but he saw her gloved fingers tighten on the sticks of her fan, saw her sudden intake of breath against the satin of her bodice. She wasn’t indifferent to him. Whatever this strange, sudden spell was, he wasn’t in it alone.
‘Miss Bancroft,’ John said, giving the girl a bow. ‘Very nice to see you again.’
‘And you, Lord John,’ she answered, her voice low and soft, musical, with a flash of gentle humour in its depths. ‘It is a most dutiful brother who would brave a Drawing Room for his sister.’
John laughed and half-turned. ‘May I present my very good friend, Hayden Fitzwalter, the Earl of Ramsay? He especially asked to make your acquaintance. Hayden, this is Miss Jane Bancroft.’
‘How do you do?’ she murmured. She made a little curtsy and slowly held out her hand to him.
Her fingers trembled a bit as he folded them in his own, and her cheeks turned a deeper pink. Jane, Jane.
And in that moment he was utterly lost…
Curiosus Semper.
Careful Always. Jane had to laugh as she tore a trailing veil of ivy away from the stone garden bench and saw the motto carved there. The letters were faded with time, encrusted with the moss and dirt of neglect, but they were still visible. She would wager her ancestors never could have foreseen how sadly ironic those words would be for their family.
She stood up and dusted some of the soil and leaves from her gloved hands. Her shoulders ached from kneeling there, clearing away some of the tenaciously clinging vines, but it was a good ache. Work meant she didn’t have to think. And there was plenty of work to be done at Barton Park.
As she stretched, she studied the house that loomed across the garden. Barton Park had belonged to the Bancrofts for centuries, a gift to one of their ancestors from Charles II. Legend had it that the house was part of the payment in exchange for that long-ago Bancroft marrying one of the king’s many cast-off mistresses. But the marriage, against all odds, was a happy one, and the couple went on to make Barton Park a centre of raucous parties and all sorts of debauchery.
Just the sort of place Hayden would have liked, Jane often thought. Perhaps if she had been more like that first mistress of Barton Park things between them could have worked out. But the Bancrofts that followed were quieter, more scholarly, and not as adept at accumulating royal gifts. Their fortune dwindled until by the time of Jane’s father there was little left but the house itself, which was already crumbling with neglect.
Little but the legend of the treasure. The old tale about how one of the first Barton Park Bancrofts’ many licentious guests had dabbled in highway robbery and had hidden his ill-gotten treasure somewhere in the garden. Jane’s father, as he grew sicker and sicker, had become obsessed with the idea of this treasure. He told Jane the story of it over and over, even sending her out to try digging in various spots around the grounds.
Then he died and her mother had told her different tales. Harder, more bitter stories about the truth of a woman’s insecure place in the world, of how finding the right husband—a rich husband—was all that mattered. Jane was frightened to think she might be right. Money and position could bring security, of course, and she craved that so much after the uncertainties of her childhood. But surely there must be more? Must be some chance of a happy family? Of being a good wife and mother, despite the poor example she had always seen before her.
Then her mother also died and Jane went to have a London Season with her aunt while Emma was sent to school.
Both those destinations had ended badly for the Bancroft sisters. Jane had found she had more of her fanciful father in her than she ever would have thought. She had imagined she had found a fairy tale, a happy-ever-after with Hayden, until she discovered she was in love with an illusion, a man who never really existed except in her dreams. She didn’t know how to fit into his world and he couldn’t help her. They had been so young, so foolish to think that they could even try, that their passion in the bedroom could be enough to make a life together.
So her father had been wrong in relying on fairy stories. But so had her mother. A rich husband was not all a woman needed.
Jane tossed her trowel and garden gloves into a bucket and examined the house. Barton Park was not a large dwelling, but once it had been very pretty, a red brick faded to a soft pink, centred around a white-stone portico and surrounded by gardens, a mysterious hedge maze and a pretty Chinoiserie summerhouse. Now the stone was chipped, some of the windows cracked and the lovely gardens sadly overgrown. She hadn’t gone in the hedge maze at all since she moved back.
Jane did her best. She and Emma lived on a small bequest from their mother’s family, which Hayden could probably claim if he wanted, but it was surely too insignificant to interest him. It paid for their food, a cook, a maid, fuel for the fires, but not a carriage or a team of gardeners. No grand parties, but she had had her fill of those in London. She had found she wasn’t at all good at them, either attending or hosting them. There could be money from Hayden, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
Jane sighed as she pushed the loose tendrils of her brown hair back into her scarf. Emma was sixteen now. In a couple of years she should have a London Season, though Jane had no idea how to pay for it or how to weather London gossip in order to launch her.
Not that Emma seemed in the least bit interested in a Season. She was a strange girl, always buried in books about botany or running off to the woods to collect ‘specimens’ or bring home new pets like rabbits or hedgehogs. She liked the quiet life in the country as much as Jane did. They both needed its peace. But Jane knew it couldn’t go on for ever.
That was why she had forced herself to write to Hayden after all these years. It had taken days of agonising before she could take up that pen to write the letter and even more before she could send it. Then there was…
Nothing. The days had gone by in silence with no answer at all from her husband.
Her husband. Jane pressed her hand to her stomach with the spasm of pain that always came when she thought those words. She remembered Hayden as she had last seen him, sprawled asleep on the stairs of their London house. Her husband, as beautiful as a fallen angel. How horribly they had disappointed each other. Failed each other.
She tried so hard not to think about him. Not to think about how things were when they first married, when she had been so naïve and full of hope. So dazzled by Hayden and what he gave to her. By who he was and the delights they found together in the bedchamber. She tried not to think about the babies, and about how losing those tiny, fragile lives showed her how hollow and empty everything was. She couldn’t even fulfil her main duty as a countess.
During the day it was easy not to think about it all. There was so much work to be done, the gardens to be cleared, the meagre accounts to go over, a few neighbourhood friends to call on or join for tea or cards. But at night—at night it was so different.
In the silence and the darkness there was nothing but the memories. She remembered everything about their days together, the good and the bad. How they had laughed together; how he had made her feel when he kissed her, touched her. How in those moments she had felt not so alone any longer, even though it was all an illusion in the end. She wondered how he was now, what he was doing. And then she wanted to sob for what was lost, for what had never really been except in her dreams.
Yes. Except for those nights, life would be very tolerable indeed. But it wasn’t just Emma’s future she needed to think about, it was her
