“I asked Nat to come to me that night because I wanted to talk to him,” Lizzie said. “I told myself that I wanted to save him from making a huge mistake in marrying Flora, but the truth was that it was because I loved him and could not bear for him to marry someone else.”

“I remember that you were quite vehement on the subject of Lord Waterhouse’s betrothal when we discussed it a few months ago at the spa rooms,” Alice murmured.

“Then you will also remember that when we spoke of it you told me that if I had feelings for him I should do something about them before it was too late,” Lizzie said.

“I scarcely meant that you should seduce him,” Alice said wryly. “Perhaps you took me a little too literally.”

“Oh, I am not blaming you,” Lizzie said hastily. She knitted her fingers together, pressing hard. “I know that this whole affair is no one’s fault but my own. Not even Nat’s, for I goaded him beyond endurance and provoked him and made him exceptionally angry with my interference and all the time I was pretending that it was for his own good.” She sighed. “Anyway, it was a disastrous mistake, for he does not love me.” She looked up and saw Alice watching her with nothing but gentleness in her blue eyes, and saw Laura’s sympathy and Lydia’s kindness and wanted suddenly to cry.

“I am not naive,” she said. “I understand that men and women come together for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with love and in our case it was frustration and fury and lust-” She stopped and shrugged a little hopelessly.

“But you do love him,” Laura said softly.

“Yes,” Lizzie admitted. “I do. I love him so much…” She hesitated. “If you had asked me even two weeks ago I think that I would have denied I loved Nat,” she said. “I was trying to fool myself as well as everyone else.” She made a brief, impatient gesture. “Oh, it does not matter how I feel! What matters is that for one stupid, deluded moment I thought that Nat might love me, too, but the truth is that he does not, and that is what hurts.” She pressed her hand to her heart in an unconscious gesture. “I have been so foolish,” she said starkly, “but I will not compound my stupidity by marrying Nat when he does not love me.”

“But he cares deeply for you-” Alice began.

“Would you want to be married to Miles if he merely cared for you?” Lizzie said bitterly. “If you loved Miles, adored him as you do, with every fiber of your being, and in return he cared for you?” She saw Alice’s stricken look and felt terrible. “I’m sorry, Alice,” she said remorsefully. “But it would be such an unequal match. It would break my heart each and every day.”

“But love can grow,” Alice argued.

“And if it does not?” Lizzie said. She thought of her mother again. “What if you wait and wait and that never happens? What then?” She shook her head. “It would be the worst match in the world,” she said. “You all know that Nat and I simply would not suit.”

No one contradicted her and that, Lizzie thought, rather proved her point.

“So you are saying that Nat has proposed simply out of a sense of honor,” Laura said slowly, “and because he cares for you and wants to protect you? That sounds good enough to me.”

“I do not deny he is a good man,” Lizzie said.

“But you want more than that,” Lydia said.

“I do when the whole of the rest of my life is at stake.” Lizzie shrugged, uncomfortably aware that Lydia, betrayed by her parents and her lover, would probably feel she had nothing to complain about. “I could not bear it if Nat fell in love with someone else after we wed,” she said honestly, “someone like Priscilla Willoughby. Better to lose him now, when he is not truly mine, than to another woman after our marriage.”

“But if you were to have a child,” Lydia began hesitatingly, her hand resting protectively on her own stomach, “then surely it would be better for it to have a loving father?”

Lizzie felt humbled. There was a huge lump in her throat and a raging anger inside her for her feckless, libertine brother and what he had done to Lydia. “There won’t be a child,” she said. “It was only once and anyway I do not feel in the least bit pregnant-” Her voice broke a little.

“Oh, Lizzie,” Lydia said, reaching out to her. Lizzie could see pity in her eyes. “Don’t be afraid. Everything will be well-”

The fear and the misery fused in Lizzie’s chest in one tight, hot ball. She wanted to take comfort from her friends but she did not want them to see her cry. She had always preferred to be alone with her misery, ever since she had been a child.

“Please excuse me,” she said. “I must go back to Fortune Hall now. There is so much to be done.”

Alice put out a hand. “Would you like me to come with you, Lizzie?”

Lizzie shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I will manage quite well on my own.”

