Читать книгу The Duchess Hunt - Elizabeth Beacon - Страница 7

When she saw Jack strolling in the Park the next day, Jessica suddenly realised why she felt so uneasy about this projected house party of his. She caught sight of him long before he spotted the Pendle barouche and idly wondered at her ability to pick the Duke of Dettingham out from the crowd. He looked so alone, despite the chattering crowds and cheerful hails of his cronies. She marvelled at how many eager, beckoning looks the society beauties sent him in the hope of catching his notoriously discerning eye, despite the scurrilous stories they went on whispering about him behind their fans and their débutante sisters simply sat and simpered in the prescribed fashion.

It occurred to her that he looked solitary, although he could hardly be more at ease with himself, because she expected Richard to be nearby whenever she encountered Jack even now. The cousins had been inseparable as boys and so often together as young men she had come to think of them as brothers in arms. Jess suddenly realised why Jack intended to marry and gave a shocked gasp that she had to turn into a sneeze to disguise. He hoped his scapegrace heir would come home once he realised Jack was wed and there was little risk of him inheriting the family strawberry leaves. A worse reason for marriage evaded her and she wanted to scream denial over the chatter of the assembled throng.

‘Idiot,’ she muttered under her breath, as her gaze dwelt broodingly on the manly form ambling towards them as if her dark thoughts had drawn him to them as inevitably as north drew a compass needle.

‘Dettingham,’ her father greeted him genially.

‘Your Grace,’ her mother said as she held out a hand in public greeting to the latest butt of scandal to confound the tabbies.

‘Jack,’ Jessica managed flatly and in calling him by his given name overstepped the mark once again in her attempt not to bluntly ask him what on earth he thought he was doing by thinking up such a cold-blooded method of flushing out his errant cousin.

‘Really, Jessica, I know I asked you to be civil to him, but that’s going much too far in public,’ Lady Pendle scolded distractedly while she discreetly aimed an admonishing kick at her husband’s ankle to remind him not to grin at the pair of them as if he could imagine nothing better than his daughter and the Duke of Dettingham being overfamiliar with each other.

‘And did you promise to obey your mama in such a testing quest, Princess?’ Jack asked with that almost-open smile that always threatened to do strange things to her insides if she let it.

‘If I did, then I’m fated to make a liar of myself almost as quickly as you have, your Grace,’ she told him with a reproachful look for the determined use of that hated nickname once again.

He bowed with such mocking elegance she had to bite back a chuckle. The last thing she wanted at the moment was a truce between them, considering she had a very large bone to pick with him the moment they were alone.

‘I apologise for my lapse, Miss Pendle, but your best regal look always has a weakening effect on my already ragged manners,’ he told her a little too meekly.

‘If I went about making that sort of excuse for my follies, I would be banned from every drawing room in Mayfair,’ she informed him sternly.

‘Then I must try it whenever possible from now on, since I can imagine no fate more perfect than being forbidden the sticklers’ company, preferably for ever.’

Jessica’s father laughed out loud and drew the interested attention of all those straining to hear every word that fell from Jack’s lips. ‘Might put that one into effect myself, my boy,’ Lord Pendle confided, seeming oblivious of all the sharp looks and eager speculation around him on the subject of their conversation.

‘You won’t if you wish to share any of the rooms in your London home with your wife during the next year or so,’ she heard her mother murmur for what she thought was her husband’s ears only.

From Jack’s carefully blank expression he had caught that muttered threat as well and Jessica marvelled at the cat-like sharpness of his senses even as she reminded herself to keep a still tongue between her teeth in his company.

‘Should you like to take a drive with me, Pr—Miss Pendle?’ he asked with such an air of bland innocence that Jessica gave him a sharp look. ‘Well, you can’t say I’m not trying,’ he told her with a cheerful shrug and a smile that had her rising to her feet in response before she’d even thought how he used that look to charm the birds out of the trees when she wasn’t around to waste it on.

‘In what, pray?’ she asked as she plumped back down again against the comfortable squabs of the family barouche.

‘My imaginary curricle?’ he said with raised eyebrows and a boyish grin she truly did find irresistible this time.

‘Oh, well, that’s all right then,’ she said and looked down at him with laughter in her eyes and a smile tugging at her lips.

