Jack Chiltern's Wife (1999)

Escaping marriage she doesn't want, Kitty Harston runs away to find her brother in France. Jack — Viscount Chiltern — can't leave her to fend for herself, so they pretend to be husband and wife...

He doffed his tall hat and executed a mannerly leg as steadily as if they had been in a London drawing room and not on a heaving deck. He was smiling. ‘As you see! Jack Chiltern at your service, ma’am.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, unaccountably pleased to see him. ‘Have you been following me?’

He smiled lazily. ‘Why should I do that?’

‘To take me back.’

Born in Singapore,
MARY NICHOLS
came to England when she was three, and has spent most of her life in different parts of East Anglia. She has been a radiographer, school secretary, information officer and industrial editor, as well as a writer. She has three grown-up children, and four grandchildren.

Recent titles by the same author:

• MISTRESS OF MADDERLEA
  

Mary Nichols

www.millsandboon.co.uk

1793

T
he atmosphere in the rectory library was charged with tension. It crackled like lightning in a leaden sky, presaging a storm which threatened to engulf the three people who stood grouped around the hearth. The Reverend William Harston, still in the black evening coat and breeches he had worn to Viscount Beresford’s Hunt Ball, stood with his back to the dying fire, facing his niece, Catherine, known to family and friends as Kitty. His dark features were sad and disappointed rather than angry, a fact which filled Kitty with remorse. But that remorse was tinged with defiance.

She, too, was still dressed for the ball in a high-waisted white silk gown with a square neck and three-quarter-length sleeves which ended in lace ruffles, as befitted a young lady of nineteen still in the single state.

Beside them, almost between them, stood Kitty’s stepmother, Alice. Her plump frame spilled out of a voluminous gown of pink satin. She wore an old-fashioned white wig and patches on her heavily powdered face. The powder was wearing off and did little to hide the red spots of anger on her cheeks.

‘Sorry! Sorry! Is that all you can say?’ Alice’s green eyes gleamed with malice. ‘You behaved like a harlot …’

‘Madam, you go too far,’ William interposed. ‘Pray, moderate your language.’

Alice ignored him and continued her tirade against Kitty. ‘You think “sorry” will see an end of it? We will never live it down. Never. It makes me quite ill to think of what we have just witnessed. The most flagrant impropriety imaginable …’

Kitty had made up her mind not to rise to her stepmother’s taunts, to be calm and dutiful and accept whatever punishment her uncle meted out to her. He was her father’s brother and her guardian and she respected him. But that was too much of an injustice. She looked up, violet eyes sparkling, and turned to the overbearing woman who had married her late father.

‘That’s not fair!’ she said. ‘It was only a kiss and meant nothing. Don’t tell me you never allowed a gentleman to kiss you before you were wed, because I will not believe it.’

‘That’s enough, Catherine!’ her uncle snapped. ‘Apologise for that at once. You should go down on your knees in thankfulness to have a mother who cares for your reputation and the good of your soul.’

It was more than Kitty could bring herself to do and she hung her head and said nothing. After all, she had done nothing so very terrible, except allow Edward Lampeter to dance her straight out of the ballroom on to the terrace, where he had proceeded to kiss her soundly.

The trouble was that he had not taken her far enough and some of the guests at the ball had seen them, had seen, too, that she was enjoying the experience. Her stepmother had been one of them and lost no time in drawing her uncle’s attention to the spectacle, and in such a noisy way that even those who had hitherto been oblivious had seen them and either smirked behind fans or chuckled aloud.

Uncle William had forced them apart, pushed Kitty behind him and stood facing Edward in icy control of his temper, before muttering a warning that he would call on him the next day and
hustling Kitty from the room and out to his carriage. Alice had been furious at their abrupt departure from so prestigious an event but, in Kitty’s eyes, she had made matters far worse by her display of outrage. There was no need to make such a fuss, unless she wanted Kitty to be publicly disgraced.

The carriage ride home from Beresford House, across the park to the rectory, had been made in silence, except for the clop of horses’ hooves and the jingle of harness. Only when they were behind closed doors did her uncle speak. ‘Do not think you are going to be allowed to go to bed, young lady. Into the library with you.’

Kitty had thrown off her cloak and given it to the waiting Judith, who looked from one to the other and, noticing the black looks of her employer and heightened colour of Mrs Harston, wondered what scrape Miss Kitty had got herself into now.

