‘My lady. Welcome to Hainford Hall.’
‘Thank you, Fallowfield. I know I am going to be very happy here.’
And I will be, if force of will can guarantee happiness.
‘How did he lose his arm?’ she asked as the carriage rolled through the gates and then through wide open parkland dotted with clumps of trees. Everything seemed lush and green and fertile. Rich.
‘He was our farrier. A big plough horse reared as it was being led into the forge, struck his arm, pinned him against the wall. The arm was too badly crushed to save, so I gave him the lodge here, and charge of all the other lodges, the boundaries and the woodsmen.’
All the other lodges, Ellie thought weakly. This isn’t an estate—this is a small kingdom.
Then she forgot her nerves at the sight of the house, long and low and golden in the sunlight, as beautiful and elegant in its sprawling grace as its master.
‘You like it,’ Blake said. It was a statement—he could see her face, her betraying expression, but she did not care if she was transparent.
‘I love it,’ she replied, and for a second thought she saw something in his face.
Pain? Regret? Surely not. Probably annoyance that she was exhibiting such strong emotion. Whatever it was it was fleeting, gone in the blink of an eye, and he was smiling back at her.
‘It looks like a home,’ Ellie explained. ‘I was fearing a palace and this is…this is…’
And suddenly her eyes were blurred with tears. She swallowed hard, fighting them back. So stupid. She did not cry, and there was nothing to cry about—only that she had been searching for a word that would please Blake and what she had said had been the absolute truth.
‘Eleanor?’ Her face had betrayed her again.
‘It looks like a home, not just a house. It looks like our home. I cannot recall feeling that I have had a home—not since my father died. Places to live, yes. But when my mother married again it was not our house, somehow.’
‘And then it became dangerous because of your stepfather?’
She nodded tightly. ‘And the house where I lived with Francis…that was just somewhere to be. It was perfectly fine, but somehow it was only a roof over my head. I think, if things had not been so difficult there, that Carndale Farm might have become a home, but it would have taken time. I would have had to create it. But this…’
This house will contain you at its heart.
‘It was a good house to grow up in,’ Blake said.
They had never spoken of children—not explicitly, not in terms of a family. There had just been that joking reference to the Pencarrrow nose. Ellie had a sudden vision of small boys racing their ponies across this green parkland, little girls shrieking with laughter as they chased a puppy and a ball along the wide terrace that was coming into view as the carriage drive swung round.
‘The West Front,’ Blake said, pointing. ‘We came in from the north, but the main entrance is on the South Front.’
As the carriage turned again Ellie looked away from the house and caught a glimpse of a distant tower beyond the trees that edged the park. ‘What is that? Another house?’
‘The next estate.’ Blake’s face had become expressionless. ‘That is the point where my neighbour’s land comes nearest to the house. Two generations ago my grandfather’s best friend, Charles Harper, Viscount Trenton, built his new mansion almost on the boundary, so their families would be as close as possible.’
‘That sounds like the preliminary to a marriage,’ Ellie said.
‘It might have been,’ Blake said, his voice strangely constrained. ‘But my father had only brothers and so did George Harper, the heir of Trenton.’
‘And you are the only child of the last Earl? Did the Viscount not have a daughter for you to marry?’
She’d said it lightly, meaning to tease, but Blake had turned away abruptly.
‘Oh, I am sorry—that was the home of Felicity wasn’t it? How clumsy of me not to realise.’
‘She…’ For a second Blake closed his eyes, and when he opened them again they were dark, hard. ‘As I told you, Felicity had other ideas. When she eloped with that damned poet she broke…she broke her father’s heart.’
His reaction to the failure of an arranged betrothal seemed somewhat extreme after what must have been several years. Unless it had been Blake’s heart that had been broken and not Felicity’s father’s.
‘We are about to arrive. You need to put your bonnet back on, Eleanor.’