Louise Allen - Scandal in the Regency Ballroom - No Place For a Lady / Not Quite a Lady

Mr Ryder just waited, silently. It was a technique Max used himself and he was wryly amused to find himself succumbing to it. ‘If she had loved me, I don’t think that would have mattered, but she didn’t. I think she had seen me as the equivalent of a wealthy merchant and that was the height of her ambition. She had not expected to have to work for the title and the wealth and the position. I might have been young, and I might have been besotted, but I knew what a countess’s duties and responsibilities were.

‘She realised that this was not a game and we both realised she did not love me. It took three weeks to reach that point.’

Mr Ryder taped his teeth with the end of his pencil. ‘I suppose that there were not grounds for an annulment?’ he enquired delicately.

‘No.’ Max looked back over the years with grim amusement. ‘I think you might say that the one place where we were compatible was in bed.’

There was a pause while the investigator gazed tactfully out of the study window and Max consigned those particular memories to a deep, safe, dark, mental cupboard.

‘Then she met a gentleman when she was shopping in Norwich. It is the closest town to my country seat. Drusilla enjoyed shopping and Grandmama saw no harm in it so long as she went incognito. That gentleman was handsome, charming, lived by his wits and was, as she informed me in the exceedingly ill-spelled letter she left me, fun . She left, taking all those jewels Grandmama had not locked in the safe.’

‘You pursued her?’

‘No. I wrote to her at the inn her note had come from and informed her that I was opening an account with my bank on which she, and only she, could draw, and that I hoped she was happy.’ He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. ‘I never saw her, nor heard from her, again. Money was taken out, to the limit I told her I would maintain, for two years. After that it was untouched and has remained so to this day.’

‘The logical presumption would be that she is dead, or no longer in the country,’ Ryder remarked.

‘I need more than presumption, Mr Ryder. I need to know whether I have a wife living or not.’

‘Indeed, my lord, I can understand why you feel that to be desirable. Did you contact her family?’

‘No.’

‘Make any enquiries at all?’

‘None.’

‘Why not, my lord? Nine years is a very long time with, if I may be so frank, the succession to an earldom to be considered.’

‘Because I had a guilty conscience and because I am unused to failure.’ Max had had long enough to work out why he had consigned the problem of his marriage to a locked cupboard. ‘Don’t think I feel any complacency about my lack of action. But I should never have married her—I took the poor girl completely out of her depth. And having done so, somehow I should have made it work. It may sound arrogant, Mr Ryder, but I am not used to failure.’

‘I am sure that is the case, my lord.’

Max paused, tapping the tips of his joined fingers against his lips. ‘And the longer I left it, the more difficult it became. I suppose, too, that my damnable pride got in the way as well. I had offered her a golden future and she tossed it back in my face to run off with an adventurer—I was damned if I was going to chase after her.’ Was that at the heart of it? Was that the real reason, and I’ve been too much of a hypocrite to admit it? Pride?

‘Well, my lord, I think I have enough to commence my investigations. I will write to you weekly to advise you of progress, unless, of course, I make a breakthrough. I will refer to the Countess in terms of a painting that was stolen some years back and which you wish to trace. That should be adequate cover in the event of a letter falling into the wrong hands.’

Ryder stood, tucking his notebook away in a breast pocket. ‘Just one more thing, my lord. Did none of her family make any attempt to contact you after the marriage?’

‘No.’ He looked at the investigator and suddenly that omission seemed as odd to him as it obviously did to Ryder. ‘How very strange.’

‘Indeed. I believe I will start with them. Good day, my lord.’

Max went to sit at his desk again as the door closed behind Ryder. He felt confidence in the man, both in his discretion and his skill. A few weeks and he would know where he was and how he stood. It was good to have done this at last. For years he had been telling himself that Nevill would make a perfectly acceptable heir. Now he could close his eyes and see the nebulous outline of his own son. The fact that this phantom of the future had only begun to appear since he had met Bree did not escape him.

A son with her blue eyes and his dark hair, or perhaps his brown eyes and her wheaten blonde hair—either was an attractive thought. And a number of daughters, all like their mother.

Max grinned at his distorted image in the silver inkwell, his spirits lifting from what seemed like an inordinate time in the doldrums. Surely, if one was daydreaming about the number of children one would have with a lady, one was beyond the stage of being undecided about one’s feelings? All this needed was very careful timing and complete self-control. And her co-operation, of course. And beyond that, to learn what one had done so very wrong before and not commit the same mistakes again.

By the second circuit of Green Park on Wednesday afternoon with Mr Latymer, Bree had come to the conclusion that she needed at least three new walking dresses if she was going to keep this up. And two new bonnets.

On Tuesday Lord Lansdowne had called and had taken her driving in Hyde Park at the height of the fashionable promenade. She had been acknowledged by a gratifying number of new acquaintances from the Dowager’s ball, despite the Viscount’s protestations that town was virtually empty of company.

‘I wouldn’t be up now if it weren’t that Grandmama wanted to puff off Sophia’s engagement from the town house,’ he explained. He moved the phaeton off again after a stop to speak to three of Bree’s Grendon cousins who were staying up in town while the fine weather lasted.

‘But the Nonesuch Whips are here,’ Bree observed. ‘At least, enough of you to be having meetings.’

‘Mmm.’ The Viscount touched his hat to a barouche full of fashionably dressed young matrons as they passed. ‘I’m here for Sophia’s affair, Greesley’s staying on because his elderly uncle, the one who’s going to leave him all the money, is threatening to turn up his toes, and Greesley’s doing the dutiful. Penrith’s up because his suite at his country seat is being redecorated and he’s fled from demands to choose hangings—at least, that’s his story—and young Nevill’s here because Penrith is. Don’t know what Latymer’s reason is, but once there’s a core of us, then it makes it worthwhile for the others and it snowballs.’

‘Has Lord Penrith told the other club members about my suggestion for them to drive the stage?’ Bree twirled her parasol and tried not to feel guilty about leaving Rosa with a stack of account books. Her companion had protested that she wanted to read them to get a better understanding of the business and had shooed Bree out of the house as soon as Lord Lansdowne had called.

‘Indeed he has.’ The Viscount was enthusiastic. ‘It’s what’s keeping us all up now, the hope we can get at least two outings in while the weather holds.’

‘I really do not understand the attraction,’ Bree said doubtfully, still uneasy that they would try and race. ‘I expect you all have beautiful rigs and very fine teams.’

‘That’s just the point.’ Lansdowne caught the end of his whip neatly round the handle in a way that had Bree itching to learn the trick of it. ‘We spend the money, but is it our horses and our well-balanced rigs that make us drive well? How do we know? If we take a stagecoach, which, forgive me, is not built to the same standards, and have to take pot luck with teams that are not bred for looks or speed, then the man with the better skills will be obvious.’