Lily (Flower Trilogy) (22 page)

Never mind how carefully he’d dressed; Rand felt slovenly under that gaze. For that moment he was ten again, pining for the man’s love, willing to do almost anything to gain that elusive acceptance. But whatever he had tried had always been for naught, and today was no different.

And he wasn’t that small boy anymore.

Patience, he told himself. There was no point in starting out confrontational. The marquess had asked why he’d taken so long, and he would give him a civil answer.

He was opening his mouth to explain that he hadn’t been home to receive mail when the man added, “And who the hell is she?”

Patience fled, chased away by stunned disbelief. Rand lifted his chin and wrapped an arm around Lily. “May I present Lady Lily Ashcroft, the Earl of Trentingham’s daughter. And the woman I am going to marry.”

The marquess’s shoulders stiffened under his jet-black velvet suit. “You’ll marry her over my dead body.”

For a moment, Rand wished he could arrange that.

He could feel Lily quaking beside him, but her spine remained straight. He met the man’s cold gray gaze with one of his own. “Might I request you get to know the lady before you forbid our marriage?”

“My lord,” Lily added in a tone both respectful and steady, “I am from good family, and I am in love with your son.”

The marquess’s expression didn’t soften. “Then you will make him an excellent mistress,” he snapped, and turned to go into the house.

“That’s enough!” Rand called after him dangerously.

But the stubborn man didn’t even glance back. Appalled, Rand turned to Lily. “I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Her voice was quiet so as not to be overheard, but determination laced every word. “He’ll not keep us apart.”

Rand hadn’t known his sweet Lily had so much steel inside her, but he was supremely grateful to find out. “He won’t,” he agreed, matching her confidence outwardly.

But he knew that no matter how misguided his father’s reasons, the man would fight to the bitter end.

The Marquess of Hawkridge always got his way. Together, Rand and Lily would have to make sure this time was the exception.

Servants were milling around them, handing down luggage and carting it up the steps. Rand was surprised to find he still recognized most. They smiled, and he tried to smile back as he drew Lily up the two sets of stone steps and into Hawkridge’s imposing Great Hall.

Arms crossed, the marquess waited inside, eyeing the luggage sitting on the black-and-white marble floor. His expression of disapproval had given way to incredulousness. “She cannot be thinking to stay the night.”

Rand set his jaw. “Lily and I are betrothed. If she leaves, so do I.”

The marquess thought on that a moment, but he’d always been a man who knew which battles were worth fighting. He beckoned to one of the waiting maids. “Etta, put her in the Queen’s Bedchamber. For now,” he added ominously. After pausing a moment for effect, he also added, “Randal, you will join me in my study.” Without waiting for agreement, he turned to leave.

The maid curtsied and touched a hand to the white cap that covered her gray curls, and Rand blinked in shock.

His old nurse, reduced to a housemaid.

“Nurse Etta,” he started.

“You’d best go,” she warned, her voice kind but her gaze straying to the marquess’s stiff, retreating back. “I will take care of your lady.”

Lily went off with her head held high while Rand followed the marquess, hoping she would find the Queen’s Bedchamber a comfortable place to wait. The room had acquired that name years earlier after it was redecorated for a visit by Queen Catharine of Braganza, King Charles’s wife. Hopefully Lily would feel honored to be assigned the chamber, but Rand knew the truth: The marquess meant her to be intimidated. In anticipation of the Queen’s using it, the room had been fitted out in a way meant to display the marquess’s power.

It also—by no coincidence, Rand was certain—sat as far from Rand’s own chamber as physically possible. On a different floor, even.

In another move meant to intimidate, the marquess sat behind his desk, which rested on a raised dais toward the back of his study, and waved Rand toward a chair on the lower level. Rand dropped onto it, sat back, and crossed his arms.

Looking up at his father that way used to make him feel like a contrite child, but he’d come too far to fall for the old goat’s tricks.

The marquess was one of the few men Rand knew who wore a periwig every waking hour of every day, even tucked away out here in the countryside. When that gray gaze settled on Rand, he braced, waiting for his father to make mention of his uncovered, chopped-off hair. Then he chided himself. It had been too long for the man to recognize the difference. Or he hadn’t noticed. Or he simply didn’t care.

