Page 1 of Contracted as His Countess

Chapter One

Castle Beaupierre, the Kent countryside

—10th July, 1816

Jack Ransome reined in his horse on the crest of the rise and looked down at a vision of the fourteenth century transported to the age of the Hanoverians. England was still littered with castles, large and small. Some were ruins, some were converted long ago into more or less comfortable houses, but none still fulfilled the function for which they had been built. Except, apparently, this one.

It helped, of course, if you were wealthy and more than slightly eccentric as the late Peregrine Aylmer had been. Then you could pour thousands of pounds and a lifetime of scholarship into creating your fantasy world.

Castle Beaupierre seemed to bask as it lay in the sunshine that reflected off the polished slate of the roofs, the walls of creamy, perfect stone. Jack tried to estimate the cost and time involved in cleaning and repairing those walls and roofs and failed utterly.

From the centre tower a great black flag stirred and lighter pennants fluttered, red and blue and gold, around it. The encircling moat, full of water, was home to perhaps a dozen swans gliding in pristine white formation past the drawbridge. Which was raised.

‘She invited me, Altair,’ Jack observed. The big black gelding flicked one ear and then cocked a hoof comfortably, settling down to wait. ‘The least she could do is lower the drawbridge. Perhaps I am supposed to send a page over in a rowing boat or have a herald trumpet my arrival. What is the etiquette for calling on people deluded enough to live in the Middle Ages?’

He gathered up the reins and sent the horse on at a walk down the slope towards the fairy-tale building. When they were halfway there the drawbridge began to creak slowly downwards until it reached his side of the moat with a dull thud. Someone was watching.

‘Which leaves me faced with a portcullis,’ Jack muttered. ‘What is the matter with the woman? Her father was the lunatic who wanted to play knights in armour and he’s been dead for almost a year.’ Hence, he supposed, the black flag. As he spoke there was a rattle of chains from inside the walls and the wood and iron grid creaked upwards.

Now, faced with vast double oak doors studded with sufficient metal knobs to repel a charging elephant, Jack felt both amusement and patience slide away. ‘I should have brought siege engines, obviously. If Mistress—Mistress, if you please!—Madelyn Aylmer wants me then she can open her confounded gates because I am not going to knock. I did not drag down to Kent in the middle of the Newmarket July race meeting to play games.’ He clicked his tongue at Altair, who stepped on to the bridge, pecked at the sudden hollow note under his hooves, then walked on. Finally, the great doors opened.

The shadows were deep as Jack rode through the high archway, the sunlight blinding in the courtyard beyond a second opening. Here he was in the killing ground, where attackers could be penned in and assaulted on all sides from above, and he felt a prickle of awareness run down his spine as he rode towards the light. Someone was watching him. Jack circled the horse and looked up and back to a window high in the wall, making no attempt to disguise his scrutiny. A flicker of white, the pale oval of a face, the flash of spun gold and the watcher was gone.

Serve her right if I keep going right back where I came from.

But this was a commission, which meant money, and at least Mistress Aylmer hadn’t expected him to dress up in medieval clothes for this meeting. Pride was all very well, but it was a hollow coin that bought neither bread nor horseshoes. Jack turned Altair back and rode into the courtyard where, finally, someone had come out to meet him.

It was a surprise that the servants were not dressed in tights and tabards, although the leather jerkin and breeches of the groom who took Altair’s reins and led him away had a timeless look to them and the black-coated individual who came forward could have come from any period in the past hundred years.

‘My—’

‘Mr Jack Ransome to see Miss Aylmer, by appointment.’

‘Mistress Madelyn will receive you in the Great Hall,’ the man responded with the same emphasis Jack had used and without a flicker of either amusement or annoyance. ‘This way, sir.’

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