‘Is it, Princess?’ he asked with an oddly twisted smile and a look in his eyes as if he’d just witnessed something so unexpected it had almost robbed him of words.

‘I thought we had dealt with that misname,’ she managed to scold, even as she fought an urge to languish at him like all the other susceptible misses.

‘Sorry,’ he said as if shrugging off something irrelevant and getting back to the task in hand, ‘it just slipped out; I obviously need more practice preventing myself from saying it. So will you come for a drive and allow me to put some in before we’re immured at Ashburton together for two whole weeks, Miss Pendle? I truly have the means to take you for one over yonder and am not yet suffering delusions,’ he said, waving a hand at the gleaming curricle halted under the trees.

The whole rig was attracting a great deal of gentlemanly envy for the spirit and quality of the perfectly matched team the tiger and his groom were fussing over. Jessica wondered who had attracted Jack’s notice so successfully that he’d stepped down from such a splendid equipage in the first place, but managed not to dwell on a mental picture of the magnificent sloe-eyed siren rumour had it was his very secret lover as well a grand lady of the ton. His amorous adventures were clearly no business of hers, but his ridiculous scheme to flush Richard out of hiding felt so acutely wrong that she shivered despite the building heat of a sultry June afternoon and wished she was a special enough person in his life to stand even a chance of persuading him not to go through with it.

Jack snapped his fingers imperiously and the curricle appeared at his side as if the milling crowd did not exist. She speculated crossly on the nature of power and the powerful and found herself sitting beside Jack on the narrow bench seat without ever agreeing to drive with him in the first place so far as she could recall.

‘Thank you, Brandt,’ she said once she had almost shaken off the nerve-tingling effect of sitting by his master long enough to remember the name of Jack’s head groom.

‘It’s always a pleasure to help a true lady into one of our carriages, Miss Pendle,’ the middle-aged man said, as if he didn’t think much of the females who usually graced the ducal curricle, and Jess bit back a chuckle at hearing his grace the Duke of Dettingham being scolded about the company he kept by his groom.

‘Indeed it is,’ Jack muttered blandly, then informed Brandt he could walk home as a reward for his impudence.

‘Aye, your Grace,’ the man said equably and took off at a brisk pace as if he relished the task.

They set off and Jessica tried not to look surprised and a little bit scandalised when Jack left the Park in order to set down his tiger not far from his house in Grosvenor Square, although she couldn’t help but be amused at the swagger in the diminutive tiger’s step as he doffed his cap to her with elaborate courtesy and cocked Jack a knowing glance before strolling off towards the Dettingham House mews.

‘Where on earth did you find him?’ Jess asked as she waited for the greys to admit Jack was indeed their master and fully in control before he gave them the office to move off.

‘The stews, but he’s going to be the best jockey I ever had if only he’ll learn to listen to those who know more about the art than he thinks he does.’

‘So you punished his intransigence by making him your tiger? Your servants must tremble in their boots when you lose your temper with one of them, your Grace,’ she teased, but secretly thought his leniency admirable, especially in contrast to the appalling way some powerful householders treated their servants.

‘I don’t have to lose my temper, Miss Pendle; all it takes is one of my ducal frowns and they all run about doing my bidding as if I were a king in his palace.’

‘How things must have changed at Ashburton,’ she said with a mock sigh. ‘I shall look forward to witnessing it.’

‘You’ll do so in vain,’ he said with a rueful smile that made her recall how likeable she might find him if she dared let herself. ‘They’re all convinced they know how to run the place far better than I do.’

‘They’re probably right,’ Jessica pointed out helpfully. ‘I doubt you had lessons on how to order a china cupboard or keep a linen cupboard supplied inflicted on you as a boy.’

‘Something for which I am truly thankful,’ he said and turned his team out into the traffic.

‘Where are we going?’ Jess asked, clutching her best bonnet, then tying the ribbons a little tighter as he set the restless team to as fast a pace as was safe in the London traffic.

‘Somewhere they can have a half-decent run and we can breathe in clean air for once,’

he told her rather distractedly as he skirted a wagon and restrained his high-spirited team as they took offence at a lady’s parasol in a virulent shade of green that would have made Jess do the same if she had to stare at it for long.

