Blaze Wyndham (25 page)

“My uncle’s widow,” he said low.

“She despises you, my son.”

“In time I will teach her to love me, Mother, for I have loved her since the day I first laid eyes upon her,” replied Anthony Wyndham.

“God help you, Tony,” said his mother. “It will take a miracle now to bring about what you so desperately desire.”

“My lord earl.
My lord earl,
” came the voice of the household’s majordomo more insistently. “What orders would you give for Lord Edmund’s body?”

For a moment Anthony Wyndham looked uncomprehendingly into the face of the upper servant, and then it came to him that he was now the Earl of Langford. Shocked, he found he could not speak.

“Take my brother’s body, and lay it out in the family chapel,” said Lady Dorothy. “Then send Father Martin to me immediately.”

“Very good, m’lady,” replied the majordomo, backing off.

“
Anthony!
Get a hold of yourself this minute!” she said sharply to her son. “There is no help for it! You are indeed the fourth Earl of Langford, and as such it is to you that your people look. Edmund’s death and the miscarriage of his son will bring great sadness to Langford and its people. You are now their leader, and as such you may grieve, but you may not show that grief, lest you distress the people even further. It is to you that Langford people will now look for guidance. A ruler must be strong, for the people are weak!”

There was a long silence, and then Anthony Wyndham raised his head. His eyes were sad, but their look was resolute. His voice when he spoke was now firm. “I’ll send a messenger to Ashby. The Morgans will want to be with Blaze now in her mourning.”

Lady Dorothy nodded approvingly.

In the next few days there was much coming and going at RiversEdge. Lord and Lady Morgan arrived to comfort their daughter, who lay in her bed weeping for the loss of her husband, and her son, but recovering from her miscarriage. Lady Rosemary had overruled her daughter Delight, who, seeing her eldest sister’s tragedy as another opportunity to chase after Anthony Wyndham, wanted to come.

“None of you are to come,” said Lady Rosemary firmly. “We must leave immediately. Delight, you will be in charge of your sisters and brothers. If Lord Anthony did not want you before he became Earl of Langford, he will not want you now,” she said bluntly. “He can aspire to a much higher name, and undoubtedly he will. Now that he is the Earl of Langford, he will certainly marry when his mourning is over. I hope that, knowing this, you will decide to stop your foolishness, and accept one of the good offers we have had for you. You are, after all, sixteen and a half. Soon you will be considered too long in the tooth to be a wife. Is that what you wish? Surely you do not intend to end your days a maiden?”

Delight, Lady Rosemary found, was far easier to control than her eldest child. Blaze lay weakly within her bed, her eyes burning dark with her anger. “
He
killed Edmund,” she told her parents. “If I could kill him, I would!”

“Stop this, Blaze!” said Lady Rosemary in her firmest, most maternal tone of disapproval.

“What do you know, Mama? You have lived your whole life happily at Ashby having Papa’s children. You have never lost a child
or
a husband!” Blaze snarled at her mother. “Edmund would be alive today, and our son also, had not Tony goaded my husband into hunting that day. He planned to kill Edmund! I know it! He wanted Edmund’s place all along, though he masked it well, the bastard!” Her voice bordered on the hysterical.

“Nay, daughter, do not allow your sorrow to blind you to the truth,” said Lord Morgan in a quiet, firm tone. “Edmund wanted to hunt that day. Admit it. He grasped at the first excuse to do so. Do you really believe that Anthony was responsible for making that deer bolt from the forest directly in front of your husband’s horse? There were a dozen witnesses to the incident, and Edmund’s was not the only horse to shy. Unfortunately he was taken unawares, else he would have controlled his animal, for he was a fine horseman. It was an accident, Blaze. A terrible accident. It is unfair of you to blame Anthony for it. Unfair, and unkind. Edmund was Anthony’s best friend. They were more brothers than uncle and nephew. He grieves too for Edmund, and as deeply as do you.”

Blaze gazed mutely at her father, but Robert Morgan saw the pain she suffered, and took her into his embrace, where she wept until her eyes were burned closed with the salt of her tears. “I hate him!” she sobbed into her father’s shoulder.

