Fool for Love

  “I would never want to leave you, Papa,” she had said.

  “And you never will,” he had said tenderly, kissing her on the forehead.

  Now she was three-and-twenty. Her papa was dead these two years. But it wasn’t as if there were suitors pounding on her door anyway.

  The truth stung. Yes, her father had made it clear that he would never allow her to marry. But men never wanted anything to do with her once they found out about her hip. Who would want a wife who was sure to die giving birth, almost certainly taking the child with her? Everyone said that she herself had only survived due to a miracle.

  “Perhaps you should forgo the evening if you are overly tired,” Imogen said, checking her curls in a little mirror she carried in her reticule.

  Normally, Henrietta would have agreed without a second’s thought. But this evening they were invited to Lady Rawlings’s house, and there was Mr. Darby. Not that he showed any interest in meeting her again.

  But it would be amusing to see him play off his airs and graces with their neighbors. It would be worth it to have a front-row seat when they realized that a swan had found its way into their little backwater.

  5

  Infamous Esme

  Shantill House

  Limpley Stoke

  Lady Esme Rawlings wasn’t feeling very spry. She stared at her ankles. Through her entire life, her ankles had been a point of pride. When she debuted, she was deliciously aware that gentlemen clenched their jaws at a glimpse of their slender elegance. After the first picture of a Frenchwoman with her skirt looped up at the side arrived on British shores, Esme lost no time looping up her skirts as well.

  But now…Her ankles were fat and bulgy. She reached forward with a little grunt and poked at the place where her ankles used to be. Her finger sank into puffy flesh. It was unbelievable. Not that it mattered. The only body part in which anyone showed interest was her belly, as demonstrated by the fact that it was regularly mentioned. “Aye, missus, belly’s getting on a fair treat, in’t it?”

  No one had ever discussed her belly until she embarked on this task of carrying a child. In the regular course of life, ladies’ bellies were unmentionable.

  With a sigh she leaned back in the chaise longue and placed her hands on the rug that covered her belly. When she lay on her back her belly rose straight in the air like an island starting from a river. Thin January sunshine shone on her closed eyelids. Beneath her hands there were faint stirrings.

  Well, Miles, she thought, here’s your babe.

  Perhaps.

  In the distance she could hear Helene calling. But she didn’t feel like answering, so she lay still, tracing with her fingers the house in which her baby lived, trying to sense whether there were two wee babes there.

  The old woman who ran the creamery in the road to the village was fond of predicting that she was carrying two. The idea seemed possible because she was so large. And unlike many women, she knew precisely when she had conceived the baby—well, she had it narrowed to two nights, one after the other. That meant she was precisely six months along: no more, no less.

  Yet she was growing bigger by the moment. Her belly looked nearly as large as some women’s did at birth—and the babe wasn’t due to be born for another three months. Twins was an absorbing, terrifying thought. How could it be? How could it not be twins?

  One boy and one girl, she thought. Or two girls. Or two boys. They danced behind her closed eyelids, in the golden warmth of sunshine, small girls in pinafores with ribbons in their curls, boys with rumpled hair—

  No! She had accidentally given the boys golden hair. You don’t have that hair, she told them silently. You have Miles’s nice, brown hair. For a while anyway. Your father didn’t have more than a few strands left.

  She reshuffled the pictures in her mind. Now she had boys with sweet round faces and rumpled brown hair, already looking a little thin on top although they were only a year or so. That’s better, she thought sleepily. Brown hair, Miles’s boys.

  A cool voice cut into her sleep. It was her friend Helene, or Countess Godwin, as she was known to the rest of the world. “You have visitors, Esme.”

  “Visitors?” she said, struggling against the impulse to sink into a sleepy daydream.

  “Your nephew has arrived for an unexpected visit.”

  There was a sharp note in Helene’s voice that caught Esme’s attention. She struggled to a sitting position. “Darby is here? Darby? Truly?”

  “He drew up in a traveling coach with his sisters. Looks as if he’s been on the road for days.”

