“There is something about Harold Valland I do not trust. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was far from an innocent bystander.”
They were silent a moment.
“Someone,” said Marietta, her eyes fixed on the fire, “should do something about it.”
Mr. Jardine gave her a sharp look. “Miss Marietta, this is none of your affair. Do not think to meddle.”
“Who said anything about meddling?” Marietta said mildly, and sipped her tea.
A tap on the door saved her from further questioning by Mr. Jardine, and when Lil entered the library it was with a request from Vivianna for Marietta to come to her bedchamber.
Relieved, Marietta set down her cup and hurried out, but Lil lingered, exchanging some pleasantries with Lady Greentree’s secretary on her current life in London.
“Jacob Coachman’s heart is broken, you know that, Lil?” Mr. Jardine teased. “He will never be the same again.”
“Oh, go on with you!” cried Lil. “He’ll find someone else, you wait and see. Men, they’re all the same they are, apart from you, Mr. Jardine,” she added earnestly.
But Mr. Jardine did not seem to notice the admiring expression in her eyes or the quickening of her heart. He just smiled at her in his paternal way and told her to be a good girl, although he knew she was, and then went back to whatever it was he had been doing.
With a sigh, Lil left him to it. She had loved him for years, ever since she went to work for Lady Greentree at Greentree Manor. Even though she knew she was unworthy of such a gentleman, she could not help but wish things were different and Mr. Jardine would look at her as a man, and not a father.
Lil had grown up on the streets and through necessity, when she was far too young, had earned her keep by selling her body. Vivianna had found her in that state and “saved” her, and Lil had loved her for it ever since. Vivianna had given Lil the chance at a new life.
Lil was determined to deserve it.
She would never fall back into her old ways, she was far too respectable for that now. Indeed, she studied respectability as others might study music or art, and she was very careful in her every action. But she knew she would never be deserving enough for a wonderful man like Mr. Jardine. Besides, he loved Lady Greentree. It was sad that Lady Greentree still loved her husband, who had died many years ago in India. It was sad that Lady Greentree could not see that there was a man waiting for her, a flesh and blood man, right under her nose.
Lil sighed again, and set off up the stairs after Marietta.
Chapter 6
Max drifted in and out of consciousness, rather like a aeronaught in a gas balloon. The doctor had given him laudanum, and although it helped him to sleep and heal, it was not a peaceful slumber. Once he thought he heard Harold in the room with him, and then, strangely, his father. “Get well, my son,” the duke said, and then his breath caught, as though the word had come from his lips unawares and he had realized all over again that Max was no longer his “son” but some stranger’s child foisted upon him.
Max and his father had never been close in the demonstrative way Max and his mother were close, but then his father was not the sort of man who could easily express his feelings. However, he had always believed his father loved him, and all the more since his mother had died. The duke had seemed genuinely proud of Max and the man he had become. Now all that was gone. The violent severing of the ties between them caused an ache inside Max’s chest very much like the wound in his head, except this one could never heal.
At the age of twenty-nine he had lost both his parents.
He wanted to hate his mother for what she had done, but he could not do that either. The duchess had been a kind, sweet lady. How could Max hate her? And—deep in his heart—how could he believe that she had really conceived him with another man and then married the duke? Deceived and lied and played a part. And yet the duke obviously believed his wife’s letter to be the truth, and Max, too, must accept the evidence, however much his heart rebelled against it.
Max tossed and turned in his enormous ducal bed, until eventually his mother’s face faded and his thoughts turned instead to a cool palm on his feverish skin, and blue eyes smiling down at him, and a soft lap pillowing his head during that appalling ride home in the coach.
Marietta Greentree.
What was it about the woman that got under his skin, despite his best efforts to keep her out? She was bossy and pert, and he wanted nothing more than to escape her clear, cool gaze and put a stop to her intrusion into his life. He had never asked for her help or her interference, and yet suddenly here she was, inside his world, and he didn’t know how to push her out again.
Not exactly sound economics…
Her voice echoed in his pounding head, and he smiled wryly at the memory of her reprimand. She had been right—he shouldn’t be spending money at Aphrodite’s Club when he couldn’t even pay his servants’ wages or the tradesmen who called constantly at his door, demanding he settle their accounts. What had he been thinking, to go there? Probably that he was miserable and alone and nothing would ever be the same again. Soon, he knew, he must make a final decision about his future.
Cornwall. That was where his mother’s family’s house was, where it had stood for generations. Max had only been to Blackwood once, when he was a boy; he barely remembered it, and what he did remember wasn’t encouraging. Grim, gray stone and small, dark windows that reflected no light, perched on a precarious cliff above an unfriendly sea. If he sold everything he had left he could then afford to move to Blackwood and live there frugally for forty or so years. Until he died.
Max shuddered in his fever. He would become the hermit of Blackwood House, the last of his line, forgotten except by the gossips who would not let his story die. The Disinherited Duke, that was w
hat they would call him, and shake their heads…
What was it Ian Keith had said? Something about this being Max’s chance to make a new life for himself, without the shackles of position or privilege. Max admitted that the thought of being cast adrift from his allotted place in the world was not comfortable. Perhaps he was running away to Cornwall, not because he had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, but because he had not been brought up to be anything but a duke. A gentleman did not dirty his hands with actual paid work. A gentleman preferred to keep his hands clean and slowly starve to death.
Maybe Ian was right. Time to put aside the worn out prejudices, time to think like a man and not a peer. Max searched his mind for something he could do, something he was good at, something he might enjoy. Farming? He could turn the land in Cornwall into a prosperous concern. He pictured himself toiling with his laborers over the stony ground growing things like…like mangel-wurzels, the sun warm on his back, the smell of the soil on his hands. But was it enough to sustain him and those dependent upon him?