The Earl's Marriage Bargain (Liberated Ladies)

‘Everything, if you please,’ said His Lordship. ‘And send in the cellar man.’

‘Should you be drinking wine or spirits if you have had a blow to the head?’ Jane enquired. ‘I am not nagging,’ she said hastily when she got The Look again. ‘Merely concerned that you do not throw a fever, because that would hold us up.’ She sat down at the table to demonstrate her lack of desire to fuss over him.

‘Us? I was not aware that there was an us.’ Lord Kendall drew out a chair and sat opposite, both hands flat on the table like a man ready to jump up and leave at any moment.

Jane found herself studying the grazes across the knuckles, the neatly trimmed nails, the tendons and veins, the plain gold signet ring, and jerked her attention away. This was no time to wonder about making a series of studies of hands.

‘You have no money, I do. If I had not rescued you, goodness knows what would have happened to you. As a result of that rescue I am without my maid. You could escort me to Batheaston.’

‘It would be scandalous for you to travel with an unrelated man. If I had any confidence that I could ride that distance just now, then I would offer to escort you on horseback and you could hire a maid to travel with you in the carriage. As it is, the option of staying here together until I am strong enough to ride is an even more outrageous proposition.’

‘You are very honest about your strength,’ she remarked, intrigued. ‘Most men would pretend they were perfectly capable, whatever the truth of the matter.’

‘If we encounter trouble and my right arm is not strong enough to use a pistol—not that we have one—or otherwise deal with an attacker, then I would have put my self-esteem above your safety.’ He studied her for a long moment. ‘Are you acquainted with many gentlemen?’

‘My father, my brother, the local gentry and their sons. Oh, and the Bishop of Elmham—the retired one—and his secretary and the Duke of Aylsham. I was a bridesmaid at his recent wedding.’

‘You move in very respectable circles, Miss Newnham.’

‘You mean the Duke being such a pattern card of perfection? I can assure you, marriage to my good friend Verity, who is the Bishop’s daughter, has changed him considerably.’

‘Why am I not surprised by that?’

Jane felt the sudden heat in her cheeks. ‘Might I suggest that we do not quarrel, Lord Kendall? Otherwise I might be inclined to take myself—and my money—elsewhere.’

‘I meant,’ he said, with only the faintest twitch of bruised lips, ‘that Aylsham doubtless required enlivening.’

Hmm, Jane thought. That was as neat a piece of foot-removal from mouth as I have ever heard.

‘Of course you did,’ she said cordially. He stared back, his expression blandly innocent. ‘You are not at all what I expected an earl to be like.’

‘No? I have spent the last nine years in the army, perhaps that accounts for it. I have had only three months’ practice at being an earl and only two weeks of that in this country.’

‘Nine? My goodness. How old are you?’

‘Twenty-seven. I joined as an ensign.’

He looked older, she would have guessed at thirty, but perhaps that was the bruises and cuts and general air of hard-won experience. ‘I am twenty-two,’ she offered in an attempt to elicit more confidences.

‘And fresh from the Season, I presume?’

‘I have not had a London Season. Papa considered that local society would be quite sufficient, although Mama disagrees.’

And I have an expensive older brother, she could have added, but did not.

‘And was it sufficient? There is no fiancé or a string of beaux left behind in London?’

‘They would be in Dorset if I had any, which I do not. We were only in London visiting Aunt Hermione for a month because she has been unwell. Not that I want a beau, let alone a betrothal.’

Lord Kendall stopped tracing a crack in the planked table top with his index finger and looked up sharply. ‘Why ever not?’

‘Marriage and husbands seem to complicate life so much. They restrict it. I am an artist. Matrimony and art are not compatible—unless one is a man, of course.’

It was the first time she had said it out loud, the thing she had been thinking secretly. It felt momentous, just to say the words, I am an artist, and to mean them, not as a description of what she enjoyed doing as a pastime, but as something that defined her, Jane Newnham. Artist.

‘Surely that is not what you should expect of marriage. You certainly draw with great proficiency and insight, but what has a husband to do with that? Most ladies sketch and paint in watercolour and I assume you all have drawing masters or governesses to teach you.’

‘I am not interested in a mere genteel pastime,’ Jane explained. The strange sense of recklessness her declaration had produced seemed to sweep through her, take over her voice. ‘I want—I need—to improve, to paint in oils to be as good as I want, to be able to paint portraits to a professional standard.’