Virtue's Reward (29 page)

“But I’m glad if you did. It was only natural to wonder if I was in league with Garthwood. For all you knew, we might have cooked up some devilish scheme together the night before I accepted your proposal. And maybe it will even out my accusations against Harry. I knew I had not been in your room, nor acted in any way against you, and I could think of no one else.”

“What else were you to imagine? I should have shared what I knew with you as it happened, but I’ve been in the habit for years of trying to protect Harry. It’s a terrible affliction to be a favorite child.”

“
Harry
was the favorite?”

“He never asked for it, but my father always burdened him with the force of an entirely selfish attention. Harry must always do better than anyone else—at riding, at shooting, all of it. Father made him practice until he was exhausted. He had to creep away if he wanted to join me in normal mischief like any other boy. Then it would hurt him terribly when I alone was punished and he was not, which was generally the case. Grandmama reacted like everyone else and tried to make it up to the rest of us by overlooking him. Which left Harry with no one but me.”

“I should have believed you,” Helena said.

Of Richard’s reaction to his father’s preference for his brother, she could say nothing. But how many children would have responded as he had, with love rather than with jealousy?

“Should you? Why? What reason did I give you to trust me? Helena, I have been a contemptible husband. You are a woman of your own means now. If you wish to be free of me, I shall arrange it. I shan’t try to impose on your independence. But there’s a child to consider. What can we save from this intemperate marriage?”

“I don’t know, Richard.”

She looked back up at him. The firelight gilded his cheek and struck sparks of light in his fair hair. The bruise he had been given in the tunnel distorted the clean line of his jaw. What did he want from her? That she should stay at Acton Mead while he joined Marie in London?

Her courage began to fail and she clenched her hands together.

“Because I haven’t been honest either,” she said. “I told you when we met at Trethaerin that I didn’t believe in pretending anything, but I didn’t realize how hard that would be when I wanted something so very much.”

“What do you want?” he asked quietly. “I have given so little thought to what you might need for yourself.”

“You have been too busy staying alive!” she said with a wry smile. “You offer me my independence—I assume because you want yours. Very well! Our child should get to know Trethaerin as well as Acton Mead, so I can move between both places. I hope you’ll want to see the baby often, but otherwise, I shall try to enjoy the freedom you offer me. Perhaps in time I will, but I can’t pretend to want it.”

He said nothing, just looked steadily at her. She met his gaze with a longing she could no longer conceal. Whatever the consequences, she owed him the truth now.

“What I had hoped,” she continued, “was that if I kept quiet and made Acton Mead a place that would welcome you without reproach, you would still come to visit me there. I wanted your company. So I pretended not to know about Marie. Well, I do know about her. And I can’t feign anymore not to care. I can’t live with half of you, Richard. I’ll take the gift you give me and make of it what I can, if you’ll take mine. Take your freedom back, too. Go to London.”

“And live with
Marie
?” Richard said incredulously.

“If you love her.”

“But I haven’t seen Marie since September and that was just to say good-bye. I haven’t slept with her for over a year. I have never, for one instant, thought I was in love with her. If it had not been for the wild efforts of Nigel Garthwood, I would never have left Acton Mead. But how did you find out about Marie?”

Odd things began to flutter in Helena’s chest. “From what I overheard your father say about your mistresses, and then Harry said—”

His face became suffused with laughter. “My father has always had exaggerated ideas about my adventures, dearest Helena. And my brother—though an honorable conspirator and a deadly shot—does not know all the details of my life. When he asked me about Marie at Acton Mead, I had long before given her up. Besides, she’s a widow of independent means who makes a career out of entertaining single young men of sufficient wealth. A future duke is enjoying her company now, I believe. She would find a married man who is besotted with his wife a dreadful bore.”

“But you aren’t,” Helena said. “Besotted, I mean. Only dutiful.”

At which Richard came and knelt at her feet and took both of her hands in his. His golden hair had grown just long enough to curl at the temple.

