Rivals at Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #5)

Chapter One

‘You will be nice to Miss Rowsham, won’t you?’ Kitty asked.

‘I’m nice to everyone,’ Richard replied, with a hint of irritation.

‘But especially nice,’ Kitty urged.

‘If this is an attempt at match-making, Pusscat, it doesn’t become you. Also, it would have been less blatant if you had invited some more people for this Saturday-to-Monday, and not just the Ravenscars.’ Miss Rowsham was Lady Ravenscar’s sister.

‘I did invite other people, but they couldn’t come,’ Kitty protested.

That made Richard laugh, breaking the tension. ‘Oh dear! Don’t ever go into the diplomatic service, will you? Deviousness is not your forte.’

Kitty didn’t mind him laughing at her. She knew it was affectionate, and she preferred mockery to his recent withdrawn and unhappy air. ‘But, dear Richard, she’s such a sweet girl, and she has a sad past.’

Richard leaned in and gave his sister-in-law a valedictory kiss. ‘So have we all, love,’ he said, and went away. He ran up the stairs, and stopped at the first landing to rub his shoulder.

Alice, his youngest sister, was coming down, and gave him a sympathetic look. ‘Is it bad today?’

‘The damp weather gets into the old war wound,’ Richard said lightly. He had indeed taken a wound in the South African wars, but then the same arm had been injured in a car smash. The second injury was more troublesome than the first.

‘Poor Dicky! I thought you looked uncomfortable at breakfast. Will it stop you hunting on Saturday?’

‘Oh, it’s not as bad as that. When do you go back to school?’ Alice was about to start her second year at the Blackwood School of Art in London.

‘Two more weeks,’ Alice said. ‘I’m really looking forward to it. I’m to join one of Mr Wentworth’s special classes.’

‘Ah, yes, the famous Ivor Wentworth! I must say his paintings are easier on the eye than some of the modern stuff that’s raved about these days. And you’re really going to live in lodgings, not with Aunt Caroline? I can’t believe Giles agreed to that.’

She frowned. ‘It sounds as if you trust me less than he does.’

‘No, I care more about you than our illustrious brother. You have too few legs to interest him.’

‘You’re the one who’s obsessed with cows,’ Alice retorted.

‘Please don’t say that in front of company at the weekend. I’m supposed to be making a good impression.’

‘Oh, has Kitty “had a word” with you about Miss Rowsham? I told her she shouldn’t. I told her you weren’t ready for it.’

‘And what do you suppose you know about it, miss?’

‘Don’t be miffed. Grandmère told me at Christmas you’d had your heart broken. But I think I’d have known anyway. I can tell the signs,’ she concluded wistfully.

Richard’s expression softened. ‘Don’t tell me you have a crush for someone? Won’t he love you back, the villain?’ He had a thought. ‘It’s not that stout lad you danced with at the Shacklocks’ ball, is it?’

‘Bentham Farocean is not stout! How can you say so?’

‘You jump to his defence so readily, it makes me suspect that he’s the one.’

Alice was about to refute it indignantly, then paused.

It was a useful misdirection from the real object of her passion – a man everyone would think far below her station.

She thought of that line in Jane Eyre: Your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you.

She imagined herself saying it to Axe Brandom.

But Jane Eyre had been a poor female looking higher – it was somehow so much worse the other way round.

Richard was eyeing her curiously, so she had to distract him. ‘Who was it who broke your heart?’ she asked. ‘It must have been someone in London – you never pay any attention to local girls.’

He tweaked her nose. ‘None of your business, Lady Alice!’ And went on towards the library.

Adeline Rowsham knew herself to be a middling sort of girl.

She had been neither the prettiest nor the plainest debutante of her year.

She had been popular enough, without being one of those shining creatures other girls swooned over – the ‘delicious’ Lady This and the ‘heavenly’ Miss That.

There had been a craze for autograph collection during her come-out year, and she had written in the pretty morocco-bound blank books of as many girls as had written in hers.

She had not danced every dance at the balls she attended, but neither had she sat out much.

And the young man who had eventually asked for her hand, Mr Summerhill, had been an ordinary nice boy, lifted above the average only by being her ordinary nice boy.

