Buch lesen: «Marrying His Cinderella Countess»

Chapter One

London, May 1816

As the burning ball of the sun sinks into the shimmering azure of the Mediterranean and the soft breezes cool the heat of the day I lie in the cushioned shade of the tent, awaiting the return of the desert lord. The only sound besides the lap of the wavelets and the rustle of the palm fronds is the soft susurration of shifting sand grains like the rustle of silk over the naked limbs of...

‘Susurration... Drat!’ Ellie Lytton thrust her pen into the inkwell and glared at the words that had apparently written themselves. She opened the desk drawer and dropped the page onto a pile of similar sheets, some bearing a paragraph or two, some only a few sentences. She took a clean page, shook the surplus ink off the nib and began again.

I can hardly express, dear sister, how fascinating the date palm cultivation is along this part of the North African coast. It was with the greatest excitement that I spent the day viewing the hard-working local people in their colourful robes...

‘Whatever possessed me?’ she muttered, with a glance upwards to the shelf above the desk.

It held a row of five identically bound volumes. The gilded lettering on the red morocco spines read: The Young Traveller in Switzerland, The Youthful Explorer of the English Uplands, Oscar and Miranda Discover London, A Nursery Guide to the Countries of the World and The Juvenile Voyager Around the Coast of England. All were from the pen of Mrs Bundock.

Her publisher, Messrs Broderick & Alleyn, specialists in ‘Uplifting and Educational Works for Young Persons’, had suggested that Oscar and Miranda might fruitfully explore the Low Countries next. Edam cheese, canals, tulip cultivation and the defeat of the French Monster would make an uplifting combination, they were sure.

Ellie, known in the world of juvenile literature as the redoubtable Mrs Bundock, had rebelled. She yearned for heat and colour and exoticism, even if it came only second-hand from the books and prints she used for research. She would send young Oscar to North Africa, she declared, while secretly hoping that the Barbary corsairs would capture him and despatch the patronising little prig to some hideous fate.

What she really wanted was to write a tale of romance and passion to sell to the Minerva Press. But separating the two in her head for long enough to complete Oscar’s expedition—and earn enough from it to subsidise several months of novel-writing—was proving a nightmare. No sooner had the beastly boy begun to prose on about salt pans and date palms than her imagination had filled with the image of a dark-haired, grey-eyed horseman astride a black stallion, his white robes billowing in the desert breeze.

She pushed back the strands that had sprung out of her roughly bundled topknot and jammed in some more pins.

After luncheon, she promised herself. I will start on the sardine fisheries while the house is quiet.

Her stepbrother, Francis, who had not returned home last night, was doubtless staying with some fellow club member, which meant that all was blissfully peaceful. With only Polly the maid in the house she might as well be alone.

The rap of the front door knocker threatened her hopes of an uninterrupted morning. Ellie said something even more unladylike than drat, and tried to ignore the sound. But it came again, and there was no sign of Polly coming up from below stairs. She must have slipped out to do the marketing without disturbing her mistress at work.

Ellie cast a glance at the clock. Nine o’clock, which meant that it was far too early for any kind of demanding social call, thank goodness. In fact it was probably only Francis, having forgotten his key again.

She got up, wiped her inky hands on the pinafore she wore when writing, jammed a few more hairpins into her collapsing coiffure and went out into the hall, wincing as her damaged leg complained from too much sitting. She tugged at the front door and it opened abruptly—to reveal not Francis, but a tall, dark, grey-eyed gentleman in dishevelled evening dress.

‘Miss Lytton?’

‘Er... Yes?’

I am dreaming.

She certainly seemed to have lost the power of coherent speech.

I have only just shut you safely in the drawer.

‘I am Hainford.’

‘I know,’ Ellie said, aware that she sounded both gauche and abrupt. Where are the white robes, the black stallion? ‘I have seen you before, Lord Hainford. With my stepbrother Francis.’

But not like this. Not with dark shadows under your eyes. Your bloodshot eyes. Not white to the lips. Not with your exquisite tailoring looking as though it has been used as the dog’s bed. Not with blood staining—

‘Your shirt... You are bleeding.’

