had not gone far when Emily, who had clearly been turning something over in her mind for quite some time, said, ‘Has it occurred to you that it might not have been the marquis himself who ran you off the road? You did say he was bringing a friend with him.’
‘Oh, it was him,’ Hester breathed. ‘He more than matched the description my aunt Susan provided us with.’ Her lip curled. ‘Of course, she used terms that were meant to make him sound attractive. Saying he had the physique of an accredited Corinthian, besides being tall and distinguished in his bearing.’ She snorted in derision. ‘The truth is that he is a great brute of a man with shoulders like a coal heaver and a permanent sneer on his face. He has eyes as hard and black as jet. I don’t think I have ever seen a man who is so…dark. Like a creature of the night.’ She shivered. ‘Everything about him was black. His clothes, his hair, even the language he used came straight from the pit. And,’ she concluded, ‘expressed complete contempt for lesser mortals.’
Em looked thoughtful. ‘I suppose he must have thought you were just a simple working woman, though, Hester, since you are dressed for visiting…um…the disadvantaged, and were without a chaperon.’
‘Well, that would excuse him, of course!’ Hester’s pace quickened as her temper seethed, forcing Emily into a trot to keep up with her longer-legged stride. ‘In effect, it was all my fault for getting in his way.’
‘No, that was not what I meant at all,’ Emily panted. ‘Only that it might have accounted for his attitude. I am sure he would not treat your cousins with the same—’
‘Contempt?’ Hester supplied. ‘Oh, he might gloss it over with society manners, but that is exactly how he will treat them. Men of his class think of women as playthings at best. Have you forgotten what I told you about the poor women Mrs Parnell takes in?’
Hester had renewed her acquaintance with her former schoolfriend during her short, disastrous Season, and become heavily involved with the refuge she ran for unwed mothers and foundling children. She had found it increasingly hard to mingle, in the evenings, with men who she knew full well were capable of using and discarding women of the lower classes without a qualm. Who would then compound their villainy by duping an innocent girl of their own class into marriage with the intention of squandering their dowries on vice. When any of them had looked her over with the sort of lascivious gleam in their eye that other girls regarded as a form of flattery, she had gone hot all over, and then icy cold, and then begun to tremble so violently that she usually had to flee the room altogether.
‘And wives have no legal rights,’ she continued. ‘A husband can do what he likes with his wife, as he can with any other of his possessions, while she must turn a blind eye to his conduct if she values her own skin. I dread to think of either Julia or Phoebe in the hands of such a brute as Lord Lensborough.’
She dreaded him being in the house at all. He would be looking her cousins over in that speculative way that single men had when considering marriage, polluting the wholesome atmosphere of what should have been an informal family gathering.
‘Surely his sense of pride in his family name would prevent him from being downright cruel, though? Even I have heard how high in the instep the Challinors are.’
‘On the contrary. Having met him, I fully believe he is so conceited that he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of him. He acts as though the rest of the human race is so far beneath him that he need not pay any heed to what they think, or say.’
Emily reached out and gave Hester’s hand a squeeze. ‘Don’t judge him before you have even got to know him. During the course of this week you will have ample opportunity to observe him, and perhaps find that he had reasons to explain his behaviour this afternoon. It is all too easy to misjudge a person’s motives. After all, a person who did not know you as well as I do might well put a most ungenerous interpretation on your own behaviour.’
Hester broke away abruptly, climbed on to the stile that spanned the hedge, and swung her legs over it.
‘That is entirely different,’ she insisted as she dropped into the meadow on the other side of the hedge and strode, head held high, towards the cluster of brightly painted caravans that were drawn into a semi-circle around an open fire.
She did not look back. She knew Emily would soon realise that she would feel much safer beside her than hesitating timidly on the stile.
Eagerly, she searched among the swarm of ragged children who were tumbling out of the caravans for one very special little girl. Tears sprang to her eyes the moment she saw Lena’s copper curls bobbing amidst the sea of black, and it was all she could do not to rush forward, sweep her into her arms and kiss the tip of her freckled little nose. How she had grown.
Emily was so naïve. Men were beastly, even the ones you thought you could trust. The very thought of marrying one of them was akin to enduring the most degrading form of slavery. And as for saying she should observe Lord Lensborough before deciding what his motives were—she knew all too well what motives men had for the way they acted towards women. She had Lena as living proof.
Chapter Two
Lord Jasper Challinor, the fifth Marquis of Lensborough, lounged against the mantelpiece, watching in growing disbelief as the room filled with Sir Thomas Gregory’s extended family. They greeted each other with a noisy, informal exuberance that made him shudder with distaste. Nobody gave so much as a passing nod to the rigid etiquette that governed the behaviour of the circles in which he normally moved. No wonder the children were so boisterous. They were running about as if this were a playground, not a drawing room, and nobody saw fit to check them.
On the contrary, Sir Thomas had been quite adamant that he wished to encourage the children to mingle with their elders, that he liked having all the children present at this annual family gathering, and had warned him, in quite a belligerent voice, that they would all be sitting down to dinner that evening, right down to the youngest babe in arms. That had been just before he had introduced him to the nursery maid, in whose arms the babe was being carried.
His mood, which had not been all that sanguine when he set out that morning, had been growing steadily blacker as the day had progressed. It set up a tangible barrier that none of the other guests dared broach, leaving him to stand in haughty isolation beside the fire.
Stephen Farrar, who as an ex-soldier had no qualms about making the most of whatever company he found himself in, detached himself from their hostess, Lady Susan, and came to stand beside him, his face alight with merriment.
‘I’m glad you are enjoying yourself,’ Lensborough said through clenched teeth.
‘I have to admit, the whole day has been vastly entertaining.’ Stephen grinned.
Lord Lensborough grimaced. Agreeing to pit his bays against Stephen’s showy greys had been an act of monumental folly. Neither of them was familiar with the terrain. That, Stephen had said, was the point. It gave the race an edge. It had almost resulted in tragedy.
And brought Bertram’s death horridly close. His brother had never told him what it felt like to look someone in the eye as you robbed them of their life, and now he knew why. That woman’s face was indelibly seared into his memory. Was his brother’s face seared into the memory of whichever Frenchman had slain him? Or had he too become a casualty of Napoleon’s ferocious ambition? He shook his head. At least Bertram had died with a sword in his hand. That woman had nothing with which to defend herself. She had briefly clutched the basket she had been carrying to her chest, as though the wickerwork could shield her from the
