The Inconvenient Elmswood Marriage (Penniless Brides 0f Convenience Book 4) Page 2

  ‘His withdrawal from society was gradual. It was only in the last two years or so that he became almost completely cut off from the world.’

  ‘Making it easy for you to take over your father’s duties without his realising?’

  ‘We did not hoodwink him,’ Kate retorted angrily. ‘Once a month Papa submitted the books to Lord Elmswood, via his valet, and if your father required to consult him on any matter he sent Papa a written note. The authority remains formally invested in my father. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think your father cared who actually did the donkey work and—without wishing to offend you, Lord Elmswood—’

  ‘You offend me every time you use that title. I wish you’d call me Daniel.’

  ‘Daniel.’ It felt strange saying his name...intimate. ‘It wasn’t only that he was uninterested in the detail, he seemed indifferent to the fact that only the bare minimum was being done. I’m afraid that you’ve inherited an estate in dire need of modernisation.’

  He dug his hand into his coat pocket to retrieve a small, brightly coloured precious stone, which he began compulsively to turn over and over in his hand. ‘I made it perfectly clear the last time that I was home that I wished to relinquish my claim to Elmswood.’

  ‘Relinquish! You mean you wanted your father to disinherit you?’ Kate exclaimed, shocked to the core to hear the place she loved so passionately dismissed so summarily.

  Daniel smiled thinly. ‘Don’t worry. As ever, he completely disregarded my wishes.’

  ‘But—but can you really mean you want nothing to do with Elmswood—ever?’

  ‘Never. Though that does not mean I am pleased to see the place so run down. I could barely locate the door into the walled garden.’

  ‘I know, and that is a subject close to my heart, believe me,’ Kate said, diverted. ‘It’s been a dream of mine for years to be able to restore Elmswood Manor and the gardens to their former glory.’

  ‘To say nothing of modernising the farms? It’s a strange ambition for a female to have.’

  ‘I have inherited my father’s love of Elmswood.’

  ‘Is Mr Wilson likely to recover? Forgive me for being blunt, but...’

  ‘I would much rather you were. I’m extremely aware that time is of the essence to you. Papa is frail, and, while not in any immediate danger, his days of estate management are well and truly over.’

  ‘Does he have everything he needs to make him comfortable? You said there is something I can do for him? What was it?’

  It was the perfect opening. Kate’s throat was dry, her heart thumping in her chest, but she might not get another opportunity. She owed it to Papa as much as herself to take it. And of course to Elmswood itself.

  ‘My father is concerned about what will happen to us now that he is not fit to continue serving you.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean?’

  ‘I mean, where will we live and how will we survive? Our house is tied to your estate, as indeed is our income, save for a small legacy your father left in his will. Our circumstances would be severely straitened were you to appoint another estate manager. I don’t mind for my own sake, but Papa...’

  ‘There’s no need for that. You are currently acting as de facto estate manager. I see no reason for that situation to change. I will formalise the arrangement before I leave—you have my word. I came here with the intention of investing complete authority in your father to allow me to resume my foreign travels. Circumstances have changed, but now I shall invest my authority in you instead. You are clearly trustworthy—better still, you obviously cherish this place. I consider you a very safe pair of hands.’

  Daniel smiled, looking as much relieved as pleased.

  ‘There, I hope that puts your mind at rest. So, let us turn our minds to what I need to do in order—’

  ‘I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid it won’t work.’

  His smile faded. ‘You don’t want the position?’

  ‘I’m extremely flattered that you should offer it to me, and I can say, hand on heart, that I would do my very best to ensure that you would never have any cause to regret placing your faith in me. Believe me,’ Kate said earnestly, ‘if I thought for a moment it would work in practice I’d leap at the chance. It’s not that I can’t do the job—the accounts prove that—but the reality is I’m a female of modest background, and you would not be here to underpin my authority, or indeed be available to make important financial decisions. Though it pains me to admit it, that is a fatal combination. It would be doomed to failure.’

  ‘But what is the alternative? I don’t want to employ a stranger and throw you and your father out onto the street, and even though I don’t give a damn about this place, I don’t want to let it go any further down the road to rack and ruin.’

  ‘You could look to offload it. I’m sure you could find a willing purchaser.’

  ‘That would make your situation perilous.’ Daniel began to turn over the stone in his hand again, frowning down at it. ‘No, I need a caretaker I can trust implicitly. My sister in Ireland has a son. It seems to me that he is the obvious person to hand the place over to, when he comes of age. Lock stock and barrel, as they say. Of course I can’t pass on the title, but I see no reason why my nephew shouldn’t make use of that too.’

  Kate’s mouth dropped. ‘You have a nephew!’

  ‘So I’ve been informed.’

  His tone was one of insouciance, but he could not possibly be indifferent to such news. Or perhaps she’d misunderstood.

  ‘You didn’t know that your sister had a son? His birth is a recent event, then?’

  ‘I believe the boy is seven or eight, so it will be a good few years before I can hand the reins over to him.’

  ‘Seven or eight! Did your father know of his existence?’

