Page 36

There was a communal gasp.

Mr Croft stopped reading and looked up, embarrassed.

Lady Lockhart turned blazing eyes on Madeleine. ‘You! The scheming little snake we nurtured in our bosom. Is this what all your visits to your dear Grandmama were in aid of? To persuade her to change her will in your favour?’

Madeleine flushed. To hear the lawyer’s words was akin to being struck by a thunderbolt and before she could process what they meant, she was accused of the most malevolent crime. She leapt to her feet. ‘No! I had no idea. I have never discussed such things with her.’

Henrietta then took up the attack. ‘You may not have spoken outright, but Grandmama was not of sound mind and you could have argued your case with tales of woe and deprivation.’

Madeleine was still standing and she whirled around to face her cousin. ‘I did no such thing. I do not feel so disadvantaged and in fact, am most grateful to my aunt for taking me in. I too took it for granted that Edwin would inherit.’

Lady Lockhart turned her alarming stare on Mr Croft. ‘Could we challenge the will, citing that old Lady Lockhart was deranged?’

This question energised the young man, who became quite emphatic. ‘Her ladyship was as sharp of mind as anyone. I would never swear in a court of law that she had not the soundest understanding of what she intended. I do advise against disputing the will. The only people who emerge wealthier from such an action are the lawyers, myself included.’

Lord Lockhart rose to his feet and strolled towards the window. No one had heard a word from him since the dramatic news of his disinheritance, but he seemed to have become the least aghast person in the room. His gambling and libertine life had used up most of his father’s inheritance and he had been relying on his grandmother’s even larger estates to enable him to continue his pursuit of lordly pleasures. With the sudden reversal in his fortunes, he knew it would become imperative to find himself an heiress for a wife.

All eyes were on him as he turned, his good-looking face pale and constrained. He smiled as he walked towards Madeleine and, taking her hand, said, ‘Well, it’s obvious to me. I shall have to marry Maddie.’

This was too much for Madeleine, who snatched her hand from his grasp. The full impact of her grandmother’s will sank into her. She felt the burdensome weight of a gift that should have brought her freedom to live as she wished and love as she chose, the means to do anything, even open a sanctuary in the country for abandoned children, but it was never to be so simple.

Lady Lockhart’s voice broke through the ferment in her own mind by expressing the dilemma at the heart. ‘That’s a sensible idea, Edwin. It is, after all, the Lockhart inheritance and there is no better way than for Madeleine to become a Lockhart too, and restore the family fortune to its rightful place, with you, the current Baron, at the head of this ancient line.’

Madeleine knew there was a terrible logic to this argument. These ancestral families were more venerable and important than any individual; who was she to interrupt the natural succession and stand in the way of the rightful heir and his inheritance? Her grandmother’s concern for her had inadvertently set the trap and suddenly here she was on a narrow, perilous path with a destination she could not easily evade. Could she even refuse it? Stolen inheritances were entertaining in fiction, but in real life they rocked the pillars of the establishment. Madeleine turned and fled the room.

* * *

Ferdy was triumphant, if exhausted. He had averted a crisis of the deadliest kind and no one apart from the perpetrator of the assault had been hurt in the slightest degree. Max Flambard’s brush with death had made him unusually subdued and contrite. ‘I see now how I have implicated you in the least worthy of my activities and I’m sorry, Ferdy. It’s no way to treat a friend. I shall not trouble you for another night’s shelter and am off to Albany this very moment.’ He grasped his friend’s hand. ‘I’ll be gone from your house but not, I hope, from your heart.’

Ferdy smiled and took his outstretched hand. ‘Old friends remain old friends ’til death us do part.’

‘Thank you for your quick thinking and adroit swordplay. You saved my life, if not today, then next week when the Count would have contrived to kill me in a duel in Paris.’

‘Don’t tell me, Max, his wife was another lady ravenous for your attentions whom you could not in all politeness refuse!’

Colour had returned to Lord Flambard’s dark face and he chuckled. ‘Well, not exactly, but⁠—’

‘Save me the details! All I can say is try to be more resistible when in the company of the fairer and cleverer sex. You seem to be putty in their hands and it’s not a sensible stance for a man of your susceptibilities.’

As Lord Flambard and his valet left in one of the Shilton carriages, Ferdy thought with longing of his reunion with his old friends Alick and Corinna Wolfe, who were back in residence and had invited him for dinner. Having avoided the usual storms of life, he was now disconcerted by how febrile his emotions had become. No longer was he under a canopy of blue, sailing his most comfortable and richly endowed barque on a tranquil sea: instead, a tempest seemed to be swirling towards him, dark clouds driven before the wind whipping up the waves and blocking the sun. And he had never been so far from land.

Taking a deep breath, Ferdy entered the familiar Wolfe mansion, reminded of the pleasures of meals here when the friends would meet during the Season. Alick and Corinna, Raven and Eliza Purfoy gathered round the table with much talk and affection, lubricated with good food and even better wine. The sense of comfort, love and nostalgia almost brought tears to his eyes. He grasped Alick Wolfe’s large warm hand with an intense grip and when he embraced Corinna, he held her so long and tight, she exchanged a worried glance with her husband. Ferdy was evidently much out of sorts.

Alick took his friend by the arm and steered him into the library. ‘You look like you need a drink.’ Ferdy sank into his familiar chair on one side of the fireplace and took the glass of brandy with gratitude. He looked up into Alick’s genial face and felt consoled.

Corinna joined them by the fire. She was the woman all the friends loved but whose hand Alick had won. She was now a sought-after portraitist, but her warmth and understanding for anyone’s troubles made her a port of safety in every storm. Her handsome green eyes looked shrewdly at their dandy friend. ‘Ferdy, my dear, I’ve never seen you so lacklustre. Tell us what has been happening since we left for the country.’

Ferdy sighed and closed his eyes, letting the liquor warm his throat all the way down to his chest. ‘I’ve just had to throw a murderous Parisian count out my door, after an attempted abduction – if not actual assassination, – of Max Flambard. You remember, Alick, Flambard at school, a big, good-hearted brute, always in some scrape or other.’

‘Yes, I do. Wasn’t he expelled for “Aggravated Brawling”?’ Alick laughed and quaffed his brandy. ‘What’s he done now?’

‘Indeed, and it seems his brawling has continued, but now instead of brangling with schoolboys, his focus has shifted to cuckolding husbands.’

‘I remember that scandal. We were barely out of Eton britches but agog that one of us would be so foolhardy as to fondle the wife of a King’s Hussar.’ Alick’s eyes twinkled with amusement. ‘Then shoot the hero dead in a duel!’

‘Indeed, I think we were as astounded as the rest of the beau monde.’

Then Alick leaned forwards with a more serious expression. ‘But are you saying, Ferdy, that Max has continued to sow the wind with other men’s wives and today he reaped the whirlwind?’