Ellie banged the door open wide and came down the step to take his arm. It was only when she touched him that she remembered she was alone in the house. But, chaperon or no chaperon, she couldn’t leave a man out there, whoever he was. Losing blood like that, he might collapse at any moment.

‘Were you attacked by footpads? Do come in, for goodness’ sake.’ When he did not move she took his arm. ‘Let me help you—lean on me. Into the drawing room, I think. It has the best light. I will dress the wound and as soon as my maid returns I will send for Dr Garnett.’

She might as well have tugged at one of the new gas lamp posts along Pall Mall.

‘I am quite all right, Miss Lytton, it is merely a scratch. I must talk to you.’ The Earl of Hainford, standing dripping blood on her doorstep, looked like a man contemplating his own execution, not a shockingly early social visit.

He was going to fall flat on his face in a moment, and then she would never be able to lift him. Worry made her abrupt.

‘Nonsense. Come in.’

This time when she grabbed his arm he let himself be pulled unresisting over the threshold. She shouldered the door closed and guided him down the hallway, trying not to let her limping pace jar him.

‘Here we are. If you sit on that upright chair over there it will be easiest.’

He went willingly enough when she pushed him into the drawing room, and she realised as he blinked at her that he was very tired as well as wounded, and possibly rather drunk. Or in the grip of a hangover.

‘You are Miss Lytton?’

No, not drunk. He sounded perfectly sober.

Something fell from her hair as she put her head on one side to look more closely at him and she caught at it. Not a hairpin, but the quill she had misplaced that morning.

‘Yes, I am Eleanor Lytton. Forgive my appearance, please. I was working.’

And why am I apologising for my old clothes and ink blots? This man turns up at a ridiculously early hour, interrupts my writing, bleeds on the best carpet... So much for fantasy. The reality of men never matches it.

‘Please wait here. I will fetch water and bandages.’

The Earl had extracted himself from his coat by the time she got back. The state it was in as it lay on the carpet was probably not improved by her spilling water on it in agitation as he began to wrestle with his shirt.

He is wounded, she reminded herself. This is not the moment to be missish about touching a man’s garments, let alone a man.

‘Let me help.’

It was probably an indication of the state he was in that he sat down abruptly and allowed her to pull the shirt over his head. She took a sharp breath at the sight of the furrow in his flesh that came from below the waistband of his breeches at the front and angled up over his ribs to just below his armpit on the right-hand side. It was not deep, but it was bleeding sluggishly and looked exceedingly sore as it cut across the firmly muscled torso.

Ellie dropped the shirt, then picked it up again and shook it out, pulling the fabric tight as she held it up to the light.

‘That is a bullet wound in your side.’ She had never seen one before, but what else could make a hole like that?

He nodded, hissing between his teeth as he explored the raw track with his fingertips.

‘But there is no hole in your shirt. And the wound starts below the waistband of your equally undamaged breeches. You were shot when you were naked?’

Hainford looked at her, his eyebrows raised, presumably in shock at a lady saying breeches and naked without fainting. ‘Yes. Could you pass me some of that bandage and then perhaps leave the room so I can deal with this?’

He gestured downwards. The bullet must have grazed his hip bone, and the chafing of his evening breeches, even if they were knitted silk, must be exceedingly painful. He would certainly need to take them off to dress the wound. There was already far too much of the Earl of Hainford on display, and she realised she was staring in appalled curiosity at the way the light furring of dark hair on his chest arrowed down and...

‘Here.’ Ellie pushed both basin and bandages towards him. ‘Call me when you are decent—I mean, ready—and I will bring you a clean shirt.’

She was not afraid of the sight of blood, but she had absolutely no desire to get any closer to that bared body, let alone touch it, even though as a budding novelist she ought to know about such matters. Writing about them was one thing, and fantasising was another, but experiencing them in real life...

No.

She closed the door behind her and leaned back against the panels while she got her breathing under some kind of control. The man she had glimpsed a few times with Francis—the one who had become the hero of her future novel and the disturber of her rest—was in her drawing room. Correction: was half-naked and injured in her drawing room.

How had he been shot like that? By a cuckolded husband catching him in flagrante with his wife, presumably. She could think of no other reason for a man to be wounded while naked. If it had been an accident in his own home his servants would have come to his aid.