  ‘I have no idea. There was no mention of the boy in his will.’

  ‘And your sister? What does she think of your plan?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t discussed it with her,’ Daniel answered impatiently. ‘I am no more interested in her life than she is in mine, and I would be obliged to you, Miss Wilson, if you would resist asking the many questions I can see you are desperate to ask, because I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss the matter further. I would rather my nephew did not inherit an encumbrance. You are the ideal person to ensure that he does not, and yet you’re telling me that, much as you’d like to take on the job, it’s impossible. We both want the same thing here. Surely there must be a way of making the impossible possible.’

  There was, and she must speak now or for ever hold her peace, but her head was swimming with the revelations Daniel had so callously announced. But they were all grist to her mill, she reminded herself.

  Her hands were clammy. She wiped them surreptitiously on her gown under the desk. She cleared her throat. ‘I do have a plan, as it happens, which will restore the fortunes of both this house and its lands, and make them a fit inheritance for your little nephew.’

  Daniel set his turquoise stone down on the desk. He sat back, his hand curling around the crudely polished stone. He smiled suddenly. ‘What a very surprising young woman you are. What is this cunning plan of yours?’

  His teeth were very white and even. When he smiled, his eyes lit up. It was a very infectious and unexpected smile. The kind that she suspected one would do a great deal to earn. It changed him, that smile, and it made her uncomfortably aware of him as a very attractive man.

  Kate allowed herself a very prim smile in return, but now she was coming to the point her stomach was starting to churn again.

  ‘It’s a little radical.’ Perspiration prickled her back. ‘In fact it will take a bit of a leap of faith on both our parts.’

  ‘Now I am thoroughly intrigued. Take a deep breath and spit it out.’

  ‘Very well. What I’m proposing resolves both
our dilemmas—your desire to live abroad unencumbered by responsibility, and my desire to live here with Papa while he is still with me. It would provide me with the natural authority to make whatever significant decisions need to be made without referring to you, including financial ones. It would allow me not only to maintain your lands but to improve them, and to restore the house and gardens too, while you’d have nothing to do save return to your life in darkest Africa, or wherever it is. And then when the time came, you could make the lands over to your nephew and I could—well, I don’t know what I’d do, but we can worry about that when the time comes. What do you think?’

  ‘To be honest, I think it sounds too good to be true. And when something sounds too good to be true, it is my experience that it usually is.’

  Kate shuffled her feet under the desk. She picked up the polished stone, turning it over in her hands as Daniel had done. It was elliptical in shape, smooth and not quite flat, and had a very soothing effect. ‘Is this turquoise?’

  ‘Yes, it is, Miss Wilson.’

  He held out his hand. Embarrassed, she surrendered it. ‘Kate. You may as well call me Kate, since—if we are to—and after all I’m already calling you Daniel.’

  ‘You’ve come this far without equivocating. Don’t falter now. What is your devilishly clever plan, Kate, and what is the catch? For there must be one.’

  ‘I suppose you might say I am.’

  ‘You really have lost me now.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I think we should get married.’

  He looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or have her committed to a Bedlam. ‘Right! Anything else I should know?’

  ‘There is, as it happens,’ she said breezily. ‘In order to protect my father’s pride, I’m afraid it has to be your idea.’

  Chapter One

  Elmswood Manor, June 1831

  With a heavy sigh, Kate pushed aside the letter she had been attempting to compose to Eloise. Her husband’s eldest niece, she had just learned, had given birth to a daughter. She had, it seemed, embraced motherhood with an enthusiasm that was staggering, considering that she had originally wed Alexander with no intentions of consummating the marriage, far less of conceiving a child. But Eloise’s marriage of convenience had turned into a true love match.

  Her obvious happiness leapt off the page of the letter Kate had just received, and she was desperate to accept the invitation to her home in Lancashire to meet baby Tilda for herself. For the moment, however, that was sadly completely out of the question.

  She had missed so much while she’d been away. How long would this very strange state of affairs continue?

  Pushing her chair back from the desk, Kate prowled restlessly over to the window. The morning room faced out to the back of the house. The expanse of lawn had been neatly mown and trimmed, revealing a vast swathe of verdant green. Leaves covered the huge, ancient oak which Eloise had been so fond of climbing when she’d first come to live at Elmswood. On the still waters of the lake a pair of swans were gliding effortlessly.

  Had it really been last October when those two distinguished gentlemen had turned up unannounced on her doorstep? ‘Colleagues of her husband’, was how they’d introduced themselves, and she’d thought they were bringing her some long overdue letters. She’d served them tea and cake, and they’d talked about the weather, and the shocking state of the roads, and there had been mention of them having met Eloise socially, she recalled, before they had revealed the real purpose of their visit by informing her that Daniel’s wellbeing was a matter of grave concern.

  She’d still been wondering what connection the pair of them might have with Eloise, and why Eloise had never mentioned it, when she realised that their polite smiles had been replaced with another expression entirely.

  Then the interrogation had started, with questions being flung at her one after the other in rapid succession, until finally she’d startled them by demanding that they stop bombarding her with demands for information and start providing her with answers. What they told her and what they had proposed had sent her reeling.