Or all of the above.

The marquess wasted no time on preliminaries. “Your brother, as you know, had been betrothed since childhood to Margery. I swore to her father they would marry when she turned one-and-twenty. That happens to be next week. I intend for you to fulfill that pledge.”

Rand felt as though the air had been knocked out of him. He closed his eyes for a moment, then forced them open, a failing attempt to appear unruffled.

Margery. How could he have forgotten how these developments would impact Margery?

“Where is Margery?”

“In London. I sent her there to obtain a proper wardrobe for mourning. She returns tomorrow.” The marquess lifted a quill, pristine white lace falling back from his wrist. “I expect you to greet her as befits a husband-to-be.”

“I cannot.” Rand had washed his hands of the marquess long ago. He wasn’t responsible for the man’s twenty-year-old agreement. “I am sorry for Margery, but I am pledged to Lily.”

Pledged and bedded.

“My honor is on the line,” the marquess continued, breezing over Rand’s refusal. “And the family wealth is at stake as well.”

Looking toward the heavens for patience, Rand waved an arm, the gesture encompassing the overblown glory that was Hawkridge Hall. “The family wealth does not seem in jeopardy.”

For once, his father looked almost uncomfortable. “I have never had any reason to discuss family finances with you, but the fact is I mortgaged the Hawkridge lands to raise funds for Charles.”

Rand knew he meant Charles I, not the current King Charles, and that the funds had gone to support his side in the Civil War. The money would have been lost along with the battles, but William Nesbitt had been and still was a loyal Royalist. That he’d done such a thing was hardly surprising.

But his next words were.

“I was on the verge of ruin when Margery came into our lives.”

Margery. Rand pictured her young upturned face, her delicate features framed by the palest blond curls. Between her sporadic letters, he hadn’t thought of Margery often—he’d avoided thinking of anything at Hawkridge for years—but when he had, they’d been fond thoughts.

He thought of her much like a sister.

Never, ever as a potential wife.

“I am wedding Lily,” he repeated. “Soon.”

For God’s sake, she could be carrying his child.

The marquess dipped the quill and started signing papers while he talked. “As Margery’s guardian and eventual father-in-law, I have run her extensive lands along with Hawkridge’s for twenty years. The loss of those lands and income would be devastating, leading to eventual bankruptcy.”

One of Rand’s hands reached up to find the ends of his once-long hair, then fisted and dropped to his lap. “Surely you exaggerate.”

“I do not.” The marquess flipped a page. Rand figured the man’s half attention was calculated to make him feel worthless, but it wasn’t going to work. “If you refuse to marry Margery,” his father continued, “her land will be lost to us, and all of Hawkridge will suffer.” Finally, he looked up. “All, Randal.”

All. Not only what was left of the family, but the old family retainers. Etta and the other servants. The tenants, the villagers, and everyone else who depended on Hawkridge for their livings.

Rand knew his father was preying on his sympathies.

The old man cared little for the people—he worried for himself, and himself alone. But knowledge of the marquess’s machinations did little to lessen the effect of the threat.

He rubbed his palms on his velvet breeches. “I care not,” he said, afraid that he did.

A man didn’t turn his back on people who relied on him.

The marquess’s expression remained stony and resolute. He signed the paper in front of him, the scratch of the quill loud in the awkward silence.

“Lily has a dowry,” Rand said. “Three thousand pounds.”

“Three thousand wouldn’t begin to make a dent in Hawkridge’s needs.” The page crackled when he flipped it to look at another. “It grows late, and I have much to do. We will discuss this again tomorrow.”

Rand was dismissed. He rose and walked to the door, then turned back. “Perhaps tomorrow you will come to your senses.”

Though it had often cost him dearly as a boy, he never had learned to resist getting in the last word.

For the first few minutes she was left alone, Lily wandered around the magnificent Queen’s Bedchamber, alternating between worrying about what Rand and his father were discussing and marveling at the exquisite furnishings.

She supposed the Queen really had graced this room at least once, for it certainly had been decorated for royalty.

