“People to whom Fairclough owed money, I believe, sent here by his brother. The house was gifted to me by my parents. In turn, it had been gifted to my father with the same restrictions regarding selling it. While my husband could not sell the estate outright by the terms of its legal trust —thank God! —naturally, he owned everything in it. There was nothing I nor my parents could do but let everything be taken and sold to pay Fairclough’s debts.”
“How awful.” Adam had lost his appetite, but she spoke so matter-of-factly, he knew she’d long ago accepted the circumstances. She certainly wasn’t grieving over the reprobate, nor devastated and heartbroken.
“Thoughtlessly, or perhaps maliciously, Fairclough did not leave our London home to me. It, too, was sold quickly by his brother, Gerald, the new Lord Fairclough. Thus, with no money and no roof over my head in London, I left and decided it better to be a governess than a tragically impoverished widow. No one recognized me until I started dressing up and going out to places a governess should not be.”
“With me,” he finished.
“Yes, but I did enjoy our outings,” she confessed, offering him the first real smile since he’d arrived.
Suddenly, he recalled the name, and Alice’s speedy departure made a little more sense.
“You left Bath because of that woman who addressed you as Lady Fairclough?”
“I did.”
“But why?” Adam hoped she would continue talking. Inside, he was a little shaken to think of all the times they were together with her pretending to be the middle-class Mrs. Malcolm, and he’d believed her.
“If it happened once, it would happen again,” she explained. “I allowed myself the indulgence of going to a ball, being in a setting which would bring my true identity to people’s minds. And I didn’t want Lord and Lady Beasley to know whom they had actually hired. They would have sacked me for the ruse, and I would have had to leave, but then, everyone in Bath would have known who had been in their midst. You know how the servants’ grapevine works, do you not?”
“I believe I understand the concept,” Adam said wryly. “Yet you left, anyway.”
“On my own terms. And without all the snooty nobs in Bath —”
“Your fellow nobs, if I am grasping the situation correctly.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “My father is an earl and my mother is a viscount’s daughter. They hoped I would marry in my first Season. With my mother’s unusual chaperoning skills, too lax when I needed her and rather forceful when she saw an opportunity to push me in the wrong direction — into the wrong arms, as it were — my parents got their wish.”
“Are you saying your parents approved of Fairclough?” Now that Adam knew the name, memories of a thundering reprobate floated through his brain. He’d never met him, but the man hadonce lost so badly at cards, it was the stuff of legend at White’s. And he was equally unfortunate at common wagering, losing so much he was right up the list with Beau Brummel.
“Approved is too strong a word,” Alice said. “They didn’t really care who it was, as long as he was from our class, of course, and he didn’t mind that my dowry was not a large one. He thought he would have this estate to sell. I didn’t find out until later that my father had never told Richard of the restrictions on the deed. In any case, unable to stop our belongings from being sold, my parents packed up and left for the less expensive and far sunnier Spain.”
Adam could not imagine such negligent parents leaving their offspring, and a female, at that, to fend for herself.How could his Alice have come from such weak and cowardly people?
“And now you are back, is your plan to remain here indefinitely?”
Again, she sighed. “I honestly did not know what I would find here. Stonely Grange might have been burned to the ground for all I knew. Believe it or not, even seeing it like this, in its ravished state, I am vastly relieved. And then, of course, there is the library.”
“Therefore, the intrepid Lady Fairclough —”
“Don’t call me that,” she interrupted with a scowl.
“And so, Lady Alice intends to live in her hulking, empty house with her handful offriends, reading her beloved books until...?”
“Why must there be an until?” she asked, blinking at him.
“I don’t know that there must. But is that the life you want? Peaceful, I suppose, but devoid of that fun and companionship you enjoyed with me in Bath.”
With a shrug, she looked away. “I think I will stay as long as I can. And when I cannot, then I shall go be a governesssomewhere remote, thereby removing the possibility of a nosy-poke yelling my name.”
He wondered if she would prefer that life to being with him.
“Do you intend never to reclaim your place as a member of theton,nor return to London?”
She shook her head. “I cannot return to London.” Rising to her feet, she added, “I promised Mrs. Georgie that I would help make preserves, or was it pickles? Anyway, something to do with jars.”
Adam had stood, too, and now he moved around the table, wanting to put them back on the same footing they had been before she had vanished. Hoping she would allow him, he reached for her hand.
When she didn’t flinch or pull away, he took the other one, too. Feeling as if he were coming home, he pulled her close.
