Secrets of the Heart (2 page)

“Hello, Cummings.” Rachel smiled warmly at the man who had been the butler here since she was a child. “Allow me to introduce Miss Gabriela Carstairs. Miss Carstairs is the ward of the Duke of Cleybourne.”

The man bowed gravely to Gabriela. “May I welcome you to Darkwater, Miss Carstairs? The Duke and Duchess have been waiting eagerly for your arrival. Ah, here they are now.”

Foregoing formality, the members of the household were hurrying out the opened front doors despite the chill of the night air. In front were a tall, stunning red-haired woman and a man of dark mien, both smiling broadly. Slightly behind them came another couple, a pretty pregnant woman and a devastatingly handsome man, followed by a young girl of about Gabriela's age.

“Gaby!” The redhead, who was the new Duchess of Cleybourne, threw her arms open wide to her charge. She had been the girl's governess for six years before marrying Gabriela's guardian, and she looked upon her almost as her own child.

“Miss Jessie!” Gabriela flew into her arms and hugged her tightly. When she was at last released, she turned to the man beside the duchess, smiling up at him a little shyly. “Your Grace.”

He smiled, lighting up his dark face. “Have you forgotten, Gabriela?” he asked lightly. “I thought we agreed we were not to be so formal.”

“Uncle Richard,” she corrected with a smile, and when he, too, held out his arms to her, she went into them quickly for a heartfelt, if somewhat less energetic, hug.

The duke and duchess turned to Rachel, who had been caught up in hugs by the other couple, her brother Devin, the Earl of Ravenscar, and his wife, Miranda, who was several months along with child. There were more greetings all around, with Richard introducing his new ward to the earl and countess.

“And,” Richard went on, with a smile to Gabriela, “there is someone else who has been eagerly awaiting your arrival. Lady Ravenscar's sister, Miss Veronica Upshaw, is here visiting, and she is just about your age, fifteen last month. Veronica…”

The girl stepped forward, smiling at Gabriela. She was a pretty thing, with light-brown hair and blue eyes, though there was little about her that resembled her sister Miranda. She was, Rachel knew, Miranda's stepsister, rather than any blood relative, the daughter of the woman whom Miranda's father had married when Miranda was in her teens. Mr. and Mrs. Upshaw lived much of the time in London, Miranda had told Rachel, but all had agreed that Devin's country estate was the best place for the young girl. There would be time enough for London in a few years, when she had her coming out.

Rachel smiled a little, thinking that these two girls would probably have their coming out in the same year. The
Ton,
she thought with unabashed delight, would doubtlessly reel under the joint assault upon it by the formidable team of the duchess and the countess. Rachel intended not to miss a party that Season.

Laughing and talking, the group went inside. The girls retreated to Veronica's room upstairs, both of them thrilled at finally having someone their own age to talk to, while the adults returned to the music room, where the two couples had been wiling away the evening before Rachel's arrival.

Their conversation turned first to polite inquiries as to Rachel's trip. With studied calm, Rachel replied, “It was all right, really, except for being stopped by a highwayman.”

The four other people in the room stared at her speechlessly for a long moment. Then Devin sprang to his feet, his ready temper rising. “What? Are you joking?”

“No. Not at all. It was the most peculiar thing.”

“Peculiar!” Dev exclaimed. “That is hardly how I would describe it.”

“Oh, yes, you would, if you had been there.”

“Rachel! Why didn't you tell us immediately?” Miranda cried, getting up a little awkwardly and coming over to her sister-in-law. “Are you all right? You weren't hurt, were you?”

“No. I just lost a few coins, that is all. He did not threaten me at all.”

“What the devil was he doing all the way up here?” Cleybourne asked. “Have you heard anything about this chap before, Dev?”

“No, not a bit. I can scarcely think it would be profitable patroling the byways of Derbyshire.”

“I'm not at all sure that profit was his primary motive. He indicated that he was taking the money mostly for show—so his men would not suspect.”

“What? Suspect what?” Dev looked at Rachel suspiciously. “Are you sure you aren't having us on?”

