Sherry Thomas - Ravishing the Heiress

And yet there was enough misery present to wilt flowers and curl wallpaper. Nobody noticed the earl’s distress. And nobody—except Mrs. Graves, who stole anxious looks at Millie—noticed Millie’s. Was unhappiness really so invisible? Or did people simply prefer to turn away, as if from lepers?

After the guests took their leave, Mr. Graves pronounced the dinner a succès énorme. And he, who’d remained skeptical on the previous earl throughout, gave his ringing endorsement to the young successor. “I shall be pleased to have Lord Fitzhugh for a son-in-law.”

“He hasn’t proposed yet,” Millie reminded him, “and he might not.”

Or so she hoped. Let them find someone else for her. Anyone else.

“Oh, he will most assuredly propose,” said Mr. Graves. “He has no choice.”

Do you really have no other choices, then?” asked Isabelle.

Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Futility burned inside Fitz. He could do nothing to halt this future that hurtled toward him like a derailed train, and even less to alleviate the pain of the girl he loved.

“If I do, it is only in the sense that I am free to go to London and see if a different heiress will have me.”

She turned her face away and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. “What is she like, this Miss Graves?”

What did it matter? He could not recall her face. Nor did he want to. “Unobjectionable.”

“Is she pretty?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know—and I don’t care.”

She was not Isabelle—she could never be pretty enough.

It was unbearable to think of Miss Graves as a permanent fixture in his life. He felt violated. He raised the shotgun in his hands and pulled the trigger. Fifty feet away, a clay pigeon exploded. The ground was littered with shards: It had been an excruciating conversation.

“So, this time next year, you could have a child,” said Isabelle, her voice breaking. “The Graveses would want their money’s worth—and soon.”

God, they would expect that of him, wouldn’t they? Another clay pigeon burst apart; he scarcely felt the recoil in his shoulder.

It hadn’t seemed quite so terrible at first, becoming an earl out of the blue. He realized almost immediately he’d have to give up his plan of a career in the military: An earl, even a poor one, was too valuable for the front line. The blow, although harsh, was far from fatal. He’d chosen the military for the demands it would place on him. Returning an estate from the brink of ruin was just as demanding and honorable an occupation. And he did not think Isabelle would at all mind becoming a ladyship: She would cut a dashing figure in Society.

But as he stepped into Henley Park, his new seat, his blood began to congeal. At nineteen, he had not become a poor earl, but a desperately destitute one.

The manor’s decline was frightful. The oriental carpets were moth-eaten, the velvet curtains similarly so. Many of the flues drew not at all; walls and paintings were grimy with soot. And in every last upper-story room, the ceiling was green and grey with growth of mold, spreading like the contours of a distorted map.

Such a large house demanded fifty indoor servants and could limp by with thirty. But at Henley Park, the indoor staff had been reduced to fifteen, roughly divided between the too young—several of the maids were barely twelve—and the too old, retainers who had been with the family for their entire lives and had nowhere else to go.

Everything in his room creaked: the floor, the bed, the doors of the wardrobe. The plumbing was medieval—the long decline of the family’s fortune had precluded any meaningful modernization of the interior. And for the three nights of his stay, he’d gone to sleep shivering with cold, listening to the congregation of rats in the walls.

It was a step above outright dilapidation, but only a very small step.

Isabelle’s family was thoroughly respectable. The Pelhams, like the Fitzhughs, were related to several noble lineages and in general considered just the sort of solid, upstanding, God-fearing country gentry that did the squirearchy proud. But neither the Fitzhughs nor the Pelhams were wealthy; what funds they could scrape together would not keep Henley Park’s roof from leaking, or her foundation from rotting.

But if it were only the house, they might still have somehow managed with various economies. Unfortunately, Fitz also inherited eighty thousand pounds in debt. And from that, there was no escape.

Were he ten years younger, he could bury his head in the sand and let Colonel Clements worry about his problems. But he was only two years short of majority, a man nearly grown. He could not run away from his troubles, which assuredly would only worsen during any period of inattention.

