Chapter One
Miranda, Lady Madeley,widow of the late Sir Geoffrey Madeley, baronet, was seated in her parlor in apparent industry when her butler, Crawford, showed Mr. Percival Pratt of Pratt and Somersby Solicitors into the room. This was to be his fifth visit since the demise of her husband some four months ago, and she was beginning to feel as though she’d seen enough of him. Every time he came, he seemed to arrive dragging a further problem in his wake.
However, deciding to view his unexpected presence this morning as a welcome rescue from something she was not at all good at, with her customary gentle smile she looked up from the sewing in her lap. Embroidery was as alien to her as it would have been to the King of England. But her late mother had taught her many years ago that gentlemen liked to be given the impression that a woman enjoyed the gentler arts. Like embroidery. So that was what she’d chosen to be surprised in, having been warned of his arrival just a few minutes ago by her oldest daughter, Melissa.
In fact, in order to give callers in general the illusion that it was her habit to participate in such a ladylike pastime, she kept a piece of needlework at hand beside her chair. A piece her old nursemaid, the redoubtable Betsey, had started for her. And it worked, for Mr. Pratt, a man she’d only met twice before her husband’s unexpected demise four months ago, assumed a look of benevolent, and somewhat paternal, admiration the moment he laid eyes on her. Just as he alwaysdid, despite the problems he was dealing with.
Good. She wanted him to think her the perfect wife, and by inference, also the perfect widow, which of course, she was, with her black armband and meekly lowered eyes. And she was well aware that the ideal most men had of perfection was of the meek little woman engaged in some indoor pastime, such as embroidering a handkerchief like the one in her hands.
Had Mr. Pratt looked a little closer, he might have been able to make out that she’d done very little embroidery at all, and was merely holding the offending piece of flimsy cotton lawn in a manner that implied activity. But he was a man, so of course he didn’t look. Embroidery didn’t interest gentlemen one bit.
She now set the sewing down on a side table before Mr. Pratt might realize her subterfuge and bestowed the sweetest of smiles on her visitor. “Good morning, Mr. Pratt. My daughter informed me you had called.”
Mr. Pratt, a portly gentleman of mature years and very little hair, swept her a deep bow, as befitted the widow of the lord of Windrush Hall. “Lady Madeley, I must apologize for having to bother you yet again, but I come here with news of progress, which I think might please you.” He harrumphed. “You must understand that I hold you in the highest esteem.”
Nothing new there. He always assured her of this. Anybody would think him about to propose marriage.
He cleared his throat. “Sir Geoffrey was a most valued client, and, I have always liked to think, a friend. It has been my pleasure to serve you to the best of my abilities and it is with a mixture of both great sadness and great relief that I have to inform you that an end is finally in sight. Sadness for you, I fear, but not for the heir whose whereabouts we have finally succeeded in discovering. Although I am certain you will be relieved to be able to move on.”
Miranda kept her expression bland. Mr. Pratt might have liked tothink of Geoffrey as a friend, but she knew very well that Geoffrey himself had not possessed any similar feelings. In fact, on more than one occasion he’d berated the man, in private of course, for being a stuffy old woman and a knucklehead. A few other choice adjectives she chose not to recall had also been deployed. Enough, indeed, to imply that the late Geoffrey had not wished to be on any closer terms than pure business ones with his solicitor. And, to be honest, Mr. Pratt had not so far shown himself up for being good at his job, not with the mess he’d allowed Geoffrey’s final affairs to get into, and the length of time he’d taken finding this missing heir. So long that she’d permitted herself to cherish the forlorn hope the man didn’t exist, or had died.
She gave the tiniest of frowns. She wasn’t at all sure she wished to entertain Mr. Pratt this morning if he came with such news. But, needs must, so she would have to force herself to be welcoming. She threw a brief glance at the parlor window, through which she could see a cloudless blue September sky. How much better to be outside and preferably on a horse, as no doubt the girls were right now. Or with the dogs. Only Tippo, her ageing pug, remained in the parlor with her, curled on the rug in front of the fire and snoring gently. The others would either be in front of the larger library fire or out with the girls and their horses. Having fun.
But when one’s husband died, whatever one’s lack of feelings towards him, one was not expected to wish to have fun, even four months after the fact. One was expected to play the dutiful widow for eternity and deal with the mess one’s ill-prepared husband had left behind. And there had definitely been a mess to sort out.
Miranda gestured to a particularly uncomfortable upright chair. “Do sit down, Mr. Pratt.”
He perched on the edge of the chair, and, seemingly unsure what to do with his pudgy hands, eventually chose to clasp them around the leather document case in his lap. He looked rather as though he were an anxious schoolboy brought before the headmaster. Miranda bit herlip in an effort not to smile. As a suitably grieving widow, she must keep her face straight, even though she’d got over Geoffrey’s loss quite quickly, spurred on by the shocking discovery that he’d not really planned for his wife and daughters’ futures in the case of his own demise.