“No, I promise you. I told you it was most peculiar. He seemed—well, he apparently thought Michael was in the carriage. He said he saw the coat of arms on the door. I'm not sure if he meant he was lying in wait for his carriage—I cannot imagine how he would know that it would be coming by any time soon—or if he was traveling to Westhampton and just stumbled upon us.”

“A highwayman was meeting Michael?” Miranda asked. “Whatever for?”

“He said he wanted to warn Michael. So he told me to give Michael this message—that someone wishes him ill, that Michael is ‘too close,' and there are people who mean to stop him.”

Her words were met with another stunned silence.

“Are you sure you heard him right?” Dev asked finally.

“Yes. Ask Gabriela. She witnessed it all. That is what he said. Then he said he was sorry, but he would have to take something to make it look right, or something like that. And he wanted my emerald studs, but I protested and said they were a bride's gift from Michael, and he took a purse full of coins instead. Then he left.”

“I'm sorry,” Jessica said tentatively. “I don't know Lord Westhampton as well as the rest of you. What did he mean?”

“I don't have any idea,” Rachel replied frankly. “I was hoping Richard or Dev would have some idea—that perhaps there was some sort of male activity involved which you conspired to keep secret from us females. Or from me, at least—so I wouldn't worry or be afraid or something.”

“I haven't a clue,” her brother responded, looking perplexed. “And if I were in on some male secret, you can be sure that Miranda would have wormed it out of my by now.” He cast a fond glance at his wife, who gave him a dimpled smile in return.

“Maybe it is some sort of code,” Miranda mused. “I know Westhampton told me once that he had always been fond of puzzles and things like that.”

“Yes, he is.

“The fellow must have been mad, that is all I can think,” Richard added. “Best thing, I suppose, is to send a message to Westhampton, let him know what happened. Perhaps he, at least, will understand it.”

“Yes, I guess you are right,” Rachel agreed. “I will write him a letter tonight.”

“I shall send one of the grooms up to Westhampton with it first thing tomorrow,” Dev assured her. “I'm sure there's nothing to it, but best be safe, you know.”

So later that night Rachel sat down at the small secretary in her room and dashed off a letter to Michael, telling him everything that the stranger had said to her and adding a few questions of her own. Dev entrusted the missive to his head groom, who would leave at dawn the next morning on one of Dev's excellent horses, so that Michael would know as soon as humanly possible about the strange occurrence.

But knowing that she had done all she could to warn Michael—if, indeed, there was any truth to the highwayman's words—did not bring Rachel peace of mind. As she dressed for bed and took down her hair, her thoughts kept returning to the events of the evening, much as a tongue sought out a sore tooth. Suddenly everything connected to Michael seemed unsure and awkward.

She and Michael were not close in the way that Dev and Miranda, were. There was not that intimacy between them that seemingly only love and passion could bring. But she had thought that she knew Michael well. She knew the subjects that interested him, the foods he liked and disliked. She could have named the tailor and boot maker he frequented, and the clubs to which he belonged, the names of most of his friends and even those of some of the people with whom he corresponded.

However, the encounter with the Cassandra-like highwayman had left her wondering how much she really knew Michael. The man “Red Geordie” had spoken of seemed to be someone altogether different from the Westhampton she knew—a person involved in something that threatened someone else, someone who needed to be warned. Someone who would be acquainted with a highwayman. She kept thinking that the odd man must have been mistaken, that he was talking of another man besides her husband. Yet he said that he had recognized the crest on the side of the carriage. He had called him Westhampton—or had it been she who had offered the name and the man had simply agreed?

Perhaps, as one of the others had suggested, the intruder had been quite mad. Or it was all some bizarre hoax. After all, neither Dev nor Richard had known what the man was talking about; they had been as much in the dark as she. And Richard had been friends with Michael since before Rachel herself had met him. Surely he would know if Michael was somehow involved with a highwayman. But Rachel could not escape the thought that a wife should not have to depend on someone else's knowledge of her husband to be sure of him. Surely she, as his wife, should know him the best of all! Rachel felt sure that if Miranda had been in her situation, she would have known exactly what Dev was involved in.

