Mary Balogh - One Night for Love

Henry Doyle, it seemed, had been dead these four years and more.

Neville felt a door slamming in his face. "I understand," he said, "that the regiment returned Sergeant Doyle's belongings here after his death more than eighteen months ago. Would you know anything about those, ma'am?"

"Oh." She curtsied. "I daresay they were given to William Doyle, my lord. Henry Doyle's son, that is."

Ah. "And where may I find William Doyle?" he asked.

"He is dead, my lord," she told him. "He died about a year ago in a nasty accident, my lord."

"I am sorry to hear it," Neville said. And he was too. Two men who would have been perhaps Lily's only surviving relatives were both dead. "Would you know, ma'am, what happened to his belongings?"

"I daresay Bessie Doyle has them, my lord," she said. "She is William's widow. She still lives in the cottage. She has two growing lads and the master was too kind of heart to turn them out. She takes in laundry."

Lily's aunt—and her cousins.

"Perhaps," he said, "you would direct me to the cottage, ma'am."

The housekeeper, considerably flustered again, assured his lordship that she could have Bessie summoned to the house, but he declined her offer and was given the directions he needed.

Bessie Doyle was a stout, florid-faced woman of middle years. She kept an untidy home, though it looked clean enough. She greeted the sight of a fashionably dressed earl on her doorstep with an assessing head-to-toe glance and hands firmly planted on ample hips.

"If it is laundry you has for me," she told him, "you have come to the right place. Though I do not answer for fancy boots like them there after they have tramped through the mud. You had better wipe your feet if you intends to come inside."

Neville grinned at her. The tail of the army was full of Bessie Doyles, strong, capable, practical women who would have greeted the whole of Napoleon Bonaparte's army with hands on hips and some tart remark on their lips.

Yes, Bessie remembered the letter that had come to tell them about Thomas's getting killed—Will had taken it to the vicar to read. And yes, this was where his stuff had been sent—useless junk all of it. It had been in a heap over there—she pointed to a corner of the room in which they stood—when she came back from nursing her old mum, who had not died after all, as it happened, though Will had. She had been called back from her mother's a few miles away with the news that he had fallen from his horse and knocked his brains out on a stone when he landed.

"I am very sorry," Neville told her.

"Well," she said philosophically, "at least it proved that he did have brains, didn't it? Sometimes I wondered."

Bessie Doyle, Neville gathered, was not an inconsolably grieving widow.

"I burned the stuff," she told him before he could ask. "The whole bloody lot."

Neville closed his eyes briefly. "Did you look through it carefully first?" he asked her. "Was there no letter, no package, no—no money, perhaps?"

The very idea of money drew a short bark of laughter from Mrs. Doyle. Will, in her wifely opinion, would have drunk it up in a hurry if there had been.

"P'raps that was what made him fall off," she said, but it was not a serious suggestion. "No, course there weren't no money. Tom wouldn't have kept no money for the likes of Will to get his hands on after he croaked, would he now?"

"Thomas Doyle had a daughter," Neville told her.

Well, Bessie Doyle did not know about that and showed no burning desire to learn anything about her long-lost niece. Her lads were going to be home from the stables soon, she told his lordship. They worked there. And they were going to be hungry enough to eat an ox apiece.

Neville took the remark as a hint to be on his way. But something caught his eye as he turned to leave—a military pack hanging from a nail beside the door.

"Was that Thomas Doyle's?" he asked, pointing at it.

"I daresay it was," she said. "It was the only useful thing out of the whole lot. But filthy? Had to scrub it to a thread, I did, before I could use it." It was stuffed full of rags.

"May I have it?" Neville asked her. "May I buy it from you?" He took his purse out of his pocket and withdrew a ten-pound note from it. He held it out to her.

She eyed it askance. "Are you daft?" she asked his lordship. "That is more than I and the lads earn in a year between us. For that old bag?"

"Please." Neville smiled. "If ten pounds are not enough, I will double the amount."

But Bessie Doyle had her pride. His lordship of the expensive muddy boots might be daft, but she was no robber. She emptied the contents of the pack onto the floor, handed it over with one hand, and took the ten pounds with the other.

The clean, misshapen pack that had been his sergeant's lay on the carriage seat opposite the one on which Neville sat all the way back to Newbury. It would be Lily's one memento of her father. He would have paid a hundred pounds for it—a thousand. But he felt disappointment too. Had Mrs. Doyle inadvertently burned a letter or some sort of package that had contained something more personal for Lily?

Neville had given himself a month to remain at Newbury before removing to his town house in London. Two weeks had passed by the time he returned from Leicestershire. Only half of a month with half still to go! And even then, the faint hope that had sustained him might well prove to have been illusory. Lily, he suspected, would not easily be persuaded to change her mind.

But just before the month was over, before he had decided upon an actual date for his departure, a small package arrived from Elizabeth.

"I have procured you this," she had written in a short note, "having let it be known that you are planning to come to town soon. You may wish to be in attendance, Neville."

The accompanying invitation was to a ball at Lady Ashton's on

Cavendish Square

.

Neville nodded his head to the emptiness of the library. "Yes," he said aloud. "Oh yes, Elizabeth. I'll be there."

Chapter 18

Lady Ashton's annual ball on

Cavendish Square

was always one of the Season's great squeezes. It was the ball at which Lady Elizabeth Wyatt had decided to introduce her companion to society.

Elizabeth had many friends and acquaintances. A number of them had called upon her during the month since her return to town, and she had done a great deal of visiting herself. She had also attended a number of evening entertainments. But no one had met her new companion, Miss Doyle, or shown any great curiosity about her until Elizabeth let drop, as if by accident, at a dinner one evening shortly before the Ashton ball the information that Lily Doyle and the woman who had caused such a stir at the Earl of Kilborne's wedding at Newbury earlier in the spring were one and the same person.

Everyone knew about Lily. She was perhaps the most famous, or the most notorious, woman in England during that particular spring—among members of the beau monde , at least. Even her appearance in the church at Newbury, completely disrupting one of the greatest ton weddings of the year, was surely enough to have fed conversations for the whole Season and beyond. But long before that sensation had begun to die, the rest of the deliciously bizarre story was revealed—Lily was not after all the Countess of Kilbourne because her marriage to the earl had never been properly registered.

Lily's story had been told and discussed in every fashionable drawing room and dining room in London. There were so many unanswered questions that there were unending issues for debate: Who was she? Why had Kilbourne married her? Why had he never told anyone? Where exactly had she been during all the time Kilbourne had thought her dead? What had happened when Kilbourne had discovered the truth about the legality of the marriage? Had she begged on bended knee that he marry her again? Was it true that she had threatened to throw herself off a cliff to be dashed on the rocks below? Had anyone heard for sure how large a settlement Kilbourne had been forced to make on her? Was she really as vulgar as everyone said she was? Where had she gone? Was it true that she had run off with half the earl's fortune and one of his grooms to boot? When was Kilbourne to marry Miss Edgeworth? Would they decide upon a quiet wedding this time? Was it true that Miss Edgeworth had spurned the earl's offer? And who was this Lily? Was she really just the daughter of a common soldier ?