Chapter One The Bride Who Wasn’t #4
Sir Edmund sighed.
“Mortgaged also.”
Clara closed her eyes. Their estate was not grand. Whitcombe Park consisted of a square old house, two farms, woodland and enough land to provide a modest income when managed carefully. It was where Clara had grown up. Her mother was buried in the churchyard nearby.
“What happens now?”
“Farrow may recover.”
“You do not believe that.”
“No.”
The admission frightened her more than the loss.
“When is the next mortgage payment due?”
“Three weeks.”
“And can we meet it?”
Silence. Clara stood and crossed to the window, though there was nothing to see beyond her own reflection in the dark glass.
She had spent years balancing expenses, cutting household costs and preserving the appearance of stability because appearance mattered.
Respectability itself cost money. There must be a London house during Lucy’s Season, servants sufficient to maintain it, gowns that did not advertise hardship and dinners returned in the proper measure to those who invited them.
All the while the foundation beneath them had been disappearing.
“Why did you not tell me?”
“I intended to.”
“When?”
“When I had some solution.”
“That is not the same as telling me.”
“I did not want to worry you.”
Clara turned. Her father looked miserable. For a moment she saw not a foolish man but a frightened one. Her anger softened, though it did not disappear.
“You cannot protect me from an empty bank account by declining to mention it.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He winced. Clara regretted the sharpness immediately. She returned to the desk and sat opposite him.
“What can be sold?”
“The London house, perhaps.”
“With the mortgage?”
“It would leave little.”
“And Whitcombe?”
His face changed. That was enough. Clara’s throat tightened.
“We may lose it.”
“We may have to sell.”
“My mother—”
“I know.”
He reached across and took her hand. Clara looked down at his fingers.
Her mother had died six years after the scandal, slowly enough for Clara to learn that grief could occupy a house before death arrived.
Afterward, she and her father had survived by habit.
Whitcombe Park had become less a property than the place containing every version of their family that no longer existed.
“We shall find some way,” Sir Edmund said.
The familiar optimism was back, weaker than before. Clara squeezed his hand.
“Yes.”
She did not know whether she believed it. Her father glanced toward the clock.
“Dinner will be dreadful.”
“Almost certainly.”
“Mrs. Pritchard mentioned mutton.”
“She has been mentioning the same mutton since Tuesday.”
That earned a smile. Sir Edmund leaned back. Then his expression altered again.
“I heard about Harcourt.”
Clara turned her full attention to him.
“Already?”
“Beckford called this afternoon.”
Of course he had. Bad news traveled through London faster than good horses.
“I am sorry, my dear.”
Clara stared at the scattered financial papers.
“So is everyone, apparently.”
“You need not be.”
She looked up. Her father rarely spoke of Adrian. Sir Edmund’s anger after the broken engagement had been terrible precisely because he was not an angry man.
“I don’t know what I am.”
“That is allowed.”
Clara smiled faintly.
“Lady Winterbourne said something similar.”
“Winterbourne?”
“Yes.”
“Terrifying woman.”
“I like her.”
“So do I. From a distance.”
He began organizing the papers again. Clara watched him and realized their financial crisis had done something Adrian’s death had not.
It had given her something immediate to solve.
Grief, if what she felt could be called grief, had no ledger.
Debt did. Tomorrow she would begin. Rain arrived during the night.
By breakfast it had settled into the steady gray persistence London did so well, turning the windows opaque and polishing the street to black.
Clara had slept badly. Whenever she closed her eyes, fragments surfaced without invitation.
Adrian laughing. Her father’s mortgage papers.
A white wedding gown she had not seen in more than a decade.
Lady Winterbourne saying London had finished with her.
She came downstairs before nine and found Sir Edmund already gone to meet his banker.
Lucy had not yet appeared. Clara poured coffee and opened the household book.
Numbers were comforting because they did not pretend.
Seven hundred pounds owed here. Three hundred there.
Coal. Wine. Servants’ wages. Dressmaker.
The Season itself had become an extravagance they could no longer afford.
Perhaps Lucy could return home after another month.
Perhaps Aunt Marianne could take her to Bath later in the year.
Perhaps the London house could be let rather than sold.
Clara was calculating what savings might be achieved by dismissing two servants when the butler entered. Mr. Marsh had served the Whitcombes since Clara was a child and possessed a face designed to convey catastrophe without impropriety.
“A card has arrived, Miss Whitcombe.”
“At breakfast?”
“Yes, miss.”
He carried it on a small salver. The card was edged in black.
Clara’s attention fixed upon that before she read the name.
The Duke of Ashcombe. For one disorienting instant, she thought of the old duke.
Then Adrian. Neither could have sent it.
The title belonged to someone else now. Her hand remained above the card.
“Who brought this?”
“A footman, miss.”
“Is he waiting?”
“Yes.”
Clara picked it up. The card contained a brief handwritten message beneath the engraved name.
The Duke of Ashcombe requests the privilege of calling upon Miss Whitcombe this morning, upon a matter concerning the late Lord Adrian Harcourt.
She read it twice. Rain tapped against the windows.
Sebastian. The name came with startling clarity.
Sebastian Harcourt. Adrian’s elder brother.
The new Duke of Ashcombe. She had not seen him in eleven years.
Not properly. He had been twenty-four when she last knew him, already marked by the gravity expected of an heir.
Where Adrian had filled rooms, Sebastian seemed to measure them.
He had been tall, reserved and sometimes so quiet that Clara had once believed he disliked conversation.
Or perhaps simply disliked her. She had never known.
“Miss?”
Marsh was waiting. Clara looked toward the rain-darkened street beyond the dining-room windows.
“Tell the footman His Grace may call at eleven.”
“Yes, miss.”
Marsh withdrew. Clara continued holding the card.
Memory was an irritating thing. It ignored the scenes a person had every reason to remember and preserved useless details instead.
She could not now recall the exact wording Adrian used when he proposed.
She had forgotten what flowers were arranged in the room.
She could barely remember the sound of his voice.
But Sebastian— Once, months before Adrian began courting her, there had been a ball at Lady Stanton’s house.
Clara had been eighteen and wearing new silver slippers.
During a country dance the ribbon of one had snapped.
She had stepped quickly toward the wall, terrified of stumbling in front of everyone.
Sebastian had noticed. Nobody else had. Without saying anything, he crossed the floor, placed himself between Clara and the ballroom, and began a perfectly ordinary conversation about the heat while she crouched behind the shelter of his coat and retied the ribbon around her ankle.
He never teased her. Never mentioned it again.
When she thanked him, embarrassed, Sebastian merely said, “I thought you might prefer not to have an audience.” Then he returned to his brother. Clara had forgotten that.
Entirely. She looked down at the black-edged card.
Sebastian Harcourt was coming to see her.
After eleven years. On a matter concerning the man who had almost been her husband.
Clara placed the card beside her untouched coffee and told herself that the sudden, inexplicable beating of her heart had nothing whatsoever to do with remembering silver slippers, a crowded ballroom and a quiet young man who had once stood between her and the eyes of the world.
She had not thought of Sebastian Harcourt in years. Or so she told herself.