The Runaway Countess (2 page)

Three Years Later

W
as it an earthquake in London?

That was surely the only explanation for the blasted pounding noise, because Hayden knew that no one in his household would dare to disturb him with such a sound in the middle of the night.

He rolled over on to his back in the tangled bedclothes and opened his eyes to stare up at the dark green canopy above his head. Pinpricks of light were trickling around the edges of the tightly closed window curtains, but surely it
was
still the middle of the night. He remembered coming home from the club
with Harry and Edwards, stumbling through the streets singing, and somehow he had made it up the stairs and into bed. Alone.

Now he felt the familiar ache behind his eyes, made worse by that incessant banging noise.

The room itself wasn’t shaking. He could see that now that he forced himself to be still. So it wasn’t an earthquake. Someone was knocking at the bedroom door.

‘Damn it all!’ he shouted as he pushed himself off the bed. ‘It is the middle of the night.’

‘If you will beg pardon, my lord, you will find it is actually very near noon,’ Makepeace said, calmly but firmly, from the other side of the door.

‘The hell it is,’ Hayden muttered. He found his breeches tangled up amid the twisted bedclothes and impatiently jerked them on. His shirt was nowhere to be found.

He glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel, and saw that Makepeace was quite right. It was going on noon. He raked his hands through his tangled hair and jerked open the door.

‘Someone had better be dead,’ he said.

Makepeace merely blinked, his round, jowly face solemn as usual. He had been with Hayden’s family for many years, having been promoted to butler even before Hayden’s parents died when he was twelve. Makepeace had seen too much in the Fitzwalter household to ever be surprised.

‘To my knowledge, my lord, no one has shuffled off this mortal coil yet,’ Makepeace said. ‘This letter just arrived.’

He held out his silver tray, which held one small, neatly folded missive. Hayden stared at it in disbelief.

‘A letter?’ he said. ‘You woke me for
that?
Leave it with the rest of the post on the breakfast table and I’ll read it later.’

He started to slam the door to go back to bed, but Makepeace adroitly slid his foot in. He proffered the tray again. ‘You will want to read this right away, my lord. It’s from Barton Park.’

Hayden wasn’t sure he had heard Makepeace right. Perhaps he was still in bed, having a bizarre brandy-induced dream where
letters arrived from Barton Park. ‘What did you say?’

‘If you will look at the return address, my lord, you will see it’s from Barton Park,’ Makepeace said. ‘I thought you might want to see it right away.’

Hayden couldn’t say anything. He merely nodded and took the letter carefully from the tray. He closed the door and stared down at the small, neatly folded missive. It glowed a snowy white in the dim, gloomy room, like some exotic and deadly snake about to strike.

It did indeed read ‘JF, Barton Park’ in a neat, looping handwriting he remembered all too well. The last time he received a letter from that address had been three years ago, when Jane wrote a brief note to tell him she had arrived at Barton Park and would be staying there until further notice. Since then he had sent her monthly bank drafts that were never cashed and he hadn’t heard from her at all. He would only know she was alive because his agents reported it to him on a periodic basis.

Why would his estranged wife be writing to him today? And why did he feel a blasted,
terrible spark of hope as he looked at the paper? Hope wasn’t something he deserved. Not when it came to Jane.

The haze of last night’s drink cleared in an instant as he stared down at the letter in his hand. All his senses seemed to sharpen, three years vanished and all he could see was Jane. The way the light glowed on her dark hair as she laughed with him in their sunlit bed. The rose-pink blush that washed over her cheeks when he teased her. The way she stared up at him, her eyes shining with emotion, as he made love to her.

The way all that heat and light had completely vanished, turned to cold, clear, hard ice, when she turned away from him. When she threw away their marriage and left him.

Now she was writing to him again.

