A Reluctant Courtship Read online

  Honore jumped. “You are an American?”

  “That, my dear, is debatable now, since I wasn’t born in the United States or England and have been invested with the title, thanks to your father.”

  “Papa?” Honore stared at him. “Papa helped you accede to the title?”

  “Our fathers were friends long ago, so I appealed to Lord Bainbridge when I found myself taken up for a spy the instant I arrived here.”

  “And your jailers listened to you?” Honore barely suppressed a skeptical snort. “You expect me to believe they contacted a peer of the realm for a foreigner?”

  He shrugged. “I was carrying a letter with a royal seal. I expect the local magistrate didn’t want to risk being wrong about my claim of who I was—er, who I am.”

  “And just like that my father got you freed and accepted by the Royal College of Arms?”

  If she were not missing a shoe, she would have set off across the field for home at a trot. She had spent quite enough time alone with this odd stranger with his claim of a connection to her father. More like a claim to a physician at Bedlam.

  “If three months is ‘just like that,’” he responded to her with the ease of the self-assured—or someone so insane he thought he spoke the truth—“then yes, he helped me ‘just like that.’”

  Honore gazed at him through narrowed eyes. “When?”

  “A year ago.”

  “Aha!” She backed away a step, prepared to climb over the low wall around the pasture, one shoe or not. “Papa was not in London or Devonshire a year ago.”

  “He was until the end of September and again from the end of November until his passing.” He held his hand out to her without touching her. “I was with him that night, you know.”

  “You were?” Honore halted her retreat. “You knew him that well?”

  “By then, yes. Well enough to attend a private meeting in Cavendish Square regarding a marriage settlement.”

  “A marriage settlement?” A distant bell of memory rang in Honore’s head, and she started to feel queasy. “You wanted my father to find you a wife?”

  “It was his idea.” He set his foot on the ground and straightened to more than a head taller than she stood. “He considered the earl of Ashmoor a suitable match for his youngest daughter.”

  2

  “But I’m his youngest daughter.” Miss Honore Bainbridge’s face turned the same whitish green as the froth atop the waves a hundred yards away. “Papa would never have—he could not have—” She set her hands on her hips and shot him a glare from eyes as blue as the September sky. “You must be lying. Papa would never have signed a marriage contract on my behalf without consulting me first.”

  The earl of Ashmoor swallowed the impulse to tell the honorable Miss Bainbridge that not only was he telling the truth, but she would have gotten a good bargain in him. A young lady with her dubious reputation rarely deserved courtship from a peer of the realm with an income of twenty thousand pounds a year. But she would have gotten Lord Ashmoor, né Americus Poole—called Meric by family and friends—on a ship somewhere between Plymouth and New York if he had signed those papers. He had not signed them, a fact for which he gave thanks whenever her name arose in conversation during the past nine months.

  “I have the papers with me,” he told her instead. “That’s why I was looking for you this afternoon. I thought you might like to have them.”

  “You took them from my father’s house the night he—he—” She dropped onto the low wall around the pasture.

  He shrugged. “Would you have wanted me to leave them and allow someone else to find them?”

  “No. No, I would not have.” She gazed at him, her lips parted as though she intended to say more but couldn’t form the words.

  Even pale and tearstained, her face presented an image of artistic perfection in a wash of gold from the afternoon sun. The perfect oval, the wide eyes, the curve of cheekbones and chin formed the stuff about which poets had written for hundreds of years. Her beauty—added to the courage she demonstrated that afternoon, clinging to that spindly shrub of a sapling while most of her dangled above certain death if either she or he let go—sent a line or two of verse running through Meric’s head.

  Such a pity she had blotted her copybook with not one but two regrettable attachments during the first six months after her debut into Society. Had he known about those connections to unsavory, even criminal, men, Meric never would have so much as discussed marriage to Bainbridge’s youngest daughter, let alone let him go so far as to draw up a settlement. Meric needed a wife to cement his new role in life. With a cloud of suspicion still dangling over his head like the Sword of Damocles, not to mention the lingering gossip about his late father, that wife could never be Miss Honore Bainbridge. He could not clear his father’s name unless he made only impeccable alliances with a daughter of the local landowners, one or two of which looked promising.