Not that she wasn’t still a little bit sad to have lost Geoffrey, for he’d never been unkind to her even though their match had been anything but one of love. He’d given her three beautiful daughters she adored, and she couldn’t fault him for that. And he’d done his best to hide his disappointment that not even one of them had been a son. Despite being a somewhat distant parent, she’d thought he’d loved them dearly, and for that she was most grateful. However, despite his kindness to the girls, she couldn’t help but think that life should have been a little easier now she was free of having to please a man.
Only it wasn’t going to be. And that was all down to Geoffrey, and of course, in part also due to the fact that Mr. Pratt, with due diligence, had gone off searching to see if there was a male heir for both the baronetcy and the estate. And found one.
She rather wished he’d been too lazy to have tried.
She regarded him in expectation. No doubt he’d come to tell her about the heir. As far as they’d all thought, up until his untimely death, Geoffrey had possessed no living heir apart from herself and her three daughters, which would have meant the whole estate could perhaps come to them. However, as he’d been a baronet, that assumption had posed a problem. Without a male heir, there would have been no one to inherit the title as, rather unfairly in the opinion of Miranda and her three daughters, only a man could do that. So Mr. Pratt, in a fit of over overzealous efficiency, had taken it upon himself to search. A search that had taken an inordinate amount of time, during which Miranda, and her daughters to a certain extent, had been living in a kind of limbo at the Hall, unsure of what, if anything was to come to them.
But this was over now, it seemed, as there was a living heir, andthe Hall was no longer to be theirs. In fact, very little was to be theirs.
Of course, she’d had more than a few sleepless nights of worry about what would happen regarding her and the girls if an heir turned up. She’d hoped Mr. Pratt would find nothing, for if there was no man to inherit, surely they would get everything? And everything was quite a lot: the house and small park, the eight tenant farms and the considerable capital Geoffrey had so assiduously hoarded for a rainy day that had never come. With all of that, she would have been able to make sure the girls each had a nice dowry and she herself could go on living here at Windrush Hall and enjoying her dogs and her horses, just as an eccentric, country-loving widow was expected to do. Perfect.
A small glimmer of guilt arose in her heart that she wasn’t treating Geoffrey’s demise, from an unexpected apoplexy, as something more regrettable. But her discovery of the contents of his will had been enough to put paid to most of her sadness. This had been replaced at first with shock and then disgust that he seemed to have cared so little for her and his daughters and more for some distant, possibly imagined male heir. And this in turn had fuelled a resentment that she’d been married for nineteen years to a man a full twenty-three years her senior, who plainly had never loved her and had harbored a well-hidden grudge that she’d not produced a son.
Now, if she thought about Geoffrey at all, it was not in the most favorable of terms. She’d been sad at losing him for a while but could not do it forever. Life, as her late papa had said to her on several occasions, was for the living. The dead were gone forever and not coming back. Which was just as well for Geoffrey because she might have been tempted to box his ears for him. Or worse.
Mr. Pratt had visited her shortly after the funeral, bringing with him the same leather document case he had in his hands now. He’d been nervous, but she hadn’t known why. She’d soon found out though.
He’d taken a document out and laid the case by his feet, hismovements precise and delicate. He’d cleared his throat, something she was to discover was an annoying little habit of his when nervous. What had Geoffrey put in his will? Presumably he’d made provisions for dowries for the girls. Melissa was eighteen and they’d been planning for her to make her debut in London society the following spring. Six months from now. She was so pretty, Geoffrey had said, she was sure to make a match with an earl or even a duke. They’d laughed together over their plans, remarking on how swiftly she’d grown up. Now she had to ask herself if it had all been false. Had Geoffrey, in truth, not cared a whit for his daughters’ futures?
Facing Mr. Pratt that first time, she’d wondered if perhaps he’d left a few kind legacies to his trusted servants. The long serving Crawford certainly merited something of the kind, as did dear Betsey, who’d brought the girls up just as she’d brought Miranda herself up all those years ago.
But no. She’d been wrong on all counts. For a few moments Mr. Pratt’s pudgy fingers had fidgeted with the document in his lap, before he cleared his throat again. “Your husband’s will might not be quite what you were expecting, my lady.”
Those fateful words signalled a drastic change in their fortunes. At that point, just a possible drastic change, but now, with the discovery of the heir, a definite one. Miranda had felt a quiver of unease but had kept her face expressionless. She’d been brought up not to betray her emotions in times of stress, and to smile through all adversity, so she was not about to show her trepidation to Mr. Pratt, no matter what he had to say.
He’d begun by explaining about the possibility of there being an heir, a fact that had come as a shock to Miranda. Geoffrey had never once intimated that he had any living family. His first wife had died giving birth to a little boy who himself had died only a few years later, an occurrence that had prompted him to seek out a healthy young lady who might provide him with the heir he needed. Miranda. More abusiness arrangement than anything else, although they’d got on well enough. Now, it seemed he had some more distant, never spoken of, relatives. Ones he’d not deemed her worthy of knowing about.
“This,” Mr. Pratt had said, “is a letter from Sir Geoffrey to me to be opened in the event of his death.” He took a breath. “As you can see, I have taken the liberty to already open it. I have read the contents, which I can assure you I had no knowledge of prior to this letter.”
