‘This little shop of yours is doing mighty well, I hear!’
Just then a young woman with curly brown hair burst in from the back room. ‘Madame, should I tell the girls—excuse me, I had no idea you had company!’
Gabby—Belle’s French assistant—bobbed a curtsy to Edward, whose eyes, Belle noted with exasperation, lit up at the sight of her. Belle replied, more curtly than she meant to, ‘I’ll be with you shortly, Gabby. Yes, send Jenny and Susan home by all means, and thank them for all their hard work today, will you?’
‘Of course, madame! But there is something else—’
Belle interrupted, ‘Tell me later, would you?’
Edward watched Gabby go, then started talking again. ‘I just need a little more money, Belle.’
‘To pay your hotel bill? To pay for yet more new clothes? Edward, I am not doing well enough to repay your debts as well as my own.’ Belle had sat rather suddenly in one of the dainty gilt chairs her customers used.
‘But your business is thriving. You must be plump in the pocket!’ Edward, who was two years younger than she was, eagerly pulled up a chair to sit opposite her—admiring, she noticed, his own reflection in a nearby mirror. He was slenderly built and with the same shade of green eyes as she, the same raven black hair. But there was a hint of wilfulness, of weakness about his mouth. ‘You have clients galore,’ he went on, ‘you have servants! And dash it, Belle, you’re being as ratty as when you came back from Sawle Down that day in March, all of a stew about something.’
If Edward had been in any way perceptive, he’d have seen how his sister’s cheeks became a little paler. ‘I was saying goodbye to the land that was once ours,’ she said quietly. ‘As for my servants, Edward, as you call them, I have Gabby, two assistants and a manservant—Matt—who works for me a few hours a week. That’s all.’
Edward shrugged. ‘Yes, but you live the high life, sister mine—you’re always being invited to routs and parties. And when you stayed with me and Charlotte you said you were even thinking of setting up another shop in Bath!’
‘It came to naught,’ she answered rather tightly.
‘Hmm.’ Bored already, Edward was picking up a little silk fan. ‘Nice trinket, this.’
Belle snatched at it and put it down with something of a snap. ‘Edward—’ she was gazing directly at her younger brother ‘—Edward, I think you’d better tell me everything.’
So he did. And Belle’s heart sank almost as low as she’d known it, while Edward recounted the entire sorry tale. In which everyone in the world was at fault, except, of course, himself.
At twenty-one Edward had inherited the Hathersleigh family’s estate near Bath—or what remained of it—and within the year he’d married his sweetheart, Charlotte. By the time of their wedding Belle was living in London. And whenever she saw Edward he was forever telling her how the estate was thriving, and, of course, how clever he was.
Just over a year ago he’d announced to her that he’d sold a large portion of the estate’s land to a neighbour—Adam Davenant. Belle had felt apprehension and more. She’d never met the man. He owned, she was aware, estates all over the country and wasn’t often in Somerset. But she knew her father had loathed Davenant—called him a money-grubbing upstart.
‘Did you have to sell to him, Edward?’ Belle had asked at the time.
‘Yes,’ Edward said flatly, ‘and Davenant was desperate to buy. You know what all these new-money families are like, Belle. They want as many acres as possible in hopes of making themselves respectable.’
Belle had grieved the loss of the land at Sawle Down, but had hoped that Edward would concentrate on making a success of what remained of their ancestral estate near Bath. Hoped that marriage and family responsibilities might perhaps be the making of him.
Some hope. The amount Davenant offered for the land had, in fact, turned out to be derisory—though he was now set to make a fortune from his purchase, because the sudden surge in price of Bath stone had made the old quarry there workable once more.
He must have known. Must have deliberately set out to swindle them. And now, with the London dusk closing in around her and Edward staring at her with that half-defiant, half-scared look that she knew of old, Belle rubbed her temples with her fingertips as her brother told her anew—rather resentfully, as if it were her fault—that last summer’s harvest had been a poor one, thanks to the rain that had ruined his wheat. ‘And the taxes, Belle! Last year this blasted government brought in new taxes on barley, on farm horses—anything that grew or moved, basically!’
Then Edward proceeded to remind her that the roof of Hathersleigh Manor had needed replacing entirely. ‘Uncle Philip neglected the place so badly,’ Edward complained. ‘The roof had to be fixed, or the thing would have caved in.’
Their father’s brother, the dour Philip Hathersleigh, had overseen the estate from their father’s death fourteen years ago until Edward reached his majority. Belle didn’t feel particularly close to Uncle Philip—even less to his shrewish wife Mildred—but she’d formed the opinion that Philip was a sound, careful man whose advice Edward had rashly spurned, with the result that Uncle Philip and his wife had retreated back to their estate in the north with little love lost.
‘Look after the paperwork, young man,’ Uncle Philip had said grimly to Edward. ‘And get yourself sound legal advice, if you want to stand any chance of holding your inheritance together.’
Edward had blithely ignored Uncle Philip’s warnings; her brother’s desk, Belle couldn’t help but notice on her March visit, was overflowing with neglected files and unread correspondence. And, of course, with bills.
‘So the new roof and taxes got you into debt,’ she now said steadily. From the back of the shop she could hear the merry voices of her assistants making their departure. Could hear Gabby’s laughter and Matt’s deep voice as he began to lock up. ‘Surely though, Edward,’ went on Belle, trying to keep calm, ‘the income from the estate could have kept your debts at bay?’
‘I did get on top of my debts, Belle. Or at least, I thought I had. You see, back in February—it was just before you came to stay with us, actually—I sold some of the sheep from that land Davenant purchased from me last year.’
‘You did—what?’ breathed Belle. She felt suddenly cold.
Edward shrugged, but his cheeks were pink. ‘I sold some of Davenant’s stock. He’s so rich I thought he wouldn’t even notice.’
Belle said, ‘You stole from him. Oh, Edward. You stole from that man.’
Edward jumped to his feet and walked around the candlelit shop with his hands thrust defiantly in the pockets of his new coat. ‘Stealing? Hardly—his sheep had strayed because he’d not bothered maintaining his fences. And dash it all, Belle, you could say that Davenant was stealing from me, you know? He paid me a pitiful amount for that land I sold him and if that isn’t stealing, I don’t know what is! Belle—Belle, are you all right?’
A spring evening, on Sawle Down. A stranger, whose arrogance had made her cheeks burn. Are you querying his right to this land? he’d asked cuttingly. And he’d only been one of Davenant’s labourers.