  “What on earth is he doing here?”

  “He says the children needed air.”

  Esme stood up, with just a little help from Helene.

  “Esme!” Helene said. “Don’t you understand why Darby has made this visit?”

  “I wrote him a note suggesting that London air was insalubrious for children. He refused to rusticate himself initially, but he must have reconsidered.” She began walking up the slope toward the house.

  “Why?” Helene demanded. “Why would Darby change his mind about visiting you?”

  “Because London air truly is unhealthy?” Esme said, rather confusedly. Pregnancy seemed to have filled her head with cotton wool. She felt like one of her cousins, the one her mother used to call bacon-brained.

  “Use your head. He’s suspicious of the child you’re carrying. Darby was Miles’s heir, wasn’t he?”

  “He still is,” Esme said.

  “Not if you have a boy.”

  Esme stopped and faced her friend. Helene was dressed in a rose woolen gown with a matching pelisse and gloves. Perfect for a winter’s day in the country. Her hair was drawn up in an elaborate nest of braids that made her head seem to float, swanlike, on her delicate shoulders. She didn’t look tough as nails, but she was.

  “We’ve discussed this,” Esme said. “Darby is still Miles’s heir. I will not accept the estate.”

  “Balderdash!” Helene said.

  That was the strongest oath she allowed herself, so Esme knew that she was truly perturbed.

  “If you give birth to a boy, Esme, that boy will be the heir to Miles’s estate. This house as well as the one in London in which Darby is living, if I’m not mistaken. You will not disinherit your son. In fact, I’m quite certain that you can’t, given the laws governing entails.”

  Esme laced her fingers over her stomach in unconscious support of the disloyal thing she was about to say. “You don’t seem to understand that this babe may not be Miles’s child.”

  “You don’t know that,” Helene snapped.

  “You think I would pass off another man’s child as Miles’s child?”

  “Would you deny Miles’s son his heritage?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then how are you going to know?” Helene demanded.

  “I’ll just know.” Esme could feel her eyes starting to prickle. That was the worst of being pregnant. She, who hadn’t cried since her father married her off to a stranger, seemed to cry four or five times a day at least.

  “Even I, who know next to nothing about children, know that it’s impossible to tell a child’s true parentage,” Helene announced. “Remember all the dust kicked up last year when the Earl of Northumberland insisted that his firstborn son couldn’t have been his because the boy got sent down from Oxford for the fourth time?”

  “Northumberland is a fool,” Esme muttered.

  “Likely not. The countess debuted the same year I did, after all, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers her desperate vows of adoration to a mere soldier. Her father married her off quickly to avoid a mésalliance, or so he said. But her babe was born barely nine months after the wedding: perhaps she married quickly for another reason.”

  Esme scowled. “I can’t believe you’re telling me all this sordid gossip, Helene. It isn’t at all like you.”

  “I’m trying to knock some sense into your head,” Helene said tartly. “
There’s no way to tell whose babe you are carrying. You have black hair; Sebastian Bonnington has yellow hair; your husband had brown hair. Even if the child had brown hair, it could be just a combination of your and Bonnington’s colors.”

  Esme paled.

  Helene pressed her advantage. “You would do a great disservice to Miles if you deliberately allowed his own son to be disinherited. And there is no way to ascertain a child’s father.”

  “Perhaps it will be a girl,” she said weakly.

  “That would be for the best. Especially from Darby’s point of view.”

  Esme started walking toward the house again. “I forgot Darby! And the children. Where shall we put them?”

  “The girls went into the nursery. Darby arrived without a nanny, so it’s quite lucky that your old nurse is already here to help with your babe when it’s born. She seemed pleased to have something to do. We put Darby in the blue room, at the end of the hall.”

  “Oh no,” Esme said. “Doesn’t the fireplace smoke?”

  “It serves him right,” Helene said with a certain relish. “He’s trotted all the way up here just to see if you’re bearing a bastard, to call a spade a spade.”

