She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Em,’ she said again. ‘I must be very dull company. It will take me a little time to accustom myself to their absence, you know. The silence. And I must, for I need to decide what I shall do. I can’t put it off any longer.’
‘I know you feel that,’ said Miss Naismith softly, entirely ignoring the conventional apology, which was no more than it deserved, between such close friends. ‘But does it have to be today?’
The two women were of very different appearance and character. Emily was small and trim, her hair a smooth blonde and her eyes warm blue – the kindest, gentlest face, a much younger Viola had once told her, in the whole world. The Duchess herself was taller, obviously quicker-tempered and more decisive, statuesque in build, and of a dramatic dark colouring that spoke of her mother’s Italian background. They had been close since a nervously determined seventeen-year-old Emily had arrived as governess to Mrs Constantine’s large family of daughters, among them Viola, a great gangly child only five years her teacher’s junior. And Viola knew that soon, she must lose her too.
As if sensing her gloomy thoughts, Miss Naismith said fretfully, ‘We can easily postpone the wedding for a while. I hate to leave you alone like this, when you are so bereft – it is unconscionably selfish of me. I am sure William will not mind.’
Her friend and employer smiled wryly. ‘I am sure he would mind excessively, and it would be unnatural if he did not. It would be unconscionably selfish ofmeto let you put it off. You shall be married Thursday week as planned, and I shall be there to wish you very happy and cry over you. And you know that I will not be alone here, or not for long – not if I decide to accept Lord Ventris’s offer of marriage, outrageous as it is.’
Emily’s gentle face was troubled. ‘Viola, my dear… please tell me you aren’t contemplating such a rash step merely because you don’t want to be on your own in this great barn of a house. I could not bear to think that it would be all my fault if you married that odiously rude, disagreeable, untrustworthy man.’
She laughed with genuine amusement. ‘My God, Em, do you think me so feeble? If I feared loneliness, I could find quite a dozen ladies who would rush to be my companion, though not one of them, I hope I need not say, could be what you have been to me and always will be. I could ask one of my sisters to stay with me this winter, for that matter: Bea, or Cecilia. No, that is not even the smallest of my reasons for considering the offer, I promise you.’
‘Then why…? My dear, putting aside all the rest, you hardly know him. How can you seriously contemplate tying yourself to a stranger so irrevocably? If he has set foot in this house once in the last decade, it must have been when I was absent, and I have so rarely been absent. Or am I mistaken?’
The Duchess said quietly, ‘No, you are not mistaken. He has not visited of late years, and I have had no contact at all with him since Edward died and he wrote to condole with me. Probably you even replied to his letter on my behalf – you remember how distracted I was at that time, the boys so shocked and distressed as they were. But I knew him years ago, a little. He and Edward were very attached to each other – they were cousins, as you know, but the age gap was such that they were more like uncle and nephew.’
‘If Lord Ventris had in fact been your husband’s nephew, it would be illegal for you to marry him.’ Emily’s tone suggested that she thought the law sadly negligent in this respect. ‘And I would be glad of it, for the man is a notorious rake, to say nothing of the rest. And even so, I wonder he was bold enough to write you such an extraordinary letter.’
The missive had come just over a week ago, brought in to the Duchess as she breakfasted with Emily one bright morning. The boys had been with them earlier, consuming improbably large quantities of food and then rushing off together to collect Sam for some mysterious errand that would, in Viola’s experience, lead to bruised knees, torn and dirty clothing, and the consumption of another huge meal in order to sustain them in further adventures.
She had not been entirely sure she recognised the hand, her acquaintance with Lord Ventris not having been such that they had ever had occasion to carry out a regular correspondence, but he had scrawled his title and the legendVentris Castleacross the paper by way of a frank, so she had known before she opened it that it was from him. Her stomach had lurched at the sight in instinctive recoil, and she had been annoyed with herself for that before she even knew its contents. But when she had unsealed it and read it, and then read it again because she’d feared her eyes were deceiving her and it could not possibly say what she thought it said, she had impulsively uttered highly unladylike words that had had Emily staring at her in shock. Luckily, there had been no footmen or other servants in the room to overhear her curses.
Jumping to her feet, the Duchess had relieved her feelings by striding energetically up and down the small chamber, skirts swishing furiously. Eventually, she turned and blurted out, ‘The audacity! The damnable audacity of the man!’ She seized up the paper and pressed it into Emily’s hands, saying, ‘Read it! Only read it. Do not speak a word of censure till you have done so, or you will never get to the end. “Warm recollections of our earlier acquaintance,” he says! Oh, I am so angry!’
It was a bolt out of the blue, from someone she had not set eyes on for an age. When she had known him, he had been merely Mr Richard Armstrong, younger half-brother of Mr Tarquin Armstrong. Tarquin was, before the birth of her sons, her husband’s nearest male relation and heir. Edward had loathed Tarquin and never seen him if he could help it, but Richard had been a frequent visitor to the Duke of Winterflood’s home from his youth, so Viola had encountered him a few months after her marriage.
That had been long ago, when his prospects for advancement were non-existent and he had worked for a living, in trade, despite his noble connections. But a curious quirk of English custom had made him Lord Ventris earlier this summer. Emily had read the news of his elevation to the peerage in the paper one day, and had innocently exclaimed over it, asking if the gentleman in question was not the late Duke’s cousin, as the surname was the same. Viola had confirmed that this was true, and told her lightly that Tarquin must be quite furious at the intelligence; he was a jealous-natured, bitter man who had through her own marriage and pregnancy been thwarted of the dukedom he had so long expected to inherit, and now his disreputable younger brother had had a barony and an estate fall into his undeserving lap. Yet Tarquin was still a plain mister with no title and no fortune to speak of, and no chance of either. Or – not if her sons lived.