‘Won’t there be gossip?’ she protested half-heartedly.

‘Isn’t there always gossip?’ he said cynically.

‘About you, yes,’ she agreed, but not very often about lame and respectable Miss Pendle. A rebel voice within whispered it was about time she gave them a little fodder for their ever-more-ridiculous tales, so she might as well sit back and enjoy it.

‘I doubt even the tabbies will believe Lord and Lady Pendle allowed me to abduct their ewe lamb in front of their eyes, so you can relax, Princess. I promise to get you home in one piece with your name relatively unsullied before anyone even notices you’re gone.’

‘Since this is my last foray into society, I suppose it doesn’t matter what they say about me any more,’ Jess replied half to herself.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I should have thought it perfectly plain.’

‘Not to me.’

‘I am on the shelf, your Grace—not that I was ever truly off it—and I have no intention of taking part in any more social Seasons as I don’t particularly like London at this time of year. It always seems absurd to me that we all up sticks and move to town, when the countryside is at its most lovely and busy with new life, so we may spend that precious time of year being overheated and bored in a city that can’t help but be malodorous in the wrong weather—which seems to be most varieties of an English spring and summer so far as I can tell.’

‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but you’re far too young to be at your last prayers. Not that you ever made the slightest push at being a successful débutante when you were younger and I can’t help but wonder why.’

‘Isn’t that perfectly obvious as well?’ she asked exasperatedly.

‘Again, not to me, which means that either I’m being particularly stupid, or you’re wrong. How to walk the fine line between arguing with a lady when she says black is white and I know it to be otherwise, I wonder?’ he mused as if his interpretation of events must be right, just because it always was, presumably.

‘You could try silence.’

‘Is that how you do it, Jessica? Use that quiet, sceptical manner of yours to frighten off all the sprigs of nobility who don’t comply with your high standards?’

So now he thought her a snob, incapable of finding any man fit to be her ideal pattern-card of a husband?

‘What a very high opinion of me you do have,’ she tried to joke.

‘It can’t be any lower than the one you appear to have of yourself,’ he said impatiently and finally gave his team more rein as the traffic thinned at last.

‘I am a realist,’ she stated bluntly.

‘If that were the case, you would be Lady Something or the Countess of Somewhere by now,’ he scolded as if her single status actually mattered to him.

‘And Lord Something or the Earl of Somewhere would simply overlook the fact they’d saddled themselves with a lame wife, I suppose?’ she asked caustically.

‘Yes, the only person who refuses to do just that is you, Jessica Pendle, and I’m weary of the whole tableau of the brave beauty, meekly accepting that her role in life is to make others feel pleased they are more fortunate than she is. It’s almost an insult to those of us who value you as you are, rather than as you think you should be.’

‘I’m lame, that’s how I know myself to be,’ she sparked back and tears she told herself were of temper threatened to undo her under his sceptical gaze.

‘You limp a little, that’s all,’ he argued. ‘It could have been so much worse, considering you spent a day and a night out in the pouring rain lying injured. You could have died, or been seriously crippled for life,’ he said, the passion in his voice making his now-calm team jib again.

‘I have never denied it was my own fault,’ she offered a little too meekly for her own taste.

‘Yes, it was, in so far as you took a horse you were forbidden to ride and dashed off on him into weather you should have known would terrify the poor beast. You had a quick temper and a wayward heart in those days, but none of us thought you set out to do yourself and that unfortunate animal injury. We would have been fools if we had, considering how well we all knew your fiery temper and tomboyish ways. No doubt you thought such an impulsive and ill-considered exploit would prove to the world you were every bit as good as any of your brothers at the time. Us Seabornes and your own doting family were only relieved you were alive, so why can’t you accept it as a minor miracle you survived relatively unscathed as we all did at the time?’

‘I had no idea you even knew I had gone,’ she said faintly.

‘I always notice your absences, Princess,’ he said with exaggerated patience, as if preventing himself from physically taking hold of her and shaking her until some sense had been driven in by force. ‘In those days it was mainly because I was on pins to know what mischief you were in whenever you were gone, but that time we searched all night, then half the next day for you. I’ll never forget how it felt to look in vain for a child lost in the darkness. Rich and I tramped the hills round Winberry Hall so fanatically I could probably guide a party round them, day or night, without pausing to get my bearings even now.’

