Folly's Reward (26 page)

“It’s too great a sacrifice for you,” Prudence said. “You’re the son of an earl. I’m nobody. You would be disinherited. I won’t do it.”

“Then I shan’t—in spite of a desire that is searing my soul and tearing my mind into shreds—make love to you. I want you, Prudence, in the light of these flames, and your skin burning against mine.” He kissed her hand in the center of the palm. “I want to show you how to fly. But if you deny me your promise, it’s over. Marry me!”

“Good heavens,” a cool voice said from the doorway. “I really think you had better, after this.”

Prudence looked over Harry’s shoulder. Lady Acton stood in the doorway.

“Pray, put on your shirt, Harry! And help Miss Drake to get decent.”

“But I am—”

Harry looked at her and laughed, entirely without rancor or shame. Then he rolled back onto the hearthrug and gave way to a great shout of hilarity.

Prudence watched him, relaxed and unguarded in genuine amusement. Dear God, how she loved him!

She glanced down at herself and blushed scarlet. How had he done it? Her skirts were rucked up, revealing a humiliating length of stocking above her sensible black boots. Her dress was unbuttoned. The ties of her shift lay open. Her breasts were swollen and aching, the nipples shamelessly puckered into hard nubs, like thimbles.

Her face flaming, she grabbed at her dress, but Harry’s hands were there first.

He gently pulled the fabric together and made deft little bows in the ties, then buttoned all the fastenings at the front of her dress, before kissing her once more, briefly, on the forehead.

“Tell her she must marry me, Mother,” he said. “And I will forgive myself enough to make you the apology I owe you.”

“But I cannot,” Prudence said. “You are ill and hurting. You don’t think what you ask.”

“Yes, I do. My headache is nothing. It went away when you told me you loved me.
With all my heart,
you said. As I love you, Prudence Drake. So now we shall marry and live happily ever after.”

Prudence turned to Harry’s mother. “Lady Acton, you told me yourself that it would be impossible.”

“I have changed my mind, my dear. I would like you for a daughter very much. You have my blessing for a match. As for the rest, Lord Belham has a plan.”

An eagle shrieked high overhead.

Harry pulled up the curricle and took Prudence by the hand. They gazed ahead for a few moments in silence.

Wildflowers splashed red and blue and yellow over the green skirts of Beinn Mhor. Birch and aspen clustered by the loch, leaves stirring softly in the golden air, murmuring their greeting.

Prudence glanced back at her new husband. His eyes—as clear and blue as the bright sky—shone with joy.

The horses shifted a little. Harry corrected them gently.

“Dear God, how green it’s become since we were at Dunraven Castle with Richard and my mother—and the flowers! I had no idea that such a magical place existed.”

“Then you truly don’t mind leaving England?”

He laughed and kissed her fingers. “As long as we’re together, angel, I’d be happy in Timbuktu. Yet this looks very much like paradise, for that must be Dunraven House.”

A stately stone house beckoned at the far end of the glen. Whimsical round turrets hung from each corner, steep, conical roofs piercing the towering backdrop of the mountains. Rows of tall windows gleamed, myriad panes of glass reflecting the cobalt sky.

“It’s extraordinary,” Harry said. “I had no idea that such palaces existed in Scotland. It looks like a chateau on the Loire.”

“It’s the French influence,” Prudence said. “It goes back a long way.”

“Is that what it is? I thought it was because we had landed in a fairy tale. You don’t regret anything, do you, angel?”

She laughed up at him. “To live here with you and Bobby? How could I? What more in life could I possibly want?”

“To have had a grand English wedding?”

“I’m perfectly content with my plain Scots one. We’re probably the only couple to have been married twice at Gretna Green. Though I wish, of course, that all of your family could have been there, instead of only Richard. I am sorry for that.”

“My father controls the others. And my mother didn’t dare risk coming to Scotland again so soon. But it doesn’t matter. They will all visit as soon as they can.”

“My brothers will, too, when they get home.”

