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eBook Category: Romance
eBook Description: When young, widowed Lady Lovelace realized that she had been swindled by her penny-pinching cousin, who nearly bankrupted her, she decided that she would have to marry again for money. These were the very thoughts of Lord Philip, who had nothing between him and destitution but his army pension. And so these two attractive fortune-hunters became man and wife--only to discover they were both virtually penniless...

eBook Publisher: e-reads, Published: e-reads, 1982
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2002

18 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [433 KB], eReader (PDB) [149 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [134 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [119 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [153 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [180 KB], hiebook (KML) [335 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [176 KB], iSilo (PDB) [110 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [138 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [175 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [184 KB]
Words: 41037
Reading time: 117-164 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

A well-sprung travelling coach bowled through the Oxfordshire woods at a smart pace. Its occupants were a fashionable lady dressed in the latest mode (yellow straw hat á la Pamela, loose pelisse of appleblossom sarsnet over a muslin gown) and an elderly companion in a neat round gown, plain bonnet, and kid half boots.

The younger woman craned her neck and stared up at the delicate tracery of spring leaves and cried, "Oh, Tabby! It is so good to be home again."

Her companion, Miss Tabitha Wilkins, gave a sniff. "I told you so, Lady Lovelace," she said. "I told you over and over again that there was no place like England but you would go dragging me about these heathenish places."

"Italy is hardly a heathenish place," laughed Lady Lovelace. "Never mind, Tabby, we shall soon be at Beaton Malden and no place could be more English than that!"

"If it's still there," said Miss Wilkins gloomily. "I don't know what you were about, my lady, giving Beaton Malden into the care of Mr. Bertram. You've got a perfectly good steward in Mr. Worthy, perfectly good."

"Oh, Tabby," expostulated Lady Lovelace. "Beaton Malden is the best-run estate in England. Even Bertram could not do much to it in a year. Now, spare me your dark looks. Why don't you like my cousin?"

"Mr. Bertram Warrell is a charming wastrel," said the companion. "You know my opinion of him but you keep asking me, as if by some chance I should have changed my mind."

"You just don't trust anyone young," said Lady Lovelace severely. "Bertram suggested looking after the estate because he wanted to try his hand at taking some responsibility. Most commendable in a man of only one-and-twenty. He will have managed quite well, Tabby. You'll see."

"I hope so. Goodness knows, my lady, you've fought and struggled hard enough to gain Beaton Malden."

An impish smile curled the ends of Lady Lovelace's pink lips. "Yes, I did, didn't I, Tabby?" she laughed. "But now I am a free woman. There is no need for me to marry ever again."

Miss Tabitha Wilkins's shrewd gray eyes turned on her mistress, noticing the exquisite little face with its huge hazel eyes, the gold and brown curls peeping saucily from under the wide brim of the straw hat, and gave a wintry smile. "Does my lady never envisage being in love?"

"Love!" exclaimed Amaryllis, Lady Lovelace, with all the wisdom of her twenty-seven years. "Love is the only weapon we poor females have. But that is all it is--a weapon. I have made my fortune using love, love has never used me."

"Fustian," mumbled her companion, but Lady Lovelace was gazing out of the carriage window at a waterfall tumbling down through the rocks and trees, glinting and flashing in the sun, and did not hear.

Lady Lovelace was a widow twice over. She married a wealthy squire when she was seventeen and acquired her first fortune on his death two years later. At twenty-one, she married the rich and ailing Jeremy, Lord Lovelace and added his fortune to her own when he died on her twenty-fifth birthday.

Lady Lovelace had good reason for her seemingly cold-blooded attitude to love.

She had not been born an aristocrat but the daughter of a poor country parson. Her mother had died when she was a small child and her father died on her sixteenth birthday, leaving her to take care of her two younger sisters with no money and no future at all. And so she had married the squire, thus securing a home for her beloved sisters, Sarah and Bella. No sooner had the squire died than Sarah and Bella had started demanding a London Season and their older sister, Amaryllis, found she could refuse them nothing.

She gave her hand in marriage to Jeremy, Lord Lovelace, and gave her sisters the Season and aristocratic connections they craved. Both married well.