‘I didn’t know any of that. When I recovered from the fever I got from being so wet and cold you and your cousins were all long gone, so I thought you must have already left Winberry Hall by the time I was found to be missing.’

‘Not us, and just as well since your father was in such despair when you were not to be found that night and your brothers not much better, that if my Uncle Henry hadn’t organised a systematic search of the area, we might not have found you until it was too late to help you.’

‘Then why wasn’t I told?’ she asked faintly.

‘The doctor said you were not to be reminded of your ordeal and would need all the peace and quiet you could get to recover when the fever broke and you were out of danger at last. So we took ourselves off, certain you would soon be your usual irrepressible self after giving us such an almighty scare, but you never really recovered your old spark, did you, Princess?’

For once she didn’t argue with that nickname, too busy re-aligning events in her head to bother about small details. ‘No,’ she admitted at last.

‘Why not?’ he asked as if he was truly interested in her answer. ‘You were the most intrepid female Rich and I ever came across and then you became a paper saint.’

How to explain that it was plain to her by then that none of her dawning hopes for the future could ever be, now she was imperfect and he was not? Impossible when he would think her still in love with him or some such nonsensical notion, she decided, and cast about for an excuse for losing interest in the things she’d once loved so much, like riding for hours about the Northamptonshire countryside, running like the wind and climbing every tree on her father’s estate, then most of his neighbours’ as well.

‘As a way of preserving my dignity, I suppose,’ she said finally with a shrug.

‘It was a retreat—no, worse than that, a refusal to give battle in the first place,’ he condemned sternly.

‘How can you sit there and lecture me on cowardice when you have no idea what you’re talking about?’ she accused. ‘You never suffered a moment of doubt that your limbs would hold you up for as long as you asked them to. How could you understand what it feels like to face a crowded ballroom, knowing you will have to limp across the dance floor to reach the chaperon’s benches, where everyone knows you will stay all evening because you cannot dance? You never had to face the giggles and whispers of diamonds of the first water as they discuss you as if you’re either not there or must be deaf since you’re not perfect like they are. Some gentlemen even asked my mother if I would like tea or lemonade as if I couldn’t decide for myself.’

‘You seem to me to get on perfectly well with most of them. Rich and I could never get near you for a circle of assorted young ladies and spotty youths with fiercely protective expressions in their eyes when you made your come-out.’

‘So I can’t be quite as martyred and self-pitying as you say, can I?’

‘I never said you haven’t got a great many friends, just that you are very careful never to acquire lovers.’

‘Something my true well-wishers must be thankful for,’ Jessica said primly.

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. There wasn’t a single would-be lover or husband among those very young gentlemen. Not even one grown-up male with a mind and desire all his own, my dear Princess. You know, real, mature and rampant gentlemen who might take friendship for something more if you ever let them, so you’ve kept them sternly at a distance, haven’t you?’

‘No sensible female encourages the rakes,’ she said scornfully, although she knew he was quite right.

‘One fully aware of her own beauty and wit and who is prepared to take them and life on and win would, Princess, although a spoilt young woman who is too arrogant to play the game at all if she isn’t guaranteed to win would probably not dare do so.’

‘What an original take on my life you do have, your Grace,’ she said icily.

‘And how very much you would like to box my ears,’ he said with a whimsical grin, as if he’d prefer her to revert to the wild Jess of old and do just that.

‘Tempting, but not even you make me angry enough to risk being overturned, then having cause to limp on both feet ever after,’ she teased, because it was that or rage, then probably weep all over him since no words came close to being able to express her fury at being held up for his lofty scrutiny and found wanting.

‘Oh, Princess, what are we going to do with you?’ he asked with a weary shake of his handsome head.

‘Take me home and stop calling me that,’ she said just as wearily.

It seemed for a long time as if they’d reached deadlock. Jack had taken a wide sweep round the road at a handy village green to turn his light carriage back towards London without feeling the need for any spectacular feats of driving to prove his skill. Jessica already knew he could do most things he set his mind to superbly and hoped she wasn’t going to be his latest project, something mildly challenging to divert him from the more serious business of finding a wife.

