Chapter Two #2
Arden’s mouth felt dry. “I would,” he agreed, even as the words tasted shameful.
Growing up, he had never heard his parents speak about money—it was always something that was there, ready to be spent, an infinite resource that had always been and would always be at their fingertips.
Nowadays, he spoke of money more than he spoke of anything else, and when he wasn’t talking about it, he was thinking about it.
For a moment, his aunt was quiet, swirling the sherry in her glass, before finally saying, “I don’t know the details, but I can only imagine the sort of foolishness that caused the once-illustrious Ryskamp fortune to dwindle so quickly.”
Arden’s ears warmed, though he couldn’t argue with her on that point. It was his own foolishness to blame—at least for knocking down the first domino. It was only right he take responsibility for all those that fell in its wake.
“I would hate to see the Ryskamp legacy reduced to ruin.” Despite her soft tone, Arden heard the steel beneath it. “However, I also refuse to throw my good money into whatever pit has already decimated your fortune.”
It wasn’t only Arden’s ears that were warm now. Shame burned through his whole body, chased by anger. “I can assure you, Aunt Philomena, I have made mistakes but I’ve learned from them.”
“Oh?” Aunt Philomena asked, her tone dry. “And what mistakes were those, exactly?”
I lost the woman I loved, and misfortune has followed me ever since.
The words rose on Arden’s tongue, but he couldn’t give voice to them. In five years, he’d never spoken them aloud to anyone, aware of how mad he would sound even if he knew it was the truth. He had lost Arabella, and his luck had left him right along with her.
He remembered little of that night, only that he and Arabella had quarreled over some silly thing, and in the wake of it, he’d accepted Arabella’s brother’s invitation to meet at his club, hoping to understand why she was upset with him.
Stuart Strickland had been amicable and pleasant, assuring him that Arabella would come around and it was only wedding jitters.
But then there had been ale, and too much of it apparently, because when Arden woke up in his bed the next morning, it was to find that their engagement was ended, his signature on the documents dissolving it, and he had no memory of why.
He had tried to find her, to apologize, to undo whatever mistake he’d made, but she and her brother were both gone, their suite at the hotel where they were staying empty, and no one had a clue where they went.
It was difficult to think now about the money he had spent trying to locate her, hiring every private investigator he could, all of them finding nothing but a cold trail.
Some of those investigators seemed to think he was mad, chasing after a woman who, for all intents and purposes, seemed not to exist, but Arden knew she was out there somewhere.
Arden wouldn’t tell his aunt everything, but he could tell her enough.
“I was engaged, five years ago.” He took a deep drink from his glass, all worries of keeping a clear head abandoning him.
“It ended, but I was at fault, and our betrothal contract stipulated that she was entitled to a cash settlement to make up for the damage to her reputation. Quite standard—twenty thousand. As well as the engagement ring, of course.”
His aunt’s eyes widened. “Tell me it wasn’t the emerald.”
Arden winced. The emerald ring he gave Arabella was an heirloom that had been in the Ryskamp family even longer than the house and was all but priceless in value.
Arden hadn’t known that when he picked it out from the family vault, though; he’d simply thought that the emerald would match Arabella’s eyes.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Arden said.
His aunt turned this information over in her mind as she sipped her sherry. “The ring is a terrible loss. But twenty thousand solas should not have made much of a dent in the Ryskamp fortune.”
It hadn’t—Arden hadn’t even been aware of that stipulation or the fact that the money had left his family’s coffers before he’d woken up the next morning.
It wasn’t until after his father’s death a few months ago when he was trying to make sense of a mountain of bank statements and debts that he noticed the payment, and by that point, twenty thousand solas had seemed like an absolute fortune.
“After the engagement ended, it was like everything we touched turned to rot. Even our safest investments took a turn. Everyone in Strall’s portfolio hit a rough patch, but for most it was manageable.
For us it was not. I tried to salvage it, but I’m afraid I made matters even worse with some . . . unwise investments.”
“You ought to have found another woman to marry,” she told him frankly, gesturing for a waiter to refill her glass.
When he did, she sat back and surveyed Arden.
“You aren’t a bad-looking young man, and the Ryskamp name and magic still have value even if there is no money in the bank.