Hayden slowly walked to the fireplace and propped the unopened letter on the mantel, next to the clock. Leaving it there, like a white, reproachful beacon, he went to the window to pull back the curtains and let the light in. When Jane left, it had been a chilly, rainy spring, the busiest part of the Season. Now summers and winters had passed, and it
was almost summer again. A time of warmth and light, and long, lazy days.

What had Jane been doing all that time? He had tried not to think about that over those long three years, about Jane and what her life was like now. Every time she came through his mind he shoved her away, buried her in cards and drink, in late nights where if he didn’t sleep he couldn’t dream. They were better off apart. They had been so young and foolish when they married and she was safer away from him. He had convinced himself she was just a pale phantom.

Almost.

Hayden unlatched the window and pushed it open. Fresh air rushed into the stale room for the first time in days, a warm breeze that was another reminder that summer was coming. That his life really couldn’t keep going on as it had, in a blurred succession of parties and drinking. That was the way it had always been, the way his parents’ life had been. It was all he knew, all he had been taught. But what could take their place? Once he had known, or thought he had known, something different. But it was an illusion in the end.

Hayden turned away from the bright day outside and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror across the room. For a second He didn’t recognise himself. His black hair needed cutting and was tangled over his brow. He had lost weight and his breeches hung from his lean hips. His eyes were shadowed.

‘Jane would never know you now, you disreputable bastard,’ he told himself with a bitter laugh. He pulled open his wardrobe and reached for the first shirt hanging there. He pulled it over his head and splashed some cold water over his face. He wanted a brandy to fortify himself for reading Jane’s letter, but there was none nearby.

He had to read it now.

Hayden took the letter from the mantel and broke the seal.

‘Hayden,’ it began. No ‘dear’ or ‘beloved’. Right to the point.

Hayden was stunned. A divorce? Jane wrote him after all this time to say he should seek a divorce? He crumpled the letter in his fist and tossed it into the empty grate. A raw, burning fury swept through him, an anger he didn’t understand. What had he expected would happen with Jane? Had he just thought they would go along in their strange twilight world for ever, married but not married?

The truth was he had avoided thinking about it at all. Now he saw he must. Jane was quite right. Even though he avoided considering his responsibilities as much as possible, he needed an heir. When Jane lost the babies, that hope was gone as well as their marriage. It was like his poor mother all over again, only Jane had luckily been spared the fate of dying trying to give her husband a spare to go with his heir. Jane was saved—because she wisely left. Yes, she was right about it all.

But something else was there, something she did not say in that polite, carefully worded little letter. He wasn’t sure what it was, what was really going on with her, but
he was sure there was more to this sudden plea for a divorce.

My life here is a quiet one and scandal cannot affect it
.

How quiet
was
her life at Barton Park? He had heard nothing of how she really lived in the years since they had parted. No one ever saw her and, after the initial ripple of gossip over their separation, no one spoke of her. They treated him as if he was a single man again, as if Jane had never been. Now he wondered what she did. Why she wanted to be away from him in such a permanent way.

Suddenly he knew he had to see her again. He had to know what was really going on. She had left him, left their life together without a backward glance. He wouldn’t let things be easy for her any longer.

No matter what Jane thought, she
was
still his wife. It was time she remembered that. Time they both remembered that.

Hayden strode to the door and pulled it open. ‘Makepeace!’ he shouted.

‘My lord?’ came the faint reply up the stairs. Makepeace always disapproved of
Hayden’s strange habit of shouting out of doors.

‘Call for my horse to be saddled. I am leaving for the country today.’

‘W
ho
is that?’

Hayden’s best friend, Lord John Eastwood, looked around at Hayden’s sudden question. It had been a long, dull day
,
hanging about at the royal Drawing Room
,
watching all that Season’s crop of fresh young misses make their curtsies to the queen. John’s sister, Susan, was one those misses and he had been recruited to help her
.
Hayden in return was recruited to help John survive the deadly dullness of it all
.