‘What an obedient duke I am,’ he ventured after a few miles of wary silence.

‘No, you’re a devious, deceptive and dangerous one and I’m not in the least bit fooled by you, so don’t try your tricks on me,’ she told him grumpily.

‘At least I’m open to life and haven’t had my emotions preserved in aspic,’ he argued scornfully.

‘You’re certainly open to making the biggest mistake of your life this summer,’ she muttered under her breath at the arrogance of the man, thinking he could accuse her of being emotionless when he was contemplating taking a wife mainly to reassure his cousin he could finally come home, since the succession was about to be secured on to more direct heirs.

‘How lovely for you,’ she said insincerely out loud, but began to wonder anew about that cat-like hearing of his as he sent her a very peculiar look indeed.

‘Promise me that you will at least try, Princess,’ he admonished with a sigh after several more minutes of faintly hostile silence on both sides.

‘Try to do what?’

‘Join us erring and striving human beings for a change and come down out of your ivory tower for the summer. You might be surprised at what you find if you decided to embrace life instead of running away from it.’

‘And you might get your ears boxed after all,’ she snapped bitterly, for wasn’t this pot calling kettle black with a vengeance?

‘Promise?’ he said relentlessly and she made the mistake of briefly meeting his eyes and seeing genuine concern in the gold-rayed green depths of them before he turned his attention back to the road once again.

‘Only if you finally stop calling me Princess,’ she conceded and might have kicked herself for conceding that much if it would have done any good.

‘You would miss it if I did,’ he said with a wry smile as if he had suddenly realised how absurd they must look as they quarrelled most of the way round the almost countryside, then back into London again.

‘Like I’d miss chickenpox,’ she said darkly.

‘I take it all back, Jess, don’t ever change,’ he said with an easy grin and a laugh and she cursed herself for a fool when it felt more exhilarating than half an hour of flirtation with one of his rival rakes.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t. So far as I can see there’s very little hope you ever will either.’

‘And why should I change?’

‘Because marriage ought to do that to a man,’ she horrified herself by coming right out and saying.

‘Did I mention marriage?’ he asked, his voice so silkily dangerous she couldn’t fight off a visible shiver.

‘Never to me and don’t worry, I have no delusions in that direction,’ she snapped defensively.

‘I never thought you had, my dear,’ he said so remotely that it felt as if they were only a pair of strangers who didn’t particularly like each other.

‘Which is just as well, considering you would have hated it if I had designs on your ducal coronet,’ she recklessly added.

‘Who knows?’ he said vaguely, as if Jessica Pendle and her wayward ideas were a million miles from the focus of his thoughts, whatever that might be.

‘I do,’ she persisted disastrously, mainly because she couldn’t let silence fall again now the words were actually out.

‘You’re right,’ he admitted after a tense silence during which she had to actually bite her tongue not to make things worse by defending herself even more strongly and denying once more she had the least desire to attract him on any level. ‘In a weak moment I gave in to my grandmother’s edict and seriously considered marriage. It was obviously a moment too long, since I am now host to a gaggle of eligible young ladies and their assorted relatives and friends and will have a house party full of guests to consider when I return home.’

‘Hence your invitation to the Pendles, so we can water down the obviousness of a pack of eager young ladies invited by your aunt before you had time to express your second thoughts?’ she made herself say lightly, as if being considered an antidote to other more marriageable females didn’t hurt her in the least.

‘No, hence my invitation to the place I probably love most in the world to a family I consider part of my own. You are every bit as lovely as any of the ladies invited by my aunt and ought to know it by now, without having to be reassured at every turn that I will never see you as second-best to any of them,’ he said drily.

‘I am not lovely,’ she objected as indignantly as if he’d accused her of being plain as rice pudding.

‘Like it or not, you are so, my dear,’ he said with such a knowing smile she felt the edge had been quite taken off the compliment.

‘Just because you declare it, therefore it must be so, your Grace?’

