a deceiver and a false friend.

‘I have private business here. You were the cause of my leaving the country once, Lady Laurel. Now, I am glad to say, I go where I wish, when I wish.’

‘And you wish to be in Bath, of all places?’ She knew she sounded scornful. It was a beautiful city, but there was no getting past the fact that these days it was true to its reputation as the resort of the infirm and the elderly.

‘I can assure you, my presence in the same town as yourself is in no way intentional.’ He looked as though he would rather chew wasps. ‘My father is unwell and undergoing treatment here.’

Phoebe cleared her throat and he turned, unsmiling. ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am. I am aware we have not been introduced.’

‘But we have, Lord Revesby.’ Despite the crackling antagonism between Laurel and the Earl, Phoebe sounded absolutely delighted with his presence now and her cheeks were flushed becomingly with pink. ‘You will not recall it because I last saw you when you were the merest child. Why, I dandled you on my knee. I am Lady Cary, Lady Laurel’s aunt.’ She frowned slightly. ‘But how did you identify her just now, know to cross the room to us? My niece was travelling veiled.’

Laurel knew the heat was definitely a blush this time. Would Giles reveal that she had removed her veil for a few incautious minutes and that he had taken advantage of that? Although to do so would expose him, once again, as a libertine.

‘It was you I recognised, Lady Cary, although not from my childhood. I must confess that I followed the chaise. After all, I too was coming to Bath and I wanted to make certain that the chance-met lady arrived safely.’ Giles glanced, unsmiling, at Laurel, then back to Phoebe. ‘I would not have recognised you today, ma’am, but I was close enough to glimpse you in Laura Place greeting your guest. When I saw you across the room just now I came over to enquire.’

‘You followed me? Why on earth would you do that? Perhaps your rakish propensities have not improved with age, my lord,’ Laurel said sharply. Her own behaviour the day before had been decidedly improper and knowing that added vinegar to her tone.

‘My what?’ Several heads turned and he lowered his voice. ‘You were an hysterical girl nine years ago, Laurel, and, it appears, you are as poor a judge of men now as you were then,’ Giles said, his voice silky with suppressed anger. ‘I assisted you yesterday out of a disinterested desire to help a stranger.’ In the look he gave her she read the message that he was not going to mention that kiss unless she did, but that was as far as any truce between them would go. ‘I followed because I was certain I knew you from somewhere. If I had realised who you were, I would have ridden in the opposite direction, believe me.’

Let alone have kissed me, no doubt.

That behaviour was all of a piece with what she knew of his true character.

‘Lord Revesby!’ Phoebe was all of a flutter at their hostility. Laurel realised that she had been paying no attention to where they were or who might overhear. Certainly the tension was too blatant for even good-natured Phoebe to ignore. ‘Laurel! Please, both of you—whatever is the matter? Surely not that old business? Oh, dear, I beg of you, do not make a scene in here, Laurel, it would be fatal to your prospects.’

‘We could always summon a porter to have Lord Revesby removed,’ Laurel added. ‘We did not desire his presence, after all.’

Giles’s smile, if that was what it was, conveyed disbelief that anyone would be capable of ejecting him forcibly. Laurel’s fingers twitched with the desire to box his ears, but she kept her hands clasped in her lap, merely looking pointedly away as he sketched a bow and strolled away to the entrance.

‘I do not think anyone noticed.’ Phoebe cast a glance around the room and sat down again. ‘Of all the unfortunate encounters. Are you all right, my dear? You were positively bristling and I had thought... It is such a long time ago...’

‘I am perfectly all right, Aunt, thank you. After all, as you say, it is nine years since I saw Giles—Lord Revesby—last. The wretched man might still annoy me, but he hardly has the power to upset me, not after all this time.’

Giles had hurt her, betrayed her friendship and, she had realised afterwards with a shock, broken her heart, as well as causing a scandal, confounding their fathers’ mutual plans for their future and, incidentally, sending her godfather’s daughter into an hysterical decline that lasted almost an entire summer.

‘Would you like to leave, Laurel? I think he has gone. We should return home—I could call a chair for you. Or would the walk be soothing?’

‘I am certainly not adjusting my movements in order to avoid one man. I will not be driven out of anywhere by Giles Redmond. Besides, if he is staying while his father is in Bath taking treatments, we might encounter him at any time and I refuse to run away whenever we encounter him.’ She sent a sidelong glance at her aunt. ‘How much do you know about what happened?’

