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Chapter One
April 1816—the park of Westerwood Manor,
Hertfordshire
Keep still! The circular image shook, swooped over immaculately scythed grass, across flower beds fresh with young growth, over a flash of bright blue cotton… There.
The watcher’s hand jammed so hard against the branch that the rough bark scored the skin from the knuckles. Yes. Glossy ringlets the colour of autumn leaves, determined little chin, flyaway brows over eyes that must surely be clear green. Beautiful. She is so beautiful.
And then the girl smiled and turned, laughing as she ran. The telescope jerked up and a man’s face filled the circle. Hair the colour of autumn leaves, stubborn chin, angled brows, sensual mouth turned up into a smile of delight.
‘Papa! Papa!’ The child’s voice floated back through the still, warm air. The man stooped to scoop her up and turned towards the house as she buried her face in the angle between neck and broad shoulder and clung like a happy monkey. Her laughter drifted on the breeze towards the woodland edge.
The telescope fell with a dull thud onto the golden drift of fallen beech leaves and the woman who had held it slid down the tree trunk until she huddled at its base, racked with the sobs that she had stifled for six long years.
*
‘You saw her then.’
‘How did you guess?’ Laura Campion let the door slam shut behind her.
‘Look at the state of you. All blubbered up. You never could get away with tears, my la—ma’am.’
Trust Mab to exhibit the delicate sensibility of a brick. The scratch of wicker on wood as the maid pushed aside the mending basket, the sharp tap of her heels on the brick floor, the creak of the chain as she swung the kettle over the fire, all scraped like nails on a slate. But the words steadied her as gushing sympathy
never would have done. Mab knew her all too well.
‘Yes, I saw her. She is perfect.’ Laura pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. Her boots were tracking leaf mould across the floor and she tugged them off and tossed them onto the kitchen doormat without a glance. ‘She looks like Piers. She looks like him.’
‘You just said.’ Mab slopped hot water into the teapot and swirled it round.
‘No, I mean she looks like the Earl of Wykeham. Piers’s cousin Avery.’ Laura tightened her lips, stared round the kitchen of the little house that had been home for just two days and fought for enough control to continue. ‘She calls him Papa.’
‘Aye, well, that’s what he says he is.’ Mab Douglas dug a spoon into the tea canister. ‘I only had to ask at the shop who lives in the big house and they were all of a clack about it. How his lordship came here just a month ago from foreign parts with a love child and no wife and doesn’t even have the grace to be shamefaced about it.’
‘Foreign parts!’ Laura tugged at her bonnet strings. They’d do nicely to strangle his lordship with. ‘He stole her from Derbyshire, though I expect that’s foreign enough for them around here.’
‘They won’t know nothing about that, it was six years ago and he must have taken her abroad with him right away. He’s been at that Congress in Vienna, and then he stayed on to help sort out some political nonsense in the Low Countries, so they say.
‘Besides, Mr Piers is dead and Lord Wykeham is head of the family, after all. In the village they say he’s spending money on the estate.’ The boiling water splashed onto the tea leaves. ‘Perhaps he thinks he should be responsible for Mr Piers’s child as well as his old home.’ Mab, at her most infuriatingly reasonable, being devil’s advocate.
‘That might be the case, if the child did not have a mother.’ The bonnet ribbon tore between Laura’s twisting fingers. ‘But she does.’ Me.
‘Aye, and there’s the rub.’ Mab poured two cups of tea and brought them to the table. ‘You drink that up, now.’ She sat down, five foot nothing of plump, middle-aged, bossy femininity, and shook her head at Laura with the licence of a woman who had looked after her since she was ten years old. ‘He knows you’re the child’s mother, but he thinks you don’t want her. He doesn’t know you thought she was dead. The question is, where do you go from here now you’ve found her?’
‘He has never met me.’ It was time for calm thinking now the first shock of emotion was past. Laura smoothed her palms over the dull fabric of her skirts. She was so tired of the black she had worn since her parents died of influenza fifteen months ago. She had been about to put her mourning aside and return to society, but that had been before the bombshell that had rocked her world. Now the solemn garments made the perfect disguise.