Rachel sighed as she sat down in front of the vanity and began to brush out her hair. She studied her reflection in the mirror as she did so. She was still an attractive woman, she told herself. Her hair was thick and black, and moonstruck admirers still wrote odes to her green eyes. She had retained the slim figure of her youth, and no wrinkles marred her skin. She was twenty-seven, still young.

She paused in her brushing for a moment, looking intently into the mirror. Had she changed since the day Michael had met her? But she knew the answer to that question—the change had all been inside her.

Her hand tightened involuntarily on her brush. She had married as she was supposed to, as Society expected and her father had demanded. But in doing her duty, she had given up her hopes and dreams. She had denied the longings of her heart.

Rachel could still remember the awful pain of her decision. There had been nothing else she could do, she knew. Her father had been right; had she not married Michael, it would have been scandal and ruin for her family and herself—as well as for Michael, who had been entirely innocent in the whole matter. She had done what she had to do, but in doing so she had condemned her heart to despair. She had married Michael and had said goodbye to the man she loved.

R
achel remembered with clarity the evening that she first met Michael. It had been at a rout of Lady Wetherford's, a boring crush of an affair, attended, it seemed, by half of London Society. She could not remember exactly who had been there; indeed, she only vaguely recalled Lady Wetherford introducing her and her mother to Lord Westhampton. Her first impression of him had been merely that of a tall blond man, several years older than she and good-looking in a rather nondescript way. Knowing Michael as she did now, Rachel felt sure that he had been impeccably but plainly dressed, his clothes dark and formal and nothing that would attract attention. He would have been the perfect picture of an English gentleman, for, indeed, that was what Michael was.

But Rachel had paid little attention to him, smiling—for that evening she had been able to do little else but smile, so radiant was the feeling inside her—and returning the usual polite chitchat about the weather and the crush of the party and the opera, which she had attended the evening before. All the time they had talked, her senses had been tuned to the rest of the room, seeking out the same person whom she sought at every social occasion, the man who had engendered her radiant joy that night. For she remembered the evening, not because of Michael, but because that was the night when Anthony Birkshaw had told her that he loved her.

Even now, a faint smile touched Rachel's face at the memory.

 

Rachel was nineteen, and in the midst of her first Season. It was a year late in coming, a result of her family's usual state of impecunity. Cleybourne, her older sister's husband, had given her mother the money for Rachel's debut the next year, and Rachel was well aware that it was up to her to do her best to recoup the family's fortunes. Few expected her to attain her sister's success, for Caroline had married a duke, the highest rung on the ladder of nobility. But Rachel had the Aincourt good looks and a pleasing personality, and her family was one of the best in England—albeit one seemingly incapable of holding on to money. It was generally expected that she, too, would make a good marriage.

Rachel did not question her role in such plans. It was, after all, the way people of her class married. There were no longer the arranged marriages of old, of course, where a wedding was primarily an alliance of two families for purposes of wealth, power and political advancement, and the couple might not even have met each other before their wedding day. But, still, the aristocracy did not marry for love, as her mother had drummed into her head from childhood; they married for the good of their family, both present and future.

In the case of the Aincourt family, this dictum nearly always translated into marrying wealth. For generations the earls of Ravenscar had gained and lost money, but more gold, it seemed, left their hands than entered them. The reason for this, Rachel's narrowly and dogmatically religious father believed, was a Papist curse laid on the head of the first Earl of Ravenscar, who was given Branton Abbey during the Dissolution by his friend King Henry VIII as a reward for his loyalty and friendship. Edward Aincourt, Lord Ravenscar, had torn down the abbey and used its stones to build his family's home. The Abbot of Branton, legend said, had had to be dragged out bodily from the abbey, and as Ravenscar's men had done so, the abbot had laid a curse upon the earl and all his descendants, declaring that “none who live within these stones shall ever know happiness.”

Whether it was the result of the curse or simply the nature of a family too given to pride and profligacy, it was true that the Aincourts had rarely been happy in affairs of either the heart or the purse. It was good, everyone agreed, that the Aincourts were also a family tall and graceful in stature and of handsome mien, for they were always able to replenish their fortunes through marriage—though there were those who pointed out that it was perhaps this tendency that doomed them to live out the curse's prophecy of unhappiness.

