“Wait. I think this is a private conversation. Leave us please,Grey.” Wynn waited for Gideon to shut the door behind him. “Now, go on, Zebedee.”
Zeb took a deep breath. “Wynn, I cannot believe this scheme to marry Jessamine to one of us is right. She’s awfully young. She hasn’t had any opportunity to develop her own character, or taste, or to make a wide acquaintance. And tying the inheritance to her hand is surely guaranteeing a proposal for the wrong reasons.”
“The reasons are that I want Lackaday House to stay in the Wyckham family, and my Laura’s grandchild to make a match from which her unfortunate birth would otherwise disqualify her. I thought I made that clear.”
“But you’re asking her to marry a man she doesn’t know.”
“Hence I invited you all to stay for this fortnight. She will know you by then.”
Zeb scrubbed at his face with the heels of his hands. The hard thing here was that Wynn wasn’t being entirely unreasonable in principle. Old-fashioned, certainly, but few people would dispute his motives. “I see you are acting with the best intentions,” he said. “But she is a charming young lady, and surely, in this day and age, her birth is not such a millstone as all that. Why not settle a reasonable sum on her and let her choose her own path?”
“She is my Laura’s grandchild. I want her to be mistress of Lackaday House.”
“Then why don’t you just leave it to her?”
“Because it must go to a Wyckham,” Wynn said, as though Zeb were a slow child. “It is Walter Wyckham’s legacy. Jessaminewill marry a Wyckham, and she and her husband will be my heirs together. That is how I will right the wrongs of the past.”
“Marry which Wyckham, though?” Zeb demanded. “Colonel Dash, if you’re counting him, could be her father. Bram is married already. And Hawley is not a man I would want my sister to marry, if I had one.”
“Why not?”
Hawley was dissolute, decadent, and impatient of convention. That might sound very thrilling on paper, but in practice made him a nasty, self-centred, sneering piece of work, not caring who he hurt. Zeb’s social circles intersected with Hawley’s enough that he was aware of a string of affairs that never ended happily. Well, look at Elise.
“He takes after his father,” he said. “Sorry, but he does. What is Jessamine, eighteen? Hawley doesn’t treat women well at the best of times; he’ll walk all over a schoolgirl.”
“You think so? Is there not a chance that innocence will conquer the rake where worldly experience could not?”
“That’s tripe out of books. He’ll ruin her life.”
Wynn raised a brow. “And that leaves only yourself.”
“No, because I’m not going to marry her,” Zeb said. “She seems delightful, but I’m not a player in this game. Count me out.”
Wynn had grey-blue eyes. They were, Zeb discovered, quite piercing. “Not a player. Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to marry her!”
“But why not? She is young, charming, beautiful. Any man would want her.”
Zeb regularly attended a club well-stocked with men who really wouldn’t. “It’s not personal. I simply don’t care to marry a stranger for the sake of an inheritance.”
“If you got to know her, she would not be a stranger. Zeb, you have told me very eloquently what is wrong with the other candidates. Why do you want to remove Jessamine’s best hope? You are the youngest, I dare say the most attractive to a girl’s eye. Would she not be better off with you than anyone else? Do you want to deprive her of that option? What is your true objection to Jessamine? Her birth?”
“I don’t have any objection to her except that she’s far too young.”
“She is ten years your junior. When you are forty she will be thirty; that is not a gap to concern anyone.”
“Yes, but—” Zeb could feel Wynn’s logic closing in on him. He struck out in another direction. “Anyway, all this seems a bit hard on Bram.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Bram. You’ve allowed him to live in the expectation for a long time, and Elise too. Perhaps you have a reason to change that. But if he hasn’t done anything to deserve being disinherited—” The irony of what he was saying occurred to him forcibly. “The point is, I don’t like this and I should rather not be involved.”
Wynn leaned back, interlacing his fingers. “Do you think Elise would do well as mistress of Lackaday House?”
“I should call her aesthetically perfect. She’s the very model of Lady Ravendark inColdstone Abbey, all icy beauty and hauteur.”
“Ha!” Wynn looked genuinely pleased. “You’ve read Walter’s books? Yes, quite. Lady Ravendark comes to a sorry end, doesn’t she? Pushed down the stairs by her own husband because she is carrying another man’s child. What is it he says? ‘The house of my father will live on through my son.But not his.’ And then he pushes her. What a moment.”
