The Bridegroom (27 page)

“What happened? Why did your mother—?” The duke interrupted himself and said, “Sit down, Mick. Make yourself comfortable while I hear the whole of this incredible tale of yours.”

“It is a long story that reflects badly on my grandfather,” Mick began as he settled into one of the leather chairs in front of the earl’s desk. He told Alex how his grandfather had searched for years before finally locating him.

“I’m glad for you, Mick,” Alex said. “Very glad. I suppose you’re telling me this so I can find myself another steward.”

Mick shook his head abruptly, then rose from his chair. He stood anxiously, like any other young English nobleman before the father of his chosen bride, and said, “I came to get permission to court Becky.”

“I see,” Blackthorne said. He eyed Mick speculatively. “How long have you loved her?”

Mick hesitated, then said, “Since the first moment I laid eyes on her.”

Mick was watching Alex’s face, so he saw the slight flicker of concern in his eyes, the tightening of his mouth. “Does Becky know how you feel?”

“I believe she does.”

“Does she feel the same way?”

Mick’s lips curved in a rueful smile. “I wish I knew. I am hoping to convince her we belong together.”

The duke stood and crossed around his desk. For a moment Mick wasn’t sure whether Alex intended to hit him or hug him. In the end, the duke extended his hand. “Good luck, Mick. You’re going to need it.”

“Then you don’t oppose the match?” Mick said.

The duke laid an arm on Mick’s shoulders, as though he were already his son-in-law. “I know she likes you as a friend. I’m equally certain you’ll take good care of her. And now, of course, you can. Delaford has a fortune, and as his heir—”

“I won’t inherit his fortune,” Mick interrupted.

The duke’s arm slid off Mick’s shoulder, and he took a cautious step back. “Why not?”

“Carlisle managed to ruin Penrith financially. When the opportunity arose, I offered Penrith my inheritance in exchange for Becky’s freedom.”

The duke’s features tightened. “Are you telling me that
you
encouraged Penrith to annul his marriage to my daughter? That
you
are the source of Becky’s current misery?”

Mick swallowed hard. “He beat her. I could not bear it.”

The duke was clearly incredulous. “
Beat
her? She said nothing—”

“How could she?” Mick replied heatedly. “He was her husband. He would never have let her take Lily if she left him, and she would never have left her daughter behind. She could not tell you, for fear you would challenge him.”

“I would have sent him to hell, where he belongs!”

Mick laid a hand on the duke’s arm. “He is gone from England. And Becky is free.”

“That wife-beating brute should be punished,” the duke ranted as he paced the breadth of the carpet. “I will find him wherever he has gone and make him suffer, as my daughter has been made to suffer.”

“Then you become another Carlisle,” Mick said. “Is that what you want?”

The duke paused near his desk, then slumped into the chair behind it. He shoved his fingers through his hair, leaving it on end. “At least you could have left him in penury,” the duke muttered.

He suddenly looked up, focusing his gaze on Mick’s face. “If you have signed over Tenby’s fortune to Penrith, with what funds did you propose to set up housekeeping with my daughter?”

“I will inherit several entailed properties, a farm in particular, where I thought I might put my knowledge and experience to good use,” Mick said. “And I still have a trust fund my mother left me—five thousand a year—to provide for necessities.”

“You propose to make a farmer’s wife of a duke’s daughter?” Blackthorne asked in a quiet voice.

“She will want for nothing so long as I draw breath,” Mick said. “And she will be greatly loved.”

“She cannot—” The duke cut himself off. “She will not—” He cut himself off again and finally said, “What makes you think she will have you under those circumstances.”

Mick smiled. “Oh, I don’t intend to offer her even that much hope of a comfortable life.”

The duke sat forward. “What?”

“I do not intend that Becky should know of my connection to the marquess at all.”

“But why not, man?” Alex asked. “You cannot expect her to agree to marry a whore’s penniless bastard son!”

“Oh, but I do.”

The duke’s brow furrowed.

“Don’t you see, Alex? I cannot tell her the truth. If I explained what I’ve done, she might accept me out of some feeling of obligation. I want to know she’s marrying me because she loves me and wants to make a life with me.”

“Becky has never been the strong one,” the duke cautioned. “She may never find the resolve to take such a risk. Especially since she knows I would never condone such a match.”

Mick stood, braced his shoulders, and lifted his chin. “I believe Becky has more spirit than you think. But I suppose we will simply have to wait and see.”

“Why not at least tell her I will allow the marriage?” the duke offered.

Mick shook his head. “She will expect—and rightly
so—that your approval means an appropriate dowry to ease our life together. I don’t want her to make that assumption. I want her to understand that she will be giving up everything if she chooses to marry me.”

“Is that fair to her?” the duke asked. “If you love her, why are you forcing her to make such a choice?”

Mick met Alex’s hard look with bleak eyes. “If she truly loves me, nothing else should—or will—matter.”

“You belong in Bedlam.”

Mick shrugged. “Perhaps. But I want to know if she can learn to love the man she sees before her,” he said, letting Alex see his hope that she might, and his fear that she might not. “Not my title. Not my fortune. Me.”

“If that was your intention all along, why did you tell me the truth?” the duke asked.

“Because I owe you too much to court your daughter without your permission. Do I have it?”

The duke hissed out a breath of air. He stood and walked the few steps that put him face-to-face with Mick, then held out his hand for the second time and said the words that Mick had been waiting to hear.

“If Becky will have you, she’s yours, with my blessing.”