She could visualise the scene quite clearly. A screaming female on the bed, rumpled sheets, Lord Hainford scrambling bare-limbed from the midst of the bedding—her imagination skittered around too much detail—the infuriated husband brandishing a pistol. How very disillusioning. One did not expect to have one’s fantasy arrive on the doorstep in reality, very much in the flesh, and prove to be so sordidly fallible. Her desert lord was, in reality, a hung-over adulterer.

And, naturally, life being what it was, fantasies did not have the tact and good timing to arrive when one was looking one’s best. Not, she admitted, pulling a rueful face at her reflection in the hall mirror, that her best was much to write home about, and nor did she actually want to attract such a man. Not in real life.

Ellie had few illusions. After all, at the age of twenty-five she had been told often enough that she was plain, gawky and ‘difficult’ to recognise it was the truth. And now she was lame as well. A disappointment to everyone, given how attractive Mama had been, with her dark brown hair and petite, fragile appearance. Ellie took after her father’s side of the family, people would tell her with a pitying sigh.

Her best gown was three seasons old and she had re-trimmed her bonnets to the point where they were more added ribbons and flowers than original straw. Her annual allowance, such as it was, went on paper, ink and library subscriptions, and her earnings from Messrs Broderick & Alleyn seemed to be swallowed up in the housekeeping.

None of which mattered, of course, because she was not out in Society, lived most of her life in her head, and had a circle of friends and acquaintances that encompassed a number of like-minded and similarly dressed women, the vicar and several librarians. Giving up the social struggle was restful...being invisible was safe.

It was Francis who had the social life, and a much larger allowance—most of which went, so far as she could tell, on club memberships, his bootmaker and attempting to emulate his hero, Lord Hainford, in all matters of dress and entertainment.

She did not enquire any more deeply about just what that ‘entertainment’ involved.

At which point in her musings the door she was leaning on opened and she staggered backwards, landing with a thud against the bare chest of the nobleman in question.

He gave a muffled yelp of pain as Ellie twisted round, made a grab for balance and found herself with one hand on his shoulder and one palm flat on his chest, making the interesting discovery that a man’s nipples tightened into hard nubs when touched.

She recoiled back into the doorway, hands behind her back. ‘I will fetch you a shirt.’

‘Thank you, but there is no need. I will put mine back on. Please, listen to me, Miss Lytton, I need to talk to you—’

‘With a shirt on. And not one covered in blood,’ she snapped, furious with someone. Herself, presumably.

As she negotiated the stairs to Francis’s bedchamber she wondered what on earth Lord Hainford could want to talk to her about. An apology was certainly due for arriving in this state, although probably he had expected Francis to be at home—not to have the door opened by some idiot female who was reduced to dithering incompetence by the sight of a muscular chest.

She snatched a shirt out of the drawer and went back down again. Hainford got to his feet as she came in, the bandages white against his skin, the dark hair curling over the edges.

‘Here, that should fit.’ Ellie thrust the shirt into his hands and turned her back. She closed her eyes for good measure.

‘I am respectable again,’ he said after several minutes of flapping cloth and hissing breath.

Ellie turned back to find the Earl once more dressed, his neckcloth loosely knotted, his bedraggled coat pulled on over the clean shirt. His own shirt was bundled up, the blood out of sight. ‘Thank you,’ he added. ‘Your maid—’

‘Is still not back. She cannot be much longer and then she will go for the doctor.’

Something in her bristled defensively at his closeness and she gave herself a brisk talking-to. He was a gentleman, and surely trustworthy. And he was hurt, so she should be showing some womanly nurturing sympathy. At least the Vicar would certainly say so.

Her feelings, although definitely womanly, were not tending towards nurturing...

‘There is no need. The wound has stopped bleeding. I am concerned that you are alone in the house with me.’

You are concerned?

‘You think I require a chaperon, Lord Hainford?’ Ellie used the back of the chair as a support and sat down carefully, gesturing at the empty chair. ‘Or perhaps that you do?’ Attack was always safer than showing alarm or weakness.

‘No, to both.’ He ran his hand through his hair, his mouth grim as he seemed to search for words. ‘I have bad news for you, and I think you will need the support of another woman.’