‘Not a great deal, your father’s letter was such a tirade I could hardly make sense of it. But we cannot discuss it here, can we?’ Phoebe fanned herself vigorously with her hand. ‘I know—let us drink our water and then we may stroll back by way of Miss Pringles’s haberdashery shop for that braid I need. We will both find the walk beneficial and then when we get home you can tell me all about it in the privacy of our own drawing room over a nice cup of tea.’

‘Of course. What I can remember of it. After all, it was so many years ago and I was only just sixteen,’ Laurel said with a smile that was intended to betray nothing but rueful regret about an unfortunate incident that was virtually ancient history now.

The smile was very successful, she thought, catching a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrors lining the walls above the dado rail. Especially as she had just lied. Every word that had been spoken that day, every expression on Giles’s face, every stab of anguish she had felt, were still crystal clear. She had lost more than a friend and a neighbour, she had lost the young man she had fallen in love with without realising it.

How very fortunate that she had not married him after all, considering how objectionably he had turned out.

* * *

Hell and damnation.

Giles stalked along the High Street from the Pump Room and turned left into Bond Street, welcoming the stretch to his leg muscles as he climbed towards Queen’s Square and his father’s lodgings. If the old man discovered that Laurel Knighton was in Bath at the same time as his prodigal son it would probably give him a seizure. It was enough to give Giles a seizure, come to that, and his constitution was perfectly sound.

Neither of them had ever discussed Laurel directly in their punctilious, cautious, correspondence. It had taken his father a good month to recover from the worst of his fury over the collapse of his plans to marry his heir to the well-dowered girl next door. Then there had been the scandal over Giles’s flat refusal to do the decent thing and marry Miss Patterson instead, even after he had so gravely insulted her in the midst of the hideous row with Laurel.

Eventually the Marquess of Thorncote had simmered down sufficiently to write in response to Giles’s formal and polite letter informing his sire that he had removed his person—as instructed—as far as possible from the Marquess’s sight. That had taken a while to reach home as, to his father’s indignation, Giles had attached himself to his cousin Theobald’s entourage sailing for Portugal and Theobald’s new diplomatic post with the Court at Lisbon.

His father had replied, acidly, that his instruction to ‘remove’ himself had meant relocating to one of the family’s other country estates. Anyone but a stiff-necked ingrate would not interpret it as a direction to take himself off into a war zone at the age of barely eighteen. Giles would kindly bring himself back immediately if he wished to avoid falling even further into the Marquess’s ill favour. If there was any deeper hole to fall into.

But Giles found he had no desire whatsoever to go home and that had nothing to do with ghastly embarrassment, torrid gossip, furious or fainting young ladies, or fathers demanding satisfaction and reaching for their horsewhips. He wrote a temperate letter of refusal to his parent and made himself at home in Lisbon.

It had been, as Giles was fully prepared to admit, a young man’s over-dramatic solution to a monumentally unpleasant situation. But he soon found that life in Lisbon suited him down to the ground. He grew up fast and hardened up as quickly. Then the quiet gentleman who was believed generally to be the British army officer attached as liaison to the diplomatic corps revealed himself to be rather more than that and recruited Giles into his intelligence organisation. Giles had never imagined himself involved in spying, let alone risking his neck behind enemy lines, but he discovered that it was something he enjoyed and was good at into the bargain.

Now he was furious. He recognised that it was as much with himself for being thrown off balance as with Laurel, the infuriating female. The fact that the gangly, plain, awkward fledgling of a girl had turned into a lovely young woman—at least, she was lovely when she was not glaring at him—only fuelled his own bad temper, for some inexplicable reason.

He arrived at the doorstep of the elegant lodging house and spent a good half-minute getting his breathing under control before he rapped the knocker.

The man who answered was clad in a respectable suit of dark superfine with crisp white linen and had the unmistakable air of being a retired gentleman’s gentleman. He ushered Giles in and escorted him upstairs with a few unexceptional remarks about the weather. At the top he paused. ‘The Marquess has taken all of this floor for his accommodation,’ he said, low-voiced. ‘He is having a good day today, I am happy to say, my lord. His gout has eased considerably and I believe the anticipation of your visit has raised his spirits.’