  They’d given her no time to recover her composure before the younger of the two, Sir Marcus, had started issuing her with a series of concise instructions, including what she was permitted to say to Estelle, whom she’d had no choice but to press-gang into holding the fort. Within three hours of their arrival they had been gone, taking Kate with them, on the start of a journey that had taken her through the end of one year and well into the next.

  In the end, she’d been abroad for all of winter and spring, arriving home yesterday with the beginning of summer.

  Looking around her now, smelling the sweet perfume of the rose she’d picked only an hour ago, Kate had to remind herself that she really was home, for Elmswood Manor didn’t feel in the least bit familiar. The Elmswood Coven was no more.

  For the first time since her husband’s nieces had arrived, more than nine years ago, she was alone, all her beloved wards gone, embracing their own lives without any further need of her.

  Eloise had a husband and now a child. Phoebe had not only opened a restaurant in London while Kate had been away, but also married a man Kate had never heard of, never mind met. A man she would not meet for the foreseeable future, and a restaurant she wouldn’t be able to visit, no matter how much she longed to.

  For this next, wholly unexpected and hopefully brief stage of her life she would be without the company of any of her husband’s nieces, for even dear Estelle, who had stepped into the breach and held the fort at Elmswood for nine long months, had been obliged to leave.

  Not that she’d objected, thank goodness. Quite the contrary, in fact. She’d embraced her freedom and the chance to embark on a long-planned Continental trip, loyally refraining from asking awkward questions or from making what in Kate’s opinion would have been perfectly reasonable demands under the circumstances.

  And what circumstances!

  Kate sank onto one of the chairs, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. Had the last nine months really happened? She had told the girls only the bare bones. Not the story that Sir Marcus had constructed for public consumption but the truth—or a fraction of it. What they truly made of it she couldn’t begin to imagine, but they were fiercely loyal, and she knew that if they talked it would only be amongst themselves.

  Now it was over, and it felt like a dream—or should that be nightmare?

  However she chose to describe it, it wasn’t over yet. Upstairs, in one of the guest bedrooms, was a very real, lurking reminder of that fact—a simmering volcano which could erupt at any time.

  Daniel, her husband of eleven years. The girls’ nearest living relative. A man Kate barely knew and whom his nieces had never met.

  The sound of the handle of the morning room door being turned made Kate’s eyes fly open. She was on her feet when the man in question appeared, larger than life and, if not actually bursting with health, very far from death’s door and most certainly not a figment of her imagination.

  ‘So this is where you hide yourself away.’

  ‘Daniel!’

  Instinctively, Kate rushed to help him, but the fierce frown she received made her sit straight back down again. He was dressed oddly, in a somewhat exotic-looking tunic and loose pantaloons, over which he had donned a rather magnificent crimson silk dressing gown emblazoned with gold dragons and tied with a gold cord. A matching pair of slippers covered his bare feet.

  ‘Chinese,’ he enlightened her, noting her stare. ‘It seems the powers that be managed to get my luggage back to England ahead of me. Considerate of them, don’t you think? That they moved heaven and earth to make sure my effects were delivered? A small consolation for you, dear wife, in the event that you’d been forced to return here alone.’

  ‘Don’t say that!’

  To her horror, tears welled up in her eyes. Kate blinked the
m away. There had been more than enough opportunities in the last nine months to shed tears, but she’d rarely taken them.

  ‘Well, at least you’ll have something to wear, then,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘I don’t know how long it would take to send to London for a new wardrobe of clothes, and you’d struggle to find anything more sartorial than a fleece shirt and brogues in the village. There’s your father’s clothes, of course, they are packed up in the attic, but—’

  ‘I would rather dress as a farmhand,’ he snapped.

  There were so many questions raised by that one sentence—questions she’d asked herself over the years since they had married—but now was hardly the time. Perhaps there would never be a time.

  The last time he’d been home, eleven years ago, Daniel had remained at Elmswood barely long enough for her to promise to love, honour and obey him. They’d married by special licence, because technically, he’d been was in mourning, though she had known he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of waiting another six weeks for the banns to be read.

  This time she hadn’t exactly dragged him back to England kicking and screaming, but if he’d been strong enough to do more than protest weakly then she doubted he’d be here—despite the orders he’d received.

  How long would he remain? Lord, look at him—he was hardly in a state to go anywhere. The florid dressing gown was far too large for him. He had, she suspected, put it on in an attempt to disguise his loss of weight, not realising that it merely drew attention to the fact. He had shaved too. She wasn’t surprised. As she had tended to him on their protracted journey from Cyprus to Crete, then on to Malta and Gibraltar, Lisbon, Portsmouth and finally home, one of his biggest bugbears, in the intervals when he had been lucid enough to have bugbears, had been his unkempt beard.

  He had not permitted Kate to wield his razor for him, and she had not allowed him to try to use it himself, having visions of him accidentally slitting his own throat, so she had been forced to beg the services of a weird and wonderful assortment of stand-in barbers on his behalf.