Chapter 2
“Here, my lord. And here.” Mr. Coombe turned the page with a practiced motion. “The clause, as we discussed.”
The settlement lay open on the desk, and Adrian Thorne, the Earl of Ashcroft, signed where Mr. Coombe’s finger indicated without reading much beyond the final sum.
He knew a more careful man would have read every line of the document with a magnifying glass.
A careful man would have known precisely what he was pledging, and to whom, and on what terms his new countess’s fortune was to be tied to his own.
He had not wanted to know any of it for months now as the prospect of marriage loomed over him.
“As you discussed,” Adrian clarified, and signed. “It is done.”
Over the last four years, it had become easier to let matters of business and estate, the ledgers included, belong to Mr. Coombe. The whole of Ashcroft had, in fact, come to belong to a steward his father had trusted, and whom Adrian had simply never found any reason to distrust.
“The match is a sound one, my lord, whatever else may be said of it.” Mr. Coombe blotted the page, squared it, and did not look up.
“The estate has been under strain, you know this as well as I. You have done your best to repair the Ashcroft name since your father’s passing, and this is the solution. ”
“Go on,” Adrian said.
“The Vane family is prepared to pay most handsomely to see the connection made, and the girl’s reputation quietly transferred elsewhere.
Her settlement alone will see the home farm through two bad winters, should we have them.
It is, if I may say so, a fortunate turn for a house that has had rather few of them. ”
“You may say so.” Adrian set down the pen. “You generally do.”
It was not unkind, or he had not meant it unkindly. It was merely the truth, and Adrian had no energy for anything more. Mr. Coombe inclined his head, accepting it as the closest thing to gratitude his employer was inclined to offer. He began gathering the papers into the case.
Adrian watched him do it and felt nothing. No relief, no dread, and not even the faint curiosity a man might feel on the morning he acquired a wife he had never seen. He did not care about his own future.
I have not been to London in four years. I have not opened my own ledgers, truly opened them and sat with the columns and made them answer to me, for far longer than that. This will be just one more thing I do not care about and won’t find the will to.
“She arrives today,” Mr. Coombe said, as he reached the door.
“I’m aware of the date.”
“A fine day for it, my lord.”
“Indeed.”
“Well, I do believe I have seen to all the business at hand. Good day, my lord,” Mr. Coombe said as he let himself out and shut the door quietly behind him.
The room grew quiet in the way Adrian had become accustomed to. He thought of a brandy but thought better of it given the hour. He sat in his plush leather chair and looked at the fire. It had gone down to warm embers that hummed peacefully; the mantel clock ticked like a metronome.
The house had settled around him. It was a consistency he relied on. He took a deep breath and something in his chest grew tight.
He did not yet know what he was bracing for, not that all was about to change.
After a few minutes, he decided to see his sister before the coach was due. He went up the quiet staircase in the back to the East Wing toward Cassandra’s quarters. They were kept dim as a rule, and it was generally darker on this side of the house.
The heavy curtains were drawn tight against the light that did her no kindness, a source of her many migraines. He let himself in without knocking, because knocking meant she had to speak, and some days that was its own small misery to her.
She was lying still against the propped-up pillows on her featherbed.
She did not turn toward him when he entered.
She did not need to. She would have known his step from the housekeeper’s, from the maid’s, from anyone’s, the way she had learned to know a great many things now by means other than her eyes.
Adrian would have found it impressive if her confinement, while necessary, did not depress him so.
“You’ve come to tell me she’s arriving,” Cassandra said to the middle of the room rather than to him.
“I’ve come to see how you are.” He crossed to the washstand, emptied the basin at her bedside into the slop bucket, and refilled it with fresh water from a pitcher.
He set it back within reach of her hand, all of it done in the unhurried, practiced motions of a brother who loved his little sister. He had done it a hundred times before and would do it a hundred times again. “Which you have not shared. How are you today?”
“Tolerable. The floor has stopped trying to stand up at least.” A ghost of her old dryness, thinner than it used to be but not gone, showed itself. Adrian almost smiled. “That’s the day’s chief accomplishment.”
He sat in the chair beside her bed, which had worn a shape of him into its cushion. They said nothing for a moment in a comfortable silence close siblings can share.
“It changes nothing for you,” he said finally. “Whatever else it changes...You need not meet her, if you’d rather not. You need not do anything at all differently than you do now.”
“You say that as though I were fretting over it.” Cassandra’s mouth curved, faint. “I am not fretting, Adrian.”
“That is good.”
“What I am doing is lying in the dark with a basin, which is my vocation, it seems, for eternity. I find I have very little curiosity left over for your countess. Marry her, don’t marry her. It will make no difference to the floor.”
It was meant to ease him, he knew, in the way Cassandra had of turning her own suffering into something to make a joke of. So that he would not have to carry the whole weight of it on her behalf, as well as his own. He let out a small laugh.
“All the same,” he said, “you need not meet her.”
“All the same,” she agreed, and closed her eyes, and he took that as his leave to go.
On his way to the grand staircase, he found Mrs. Scott, the housekeeper, in the gallery.
“Mrs. Scott.”
“Yes, my lord,” she said with a small curtsy and a warm smile.
“I need not remind you that the East Wing was to remain closed,” he ordered as he approached her. “Lady Cassandra is not to be disturbed, not even by the new countess.”
While there is a stranger under the roof more like it, he thought to himself. No need for the new countess to come stumbling upon her by accident before there is sufficient time to explain, and no need for my sister to be made a spectacle of, gawked at, and pitied by a woman who does not know her.