‘Go to bed, Judith,’ the Reverend commanded, before ushering his niece and her stepmother into the library.

It was the only room in the house Alice had not been allowed to transform. It was the only room he could go to when he needed solitude, a room for quiet relaxation, a room for doing business and discussing family matters. Here he could put on his stern face and exert his authority as leader of his flock of parishioners and head of the household, something he seemed unable to do anywhere else in the house since he had taken his brother’s widow into his home.

Kitty suspected he had not wanted to, but had done so for the sake of the children. Kitty still missed her mother, even after eight years. Her mother had been so gentle, so loving, so understanding of her high-spirited daughter, even though she was often ill and, in the last few months of her life, bedridden.

Her death had changed Kitty’s cheerful, easy-going father. He became almost morose, and involved himself more and more with looking after the poor. He had been a country doctor and a good one, just as he had been a good father; too good, she
sometimes thought, because it was thinking of his motherless children which had prompted him to marry Alice a little over a year later. And anyone less like her darling mother could not be imagined.

If old Judith was to be believed, Alice had set her cap at Papa before he met and married Anne, the youngest daughter of Lord Beresford, and she had been furious at being spurned.

When the first Mrs Harston died, Alice had, in almost indecent haste, rushed to comfort the widower. And he, needing a mother for his children, James and Catherine, had succumbed. Whether he had regretted making her the second Mrs Harston, Kitty did not know, for he had never given any sign of it.

But he had given way to Alice’s demands in every particular, allowing her to redecorate and refurnish the house to her own somewhat flowery taste, connived in the spoiling of their son who arrived a year after their marriage, and pandered to her imaginary ills, so that Kitty became exasperated at his weakness.

But it wasn’t Alice’s nagging or his weakness that carried him off in the end but typhoid, which he, as a physician, was treating at the infirmary. She had been fourteen at the time and James seventeen, almost a man, while little Johnny was only eighteen months old. On his deathbed Papa had asked Uncle William to look after his children and he, being the good man he was, had undertaken to do so.

Uncle William, unmarried and unworldly, had allowed himself to be persuaded by Alice that he needed a housekeeper as much as she and her fatherless children needed a home. She had taken over the rectory in the same way she had taken over the doctor’s home.

But though she tried, she had not been able to subdue Kitty’s bright spirit, her love of life, her quest for adventure, for new experiences, almost impossible in the rarefied atmosphere of the rectory of a quiet Berkshire village. Hence, the kiss.

‘Just when Lord Beresford was beginning to accept me and her ladyship was showing some friendly feeling towards me, you must perforce disgrace us.’ Alice’s diatribe went on. ‘What must they think? I’ll tell you, shall I? They will think I do not know how to go on, that I do not know enough of genteel behaviour to pass it on to my daughter …’

‘Stepdaughter,’ Kitty murmured.

‘Catherine!’ warned her uncle in a low voice. ‘That is unkind in you. Your stepmama has shown you nothing but kindness and treats you as if you were her own.’

‘For which I get no thanks,’ Alice put in, addressing Kitty. ‘Why, if we had played our cards aright, Lord Beresford might very well have given you a Season; you are his granddaughter, after all, and he has financed your brother’s Grand Tour. He would have treated you both even-handedly. We could all have had an enjoyable time going out and about with all the top people. We might have been presented at court.

‘You could have found a suitable husband and set up your own household,’ she went on, hardly pausing for breath. ‘It is too late now—his lordship will not invite us over his doorstep again and I shall be snubbed by everyone and not asked anywhere.’

It was obvious to Kitty that her stepmother’s concern was all about her own aspirations to be accepted by the upper echelons of society. Alice’s father had made his own way up in the world, building up a manufacturing business and becoming comfortably off. Kitty admired him for it, but his own daughter had despised him. She had never written to him and never visited him.

To hear Alice gossiping with her cronies, you would think she was a duchess at the very least. And she loved to boast that she had connections with Viscount Beresford, which were tenuous to say the least. Tonight at the ball, for instance, she had almost hurled herself at the poor man, gushing and primping
and telling him how she loved dear Kitty like her own, even though she was often wilful and disobedient.

She had sighed heavily, fluttering her eyelashes at him over her opened fan. ‘Girls need a strong hand, do you not think so? Not that your dear Anne would not have been strong if she had been able. She was ill for so long and dear Henry so engrossed with looking after her, which was only proper of course. But it is no wonder the children were allowed to run riot.’

