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  ‘Thank you.’ Avery turned and ran one hand through his hair. ‘I was feeling a trifle blue devilled, not that it is any excuse for attempting to ravish you on the desk.’

  She was never sure afterwards what she had intended to say to him. Laura looked up and saw the portrait on the wall behind him and the words simply dried in her mouth. Piers.

  Chapter Seven

  Avery turned to follow her gaze. ‘That is my cousin Piers Falconer,’ he said. ‘I inherited this estate from him. I do not wonder that you look surprised. It is uncanny, is it not? People often take it for a picture of me and remark that they hadn’t realised I had ever been in the army.’ He did not appear to find it amusing.

  Laura looked into the clear green eyes in the youthful, unlined face in the painting and her feet took her, with no conscious volition, to stand on the hearth where she could reach up and touch the hilt of the sword. Go away, she willed Avery, but he did not move. ‘He was killed in battle?’ She knew the answer, but she had to say something.

  ‘A stupid, unnecessary skirmish with the enemy where they were not supposed to be because of a failure in communications. Ironic that a man who dreamed of glory and great epic battles should die defending a ford over a stream that shouldn’t even have needed defending.’

  ‘Ironic indeed.’ That was what you left me for, Piers, she thought. I was so angry with you. ‘He was a romantic about war?’ Her fingers slid off the leather of the hilt, still too new to have lost its grooves or to have softened and moulded to the hand of its owner.

  ‘Piers was army-mad. But he was an only child, the heir. His father died when he was seventeen and I became his trustee, although I was not that much older—four years. I pointed out that he could not join, that he had responsibilities, that his mother would be desperately anxious, but he only laughed. She would be proud, he said, and of course he would not be killed. He thought himself immortal, I suppose. He was very young in some ways.’ Avery sounded bone-weary, perhaps with the memory of endless arguments.

  ‘But he joined anyway.’

  ‘Oh, yes. As soon as he was twenty and came into some money from his godfather he went to London and bought himself a commission. There was nothing I could do and his mother, who had always indulged him, hid her fear. She died six months later. I suppose I cannot blame him for it, he never knew Aunt Alice’s heart was weak.’ Avery had wandered across to the window and stood leaning his shoulder against the frame, staring out over the parkland. ‘He came back to England on sick leave. A combination of a minor wound and a fever. They gave him three months to recover and to settle affairs after his mother’s death, although I’d handled that already.’ He shrugged one shoulder as if to push away the memory. ‘She was more like a mother to me than an aunt.’

  ‘That is why Alice is named as she is.’ Piers had never told her his mother’s name or that she had died such a short time before they met. It seemed strange, she had thought they had shared everything. How little she had known him.

  ‘Yes. Anyway, he recovered his health well and he was due to return on the next troop carrier, two days hence, when he told me he was going to make some excuse and delay.’

  ‘Why?’ Laura breathed, knowing full well why.

  ‘He had become entangled with some air-headed chit and wanted to stay with her. I pointed out that by the terms of his father’s will he could not marry without the consent of his trustees until he was twenty-one in six weeks’ time and I was not giving my approval. He said in that case he would suffer a relapse and miss the ship.’

  ‘She was so ineligible?’ Laura asked. By some miracle she kept the shake out of her voice.

  ‘No.’ Again that shrug. ‘Excellent family, no doubt a perfectly adequate dowry. But she was too young and he most certainly was, and they’d known each other a matter of weeks.’

  Five weeks. Four weeks as lovers, long enough to create a child.

  ‘Piers became very agitated, said he’d go sick for six years if it took that, let alone the six weeks until he could marry.’

  ‘But he went back.’ Laura held on to the back of the nearest chair. Piers had left, with only a brief note. I have to go back to Spain. We cannot marry yet, but wait for me. I do not know how long it will be… She had sat with it in her hand that morning, the morning when she had realised what the non-appearance of her monthly courses—usually as regular as clockwork—meant. She was pregnant and her lover had abandoned her.

