behind him.
Chapter One
‘Promise you will, Victoria.’ The whispered words were thready and Victoria Hart inclined her head closer to her husband.
A thin-skinned, thick-veined hand trembled out and rested upon the crumpled black satin of her hair. He stirred it beneath his fingers. ‘Promise me, my dear, that you will write to him and tell him. I want you to do it now…this minute.’
‘Hush,’ Victoria soothed, closing wet grey eyes to shield her grief from him. ‘You can write yourself when you are feeling a little better.’ The words were gasped out as she battled against the tears threatening to close her throat at such futile comfort. She half turned for a sideways glance at Dr Gibson by the shadowy doorway. Leaping flames in the hearth revealed his stooped silhouette and the negative swaying of his head.
Her husband attempted a wry, appreciative laugh at her sweet, hopeless encouragement but it made him wheeze and he fought to regain his breath. ‘Will you do it now, for your poor old Danny?’ he eventually squeezed out on a long, painful sigh. ‘And will you promise that Samuel takes it today for the letter-carrier? For I want him to receive it in time. He is all the kin I have, apart from you.’ As he sighed into the silence, there was a faint, appealing smile for his beautiful young wife.
Victoria nodded her dark head beneath his fleshless palm and cold, dry fingers drifted across her warm, wet cheek before falling back to the coverlet.
‘Thank you, Victoria.’ Relaxing at her wordless vow, Daniel Hart allowed speckled lids to droop over colourless eyes. ‘You know what you have promised me, my dear. No widow’s weeds…not for your Danny. Nor moping about indoors away from the young people you like. Never deprive yourself of your youth, or anyone of your sweet company. It is what I want, you know that, and others will too. It is a condition of my bequest, witnessed and sealed.’ A dry chuckle preceded his next words. ‘What care we for convention…you and I…eh, my dear?’ He patted her slender white fingers in a gesture of dismissal.
As the rustling of her skirts told him she had risen from kneeling by his bedside, he murmured, ‘There is something else you have to promise me, Victoria.’ Into the rasping silence he finally breathed, ‘Promise me you won’t cry any more…’
David Hardinge, Viscount Courtenay of Hawkesmere in the county of Berkshire, paused while dictating and smiled. So infrequent a show of consideration and humour was this that Jacob Robinson, clerk and general factotum to the Viscount, actually ceased his frantic note-scribbling to stare at his master. He peered through his dusty spectacles at the lean profile presented to him as his employer settled broad shoulders comfortably back into his leather wing chair and brought the source of his amusement closer, savouring it. Startlingly blue eyes scanned an ivory black-edged card as he shoved back his chair and leisurely settled his highly polished top-boots on the edge of his highly polished mahogany desk. He reread the few lines of elegant black script while his long fingers sought on the desk for the cheroot curling a gentle drift of smoke towards the lofty ceiling of his walnut-panelled study. With the cigar stuck between his white teeth, his narrowed blue eyes flicked upwards, contemplating the ornate plaster coving. As his mind sped back seven years, the card was tapped idly against a manicured thumbnail. A few seconds of reminiscence had his teeth clenching on his cheroot and the card flipping casually across the desk to land in front of Jacob. ‘Send condolences and usual regrets at being unable to attend.’
Juggling his lapful of letters and ledgers, Jacob finally freed an index finger, stabbed it onto the card and slid it closer. Once he’d read it, he wondered what it was about a distant cousin’s funeral, notified to him by the man’s widow, that could possibly give the Viscount cause to smile in that unpleasant way. ‘Sad business…’ he volunteered, hoping to find out.
His sympathy was ignored. David Hardinge leafed impatiently through a lengthy document. ‘Have this delivered back to Mainwaring by hand this afternoon with a note stating that if he alters terms and conditions again the deal is off. The contract of sale I issued last month is the only one I will sign.’ Piercing blue eyes fixed on the clerk as David realised the man had noted nothing down but was apparently fascinated by the notification of Daniel Hart’s demise. ‘Have you got that dictation?’ he enquired silkily past the cigar clamped at one corner of his thin mouth.
‘Sad business…’ Jacob persisted, meaningfully pointing his sharp nose at the card on the desk.
‘Is it?’ David Hardinge asked, feigned concern spuriously softening his tone. The cigar was jerked from his teeth and he studied its glowing tip.
‘Oh, yes…’ Jacob opined, pulling his lips into a sorrowful droop. ‘Poor Mrs Hart. Not married more than seven years, I’ll warrant. Widowed so young. I met her just the once, you know, at your brother’s funeral. So charming a young lady, I recall.’ He shook his greying head, reflectively sucking his teeth. ‘Of course you were fighting alongside Wellington at the time, were you not, and missed laying your brother to rest, so perhaps you wouldn’t know her. It’s hard to believe that young master Michael’s been gone these five years and that I’ve worked man and boy for the Viscounts Courtenay for more than twenty-five years and—’
‘And there’s no real need for it to continue beyond today,’ David mildly threatened, while long fingers ground out his cigar so thoroughly that he singed them, shook them, swore audibly and scowled at Jacob’s censorious look.
Oh, he knew charming young Mrs Hart, and she could damn well go to hell alongside her husband for all he cared. But he didn’t, he reminded himself. He hadn’t cared for seven years or more, not since her father had unceremoniously tossed his marriage proposal back at him and sneered in his face for his effrontery. David had known his youthful hell-raising was a minor consideration; it was his lack of money and status that was the genuine stumbling-block. Vice in bridegrooms was customarily overlooked so long as the prospects were right.
But, in fairness to the man, all of Charles Lorrimer’s objections had been quite valid. And, in his own defence, in the six months he had gently courted eighteen-year-old Victoria Lorrimer, his behaviour and morals had been impeccable. Those of his parents, however, had continued to swill around in the gutter, to the vicious amusement of the haut ton. Paul Hardinge and the courtesan, Maria Poole, he had scandalously married by then had no further affluence or influence to buy acceptability.
In the distant days of childhood, he had been fiercely loyal to his parents, believing them to be the butt of malicious gossip. But the craving for reciprocal love and attention had slowly eroded, finally extinguishing in his mid-teens when he’d abruptly had to accept that his mother was an unreformed whore and his father a drunken sybarite who had gambled away practically every asset the Courtenays had amassed over two centuries. Henceforth David had unswervingly believed what he was often maliciously told—that his destiny must be tainted and shaped by theirs—and had lived his life accordingly.
Until he’d seen Victoria Lorrimer. For six months he’d believed in salvation. He’d lived in daylight hours and serenity.
Within a month of his proposal the only woman he had ever believed himself capable of loving had married Squire Hart of Ashdowne in Hertfordshire, who, with typical bitter irony, happened to be some distant relation of the Hardinges. His father’s great-aunt had married into the Hart clan in 1680, as he recalled.
Daniel Hart had a comfortable estate and wealth, and, at fifty-two, was some thirty-four years Victoria’s senior and a mere fifteen years younger than her own dear papa.
His own dear papa had been dead of syphilis within six months and his older brother Michael had inherited the viscountcy and