Reggie was so busy with work inside the castle over the next two days, while she waited for the muddy roads to dry enough to make travel to Blackthorne Hall possible, that she never had a chance to start the work outside. However, she had a great deal of help, since she managed to hire two more maids, a groom, a falconer (she decided Carlisle would want gerfalcons once he realized he had a man to train them), a huntsman (whom she immediately sent out to find game), and a wizened gatekeeper named Cameron MacTavish.

Of course there was no gate for MacTavish to keep, since the outer stone walls that had once surrounded Castle Carlisle had long since crumbled. But Reggie had heard MacTavish tell such a glorious tale of jousting knights and their fair ladies at the kitchen table—where he had been offered a cup of tea, hot-from-the-oven butter biscuits, and a place to warm his bones—that she had begged him to stay and tell more stories.

“I canna stay without wor
rr
king for my hir
rr
e,” the Scotsman said in his thick burr.

“What can you do?” Reggie asked.

“In days of old, when Scottish lair
rr
ds lived in these castles, I was a
gille-coise
,” the old man said.

“What is that?” Reggie asked, not recognizing the Scottish word.

“A bodyguar
rr
d to the clan chief.”

“I don’t believe I could convince Lord Carlisle to accept a personal bodyguard,” Reggie said hesitantly. Then she had come up with what she thought was a positively inspired alternative. “But you could guard the gate to his castle.”

“The gate?” he said. “Ther
rr
e’s no gate her
rr
e.”

“Well, no,” she conceded. “Castle Carlisle does not actually have a gate. But you could keep watch and make sure that all who live and work here are safe.”

So Cam MacTavish had become
gille-coise
—though his title was gatekeeper—of Castle Carlisle.

Reggie was ever mindful of the fact she must make do with what was available for repairs, but she was equally determined that the castle should become a comfortable place to live. So she took unbroken windows from the third-floor nursery and used them to replace the broken panes in the second-story bedrooms. She made sure the rotten treads on the stairs were replaced with solid wood from the floor of the attic. And she cleaned. And cleaned. And cleaned.

She emptied every cupboard in the kitchen and scoured everything she found. She washed all the floors and walls and windows. She dusted every corner of the
ceiling. She scrubbed the fireplaces free of soot. She stripped the draperies from all the windows, because they were uniformly faded, moth-eaten, and moldy. In any case, they were nothing but decaying decoration, since the dense growth of ivy allowed little sunlight inside.

Reggie wanted desperately to cut away the ivy from the windows and let in more light, but it made no sense to do so until she could replace the rest of the cracked windowpanes and find a way to restore the missing draperies. She would gladly have used her own money, but upon her marriage, all her funds had legally passed into Carlisle’s control, and she had been unable to cajole him into releasing any to her.

“You will suffer nothing by it,” she had argued, standing across from him, as he sat behind his desk in the library. “Since the money was never yours in the first place.”

“It is mine now,” he pointed out, yielding nothing.

“Do you plan to keep me destitute?” she demanded.

“Do you plan to keep me out of your bedroom?”

She had taken a step back, shocked at the turn the conversation had taken. “Are you suggesting you would
pay
for the privilege of sleeping with me?”

“That was not my intent, but now that you mention it—”

She had already whirled and started for the door when she heard his amused laughter. She stopped in her tracks and marched right back to him. “I do not find it in the least amusing that you would make a whore of me. All I
asked for was enough of
my own money
to make a comfortable home for us. Only a dastard would—”

“Enough!” he roared, coming out of his chair, his palms slapping the desk in front of him with enough force to send papers flying. “I never asked you to make this a home. And you are the one who mentioned bartering yourself for draperies and furniture, not I! We are husband and wife, yet you lock your door against me at night. Bloody hell, woman, make up your mind. You want a wife’s allowance. Are you willing to be a wife?”

Reggie had retreated without a word. Her bedroom door had remained locked, and she had made do with what she had. She had worked each day until there was no more light to see the dirt, pushing herself and every servant in the house to their limits.

By late afternoon of her sixth day at Castle Carlisle, Reggie was satisfied that she had done everything she could, with the few resources she had been given, to make it a comfortable place to live. However, so far as she had been able to determine, Carlisle would have been just as happy if she had left the castle teeming with cobwebs and vermin.

Reggie decided to give the servants the rest of the afternoon off as a reward for their unceasing labor and to give herself the afternoon off as well. Even God had rested after six days of labor. All day as she worked, she had been eyeing the distant pond that was half-hidden by white-trunked birch and rowan and elderberry trees, imagining how wonderful it would feel to immerse herself and wash away all the sweat and grime she had accumulated after a day spent dusting and scrubbing.

She waited until the sun was headed downward, depending on the dusk to hide her from prying eyes, before she grabbed a towel, a bar of scented soap, and some clean clothes and picked her way down the hill across the untended lawn to the pond. The surface of the water was smooth, and the sun reflected a perfect mirror image of the spoor-ridden ferns and graceful cat-o’-nine-tails that grew along the bank.

Reggie looked around to make certain she was alone, but the shadows were already growing among the trees, and it was difficult to see to the farthest reaches of the pond. It would have been wiser to survey the area completely, but she was in a hurry because, once the sun set, it would take with it what little warmth there was. Besides, she reasoned, if anyone had been in the pond, the currently unbroken surface would have been rippled by his presence.

Reggie said,
“Brrrr,”
as she dipped a toe into the pond, then laughed aloud with delight as she strode into the cold water. She was quickly immersed up to her waist and used the washcloth and soap she had brought along to clean herself briskly and thoroughly, humming one of the more ribald sea chanteys she had learned on her recent voyage to Scotland.

She washed her hair last, laying the washcloth over her shoulder while she worked. When she was done rinsing her hair, she squeezed out the cloth, wrapped the cake of soap up in it, and threw both soap and cloth onto the bank.