  Meric filled in the silence. “The papers are in the inside pocket of that coat you’re wearing.”

  “You could have simply destroyed them.” She fumbled with his coat until she drew out a sheaf of vellum.

  “I could have.”

  “Why did you not?”

  “I thought you might enjoy the privilege since Lord Bainbridge signed them.”

  She gasped and flipped through the pages until she reached the last one. Lord Bainbridge’s signature ran in bold strokes near the bottom and ended in a circle of wax affixed with his seal. Beneath it, just enough space remained for Meric’s signature to make the document valid.

  Her hands shaking hard enough to rattle the paper more than did the sea wind, Miss Bainbridge folded the pages and then sat rubbing her fingertips back and forth across the creases. She kept her eyes downcast.

  Meric followed her gaze to the toes peeking from beneath her tattered gown. One foot remained shod in a creamy slipper wholly inadequate for walking along the cliffs, and the other showed the pink tips of toes poking through a torn silk stocking.

  “Now that you know I had your father’s approval,” Meric said, “why don’t you let me carry you home.”

  “I would rather walk on my own, thank you.” Head still bowed, she swung her legs over the wall in one graceful motion, rose, and headed across the pasture on a well-worn path through the grass.

  A handful of sheep ceased their munching and stared at her.

  Meric vaulted after her, and the sheep scattered.

  “You can’t walk home alone,” he said.

  She shouldn’t have been walking at all with only one shoe.

  “I walked here alone. I can walk home alone.”

  “So you did, and so you can. And I will still do the gentlemanly thing and accompany you.”

  She stopped and glared back at him through a tangle of gold hair. “The gentlemanly thing for you to do would be to leave me alone as I wish to be, as I am quite capable of being.”

  “Yes,” he said, “you did so well on that cliff.”

  “I—well, I—” She ducked her head. “Thank you for that. I expect there is some way I can repay you.”

  She looked so dejected, so shaken, his heart softened. Had she been one of his sisters, or even one of their friends whom he had known all their lives, he would have slipped an arm around her shoulders in a reassuring embrace. Unfortunately, she was a stranger for all practical purposes—and a young lady with a less-than-stellar reputation that could too easily tar his.

  He settled for stepping closer to her, close enough to catch a whiff of something sweet like honeysuckle drifting from her wildly disarranged curls, and gave her his gentlest smile. “I don’t need repayment, Miss Bainbridge. I wanted our first meeting to be without the scrutiny of the rest of Devonshire society because of your father’s notions regarding us, and that plan brought me to find you on the cliff, by the grace of God.” He couldn’t stop himself from raising one hand and brushing a tendril of hair away from where it clung to the tips of ridiculously long eyelashes. “It�
��s the Lord you should be thanking, not me. I nearly went home when I learned you were out.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course I thank the Lord.” She clutched the marriage settlement so tightly it ripped in half.

  She jumped as though stung and cried out.

  “Step on something?” Meric stooped and retrieved a bit of metal from the path. No, not a bit of metal—a broken button, smooth on one side, etched on the other, rough where it had snapped free of the thread holding it to its garment.

  Rough and now specked with bright red drops of blood.

  He shoved the half of a button into his pocket. “You cut yourself.”

  “It is nothing more than a scratch.” She started walking again, limping really, placing weight on only the toes of her right foot.

  “You shouldn’t walk on even a scratch without protection,” Meric persisted. “It’s really nothing for me to carry you.”

  “Even though I’m the size of a calf?”

  Meric grinned. “Only at birth.”

  She shot him a look that should have withered him to a husk, but one corner of her mouth twitched.

  “I’d offer to bind it up for you,” he said, “but that’s probably more indelicate than me carrying you.”

