Chapter 11
“Wherein a villain brings past and future scandals to darken our heroine’s life.”
Georgiana sat on the rock, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring into the distance. She’d come back to their meeting place every day for the past fortnight though she knew it was foolish. He was never coming back again.
Soon enough she would read the notice of his betrothal in the Gazette and even the faintest hope that her idiotic heart still clung to would be gone.
She scolded herself every morning that passed, telling herself severely that it wasn’t the least bit of good pining for something you knew you could never have and promising to put him out of her mind.
And yet every afternoon she would call Conrad and retrace their footsteps to the exact same place.
She just felt closer to him here than anywhere else, even though he was now miles away and perhaps already dallying with another pretty girl to chase the memory of her from his mind.
She swallowed hard as Conrad came bounding up to her and pushed his cold, wet nose under her arm, seeking attention.
“Yes, I think you miss him too, don’t you, love?
He always made a fuss of you and was very obliging at throwing sticks.
” She ruffled his chest with affection. “Yes, and I know he threw them a good deal farther than I did. I’m sorry for it, truly, but I do my best you know.
” She prattled on in this fashion for a while until even Conrad grew bored and took himself off to dig out a rabbit hole.
With care she took out the necklace Beau had left her, letting the fine gold slide between her fingers as the little heart sat in her palm, glinting in the feeble sunlight of the afternoon.
The weather was closing in, the trees almost bare now and all the autumn colour stripped from the countryside.
She felt like every trace of her short-lived affair was being taken from her as the season died and the cold hand of winter passed over the landscape.
For such a short time everything had been golden, but now it was dead and cold and lonely, and she didn’t know how she would endure it.
She tucked the heart back away and got to her feet, calling Conrad and walking back down towards the woods.
She had the distance between here and the house to force a smile to her lips and drape the persona of Georgiana Bomford about her like a mantle, hiding the person she’d become since that fateful day in the cave.
Because she wasn’t the same anymore. No matter that she tried to be.
Her world seemed small and confined and she chafed at the restrictions of her circumstances as she never had before. That was perhaps the worst of all, she thought. That he had made her so dissatisfied with her lot, when she knew she was most fortunate in every way.
With a sigh and a final scold, she turned the corner into the garden of her aunt and uncle’s house and paused as she noticed a fine carriage in the driveway.
Her heart picked up speed. It was impossible surely?
But her heart did not consider it impossible or unlikely and she burst through the front door at a run, straight into the anxious bosom of the grey-haired housekeeper, Mrs Gurney.
“Oh, thank goodness, child! Wherever have you been? I’ve been looking high and low, and the house is all at sixes and sevens. Now go on upstairs, Clara is waiting for you. She’s got out your best cambric, the pale rose, oh do hurry, Georgiana!”
“B-but who is here, Gurney?” she stammered, her heart thudding too hard to allow her fevered brain to make sense of it.
“Your uncle, Baron Dalton is here!” she hissed, flapping her hands to hurry Georgiana up the stairs.
For a moment the disappointment was so acute that she could do nothing but stare at Mrs Gurney and try to breathe through the pain in her chest.
“Well don’t just stand there like a gudgeon, love,” pleaded the older woman, flapping her apron at her in agitation. “You must go and make yourself presentable.”
“I have an uncle?” Georgiana said, as Gurney put a hand in the small of her back and physically pushed her up the stairs.
“That you do,” Gurney replied, sounding as though she’d found a weevil in the flour bin.
“Who is he and what’s he doing here?” Georgiana demanded, still too shaken to put enough effort into wondering why she hadn’t known she had another uncle.
Gurney hustled her through the door of her bedroom where Clara pounced on her and the two women wrestled her out of her walking dress between them.
“He’s your Aunt Jane’s elder brother, and my ma always told me if you can’t say no good about a body, best keep your tongue between your teeth.”
This rather bold statement from Gurney made it clear to Georgiana that not only did Mrs Gurney not like her new uncle, but neither did Aunt Jane and Uncle Joseph.
