barely believing what was written.
He was to marry Amethyst Amelia Cameron before the month was finished on the condition that he have no relations with any other woman for two years afterwards.
Shocked to the core, he took a good swallow of the brandy. Amethyst Amelia Cameron would allow her father to sell her for the promise of what? Under the law any daughter could inherit money, chattels and unentailed property from a dying father and he obviously loved her. Besides, she had experience in the business and had turned profits for many a year. Cameron had told him that himself. So what was it that she would gain from such an arrangement? They barely knew each other and, even given she was from the trading classes, an heiress of her calibre could garner any number of titled aristocrats who were down on their purse.
As he was?
‘Hell!’ Daniel threw the parchment into a drawer and slammed it shut, but the promises festered even unseen, malevolent and beguiling.
How on earth had Cameron known so much about his financial difficulties? Would Goldsmith truly call in his brother’s loans against Montcliffe before he was ready for them? If he did that, Daniel would be forced to sell the town house, the manor, the surrounding farms and any chattels that would fetch something. Then the Wyldes would be homeless, moneylenders baying for their blood and all the claws unsheathed.
If it was just him, he might have been able to manage, but Cameron was perfectly correct; his sisters were young, his grandfather was old and his mother had always found her gratification in the position the earldom afforded them in society and had freely spent accordingly.
Standing, he walked to the window and looked out over the gardens, swearing as he saw the two greys tied to a post by the roadside and his butler near them, looking more than bewildered.
He had left them just as he’d said. It was begun already. Daniel turned to the doorway and hurried through it.
* * *
‘I think he took my proposal very well.’ Robert Cameron sipped at the sweet tea Amethyst had brought him and smiled.
‘You do?’
‘He is a good man with sound moral judgement and a love for his family.’
Amethyst bit into a ginger biscuit, wiping the crumbs away from her lips.
‘So he signed his name to the deed?’
‘Not quite.’
‘He didn’t sign it?’
Her father looked up. ‘He told me that I was a bastard for even suggesting such a thing and said that I should get out.’
‘But you left the greys?’
‘I did.’
‘And he has as yet not sent them back?’
‘He has not.’
‘Then it is a good omen.’
Robert frowned. ‘I hope so, Amethyst, I really do.’
Amethyst tried her hardest to smile. Papa had become thinner and thinner no matter what she might get their French chef to feed him and he had taken to striding about the house at night...watching. He was scared and those that might harm them for their money were becoming braver. The daylight attack near Tattersall’s had made her father paranoiac about any movement in their street, any unknown face around the warehouse. Nay, he was eating himself up with worry and she could allow it no longer.
Papa wanted her to be protected and he desperately wanted her to trust in a man again. With time running out for her father Amethyst had allowed him the choice of her groom. Said like that it sounded abhorrent, but nothing was ever as black and white as one might imagine and right now she wanted her father to smile.
‘We shall wait a week. If Lord Montcliffe has not come back to us by then with an answer, we will visit him together.’ She injected a jaunty positive note into her words but everything in her felt flat.
Gerald Whitely’s face shimmered in her memory. The feel of his anger was still there sometimes, just beyond touch, his angry words and then his endless seething silence. A relationship that had blinded sense and buried reason, one bad decision following another until there was nothing left of any of it.
Cold fingers closed over the cross at her throat. Her father was the one person who had stayed constant in her life and she would do whatever it took to see that he was happy. Anything at all.
‘Your mother made me promise to see you flourish, Amy. They were the last words she spoke to me as she slipped away and I had hoped that you would, but after Whitely...’ He stopped, his voice wavering and frighteningly thin. ‘Lord Montcliffe will make you remember to laugh again. He loves horses and they love him back. Any man who can win the trust of an animal is a good man, an honest man, and I can see that in him when I look him in the eyes.’
She hoped her smile did not appear false as he held her hand, the dearness of the gesture so familiar.
‘Promise me you will try to give him all your heart, body and soul, Amethyst. No reservations. It is how your mama loved me and there is no defence for a man against a woman like that. Such strength only allows growth and wonder between a married couple and I know you have been saddened by love...’
She shook his words away, the reminder of bitterness unwanted. Her choice, cankered before it had even begun.
‘When death claimed Gerald Whitely, my love, I was not sorry. Sense tells me that you were not either.’
So he knew of that? Another shame. A further deceit that had not remained hidden.
‘It was the Cameron fortune Gerald was after, Papa. Perhaps Lord Montcliffe and he are not so unalike after all?’
But her father shook his head. ‘Whitely fashioned his own demise. Daniel Wylde is only trying to clean up after the mistakes of his brother and father and is doing so to protect the family he has left.’
‘A saint, then?’ She wished that the caustic undertone in her words was not quite so unmistakable.
‘Hardly. But he is the first man you have given a second glance to. The first man who has made you blush. Such attraction must account for something because it was the same with Susannah and me.’
Despite everything she smiled. ‘I imagine that Lord Montcliffe has that effect upon everybody whoever meets him, Papa. I was not claiming him for myself.’
‘Because you do not trust your judgements pertaining to the acquisition of a husband, given the last poor specimen?’
Her father had never before, in the year since his death, spoken of Gerald Whitely in this way. That thought alone lent mortification to her sinking raft of other emotions.
Failure. It ate at certainty like a large rat at a wedding feast. Once she had chosen so unwisely she felt at a loss to ever allow herself such a mandate again. Perhaps that was a part of the reason she did not rally against her father’s arguments. That and the yellowing shades of sickness that hung in the whites of his eyes.
Death held a myriad of hues. Gerald’s had been a pale and unholy grey