“I am besotted, Helena, word of an officer and a future earl. I love you. I don’t blame you if you despise me. Heaven knows I have done nothing to earn your regard, but if you will give me the chance to try, sweet wife, I will do my best to woo you. We never had time for a courtship, did we?”

“I suppose not. My cousin rather disrupted things, didn’t he?”

“Then will you allow me three months? Helena, don’t turn me away, and for God’s sake, don’t send me back to London. I know your sense of honor, but I also know your generosity. Can’t you give a little to me? If you cast me back out to wander the world again, I’ll no doubt survive, but I’m damned if I want to.”

“Are you saying you would like to stay at Acton Mead with me?”

“I am saying exactly that. I told Charles de Dagonet a long time ago that I had fallen in love with you. But I won’t coerce you. You are the one who has made Acton Mead into a home. You have entirely won over Mr. and Mrs. Hood, as well as the medieval princesses and my brothers. You have earned the right to turn me from the door if you want.”

He moved her hand to his lips. The golden light on his hair blurred suddenly.

“But I don’t, Richard. I want you there with me. I want you there when our child is born. I would want you there even if it were only once a month. Can’t you see, my darling viscount, that I am helplessly in love with you?”

He gave a delighted laugh. “Then why, my lady wife, are you crying about it?”

“I am not crying!”

Richard leaned forward and kissed the tears from her face.

“Helena, I love you more than life itself. When I thought you would be indifferent if Garthwood succeeded in his half-baked attempts on my life, I didn’t really care if I died. If you will allow me to live with you as a husband, I assure you that you’ll be tired of my company within the month and begging me to leave again.”

“No, I shan’t.”

“You are my anchor, sweet Helena. Promise never to cast me adrift.”

His anchor
. That was what she had thought about him when he had first come to see her at Trethaerin and she had been tempted to take shelter in his strength. Now at last she was being offered an equal bargain.

“I promise, Richard. Or if we are to be cast adrift, let it be in the same boat. Now I want to ask a favor.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Name it!”

“Please kiss me in earnest, for I have been longing for you to do so ever since Christmas Eve.”

* * *

They left King’s Acton in a remarkable good humor. The earl declared himself delighted with his oldest son’s marriage. Now that the fortune hunter had turned out to have property of her own—and was about to create another generation of Actons—all his prior rancor appeared to be forgotten.

He had even, it appeared, given Richard and Harry a fair hearing over their concerns about the young girls and promised to think about it. It was more than either son had expected, and they left the evidence of Garthwood’s racket with the earl.

The countess kissed them all.

“You may, after all, be the saving of my impossible son,” she said quietly to Helena. “God knows he needs it.”

Harry claimed the right to kiss Helena soundly on the cheek, and declared himself bound for Paris.

“Someone has to rescue that little maid from the Anchor,” he said with a grin. “I can’t leave all the derring-do to Dickon, can I?”

* * *

Viscount Lenwood handed his wife down from the carriage at Acton Mead with the greatest care.

“I’m really not porcelain, Richard, just because I’m carrying our child.”

“No, I didn’t think you were. I think you are a beautiful, desirable woman, and I intend to prove it as often as you will let me. But in the meantime, let me at least show you some simple courtesy and try to reclaim my title as a gentleman.”

“A gentleman who would tease his wife with the beginnings of poems that he never finished?” He looked at her and raised a brow. “In Exeter you began some rhymes and said you would finish them after we were married.”

Richard laughed. “They had no endings, my dear. I was making them up as I went. I just wanted to marry you so very much, and I was afraid you’d cry off.”

Mrs. Hood came out to welcome them home, the elderly butler hurrying at her elbow.

“There’s a gentleman and a lady here to see you, my lord,” she said with a slightly disapproving nod toward the drawing room. “Hood let them in as if they owned the place.”