Only for John would Hayden brave such a place and only after a stiff gulp of port
.
They had been friends ever since they were awkward schoolboys, drawn together by a
shared humour and love of parties. John’s family took Hayden in on holidays when his own family was too busy for him
.

But even for the Eastwoods he was regretting venturing in there, to the over-gilded overheated room stuffed with girls in awkwardly hooped satin-and-lace gowns and towering plumes—and their sharp-eyed
,
avidly husband-hunting mamas
.

A new young earl like Hayden was just a sitting duck, or a fox flushed out of hiding
.
He wanted to run
.

Until he saw
her.

She stood amid the gaggle of white-clad girls, overdressed just like them, with the tall headdress of white feathers in her dark hair threatening to overwhelm her slender figure
.
She was silent, carefully watching everything around her, but she drew his attention like the sudden flicker of a candle in the darkness
.

She wasn’t beautiful, not like so many of the pretty blonde shepherdess types clustered around her. She was too slim, too pale, with brown hair and a pointed chin, like a forest fairy. Yet she wore her ridiculous gown with
an air of quiet, stylish dignity and her pink lips were curved in a little smile as if she had a secret joke no one else in the crowd could know
.

And Hayden really, really wanted her to tell him what it was. What made her smile like that. No one had caught his attention so suddenly, so completely, in—well, ever. He had to find out who she was
.

‘Who is that?’ Hayden asked again, and it seemed something in the urgency of his tone caught John’s attention. John stopped grinning at his current flirtation, a certain Lady Eleanor Saunders, and turned to Hayden
.

‘Who is who?’ John asked
.

‘That girl over there, in the white with the silver lace,’ Hayden said impatiently
.

‘There are approximately fifty girls in white over there.’

‘It’s
that
one, of course.’ Hayden turned to gesture to her, only to find that now she watched
him.
Her smile was gone and she looked a bit startled
.

Her eyes were the strangest colour of golden-green, and they seemed to draw him in to her, closer and closer
.

‘The little brunette who is looking this way,’ he said quietly, as if he feared to scare her away if he spoke too loudly. She had such a quiet, watchful delicacy to her
.

‘Oh, her. She is Miss Jane Bancroft, the niece of Lady Kenton.’

‘You know her?’ How could John know her and he could not?

‘She had tea with Susan last week. It seems they met in the park and rather liked each other.’ John gave Hayden a sharp glance of sudden interest. ‘Why? Would you like to meet her?’

‘Yes,’ Hayden said simply. He couldn’t stop looking at her, couldn’t stop trying to decipher what was so immediately and deeply alluring about her
.

‘She’s not your usual sort, is she?’ John said
.

‘My usual sort?’

‘You know. Dashing, colourful. Like Lady Marlbury. You’ve never looked twice at a deb before.’

Hayden couldn’t even remember who Lady Marlbury was at the moment, even though she had been his sometimes-mistress for a
few weeks. Not when Miss Bancroft smiled at him, then looked shyly away, her cheeks turning pink
.

‘Just introduce me,’ he said
.

‘If you like,’ John said. ‘Just be careful
,
my friend. Girls like her can be lethal to men like you and you know it.’

Hayden couldn’t answer that. When was he ever careful? He wasn’t about to start now, not when feelings were roiling through him he had never felt before. He set off across the crowded room, leaving John to scramble after him
.

And Miss Bancroft watched him approach
.
She still looked so very still, but he saw her gloved fingers tighten on the sticks of her fan
,
saw her sudden intake of breath against the satin of her bodice. She wasn’t indifferent to him. Whatever this strange, sudden spell was, he wasn’t in it alone
.

‘Miss Bancroft,’ John said, giving the girl a bow. ‘Very nice to see you again.’

‘And you, Lord John,’ she answered, her voice low and soft, musical, with a flash of gentle humour in its depths. ‘It is a most dutiful
brother who would brave a Drawing Room for his sister.’

