“I’m not asking you to marry him tomorrow,” he said now in a reasonable tone. “All you have to do is go to his mother’s house tonight and meet the man. After that, you can take all the time you want getting to know him.”
“I doubt I shall want to get to know him. He probably has spindly calves and squinty eyes and…and thinning hair. Why else is his family so eager to marry him off? Even without money, an earl should be a good catch. Surely there are wealthy Englishmen who would be willing to sell their daughters for a title.”
“Are you saying I’m selling you?” her father retorted indignantly. “That’s a fine thing to say about a man who’s trying to give you one of the oldest and best names in this country. If there’s any selling going on, I’m the one buying him for you.”
“But I don’t want him.” Miranda knew as well as her father did that in reality he was wanting to buy a son-in-law for himself more than a husband for Miranda. Ever since Miranda could remember, Joseph had been an Anglophile, reading everything he could get his hands on about the English aristocracy—their rankings, their histories, their estates. He was fascinated with English castles and mansions, and wanted desperately to get his hands on one.
“How can you turn him down when you haven’t even seen the man?” he asked her now. “He’s an earl. You would be a countess! Just think how pleased Elizabeth would be. As soon as she’s feeling not so under the weather, I’m going to tell her all about it. She will be thrilled.”
“I am sure she will,” Miranda replied dryly. Her stepmother, Elizabeth, herself English, was even more enamored of the idea of Miranda marrying British nobility than Joseph was. She had come from a ‘good family’ herself, she was fond of telling whoever would listen; and the improvident, impetuous husband who had brought her to New York, then committed the final folly of catching a chill and dying, leaving her stranded in the New World with a baby daughter, had come from a family even higher up the social scale. Her dream was for her daughter Veronica, now fourteen, to live in the world of British aristocracy—to have her coming out, to hobnob with the members of the Ton, to marry a suitably noble husband. The easiest method of accomplishing this dream, she had decided, was for Miranda to marry into the aforesaid aristocracy and then bring Veronica out in a few years.
“You know how fond I am of Elizabeth,” Miranda went on. “She is the only mother I’ve ever known, and she has always been quite kind to me.” Possessed of a kind, easygoing, and rather lazy nature, Elizabeth had never mistreated her stepdaughter or tried to take away control of the household from her. Indeed, Elizabeth much preferred letting someone else handle all the troublesome details of keeping a large house with numerous servants running, for it allowed her to concentrate on her various “illnesses.” “And I love Veronica, too.”
“I know you do.” Her father beamed at her. “You’ve always been like a little mother to that child.” “But that doesn’t mean,” Miranda went on firmly, “that I am going to marry someone just because Elizabeth wants Veronica to make her debut in London society.”
“That’s not the only reason,” Joseph protested. “There’s a grand estate in Derbyshire. And a house—not a castle, grant you, but almost big enough to be one. Darkwater. Now there’s a name for you. Doesn’t it conjure up history? Romance? The Earl of Ravenscar. My God, girl, is your heart dead?”
“No, Papa, it is not. And I will be the first to admit that it’s a very romantic name—although, I might point out, a wee bit spooky.”
“All the better. There are probably ghosts.” Her father looked delighted at the thought.
“Happy thought.”
“Yes, isn’t it?” Joseph Upshaw was immune to irony at the moment. His eyes sparkled and his face positively glowed as he began to talk about the house he had spent the evening before discussing with Lady Ravenscar. “The house was built by one of Henry VIII’s closest friends and supporters. He built the main hall during Henry’s reign. Then, when his son inherited and grew even more prosperous during Elizabeth’s rule, he added two wings onto it to form the classic E-shaped Elizabethan mansion. It’s grand, but it’s falling into complete ruin. Rot in the wood…tapestries in shreds…stone crumbling.” He related the problems of the house with zest, ending, “And we can restore it! Can you imagine the opportunity? The house, the grounds, the estate. We could rebuild it all.”
“It does sound delightful,” Miranda agreed truthfully.
Real estate was one of her primary interests. During her father’s years of dealing with John Jacob Astor, she had had many conversations with that shrewd gentleman, and she had wisely followed his advice and had invested much of her father’s profits in real estate in Manhattan. The risks had already paid off handsomely, and Miranda was sure they would provide even more income in the future. The speculation of buying land to sell at a future date for high profits was fun, but what she truly enjoyed was developing projects—buying land and building something on it that she could then rent to someone, or investing in another’s plan to build or expand or create.
So the thought of restoring a grand old house to its former glory did appeal to her, and she had lived with her father for too long not to have absorbed a great deal of interest in British history and architecture. But she did not want to renovate an estate so much that she was willing to marry to acquire it.
With the look of one delivering the coup de grace, her father went on proudly, “It even has a curse.”
Miranda raised her eyebrows. “A curse? That would be splendid, I’m sure.”
“Oh, it is indeed. ‘Tis a wonderful curse. There was a powerful abbey in Derbyshire, you see—Branton Abbey—and during the Dissolution, when Henry VIII seized all the monastic lands and goods, he took this abbey and gave it to his good friend Edward Aincourt. Well, the abbot at Branton was a tough old coot, and he didn’t go easily. As they dragged him out of the church, he cursed the king and he cursed Aincourt. He cursed the very stones of the abbey, saying that nothing would ever prosper there and ‘no one who lives within these stones shall ever know happiness.’”
He looked at her triumphantly.
“Well. That is an impressive curse,” Miranda admitted. She knew her father’s love of drama and romance too well to be surprised to think that he would find a ruined, cursed house the perfect spot for his beloved daughter to live. To Joseph Upshaw, such a place would be a treasure.
“Isn’t it? They say that Capability Brown did the original gardens. Miranda…how can you pass up an opportunity like this? It isn’t only the house and grounds that need restoring, you know. Apparently the whole estate is also a financial wreck. You could rebuild that, as well. It could be one of your projects.”
Miranda chuckled. “That all sounds very delightful, I’m sure, but there is still the fact that in order to get my hands on the house and the estate and all that, I would have to marry a complete stranger.”
“He wouldn’t have to be a stranger by the time you married him,” Joseph pointed out. “You could have a long engagement, if you wish. We could start to work on the house in the meantime.”
Miranda smiled at her father and shook her head. “I am not marrying, Papa, just because you are bored. Talk about wanting a project…”
“But this would be the project of a lifetime! And it’s not just because I’m bored since I sold out to Mr. Astor. You know I’ve wanted to get my hands on a grand old house like that for years.” He paused, considering her, then went
