Mary Brendan - A Kind And Decent Man

Hard, unsteady fingers lifted to her cheek before sliding across her jaw. Long sooty lashes parted to reveal tortured relief in David’s sapphire eyes. “What in damnation do you think you’re doing here?” he gritted out.

“Looking for you,” Victoria answered with rash honesty.

Mary Brendan was born in North London and lived there for nineteen years before marrying and migrating north to Hertfordshire. She was grammar-school educated and has been at various times in her working life a personnel secretary for an international oil company, a property developer and a landlady. Presently working part-time in a local library, she dedicates hard-won leisure hours to antique browsing, curries and keeping up with two lively sons.

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Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

‘I’m begging you to hear me out, sir!’

‘Remove yourself. I have nothing further to say to you and will listen to no more.’ The words snapped out, the frail man showed his visitor a slumped-shouldered back.

‘You will hear me out.’ The quiet determination had the elderly gentleman twisting unsteadily about. Undisguised alarm in weak grey eyes elicited a sardonic tilt to the youthful supplicant’s mouth. Talk of fighting had obviously also reached his ears. The doddering fool probably believed him disposed to hitting someone almost thrice his age. He reined in his temper, politely but firmly requesting, ‘Please, let me at least speak to your daughter before I leave…’

‘My daughter is removed to Hertfordshire with her aunt.’ The information was bitten out in icy triumph. ‘She seemed unaware of your true character but I have now told her of your revolting habits and morals. Moreover, she knows her duty to her father.’

Fierce blue eyes bored relentlessly into watering grey. A white line traced around the young man’s thin, compressed lips and a cord of muscle formed, jerking a lean cheek.

Instinctively the girl’s father stumbled back a few steps. He knew of his dangerous reputation. Oh, he had heard every sordid detail gossiped abroad, and he knew this was not a man to trifle with. But his contempt was impossible to contain, and finally exploded in a hissed, ‘You have the effrontery to come here and offer for my daughter? You? The younger son of a bankrupt viscount, with no prospect of title or wealth to recommend you? You, with your gambling, your whoring, your brawling…your disgusting breeding? If your parents were struck down dead in the street I doubt that carrion would risk the taint of picking them over.’ He had gone too far, he was sure, and his bloodless, puckered lips pressed so firmly shut they disappeared.

A flash of even white teeth revealed the young man’s appreciation of the imagery and the mirthless smile terrorised the elderly man more than the leashed rage he could sense radiating from him.

‘Remove yourself before I call Brook to eject you.’ The words were pushed out, emerging in a strangled whisper.

The threat provoked no more than a careless elevation in the young petitioner’s thick dark brows. But he exhaled a steadying breath through set teeth. ‘I am aware, sir, that at present I have little to offer. But within two months I will have. I have several deals on the table and the prospect of much more. I can raise considerable finance through a private source…’

‘You think you can buy my daughter?’ the elderly man spat, hoarse with outrage, bony fists quaking at his sides.

Exasperatedly snapping back his dark head, the young man finally yielded and pivoted on his heel. He turned by the door and leaned his tall, powerful figure back against its mahogany panels. Sapphire eyes narrowed in his handsome, angular face, riveting into his gaunt, stooped tormentor. ‘Oh, I know I can,’ he softly promised, before quietly closing the door behind him.

‘Promise you will, Victoria.’ The whispered words were thready and Victoria Hart inclined her head closer to her husband.

A thin-skinned, thick-veined hand trembled out and rested upon the crumpled black satin of her hair. He stirred it beneath his fingers. ‘Promise me, my dear, that you will write to him and tell him. I want you to do it now…this minute.’

‘Hush,’ Victoria soothed, closing wet grey eyes to shield her grief from him. ‘You can write yourself when you are feeling a little better.’ The words were gasped out as she battled against the tears threatening to close her throat at such futile comfort. She half turned for a sideways glance at Dr Gibson by the shadowy doorway. Leaping flames in the hearth revealed his stooped silhouette and the negative swaying of his head.

Her husband attempted a wry, appreciative laugh at her sweet, hopeless encouragement but it made him wheeze and he fought to regain his breath. ‘Will you do it now, for your poor old Danny?’ he eventually squeezed out on a long, painful sigh. ‘And will you promise that Samuel takes it today for the letter-carrier? For I want him to receive it in time. He is all the kin I have, apart from you.’ As he sighed into the silence, there was a faint, appealing smile for his beautiful young wife.

Victoria nodded her dark head beneath his fleshless palm and cold, dry fingers drifted across her warm, wet cheek before falling back to the coverlet.

‘Thank you, Victoria.’ Relaxing at her wordless vow, Daniel Hart allowed speckled lids to droop over colourless eyes. ‘You know what you have promised me, my dear. No widow’s weeds…not for your Danny. Nor moping about indoors away from the young people you like. Never deprive yourself of your youth, or anyone of your sweet company. It is what I want, you know that, and others will too. It is a condition of my bequest, witnessed and sealed.’ A dry chuckle preceded his next words. ‘What care we for convention…you and I…eh, my dear?’ He patted her slender white fingers in a gesture of dismissal.

As the rustling of her skirts told him she had risen from kneeling by his bedside, he murmured, ‘There is something else you have to promise me, Victoria.’ Into the rasping silence he finally breathed, ‘Promise me you won’t cry any more…’

David Hardinge, Viscount Courtenay of Hawkesmere in the county of Berkshire, paused while dictating and smiled. So infrequent a show of consideration and humour was this that Jacob Robinson, clerk and general factotum to the Viscount, actually ceased his frantic note-scribbling to stare at his master. He peered through his dusty spectacles at the lean profile presented to him as his employer settled broad shoulders comfortably back into his leather wing chair and brought the source of his amusement closer, savouring it. Startlingly blue eyes scanned an ivory black-edged card as he shoved back his chair and leisurely settled his highly polished top-boots on the edge of his highly polished mahogany desk. He reread the few lines of elegant black script while his long fingers sought on the desk for the cheroot curling a gentle drift of smoke towards the lofty ceiling of his walnut-panelled study. With the cigar stuck between his white teeth, his narrowed blue eyes flicked upwards, contemplating the ornate plaster coving. As his mind sped back seven years, the card was tapped idly against a manicured thumbnail. A few seconds of reminiscence had his teeth clenching on his cheroot and the card flipping casually across the desk to land in front of Jacob. ‘Send condolences and usual regrets at being unable to attend.’