Gurney would never have ventured such an opinion of one of her relations if she didn’t know full well that her mistress's sentiments were of like mind, and this was no doubt why he’d never been mentioned before.
She assumed that this was one of the heartless relations who had cast off her Aunt Jane when she had chosen to marry for love.
So, once she was primped and tidied to Gurney’s satisfaction, it was with no small measure of trepidation she went to meet her new relation.
Knowing what she did about how coldly her aunt’s family had treated her when she married Uncle Joseph it was with no expectation of liking the man, she found in the drawing room that she opened the door.
It didn’t take her long to realise that she’d misjudged the situation.
Her uncle, the baron, was a tall, severe man, with an autocratic manner.
His dress was obviously of the best quality and he bore himself like a duke, looking around the room with distaste and like there was a bad smell lingering somewhere close by.
He had perhaps been a handsome man in his youth as he was well made with a fine straight nose and a strong jaw.
But every line of a cruel and avaricious nature seemed to Georgiana to be etched clearly on a face she found devoid of the kinder human emotions.
Indeed, when her poor aunt, who was clearly in a state of great agitation, jumped to her feet as Georgiana entered the room and made to introduce them, the way he looked her over made her blood boil.
“As I feared,” he said with a sniff. “You are the image of your mother.”
Georgiana glanced at her aunt who had clearly been crying and was clutching a handkerchief in one clenched hand and her vinaigrette in the other.
“It’s true, you are,” Aunt Jane said smiling at her, before shooting a look of intense dislike at her brother. “She was such a beauty, you see.”
“A pity she was also a whore.”
Both Georgiana and Aunt Jane jumped in shock at the cruel vulgarity of his words.
“No, Lionel,” Aunt Jane replied, with unusual force. “That is the outside of enough. I will not allow you to come here, to my house, and speak in such an abominable manner. If you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head, you can leave now.”
“I will do no such thing, madam,” her brother replied with froideur. “I have come here, to your house,” he said, announcing the word with derision as though he stood in a hovel. “To speak to Georgiana Dalton and make things clear to her. You may leave while I do so.”
“I will do no such thing as to leave her alone with you!”
Georgiana, quite stunned by this, went and sat beside Aunt Jane who was clearly on the edge of hysteria. Taking her hand, she held it in hers and squeezed to try to comfort her. Aunt Jane covered her hand with her own and clung on tight.
“Aunt Jane, what on earth is this about?” Georgiana asked, turning her back on a man she had quickly decided forced her emotions well past mere dislike into the uncharted territories of revulsion and abhorrence.
“Why does this ill-mannered creature refer to me as Dalton? I have been and will always be Georgiana Bomford.”
“You will keep a civil tongue in your head, young woman!” the man purporting to be her uncle raged at her.
Georgiana turned and stared at him with disgust. “Sir, you have been in my company for barely a few minutes, reduced my aunt to tears, called my mother a whore and generally behaved in a crass and loutish manner ill befitting a gentleman. Therefore, I can only deduce that you are not a gentleman.”
Her uncle seemed torn between his obvious desire to cross the room and deliver her a blow to the head and whatever his purpose had been in coming here in the first place. In the end his objective seemed to win out as he reined in his temper but looked at her with undisguised hostility.
“What do you know of your parents?” he asked, his voice harsh.
“Very little,” she replied, meeting his eyes and refusing to be cowed by his high-handed manner. “Only that they both died when I was but less than a year old.”
“And do you know how they died?” he demanded, and from the obvious relish he took from asking, Georgiana knew that here, at last was the shadow that covered her name.
“I do not.” She spoke with dignity and clung to her aunt's hand as she began to sob, leaning against Georgiana’s shoulder.
He gave her a cold, serpentine smile that made unease slither over her flesh.
“Your mother was conducting an affair with another man, a duke of all people, though how she managed that is beyond me,” he added with a sneer. “Your father, the previous Baron Dalton discovered the two of them together and challenged the duke to a duel.”