  Esme felt her spirits droop. “I’d better tell him the truth.”

  Helene stopped short and grabbed her arm. “You will do nothing of the sort,” she said. “To even admit for one second that the babe may not be Miles’s is both to desecrate your husband’s memory and destroy your son—who may well be Miles’s child. You don’t want to do that.”

  Esme stared into her friend’s eyes. Helene always seemed convinced of an appropriate action. To Esme, this whole issue seemed foggy.

  “Now pull yourself together,” Helene advised. “You seem to have forgotten that you have an evening at home tonight. Half the county is arriving at the house in a few hours, and here you are, drowsing on the lawn.”

  “Oh Lord,” Esme gasped. “I did forget about the evening.”

  “You would be the only one,” Helene observed. “I still cannot fathom why you wish to outrage most of the county by inviting guests to your house during your mourning period.”

  “It’s only a small at-home,” Esme said feebly.

  Helene was chewing on her lower lip, and Esme knew with the instinct of a longtime friend that she had something else to say. “What is it?” she asked, resigned to bad news.

  “Would you mind terribly if I paid a brief visit to my aunt Caroline in Salisbury? I shan’t leave until after your at-home, naturally.” Helene’s aunt lived a short distance away.

  “Of course not,” Esme said, feeling that she would mind very much indeed. In fact, she might start crying again at the very thought.

  “It’s just that Darby is Rees’s best friend.”

  “Why does that matter?” Esme said, trying to summon up a weak defense. “It’s not as if your husband is here. Darby is just a friend of his, Helene. Nothing more than a friend. You can’t avoid all of Rees’s friends.” But she already knew that Helene would leave for her aunt’s house first thing in the morning. Once Helene had decided on a course of action, it was impossible to dissuade her.

  “I don’t feel comfortable with Darby. He has always been in Rees’s confidence. When we were married, Rees would disappear, and when I demanded to know where he was, he would say with Darby. Except that I knew he’d been rollicking about with opera singers. The very women he later moved into my house, as a matter of fact.”

  Esme grimaced at the keen edge in Helene’s tone. “That was years ago, Helene. Years. Lord knows, Darby probably didn’t even know that Rees was using him as an excuse.”

  “Perhaps,” Helene said. “But I doubt it. They were always in each other’s pockets, those two. Even now, while we were exchanging the briefest of greetings, he mentioned something Rees had said to him. And I…I just don’t want to hear about Rees.”

  “But you and your husband separated ages ago, Helene,” Esme said, knowing full well that she might as well spare her breath.

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to hear or think about my husband, and unfortunately Darby brings that very subject to mind.”

  “God knows why they’re friends. They’re quite opposite, aren’t they? Darby dominates the ton when it comes to men’s fashions, but Rees—-”

  “Rees is as sloppy in his dress as he ever was,” Helene filled in. “You’re right about their dissimilarities. Darby is invariably discreet, but Rees hangs out his dirty linen in Hyde Park.”

  “Couldn’t you—please rethink your decision?” Esme asked, almost desperately. “I wouldn’t ask except that I feel quite lonely here—”

  “I cannot bear to be around him. I only have to look at Darby, and I want to scream at him for allowing Rees to move that opera singer in our house!” She stopped. “Which is hardly Darby’s fault. But I simply cannot bear to think about my husband. You must excuse me.”

  “It’s my fault for even asking you,” Esme said, shaken by the pain in Helene’s voice. “You are so composed in general that I tend to forget you have strong feelings about your husband. It’s inexcusable of me. I’ll be fine. Besides, I think that I’ve made a new friend.”

  “Lady Henrietta Maclellan? I like her enormously. I thought she showed a lot of sense at tea yesterday.” That was Helene’s highest praise. “Will she be here this evening?”

  “I hope so,” Esme said, as they started walking. “Will you stay for the evening, Helene, please? If I am indeed scandalizing the county by holding an at-home while in mourning, I would be grateful for your company.”

