The Regency Season Collection: Part Two. Кэрол Мортимер

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      For a while Verity wept as if her heart might break and Chloe rocked her gently, as she often had in her early years, when Daphne’s child sometimes went from happy little girl to a sobbing fury in the blink of an eye, as if she wept for all she had lost at birth. All Chloe could do back then was hold her until Verity calmed and slept, or Lady Virginia managed to divert the little girl from her woes with a joke or a funny story about her own misspent youth. This time there was no Virginia to make light of such woe and Chloe felt terribly alone and as bereft as Verity.

      ‘Where shall we go, Mama?’ the desperate question stuttered from Verity’s shaky lips as she battled dry sobs and looked tragic, as if all Chloe had been worrying about for the last weeks was crushing her, too.

      ‘Oh, my love,’ Chloe responded with tears backed up in her own throat as she realised she should have had this conversation with her daughter as soon as she came home. ‘I don’t know if we can stay here, but Lady Virginia left me a full year’s salary in return for a trifling charge she laid on me. I have enough saved to live comfortably on for a year or two after that, if I should choose not to look for a new post yet, and Lady Virginia left you an annuity, so you will never starve. Please don’t run away with the notion you’re an heiress, though, will you?’

      ‘Then I shall not. I love her even more though, now I know I shall be able to look after you one day, Mama, when you are too old to do it yourself.’

      Chloe went from the edge of tears to fighting laughter. ‘We probably have a few years before I’m too bowed with age to work, darling,’ she said with a straight face.

      ‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’ Verity accused.

      ‘I’m sorry, love, but I’m not even eight and twenty yet. That might sound as if I could shake hands with Methuselah on equal terms to you, but I feel remarkably well preserved when my daughter is not making me out to be an ancient crone.’

      ‘That’s what age does to a person, Lady Virginia told me,’ Verity informed her with a solemn shake of her head, as if she saw through her mother’s ruse.

      ‘Lady Virginia was at least fifty years older than me, Verity love, and that was only what she admitted to. Her age varied every time someone was rude enough to try to find it out. I’m unlikely to follow Lady Virginia into the grave for a great many years yet and you must stop fretting about me.’

      ‘But what if you die in childbed, Mama? I can tell Lord Farenze wants to marry you and ladies die giving birth, particularly when they’re old.’

      ‘Why would Lord Farenze want to marry me?’ Chloe asked; shocked that her brain picked that rather than thinking how to reassure Verity ladies gave birth safely time after time at much more than seven and twenty.

      ‘Oh, Eve and I realised ages ago,’ her daughter said, as if it was so obvious she was amazed anyone could miss it.

      ‘I hope you kept that conclusion quiet then, as you couldn’t be more wrong.’

      ‘Bran and Miss Culdrose agree with us.’

      ‘And whatever would the rest of the household make of such a silly idea?’ Chloe asked faintly, dread at facing even the smallest scullery maid eating at her lest they were already speculating about it.

      ‘They think Mrs Winterley will put a stop to it, but Eve says her father takes no notice of what his stepmother says and even less of what she thinks.’

      Chloe sighed and decided she could put off telling Verity the story of her own birth no longer, if only to scotch any false hopes of becoming Eve’s stepsister, but her niece’s eyes were red and tired after her crying bout and the sad tale of Daphne’s love affair must wait for another day.

      ‘Lord Farenze is a viscount; I am his housekeeper and lords do not marry servants. Forget such wild flights of fancy and get into bed, love. Your Miss Thibett would be the first to say you need a decent night’s sleep before you’re ready to face world trade and the laden caravans of gold, jewels, silk and spices that will be winding their way through far-off, exotic lands even as we speak.’

      Her imagination caught by the idea of those processions of camels laden down with fine cloth and exquisite treasures, Verity allowed Chloe to walk her to her room and help her undress, then get into bed. Verity asked for a story and how to resist when she usually insisted on reading herself to sleep and this might be the last time Verity let her be her mother? Chloe dreaded telling her the tale of her birth and felt like crying herself by the time they wandered a little way along that ancient road in their imaginations and Verity’s eyes got heavier and heavier until she slept at last.

      Chloe let her voice trail away, then gazed at her precious child as if she had to fill her mind with Verity as she was now. Tomorrow Verity might hate her for a pretence begun when nobody else cared enough about Daphne’s child to save her from death or a lonely life at the mercy of the parish.

      Shaking her head to keep back the idea things were better as they were, Chloe went to her own room earlier than usual to struggle with the knot her life seemed tangled into all of a sudden. Someone had lit a fire for her and she knew exactly who had ordered it. Luke’s thoughtfulness at a time when he had hundreds of other things to think about made tears sting as she gazed into the glowing flames and wondered how he’d ever managed to fool anyone he was an unfeeling recluse.

      She loved Luke Winterley and finally admitted to herself she had loved him far too long. The fact of it, fresh and vital in her heart as she knew it would be to her dying day, made her content and full of hope for all of a minute. Yet if she emerged from whatever fate her family had told the world she had met to wed my Lord Farenze, Verity would be exposed as the reason Lady Chloe was supposed to have died with her sister in the first place.

      Her brothers would walk through fire rather than publically admit they’d let one sister give birth with only her twin to help her and a rapidly sobering midwife, then forced Chloe out to starve with her dead sister’s child after even that ordeal didn’t kill the poor little mite and they had to rid themselves of her by other means.

      Chloe sat watching the fire with tears sliding down her cheeks as she bid farewell to a dream she hadn’t let herself know she had. She had Verity and a secure future many a woman left with a child to bring up alone would envy her. Verity’s future was secure as well and she ought to be dancing on air. Instead she must fight the heavy weight of grief and an urge to sob her heart out on the threadbare rug she had decreed good enough for her bedchamber, so at least nobody could accuse her of gilding her own nest.

      Luke could condemn her thrift and look at her scratch bedchamber with offended distaste, but she had lived among the cast-offs of a bygone age most of her life and was used to making do. Carraway Court had been neglected and down at heel for as long as she could remember and the older servants would shake their heads and say how different it was in her grandfather’s day, before their mother wed her lord and he took all the rents, then left the Court to go to rack and ruin.

      Even then they whispered of gambling and extravagant mistresses and how even an earl couldn’t bring such low company to his late wife’s home with her daughters in residence. Chloe wondered bitterly why her father and brothers cared so much about the family name when they blighted it so enthusiastically.

      A sentence from Virginia’s letter slotted into her mind as if her mentor had whispered in her ear and a possible plan formed. Lady Tiverley was an amiable feather-head, but she was the daughter of a far richer and more respectable earl than Chloe’s father had ever been and moved in the СКАЧАТЬ