‘My maid will soon be here,’ she said. Then what he had said finally penetrated. ‘Bad news?’

That could only mean one thing. Her parents and her stepfather were dead and there was no one else, only her stepbrother.

‘Francis?’ Her voice sounded quite calm and collected.

‘Sir Francis...there was an accident. At the club.’

‘He is injured?’

No, if he was I would have been called to him, or he would have been brought here.

She seemed to be reasoning very clearly, as though this was not real—simply a puzzle on paper to be solved. ‘He is dead, isn’t he? How? Did you kill him? Was it a duel?’

Over a woman?

That was all she could think of, given that Hainford had been naked when he was shot himself.

‘No. I did not shoot him. It was an accident. Someone was shooting at me, and Francis was standing at my back.’

‘And you had no clothes on,’ she said, her voice flat.

She must have fallen asleep over her work—this had all the characteristics of a bad dream. Certainly it made no sense whatsoever.

‘Which club was this?’

Perhaps club was a euphemism for brothel? Or something else—something not legal. She read the newspapers, had some glimmering of what went on between certain men, but she hardly knew how to ask.

‘The Adventurers’ Club in Piccadilly.’

A perfectly respectable gentleman’s club, then. Not a... What did they call them? A molly house—that was it. It would not completely surprise her if Francis had gone to one—out of curiosity, if nothing else—but this man? Surely not. Although what did she know?

Her silence was worrying the Earl, judging by his expression and the way he leaned forward to look into her face, but she was not sure how she was expected to act, how she should feel. Perhaps this was shock.

‘Look, let me fetch you some brandy. It is dreadful news to take in.’ He was halfway to his feet again when the door opened.

‘Miss Lytton, I’m back! Oh!’ Polly stood staring, her arms full of loosely wrapped parcels. An onion dropped to the floor and rolled to Ellie’s feet.

‘Polly, this is Lord Hainford and I believe he needs a glass of brandy.’

‘I do not.’

He was on the verge of snapping now—a man at the end of his tether. She should have wept and had the vapours. Then he could have produced a handkerchief, patted her hand, said, There, there meaninglessly. He would have felt more comfortable doing that, she was sure.

‘Fetch your mistress a cup of tea,’ he ordered.

‘And brandy for Lord Hainford. The hair of the dog might be helpful,’ Ellie suggested mildly.

Yes, this was a bad dream. Although...could one faint in a dream? The room was beginning to spin and close in...

She closed her eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. Fainting would not help. When she opened them again Lord Hainford was still there, frowning at her. The crumpled shirt was still at his feet. Francis had still not come home.

‘This really is not a dream, is it?’ she asked.

‘No. I am afraid not.’ Simply a nightmare.

Blake saw the colour flood back into Miss Lytton’s cheeks with profound relief. Things were bad enough without a fainting woman on his hands and, ungallant as it might seem, he had no desire to haul this Long Meg up from the floor.

Her figure went up and down, with the emphasis on up, and showed little interest in anything but the mildest in-and-out. Even so, his ribs had suffered enough, and lifting plain women into his arms held no appeal.

He studied the pale oval of her face, dusted with a spectacular quantity of freckles that no amount of Lotion of Denmark, or even lemon juice, would ever be able to subdue. Her hair was a bird’s nest—a flyaway mass of middling brown curls, ineptly secured with pins. The wide hazel eyes, their irises dark and dilated with shock, were probably her best feature. Her nose was certainly rather too long. And there was the limp... But at least she had managed not to swoon.

The girl came back with a tea tray and he gestured abruptly for her to pour. ‘Put sugar in your mistress’s cup.’

‘I do not take sugar.’

‘For the shock.’ He took a cup himself and gulped it sugarless, grateful for the warmth in his empty, churning gut.

The maid went and sat in a corner of the room, hands folded in her lap. He could feel her gaze boring into him.

Miss Lytton lifted her cup with a hand that shook just a little, drank, replaced it in the saucer with a sharp click and looked at him.

‘Tell me what happened.’

Thank heavens she was not some fluffy little chit who had dissolved into the vapours. Still, there was time yet for that...