  “Truly, my lord, it scarcely hurts, and I doubt it’s still bleeding.” She turned her foot sideways and leaned forward to look.

  So did Meric. The sole of her foot was bleeding. A slow trickle of blood oozed from her heel.

  “It—it is still nothing.” Her voice quavered.

  “It’s enough.”

  Meric gauged the distance between their location and the house. A quarter mile away, the laden branches of apple trees poked their heads above a high stone wall. Somewhere beyond the orchard stood the house. He guessed half a mile to go. He should offer to carry her again. On the other hand, she was right—it would do neither of their reputations any good if someone saw them in such an intimate position, whatever the reason for it. He could leave her in the pasture and go to fetch help, but he didn’t like what he thought he recognized on that half of a button—the word égalité. French for “equality,” as in the Revolutionaries’ cry of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

  No French buttons should lie in the Bainbridge pasture unless someone with a connection to the French had cut across it on his way to the sea. Despite the war between America and England, France was still Great Britain’s greater enemy. Nearby Dartmoor held many more French prisoners than American ones thus far, and some of those had escaped right out from the guards’ noses—not in broad daylight, but still . . .

  He curved his hand around Miss Bainbridge’s elbow, halting her. “I’ll carry you as far as the edge of that orchard. No one will see us from there.”

  “I suppose not.” She kept her head bent. Swaths of hair hid her expression. “All right then.”

  Meric picked her up. She weighed more than he recalled from those moments he’d hauled her off the crumbling cliff, but she was still a little bit of a girl, the size of his middle sister Sarah, who was sixteen and the smallest of the eight of them. Sarah wouldn’t have reposed in his arms without moving, as did Miss Bainbridge. The latter would have been easier to carry if her stillness didn’t verge on stiffness, and if she had wound one arm around his neck. As it was, she clutched the lapels of his coat together around the now torn marriage contract, and kept her head lowered as though reading something from the plain brass buttons on his coat.

  “So,” he began, seeking ordinary conversation to maybe set her at ease, “do you make a habit of walking on the cliffs?”

  “It is the first place I go when I come home, but yesterday was too wet for cliff walking.” She turned her face away from him, and strands of her hair blew across his cheek. “When I was younger, I played daring games here with some of the tenant farmers’ children. It is a good thing no children were playing here today. It looks like we have all neglected the cliff and other things, being gone so much this past year and a half. Look at those apples. They are falling off the trees for want of picking.”

  “Do you have the labor? I believe the Ashmoor harvest is done. I could send over—”

  “I can manage.” If the stiffness of her body came from the kind of cold conveyed in her tone, his arms would soon suffer from frostbite.

  “Then it’s a good thing you came back,” he murmured.

  “Someone needed to. My brother has decided that country comes before f-family at present.” A hint of a fissure in the iceberg of Miss Bainbridge.

  Meric probed at it. “England is in the middle of two wars. She needs the guidance of Parliament.”

  Miss Bainbridge looked at him for the first time since he’d picked her up. “You are not sitting in the House of Lords.”

  “I’m needed here to ensure the estates remain profitable and pay lots of taxes to support these wars.” Hearing his own cynical tone, he hastened to add, “The estates have been neglected by all but their stewards for the past three years. I am blessed that they are fine and apparently honest stewards.”

  “Ours too, but nothing truly substitutes for the presence of the owner.”

  “Ah, at last, Miss Bainbridge, we are in accord with something.” He put her down in front of an iron gate set into the orchard wall. “Is your foot well enough to walk through?”

  “It is well enough to walk, my lord.” She performed the rather remarkable feat of standing on one foot while holding the other up at an angle so she could inspect it. “See, it is no longer bleeding.”

  “No, it isn’t, but your chances of stepping on sticks and such are rather high, don’t you think?”

  The spreading acreage of laden trees, sharp-scented with the juices of windfalls fermenting on the ground, harbored a chill not apparent in the sunlit pasture—discounting Miss Bainbridge’s tone, of course.