After the death of the elderly Lord Lovelace, Lady Lovelace had diligently attended to the demands of her late lord's estate, Beaton Malden. She spent long hours in the saddle, visiting the farmers and tenants, discussing livestock and crops. She knew that she was in danger of having the label of eccentricity pasted on her, for Society did not approve of "lady farmers," the women who ran their country estates single-handed, but she no longer cared for the opinion of Society. She firmly believed in the patriarchal kind of care of estates and tenants, sensibly believing that people worked with a better heart if they were reasonably fed and housed. But her sisters, Sarah and Bella, had come on a visit with their staid husbands, moaning that their beloved Amaryllis was being damned as a quiz--and just look how it was affecting their reputations!

And so Lady Lovelace had found a competent steward in Mr. Worthy and had made plans for a journey to Italy. But her weak spot was not only the love she had for her selfish sisters but for her cousin, Bertram Warrell. It was paradoxical that Lady Lovelace, who claimed to despise love, should be such a victim of it. But she would have been vastly surprised had she been told such a thing and secretly believed herself to be very hardhearted because she had not loved either of her husbands, although, as she very well knew, that was one thing they had thankfully never found out. She had been a very tender, good, and loving wife to both of them.

Perhaps if either marriage had been blessed with children, then Amaryllis would have found an outlet for her strong maternal streak. As it was, it all flowed toward her sisters and to Bertram Warrell, and all three made the very most of it.

Miss Tabitha Wilkins, her companion, had been rescued by Lady Lovelace from a genteel life of near starvation. Lady Lovelace had found her fainting in the village street of Beaton Malden in front of a baker's window. She had taken the old lady home and had summoned the best doctor in the district, who had promptly diagnosed malnutrition. On her recovery, Miss Tabitha had grimly refused to accept charity and so Lady Lovelace had hired her in the post of paid companion. She enjoyed Miss Wilkins's astringent remarks and allowed her a great deal of license. Lady Lovelace would have been startled to find that her "Tabby's" gruff remarks covered a whole world of love and gratitude and devotion.

But then Lady Lovelace was not good at recognizing love in any shape or form. Just as she was unaware that she gave it so freely.

"We're home," said Miss Tabitha Wilkins gruffly, turning her head away so that her young mistress should not see the sentimental tears standing out in her eyes.

Beaton Malden, the house and estates from which the nearby village took its name, had been the property of the late Lord Lovelace and now belonged to his widow. It was like a young village in itself. There was the large and elegant house, designed in the Italianate style and built in the last century. There was a home farm and extensive gardens. Meat and poultry were produced on the home farm and slaughtered there; vegetables, fruit, and flowers were grown in the gardens and glasshouses; butter was churned, beer was brewed, wines, cordials, and medicines were concocted, eggs preserved, soap and candles made, and laundry washed in great quantities. There was a carpenter's shop where furniture was made and repaired along with gates and fencing, and a blacksmith's forge for shoeing horses and making farm implements. All these many departments had their expert in charge. And the great army of people who were employed to keep the house and estate running smoothly depended on Lady Lovelace for their livelihood.

"Oh, there's Mackintosh!" cried Lady Lovelace, waving to the familiar figure of the Scottish head gardener. To her surprise, he touched his cap and bent again to his work. No smile. No welcome.

"Well, that's odd," said Lady Lovelace, sinking back against the carriage upholstery in surprise. "His spleen must be disordered. I've never known Mackintosh to be grumpy before."

The carriage swung around under the porticoed entrance and the Lovelace butler, Foster, came out onto the steps, flanked by two footmen. All three stared grimly off into the middle distance.

"Dear me," said Lady Lovelace. "Shades of the French Revolution. How angry they look. Do you think they are about to string me up to the nearest lanterne, Tabby?"

"They've had a year of your cousin, my lady. 'Tis enough to make a saint look sour."

"Now, Tabby, you go too far. Why, Foster! As you can see, I am arrived home."

"Yes, m'lady."

"Well, don't stand glowering at me. What is the matter?"

"It is not for me to say, my lady."

"Well," snapped Lady Lovelace in exasperation, "if you won't say why you are so twitty, who will? You irritating old bu ... butler!"

Foster continued to stand rather in the attitude of a man facing the firing squad. Lady Lovelace's temper mounted.

"Don't stand there like Saint Thingummy on the whatsit, Foster, or I shall be strongly tempted to shake you. We shall go into the house and I shall find out what is amiss if it takes all day."

"Very good, my lady," said Foster in that particularly irritating type of hollow voice which only the best butlers can adopt when they want to convey to their superiors that life is full of withered fruit.