John laughed and half-turned. ‘May I present my very good friend, Hayden Fitzwalter, the Earl of Ramsay? He especially asked to make your acquaintance. Hayden
,
this is Miss Jane Bancroft.’

‘How do you do?’ she murmured. She made a little curtsy and slowly held out her hand to him
.

Her fingers trembled a bit as he folded them in his own, and her cheeks turned a deeper pink
. Jane, Jane.

And in that moment he was utterly lost…

Curiosus Semper
.

Careful Always. Jane had to laugh as she tore a trailing veil of ivy away from the stone garden bench and saw the motto carved there. The letters were faded with time, encrusted with the moss and dirt of neglect, but they were still visible. She would wager her ancestors never could have foreseen how sadly ironic those words would be for their family.

She stood up and dusted some of the soil
and leaves from her gloved hands. Her shoulders ached from kneeling there, clearing away some of the tenaciously clinging vines, but it was a good ache. Work meant she didn’t have to think. And there was plenty of work to be done at Barton Park.

As she stretched, she studied the house that loomed across the garden. Barton Park had belonged to the Bancrofts for centuries, a gift to one of their ancestors from Charles II. Legend had it that the house was part of the payment in exchange for that long-ago Bancroft marrying one of the king’s many cast-off mistresses. But the marriage, against all odds, was a happy one, and the couple went on to make Barton Park a centre of raucous parties and all sorts of debauchery.

Just the sort of place Hayden would have liked, Jane often thought. Perhaps if she had been more like that first mistress of Barton Park things between them could have worked out. But the Bancrofts that followed were quieter, more scholarly, and not as adept at accumulating royal gifts. Their fortune dwindled until by the time of Jane’s father there
was little left but the house itself, which was already crumbling with neglect.

Little but the legend of the treasure. The old tale about how one of the first Barton Park Bancrofts’ many licentious guests had dabbled in highway robbery and had hidden his ill-gotten treasure somewhere in the garden. Jane’s father, as he grew sicker and sicker, had become obsessed with the idea of this treasure. He told Jane the story of it over and over, even sending her out to try digging in various spots around the grounds.

Then he died and her mother had told her different tales. Harder, more bitter stories about the truth of a woman’s insecure place in the world, of how finding the right husband—a
rich
husband—was all that mattered. Jane was frightened to think she might be right. Money and position could bring security, of course, and she craved that so much after the uncertainties of her childhood. But surely there must be more? Must be some chance of a happy family? Of being a good wife and mother, despite the poor example she had always seen before her.

Then her mother also died and Jane went
to have a London Season with her aunt while Emma was sent to school.

Both those destinations had ended badly for the Bancroft sisters. Jane had found she had more of her fanciful father in her than she ever would have thought. She had imagined she had found a fairy tale, a happy-ever-after with Hayden, until she discovered she was in love with an illusion, a man who never really existed except in her dreams. She didn’t know how to fit into his world and he couldn’t help her. They had been so young, so foolish to think that they could even try, that their passion in the bedroom could be enough to make a life together.

So her father had been wrong in relying on fairy stories. But so had her mother. A rich husband was not all a woman needed.

Jane tossed her trowel and garden gloves into a bucket and examined the house. Barton Park was not a large dwelling, but once it had been very pretty, a red brick faded to a soft pink, centred around a white-stone portico and surrounded by gardens, a mysterious hedge maze and a pretty Chinoiserie summerhouse. Now the stone was chipped,
some of the windows cracked and the lovely gardens sadly overgrown. She hadn’t gone in the hedge maze at all since she moved back.

Jane did her best. She and Emma lived on a small bequest from their mother’s family, which Hayden could probably claim if he wanted, but it was surely too insignificant to interest him. It paid for their food, a cook, a maid, fuel for the fires, but not a carriage or a team of gardeners. No grand parties, but she had had her fill of those in London. She had found she wasn’t at all good at them, either attending or hosting them. There could be money from Hayden, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.

