Valentine (2 page)

“And why is he going to such lengths to give me a fair chance, as you put it?” The earl shook his head in disbelief.

Crighton was silent for a minute before saying, “His lordship would not care to see Stoneridge Manor go to rack and ruin for lack of funds to maintain it, and I also believe he wished it to remain in the hands of a member of his son’s family.”

“Ah.” The earl nodded slowly. “One could almost feel sorry for the devious old devil … torn between loathing the idea of a Gilbraith in residence and ancestral pride.”

He drew on his York tan gloves, smoothing the fine leather over his fingers, a deep frown between his chiseled brows, wrinkling the scar. “A union between a Gilbraith and a Belmont would be something indeed.”

“Indeed, my lord.”

“I give you good day, Crighton.” Abruptly, his lordship strode to the door.

The lawyer bounced up to bow his client from the room and down the narrow flight of stairs to the street door. He waited politely as the earl mounted the glossy black being held at the door by a street urchin and rode off down Threadneedle Street toward Cheapside.

Lawyer Crighton returned to his office. It was to be hoped the young Belmont ladies hadn’t heard the scandalous accusations dogging the heels of the Earl of Stoneridge. Such rumors would hardly endear a prospective suitor, particularly one of Gilbraith parentage—surely sufficient a disadvantage.

Sylvester rode back to his lodgings on Jermyn Street. Two years ago he would have gone to one of his clubs and sought companionship, port, and a game of faro. But he could no longer bear that instant of silence as he walked into a crowded room, the averted eyes, the stiff acknowledgments of his onetime friends. Never the cut direct—except from Gerard. He’d been acquitted, after all. But he’d not been exonerated.

Cowardice was a charge that clung like slime.

“It’s insufferable! How can we possibly be expected to live five miles from a Gilbraith!” The young lady at the pianoforte slammed her hands onto the keys in a crashing chord. “I don’t understand why grandpapa should have insisted on such a thing.”

“Your grandfather didn’t insist we live in the dower house, Clarissa,” Lady Elinor Belmont said mildly, examining her embroidery with a critical frown. “I think a paler shade of green …” She selected a silk from the basket on the table beside her. “But while we’re hardly in danger of debtors’ prison, we need to husband our resources. If I dip into capital to set us up in our own establishment, it’ll cut into your dowries.”

“I don’t give a hoot about a dowry,” Lady Clarissa declared. “And neither does Theo. We’ve no intention of marrying,
ever.”

“‘Ever’ is a big word, dear,” her mother remarked. “And there’s still Emily and Rosie to consider.”

Clarissa swung round on the piano stool, her big blue eyes stormy. “It’s just so galling,” she said. “To have to remove to the dower house, when we’ve always lived here.”

“Don’t fuss so, Clarry. We’ve always known it would happen … ever since Papa was killed.” A tall young woman looked up from a fashion magazine, a ray of sunlight picking golden glints in her dark brown hair. “And the dower house is very spacious. Besides, once Edward and I are married, you can all come and live with us.”

“Poor Edward,” murmured Lady Elinor with an amused smile. “I hardly think a young man, even one so accommodating as Edward, would relish starting married life in the company of his mother-in-law and three sisters-in-law.”

“Oh, fustian, Mama!” Her eldest daughter leaped to her feet and flung her arms around her mother. “Edward loves you.”

“Yes, I’m sure he does, Emily, dear, and I’m much obliged to him,” Lady Elinor said placidly, returning the hug. “Nevertheless, we shall remove to the dower house and make the best of it.”

Her two elder daughters knew the tone. Behind their mother’s mild exterior lay a will of iron, rarely exerted but never to be ignored.

“Mama, where’s Theo? She promised to help me cut up these worms.” A young girl wandered into the room, extending a cupped hand.

“Rosie, that’s revolting! Take them away,” her sisters commanded in unison.

The child blinked through large horn-rimmed spectacles. “They’re not revolting. Theo doesn’t think they are. They’re to be part of an experiment … a bio … biological experiment.”

“Theo doesn’t know the first thing about biological experiments,” Emily said.

“But at least she’s interested,” Rosie responded with asperity, peering at the contents of her palm, “If you’re not interested in things, you never learn anything. That was what Grandpapa said.”

“That’s very true, Rosie, but the drawing room is not the best place for worms,” her mother declared.