  “I suppose you are right.” She heaved a sigh that Meric half expected to produce frosty vapor. “Very well. If you prefer it.”

  “I prefer it.” He picked her up again.

  She resumed studying his unremarkable buttons.

  “I expect we’ll meet at church Sunday,” he said.

  “I doubt as much. My parish is Clovelly, not Ashmoor.”

  “I’m staying in the Poole house in Clovelly.”

  Her head shot up. “But the Clovelly house is nothing more than a cottage.”

  Meric snorted. “I hardly call twelve rooms a cottage, Miss Bainbridge. Ten of us lived in a house not half that size and never considered ourselves cramped for space.”

  Not with miles of Crystal Lake and pristine forest around them, they hadn’t. Not like he felt in this orchard with its regimented trees inside walls to protect the fruit from the sea winds, and the endless pastures and moorlands beyond. If not for the miles of coastland, he might have gone mad with everything so close together.

  “The Poole house is more comfortable than that drafty manor at Ashmoor,” he added. “And I like being by the sea.”

  Miss Bainbridge grew the slightest bit less rigid against him. “So do I. I did not like either Shropshire or Lancashire. That is where my sisters live now. And Bath, where Mama is staying? Too, too dull.”

  “I should think you’d find Devonshire dull.” He ducked to avoid a low-hanging branch across the path and caught her honeysuckle sweetness through the apple smell. It reminded him of home, the vines winding around the fence that never quite kept the wild animals out and the domesticated ones in.

  An ache started in his heart—a longing for his loved ones, for people who knew and trusted his integrity, for the pretty young woman he intended to offer for but told not to wait for him when he received word of the inheritance. Too much hope had shone in Mama’s face for Meric to say no to the title, the income, the excuse to return his father’s branch of the family to Devonshire.

  Miss Bainbridge suddenly grew too heavy in his arms, and he welcomed the sight of the orchard’s end. He set her beside the wicket of another barrier, this one a white-painte
d fence with a lawn stretching in manicured perfection to the nearest wing of a sprawling, asymmetrical house.

  “Will you be all right from here?” he asked.

  “I would have been all right from the pasture.” She dropped a slight curtsy. “But I thank you for your chivalry, my lord. I shall have your coat returned to you as soon as it is brushed and pressed.”

  She spun on the heel of her one slipper and tiptoed across the lawn just beginning to show signs of browning up for the winter. Despite the uneven gait and tattered dress beneath his overly large coat, despite her missing hat and tumbled hair, she held her head high, her back straight in graceful dignity. Such a pity she had forgotten her dignity on two occasions since her debut into Society and had thrown herself at wholly unsuitable men. Worse than unsuitable men—a traitor and a murderer.

  Meric turned his back on her. His American upbringing made him suspect to some—unfortunately, some in high places. To matchmaking mamas, however, his title and income swept concerns about his loyalties right out the door. An alliance through marriage with a solidly English family would even further clear him of suspicions of disloyalty to the Crown. Once he was fully accepted in his new country, he could amply provide for his siblings and grant his mother her two greatest wishes—to clear his father’s name and reunite her with her parents. All he had to do until then was keep himself and his younger brother out of another English prison, and maybe marry a suitable young lady whose pristine reputation would enhance his consequence—such as the Devenish chit, who reminded him of the girl left behind.

  3

  Despite the pain in her heel, Honore took the circuitous route along the orchard fence and garden wall to the terrace and long window leading into the library, from which she had exited the house what must have been a lifetime ago. To avoid the footman who perpetually stood in the main hall, she ducked down a side passage and up a narrow servants’ staircase leading to the family bedchambers. All of them overlooked the walled orchard and pasture and sea beyond, but if the hand of the Lord that had brought Lord Ashmoor along in time to save her from the cliff kept her companion Miss Lavinia Morrow in another part of the house, Honore just might manage not to disclose how close to death she had come. If she could avoid talking about the near fatal accident, she could avoid revealing her thoroughly humiliating encounter with Lord Ashmoor.