Мэри Бэлоу: Someone to Romance

A little over a year after adopting Gabriel, Cyrus had died from a fall at the dockside during the loading of one of his ships. It was an accident that ought not to have been particularly serious but had in fact proved fatal.

Shockingly, Gabriel was a very wealthy man by the time he was twenty-six and had huge responsibilities for one so young. He owned a large home, a thriving import-export business, and what amounted to a small fleet of ships. He had several hundred employees. He was a somebody in Boston society and much sought after, particularly by matrons with daughters in search of successful young men of fortune and industrious habits.

He had enjoyed the attention. He had dallied with a few of those daughters, though never to the point at which he felt committed to offering for any of them. He had enjoyed his life in general. The work suited him and filled his days with challenge and activity. Boston was bustling with energy and optimism. Within a few years he had expanded the business, added another ship to his fleet, and made himself wealthier than his cousin had ever been. In addition, he had raised wages for all his workers and improved working conditions. He had given his employees, even the lowliest of them, benefits to cover doctors’ fees and lost wages when they were sick or had been hurt on the job.

He had been happy, though he had never thought to use that exact word at the time. He had been too busy living the life that hard work and sheer good fortune had brought him. Yet he would have given it all to have Cyrus back. It had taken him a long time to recover from the grief of losing him.

He might have forgotten about his life in England, or at least let it slide into distant memory, if it had not been for the letters that came two, sometimes three, times a year from Mary Beck. She was the only person to whom he had written after his arrival in America. He had known she would worry about him if he did not. And he had felt too the need to keep some frail thread of connection to his past.

Despite himself, he had read her letters avidly for the snippets of local news she passed on. He had looked, though he had never asked, for some hint, any hint, that the truth of what had happened before he left had become generally known and had not continued to be falsified. He had sworn Mary to secrecy in his first letter, though it had been unnecessary. She had said nothing about him to anyone, she had assured him in her return letter, and would never do so under any circumstances. He had trusted her word at the time and still did.

Perhaps he ought not to have begun the correspondence. It might be better to have known nothing, to have broken all ties, to have been content to be dead to everyone and everything he had left behind. Even Mary.

The year after Cyrus’s untimely passing, Mary’s spring letter had brought word of three other shocking deaths. Her sister and Julius—her brother-in-law—and nephew had died the previous summer, just after she had written him her last letter of the year. An outbreak of typhus had taken a few other people from the neighborhood as well, though it had not touched Mary herself, living as she did, almost as a hermit in her small cottage on one corner of the family estate.

That had been astounding news in itself, but there had been repercussions that were eventually to complicate Gabriel’s life and force his return to England. For Mary’s brother-in-law and Gabriel’s uncle, Julius Rochford, had also been the Earl of Lyndale. Philip, his only son and his heir, though married, had had no sons of his own—no legitimate ones, at least. And he had predeceased his father by one day. Gabriel, son and only child of the late Arthur Rochford, Julius’s younger brother, was therefore his uncle’s successor.

He was the Earl of Lyndale.

He had not been happy about it or about the death of his aunt, who had been sweet though dithery and a person of no account in her husband’s household. He had regretted the death of his uncle too. He had not grieved the loss of his cousin at all.

He might have ignored his changed status for the rest of his life, and had done so for six years after receiving word of it in Mary’s letter. No one knew where he was—except Mary herself, and she would not tell, having given her promise. If a search had been made for him, and he did not doubt that there had been some halfhearted attempt to discover the whereabouts of the new earl or whether indeed he still lived, then it had failed to turn up any trace of him. When he had taken passage for America, it had seemed a bit of an unnecessary precaution to use his mother’s name instead of his own. As it had turned out, though, it had been a wise thing to do. After a certain number of years—was it seven?—he would be declared officially dead and the next heir in line would succeed him to the title and inherit everything that went with it. That would be his second cousin, Manley Rochford, whom Gabriel remembered with no more fondness than he had felt for Philip. But . . .

May Manley and all his descendants live happily ever after. Or not. Gabriel did not care either way. All that had happened was ancient history. He wanted nothing to do with the title or the property or the pomp and circumstance to which he was now entitled as a British peer of the realm. He was perfectly content with his life as it was and wanted nothing to do with England.

Except that there was Mary. His aunt’s sister. Mary, with her clubfoot and crooked spine and deformed hand and plain looks. Mary, with her little thatched cottage and her flower garden of breathtaking beauty and her vegetable patch and herb garden and her cats and dogs—all of them strays that she insisted had adopted her . Mary, with her books and her embroidery and her incomprehensible contentment with life.

Mary, now facing the threat of eviction.

Manley Rochford, heir to the title after Gabriel, was already acting upon his prospects. He had within the last year moved his family to Brierley Hall, as though by right, and taken over the running of the estate. He had dismissed the longtime steward, though he had no legal right yet to do so, and more than half the servants, indoor and out, in order to replace them with his own. His son, apparently a vain young man, was lording it about in the neighborhood. All of which facts in themselves would have elicited no more than a shrug from Gabriel. They were welcome, as far as he was concerned.

But . . . Manley had gone a step too far. He had given Mary Beck notice to leave his property by the time he became earl. She was not a member of the Rochford family, he had pointed out to her, and she had no claim whatsoever upon his charity. She was, moreover, a detriment to the neighborhood, where it was generally believed she had used witchcraft to bring the plague of typhus down upon her sister and brother-in-law and nephew, and upon a number of her neighbors too. He must consider the safety of his own family, he had informed her. And he must think of his neighbors, who were afraid to set foot upon Brierley land while Mary lived upon it.

None of which is true except the fact that I am not a Rochford, Gabriel, she had written in a letter to him. I know it is not. The neighbors are not so superstitious or cruel. But I must leave anyway. Please come home.

It was the only time she had ever put any pressure upon him to do anything at all. She might have exerted much further pressure, of course, by divulging her knowledge of where he was to be found in order to protect herself. But Gabriel knew she would not do that. Not Mary.

He had considered bringing her to America, setting her up in a comfortable apartment of her own in his home, giving her a part of his sizable garden, or even all of it if she wished, for her own use. But the journey might well kill her. And he could not imagine her being happy anywhere but in her own little cottage, where she had lived for as long as he had known her. And what would she do with all her strays? It might seem a trivial consideration, but they were Mary’s family, as dear to her as husband and children would be to another woman.