Marrying His Cinderella Countess Read online

  ‘And you will have mine—which is an easy promise for me to make.’

  Blake felt a flare of irritation at her self-deprecation. He had stopped noticing the details of Eleanor’s appearance, he realised. Stopped assessing the details of her figure or profile or hair. She had become familiar, had become something of his—and as his she should accept that she was perfectly adequate just as she was, he told himself, realising that that was at the core of his anger with Jon’s criticisms.

  A small stirring of discomfort warned him that perhaps he was being a trifle arrogant. He pushed it aside. How to convince her? You could not tell a woman that she was perfectly adequate.

  ‘So you say now—before you are tempted.’ He smiled to show it was a joke and she narrowed her eyes at him, whether in threat or speculation he was not certain. ‘But I am certainly not going to discuss infidelity on the day we become betrothed. I am delighted that you consent, Eleanor.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Eleanor watched Blake open a drawer and take out a red morocco leather box. He pressed the catch and she blinked as the light caught the sullen red glow of a large ruby. It was difficult to take her eyes off it when he took it from its case and came round the desk to stand in front of her.

  ‘This is a symbol of our betrothal, if you care to accept it. If you prefer a different stone, another style, of course we can choose something else.’

  Was this the ring he would have given his lost betrothed? What had been her name? Felicity—that was it. Surely he would not have a ring of this magnificence just lying around on the off-chance that a lady might come along and take his fancy.

  She could hardly ask.

  She looked down at the stone in his hand, the dance of light deep in its heart reflecting Blake’s pulse beat, or perhaps the slightest tremor of his nerves.

  ‘It is a beautiful stone.’ But for her? This was a stone for a lady of status, of power, and she would simply be Ellie…pretending.

  But once married she must pretend successfully that she was a countess—because that, surely, was her side of this unequal bargain. Blake was giving her status, security, wealth and the opportunity to pursue what interested her, what she thought worthwhile. In return she must act the part of a woman to whom that rank came naturally, so that she could support him politically, socially and on his estates.

  Jewels and gowns would be part of the mask she must construct to hide the real Ellie behind.

  She held out her left hand, palm down. ‘I think it is an exquisite ring and I would not dream of asking for anything else.’ He slid it onto her finger and she instinctively closed her hand into a fist to support its weight. ‘My goodness, I am not used to wearing such a gem.’

  On her other hand Mama’s little pearl ring seemed to fade like the moon in the light of the sun.

  ‘You will soon become accustomed. There are family jewels as well, of course—those that pass from countess to countess. We can match them against the family portraits one day so you can trace them back. It is an interesting exercise, and will distract you from worrying that the Pencarrow nose will manifest itself in the children.’

  Children.

  She had not really considered children as a reality—which was ridiculous. Of course Blake wanted children. That was the primary aim of dynastic marriages. She had resigned herself to not marrying, which meant not having children, and had told herself that it did not hurt, that many women did not have families and that she would become accustomed.

  Have I become accustomed, or have I simply pushed that hurt away like all the others?

  ‘I will send them to Rundell, Bridge & Rundell for cleaning,’ Blake said.

  She was still staring down at the ring, and he must suppose that her attention was all on the precious gem, because he did not appear to find her lack of response unusual.

  ‘You can select what you like from them and the ones you do not favour can go back into the vaults.’

  Ellie pulled herself together, looked up and found a smile from somewhere.

  Blake smiled back. ‘Some of them are fairly frightful, I have to admit.’ For a moment she thought he was referring to the painted noses, then he added, ‘We can look at getting those reset, I suppose.’

  The thought of disliking antique family jewels and simply relegating them to a vault was startling, and certainly suppressed her almost hysterical desire to laugh about the family nose. Neither her father nor her stepfather had been anything other than comfortably off, yet neither had showered a bride with family jewels. But it would seem gauche to express surprise.

  ‘I look forward to seeing them. I have read about some family gems with long and fascinating histories. Are there any with curses or legends? There’s the Luck of Edenhall, isn’t there?’

  ‘That is a glass goblet. For magic, we Pencarrows have Great-Aunt Matilda’s garnet set, which probably dooms the wearer to extreme melancholy, it is so ugly, and a diamond parure which turns other ladies green with envy, so I am told.’

  Ellie felt herself relax almost to the point of laughing. Here was Blake back again—the amusing, unserious Blake, the one she hoped she was marrying rather than the dark one, bowed down under a weight of heavy memories.

  ‘We must definitely get the diamonds cleaned for the wedding—you will want the entire set, I imagine,’ he said, and the urge to laugh fled.

  ‘The wedding? Where do you want it to be?’

  She had a sudden mental picture of herself limping down the length of the endless nave of some fashionable London church while the congregation either tittered into their handkerchiefs or shed tears over Hainford’s disastrous choice of bride.

  ‘I have no family. Friends, of course, but nowhere near the number of people you would want to invite.’

  ‘There’s the Hainford family chapel,’ Blake suggested. ‘Mind you, that would mean kicking all the house guests out before we could have a honeymoon there.’

  Oh, what the…?

  Ellie got a grip on her language.