“I hope so, for I loved meeting your sister and her husband.”

“I can’t say the same for your father. Lord Acton terrified me, Harry, calling for his solicitors to strike you from the will, stopping your allowance. Will he truly never forgive you for marrying me?”

Harry shrugged. “Possibly not. But thanks to Belham, we shan’t need his support. Nevertheless, I’m sorry, too. He’s my father, after all. He may come around eventually. Mother and Richard will work on him. Though Father and Richard never did get along, now Helena is carrying the next heir, it’s their turn to do no wrong, poor souls.”

“I can’t wait until she has the baby, and they can both visit us up here.”

He laughed and stretched with exultant pleasure. “Till then, we have each other, we have Bobby, and we have this place.”

The eagle shrieked again. Harry glanced up at it.

Prudence followed his gaze, but she did not pay much attention to the powerful bird soaring in the sunshine. She was entranced by the line of Harry’s throat, thinking of how soon she would be able to get him inside, and peel off that silly cravat, and his waistcoat, and his shirt—

Harry glanced back at her. “And I want your hair down and your—”

Her cheeks burned, though she laughed. “Let’s at least get to the house! Everyone will be waiting.”

“Yet I’m glad we first stopped to see Mr. and Mrs. MacEwen—”

“—who seemed strangely unperturbed by our turning up on their doorstep to announce that we were married—”

“—and asking for their blessing. Dear God, those first days at the Manse seem a lifetime ago. How could I ever have believed that Lord Belham meant Bobby harm?”

“Because I told you so, of course.”

“Yet it seems, angel, that from the day I first opened my eyes on that beach and saw your beautiful face looking down at me, everything I did was a lunatic failure.”

“You didn’t fail with me”

“No, for you have married me, and I have found my ramshackle self, at last.”

“The real you was always there,” she said. “Buried sometimes, perhaps, beneath Mr. Grey, and Prince Hal, and Mr. Silkiman, and your father’s favorite son. In spite of all the people who wanted to knock you over the head, or drive you into becoming a nick ninny, you were always there, and I will always love you.”

He kissed her with a luxuriant slowness, until Prudence pulled away and laughed.

Without another word, they looked ahead together to Dunraven House, glimmering its welcome.

* * *

The door flew open. The footman leaped aside as Bobby raced down the steps to fling himself at his hero. Harry swung him up, laughing.

“You came,” the child squealed. “I told everyone you would come today. The maids, and the butler, and everyone! Lord Belham said you would, too. I told them all that you and Miss Drake would come today.”

“Mrs. Acton now,” Harry said, setting the child back down. “While you were traveling up here with Lord Belham, Miss Drake and I married each other.”

“That means forever, doesn’t it?” Bobby said. “Together forever. And you will both live here with me at Dunraven House.”

The child grasped their hands and pulled them inside the entryway.

“See! This is my real home. I was born here. My papa built it for my mama, because he loved her. But she died. Then Papa took me to London, for I was only a baby, and the house made him sad. Yet she is with him forever in the painting above the mantel. In here!”

Prudence and Harry followed the child into a gracious drawing room, where the windows offered a luminous view of the loch.

Lord Belham stood before the fireplace, gazing up at a portrait of his son, Henry, fourth Earl of Dunraven, with his bride, Bobby’s mother.

The marquess turned and smiled as Prudence and Harry entered.

“Ah, my ward is in good hands, I see. Welcome, both of you, to your new home.”

Bobby ran up to his guardian and grasped his hand, then he pointed up at the painting.

“That’s my papa,” he said. “And my mama. They can never be with me again, for they’re swimming together forever, far, far away, out there in the ocean. That’s their nature, so even though they would like to, they can never return.”

“But we will stay with you always,” Prudence said. “And we will take care of you.”

Bobby released Lord Belham’s hand to fling his arms about her. Then he turned very seriously to his hero. Harry sat down, and Bobby climbed onto his lap.

