“I married twice for the sake of my family, and that was enough.I will never marry again.”
Never?He frowned at the coldness in her voice, then asked her the question that had been eating at him since Barney first told him about her.“How old were you when you married your first husband?”
She looked away, pressing her lips together, and for a long time he thought she wasn’t going to answer him.He waited.Eventually she met his gaze and said in a level voice, “Almost sixteen.”
Almost sixteen?So, she’d been fifteen—still a child.“Good God, why?”The question was out before he could stop himself.
There was a short silence, as if she was debating with herself whether to speak or not.He ate a biscuit and waited.Finally she said, “Papa was heavily in debt to some bad men.They were threatening to hurt him, maybe even kill him.Lord Holgrave was a friend of his, and he offered to pay all Papa’s debts if I married him.”She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.“I didn’t want to marry him, of course, but with my father’s life at stake, what could I do except agree?”
Refuse, Marcus thought, but he could see that at such a young age it would be hard to go against her father.But what sort of a father would do such a thing, sell his innocent young daughter, not yet sixteen, to a man old enough to be her grandfather?A perverted old man at that, who would take a child-bride to wife.
“And Lord Hewitt?”he asked when he had mastered his anger.
Her eyes dropped again.There was a short silence, then she said quietly.“Papa was dead by the time I was widowed, but gambling is in the Blaxland blood: they can’t help it.This time it was Edgar who was in trouble with bad men.I didn’t want to do it then, either, but”— she shrugged—“it happened anyway.”Marcus pursed his lips.There was something in her expression that made him think there was more to that than she was saying.
He had his doubts about the ‘bad men’.Oh, he could well believe that there were debts—the Blaxlands were notorious gamblers—but he couldn’t believe that first her father and then her brother had been in such dire straits as to have to sell a child in marriage.They’d counted on her youth and innocence—and loyalty.
Her father and brother had rarely visited Ferndale when Tessa was growing up wild and neglected and unloved, except by servants.The lonely little girl would have been eager for their approval, desperate for their love.
Putty in their hands.
Marcus frowned.“You’re a beautiful woman.Why not marry a young man and settle down to raise a family—you don’t yet have children, do you?”
She flushed and looked down.“No,” she said in a low voice.“No children.”
“Do you gamble?”
She gave a huff of humorless laughter.“Never.It doesn’t appeal to me at all.I don’t even like playing cards, though of course I do to be polite.Though not for money—chicken stakes if I must.But I avoid it when I can.”
“And Edgar is planning a third marriage for you.What is his reason this time?Is he in debt again?”
She was silent a long time.She picked up her cup, hesitated, put it down, then sighed.“It’s much worse than that.He says I must marry again to save Ferndale.”
“Ferndale?”he repeated, surprised.
She nodded.“It’s my home, you see, and belongs to me.”
“I know that, but—”
“It belonged to Mama, not Papa.It was in her marriage settlements that it would come to her first-born daughter—which is me—on my twenty-fifth birthday.That’s later this year.I would have gone to Ferndale immediately after Lord Hewitt died, but there was his estate to be disposed of which was a lot of work.And since he’d willed everything to me, I had to remain to sign the various documents.Edgar handled it of course, as he’d overseen the disposal of my first husband’s estate and knew what had to be done.”
In other words, Edgar had been stripping every last penny from their estates.
“I also needed to arrange pensions for his servants.Some of them had been with him for decades.”
“Then after that was done, why did you not leave?”Marcus had a creeping suspicion of what was to come, but he wanted to hear it from her.
“Because as it turned out there was not a penny left.And then there were the mortgages to be sorted, of course.I didn’t realize—Edgar manages all that side of things for me, as Papa did before him.And, of course, banks and lawyers and people who arrange mortgages won’t do business with females anyway.Which is very frustrating, but what can you do?”
“Which mortgages are these?”
“The Ferndale mortgages.Apparently the estate is deep in debt and has been for years—mortgaged to the hilt, Edgar said.I had no idea.And the man who holds the mortgages is threatening to foreclose.I couldn’t have that, I just couldn’t.Lose my home?”She shook her head vehemently.“Never!And since we have no money to pay the mortgages, Edgar insists that the only solution is to arrange another marriage for me—which would be my third and my last.If I married Sir Henry Lester, he would pay off the mortgage.”She shuddered.“But I won’t do it—I couldn’t bear it.Theremustbe another way.”
There was a short silence.Marcus couldn’t speak for the anger that was choking him.
“Edgar has apologized about the mortgages.He says he forgot the last few payments, but I’m sure it was a lie.My brother, like our father before him, is a hopeless gambler—it’s in his blood—and neither of them have been particularly lucky.I’m sure he had the money ready to pay the mortgage but then, no doubt ...‘There was this horse.And it was a dead cert to win.’” She shook her head sadly.“Of course, it didn’t.None of his ‘dead certs’ ever do.”
She stared into her tea for a moment.“But I’ve made it clear to Edgar that I will never marry again, not to Sir Henry, not to any man.And so he has gone out this morning to try again to get a loan to cover the mortgage interest payments.He’s trying very hard, but it won’t be easy.”