  Countess, remember? I limp, I am always going to limp, and they had better get used to it.

  ‘St George’s Hanover Square?’ she said recklessly. ‘You can invite everyone. Give Jonathan something to do organising it, instead of disapproving of me.’

  And I will find a wedding dress that will give them something other than the fact that I am lame to think about.

  *

  Jonathan—subdued, clearly embarrassed, and with an equally clear bruise on his chin—had been put to work on the wedding plans. Six weeks, Blake had pronounced, for reasons best known to himself.

  St George’s Hanover Square was organised for the ceremony and the townhouse readied for the reception, wedding breakfast and the first night before they travelled to Hainford Hall for a prolonged stay.

  But first Blake had summoned a distant cousin to act as chaperon and installed her, Ellie and Polly in a small but highly respectable hotel in Albemarle Street. Miss Paston was in her forties, very quiet and retiring, and had been helping ‘Cousin Margaret’—otherwise known as the Viscountess of Crampton—with her children. She seemed pleasant enough, if rather vague, but Ellie suspected that was a barrier she put up between herself and the realities of life as a poor relation.

  That might have been me, she thought with a shiver. The eternal companion, always in the shadows, growing older and quieter as the years rolled past. And instead I am to marry an earl.

  Ellie had accepted a new bank draft for Carndale Farm and went to call on Mr Rampion. She would have taken Polly and gone in a hack, but Miss Paston had been appalled and had sent a note round to ‘Dear Cousin Blake’, who had provided a carriage and footman. Future countesses did not travel by hackney carriage.

  Mr Rampion, invigorated by the prospect of detailed negotiations over settlements, took the draft, gave Ellie an advance against it and details of her new bank account, and saw her out to the carriage with considerable ceremony.

  Ellie clutched her reticule with
its fat purse and bank details and sat staring rather blankly at the beautifully buttoned upholstery of the carriage seat opposite her.

  ‘Where to now, Miss Lytton?’ The footman was still holding the carriage door.

  ‘Oh. Where…? Brook Street, please.’

  She gave the direction and sat back. She was never going to be a beauty, and she was always going to be…different. Well, she would be ‘different’ in the best way she could manage, and Lady Verity Standing, the most eccentric female of her acquaintance, was the very woman to ask how to go about it.

  Verity was the sister of the Duke of Severingham, now in her thirties, ridiculously wealthy, stubbornly single, the despair of her family and one of Ellie’s circle of writing friends. It was well known that the love of her life had died of a fever over ten years before. What was not so well known was that her beloved had been a woman.

  Ellie, who had long ago come to the conclusion that one took love as it came and was lucky if it did come, saw no reason to be shocked by this—was only saddened for Verity.

  Now she sent Patrick the footman to knock at the smart black front door and kept her fingers crossed that her friend would be at home—because if anyone could create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, then Verity was the woman to do it.

  *

  ‘You are never going to be a beauty…’ Verity walked around her, eying her as a gardener would an overgrown yew bush that might, just might be transformed by some creative topiary into something to grace an earl’s garden.

  It was exceedingly refreshing not to have to deal with someone determined to flatter. ‘No,’ Ellie agreed.

  ‘But you could be an Original,’ Verity pronounced.

  Given that she dyed her already red hair an even more flamboyant shade, always wore black and took a small scarlet parrot which clashed nastily with her hair everywhere, she certainly knew what she was talking about.

  ‘That is what I was hoping for,’ Ellie said, in competition with the parrot’s mutterings.

  ‘Do you want to do away with your limp?’ Verity cast herself into a deep armchair and pulled the bell-cord. ‘Tea, please, Hopkins—and something indulgently sticky.’

  ‘I would if I could, but there is nothing to be done. One leg is shorter than the other,’ Ellie pointed out as the butler left the room.

  ‘But not by much. If you had your shoes made specially you would have more of a sway.’ Verity wafted one hand back and forth. ‘I know just the man. Now, then…’ She put her head on one side. ‘That hair.’

  ‘Not red,’ Ellie said hastily. ‘Blake said I ought to cut it short.’

  ‘Did he, indeed? What an intelligent man—I do congratulate you. Now—a list.’ She picked up a notebook from the litter of books next to her chair. ‘Hair, shoes, gown, all the ghastly details of surviving the ton… Who is going to give you away? I would offer to do it myself, but your poor Blake does not want the scandal of his bride being given away in marriage by her Sapphic friend. I know—Podge can do it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Podge—Percival, my brother. He’s a terrible old bore, but he will rally round, and there’s nothing like a duke at a wedding to set the tone—unless it is a royal duke, in which case the tone goes downhill rapidly. There. Now, how long do we have?’

  ‘Six weeks,’ Ellie said, not sure whether she was excited or petrified. A duke to give her away, a transformation at the hands of one of the most eccentric women in London…

  ‘We will do your Blake proud. You are madly in love with him, I assume?’

  ‘I…’

  In love with Blake? Am I?

  She desired him, dreamt about him, liked him—most of the time. But love?

  ‘No. And it would be a very bad thing if I was,’ she said truthfully. Then, ‘Why am I doing this insane thing?’