His death from diphtheria shortly before they were to have married had shocked her, but five years later she could hardly remember his face.

She had mourned him the correct amount, but (she often thought) what they had felt for each other must surely have been just the middling sort of attachment to be expected from two people so very young.

Perhaps other girls had grand passions, and she was the odd one out.

What about Romeo and Juliet? They had been very young.

It seemed strange to her now, at this distance, to think of tying yourself for life to someone when you were barely more than a child.

However, that was how the world went. If you missed your chance, you found yourself at twenty-three regarded as practically middle-aged, and definitely on the shelf.

What was not apparent to the outside world was that the neat, unexciting Miss Rowsham led a rich inner life.

She had always read a great deal, and after finishing a novel would often rewrite the story in her mind with herself as protagonist. In this way she’d had many adventures and fallen in love many times.

And throughout her ordinary day, an inner dialogue would be carrying on inside her head, which, had anyone been able to hear it, would have had her expelled from polite society.

Her inner voice was very critical – though it criticised her as much as everyone else, so perhaps she was not a bad person.

That she so often blushed in company was put down to shyness, but it was actually because her own thoughts so often disconcerted her.

She was resigned to never marrying, but her elder sister Vanessa, Lady Ravenscar, had raised her own status so splendidly from banker’s daughter to viscountess, she would not give up on her.

Adeline was aware that Richard Tallant was the man Vanessa had fixed on: an earl’s son, and though he was a second son and already had two nephews so was unlikely ever to come into the title, he was well-connected, and an attractive man into the bargain.

It was the whole reason they were at Ashmore Castle for a Saturday-to-Monday in the dead time just after Twelfth Night.

They had been invited to arrive on the Friday so that they could hunt on the Saturday, with Lord Stainton kindly offering to mount them, and Vanessa was pleased because she thought Adeline looked well on a horse.

Adeline liked Richard and found him amusing, but he was no fool and it embarrassed her that he might suspect her of throwing her cap at him.

It made her tongue-tied, afraid of saying anything that might sound come-on-ish.

Her inner voice told her that he must wonder why on earth anyone would expect him to offer for a girl past her first flush and with nothing to say for herself.

At least, though, she would enjoy the hunting. It was impossible to have coherent inner thoughts while scrambling madly over the country on a horse. It was a shame that the weather was so bad: it poured all day, and they were all soaked to the skin.

Richard had no particular views about Miss Rowsham: she blended for him into the great multitude of females who weren’t Molly Sands, the woman who had captured his heart, and broken it by refusing to marry him.

She had been his late father’s mistress for a while back in the day, and believed it was therefore Biblically forbidden for her to mate with Richard.

He understood but rejected her scruples, but there had been no moving her, and now she was in America with her daughter Chloe, a talented pianist, the protégée and soon to be the wife of impresario and conductor Sir Thomas Burton.

They were all going to make a life over there; Richard was abandoned and bereft.

His heart therefore was not available to be given to Miss Rowsham, though that was obviously Lady Ravenscar’s wish and perhaps Kitty’s too.

Miss Rowsham seemed, in that most damning of phrases, a nice girl, which was hardly enough to rouse him from his romantic hibernation.

He gave her credit that she did not seem to be trying to ‘catch’ him.

He actually felt quite sorry for her: it must be humiliating to be dangled, by one’s nearest and dearest, in front of any available man.

And he thought better of her by Saturday evening after she had acquitted herself impressively on the hunting field: she rode well, and threw herself wholeheartedly into the business without fussing about wind or rain, mud splashes or thorns.

In that respect she reminded him of Alice, who was far and away his favourite of his sisters.

On the Sunday it stopped raining at last – the wind had gone round in the night to the east and it was colder but with a clear sky – and everyone wanted to be out of doors.

When he heard Miss Rowsham express a vague desire to walk to the village, he was only half surprised to hear himself offer to escort her.

He determinedly did not see the pleased look on the face of Lady Ravenscar.

Kitty offered to show Lady Ravenscar the gardens and Rachel said she would accompany them, and Alice had already gone out with the dogs on her own solitary ramble, so he resigned himself to being à deux.