“Alive or dissected,” Clarissa put in, closing the lid of the pianoforte. “Take them away. Theo’s gone fishing … heaven only knows when she’ll reappear.”

Lady Belmont bent over her basket of embroidery silks so that her daughters couldn’t see the tears glazing her eyes. While they’d all had a close relationship with the old earl, Theo had been the closest to their grandfather and was struggling with a well of grief that Lady Belmont understood as perhaps the other girls didn’t. Theo had needed a father. Kit’s death when she was seven had left her with needs that her mother couldn’t satisfy. The others had adapted, it seemed, and their grandfather’s influence had been important, but not as vital as their mother’s. It had been the opposite with Theo.

In the days since the earl’s death, she had plunged herself into the affairs of the estate and the solitary pursuits that had always pleased her with a single-minded dedication that would shut out her grief. She paid little or no attention to the household routine these days. Clarissa was right—Theo would return before dark, but there was no knowing exactly when.

That same afternoon Sylvester Gilbraith downed his tankard of ale in the tap room of the village inn and leaned back, resting his elbows on the bar counter behind him. The room was dark and smoky, and he was aware of the surreptitious glances of the inn’s customers as they drank and spat into the sawdust at their feet. They didn’t know who he was and speculation was rife. Not many gentlemen of quality fetched up at the Hare and Hounds in Lulworth, demanding a room for the night.

But it didn’t suit Lord Stoneridge to declare himself just
yet. He guessed that the village inhabitants and the estate workers would share the Belmont hostility to a Gilbraith. Such attitudes were passed down from the manor and rapidly became entrenched, even when the reason for them was long forgotten.

He pushed himself away from the bar counter and strolled outside. Summer had come early this year. The village street was bathed in sunshine, the mud hard-ridged, and the groom in the stableyard drowsed against the wall, sucking a straw, the brim of his cap pulled well down over his eyes.

He straightened, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles as his lordship beckoned. A sharp command brought him running across the cobbled yard.

“Saddle my horse.”

The lad tugged his forelock and disappeared into the stable, reemerging after five minutes leading the earl’s black.

“Is there a cross-country route to Stoneridge Manor?” His lordship swung himself astride his mount, tossing a coin to the lad.

“Aye, sir. Through the village, and take the right fork. Follow the footpath ’cross the fields, and it’ll bring you onto Belmont land be’ind the manor.”

Lord Stoneridge nodded and turned his horse. He’d never seen his ancestral home, except in paintings, and for a reason he couldn’t identify wanted to familiarize himself with the house, its grounds, and its dependencies before he announced himself.

He followed directions and found himself approaching the house from the rear. He broke through a spinney, and the long, low Tudor manor house faced him on a hill, across a swift-running stream, spanned by a narrow stone bridge.

Stoneridge Manor. His home … and it would be the home of his children. Gilbraith children. A surge of grim satisfaction rose in his breast. In two hundred years a Gilbraith had not set foot in Stoneridge. Now it would be theirs.
The Belmonts’ unfortunate tendency to produce female progeny had finally excluded them. Except …

With a muttered oath he turned his horse to ride along the stream. The house and its immediate park were nothing. The wealth lay in the estate—its woods and fields and tenant farmers. Without access to those revenues, the house itself was merely a gentleman’s residence, and devilishly expensive to maintain. In fact, he couldn’t possibly maintain it with the mere competency he’d inherited from his own father.

But what the hell did four chits and their mother know about running an estate, about managing the affairs of tenants? They might imagine they could rely on a bailiff, but they’d be robbed blind. The land would run itself into the ground in a few years.

The fourth Earl of Stoneridge had been demented … whatever that idiot lawyer had said.

He slashed at a gorse bush with a vicious stroke of his riding crop, and his horse whinnied, throwing up its head in alarm.

“Easy.” Sylvester patted the animal’s neck as they moved through a stand of oak trees. As he emerged into the sunlight again, he saw a prone figure some way along the bank of the stream. There was something about the intent stillness of the figure that intrigued him.

He dismounted, tethering the horse to a sapling, and approached, his footsteps soft and muffled in the damp mossy ground.

He spotted the girl’s sandals a few yards from where she lay on her stomach, her bare feet in the air, the hem of her unbleached linen dress lying against her thighs, revealing slim brown calves. Two thick black plaits lay along her back. Her sleeves were rolled up and both hands were in the brown water of the stream.