‘There is no reason he would suspect I am not who I say I am—the widowed Mrs Caroline Jordan, retired to the country to regain my strength and spirits before I re-enter society.’
‘And how are you going to meet an aristocratic bachelor who lives in the big house in the middle of a park?’ Mab was still being logical. Laura didn’t want logic. She wanted a miracle or, failing that, to sob and rant and… ‘And what are you going to do if you do get in there? Snatch the child?’
‘I do not know!’ Laura closed her eyes and dragged in a steadying breath. ‘I am sorry, Mab, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. All I knew, right from when I discovered those letters, was that I had to find my daughter. I did not dare plan beyond that. Now I have found her and I have no idea what happens next.’
‘He called her Alice,’ Mab said and laid her hand over Laura’s. ‘They told me in the village. Miss Alice Falconer. That would have been her proper name if you’d married Mr Piers, wouldn’t it?’
It was hard to speak around the thickness in her throat, to find the words in the confusion of her mind. When they did spill out they seemed unstoppable. ‘She is six years old. I heard her cry, just once, before they took her away and then they told me she was dead. I heard her say one word today and you tell me her name, the name strangers told you. I should be so happy because she is alive and healthy and yet I feel as though I have lost her all over again. How could they do that?’
How could her parents—the respected Lord and Lady Hartland—have told her the baby had died? How could they have secretly given the child—their granddaughter—away? Admittedly, their chosen recipients, the Brownes, were respectable tenant farmers on one of the earl’s distant estates, but even so…
‘They thought they were doing the right thing for you,’ Mab soothed. ‘You were only just eighteen. What they did meant you could have your come-out two months later and no one any the wiser.’
‘Really? What, I wonder, was I supposed to say to the nice young men they expected to propose to me? So sorry, my lord, but I’m not a virgin. In fact, I’ve given birth. I could hide the one—I gather there are shabby tricks, straight out of the brothel—but did they hope I’d find a complete innocent who wouldn’t notice something amiss?’ She knew she sounded angry and bitter and those weren’t nice things, either of them. But she did not care. Being angry and bitter had got her through five London Seasons as the most notorious débutante of them all.
Scandal’s Virgin, they called her, which was an irony if ever she heard one. But Lady Laura Campion, daughter of the Earl of Hartland, had the reputation of being frivolous, flirtatious and outrageous. And, to the intense frustration of the men who pursued her and the chagrin of the matrons who decried her behaviour, no one was ever able to say she had taken that one fatal step to ruin.
Yes, she would drink champagne on the terrace at a ball. Yes, she would slip away into the shrubbery and allow kisses and caresses no innocent should allow. And, yes, she would wear gowns more suitable to a fast young matron, ride with careless abandon and dance four times in an evening with the same man, if the fancy took her.
Any other young woman after five Seasons would be considered to be on the shelf, unmarriageable, the subject of pity. But… No gentleman could ever claim she had given herself to him, despite the wagers in the betting books of every club in St James’s. No one had ever managed to catch her doing more than kissing a rake behind the rosebushes. And no one could deny that she was beautiful, amusing, loyal to her friends and the daughter of one of the richest and most influential of peers. Despite the nickname and the shocked glances from the chaperons’ corner, Scandal’s Virgin continued her apparently heedless way though the social whirl and no one guessed that her heart had shattered at the death of a lover and the loss of his child.
‘If the man loved you, he might not care,’ Mab ventured.
Laura snorted. She had hoped that, once. But observation soon taught her that men were hypocrites. That theoretical lovelorn suitor would care, for certain.
In January of 1815, just as she was preparing for yet another Season full of distractions to stop her thinking of the hollowness inside, her parents succumbed to the influenza. It was sudden, shocking and completely unexpected, but within ten days of the first fever they were gone. Laura, draped in black veils, retreated to Hartland Castle and the virtual solitude of mourning, interrupted by the occasional descent of Mr Bigelow, the lawyer, and letters from Cousin James, the new earl, apprising her of his efforts to sell out of the army and return home.