  ‘The boy was a romantic. A buffle-headed, muddle-brained romantic,’ Avery said bitterly. ‘He had broken his mother’s heart by joining up, he had sworn an oath of allegiance, and the moment he fancied himself in love he would throw the whole thing over. He would lie to stay in England, pretend to be sick when his comrades went back to fight.

  ‘I told him that to do what he was suggesting would be dishonourable, that his oath as an officer preceded any entanglement with some girl who could perfectly well wait for him—and if she could not, then she would be no wife for a soldier in any case. I asked him,’ he said, his voice hard, ‘if this was an excuse and he was too afraid to go back.’

  Laura sat down, her legs boneless. ‘You called him a coward?’

  ‘By implication, yes.’

  ‘And so he went back to Spain, abandoned the girl and was killed almost as soon as he returned?’

  ‘Yes.’ The stark word in the warm air of the room scented by the breeze from the garden was like the crack of a gunshot.

  She had fallen from her horse once and the air had been knocked clean out of her. She had felt hollow then, but not as empty as she felt now. Laura stared at the dark head, still so firmly turned from her. What had that been? A confession? But he sounded angry, not remorseful, as though getting killed was Piers’s fault.

  Piers’s sword rested almost within arm’s reach. Laura saw herself pick it up and run it through that broad back as vividly as in a dream. She felt the jar as the steel hit bone and solid muscle, she felt the gush of hot blood on her hands. She blinked and it was still in its rack, she was still sitting down, her heart racing. When she spoke her voice came from a long way away and she wondered if she was going to faint. ‘Do you regret it?’

  ‘It was a matter of honour, it had to be said.’

  ‘And you did not concern yourself with the girl he loved?’

  ‘No.’

  I had lain with a man I loved, because we loved. I was foolish and heedless, but does that make me worthless? It seemed that in Avery Falconer’s eyes it did. Hypocrite, she thought. I was… I thought I liked you. Now she knew she had been right all along. He was arrogant, ruthless, judgemental and deeply unfair.

  The clock struck, a thin, silvery note. ‘My goodness, look at the time,’ Laura said and stood up, half-expecting to find her legs would not support her. ‘I must go and…and fetch something from the village. Something I promised Mab,’ she added. She had the doorknob in her hand before he turned and she was out of the room before he spoke.

  ‘Caroline—’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I really must go now.’

  *

  He had shocked her. First by taking her instinctive concern as an excuse to kiss her and then by talking of battlefields and death. Avery watched the garden, but there was no sign of Caroline, so she must have taken the front path to the village lane. Tomorrow he would apologise. Now he had to shake off this mood before Alice came home.

  Do you regret it? Caroline had asked. Regret was hardly the word, furious resentment was more like it. Damn it, he was not going to be plunged into this mental morass every time he came into this room to get a book. He could remove the portrait and the sword to the attic, but that would be cowardly. This had been Piers’s home and his mother would have wanted them there. Alice must grow up knowing what her…her cousin looked like, hearing stories of his courage.

  He had failed Piers when he could not stop him buying a commission and, somehow, he had failed him if the younger man had been capabl
e of such muddle-headed thinking about where his duty lay. Avery found the book he had been looking for and deliberately sat down at the desk to check the reference he was looking for instead of taking it to his study. If he had caved in and let Piers stay and marry Lady Laura Campion, he might have been killed in the next skirmish after he landed in Spain. He could have drowned on the transport ship. He could have contracted a fever and died of that.

  And he would have been leg-shackled to a chit of a girl who had been loose enough to throw her hat over the windmill for a handsome face in a scarlet coat and who then hadn’t the backbone to cope with what being an officer’s wife would mean. He had read the few bloodstained tatters that were all that remained of the letter that Piers had in his breast pocket when he was killed: nothing but anger and petulance. And yet his cousin had kept it against his heart and it was probably the last thing he read. No soldier deserved to have those words ringing in his ears as he fought and died. Coward…betrayal…I hate…I’m pregnant…fault…Laura.

