A Country Wooing (18 page)

“You shouldn’t be riding so soon, should you? You mentioned a few weeks or a month....”

“My arm’s all right.”

She knew by then the trouble was more than physical.

“I daresay you wonder that I haven’t been to call,” he said.

“No, Robin has just left. We do not hope to compete with rich merchants,” she said, attempting an arch manner.

No smile or playful frown was returned, but a gloomy, grim silence. After a longish pause he said, “I’ve been meaning to call on you all day.”

“Then I shall tell Mama we must just be patient a little longer.” She walked to the rock and sat down, looking at the stream while waiting for an explanation of this fit of the dismals. Alex sat beside her, his fists rammed into the pockets of his trousers. He, too, stared into the running water.

“I take it things didn’t go well in London,” she finally said.

Alex turned his head and regarded her. His warm brown eyes held a new expression today, one she didn’t immediately recognize. She thought at first he looked infinitely sad, but as she looked, the expression changed, became angry. “No, not well,” he said curtly. “In fact, things couldn’t be worse. We’re finished. The London house is mortgaged—eight thousand on it.”

“Oh, Alex! Surely not! Not on top of all the rest. That must come to ...” She tried to remember all the sums Charles had run through, but she got lost.

“It comes to over fifty thousand he ran through, exclusive of his income,” Alex said, and mentioned the various sources. “Another ten thousand from Uncle Cyrus—that one was new to me. Of course, there’s a trifling five thousand more still in unpaid bills in London. Not to mention the little bit I have paid off in back salaries at home and the domestic bills in the village.”

Anne sat dumbfounded at the list but no longer confused as to that unreadable face Alex wore. There was no way he could possibly cope with such a mountain of debt—all his properties gone or mortgaged and the income reduced. He hadn’t come to see her because he had to tell her this.

To tell her, in fact, that he couldn’t marry her. He must marry Miss Anglin now, and obviously realized it himself. That was why the whole family was at Penholme. She sat silent, wearing an expression very much like his, though she didn’t realize it. Totally disheartened at first, infinitely sad, then becoming angry as she realized that Charles was responsible for this debacle. Laughing, generous, flirtatious, handsome, damnable Charles.

Hot tears scalded her eyes. “I hate him,” she said through clenched teeth.

Alex looked at her in surprise but not in doubt. “I’ve hated him for years,” he said simply. “I tried not to. He was my brother, and I really tried very hard not to hate him, but to see him act so irresponsible while he threw our family’s fortune to the winds, giving no heed to the children, no thought to his duties—to let Penholme and Sawburne go to rack and ruin. And to see him treat you so, Annie ... I thought at least he meant to do the right thing by you.”

“He did the right thing! He didn’t marry me. I was saved that humiliation, at least. How could I ever have ... I was a young fool at the time.” She dabbed a tear from the corner of her eye angrily, in a jerking fashion.

Alex reached out and patted her hand. “It’s too bad I ever left. I should have stayed. I might have managed to do something with the ten thousand Uncle Cyrus left. Maybe if I’d been here sooner to take things in hand, I might have saved something.”

“Don’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault. Oh, but I wish you hadn’t gone, too, Alex.”

“I had to make my own way in the world. I had nothing but the few thousand Mama left me, and it wasn’t enough to buy a place. I wanted to become a colonel and come back and marry you. I had nothing to offer, Annie, when I finally began to suspect Charles didn’t mean to marry you.”

She looked at him in astonishment. “But you never looked at me! You didn’t care for me at all.”

“Oh, Duck!” He laughed ruefully. “How could I bear to look at you, pining for Charles, seeing your eyes follow him as though he were a demigod, knowing he had so much to offer—looks, money, title. I couldn’t stand it. I avoided you both as much as I could. Then when Charles began to speak of marrying an heiress—after one of my almighty harangues—I took the notion that if I became a hero—a sort of superior Wellington was what I had in mind—you might be impressed enough to have me. Or alternatively, on cloudy days, I thought I might fall in some vastly heroic death, with the corollary, of course, that you would come to appreciate me after I was gone. I daresay you never realized your role in the case was to don crepe and live a life of solitary regret.”

“Oh, I wish ...” she said futilely.