‘I was at the Adventurers’ last night, playing cards with Lord Anterton and Sir Peter Carew and a man called Crosse. I was winning heavily—mainly against Crosse, who is not a good loser and is no friend of mine. We were all drinking.’

Blake tried to edit the story as he went—make it somehow suitable for a lady to hear without actually lying to her. He couldn’t tell her that the room had smelled of sweat and alcohol and candlewax and excitement. That Anterton had been in high spirits because an elderly relative had died and left him a tidy sum, and he and Carew had been joking and needling Crosse all evening over some incident at the French House—a fancy brothel where the three of them had been the night before.

Blake had been irritated, he remembered now, and had wished they would concentrate on the game.

He had just raked in a double handful of chips and banknotes and vowels from the centre of the table and called for a new pack and a fresh bottle when Francis Lytton had come up behind him—another irritation.

‘Your stepbrother appeared, most agitated, and said he wanted to talk to me immediately. I was on a winning streak, and I certainly did not intend to stop. I told him he could walk home with me afterwards and we would talk all he wanted to then.’

Miss Lytton bit her lip, her brow furrowed. ‘Agitated?’

‘Or worried. I do not know which. I did not pay too much attention, I am afraid.’

‘You were drunk,’ she observed coolly.

It was a shock to be spoken to in that way by a woman and, despite his uneasy sense of responsibility, the flat statement stung.

‘I was mellow—we all were. And we were in the middle of a game in which I was winning consistently—Lytton should have seen that it was a bad time to interrupt. We began to play with the new pack. Crosse lost heavily to me again, then started to shout that I was cheating, that I must have cards in my cuffs, up my sleeves. That I had turned away to talk to your stepbrother in order to conceal them.’

That red face, that wet mouth, those furious, incoherent accusations.

The man had scrabbled at the cards, sending counters flying, wine glasses tipping.

‘Cheat! Sharper!’

Everyone had stopped their own games, people had come across, staring...

‘I told him to withdraw his accusations. So did the others. He wouldn’t back down—just kept ranting. It seems he was on the brink of ruin and that this bout of losses had tipped him over the edge. He was so pathetic I didn’t want to have to call him out, so I stripped off my coat, tossed it to him to look at. He still accused me of hiding cards. I took off my waistcoat, my shirt. Then, when he overturned the table shouting that I had aces in my breeches, I took those off as well. Everything, in fact. He’d made me furious. Francis stood behind me, picking things up like a confounded valet. People were laughing...jeering at Crosse.’

He paused, sorting out the events through the brandy fug in his head, trying to be careful what he told her.

Everyone had been staring, and then Anterton had laughed and pointed at Blake’s wedding tackle, made some admiring remark about size. ‘Hainford’s hung like a bull!’ he’d shouted. Or had it been a mule?

He had laughed at Crosse.

‘Not like your little winkle-picker, eh, Crosse? The tarts wouldn’t laugh at his tackle like they did at yours last night at the French House—would they, Crosse?’

‘Crosse fumbled in his pocket, dropped something, and went down on his knees, groping for it. Then I saw it was a pistol. He was shaking with rage.’

I thought I was going to die—stark naked in the wreckage of a card game.

As the club secretary had pushed his way to the front of the crowd Blake could recall wondering vaguely if you could be blackballed for being killed in the club like that.

Conduct unbecoming...

‘Crosse pulled the trigger. The thing was angled upwards, so the bullet scored the track you’ve seen across my ribs and hit Francis, who was still standing behind me.’

Miss Lytton gave a short gasp, cut off by a hand pressed to her mouth. She was so white that the freckles across her nose and cheeks stood out as if someone had thrown a handful of bran at her.

‘He really is dead?’ she managed.

Very. You don’t live with a hole like that in you.

‘It must have been instant. He will have felt a blow to the chest, then nothing.’ He thought that was true—hoped that it was. Certainly by the time he’d knelt down, Lytton’s head supported on his knees, the man had been gone.

‘Where is he now?’

She was still white, her voice steady. It was the unnatural control of shock, he guessed, although she didn’t seem to be the hysterical type in any case. She had dealt with a bleeding man on her doorstep calmly enough. An unusual young lady.