She avoided them at breakfast, then almost bumped into Lord Dreycott in the hallway as they emerged from the small dining room. ‘My… Ashley. Good morning.’ In the cold light of day she regretted agreeing to use his name and worried about how her untried attempts at cautious flirtation had been received. Even one glass of wine, she concluded as she reviewed the previous evening in the cold light of day, was apparently enough to overset her judgement. Two had been foolish in the extreme. ‘A message has been sent to Mr Havers. I would expect he will be here by ten.’
‘So soon at short notice? What if he had something already in his diary?’
‘You are the most important thing, hereabouts,’ Lina said. It was the simple truth. ‘If he had appointments, he will have cancelled them. Mr Armstrong from the local branch of your uncle’s London bank, Dr Massingbird his physician and the Reverend Perrin will be close on his heels.’
‘You sent for them also?’ Ashley paused by the study door, obviously surprised by this initiative.
‘There was no need to tell anyone,’ she explained. ‘The local grapevine will have already passed on the news last night. The local gentry will leave it until tomorrow when they know your men of business will have all been to see you, then we may expect a great many callers. His late lordship did not welcome visitors, so they will all be agog to introduce themselves.’ Ashley shook his head, so she added, ‘Cook is already baking biscuits and we have ample supplies of tea and coffee left over from the funeral.’
‘I am not a betting man,’ Ashley observed, ‘but I will wager you a guinea against that ridiculous apron of yours that I will receive no social calls.’
‘But why not?’ Lina ignored the remark about her apron. She thought it gave her authority and an air of sobriety that had been sadly missing last night.
‘Because, my dear Miss Haddon, I am not received in polite society.’
‘But Lord Dreycott said that you have hardly been in the country for years,’ she protested. ‘None of them knows you.’
‘However, they will all have heard about me. And some of them will remember me. It was not simply my uncle’s reclusive nature that explained the lack of calls—we are tarred with the same brush. We will have a large number of biscuits to eat up, I assure you.’ His face showed nothing but faintly amused acceptance of this state of affairs.
‘Of course they will call. They have no reason not to—whatever have you done that they should react so?’
‘Being the man who debauched, impregnated and abandoned the Earl of Sheringham’s eldest daughter, is, you must agree, Miss Haddon, adequate cause for social ostracism in an area where Sheringham is the largest landowner,’ Ashley said. ‘The earl carries much weight, hereabouts. His son, Viscount Langdown, carries as much, and a horsewhip.’ Lina stared at him open mouthed and he smiled, went into the study and closed the door behind him.
She watched the panels, half-expecting Ashley to reappear and tell her that it had been a joke in poor taste, but the door remained closed. Behind her there was a discreet cough.
‘Trimble?’ Lina turned to the butler. ‘Surely his lordship is…surely that cannot be correct?’
The butler looked uneasy. ‘Perhaps I had better tell you about it, Miss Haddon.’ He held open the door to the salon. ‘We will not be disturbed in here.’
She followed him and closed the door. ‘He says he expects to be shunned by the neighbourhood,’ she said, her voice low as she joined Trimble in the furthest corner of the room. ‘He said he did something quite dreadful.’
‘Yes, indeed, refusing to marry his pregnant fiancée is not the action of a gentleman and must bring opprobrium upon any man,’ the butler said, his voice flat.
‘He really did such a thing? When?’ Lina stared in horror at the butler, but her mind was full of the picture of Quinn Ashley as she had just seen him. In his deplorably casual version of an English country-gentleman’s riding attire, with his frank speech and his amused smile, it was hard to visualise the new Lord Dreycott as the heartless seducer he freely admitted to being. But of course, to have insinuated himself into the bed of an earl’s daughter, he would hardly look like a ruthless rake.
‘Let us sit down, Trimble,’ she said. This was shocking news to absorb standing up. She had already spent one night under the same roof as a dangerous libertine, it seemed. Her mouth felt dry. Seduced, impregnated, abandoned…
‘The long-established staff here know the story,’ the butler said, perching uncomfortably on the edge of a chair. ‘His late lordship told us the truth of the matter. It seemed that Mr Ashley, as he then was, abandoned his pregnant fiancée ten years ago. Given that her brother was publicly threatening him with a horsewhip followed by castration, it seemed to his great-uncle that the prudent course of action was to send him off abroad with some haste. Once there, it seems, he decided he liked the life of a traveller and has seldom returned.’
Lina swallowed. She had no horsewhip-wielding brother to protect her. She had no one except a man whose promise to take care of her now seemed a cruel jest.
‘But he was not the father of her child,’ Trimble added with haste, no doubt reading her expression with some accuracy. ‘Please be assured I would not have allowed you to remain in the house if that were so, Miss Haddon.’
‘Why did she not marry the man responsible, then?’ she managed, relief making her feel faintly queasy.
‘Mr Ashley in those days was a charming, but somewhat unworldly, perhaps even innocent, young man,’ Trimble continued, not answering the question directly. ‘A studious, rather quiet gentleman, just down from university, his head full of books and dreams of exploration, as I recall him. I was only the first footman in those days, you understand. But, as his late lordship said, why would a beautiful, highly eligible young woman throw herself at the rather dull heir to a minor barony?’
‘Because she needed a gullible husband as fast as possible?’ Lina hazarded, distracted momentarily by the thought that Quinn Ashley could ever have been described as rather dull.
‘Exactly, Miss Haddon. Her parents, when they became aware of her condition, set her to entrap him and, I fear, he was all too willing to fall for her charms and into love. The flaw in their scheme was that they had picked on a romantic, idealistic young man who, when confronted by a passionate young lady positively begging to demonstrate her affection for him by the
sacrifice of her virtue, struck a noble attitude—as he told his uncle afterwards—and refused to dishonour his bride-to-be.’
‘And then he realised what was happening?’
‘Not, so he said, until she ripped all her clothes off and became hysterical. Her father, when subterfuge was obviously impossible, offered Mr Ashley a very substantial dowry to wed her. He refused, broke off the engagement—and so they laid the child at his door and characterised him as a heartless seducer of virtue.’
‘But why?’ Lina thought for a moment. ‘Was the true father utterly impossible? Married, perhaps?’