“And you will take care of my lands, Hal, and my house, and my people, and my old keep at Dunraven Castle, where we stayed with my grandmama for a while. Though I never liked her, and I’m glad that she’s gone now and taken old Geordie with her. But Sergeant Keen is there and he says you’ll help him design a better pistol for the King, and all the gunsmiths will live there and keep working, too. We can ride over there whenever we like.”

The marquess smiled. “Then you are happy now, Bobby?”

“Yes, much, much better than I ever was before.” The child looked up at his guardian with absolute trust. “Even though I know you have to go back to London now, Lord Belham, you will visit, won’t you?”

The fearsome marquess leaned down to meet the child’s gaze. “Yes. I will visit again very soon.”

Bobby smiled back up at Harry. “Now that you’re married, Hal, your fur coat must be all burned up, so you can never be a silkie again. Do you mind being just a real man?”

“On the contrary,” Harry said. “I am very, very glad of it.”

Prudence fell back onto a sofa as Bobby let go of Harry to fling himself onto her lap, instead. The child wrapped his arms about her neck.

“You and me and Hal will live here forever, then,” he said. “Now that he’s a real man, we’re all a real family, at last.”

This story was originally inspired by a child on a beach who said to me the exact words that Bobby first says to Prudence, but it was in Ireland. To move the beach to Scotland and have Bobby enthralled by the myth of the silkie led to all the rest.

Serious canal building in Britain began when the Duke of Bridgewater cut his famous waterway to deliver coal to Manchester. Construction continued throughout the Regency. The Harecastle Tunnel, which
The White Lady
must be ‘legged through,’ took six hundred ‘navigators’ (whence: navvy, a laborer) eleven years of ceaseless toil.

Alas, canals were to be doomed by the introduction of the railway. As the Duke of Bridgewater said: “Well, they will last my time, but I see mischief in those damned tramroads.” Today fewer than three thousand miles of these quiet waterways remain. I have taken some liberties in my description of life on a narrow boat (they are not called barges), but this is a romance, after all!

The pistol of the early nineteenth century was a handmade flintlock, with ignition of priming provided by sparks from a flint striking steel. The Regency brought the art of the gunsmith to its zenith. Yet the flintlock had its drawbacks. Besides giving off black smoke when fired, there was a distinct delay between pulling the trigger and firing. If the powder was damp, or if the priming failed to ignite the main charge, there was always a risk of a ‘flash in the pan,’ when it would not fire at all.

In 1807 a Scottish minister, Alexander Forsyth, patented the first detonating lock, and the hunt was on for a replacement for the flintlock mechanism. The new principle involved a chemical compound that detonated when struck by a hammer, thus doing away with the capricious priming powder.

Unhindered by a patent that applied only in Britain, French gunsmiths continued to experiment with detonating locks. Meanwhile many British (and American) gunsmiths were busy with inventions of their own. When Forsyth’s patent ran out in 1821, the copper percussion cap showed the most promise of the many ideas tested. Within twenty years, flintlocks were essentially obsolete, and firearms had become infinitely more deadly. But how could Harry have foreseen the mayhem that would eventually result?

Folly’s Reward
is the fifth in my
Regency Reward
series, which began with the award-winning
Scandal’s Reward
. Harry first appeared in the second book,
Virtue’s Reward
, where you may discover more about his previous adventures with Richard and Helena. The Actons also star in
Rogue’s Reward
, the story of Harry’s sister Eleanor.

The final book in this series,
Love’s Reward
, which won the prestigious RITA award for Best Regency, involves the Acton sister who is most like Harry: wild, dark-haired Joanna.

Thank you, readers!

Please visit me at www.jeanrossewing.com or
www.juliaross.net
.

Copyright © 1997 by Jean R. Ewing

Originally published by Zebra Books (ISBN 978-0821756218)

Electronically published in 2016 by Belgrave House/Regency Reads

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No portion of this book may be reprinted in whole or in part, by printing, faxing, E-mail, copying electronically or by any other means without permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Belgrave House, 190 Belgrave Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94117-4228

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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.