The only viable solution was the sale of his person, to exchange his cursed title for an heiress with a fortune large enough to pay his debts and repair his house.

But to do that, he would have to give up Isabelle.

“Please, let’s not speak of it,” he said, his teeth clenched.

He didn’t want much in life. The path he’d delineated for himself had been simple and straightforward: officer training at Sandhurst, a commission to follow, and when he’d received his first promotion, Isabelle’s hand in marriage. She was not only beautiful, but intelligent, hardy, and adventurous. They would have been deliriously happy together.

Tears rolled down her face. “But whether we speak of it or not, it’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

She raised her shotgun and blasted the last remaining clay pigeon to pieces. His heart was similarly shattered.

“No matter what happens…”

He could not continue. He was no longer in a position to declare his love for her. Whatever he said would only make things worse.

“Don’t marry her,” she implored, her voice hoarse, her eyes fervent. “Forget Henley Park. Let’s run away to-gether.”

If only they could. “Neither of us is of age. Our marriage wouldn’t be valid without the consent of your father and my guardian. I don’t know about your father, but Colonel Clements is dead set on my doing my duty. He’d rather see you ruined than allow our marriage to stand.”

Overhead thunder rolled. “Isabelle, Lord Fitzhugh,” cried her mother’s voice from inside the house, “better come back. It’s going to rain soon!”

Neither of them moved.

Drops of rain fell on his head, each as heavy as a pebble.

Isabelle gazed at him. “Do you remember the first time you came to visit?”

“Of course.”

He’d been sixteen, she fifteen. It had been at the end of Michaelmas Half. And he’d arrived with Pelham, Hastings, and two other mates from Eton. She’d sprinted down the stairs to hug Pelham. Fitz had met her before, when she’d come to see Pelham at Eton. But on that day, suddenly, she was no longer the little girl she’d been, but a lovely young lady, full of life and verve. The afternoon sun, slanting into the hall, had lit her like a flame. And when she’d turned around and said, “Ah, Mr. Fitzhugh, I remember you,” he was already in love.

“Do you remember the fight scene from Romeo and Juliet?” she asked softly.

He nodded. Would that time flowed backward, so he could leave the present behind and head toward those older, more joyous days instead.

“I remember everything so clearly: Gerry was Tybalt and you Mercutio. You had one of my father’s walking sticks in one hand and a tea sandwich in the other. You took a bite of the sandwich, and sneered, ‘Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk?’” She smiled through her tears. “Then you laughed. My heart caught and I knew then and there that I wanted to spend my life with you.”

His face was wet. “You’ll find someone better,” he forced himself to say.

“I don’t want anyone else. I want only you.”

And he wanted only her. But it was not to be. They were not to be.

Rain came down in sheets. It had been a miserable spring. Already he despaired of ever again walking under an unclouded sky.

“Isabelle, Lord Fitzhugh, you must come inside now,” repeated Mrs. Pelham.

They ran. But as they reached the side of the house, she gripped his arm and pulled him toward her. “Kiss me.”

“I mustn’t. Even if I don’t marry Miss Graves, I’m to marry someone else.”

“Have you ever kissed anyone?”

“No.” He’d been waiting for her.

“All the more reason you must kiss me now. So that no matter what happens, we will always be each other’s first.”

Lightning split the sky. He stared at the beautiful girl who would never be his. Was it so wrong?

It must not be, because the next moment he was kissing her, lost to everything else but this one last moment of freedom and joy.

And when they could no longer delay their return to the house, he held her tight and whispered what he’d promised himself he would not say.

“No matter what happens, I will always, always love you.”

Eight years later, 1896

I hear Mrs. Englewood has arrived in London,” said Millicent, Lady Fitzhugh, at breakfast.

Fitz looked up from his paper. The strangest thing: His wife never gossiped, yet she seemed to know everything the moment it happened.

She wore a morning gown of cornflower blue. The morning gown, worn strictly indoors among intimates, was looser of form and construction than its more tightly corseted cousins the promenade gown and the visiting gown. But there was something about his wife that was highly—almost excessively—neat, so that even the slouchier morning gown looked prim and precise on her.