A gypsy tickling trout was Sylvester’s immediate conclusion.

“We thrash poachers where I come from,” he observed to her back. The girl’s position didn’t change, and he realized that his approach hadn’t startled her. She must have heard his footsteps, soft as they were.

“Oh, we ’angs ’em in these parts,” she said in a soft Dorsetshire drawl, still without looking around. “Less’n we’re feelin’ kind. Then we transports ’em to the colonies.”

He couldn’t help smiling at this cool riposte. Clearly this gypsy wasn’t easily intimidated. He stood silently, affected by her intense concentration as she engaged in a battle of wits with the fish lying inert in the shadow of a camouflaging flat brown stone. Sunlight danced on the smooth surface of the water, and her hands were utterly still while her prey became accustomed to them. Then she moved. Her hands shot up from the water, flourishing a speckled brown trout.

“Gotcha, master trout!” She chuckled, holding the thrashing fish in the air for a second before tossing him back into the stream. The fish leaped out of the water, an agile flashing curve, sunlit drops of water along its back, and then it was gone, leaving a widening circle of bubbles on the surface.

“Why on earth did you throw it back? It looked big enough for a substantial dinner,” Stoneridge asked in surprise.

“I’m not ’ungry,” she said in the same cool tone as before. Rolling over, she sat up, squinting at him against the sun. “We shoots trespassers in these parts, too. An’ you’re on Belmont land … boundary’s just beyond those trees.” She gestured with an outflung arm.

“If I am trespassing, I’ll lay odds I’m in good company,” he said, his eyes narrowing as he examined her face. A gamine face, brown as a berry, with a pointed chin and small, straight nose. A fringe of black hair wisped on a broad forehead over a pair of large pansy-blue eyes. Quite an appealing little gypsy.

She merely shrugged and scrambled to her feet, shaking down the folds of her coarse linen smock, tossing the heavy black plaits over her shoulders. “Not your business what I do. You’re not from these parts, are you?”

She was standing with her bare feet slightly apart, her hands resting on her hips, and there was a distinct challenge to her stance and the tilt of her head. He wondered if it was unconscious—her habitual way of viewing the world. It amused him. And she really was quite an appealing gypsy.

He stepped toward her, smiling, reaching out a hand to catch her chin. “No, I’m not, but I’ve a mind to become better acquainted with them … or rather with their Romanys.” His hand tightened and he brought his mouth to hers.

The Earl of Stoneridge never fully understood what happened next. One minute he was standing upright, his lips pressed to hers, the sun-warmed scent of her skin in his nostrils, the firm line of her jaw in his palm, and the next he was lying on his back in the stream. Someone had instructed the gypsy poacher in the martial arts.

“Rat … cur …,” she yelled at him as she stood on the edge of the bank, dancing on her toes, her eyes almost black with outrage. “That’ll teach you, you filthy toad … tryin’ to take advantage of an honest girl. You come near me again and I’ll cut your—”

The rest of the tirade was lost in an indignant screech as he lunged off the bed of the stream, braceleting her bare ankles with finger and thumb. A violent jerk and she thumped onto her backside onto the hard ground. She yelled, grabbing at tufts of mossy grass, trying to save herself as he yanked her off the bank until she was sitting, hissing and spitting, in the thick mud of the shallows.

Sylvester stood up, glaring down at the livid girl. “Sauce for the goose, my girl,” he declared. “Whoever taught you to wrestle omitted to teach you not to crow too soon.” He dusted off his hands in a gesture that he realized was futile and squelched out of the stream, clambering onto the bank.

The girl picked herself up out of the mud. “Don’t you call me ‘your girl’!” she yelled, gouging a lump of mud from the bank and hurling it at his retreating back. It caught him full
between his shoulders, and he swung round with a bellow of anger.

She had scrambled onto the bank, and there was murder in her eyes. He looked at the sodden, mud-smothered figure all set to do battle in whatever fashion presented itself, and suddenly he burst out laughing as the absurdity of the situation hit him.

He was soaked to the skin, his boots full of water and probably ruined beyond repair, all because that bedraggled bantam took exception to a kiss. How was he to have guessed that a gypsy girl would react with all the outrage of a vestal virgin?