  There were not many young ladies by that name and fewer still who vanished from the social scene because of a family crisis at a distant estate. He had gone to find Lady Laura, telling himself that Piers would have wanted him to, driven by grief and anger at the fates and at himself. When he tracked her down, the word locally was that Lady Laura was not well and consumption was feared. That was enough to keep visitors away.

  Avery had had to return to his duties abroad, so he had bided his time, watched the calendar, paid a skilful agent to spy, to intercept the mails before they reached the receiving office. The girl had sent the baby away, far away, he learned. After that it was simple. Wait a short while, then a few weeks’ leave and he was back in Vienna with Alice.

  The agent was rewarded well for his discretion and for the reports he continued to send about Lady Laura Campion. She had returned to London society, but not heartbroken, not crushed by the shame or by giving away her child. Of course she’d had to do it, no lady in her position could have survived it becoming public knowledge that she had given birth out of wedlock. Her reputation would have been shredded if she had kept the baby.

  But surely she could have kept the child close and found a respectable family where she could visit without suspicion to watch over her growing daughter? To have sent her to the other end of the country, to a remote dale and the hard life of a small farmer’s child, that argued a complete lack of concern for anything but a swift removal of an embarrassment.

  Scandal’s Virgin they call her, Lambton had written. She’s the fastest of all the débutantes, she spends money like water and they say she leaves broken hearts behind her like so much smashed crockery. The chaperons shake their heads, the matrons are scandalised, the gossip sheets love her and the men pursue. The betting books in the clubs are full of her name—but no one can claim on the wagers because, it seems, she always stops just this side of ruin. An arrant flirt…

  Avery could think of other words to describe Lady Laura Campion. Any guilt he might have felt at taking the baby vanished. If she had been heartbroken over Piers, if she had led a quiet, respectable life and married a decent man after an interval of mourning for Piers, then he would have experienced severe qualms about what he had done.

  But Alice did not deserve a mother like that, a woman who showed no sign of mourning her dead lover or the loss of her child. He would move heaven and earth to make sure Alice never knew who she was. Sooner or later he was going to have to make up some fairy story for the child, create some perfect woman to be her mother and some satisfying, if romantically sad, reason why he could not marry her.

  Not long now before he was in London and then he would see her, this witch who had so turned Piers’s head that he forgot his honour and his duty, this lady with the heart of a harlot who had sent her own child far away so she could wallow in pleasure and break hearts as she had broken his cousin’s heart.

  *

  ‘We are leaving. Now. Today.’

  ‘What? Why?’ Mab dropped the laundry basket onto the kitchen table with a thump.

  ‘That man….’ Her voice was shaking so much she had to stop, grip the edge of the table and breathe hard before she could steady it. ‘That man forced Piers to go back to Spain before he could marry me. He called him a coward and he got him in such a muddle about his duty and his honour that he went—and he was killed.’

  ‘Lovey, he might have been killed whenever he went back.’

  ‘I know.’ Laura sank onto the nearest chair. ‘But he would have married me and Alice would be legitimate and Piers would not have died with that worry on his mind.’

  ‘He knew?’ Mab sat down, too.

  ‘I wrote and it would have caught the next ship out. I think, from the timing, he could have received it. Perhaps I should not have done it, but I was so frightened and all I could think of was that I had to tell him.’ I feel such a coward. It seems like a betrayal of everything I told you I could be as a soldier’s wife. I hate to worry you, but I am pregnant with our child. Please don’t blame yourself, we were both at fault, but write, I beg you, tell me what to do… There had never been a response, only the news of his death.

  ‘I dare not risk being near Lord Wykeham or I will say something I regret, I know I will. I cannot believe I kept my tongue between my teeth just now as it is.’ She covered her face with her hands as if the blackness could somehow bring a measure of calm. ‘The boy from the Golden Lion can take the gig into Hemel Hempstead and give a message to Michael to bring the carriage right away.’ She got to her feet and ran to the front parlour to scribble a note for her coachman, who was waiting at one of the big coaching inns and enjoying a quiet country holiday while he did so. ‘If you go to the Golden Lion now with this, I will start packing.’

