Elizabeth Harbison - Emma and the Earl

Brice’s correspondence with Emma had been very impersonal, at first. But then she’d written again, and something in her response had moved him. “I couldn’t help but laugh when you mentioned you were off to microwave a ‘pitiful chicken dinner,’” she’d written. “Believe it or not, I had the same thing on the table in front of me. I’m starting to think we’re cut from the same cloth. If you told me it was overcooked and rubbery, despite your best efforts, I’d be sure.…” He’d written back, not wanting to break the illusion he’d created, both for Emma and for himself. Before he knew it, a close friendship had developed. By then it was too late to tell her he wasn’t who she thought he was.

“How do you decide when it’s okay to lie and when it’s not?” John asked Brice now, his freckled face twitching into a goading grin.

“This was not a typical lie,” Brice said calmly. “The difference is in the intent. I didn’t tell Emma I was John Turnhill for any malicious reason, or to take advantage of her. You know as well as I do that I wrote that letter for you in your name as a favor because you were in a pinch. I never dreamed it would lead to any sort of personal correspondence.”

“Come on, old man.” John thumped his friend on the shoulder. “You’ve had a couple of years to tell her the truth now. Why haven’t you?”

“It’s ironic, I’ll concede that.” Brice bit out the words. The truth even sounded like a lie to his own ears. “But the reason is that she has a…a thing, as she puts it, about honesty.”

“A thing?”

“It’s really important to her. And rightly so.” He wouldn’t say more. It had been a confidence Emma had shared with him. He wasn’t going to give John the details, no matter how much they might support his own case. “The fact of the matter is that by the time I should have told her the truth, it was already too late.”

“It’s never too late to tell a woman you’re the earl of Palliser.” John gave a cynical laugh and gestured around the ornate room. “Surely she’d be thrilled to find out your true identity, rather than believe you’re plain old me.”

Brice looked at him seriously. “No, she wouldn’t.”

John studied Brice for a moment, then sat down in the Louis XVI chair in the light of a high narrow window. “Even if that’s so, I honestly don’t see how you can pull this off. A lot of people in this country know who you are on sight, especially women who read articles titled ‘The Ten Most Eligible Bachelors in Europe.’ How are you planning to avoid that kind of recognition?”

Brice gave a heavy sigh. John was right, he had gotten some of that kind of publicity over the years. Every now and then he learned of another magazine or newspaper who had put him on a bachelor list. “Emma wouldn’t read that kind of article.”

“But what if she did?”

Brice shrugged, certain she hadn’t. “How many people would really recognize me in the flesh after just seeing one or two badly reproduced photos?”

“That’s the question. If you ask me, you’re recognizable even from a bad photo.”

Brice looked at his reflection in a gilded mirror on the wall. His dark hair, slightly wavy and a little longer than usual, was fairly ordinary. On the other hand, his distinct Palliser bone structure—the high cheekbones and straight brow—were easily distinguished. The green eyes, which everyone likened to his late father’s, seemed somehow conspicuous.

“Look,” John said, interrupting his thoughts.

“Why don’t you just tell her the truth and let the proverbial chips fall where they may? It seems a lot easier than all this agonizing.”

“I don’t want to lose her,” Brice heard himself say, and realized that it was true. It might be selfish, but he wanted to preserve his friendship with Emma at any cost. “This is the only relationship that I’ve ever had with someone who accepts me for myself alone and not for this…” he gestured around the room, “this persona.”

“In leaving out this persona,” John gestured as Brice had done, “haven’t you left out a great deal of who you really are?”

Brice followed the sweep of John’s arm, assessing the office of his London home. Oriental carpets covered a gleaming wood floor. The high walls were adorned with priceless art and tapestries. His eye fell on a Remington painting, whose value was higher than that of some people’s homes. This wasn’t exactly the impression he had given Emma of his life, he knew. “Maybe.”

John gave a knowing nod. “And you’ve used my name to do it. That’s two enormous lies right there. It’s a tangled web all right.”

Unbelievably tangled, Brice thought with an inner groan. Almost schizophrenic. Yet for everything he’d left out in telling her about himself, he’d revealed something more important, in many ways more true. That was at the core of his dilemma, in fact: one of the main reasons Brice was reluctant to tell Emma who he really was, was that in his letters he’d been free to be the man he really wanted to be but couldn’t. He’d been light, fanciful at times, even funny. He’d never gone into the subject of his duties, his public persona, the historical estates he had to maintain, the international company he had to run. The heavy weight of his responsibilities lifted every time he picked up the pen as John.

Emma would be hugely disappointed to learn that the man she’d been writing to all this time was a serious, duty-minded aristocrat, who might have dreamed of dancing in the fountain in front of the Ritz on paper, but who would never even consider such a thing in his real life.

When John spoke again, he was very serious. “You have to be very careful about getting involved with someone, remember.”

“I know.”

“Unless you’re ready to tell your mother the truth about Caroline.…”

Caroline Fortescue was the daughter of Brice’s father’s business partner. Though both men had passed away several years back, there was an expectation among remaining family members, most notably Brice’s mother, that Brice and Caroline would marry.

It made sense as a business merger: the budding Fortescue microchip technology together with the Palliser telecommunications technology would dominate the market. Their parents thought it was “a good match,” and they’d been heavy-handed in their persuasion ever since Caroline and Brice had been in their early twenties. Finally, for the sake of living in peace with their parents, the two had decided to pretend to agree with the plan until they’d found what they really wanted. They were very sure of one thing though, they would never marry each other.

Brice groaned. “If I tell my mother that Caroline and I have no real intentions of getting married, she’ll go on a matchmaking campaign the likes of which would have made Wellington quake with fear.” He shook his head. “I’m not up for that just yet.”

Brice’s parents had made “a good match,” and as a result Brice had grown up with cold, distant parents who had more regard for appearances than they did for each other. Now his mother was fully willing to extend that legacy to him. Living alone, he’d found out at age twenty, was a far warmer experience than living with two people who led such pointedly separate lives. Perhaps when two people loved, living together was something different than he had experienced. But unconditional love was for other people. He’d never experience it—how could he? His very name created conditions that would be difficult to live with, not the least of which was the occasional public scrutiny.

“Until you say otherwise, and firmly,” John said, “Caroline is a consideration.”

“That’s right.”

“Then you’ll have to let this Emma know,” John persisted. “Before she gets dreamy ideas about herself and you and inadvertently creates havoc for you both.”