Even Lily, whose own family home was worth gawking at, found this chamber astonishing. The enormous state bed, hung with costly cloth of gold, sat on a raised parquet dais behind a balustrade in the French style. Great poufs of ostrich feathers crowned its four corners. The ceiling was elaborate painted plasterwork, the furniture gilt wood. The walls were hung with rich tapestries, and the marble fireplace boasted gilded crowns over the chimneypiece and on the piers.

But above all, the position of the room demonstrated its status. Beyond its windows, as in a royal palace, the gardens and avenues spread out in perfect symmetry, from this, the exact central vantage point.

However, Lily had little inclination to stare at Hawkridge’s gardens. Her own father’s were much more impressive. And while she had no doubt she’d been shown to this room in the hope it would convince her of the marquess’s wealth and power, having fought Rose—

and herself, she admitted—for Rand, she was unwilling to give him up so easily.

Along with the other priceless furnishings, the Queen’s Bedchamber contained a lovely rosewood harpsichord.

No matter the marquess’s intentions, he really couldn’t have assigned her to a more perfect room. Smiling in spite of her heavy heart, she sat down to play.

And that was where Rand found her half an hour later.

For a moment, or maybe longer, she’d managed to lose herself in the music. But one look at Rand’s face brought her crashing back to reality.

“It did not go well,” she said. A statement, not a question.

He dredged up a smile—a weak, obvious effort.

“Everything will be fine. I need to think. I need to . . . to go off by myself. Sometimes I do that, and I just wanted to let you know.”

“All right.” But she stood, reaching to catch the stool when she almost knocked it over. “Where are you going?”

“I just need to run.”

“I’ll come along—”

“Alone, Lily. I will be back, I promise.” He took a step closer, close enough to meet her lips with his own. A soft, apologetic kiss. “I promise.”

She searched his eyes, her fingers brushing the slight roughness on his cheek. “May I walk you out of the house?”

He shrugged, then silently peeled off his surcoat and tossed it on the bed. His cravat followed. As he walked from the room, he began rolling up his sleeves.

She hadn’t taken him for a moody sort of man, but then, she admitted to herself, she really hardly knew him.

But she knew she loved him. And if he needed some time to himself, how could she begrudge him that? ’Twas not as though he were asking to go to another woman.

She followed him from the chamber and down the massive oak staircase, another feature of the mansion clearly built to impress. Beneath the handrails, pierced wooden panels were carved with armor, cannons, muskets, spears, and lances. Trophies of war, their details highlighted by gold and silver leaf.

A display of force and power.

“What did your father say?” she asked Rand, watching his shoulders tighten beneath the thin white cambric of his shirt. “Is he demanding you leave Oxford to live here?”

“That minor detail hasn’t even been discussed yet.” He sighed and paused, waiting for her to catch up. “He has forbidden our marriage.”

She ordered herself not to panic. Rand sounded nothing if not resolute. And his father couldn’t really prevent them from wedding, could he? They would wish for his blessing, of course, but as a last resort, they could always elope. Especially given that Rand claimed to care little for his inheritance.

He resumed his descent, and she reached for his hand.

“Why?”

“My brother was to wed his ward, a woman named Margery Maybanks. I told you about her, didn’t I? The marquess expects me to honor that commitment.”

“Would you not make a poor substitute? She loved your brother, not you.”

A short, harsh laugh tore from his throat. “Oh, I doubt she loved Alban. Aside from the marquess, I’m aware of no one who did.” At the bottom of the staircase, he turned and led her across the Great Hall toward the front door.

“Margery’s father saved the marquess’s life in the Battle of Worcester, and the marquess promised him a boon. A few years later, on his deathbed, the man made his claim: that the marquess raise his motherless newborn daughter here and marry her to his heir on the day she turned one-and-twenty.”

A footman opened the door, and they stepped out.

After the dark tones that dominated Hawkridge’s interior, Lily blinked in the sunshine. “And now you’re the heir.”

She tugged on Rand’s hand until he stopped and turned to face her. “Can you refuse?”

“I
have
refused. But . . . there is more.”

“What—”