“Of course, my lord,” she said with a small curtsy. “I will be sure to reiterate this order to the rest of the household. All the required preparations have been made for the arrival. We have her quarters set, and then there is the—”
“Good.” Adrian nodded, which was as good of a thank you as she would receive, and he walked away.
***
The carriage came down the long gravel drive, and Adrian found he was holding his breath.
When it finally arrived, and the horses slowed to a full stop, she stepped down without waiting for the footman’s hand.
That was the first thing he noticed about her.
The second thing he noticed was that she did not curtsy to him before she approached.
There was no feminine obeisance in her manner of moving, no fluttering as she approached her would-be husband.
There was nothing of the performance he had braced himself to endure from a woman who knew precisely what his title was.
She simply stood a moment, taking in the house with an unhurried, assessing look, and then turned that same look on him.
“Lord Ashcroft,” she said plainly, with no warmth put on for show, nor chill to match the rumors she must have heard about him.
“You are prompt, Lady Vane,” he said, which was not gracious, though true.
The coach had come exactly when the letter promised it would, and for that alone he was inclined to think well of her before she’d even stepped down.
He valued order in a life that he built for himself on that very principle, and had long since learned to distrust anything that arrived early, or late, or unannounced.
What he had not prepared for was finding her quite so attractive. It caught him somewhere beneath the ribs, unwelcome and uninvited. She was not the classic, curated beauty he’d have known how to be unmoved by in the ton. He had no taste for that.
What she possessed was something plainer, and in that way harder to guard against. She had dark blue eyes the color of the ocean.
They held his a moment longer than courtesy dictated, as though she’d already taken his measure and was deciding what to make of him.
If he did not know better, he would have thought she was intrigued by him as well.
“I dislike being late. It unsettles people needlessly,” she said. “Myself included.”
She drew off one glove, finger by finger, then the other. He could see her hands were rougher than a lady’s should be, calloused in places his own were.
Hands like that were the result of hard work rather than hobby, he thought, the nails cut blunt and plain.
How strange, and yet a hard life will roughen anyone’s hands. It is of no importance to me.
“You’ll find the house plain fare after London,” he said gruffly.
“I have found London plain fare after a great many things,” she said, “so we shall get on.”
It was not the answer of a frightened widow, arriving under duress at the house of a man half the country called strange behind his back.
Nor was it the answer of a grasping one, feeling out what she might squeeze out of him.
He had braced himself for tears, or some other feminine display, and had gotten instead a woman standing very still and confident, meeting his eye without flinching. She was a marvel.
His eyes looked her up and down, again without meaning to.
This was the second time now. He held her gaze for a moment more, until he understood the plainness was not the whole of it and looked down at his feet.
There was something in this woman’s very essence, just beneath the surface, that pulled him, unraveled him.
He could not place it. Her dark blue eyes were so alluring, he all but swam in them.
While her auburn hair was pulled up atop her head, small curls framed her face and highlighted her cheekbones.
She had freckles that danced along her nose, which had surprised him.
Most ladies he knew did not have such spots, but on her it was becoming, ethereal and earthy.
“The East Wing is closed,” he said, more abruptly than the moment called for, turning back toward the house as they began to walk side-by-side. “I will ask you not to go up that way.”
“Understood.”
He watched for the flicker he expected out of the corner of his eye. Curiosity, at least, if not offense for his short explanation.
“I’ve heard a great deal said of you on the road here, my lord,” she said plainly as they got closer to the entrance. “I find I mean to believe none of it until you’ve given me cause, nor to question it. I expect you might extend your household the same courtesy.”
It was the first thing anyone had said to him in four years that he had no ready answer for. He was completely unprepared for this strange woman who was now to be his wife.
“Lady Vane,” he said, gesturing her toward the door.
The hesitation was small enough that he might have missed it if he weren’t watching her every movement.
There was the smallest reluctance before she crossed the threshold, as though the name had reached her a moment later than it should have.
He chalked it up to her nervousness, no doubt a result of the rumors she had heard about his past.
Any woman in her position would be wary to engage with me.
“Yes, my lord,” she said as she quickened her pace to meet his.
“The household has been instructed to meet us in the drawing room so we may have introductions. You will be shown to your quarters thereafter,” he said as they entered the foyer.
“Thank you,” she said, the slightest flush in her high cheekbones.
It is nothing. A long journey, a strange house. She has not been Lady Vane for very long, and two years without a husband. There are a dozen ordinary reasons why a tired woman might be slow to answer to her own name. Nothing more than that...
I have spent four years teaching myself not to reach for explanations and will not begin reaching now. I must remind myself that I do not care.
“Mrs. Scott,” he said as they entered the drawing room, the staff assembled as promised. “Please see to Lady Vane’s introductions, and that she is brought up to her quarters to settle.”
“At once, my lord,” she said. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Lady Vane.”
“And I you, Mrs. Scott,” Lady Vane replied warmly, more warmly than she had addressed him.
He knew he should have stayed to introduce his future wife to the people that maintained his household, yet he turned back toward his study and walked. He paced toward the ledgers he would not open and the letters he would not answer, already half done with the thinking of it.
He went in, sat down at his desk, and left the door ajar, listening more intently than he could admit to himself to the voices down the hall.
He got up and poured himself the small whiskey he had thought of earlier, not caring that the hour was not fashionable for drinking.
He took a small sip when he heard the rustle of skirts going up the stairs.