In this particular generation of Aincourts, the lack of money had grown acute. The earl, a religious man of stern views, had not extended his religious beliefs to living an ascetic life. He loved to live well and buy beautiful things, as had his father before him, and as a result, the family fortunes had declined at an ever greater rate. It was generally considered up to the daughters of the family to provide for the family, as the earl had parted with his only son, Devin, the heir to the family title and what remained of the family fortune. Devin had, in his teen years, given himself over to a life of what his father deemed pagan excess, for years loving a married woman and refusing to marry as his father wished.

So Rachel dutifully expected to marry as her father determined, but she could not help but dream secretly that her marriage would turn out to be one of love as well as duty, as her sister Caroline's had been. Everyone knew that the Duke of Cleybourne loved his wife to distraction, and she had seemed to love him in return, though later the truth of her feelings had been proven to be more shallow. At the very least, Rachel intended to enjoy her time on the marriage market, wearing the new dresses and ball gowns bought for her debut, going to parties and balls and fetes, enjoying the plays and operas and other amusements that London had to offer a girl who had spent most of her life on a crumbling estate in Derbyshire.

Rachel was an immediate, dazzling success. Her life was a whirl of social activities that would have left anyone but a vibrant young girl exhausted. She received her invitation to Almack's. Every dance saw her card filled within minutes after her arrival. She had a choice of corsages sent by hopeful suitors for every ball, and there was never a shortage of young men calling at her house.

But Rachel had eyes for only one man. She met Anthony Birkshaw two weeks into the Season, and as soon as she saw him, she knew that this was the man of her dreams. He was a well set up young gentleman a few years older than she, with a frank and open manner that charmed her instantly. His hair was dark brown, thick and falling carelessly over his forehead, and his eyes, she thought, were those of a poet—large and brown, rimmed with thick, sooty black lashes.

And he was, miraculously, as taken with her as she was with him. He did not, of course, make a cake of himself as Jasper Hopkins was wont to do by dancing the two dances with her that were all that was proper from a young man not a girl's fiancé, then pointedly standing apart and watching her the rest of the evening, not dancing with any other girl. Anthony was all that was proper and courteous, dancing and chatting with other young women, not devoting himself so exclusively to Rachel that he caused gossip.

That night, after their waltz together, as they had taken a long promenade around the ballroom, Anthony had told Rachel that he loved her. Her feet had scarcely touched the floor the rest of the evening.

She spent the rest of the summer in a giddy state of love. Given the assiduous way young unmarried girls were chaperoned, she was almost never alone with Anthony. Their love subsisted on looks, daydreams and waltzes. She “ran into” him now and then as she walked with her maid to or from the lending library, fueling a renewed love of reading. When he sent her a posy, she slept with it by her bed, and when it began to wither, she carefully pressed the flowers between heavy books and saved them. Every now and then, at some huge rout or ball, they were able to sneak away together for a few moments, get lost in the crowd after a dance or during a midnight supper, and find a spot in the gardens or some dim alcove in the house. There, briefly, they could whisper of their feelings, pour out the excitement that thrummed in them whenever they were together, even exchange a chaste kiss or two. Rachel lived for those moments.

Lost in her haze of love, Rachel was scarcely aware of how often Lord Westhampton came to call or led her onto the dance floor. She was too wrapped up in Anthony to take much notice of any of her other suitors, but she had not even put Michael among that group. He was almost ten years older than she, as well as a friend of Caroline's husband, and she merely assumed that he was part of the circle of friends around the duke and duchess. As she and her family were living for the Season at the enormous Cleybourne House, their own house in London having been sold some years before, it did not seem untoward to her that one of the duke's friends often came to call or was frequently included on their various outings. He did not form part of the circle of young men around her at parties, maneuvering to be the one to bring her a glass of punch, pick up a dropped glove or lead her down to supper. Had she been older or less naive, she would have realized that his absence had in fact signaled to her parents a more serious intent. He was too mature and important, too serious in his regard, to have joined the group who pursued her. He was not a man who wanted to flirt and admire; he was a man who intended to marry.