A plump dowry could have made all the difference. ”
Suddenly, Arden wished she would go back to discussing his financial blunders.
“I tried, but nothing materialized.”
That, too, was a shade of the truth. He had made attempts to court a handful of women over the last few years, but while the money he paid Arabella had been meant to offset the damage to her reputation, Arden’s reputation had taken a hit of its own, especially when Arabella had never been seen or heard from again.
Perhaps he could have overcome the rumors with enough charm—after all, Arden had never wanted for charm—but that was before Arabella.
Over the last five years, his romantic life had been a string of embarrassments.
There was the time he’d taken Melody Espinosa on a walk through the park, when he had tripped and fallen face first into horse dung; the ball where he’d asked Irenie Fettel to dance and accidentally stepped on her skirt, revealing a scandalous amount of her petticoat to half of Luster society; and the tea where he’d regaled Ursula Everly with a story about a concert he’d attended the day before involving a singer who had been painfully off key, only for her to frostily inform him that he was speaking about her sister.
And those were only the three that the society pages had gotten word of—he’d horrified half a dozen other eligible young ladies without seeing the experience repeated in print, mercifully.
It seemed charm had abandoned him along with luck when he’d lost Arabella.
His attention wandered again to the woman on the balcony, whose head turned just enough that he could glimpse her profile again.
He expected to be disappointed when the mirage of Arabella was replaced with the face of a stranger, but disappointment never came.
The longer he stared at her features—the sharp angle of her chin, the slope of her nose, the high cut of her cheekbones—the more certain he became. It was Arabella.
He sat up straighter. “Aunt—” he began, but she interrupted him.
“You’ll stay with me for the summer season,” she said, a statement rather than a question.
“If I am to restore the Ryskamp legacy, I intend to do a thorough job of it. That means not simply throwing money at you but ensuring it will be passed on to Ryskamps for generations to come. You are your father’s only child, are you not? ”
Arden could only manage a nod, his gaze still on Arabella, who laughed at something her companion said to her. A spike of jealousy cut through him. Who was he?
“Which means that unless we wish to shake the outer branches of the family tree, not knowing what fresh hell will shake loose, the two of us are the last Ryskamps in the world.” She sighed, shaking her head.
“I’ll name you my heir, Arden, but only if you find yourself a suitable bride before I die. ”
For a moment, Arden couldn’t speak, his aunt’s words echoing in his mind. For just a sliver of an instant, all thoughts of Arabella slipped away, and all he could think of was his aunt’s words. A joke, surely, but Philomena Gellis wasn’t laughing.
“A suitable bride,” Arden repeated slowly, dread settling in his stomach like tar as he remembered Melody, Irenie, Ursula, and all the others he’d made an ass of himself in front of. “The end of the season is less than two months away, and I’m a stranger here. What you ask for is impossible.”
His aunt looked over her shoulder, nodding toward the balcony. “Do you see that woman?”
Arden followed her gaze to find Arabella on the balcony, the man she was dining with kissing the back of her hand—her left hand, where a large diamond ring twinkled. Arden felt sick to his stomach.
“That,” his aunt continued, oblivious to his discomfort, “is Miss Delphinia Lindcourt.”
Delphinia Lindcourt. Had he truly lost his mind so thoroughly that he’d started hallucinating? Or . . .
There is another possibility, one of the private investigators he’d hired had suggested, a possibility so laughable that he had paid the woman for her time and assured her that her services were no longer needed.
Now, the woman’s words were no longer laughable at all.
She conned you. She blew into town, convinced you to marry her, then made off with what sounds like an expensive ring and a decent sum of money on top of it.
I’d bet my last sola that Arabella Strickland doesn’t exist.
Maybe Arden heard the truth in that investigator’s words even then. Maybe he simply hadn’t been able to accept it. What other reason was there that Arabella would be here in Garlin, calling herself Delphinia Lindcourt and wearing another man’s engagement ring on her finger?
“What do you know about Delphinia Lindcourt?” he asked his aunt. Though the truth was impossible to deny, he was still desperate for some other answer, some trapdoor he could tumble through and find a place where everything made sense again.