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Guin climbed into bed, snuffed out the candle and lay imagining that she could hear Jared’s breathing on the other side of the door. Of course this could never be anything but an affair. How could she agree to marry him now, if that was the alternative he was offering to them remaining as lovers? She had lost two husbands in suspicious circumstances, the print shops had been full of her image. Her innocence would not weigh in those scales. Even if they managed to resolve this awful situation, neutralise Elizabeth’s venom, prove Theo innocent, scandal would still cling to her.
Scandal would cling to Jared too, the long-lost second son reappearing conveniently to claim his inheritance, the reasons for his disappearance a subject for gossip and speculation. He must marry and marry well to counter that in the eyes of Society. Sophie the Duchess would be able to find any number of well-dowered eligible young ladies of breeding for him. He did not need a twice-married, scandal-ridden wife from the obscure Lancashire gentry.
She was not going to cry, she told herself. She would go to sleep thinking of ways to expose Elizabeth and avenge Augustus, find a way to live her life when all this was over. Guin rolled over and buried her face in the pillow. The man had ears like a cat, he would probably be able to hear the most silent tear…
Ravenscar was as rugged as its name. It was bleak even in sunshine, growing out of the sandstone outcrop from where it loomed over a deep-cut ravine with a narrow torrent at the bottom. All around the landscape was more benign, green, prosperous, but Ravenscar looked what it was, a house that could withstand a siege, built in an age when your neighbours would take your stock by force of arms and your womenfolk too if they could.
But it was home. He had thought that he hated it, never wanted to see it again, but now Jared blinked hard to get the battered silhouette into focus then set about breaching its defences.
First it was necessary to get inside the high stone walls without going through the two-storey gatehouse. He had no intention of announcing his presence until he was inside and knew who was there, but the section of wall to the south, where some penny-pinching repairs in the mid eighteenth century were beginning to crumble, offered the same handholds that he had used as a schoolboy.
The turf was soft as he dropped down at the back of the shrubbery. The sense of being fourteen again almost made him grin, before the silent mass of the house sobered him as returning always had. It was the classic E-shape of the 16th century, a long range to the west with two side wings at either end of the eastern side and a massive porch forming the central stroke. He had no intention of walking in at the front door.
The grounds seemed deserted and garden room door was probably unlocked. Jared sauntered across the grass between shrubbery and house. No-one glimpsing him would see suspicious or furtive movements.
The handle turned under the pressure of his hand and he was inside, edging between benches holding pitchers and vases, a pair of shears, bundles of wire and a vast bucket full of greenery. It seemed Bella, or the housekeeper, still arranged flowers in the house.
The hall clock struck ten as he came out of the shadows under the great carved oak staircase. Unless his father had changed his habits he would be in his study now for an hour. That would be the usual time for summoning boys in disgrace. Jared recognised now that it had been deliberate in order to give the culprit – usually himself – a sleepless night and no appetite for breakfast. He wondered if some long-engrained habit had made him time his arrival for just this hour.
Voices from the front of the hall – a pair of footmen by the sound of it – brought him out of time past back to the present, sent him away, down the corridor to the study door.
The hinges were as well-oiled as they ever had been and he was inside and in front of the desk without the man sitting on the other side of it looking up. He had always found it a strange choice, that piece of frivolous French rococo furniture when something massive and oak would surely have suited his father better.
‘Wait,’ The Earl was writing something across the bottom of what looked like an invoice, something dull and agricultural from the absence of any fancy bill-head and the closely packed lines of writing.
Jared stood, as patient and silent as the best-trained footman. The bent head in front of him had the same golden brown hai
r as his own, but short and thickly laced with silver now. The shoulders in their mourning black were as broad as he remembered, the handwriting as determined.
His father put the pen on its stand and looked up. ‘Yes?’ He came to his feet as he spoke, the colour draining out of cheeks weather-beaten from the hunting field and riding the estates in Yorkshire weather. ‘Who the devil are you?’ Then, ‘Jack?’
‘I go by Jared these days.’
‘Jack.’ His father seemed not to have heard him. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
Good to see you, too, Father dear. ‘I heard about William. I am sorry.’
For a moment his father’s face crumpled, the grief raw and brutal, then he had his formidable composure in place again. ‘You’ve come to see what you can lay your hands on now, have you?’
Well, it wasn’t as though he had expected any other reaction, certainly no-one rushing out to kill fatted calves and open the best champagne. ‘No. I have my own life, my own concerns and my own business. This – ’ He waved a hand to encompass study, house, estate, title, ‘– This would be a damned nuisance.’
His father sat down again with a thud. ‘My son is dead and you call it a damned nuisance.’ When Jared made a sharp gesture of denial, he added, ‘You’d turn your nose up at an earldom?’
‘I won’t have the choice when it comes to it, will I? Until then, I thought I had a duty to come back and see if I could help. Bella did not mention seeing me the other day, then?’
‘Bella? No, of course not. She knows no more about you and your whereabouts than I do.’ The colour was coming back into his face now and his breathing slowing. Jared told himself that he really did not want his father’s death by apoplexy on his conscience.
‘She has known where I am, who I am, for nearly a month. Yesterday I encountered her in Whitby.’ It did not seem that he was going to be offered a chair so Jared took one anyway. His father simply stared at him as though he was a ghost. He supposed he was. ‘It is probably a waste of breath to say this, but I did not force myself on her all those years ago and I am not the father of her child.’
‘I know.’
The shock kept him in the chair, knocked the breath out of his chest, the words from his mouth. He stared at his father, stared into the amber eyes just like his own and fought for some control. ‘You knew. When did you know?’
‘A month or so after you had gone, when William had stopped ranting and posturing and playing the little gentleman and Bella had stopped pretending to be a wronged woman and had dispensed with the crocodile tears and had got a wedding ring on her finger. Your brother never could tell a lie with any conviction, not and make it stick.’
‘You knew. You have known for eleven years. Did you bother to look for me?’ Pride kept his tone ironic, kept him from getting to his feet and hurling things about the room.
‘Yes, I knew. And I searched, believe me. But by that time they were married. My son and heir was married to the daughter of some jumped-up Whitby coal merchant, they had tricked me into agreeing to a marriage William knew damn well I would forbid, and you had vanished off the face of the earth. In the end I put it about that you’d run off to join the army, at least that preserved the family name from scandal.’