Lady Lovelace walked through the entrance hall and up to the drawing room on the first floor. She noticed that the staff were not assembled to meet her. Then she decided they had probably not received her letter announcing her arrival and were a little put out. But that still did not explain Foster's attitude.

She untied the strings of her bonnet and threw it on the sofa and walked over to the fireplace where an applewood fire of miniscule proportions was burning on the hearth.

"Now, Foster," said Lady Lovelace. "You may begin."

Mr. Foster pulled down his striped waistcoat and looked at the highly polished toes of his flat shoes. He had forgotten his mistress's rather autocratic manner. She still looked disconcertingly like a girl just out of the schoolroom with her huge eyes and tumbling curls and tiny stature.

"Well?" she was demanding ominously.

The butler took a deep breath and fixed his protuberant gaze on the marble fireplace, where a white marble god was tearing the white marble clothes off a placid and bucolic white marble Greek lady. "My Heart is Heavy," he said portentously, "on account of not having been paid a Groat since your ladyship departed for Foreign Shores."

"Really, Foster, can't you speak a little plainer? Nobody pays anyone in groats anymore so it is not in the least surprising that you have not received one."

Of course, Lady Lovelace knew exactly what he was talking about but the whole idea of one of her staff not receiving any wages at all was too terrible to face.

"I have not received a penny, my lady, if I may put it that way," the butler was saying, "and neither has any of the other staff."

"What!" Lady Lovelace thought wildly of all the footmen and housemaids and dairymaids and gardeners. "It's not possible. How has this come about? Send Mr. Worthy to me."

"Mr. Worthy is working for the Earl of Chaphem."

"What!" I must stop saying "what," thought Lady Lovelace. But what else can one say but "what?"

"He was dismissed," pursued the butler with gloomy relish, "after the first month of your ladyship's absence."

"Why was I not informed of this?"

"If you remember," intoned Foster, addressing the fireplace, "your ladyship desired to be free of the cares of the estate and therefore left no address."

"Get me Mr. Bertram Warrell immediately," said Lady Lovelace. "This is outrageous!"

"I fear I cannot summon Mr. Warrell."

"In Heaven's name, why not?"

"He has Departed to the Other Shore."

"Gone to America!"

"No, my lady, the bourne from which no traveler returns."

"Dead?"

"As a doornail, my lady."

Miss Tabitha bustled forward, her face red with anger. "Off with you, Foster. Cannot you see that my lady has had enough?"

"Leave me, Tabby," said Lady Lovelace faintly. "How did Mr. Warrell die?"

"He was shot, my lady."

"Where?"

"In the heart, and it please my lady."

"I did not mean in which part of his anatomy. Where did this take place?"

"In a certain gambling establishment. Mr. Warrell was cheating at cards."

"But that is ridiculous. All the ton cheat at cards. You know that, Foster. Even the Duchess of Devizes marked her cards with a hatpin the last time she was here. That was surely not the reason he committed suicide?"

"Oh, he did not commit suicide, my lady. He was shot by Mr. Jimmy Andover. Mr. Jimmy Andover had lost a fortune to Mr. Warrell and found Mr. Warrell cheating at cards. He challenged Mr. Warrell to a duel. Mr. Andover, regretting the duel and knowing himself to be an excellent shot and Mr. Warrell to be a poor marksman, fired in the air, my lady."

"And hit Bertram by mistake!"

"No, my lady. The duel was finished and both parties were repairing to their respective carriages when Mr. Warrell attempted to shoot Mr. Andover in the back. Mr. Andover was very angry, my lady, and promptly turned about and shot Mr. Warrell through the heart."

"This cannot be true. Bertram was weak and silly but never vicious."

"As your ladyship pleases."

"You obviously do not agree."

The butler gave a little cough. "There was a great deal written about the incident in the newspapers, my lady. The seconds of both parties testified to Mr. Warrell's attempt to shoot Mr. Andover in the back."

"I insist that you go and lie down," said Miss Tabitha. "You have had a very great shock, my lady."

"Yes," said Lady Lovelace dully. "But I have a great deal of responsibility. I have no time to mourn Bertram's death. I must find out what he has been doing with my funds. I ... I ... gave him carte blanche, Tabby. He was so young. He seemed so determined to make a go of it. We ... we ... laughed over his determination to turn farmer and ... and ... I was so sure he would do well...."

Her eyes filled with tears but she pushed her companion away. "You must leave me now, Tabby," she said gently. "I have so much work to do."