“Yes, so I hear,” Richard said dryly, for someone was playing cascading duets on the pianoforte. He strode forward and flung open the door. “As I suspected,” he said. “Who else but Charles de Dagonet? What on earth are you playing—Mozart?”

“The same, dear sir,” Dagonet said, rising from the piano stool. “Forgive our rude use of your home. Like Odysseus, we find shelter wherever we are washed up. I believe you have already met my wife?”

Helena had seen who was sitting at the instrument with him.

“Catherine!” she cried, and, running forward, she embraced her old school friend, who had once been known simply as Catherine Hunter.

“You’re a damned dark horse, Dagonet,” Richard said. “When did this happen?”

“When did Kate grace me with her hand? It’s a long story for another time, my friend. But we are headed for Exmoor and wanted to stop to give you the news.” He looked up at Helena and gave her a solemn wink. “
L’amour et le fumée ne peuvent se cacher.
”

“And where there’s smoke, there’s fire? Let us take off our hats and then I insist on hearing all about it,” Helena said, laughing. “Ring for tea, would you, Catherine? We’ll be back in a moment.”

Richard took Helena’s hand as they went back into the hall.

“I had no idea,” he said, “that they even knew each other. Do you suppose they can possibly be as happy as we are?”

“I sincerely hope so. If it hadn’t been for Catherine Hunter, who is now to my amazement Mrs. Charles de Dagonet, you would never have had the excuse to offer for me,” Helena said. “I might even have married Garthwood.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Richard said instantly. “My vow to Edward was most convenient, but I could never have left Cornwall without you. I wanted you then and I want you now. I was just too much of a damned fool to see it.”

“Then prove it,” Helena said as, moving up to him, she stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the mouth.

* * *

“You know, Charles,” Catherine said, sitting down again on the piano stool. “Your friend Richard seems changed from when I met him on Exmoor.”

“How changed,
ma chérie
?”

Catherine tipped her head to one side and allowed her fingers to stray idly over the keys.

“I don’t know. Healed somehow, I think.”

“It’s because, Kate, he has found that he knows how to love and he has found someone who loves him back, as to my infinite surprise have I. And I can think of no person who deserves it more than Richard Acton.”

“Except for Helena Trethaerin,” Mrs. de Dagonet said.

It was the fashion in some brothels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for gentlemen to pay large sums to deflower virgins, and young English girls were often sold to Europe for this purpose. Girls were particularly vulnerable in France after the Revolution, since the
maisons closes
were regulated only by a corrupt police force without the backing of the courts.

In England such exploitation was next to impossible to control when there was no child labor law in general. Legal restrictions on the employment of children began late in the Regency, but it was not until 1882 that an independent inquiry recommended that it be made a crime to lure British girls into foreign brothels.

Helena’s recipe for black ink using the galls of Aleppo is genuine. It comes from a delightful book written in 1814, entitled
The Young Woman’s Companion; or Female Instructor
, which belongs to my family. The medieval custom of killing a wren on the day after Christmas persisted into Victorian times. I hope readers are able to picture the Regency kissing bough. The Christmas tree did not become popular in England until introduced by Prince Albert in 1841.

Both Charles de Dagonet and Richard Acton were members of Wellington’s Intelligence in the Peninsula. Such a group of scouts did indeed exist. The most famous of them, Major Colquhoun Grant, was described by Wellington as “worth a brigade to me.” Without their work with the local partisans, the Peninsular campaign could never have been won.

The adventures of Dagonet and Catherine Hunter may be found in
Scandal’s Reward
, the first book in this Regency series. Richard and Helena appear again in
Rogue’s Reward
, which comes next, when Lady Eleanor Acton meets dangerous Leander Campbell, the illegitimate son of an earl.

Please visit
www.jeanrossewing.com
or
www.juliaross.net
for more information.

Thank you, Readers!

Copyright © 2015 by Jean R. Ewing

Originally published by Zebra Books (ISBN 978-0821748473), February 1995

Electronically published in 2015 by Belgrave House/Regency Reads

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED