a thin, silvery note. ‘My goodness, look at the time,’ Laura said and stood up, half-expecting to find her legs would not support her. ‘I must go and...and fetch something from the village. Something I promised Mab,’ she added. She had the doorknob in her hand before he turned and she was out of the room before he spoke.
‘Caroline—’
‘Tomorrow,’ she called back over her shoulder. ‘I really must go now.’
* * *
He had shocked her. First by taking her instinctive concern as an excuse to kiss her and then by talking of battlefields and death. Avery watched the garden, but there was no sign of Caroline, so she must have taken the front path to the village lane. Tomorrow he would apologise. Now he had to shake off this mood before Alice came home.
Do you regret it? Caroline had asked. Regret was hardly the word, furious resentment was more like it. Damn it, he was not going to be plunged into this mental morass every time he came into this room to get a book. He could remove the portrait and the sword to the attic, but that would be cowardly. This had been Piers’s home and his mother would have wanted them there. Alice must grow up knowing what her...her cousin looked like, hearing stories of his courage.
He had failed Piers when he could not stop him buying a commission and, somehow, he had failed him if the younger man had been capable of such muddle-headed thinking about where his duty lay. Avery found the book he had been looking for and deliberately sat down at the desk to check the reference he was looking for instead of taking it to his study. If he had caved in and let Piers stay and marry Lady Laura Campion, he might have been killed in the next skirmish after he landed in Spain. He could have drowned on the transport ship. He could have contracted a fever and died of that.
And he would have been leg-shackled to a chit of a girl who had been loose enough to throw her hat over the windmill for a handsome face in a scarlet coat and who then hadn’t the backbone to cope with what being an officer’s wife would mean. He had read the few bloodstained tatters that were all that remained of the letter that Piers had in his breast pocket when he was killed: nothing but anger and petulance. And yet his cousin had kept it against his heart and it was probably the last thing he read. No soldier deserved to have those words ringing in his ears as he fought and died. Coward...betrayal...I hate...I’m pregnant...fault...Laura.
There were not many young ladies by that name and fewer still who vanished from the social scene because of a family crisis at a distant estate. He had gone to find Lady Laura, telling himself that Piers would have wanted him to, driven by grief and anger at the fates and at himself. When he tracked her down, the word locally was that Lady Laura was not well and consumption was feared. That was enough to keep visitors away.
Avery had had to return to his duties abroad, so he had bided his time, watched the calendar, paid a skilful agent to spy, to intercept the mails before they reached the receiving office. The girl had sent the baby away, far away, he learned. After that it was simple. Wait a short while, then a few weeks’ leave and he was back in Vienna with Alice.
The agent was rewarded well for his discretion and for the reports he continued to send about Lady Laura Campion. She had returned to London society, but not heartbroken, not crushed by the shame or by giving away her child. Of course she’d had to do it, no lady in her position could have survived it becoming public knowledge that she had given birth out of wedlock. Her reputation would have been shredded if she had kept the baby.
But surely she could have kept the child close and found a respectable family where she could visit without suspicion to watch over her growing daughter? To have sent her to the other end of the country, to a remote dale and the hard life of a small farmer’s child, that argued a complete lack of concern for anything but a swift removal of an embarrassment.
Scandal’s Virgin they call her, Lambton had written. She’s the fastest of all the débutantes, she spends money like water and they say she leaves broken hearts behind her like so much smashed crockery. The chaperons shake their heads, the matrons are scandalised, the gossip sheets love her and the men pursue. The betting books in the clubs are full of her name—but no one can claim on the wagers because, it seems, she always stops just this side of ruin. An arrant flirt...
Avery could think of other words to describe Lady Laura Campion. Any guilt he might have felt at taking the baby vanished. If she had been heartbroken over Piers, if she had led a quiet, respectable life and married a decent man after an interval of mourning for Piers, then he would have experienced severe qualms about what he had done.
But Alice did not deserve a mother like that, a woman who showed no sign of mourning her dead lover or the loss of her child. He would move heaven and earth to make sure Alice never knew who she was. Sooner or later he was going to have to make up some fairy story for the child, create some perfect woman to be her mother and some satisfying, if romantically sad, reason why he could not marry her.
Not long now before he was in London and then he would see her, this witch who had so turned Piers’s head that he forgot his honour and his duty, this lady with the heart of a harlot who had sent her own child far away so she could wallow in pleasure and break hearts as she had broken his cousin’s heart.
* * *
‘We are leaving. Now. Today.’
‘What? Why?’ Mab dropped the laundry basket onto the kitchen table with a thump.
‘That man....’ Her voice was shaking so much she had to stop, grip the edge of the table and breathe hard before she could steady it. ‘That man forced Piers to go back to Spain before he could marry me. He called him a coward and he got him in such a muddle about his duty and his honour that he went—and he was killed.’
‘Lovey, he might have been killed whenever he went back.’
‘I know.’ Laura sank onto the nearest chair. ‘But he would have married me and Alice would be legitimate and Piers would not have died with that worry on his mind.’
‘He knew?’ Mab sat down, too.
‘I wrote and it would have caught the next ship out. I think, from the timing, he could have received it. Perhaps I should not have done it, but I was so frightened and all I could think of was that I had to tell him.’ I feel such a coward. It seems like a betrayal of everything I told you I could be as a soldier’s wife. I hate to worry you, but I am pregnant with our child. Please don’t blame yourself, we were both at fault, but write, I beg you, tell me what to do... There had never been a response, only the news of his death.
‘I dare not risk being near Lord Wykeham or I will say something I regret, I know I will. I cannot believe I kept my tongue between my teeth just now as it is.’ She covered her face with her hands as if the blackness could somehow bring a measure of calm. ‘The boy from the Golden Lion can take the gig into Hemel Hempstead and give a message to Michael to bring the carriage right away.’ She got to her feet and ran to the front parlour to scribble a note for her coachman, who was waiting at one of the big coaching inns and enjoying a quiet country holiday while he did so. ‘If you go to the Golden Lion now with this, I will start packing.’
Mab, her bonnet jammed on her head and her mouth set in a grim line, marched in and took the note. ‘Don’t you be putting your back out pulling that trunk out of the cupboard,’ was all she said before she banged out of the front door.
Laura pulled another sheet of paper towards her and wrote as swiftly as her shaking hand allowed.
Dearest Alice,
I am
