Julia Justiss - The Untamed Heiress

Or someone. A moment later his questing eyes met hers. Defiantly, Helena held his gaze. After regarding her steadily for several minutes, he nodded.

Curious now, she nodded back. The stranger gave her a brief smile, then turned back to the preacher.

While Helena watched the minister continue to read the service, her mind raced back to something Mad Sally had told her shortly before her death. Not daring to place any credence in so unlikely a possibility, Helena had dismissed as another of the old woman’s crazy mutterings the claim that Helena’s mother had sent someone to watch over her. Someone who’d been waiting in the village for years for her father to grow ill or incapacitated enough for it to be safe to approach her.

Could Sally’s message have been true? Might this man be the one?

She mustn’t let excitement carry her away, she told herself, trying to rein in her rioting imagination. However, since she intended to set off in that direction anyway, it wouldn’t hurt to trail the man back toward the village—assuming her expectations were correct and no armed guards remained at their posts to prevent her leaving.

The service concluded, the minister waited only until the two mourners had each tossed a handful of stony soil over the coffin before wrapping his robes about him and hurrying out of the graveyard, shoulders hunched against the wind. Without glancing at her again, the stranger followed, leaving the two grave diggers to their work.

Watching from her rocky perch as the group dispersed, Helena hugged her thin arms around the worn bodice of her outgrown dress. Since she’d long ago grown inured to the cold of the coastal wind and mist, the shiver that passed through her frame must be hope.

“I’M SO SORRY, MY DEAR.”

As if the words made no sense, Helena sat staring over the desk at the kindly visage of Mr. Pendenning, Mama’s London solicitor. Except he wasn’t Mama’s solicitor anymore. Mama was dead.

The man at her father’s funeral, Jerry Sunderland, had not known, the lawyer told her. He’d been sent to the village years earlier, after her mother’s attempt to rescue her failed, with instructions to settle quietly, pursue his trade and wait until such time as he judged it safe to approach Helena with Mr. Pendenning’s message.

Somehow, all through the long journey from the coast to London, she’d sensed it, though she’d forbidden her mind to even consider the possibility. Along with the lawyer’s note, Jerry had given her money enough to make the trip in easy stages, but that amorphous, unnamed fear in her heart had driven her to travel night and day without rest. Oblivious to wind, rain and chill, she’d ridden much of the way on the roof of the mail coaches, unwilling to wait and reserve an inside seat on a later run. With that inner cadence pounding in her ears—hurry! hurry!—she’d done little more than numbly note the marvelous variety of terrain and the many occupations being practiced by the folk they passed on their route.

Exploring the wonders of the world now open to her was for later. Ignoring the pain in her ankles from the stiff shoes and the scratch of the rough wool cape Jerry had provided, she had clutched in her hands the slip of paper with the solicitor’s address, her mind fixed on a single imperative: get to London. Find Mama.

But Mama would not be found, in London or elsewhere. For more than a year, Mr. Pendenning had just told her, Mama’s brilliant smile and joyous laughter had been entombed on a small Caribbean island half a world away. The place where Gavin Seagrave, the man she’d loved and fled to, had settled after being forced to leave England.

There would be no reunion. The goal that had sustained her through beatings and isolation and deprivation, that had given her hope and steeled her to persevere, had vanished like snow in a hot noon sun.

For the first time in her life, Helena felt truly alone.

“What am I to do now?” she whispered, unaware she’d spoken the words out loud.

“Live your life, my child,” Mr. Pendenning said gently. “I corresponded with your mother for years and can with confidence, I believe, offer you the advice she would have given. After her health began to fail and she accepted the painful fact that she would probably not outlive your father, it became her single goal to arrange her affairs so that once you were free, you would have the means to do whatever you wished. And though I haven’t yet received the particulars from your father’s attorneys, as his sole heiress as well as your mother’s, you will find yourself an extremely wealthy young woman.”

Helena had been listening listlessly to the lawyer’s recitation, but at this, her head snapped back up. “I want nothing to do with anything that was my father’s.”

The lawyer ran a sympathetic glance over her thin form. “Though you did not hold him in affection, that does not alter the fact that you are still his legal heir. In addition to cash reserves, there is—”

“No!” Helena interrupted with such vehemence the lawyer fell silent. “I want nothing that belonged to him. Not one handful of earth from any property he owned. Not a penny of his wealth. I’d rather live in the streets.”

The lawyer smiled. “There’s no chance of your having to do that. However, you must consider that part of your father’s estate consists of the land and capital that was your mother’s dowry. The rest of his assets you could sell, perhaps, and invest the proceeds.”

“Whatever was Mama’s I will keep,” Helena replied. “But nothing of my father’s. Nothing. Do you understand?”

Though he gave her a dubious look, the lawyer nodded. “As you wish. But what of Lambarth Castle? It was your home and your mother’s. If you do not wish to live in it, remote as the property is, I expect a buyer can be found.”

“I should like the books from the library shipped to me. As for the castle itself,” Helena said, turning the full force of her dark-eyed gaze on the lawyer, “I wish it to be torn down, stone by stone and beam by beam, and the rubble cast into the sea.”

The lawyer’s face blanched and he swallowed hard. “I…I see. And the servants?”

“By the time Papa died, only Holmes and his wife remained.” Helena recalled with loathing how the two had delighted in enforcing her father’s cruelty. “I suppose I cannot negate any bequests made to them in my father’s will? Then they may have whatever Papa left them and not a penny more. I am a wealthy woman now, you said?”

“Extremely wealthy.”

“And I may spend this wealth as I choose?”

“Your mother named me as trustee to advise you, but otherwise you may spend as you will.”

“Then I should like to do one more thing at Lambarth Castle. Erect a marble monument in the burial grounds.”

“To mark the grave of your father, I expect?”

Helena gave a harsh laugh. “Certainly not. The crows are welcome to him. No, the marker is for an old woman, Sally—I don’t know her last name. She was a healer, and my…my friend,” Helena concluded, her voice breaking.

The lawyer’s face softened. “I know this must have been a terrible shock to you, leaving the only place you’ve ever known and traveling so far, only to find the one you were seeking forever lost to you. We’ve spoken of financial matters, but nothing specifically of what you will do today, tomorrow and in the coming weeks. Will you allow me to make some suggestions?”

Suddenly, Helena felt the weight of the long hours of travel with little sleep and less food. Swaying, she put a hand on the lawyer’s desk to steady herself. “I…I would be grateful,” she murmured.

Mr. Pendenning poured a glass of wine from a crystal decanter on his desk. “Here, sip some of this. I’ll touch briefly on what I think you should do, and then you must rest.”