Tarquin and Richard had shared a father but not a mother, and this was the crucial point she had had to explain to her puzzled friend. The Duchess knew, and the newspaper article confirmed, that Richard’s mother had been the youngest daughter of an ancient Border family, whose title by writ could descend through the female line. His mother’s oldest sister, lacking brothers, had therefore been Lady Ventris in her own right. When she had died without issue or a sibling living to succeed her, her nephew had stepped into her shoes. He had found himself owner of a castle on a cliff and a great deal of windswept, empty moorland, home chiefly, the London gossip said, to sheep and red deer and scarce but surly inhabitants. It was the sort of place that bred hardiness and independence of spirit in all ranks of society. What would a man of his dark reputation find to do there?
Viola had assumed that Lady Ventris, that great lady of the north, had left her fortune, gained through shrewd marriage alliances, to Richard too; where else would she think to leave it? But the letter she had received told her – along with much more outrageous content – that this was not quite correct.
Richard’s irreverent personality came strongly from the page – it was like speaking with him again after so many years. Whether this was a pleasant sensation for her was quite another matter.
When Emily had finished reading, mild blue eyes growing rounder and rounder with every paragraph, she had asked if Lord Ventris was quite mad, so peculiar did the missive appear to her. Even the gentle governess could not wonder at her friend’s anger on receiving it. But Emily had never met Richard, and Viola, who had, knew that whatever else he might be, he wasn’t deranged.
My dear madam,
It is a long time since we saw each other, and I trust you and the boys are well. I am sure they will be grown tall and strong by now, true Armstrongs in their father’s image. I know Edward would have been so proud of them, and of you as their mother.
You will, I am sure, be aware of my accession to the Ventris title in my Aunt Alice’s place. I gather it was quite a sensation in the polite world. You might perhaps have presumed, if you thought about me on hearing the news, that I fell heir to the lady’s substantial financial assets also, but alas, it is not so. Or at least, not yet.
Aunt’s heir was always to be my older cousin, Simon, son of another aunt now sadly deceased. Simon was in holy orders, and a person of whom she greatly approved, and furthermore, had recently engaged himself to be married to a Yorkshire-woman of equally tedious and conspicuous virtue. Every time I met Aunt Ventris of late years, she was pleased to dwell at length on the distinction between Simon’s manner of life and my own, to my enormous disadvantage. But poor, dull Simon was carried off by an inflammation of the lungs this last winter, still sadly unwed, and she was left, to her horror, with me. She did not refrain from telling me that she wished that Providence had seen fit to strike down my unworthy person instead of him. No doubt she had a stern word with Providence on the subject too; she was a very grand lady and I am sure they were upon terms.
Feeling her end approaching, my aunt summoned her lawyer and drew up a codicil to her will. Wherever she is now (of which I am by no means certain), she must be chuckling at her own cleverness. She could not keep the estate’s lands from me, nor the name and title, but since her fortune came to her by marriage, she was free to dispose of it as she wished. And what she wished was to say that I might have it all with her blessing, as long as by my thirty-fifth birthday, I should be married and the father of a child. One small mercy is that she was not so inconsiderate as to specify the sex of the infant.
You may or may not recollect that I shall achieve that great age in eighteen months’ time. I have now in my unworthy hands – you will appreciate the irony – a very large estate comprising many of the most inhospitable sections of the north of England, and scarcely a penny to maintain it, nor the ancient castle set upon it. If I wish to prevent everything falling into utter ruin, I must induce some unfortunate female to marry me very soon. This lady must then embark upon the chancy enterprise of attempting to conceive a child and bring it safe into the world, in the full knowledge that if she does not do so in very short order, through no fault of her own, she will live out the rest of her life penniless, and burdened with me as a husband into the bargain, in a crumbling castle in the middle of a howling wilderness.
I know my reputation is not the most shining, but I find in myself an odd scruple that may make you smile: I cannot ask anyone to marry me without revealing these uncomfortable particulars to her. I have not yet run about London looking for sufficiently desperate women, and I hope I never am obliged to do so, but I have no confidence at all in finding one prepared to take me on those terms.
Naturally, then, my thoughts turned to you, Duchess. (Admit, if only to yourself, that you knew that this was where all my elaborate preliminaries were leading.) I do not wish to be indelicate, but you are notoriously – even proverbially – fecund. To the wonder of all the world, you gave my cousin Edward two fine sons within two years of your marriage to him, when his previous unions had both been childless. Is it too crude to hope that you might do the same for me – with me?
Viola, will you marry me?
You will say – I can almost hear you saying it, dark eyes flashing splendidly – that I offer you no incentive. Why should you be different from any other woman who has the sense to think me a terrible bargain? But you are, your grace, because we can discuss this matter openly and honestly. If between us we cannot fulfil the conditions of my aunt’s ridiculous testament, you will not be obliged to stay with me. I am all too aware that eighteen months is not so very long. Winterflood is your home, and I have no power or wish to take it from you. Even if we do succeed in our endeavours, I will not think of forcing you to remain with me if you do not desire to. You may make any stipulations as to your future that you care to, and I swear I will honour them.
I am sure that your boys are now of an age to need a father – a stepfather, at least, since no one can truly take Edward’s place. I presume that one of the reasons a woman so lovely and so desirable in every way has not remarried is because you fear bringing a stranger into your sons’ home as some poor substitute for my cousin. That too would be a chancy business. But you have my solemn assurance that I will care for them as if they were my own, if you let me, whether we give them siblings or not. I would do so for poor Edward’s sake, for yours, and for theirs too.