‘If that’s what it takes to convince you I’m right. Now kindly take that about-to-be-martyred look off your face and behave like the proper young lady society knows you to be, Princess. It might be best if you pretend we just enjoyed a sedate tour round the leafier parts of Mayfair rather than a dashing tour of the outer villages perhaps.’

‘Yes, much better—and you’re still wrong,’ she sniped as the dusty streets became familiar and she felt him slip back into cynical Duke of Dettingham persona and out of her reach once again.

‘I’m not, you know,’ he murmured as he passed over her reticule and fan when the Pendles’ head footman had finished helping her down from the relatively high carriage seat.

‘Not what?’ she replied distractedly, for trying to descend gracefully from even a normal carriage was always a challenge and today she had wanted to land in a heap at his horses’ feet even less than usual.

‘Wrong, of course.’ He reminded her of his assertion she was lovely with a look of such molten heat in his gaze that she almost believed him for a moment, until she reminded herself he was an accomplished flirt and very good at making susceptible females believe they were uniquely special to him.

‘Hah! Try telling that to your other female guests when next we meet. They would have you declared insane or throw me in the moat.’

‘I don’t have a moat,’ he argued as she stood back on the pavement and waited to bid him an acceptably polite farewell.

‘They would dig one especially for me.’

‘Should I consider that a challenge, I wonder?’ he said with a teasing smile that threatened to leave her in a collapsed heap of compliance in the street.

‘No!’ she said a little too shrilly and stepped back as if just looking at him might burn her.

‘Pity,’ he said with a taunting grin she recalled seeing all too often when she was a child and he and Rich were about to escape her yet again. ‘I always liked a challenge and so few other females grant me the delight of proving them wrong as often as you do, Princess.’

‘Then count me in as just another female,’ she advised with as much of a flounce as she could manage and turned to quit the scene if he refused to play the gentleman and leave her in peace.

‘You could never be one of the crowd to me, Princess,’ he assured her outrageously as he finally obliged her and drove off with a careless salute of his driving whip and a flurry of dust from his chariot wheels.

‘Infuriating, arrogant, idiot,’ she gritted between her teeth as she stood on the pavement, watching slavishly until he was completely out of sight.

‘I beg your pardon, Miss Jessica?’ the butler said blandly, clearly having heard every word, but preserving the fiction that good servants were made of wood and set going every morning by a clock winder.

‘Tea, I think, Wellow,’ she said brightly. ‘I stand in need of it after that.’

‘What lady would not,’ Wellow allowed himself to answer as he followed her into the hall.

Two weeks later Jessica decided that not even tea would cure this disastrous situation. Her father and mother had cried off at the last minute and she was about to reach Ashburton New Place to face the ducal summons alone. The carriage slowed to take the entrance to Jack’s mansion and she fought a cowardly impulse to order her father’s coachman to return to Winberry Hall instead.

Despite their oddly unforgettable encounters back in London, Jack would treat her with his usual absent-minded courtesy, then forget her, she reassured herself uneasily. All she had to do was limp about his glorious stately pile looking serene and untroubled for the next two weeks while he took his pick of the finest belles of the ton, then she could go home and get on with her life. Resigning herself to a fortnight of pretence, Jessica leant forwards for her first glimpse of Ashburton’s famous deer park as the coach finally swung through the imposing gates and there could be no turning back.

‘Her ladyship said I was to remind you to be polite to the duke,’ her mother’s ancient and formidable dresser informed her sternly as the coach slowed again.

‘I’m not such a fool as to show his Grace up in a bad light while he’s entertaining guests, Martha.’

‘Your mother wouldn’t want you hurt, Miss Jessica,’ Martha said earnestly.

Then why had Lady Pendle been so insistent Jessica accept this invitation without her support? She must know the beauties invited for this fortnight would have their claws honed ready for the scramble to grab Jack’s strawberry leaves.

‘You can depend upon it, all is well, my love, despite all this panic from Rowena’s husband,’ her mama had told Jessica when a note was delivered by an exhausted groom as she and Jessica were finally packed and ready to leave. ‘Rowena is as healthy as a horse, despite Sir Linstock fussing over her as if she might break, but she never would attend to her sums and has very likely got the date of her last courses wrong. I said she looked large for just over seven months last time we visited, did I not? Linstock and your papa will be quite useless until we’re certain your sister is out of danger, so I must go and help the poor girl endure her confinement without having to worry about them as well as herself and the babe.’

Lady Pendle paused and considered the general idiocy of gentlemen when confronted with childbirth, gave a heavy sigh and shook her head. ‘You must take Martha with you and Lady Henry will chaperon you at Ashburton, my love. Your godmother will be sorely in need of your help with so many giddy young misses in the house,’ her mother said.

Lady Pendle clearly thought Lady Henry Seaborne faced an unenviable task keeping so many deadly rivals from scratching each other’s eyes out in their scramble to become Jack’s duchess. So how could Jess refuse to come here in Martha’s sternly respectable company when her godmother had always given her loving support to her goddaughter whenever she needed it?

‘His Grace and I are little more than nodding acquaintances nowadays, Martha, and I am only here to assist my godmother,’ Jessica said now. ‘Clearly I shall be far too busy to lounge about on sofas looking elegant, so you will not be required to dress me up like some aged ingénue. I suggest you regard this visit as something of a holiday and enjoy the comforts of Ashburton while you are here.’

‘That I shall not, Miss Jessica. Lady Henry and your mama would never allow you to be less elegantly dressed than the rest of the company, even if the rest of us was prepared to let you make a spectacle of yourself,’ Martha told her as if the very idea was preposterous.

‘I am three and twenty and quite on the shelf, not some hopeful little miss of seventeen or eighteen,’ Jessica countered lightly, but hoped there was enough steel in her voice to make it clear she considered that to be that.

She recalled what it was like to be that young and artless and shuddered. At seventeen she had still dreamt young girls’ dreams, even if she had put an embargo on any fancies about Jack. She had been cured of them quickly enough after overhearing a handsome and impecunious lieutenant who had sworn to her only the night before that she was the light and purpose of his life confide in his brother, the village curate, how her small fortune from her great-aunt would buy him preference and a commission. She could still hear every one of his cruel words now …

‘Without her money, I should never look at such a dull little cripple, I can assure you, brother mine. If not for my need being so much greater than yours, she would make you a neat wife, Hubert. At least Miss Hop-Along will never be chased by the local squires or ogled by the sons of the gentry. Not that she wouldn’t be easily caught if they chose to chase her, for she ain’t able to run away, is she?’ Julius Swaybon had said with a braying laugh that she had failed to notice was loud and unamused until that very moment.

Reverend Swaybon had been a much nicer gentleman than his brother and protested such a dismissive attitude to a girl the man was seeking to marry.

‘Don’t be more stupid than you can help,’ his more worldly-wise brother told him scornfully. ‘She wouldn’t be looking my way if she had any prospect of a better catch. The wench must know she’s flawed; she’ll accept me and be thankful, or remain a drain on her family for the rest of her life.’

‘I thought you said she had her own money,’ Reverend Swaybon defended her stalwartly and if she’d had it in her to fall in love out of gratitude, she knew which brother she would have chosen, she reflected now.

She hadn’t loved Julius Swaybon either, but she had been flattered by his extravagant praise and outrageous flirtation. Then she’d heard him speak of her as if she was a well-bred horse with a flaw that would bring her within his purchasing power and seen him for the straw man he truly was. It only confirmed her instinctive reaction to Jack when she was sixteen and eager for love, life and passion, but caution warned it would be a disaster for a girl like her to love him. He was seven years more cynical, experienced and dangerous now and an inner voice whispered he was also more fascinating, but she ignored it.

‘Lady Henry has her ways of getting things done,’ Martha said as they left the shade of the venerable oak trees and Ashburton Place came into clear view at last.

At least the magnificent mansion distracted her from wondering exactly what her godmother wanted to achieve this time and Jessica tried to dismiss that cryptic comment as if she hadn’t even heard it. Even the Seabornes, who loved every stick and stone of the place, acknowledged Ashburton was a beautiful rabbit warren. The towers and domes of the mighty roof were punctuated with banqueting houses and fanciful pinnacles so fashionable in Tudor England, but at least the main house was brightened by arrays of bay windows in the highest fashion of the times. With subsequent additions in the same brick or sandstone, Ashburton was a vast yet welcoming ducal seat.