  ‘Because you were on the verge of being poverty-stricken, stuck in a rain-soaked Lancashire farmhouse with drips coming through the ceiling and miles from a decent library?’ Verity suggested.

  ‘If it had been anyone but Blake who had asked I would have still said no,’ Ellie said, thinking it through. ‘I do not wish to take charity. But because it was Blake I thought maybe I could give something back to him. And I do think he needs something. Perhaps something I can give him. He has dozens of friends, a half-brother who adores him, and yet he has such darkness inside…’

  Verity sat up sharply, sending the parrot off in squawking flight and making Hopkins start and almost drop the tea tray. He put it down with a reproachful look at his employer and left.

  Ellie took a small, wicked-looking pastry and bit into it. ‘Oh, bliss—do try one.’

  Verity waved the plate away. ‘Darkness? Ellie, darling, do be very certain that it is a dark space that you can bring light into and not a black emptiness that will suck you in too.’

  *

  Ellie was still brooding on Verity’s Gothic pronouncement five weeks later. She had not seen a great deal of Blake, other than during his punctilious calls to enquire after her heath, report on the progress of the preparations and to take her for drives in the park when it stopped raining.

  She was still in mourning, so she was able to retreat into anonymous blacks and wear a veil, which meant that while London might be buzzing with the news that the eligible Earl of Hainford was betrothed to an unknown, no one could fault her for remaining quietly out of sight.

  It did increase the speculation about exactly who she was, beyond the bland information offered by various genealogical reference books. The dreadful accident that had claimed her stepbrother’s life and its connection to what had been shocking goings-on at White’s might have been a problem, until even the most assiduous gossip had finally had to accept that Sir Francis Lytton had simply been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Verity, recounting all of this, had added that the general consensus was that the tragedy had brought the stepsister and Hainford together, and that, everyone agreed, was a good thing if he finally got around to marrying—especially after the scandal of his early betrothal. What a foolish, wicked girl that Felicity Broughton had been, the gossips said, happily dredging up the old scandal. To throw away wealth, position and ultimately her life—and all for a poet too.

  Three days before the wedding Blake took Ellie driving at ten o’clock in the morning—much earlier than usual, at a time when the fashionable crowd was delicately sipping its hot chocolate or still slumbering behind tightly drawn curtains.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked, almost abruptly, as they turned through the gates into Green Park, leaving Blake’s tiger to perch on a bench and wait patiently for their return.

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  Wishing you would find me ‘kissable’ again. Or is that just a thing that you say to all the girls you tumble in the long grass?

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Also well. Suffering from Jonathan’s efforts to create the perfect wedding, when he ought to know that no social occasion can ever be perfect. I have had to endure discussion about the precise shade of my neckcloth, the number of horses for the carriage, and which carriage, whether there can possibly be sufficient champagne for the number of guests and exactly how much to tip the bell-ringers.’ He negotiated a sharp turn and added, ‘And that was just this morning.’

  ‘I do not believe you,’ Ellie said, laughing. ‘And what about me? I have to shop endlessly. And have pins stuck in me, and endure my bridesmaids squabbling genteelly about headdresses, ribbons and prayer books.’

  As her bridesmaids had been selected from amongst her bookish friends, who normally took little notice of what they wore, it was taking all Verity’s best efforts to turn them out looking like Society ladies.

  And then there was the little matter of learning to walk in the new shoes Verity’s cordwainer had made for her. It hurt, changing the whole way she had adapted to cope with her slightly shortened leg, and she was not going to wear them every day—she was certain of that. But just for that walk do
wn the aisle, when all Blake’s friends, family and acquaintances saw her properly for the first time, she was determined not to give them something else to criticise.

  The gossip and comments about marrying a plain nonentity would be quite enough for Blake to have to put up with, without adding her lameness to the list. Once they were used to her, then she would be her normal self again.

  Verity’s modiste had stalked around her, clicking her tongue and muttering about enhancements. But Ellie drew the line at padding. She was doing her best to eat well, but sooner or later—much sooner than later—she was going to be skin to skin with Blake and he would know what had been false and what was true. Honesty was something else she owed him.

  Whether she was receiving honesty from Blake in return was something Ellie wondered about in the early hours while she lay awake and told herself that there was nothing to worry about. That there was everything to worry about—

  ‘What is wrong?’ Blake asked, and she realised that she had fallen abruptly silent. ‘It is not like you to brood.’

  ‘How do you know it is not?’ Ellie said, far more lightly than she felt. ‘I could spend most of my time brooding for all you are aware.’

  She usually spent most of her time writing, and that involved a great deal of brooding, although she had hardly touched either of her manuscripts since Blake’s proposal. She must finish the latest and final account of Oscar’s educational travels, because she had an undertaking with her publisher, but as for the Minerva Press romance…

  No, countesses did not write faintly shocking novels. She might not know much about the haut ton, but she was pretty certain of that. The manuscript and all her notes were securely locked away in the bottom of her trunk. Besides, she had her grey-eyed, black-haired dashing hero in reality—there was no longer any need for her to weave fantasies about him.

  Blake was still looking at her with that small vertical line between his brows and she realised that he could not see her expression clearly because of her black veil.