As she walked down the path to the water meadows she reflected that she knew what her friends would be thinking. Because Laura and Alice and Lydia knew her well, they would not ascribe her damned independence, as her brother Monty had called it, to snobbery, which many people did. They knew she often chose to be alone because she had been accustomed to solitude since childhood. It had become a habit for her. She preferred it.

She skimmed a stone across the swift flowing waters of the River Tune and thought about Monty’s death. He had been the second worst brother in the world, after Tom, but she still wanted to cry for him because she had lost him; lost both the real Monty, weak and worthless, and the brother she had desperately wanted him to be.

She thought of Nat Waterhouse, too, as good a man as Monty Fortune had been a bad one. Many women would settle for what Nat was offering her. She knew that. Many would think her mad, bad and foolish to refuse him simply because the one thing that he could not offer, his love, was the one thing that she wanted most in all the world. Yet when she thought of marrying Nat and the possibility of losing him to another woman, to someone he could love, like Priscilla Willoughby, her blood ran cold. She could not bear the thought. She had seen her mother run mad because her father had withheld his love from her. Society had called Lady Scarlet a bolter, because she had run away from her marriage, disappearing in a perfumed rustle of taffeta and lace to Ireland with her horse-master. She had been condemned as a faithless wife but Lizzie knew it was not love but a lack of it that had caused her mother’s downfall. She had seen her mother, day after day, neglected and alone whilst the Earl had pursued his mistresses and his Town entertainments. Lady Scarlet had waited and waited for the Earl to love her and when he had not she had taken second best and run and been damned forever for it, lurching from affair to affair, from men to the brandy bottle, until she died.

So she, Lizzie Scarlet, would not make the mistakes her mother had made. She had sent Nat away now, before it was too late. It hurt to love him and to make herself give him up but that was nothing to how much it would pain her to lose him if they were wed. She would not make Lady Scarlet’s mistakes. Not now. Not ever.

CHAPTER EIGHT

DESPITE DEXTER relieving him of any responsibilities in the investigation into Monty Fortune’s death, it was Nat who found Tom Fortune that afternoon in an advanced state of inebriation at the Half Moon Inn, some ten miles distant from Fortune’s Folly. Nat had not been able to sit idly by whilst his colleagues hunted Monty Fortune’s murderer. For Lizzie’s sake, if nothing else, he wanted to do whatever he could to help. He had seen her face, stricken and pale, when she had heard the news of Monty’s death. He knew how much she was hurting over the loss of her brother, even a brother as feckless as Monty had been. The scoundrel had not deserved a loving sister. It pained Nat that Lizzie would not turn to him in her misery and loss, but he knew that she had always been one to deal with her unhappiness in private. A girl who could also be spectacularly, publicly outrageous, Lizzie was nevertheless one of the most contained people he knew.

The landlady of Half Moon Inn, Josie Simmons, had just thrown Tom bodily into the courtyard when Nat arrived and Tom was shouting and swearing most horribly as the tapster, Lenny, poured barrels of cold water all over him in an attempt to sober him up. Nat looked down on Tom’s drunken and unkempt state and his heart sank. He would as lief leave Lizzie in Tom’s care as he would abandon her with a pack of wolves. Yet Tom was her guardian in law now-Sir Thomas Fortune, the squire of Fortune’s Folly.

“Take him away and good riddance to him,” Josie said as Nat hauled Tom to his feet and told him sharply that they wanted to question him over his brother’s death. “He’s been bragging all afternoon long about being Sir Thomas now and not a word of sympathy for his dead brother.” She rested her huge fists on her hips. “Not that Sir Montague deserves any sympathy, mind,” she added. “One’s as bad as the other, if truth be told. There’s terrible bad blood in that family. Makes me fair grateful we’re outside the parish here.”

Tom’s face had set in a mask of malevolence when he saw Nat. “Well, if it isn’t that worthy citizen the Earl of Waterhouse!” he taunted. He grabbed Nat’s lapels, almost lurching off his feet in the process, and stuck his face close to Nat’s own. His breath reeked of ale and smoke. “Don’t forget my money,” he slurred, turning Nat’s blood cold. “Did you get my letter? I’ll broadcast the truth about your sister, Waterhouse, unless you give me the twenty-five grand. I’ll go to your father. She’s a strumpet, Lady Celeste, and the world deserves to know her perversions.”