  Mab, her bonnet jammed on her head and her mouth set in a grim line, marched in and took the note. ‘Don’t you be putting your back out pulling that trunk out of the cupboard,’ was all she said before she banged out of the front door.

  Laura pulled another sheet of paper towards her and wrote as swiftly as her shaking hand allowed.

  Dearest Alice,

  I am sorry I had to leave without saying goodbye to you. I will always remember you and think of you. Please understand that not everyone who has to leave you wishes to do so.

  With all my love, your ‘adopted aunt’.

  *

  They had not brought much with them, for the cottage had been rented furnished and Laura’s pose as a widow in mourning meant she could manage with a limited wardrobe. By the time Michael arrived in the coach—the one she had chosen specifically because it had no crest on the doors—she and Mab had the trunk filled and a neat row of portmanteaux lined up in the hall.

  It was not a good time of day to leave, for they could not get back to London in daylight and would have to put up at an inn overnight, but Laura dared not risk staying another day. As it was, there seemed little chance that Avery could discover who she was, even if he wanted to. The cottage had been rented through her man of business in her false name, she had received no post and Michael had told no one who his employer was.

  The note for Alice was dropped off at the inn for delivery the next morning. By then Laura would be on the road again, heading for London, the Curzon Street house, appointments with modistes and milliners, the re-entry into her world—the world of the Season and the haut ton and oblivion in a whirl of pleasure.

  Avery Falconer could advertise for a governess and then pack his bags and go back to arranging the affairs of Europe wherever the government chose to use his undoubted talents for autocratically directing the lives and destinies of others.

  He had cared for his cousin Piers and yet, when the young man had crossed Avery’s line of what constituted honour and duty, he had bent him ruthlessly to his will. He loved Alice: Laura told herself that she just had to believe he would never break her daughter’s heart because he thought he was doing the right thing.

  *

  For two we
eks Avery kept the tightest rein on his temper he ever had in his life. He interviewed governesses and found none to his liking, he arranged for the Berkeley Square house to be put in readiness and he dealt with a weeping child who could not understand why her new Aunt Caroline had vanished. And that was difficult to endure because he had the nagging conviction on his conscience that she had fled his kisses and Alice’s distress was therefore all his fault.

  After a few days of tears, followed by clinging, Alice seemed to settle down. After all, as she confided in Avery, poor Aunt Caroline had been sad, so perhaps it was best that she had gone home to her friends, the only excuse he had been able to come up with.

  Now all he had to do was to find Alice a stepmama who would love her and she could forget a mother who had sent her away and a mysterious aunt who had vanished. He found he was quite looking forward to it. There would be no work, no worries, no sudden crises, simply a process of sociable, pleasurable wife-hunting and then marriage.

  Must be getting old, he thought, studying himself in the pier glass and tightening the muscles of an already flat stomach. No sign of grey hairs yet, but the prospect of a wife is surprisingly attractive. There would be none of the expenses and tantrums associated with mistresses. And none of the tension and guilt associated with respectable widows either, his conscience added. But it was good that Caroline had gone, for an earl with diplomatic responsibilities could not offer marriage to the widow of some middling gentleman and the alternative would not have been honourable. Yes, it was fortunate that he would never see Mrs Caroline Jordan again. But he missed her.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘So who is chaperoning you? Hmm?’ The Dowager Marchioness of Birtwell lifted her lorgnette to her eyes and fixed Laura with an unnervingly magnified gaze.

  Laura paused in her wanderings through the crowds at Mrs Fairweather’s May Day musical reception and dipped a curtsy. ‘My cousin Florence, ma’am.’ Laura reminded herself that one day she might be eighty with arthritis and managed a smile. She crossed her fingers behind her back—after all, Cousin Florence had promised to come and stay soon…she just wasn’t here at this moment.