“Hate him if you will, Blaze, but do not blame him for something that was not his fault,” replied Lord Morgan.

After two days in the family’s private chapel the body of the third Earl of Langford was moved to the Church of St. Michael, where it stayed on view another day so that his people might come and pay their respects. Had the weather not been cool they would not have had the opportunity. Atop the coffin rested Edmund Wyndham’s effigy, and within the closed casket, out of sight of the mourners, the earl held in tender and eternal embrace the swaddled body of his infant son, having gained in death that which he had so dearly sought in life, but had been unable to attain.

Blaze had insisted upon being present at her husband’s funeral and had been carried into the church by her father. The people wept all the harder seeing their beautiful young countess, for Blaze appeared to them to be brave and noble in her terrible grief. What sons would have come from such a woman, they thought silently, and mourned all the more their double loss.

It began to snow as they exited the church, having interred Edmund Wyndham’s broken body in its designated place within the family crypt. To her shock Blaze found herself alone with Anthony inside a coach.

“I
must
talk with you,” he said quietly, and when she did not reply he continued. “I plan to settle Riverside and its lands upon Nyssa as her marriage portion. I know that Edmund had not yet even considered her dowry, and now it is my responsibility. As a reigning earl’s daughter she would have been greatly sought-after. Her father’s death would lessen her value as a bride, but that I have given her Riverside. She is now a great heiress.”

“Are my daughter and I to live at Riverside?” she asked him coldly.

“Nay, Blaze, RiversEdge is your home,” he replied. “You are now the dowager Countess of Langford, and nothing has changed.

“My husband and son lie in the family crypt at Michaelschurch,” she said bitterly. “That has changed my life, and that of my daughter, my lord earl. I will never live at RiversEdge as long as you are there, Tony! I will take my daughter and go to Greenhill which belongs to me. Edmund gave it to me when Nyssa was born, and ’tis where we shall live!” Her pale face was resolute in its determination.

“Greenhill? You cannot live at Greenhill!” he said. “The manor house there is very old, and has not been lived in for thirty years. It is probably uninhabitable at this point.”

“Then why did Edmund give it to me?” she demanded of him.

“He was giving you the manor with its lands, not a house to live in,” explained Tony.

“But I will live in it,” she said stubbornly.

“It is not proper for a young woman without a husband to live alone in an isolated place,” he said through gritted teeth. “I will not allow you to live at Greenhill.”

Her violet-blue eyes darkened in their anger and narrowed dangerously. “
You will not allow me?
Who are you to say what I may or may not do? How dare you even presume to do so, sir!”

“Who am I?”
he repeated, and his voice was deep with his own rising anger. “I am the Earl of Langford, madam, and you as its dowager countess are my responsibility, as is your daughter, who I would remind you is Wyndham-born. It is I who will say where you may live, and
if
the Lady Nyssa Wyndham may go with you. As Earl of Langford it is my decision you remain at RiversEdge, madam, and because you are young and attractive,
and
because I would have a care for your reputation, my mother will remain as your chaperon. Is that quite understood, Blaze?”

“Am I to be your prisoner then?” she queried him sarcastically.

“You are the honored widow of my predecessor, madam. You and your daughter belong at RiversEdge. What would people say if you no sooner buried Edmund than you moved bag and baggage with your child to another house?”

“And if you wed, sir, what will your bride think of our presence?”

“If I wed we will then discuss possible changes,” he answered.

She was the most irritating woman he had ever met, he thought. Yet he wanted to take her into his arms and comfort her, for he could see her pain over Edmund’s loss.

“Let me go home to Ashby for a time,” she said low. “I cannot bear the thought of Christmastide here at RiversEdge right now.”

He reached out to take her little hand in his, but she drew herself back into a corner of the seat like some wounded animal.

“
Please
,” she said, and although he could not see the tears in her eyes he knew that they were there, and he was torn.

“Would you take Nyssa with you?” he asked.

“Of course,” she replied. “You would not ask me to leave my child, would you? I will be with my parents. Surely you trust them to do the right thing even if you do not trust me.”

