Amanda McCabe - The Runaway Countess

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.