‘How bad is his health?’ Giles asked bluntly. ‘I would rather have the truth with the bark on, if you please.’

‘You will wish to speak to the medical practitioner who attends your father, my lord, to satisfy yourself. I would only venture to say that the Marquess’s condition is always vastly improved when his mood is good.’

In other words the gout was thoroughly unpleasant, but everything else was in his head, Giles mentally translated. Whether his father was looking forward to taking the prodigal to his bosom in an excess of forgiveness or was pleasurably anticipating giving vent to nine years’ accumulated disapproval remained to be seen.

‘This way, my lord.’ The landlord tapped on a door, then opened it. ‘Lord Revesby, my lord.’

Chapter Four

Giles stepped into a spacious sitting room with a pair of windows overlooking the square. His father was seated in a large winged chair with his left foot, heavily bandaged, resting on a gout stool and as Giles entered he turned to scowl at him from under heavy brows that had turned almost white.

But despite the grey in his hair and the white brows and the footstool this was not an old man, far from it.

He’s only sixty, Giles reminded himself. It must be maddening to find himself crippled like this, no wonder he is turning into a hypochondriac. He should be rampaging about the estate giving everyone hell and persecuting foxes and pheasants as he always did.

‘My lord,’ he said formally as he approached. ‘I am sorry to find you not in the best of health.’

To his alarm the Marquess lurched to his feet and pulled him into an embrace. ‘Giles. My God, it is good to see you again, my boy.’

When the grip on Giles’s shoulders relaxed he eased his father back down into the chair, restored his foot cautiously to the gout stool and sat down opposite, unbidden. He spent an unnecessary moment fussing over the cushion at his back so his father could deal with the tears on his cheeks. He had not seen his father weep since that awful day more than twenty years ago when both his mother and his just-born sister had died. ‘Sir, you should take care.’

‘Hah! I should indeed take care. Too late for that now,’ he added.

‘Surely not?’ Now Giles was here he realised how much he had missed his father, even at his blustering, noisy worst. He had loved him and hadn’t known it. ‘Father, your gout is obviously bad, but you are a young man still, in your prime. Nothing is too late.’ Even as he said it a superstitious chill ran through him. ‘Or is there something else, some disease you haven’t mentioned in your letters?’

‘No, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my health, only this hell-bitten foot and a lack of exercise giving me the blue devils.’ The older man shook his head, his expression strangely rueful. ‘Let me look at you. I cannot believe how you have changed, which is foolish of me. You’re a grown man now and you’ve the look of your mother’s family about you, and that is no bad thing—fine-looking men, the lot of them.’

‘I should have come home sooner,’ Giles admitted.

‘I do not think so. I can read between the lines, and your cousin Theobald dropped me a few discreet hints. You’ve been involved in more than Court affairs in Lisbon, I would guess. Scouting into Spain? Intelligence work?’ When Giles shrugged and smiled, his father nodded. ‘I thought as much. You would have probably been safer in a regular regiment, in uniform, damn it, than risking your neck without its protection, but you’ve been doing your duty for your country and I am proud of you.’

Giles could find no reply. His father had never said anything before to suggest that his only son was not a grave disappointment, a bookish, clumsy, serious boy. When he was younger, before he realised the implications of primogeniture, he had wondered why his father did not remarry and sire another son, a satisfactory one to inherit.

Now that had changed, it seemed. He sensed that it was not simply that he had somehow proved himself to his father with his activities in the Peninsula, but that there had been something in their exchange of letters, stilted though they had been, that had gradually built a bridge of understanding, of sympathy, between them. Perhaps that link would never have been constructed when they had been close enough to irritate each other in person.

Giles cleared his throat. ‘So is Bath proving helpful with your gout?’

‘The damn quack has me on a reducing diet and has ordered my man Latham to hide the port and it seems to be working, confound it, so I suppose I must admit he has the right of it, the arrogant, expensive, devil. But the gout’s neither here nor there. I wanted to see you urgently and thank the Lord—or more probably Wellesley, or Wellington as he is now—for ending the war and bringing you home, otherwise I would have had to send for you.’

The warm feeling inside him, the pleasure at his father’s pride and the relief that this encounter was not going to be the fraught affair he had been steeling himself to deal with, drained away. There was trouble brewing or, judging by the bleak look in his father’s eyes, it was already brewed, thick and dark. ‘What is wrong, Father?’

