Marrying His Cinderella Countess Read online

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. ‘Agita
ted?’

  ‘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.

  ‘At the club. There was a doctor there—one of the members. We took him to a bedchamber, did what was necessary.’

  They had stripped off the wreckage of Lytton’s clothes, got him cleaned up and dressed in someone’s spare nightshirt and sent for a woman to lay him out decently before any of his family saw him.

  ‘I have his watch, his pocketbook and so on, all safe.’

  ‘I see.’

  Miss Lytton’s voice was as colourless as her skin, and that seemed to have been pulled back savagely, revealing fine cheekbones but emphasising the long nose and firm chin unbecomingly.

  ‘He must come here, of course. Can you arrange that?’

  He could—and he would. And he would try and do something about that mass of blood-soaked papers with a hole through the middle that had been stuffed into Lytton’s breast pocket. There was no way he could hand those back as they were.

  ‘Certainly. It is the least I can do.’

  The dowdy nobody of a woman opposite him raised her wide hazel eyes and fixed him with an aloof stare.

  ‘I would say that is so. If you had listened to your friend when he was obviously anxious about something, instead of drunkenly goading that man Crosse, then Francis would not be dead now. Would he, my lord?’

  Chapter Two

  Her hostility had hit home—visibly. Ellie suspected that if he had been himself, alert and not in pain, Lord Hainford would have betrayed nothing, but she saw the colour come up over his cheekbones and the bloodshot grey eyes narrow.

  ‘If your brother had not come to the club, yes, he would be alive now, Miss Lytton.’

  ‘My stepbrother Francis is…was…the son of my mother’s second husband, Sir Percival Lytton. I took his name when she remarried.’

  She could hardly recall her own father, the Honourable Frederick Trewitt, an abrupt man who had died when she was eight. Her mother’s remarriage had given them much-needed financial stability, although Sir Percival had shown little interest in his stepdaughter at first—so plain and quiet, where her mother had been vivid and attractive.

  Not at first.

  As for Francis, three years her senior, he had ignored her until, his father and stepmother dead, he had needed a housekeeper.

  She had felt no affection for him, waiting for him to turn out like his father, but as time had passed and he’d shown her nothing but indifference she had begun to relax—although never to the point of leaving her bedchamber door unlocked.

  The use she could be to her stepbrother had given her the only status that Society allowed a plain young woman of very moderate means and no connections—that of respectable poor relation.

  ‘You were close, of course. This must be a dreadful shock for you…a great loss.’ The Earl had reined in his irritation and was clearly ransacking his meagre store of conventional platitudes. ‘I quite understand that you are distressed.’

  ‘If my stepbrother had removed himself to some remote fastness and I had never seen him again I would not have shed a single tear, my lord,’ she said. ‘That does not mean I do not grieve the fact that he met his end in such sordid circumstances, thanks to someone else’s selfish neglect.’

  She would have felt pity for any man killed like that, let alone a relative.

  ‘Madam, neither the place nor the circumstances were sordid, and Lytton was in a club where he might have safely passed the time with any number of acquaintances while he waited for me to be free.’

  Hainford got to his feet and regarded her with something very like hauteur.

  ‘That he chose to insinuate himself into the middle of a fracas was entirely his choice, and the result was a regrettable accident. Unless you have an undertaker in mind I will engage a respectable one on your behalf. I will also establish how the Coroner wishes to proceed and keep you informed. Good day to you.’

  Polly scrambled to reach the front door before he did, and came back a moment later clutching a small rectangle of card. ‘He left this, Miss Lytton.’

  ‘Put it down over there on my desk, please. I know perfectly well who he is.’

  She had made it her business to find out the identity of the grey-eyed man whom Francis had idolised. William Blakestone Pencarrow, third Earl Hainford, was twenty-eight, owned lands in Hampshire, Yorkshire and Northamptonshire, a London townhouse of some magnificence in Berkeley Square and a stable of prime bloodstock.

  He was also in possession of thick black hair, elegantly cut, a commanding nose, rather too large for handsomenes
s, an exceptionally stubborn chin and eyes that were beautiful even when bloodshot. His shoulders were broad, his muscles, as she was now in a position to affirm, superb, and he easily topped Francis’s five feet eleven inches.

  To Francis, silently worshipping, he had seemed a god—a non-pareil of style, taste and breeding who must be copied as closely as possible, whatever the cost.

  Altogether Hainford had seemed the perfect hero for her book. It did not matter in the slightest that in real life he had proved to be impatient, arrogant, self-centred and shameless.

  Something fell onto her clasped hands. She looked down at the fat drop of water that ran down to her wrist.

  Poor Francis, she thought, feeling sympathy for her stepbrother for the first time in her life. He deserved something more than one tear from her. He deserved that she exert herself for this final time for his comfort and dignity. He hadn’t been able to help being his father’s son, and probably hadn’t been able to help being insensitive and foolish either.

  ‘Polly, please see that the front room is cleaned thoroughly for when the…for when the master is brought home. The blinds and drapes must be closed in all the rooms. And then we will look at mourning clothes.’

  *

  Gradually the shock wore off. In a strange way it was a relief to feel loss as well as anger, and to cling to the rituals of death that Society prescribed. The black ribbons on the door knocker, the drawn blinds, the hasty refurbishment of the mourning blacks last worn when her stepfather had died—all occupied Ellie’s time.

  A letter had arrived from the Earl, informing her that the inquest had been arranged for the next day. It seemed surprisingly prompt to Ellie, and she was grateful for the Coroner’s efficiency until she realised that it was probably due to Hainford’s influence.

  The undertaker he had selected called on her, sombre and solemn as he delicately discussed the funeral details.

  ‘The Earl did not want you to be troubled with any tiresome detail, Miss Lytton.’

  ‘How kind,’ Ellie said thinly.

  Managing, autocratic, domineering… Or perhaps he is feeling guilty, as he should.

  The day of the funeral passed in a blur, until finally she was able to join Mr Rampion, the family solicitor, in Francis’s study. He seemed ill at ease—but perhaps he rarely dealt with women. He stood when she entered the study, as did the man sitting to one side of the desk.