  Helene nodded in a tight-lipped kind of way that indicated that she wished to be gone, but would stay for the evening.

  “Thank you,” Esme said, kissing her friend’s cheek.

  “I’ll only make a brief visit,” Helene said. “I will return long before the baby is due.”

  “You probably won’t recognize me by then,” Esme said morosely. “I already look like a moving elephant.”

  Helene laughed. “A very small elephant, darling.”

  6

  Extreme Youth and Scorn Are Close Associates

  Holkham House

  Limpley Stoke

  “I simply can’t believe that Mr. Darby has come to Wiltshire!” Lady Imogen Maclellan said to her stepsister. “Who would have thought? Emilia Piggleton told me all about him. She actually saw him at Almack’s one night, but of course he didn’t ask to be acquainted with her. Do you think I should wear my new gown, Henrietta? It was only delivered yesterday. You remember, the sprigged India muslin. Except that Mrs. Pinnock—”

  Her mother appeared in the doorway, interrupting the conversation. “Good evening, darlings,” said Millicent Maclellan, the Dowager Countess of Holkham. “We probably ought to begin to make our way to dinner.”

  “Mama, do you know who has picked out the very same dress as I?” Imogen said, in the affected, rather snappish way she had lately adopted. “Our beloved next door neighbor, Selina Davenport! Mrs. Pinnock told me.”

  “Oh dear,” Millicent said. Selina Davenport was the closest thing in Wiltshire to a high-flier. She was married to a squire who cared more for his hounds than his wife. Not that that was unusual, but it was rumored that a pile of dogs shared the ancestral bed, and where Selina slept was an object of everyone’s curiosity.

  “It’s disgraceful,” Imogen said scornfully. “I don’t know why Selina can’t simply accept the fact that she’s a married lady, and be done with it. She’ll have had the bosom lowered on the gown, and she’ll sit there with the tiniest bodice on this side of London. Likely she’ll insist on sitting beside me all evening.”

  “Only to share in your popularity, dearest,” Millicent said. “And I don’t like your peevish tone. Women will be your greatest ally during the season, but not if everyone decides that you are a sharp-tongued snippet.” Imogen had just begun attending local parties, and already had a phalanx of local boys clamoring for her attention. It had had an unfortunate effect o
n her disposition.

  “No one will take a second glance at me when Selina’s bosom is hanging out for all the world like a piece of washing!”

  “That is a most unladylike remark,” her mother said. “Why don’t you wear your ivory gauze tonight instead of the sprigged violet?”

  “I suppose,” Imogen muttered. “What are you going to wear, Henrietta?”

  “My Italian crape.”

  Imogen stared. “I thought you were saving that for something quite special.”

  “I have changed my mind.”

  “Lady Rawlings is in mourning, Henrietta. There won’t be dancing.”

  Henrietta opened her mouth, but Imogen corrected herself. “Not that the mourning signifies, because you don’t dance. So why on earth should you wear your Italian crape? I thought you were saving it for the next assembly in Tilbury.”

  Henrietta shrugged. “Why should I? As you say, I can’t dance. So why shouldn’t I wear what I want? It doesn’t make a bit of difference.”

  “No one knows what the future has in store for them, darling,” Millicent said, winding her arm around Henrietta’s shoulders.

  Henrietta smiled affectionately at her stepmother. “In my case, it doesn’t include dancing. Or suitors.”

  “You’re more beautiful than Selina Davenport any day,” Imogen said with some satisfaction.

  Henrietta grinned. “What a hum that is!”

  “It’s true. None of the girls around here can hold a candle to you. If you weren’t lame, they wouldn’t have a single beau amongst them. I heard Mrs. Burnell saying that you were getting dangerously beautiful, Henrietta. Imagine that—dangerously beautiful! No one will ever say that of me. Not with my unfashionable hair.”

  Imogen came up behind Henrietta and made a face into the glass. Henrietta’s hair was a pale amber marked with strands of sweet lemon and honey gold. Imogen’s was a less modish mass of black curls.