Georgiana drew in a breath as her aunt began to cry harder beside her. She had constructed many stories about her parents when she was very small, inventing tales of lost princesses and bad fairies.
As she had grown older, she had come to believe that something had happened that would not cast her in a good light and had instinctively shied away from asking too many questions. But never, in her wildest imaginings, had she considered anything so dreadful as this.
“Your father was killed outright by the duke,” her uncle continued, unheeding of his sister’s misery or of the obvious hurt he was inflicting upon his niece.
“The duke in turn was forced to flee, taking your mother with him.” He paused to give her such a callous smile that real fear bloomed in her chest. “Of course, she abandoned you and left you without a second glance to run off with her lover.”
“No, Lionel!” her aunt pleaded, sobbing.
“You cannot be so cruel as that. She had no time to fetch Georgiana. She would have I’m sure!
” She turned to Georgiana, her eyes full of compassion as she clung to her hand.
“Your mother loved you, sweet child. I’m sure she did.
She would never have left you if she’d had a choice.
I’m certain she intended to send for you once she was settled. ”
“You know nothing of the sort.” The baron strode across the room to look out the window at the pretty garden that lay behind the house, though his eyes seemed to find nothing to please him.
“The whore ran away and left her child and it was the only favour she ever did you, as she drowned with the duke when their ship went down in a storm.”
Georgiana clutched at her aunt’s hand and tried to keep calm. They couldn’t both succumb to hysterics and she determined that this vile man would not see he’d hurt her or discomforted her in any way.
“I see,” she said, with the strangest feeling she was living in some kind of bizarre nightmare. Her emotions were already so raw and close to the surface with Beau leaving, that to add this melodrama to the misery of the past weeks was almost more than she could bear.
She could only be glad that the shock of it had numbed her for the moment so that her voice did not tremble when she spoke.
“I thank you for taking the time to come and divulge such unpleasant tidings to me, sir. I hope you have taken enough satisfaction from the delivery of them and pray we do not keep you a moment longer from your affairs.”
He laughed, a cold and unaffected sound that quite chilled her.
“Oh, but that isn’t why I’m here, child,” he said and when she looked up, she discovered that her uncle had taken on the persona of every villain she had ever read of in all the Gothic novels she loved most. All she needed to complete the picture was that it be night time in a castle instead of afternoon in their cramped drawing room, that the candles should be guttering in their sockets and a thunderstorm raging outside.
To her relief this ridiculous notion made her smile as it cast her as the heroine who must outwit her wicked relative, no doubt bent on murdering her or something equally nefarious.
She thought perhaps her sensibilities must have suffered enough for one day and she was overwrought, as she began to laugh.
Her uncle looked at her in astonishment.
“What the devil is wrong with you now?”
He paced back across the room to stand beside the fireplace, and with such a furious look on his face she was put strongly in mind of the wicked Marchese de Montferra, in The Orphan of the Rhine.
The idea quite overset her, and she had to bite her lip rather hard to restore her equilibrium.
It did however remove some of her fear of both the situation and her uncle and gave him a rather ridiculous character in the light of all his airs and graces.
“Why nothing, Sir. Pray do continue,” she said, staring at him in quite a new light.
He stared at her with a cool expression for a moment before he spoke again. “I will speak with you alone.”
“That you will not!” her aunt shrieked, though she trembled visibly now, and Georgiana was alarmed by the high colour on her cheeks.
“There, there, Aunt Jane, please don’t worry. You go and have a lay down. I will speak with my uncle and show him out as soon as he has said his piece. I’m sure it won’t take but a moment,” she added, glaring at the man.
With difficulty Georgiana calmed her a little and sent for Mrs Gurney who took one look at Baron Dalton, gave a sniff of outrage as she summed the man up with one disparaging glance and went to her mistress.
Supported by Gurney, Aunt Jane was persuaded out of the room, leaving Georgiana alone with her uncle.