“When they brought me the news of Charles’s death in Spain, I was half delirious in Belem, but the first thought that ran through my fevered brain wasn’t that my brother was dead or that I was now Lord Penholme. It was that there was no possibility of your marrying Charles. You were free, and I’d come home and marry you. It’s all that kept me alive, Annie. It was a dreadful mistake on my part to have ever enlisted. I knew it as soon as I got there. I was no hero, but I was there, with no place else to go, so I stayed. When I got back, I thought it was the end of all my troubles. A little penny-pinching, cheese-paring, and we could get married. I soon realized you were in love with a ghost. Weren’t you?”

“With a sham. I had no idea what he was really like.”

“I almost wish we hadn’t come so close,” he said, then his voice broke. He looked away toward the stream with his jaw clenched. It was unfitting for an officer to have moist eyes.

Such bravery was not required of a woman. Anne sniffled quite audibly into her handkerchief.

“Don’t cry, Annie,” he said, which made the tears come faster. He put an arm around her shoulder, and her head drooped against his chest while she tried to dry her tears and compose herself. His arm tightened around her; she felt some pressure on her head from his fingers or lips. She thought that perhaps he had kissed the top of her head, and she looked up.

“Alex, I have five thousand, if that’s any help ...”

“Don’t, Duck,” he said unsteadily. “Prices are still going up. You’ll need it for buying tacks and thread. I can’t marry you. To know you would have had me—that will have to be enough.”

“It’s
not
enough!” she objected. “You shouldn’t have given Robin Sawburne. If Charles was too selfish, you’re too generous.”

“It wasn’t just idle generosity. I would have lost it anyway. Anglin will bail him out, and we’ll have a home in the family. Somewhere for the children to go if I have to leave.”

“Leave? Alex, you’re not rejoining the army!” she gasped.

“Lord, no! I didn’t mean that. I’d sooner live in hell. I’m thinking of setting up as a diplomat, as soon as I find out what it pays. I speak some Spanish and Portuguese now, though I’d prefer any other posting to Spain. Austria, maybe. I’ll be as bad a diplomat as I was a soldier, but at least I won’t be required to kill anyone.”

Anne drew her bottom lip between her teeth and began imagining herself as a diplomatic hostess. “That might not be so bad,” she said, a hopeful question lighting her face.

“It will be wretched! I’ll be away from you.”

“Oh! Can—can they not be married?”

“Only if they have the effrontery to ask a woman to marry them, without a sou to their names. I haven’t. You can do better for yourself than a maimed pauper, and an exile at that,” he said firmly. “Forget about me, Annie. It’s all over for us. We must both do what we can to set our lives to rights.”

“Would you be able to save Penholme if you took the job?”

“At the moment, it’s only a possibility. I haven’t begun to look into it yet. But even if I could hold on to it, I couldn’t look after the tenants. There are more people than just family to consider, darling. I fear for the health of my tenants, living in damp, drafty cottages, barely eking a living out of the land.”

“Then you’ll be returning to London.”

“I must. There are a dozen loose ends to tie up there.”

“You’ll call on me when you get back this time?” she asked.

“Yes, if you like.”

“Even if the news is bad, Alex. Don’t leave me in suspense again.”

“I’ll tell you, but really, Anne, the news isn’t likely to be good. Don’t raise your hopes.”

The weak little shoot of hope that had been trying to sprout shriveled at this blast, and she looked at him disconsolately. “It would have been so nice. Alex, there is always Rosedale....”

“Not always. Only while your mama is alive. No, Annie, I don’t want it to be like that. Penholme is my home and my family’s home. It has been for generations. I must save it, if at all possible.”

“But what will you do?”

A fierceness possessed him; it echoed in his voice when he answered. “Whatever I have to.” He looked deeply into her eyes—an angry look, it was. Then he removed his arm from around her shoulders and rose.

He thought of the London house, well furnished. That lumber should bring a few thousand at auction. Sell the house as well—two thousand would be realized after the mortgage was paid. He also thought of Annie’s five thousand, hating the necessity of doing it, but it could be done. Exmore and the merchants were consigned a long wait for their money. He’d strip Penholme of all but the basic necessities of life. They’d live in an empty house, if necessary. Sell every stick of lumber, every inch of canvas, every piece of silver, every spare piece of horseflesh in the stable. He hadn’t come through three years of hell, miraculously surviving a wound that everyone thought fatal, finally found Annie loved him enough to go into exile with him, only to be defeated again by Charles. He’d marry her if they had to live in the dovecot.

“Whatever I have to,” he repeated softly, fiercely, then turned away.

“You’re leaving now?”

“Yes, but I’ll be back,” he said on a determined note. “Good-bye, Duck.”

He mounted and rode away. Anne remained sitting at the stream for a long while, remembering Alex’s words and the determined way he had uttered them. Whatever he had to do ... He was going to marry Miss Anglin, then, and she couldn’t even blame him. She threw a pebble into the stream and watched it sink. Of course, things sank when their weight was too much to be borne. Everything sank in the end—hopes, wishes, love.

Chapter Thirteen

There was a delightful piece of news awaiting Lord Penholme when he returned to the Hall. Robin had offered for Miss Maggie and had been accepted. Albion was impatiently pacing the front hall when Penholme arrived, and he whisked his host into the study to discuss settlements before that gentleman had time to wash his hands. Alex felt a stirring of apprehension at having to disclose the true state of affairs to the man. He would not have been the least surprised to have him call off when the whole morass of bills was divulged, but at least Robin was clear of the debts. He had only the Sawburne mortgage to worry about.

“Now,” Albion said blissfully, “if we was to put your goods on one hand and your debts on t’other, just where would you stand?’’ A pair of eyes of a daunting craftiness regarded his lordship sharply.

“We would stand pretty well on one foot,” Penholme said. “The wrong one, I fear. But Robin is better situated than I.”

“We’ll start with the Hall—only ten thousand clear there, and another ten thousand in furnishings, I make it. So there’s twenty thousand on the right side—the credit side.”

Penholme brightened to hear such a high estimate placed on his chattels. Another five thousand was consigned to the right side by the unseen furnishings in the London house. “It is the custom to assess the town furnishings at fifty percent of country goods,” Albion mentioned. Penholme was too cheered to quibble. He owned up manfully to the London mortgage. “I feared I might be right on that score,” Albion said modestly.

Penholme did not feel it necessary to say he owed Exmore close to five thousand.

“Then there’s the holdings assembled by the late lords of Penholme,” Albion rattled on.

Feeling any holdings Charles had a hand in were more likely to have been disbursed than assembled, Penholme spoke reluctantly. “I haven’t gone through my brother’s papers. I have them in my room to look over tonight.”

Albion stared at such a dilatory way of going on. “There’ll be holdings there,” he said hopefully. It was not mentioned that the holdings were mostly in a worthless shipbuilding company. “You have a while to run an eye over them before dinnertime,” Albion added impatiently.

There would clearly be no hiding anything from this inquisitor, but the burden was Alex’s, not Robin’s. For that matter, Albion might be the very one to advise him how to go on. “Would you like to have a look at them now, sir?” he suggested.

Albion’s broad smile hardly required any verbal confirmation, but he said, “I’d be happy to have a glance at them with you.”

“I have to wash up, but if ...”

“I daresay I could work faster alone.”

The boxes of bills and “holdings” were handed over to the merchant, who settled into Penholme’s study with a smile of anticipation at getting such exact and voluminous information to play with. He was given a box of cigars and a pot of tea, for Albion never befuddled his mind with spirits when he was ciphering. “You needn’t bother holding dinner for me. A chop on a plate here at the desk will do fine,” he said, rubbing his hands in pleasure at the delightful evening ahead of him.

The meal was a happy one in spite of Albion’s absence. Robin was radiant, and Miss Maggie in alt. Miss Anglin foresaw a considerable increase in the new beaux to whom she would be exposed as a result of her sister’s alliance, and even Mrs. Anglin said without a word of prompting that she was very happy for the match, very happy indeed. And so she was. Lord Robin was very easy to talk to when he wasn’t with his family. He rattled on so merrily that she hardly had to say a word.

After the customary gulping of the port, Penholme and Robin joined the ladies in the gold saloon, but still Albion remained shut up in the smoky office, nodding his head as he toted up long columns. The Misses Anglin helped pass the evening by playing and singing for the family, and the twins brought down their war trophies to be admired. Mrs. Anglin sought company in the young girls, Loo and Babe, and became quite talkative for the half hour they were allowed to visit. At nine, the children were sent to bed, but still no word came from the study.