It had given Kitty a perverse pleasure when her grandfather, tall and upright, had pursed his lips and said, ‘Yes, indeed?’ in a tone of voice which would have cowed anyone with a thinner skin than her stepmother.

‘Oh, yes, my lord. I could see that dear Henry was devastated when she passed away. Being a woman of sensibility, I longed to comfort and succour him and his motherless children after his untimely bereavement; God made it possible.’ She had sighed again. ‘It was not easy. And after the poor dear man passed away himself, I was left to manage alone and, being a slave to poor health myself …’

There was nothing wrong with Alice’s health; it was just an excuse for idleness, to give Kitty more and more to do. She did it willingly for her uncle’s sake, and for Johnny, her six-year-old half-brother whom she adored. When the occasion demanded, such as an invitation to Beresford Hall, Alice could be as energetic as anyone there. And certainly her tongue never rested.

‘There! You can see how right I have been all along, William,’ she went on, when Kitty remained silent. ‘She has been thoroughly spoiled. If I were you, I would wash my hands of her, send her to your Aunt Henrietta in Scotland. She will be suitably strict with her and the climate might cool her ardour.’

‘No!’ Kitty cried, afraid her uncle would do as she suggested. Her great-aunt lived in splendid isolation in the far north west of Scotland. She was almost a recluse, refused to go out and
was very rude to any visitors who called. It would be tantamount to a prison sentence. ‘Uncle William, am I a criminal to be sent away from you? What have I done that is so very bad, except to be young and want to enjoy my life?’

‘Kitty, please don’t make matters worse,’ he said. ‘Apologise to your stepmother and let us discuss what is to be done in a calm and sensible manner.’

For the love and respect she bore him, Kitty turned and gave the apology with as good a grace as she could muster.

‘That’s better,’ he said, giving a sigh of relief, but he did not smile. Indeed, his countenance was even more sombre than usual. ‘Now, I will tell you what I have decided.’

Kitty turned towards him, trying to convey a plea in her large, expressive eyes which would soften his heart. Could he not see that Alice wanted to be rid of her and had seized this opportunity to have her sent away? Her stepmother hated her for being too much like her dead mother, whom her father had adored.

Surely Uncle William had noticed the little acts of cruelty Alice had meted out when they first came to the rectory: the stinging rebuke; the quick cuff round the ears; sending her to bed without her supper for the slightest misdemeanour. Even now, when she was grown up, she was subjected to constant reminders of her failure as a daughter.

She was too outspoken, her deportment was a disgrace and her social graces sadly lacking. By social graces Kitty understood she meant the artificial manners in company which went by the name of politeness. Alice was the master of cutting innuendo. Why did her uncle not see it? Or perhaps he saw it and chose to ignore it for the sake of peace and quiet.

Even now he was taking Alice’s side and refusing to hear her explanation of what had happened. If they sent her away, Alice could act the injured party. She could almost hear her plaintive voice. ‘Why, I did my best with the girl, but she would not have
it. We did not want to send her away, but what else could we do?’

Kitty was forced out of her reverie when she realised the Rector had spoken. ‘I beg your pardon, Uncle, what did you say?’

‘I said you will marry him.’

‘Marry? Whom should I marry?’

‘Edward Lampeter, of course.’

Kitty’s mouth fell open. ‘Uncle, I can’t do that. He has not offered for me and we do not have that affection which is necessary for a happy marriage.’

‘What is that to the point? He is single and of good family, not as well-heeled as I would have liked, but that can’t be helped. The money your mother left you will be your dowry and that should suffice …’

‘You call that punishment!’ Alice broke in, just as surprised as Kitty by her brother-in-law’s pronouncement. ‘It is more like a reward. What she needs is a little discipline and your Aunt Henrietta is just the person to give it to her.’

‘Not while there is a chance to salvage the situation,’ he said. ‘At least this way we can pass it off as a little premature exuberance on the part of the young couple, that we had intended to announce the betrothal at a gathering of our own later in the year but, in view of the couple’s impatience, we have decided to bring it forward …’

‘I won’t agree to that,’ Kitty said. ‘And Edward won’t agree either. We should not suit. Uncle, please do not put either of us to the humiliation of being refused.’

‘Neither of you will refuse,’ he said, setting his lips in a thin hard line. ‘The young man is honour-bound to make an honest woman of you.’

‘I won’t. I can’t. Oh, Uncle, please don’t make me.’