The older man shifted in his chair and when he did answer, it was oblique. ‘It was a bad thing that the marriage to Palgrave’s chit fell through.’

That old history, coming so close on his encounter with Laurel that morning? The sensation of a chilly finger on his spine was back. ‘Father, it is nine years in the past. She was far too young to think of marriage. So was I, come to that. Even without that misunderstanding we might well have grown to find we were incompatible.’ They certainly would be from the evidence of that morning’s encounter. Although the memory of Laurel’s lips persisted. ‘I will set about finding myself a suitable bride as soon as possible, I promise you.’ Giles put as much energy and commitment into the promise as he could muster.

The Marquess shook his head. ‘You know her father and I had planned that marriage between you for years, ever since you were children. It would have united the two estates. Even after everything went wrong and you left the country and there was a coolness between the two households, it seems that Laurel’s father still cared a great deal about that alliance. And now, I find, I care about it again, too. It would solve everything.’

Why bring this up now? Surely he doesn’t think himself in such bad health that he is worrying about the next generation of heirs?

And if his father really was becoming agitated on the subject, then surely he knew as well as Giles that a marquess’s heir should have no difficulty securing an eligible match?

Giles found he was on his feet. He paced to the window and turned, his back to the light, so the irritation on his face would be hard to read. Even so, the words that escaped him were harsh. ‘Why the devil are we still talking about this? That fiasco is cold news, no one gives a damn about it.’ Except, apparently, him, judging by that sudden loss of control. That was an uncomfortable insight. At the time it had been infuriating and deeply embarrassing, but surely he had got over that by now? His duty now was to find a suitable bride and he certainly had no intention of being distracted by nonsense about Laurel.

‘Giles, sit down and listen to me. You have to do something within a few months or we risk ruin.’

Perhaps he had drunk too much last night, or had hit his head and was concussed, or this was all some kind of anxiety dream brought on by travel weariness and frustrated desire and worry about this meeting. Giles resisted the urge to pinch himself. ‘Ruin? How can we be facing ruin? This is ridiculous.’ He sat down. ‘I have to do something? Tell me.’

This time his father did not hesitate, just plunged in. ‘Five years ago I started to speculate. It seemed I had the knack for it. I made money.’

Giles had the strange sensation that the blood was draining out of his head towards his feet. ‘Yes?’

‘I went on investing, speculating.’ Now that his father had started confessing the words poured out. ‘What I should have done, of course, was to keep back my initial stake, put it into land or government bonds, kept adding a proportion of my gains to it as I went along. But I kept investing it all, making it work, or so I thought.’

He sighed and rubbed one hand over his face as though intolerably weary. ‘Then I lost, heavily. Cornish tin mines failed to produce silver, a Brazilian scheme fell through. It was one disaster after another. I put in more, tried to make up the losses. Before I knew where I was, everything had gone, Giles. Everything except the entailed lands.’

Everything. The title had never been a very wealthy one. An ancestor had been granted the spectacular honour of a marquessate for a very murky piece of assistance to the first King George. He had risen from a minor rural earldom to the upper branches of the aristocratic tree without the generations of slow accumulation of wealth that most of the great noble families had behind them. There were no estates dotting the length of the land, no great hoard of jewels dating back to the Tudors, just Thorne Hall, its lands and the trappings of a very comfortable lifestyle.

‘So, what did you do?’ Incredibly Giles was keeping his voice steady.

‘I sold off all the unentailed land to Palgrave, which met some of the debt. Then I borrowed the rest from him.’

‘How much do we still owe?’ This was a nightmare, had to be. He was going to wake up in a minute, sweating, in his bed in Lisbon...

His father told him, then into the appalled silence added, ‘The estate earns enough to service the loan, but not to clear it.’

All right, he was not, apparently, going to wake up. ‘Palgrave died just over a year ago, yes?’ Laurel had been out of mourning when he saw her, he realised.

‘He left letters for me and for his heir. Malden Grange and the land he bought from me are in trust to Laurel, with the new Earl as trustee. Malden was never the main house, so its land is not entailed. This man prefers the old place on the other side of the county, along with its mouldering castle ruins—he’s something of an antiquary, it seems—and he has his own properties anyway.’