“You may go,” he said helplessly, for to have refused her would have been churlish, and he was desperate to gain ground with her. “I will expect you to return by Candlemas.”

“Oh, please,” she begged him, “let us stay until after Eastertide, my lord! I need to be with my family, and Nyssa will have her uncles for playmates.”

He nodded. Distance would give her time to think, and he believed that when she did, she would realize that he had not been at fault in the matter of Edmund’s death. Then, come the spring, upon her return, he would gently court her.

Bidding Lady Dorothy farewell, Blaze returned to Ashby with her parents. She would have her own apartments in the beautiful new brick wing of the house that Edmund had gifted his in-laws with just last year. It was well that he had done so, for Blaze traveled with her tiring woman, Heartha, her child, and her child’s two nursemaids. She had her own groom, who looked after her white mare, and the young gray gelding Edmund had given her, and several liver-and-white spaniels who adored her, always following in her wake. Without this new wing Lady Rosemary would have been greatly put upon to house her eldest daughter and her small entourage.

After a few weeks back at Ashby Blaze realized that what her younger sister had said those three years back was true. Time had passed, and she had, of course, changed. Nothing was the same now as it had once been. She did not feel as if she belonged at Ashby, and she certainly did not belong at RiversEdge any longer. Having run her own large house, she was uncomfortable with her mother, and several times she caught herself opening her mouth to criticize something that her mother did that was not done that way at RiversEdge. She walked and she rode until the weather became simply too foul for being outdoors, which was worse, for she found that the sibling rivalry existing between her younger sisters was now beneath her.

Delight irritated her most, for all she seemed to want to talk about was the very thing that Blaze did not want to talk about. Anthony Wyndham. Larke and Linnette were sweet creatures, but their simple conversation, most of which was in unison drove her to distraction. They were so alike, she wondered if her parents would ever find husbands for them. She would have liked to spend more time with ten-and-a-half-year-old Vanora, but Vana was like a will-o’-the-wisp, never in one place for long, and leading a secret life that had caused Lady Rosemary to throw up her hands in desperation. Glenna, she hardly knew now, and Glenna was shy of her eldest sister, who in coping with her grief was not of a mind to win over the youngest of the Morgan sisters.

Blaze found herself looking forward to Christmas now, when Blythe and Bliss would come with their husbands, but a messenger arrived saying that Mary Rose and baby Rob were ill. Although in no danger, Blythe had chosen not to travel with them to Ashby. Bliss and Owen did arrive, however, bringing with them a heavy snowstorm that left the countryside blanketed in a mantle of white.

Bliss had the perfect solution to her sister’s problems, and she shared the idea first with her mother.

“She will come back to court with us,” Bliss said.

“Your sister is in mourning,” chided her mother.

“She can mourn him as well at court as in the country, Mama. Though she says nothing, she still blames Anthony for Edmund’s death which makes her residence at RiversEdge uncomfortable at best. She is bored to death here at Ashby. Can you not see it? She needs to be someplace new where she will be distracted from her grief, and where she may even find herself a new husband. Think, Mama! Blaze is the widowed Countess of Langford with a widow’s generous portion
and
lands of her own. She is quite a catch, and there are plenty of suitable gentlemen at court who should be happy to have her for a wife. What can you and Papa do for her, really? As for Anthony Wyndham, he will now be far too busy finding a wife of his own, lest the Wyndhams die out. He cannot help Blaze,” finished the practical Bliss.

Robert Morgan agreed that there was merit in Bliss’s suggestion, and Blaze, when approached with the idea, considered a moment and then agreed, to everyone but Bliss’s surprise.

“You will have to leave Nyssa, however,” said Bliss. “Lodging at court is a crowded thing at best. If Owen and I did not have a small extra bedchamber at Greenwich we could not offer to house you. Heartha will have to sleep upon the trundle in your room, but there is no room for Nyssa and her entourage. I hope you understand, sister.”

“Nyssa will be just fine with us,” said Lady Rosemary. “Henry and Tom adore her. They have grown so used to her now that they would be lost without their little niece.”