Jane sighed as she pushed the loose tendrils of her brown hair back into her scarf. Emma was sixteen now. In a couple of years she should have a London Season, though Jane had no idea how to pay for it or how to weather London gossip in order to launch her.

Not that Emma seemed in the least bit interested in a Season. She was a strange girl, always buried in books about botany or running off to the woods to collect ‘specimens’
or bring home new pets like rabbits or hedgehogs. She liked the quiet life in the country as much as Jane did. They both needed its peace. But Jane knew it couldn’t go on for ever.

That was why she had forced herself to write to Hayden after all these years. It had taken days of agonising before she could take up that pen to write the letter and even more before she could send it. Then there was…

Nothing. The days had gone by in silence with no answer at all from her husband.

Her husband
. Jane pressed her hand to her stomach with the spasm of pain that always came when she thought those words. She remembered Hayden as she had last seen him, sprawled asleep on the stairs of their London house. Her husband, as beautiful as a fallen angel. How horribly they had disappointed each other. Failed each other.

She tried so hard not to think about him. Not to think about how things were when they first married, when she had been so naïve and full of hope. So dazzled by Hayden and what he gave to her. By who he was and the delights they found together in the bedchamber.
She tried not to think about the babies, and about how losing those tiny, fragile lives showed her how hollow and empty everything was. She couldn’t even fulfil her main duty as a countess.

During the day it was easy not to think about it all. There was so much work to be done, the gardens to be cleared, the meagre accounts to go over, a few neighbourhood friends to call on or join for tea or cards. But at night—at night it was so different.

In the silence and the darkness there was nothing but the memories. She remembered everything about their days together, the good and the bad. How they had laughed together; how he had made her feel when he kissed her, touched her. How in those moments she had felt not so alone any longer, even though it was all an illusion in the end. She wondered how he was now, what he was doing. And then she wanted to sob for what was lost, for what had never really been except in her dreams.

Yes. Except for those nights, life would be very tolerable indeed. But it wasn’t just Emma’s future she needed to think about, it was
her own. And Hayden’s, too, even though the future had never seemed to be something he considered. He was an earl and also an orphan with no siblings. He would need an heir. And for that he would have to be free, as complicated and costly as that would be. She had to offer him that.

And she needed to be free, too.

Jane pushed away thoughts of Hayden and the unanswered letter. She couldn’t worry about it now. She scooped up the bucket and made her way along the overgrown pathway to the house. They were expecting guests for tea.

As she stowed the bucket next to the kitchen, the door suddenly flew open and Emma dashed out. She held a wriggling puppy under one arm and the dirty burlap bag she used for collecting plants over the other. Her golden-blonde hair was gathered in an untidy braid and she wore an old apron over her faded blue-muslin dress.

Even so dishevelled, anyone could see that Emma was becoming a rare beauty, all ivory and gold with their mother’s jewel-green eyes, eyes that had become a muddy hazel
on Jane. Emma’s beauty was yet another reason to worry about the future. Emma might be happy at Barton Park, but Jane knew she couldn’t be buried in the country for ever.

‘Where are you going in such a hurry?’ Jane asked.

‘I saw a patch of what looked like the plant I’ve been seeking by the road yesterday, but I didn’t have time to examine it properly,’ Emma answered briskly. ‘I want to collect a few pieces before they get trampled.’

‘It looks like rain,’ Jane said. ‘And we have guests coming to tea soon.’

‘Do we? Who? The vicar again?’ Emma said without much interest. She put down Murray the puppy and clipped on his lead.

‘No, Sir David Marton and his sister Miss Louisa. Surely you remember them from the assembly last month?’ Their last real social outing, dancing and tepid punch at the village assembly rooms. Emma would surely remember it as she had protested being put into one of Jane’s made-over London gowns and had then been ogled and flirted with by every man between fifteen and fifty. Sir
David had danced with her once, too, then he had spent the evening talking to Jane.