She did not think much about him, but if she had, she would have said that she liked Lord Westhampton. He was quiet, a good listener, and if she made a social gaffe or a naive remark, he would only smile a little and smooth it over. Because she did not count him as one of her circle of admirers, she did not feel any pressure to sparkle or enchant him as she did with many other young men. Though she was not interested in any of them except Anthony, it was accepted that the number of suitors in one's circle was the mark of a young woman's success in the
Ton,
so it would not do for people to see that the knot of admirers around one was shrinking away. So she had to flirt without seeming bold, had to be witty and lively and respond to their attempts at wit without ever seeming to favor one over the others.

With Westhampton, she found, she could talk more easily. She did not worry about trying to appeal to him or needing to maintain a certain image. She simply treated him as she always had any of her older brother's or sister's friends. It did not take her long to realize that if she had a problem concerning social etiquette or needed to find out who someone was and where they fit into the pattern of the
ton,
Lord Westhampton was the person to ask.

Then, one day late in July, her father called her mother and her into the library. Her heart speeded up a little, and her cheeks flushed attractively. Such a summons from Ravenscar meant something important was up, and her thoughts jumped instinctively to Anthony Birkshaw. He had asked Ravenscar for her hand in marriage! In her young, love-drunk mind, it was the only possible outcome to the summer.

Her father stood behind one of the library tables, looking large and imposing, as he always did. Rachel had grown up fearing the man. Stern and religious, with no sense of humor, the Earl of Ravenscar had little liking or understanding of children. He rarely saw his own progeny except on Sundays, when the family went to the church in the village and afterward endured a long reading from the Bible by the earl, followed by a careful catechism from him concerning their religious training at the vicarage and what particular sins they had committed that week. He lived by the precept that children were placed on earth to honor and obey their father, and any form of rebellion was immediately and thoroughly quashed.

The youngest of the three children, Rachel had grown up seeing the battles that raged between the earl and his son, finally ending in a cataclysmic rupture in which Ravenscar had thrown Devin out of the house and told him that he would no longer be received there. Since that time, Rachel had not seen her beloved older brother until this summer. The aching hurt and loss of that split, the terror of her father's purple-faced rage, were indelibly imprinted on her psyche. Rachel had managed to avoid such painful and frightening confrontations by staying out of her father's sight as much as possible and never crossing him openly. Her thoughts were her own, but she was careful never to reveal them to Ravenscar.

On that particular day almost seven years ago, however, her father was smiling and pleased. “Well, Rachel,” he said cheerfully, “I imagine you have some idea why I've called you in here today.”

“I—I think so,” Rachel answered a little hesitantly. She would not have thought her father would have been this pleased about Anthony's proposal. She knew nothing about his finances, of course, but he was a younger son of a younger son, his lineage perfectly respectable, of course, but without a title or any prospects for one, and not, she would have assumed, a man of such wealth as to make her father beam with pleasure.

“I'll warrant you do,” Ravenscar went on in a hearty avuncular way. “Lord Westhampton is quite a catch. Not a duke, of course, like your sister…” He gave this little quip the chuckle he thought it deserved, and went on. “But still an excellent prospect. Title. Lands. Family dating back to one of William the Conqueror's barons. Yes, I am quite pleased that Westhampton has taken such a fancy to you. Offering a very generous settlement, of course—haven't worked out the details yet. Of course, he wants to ask you the question himself. But I think we all know what your answer will be, eh?”

“Lord—Lord Westhampton?” Rachel got out through suddenly bloodless lips. There was a strange roaring in her ears, and she thought for a dreadful moment that she might actually faint. “Lord Westhampton has asked for my hand?”

“Why, yes.” Her father cast her a look of surprise that quickly turned dark and suspicious. “Why? Were you thinking it was someone else? Have you given your affections to another?” His voice rose with each question until it was close to a shout.

“Nonsense,” Rachel heard her mother say smoothly, moving up to wrap a hand around her daughter's arm. “Of course she has not given her affections anywhere. I am sure she was just surprised that a man of such consequence as Lord Westhampton had been so taken by her. Any young woman of proper modesty would be. He is quite a catch, as you said, especially for a mere slip of a girl.”