The Baron’s Betrothal: An On-Again, Off-Again, On-Again Regency Romance (The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series) (4 page)

They showered everyone with guineas flung into the air. Then, the duke’s carriage carried the newlyweds to Morford Street for a festive breakfast with the couple’s intimate friends. At this breakfast, the groom continued to make an idiot of himself, subjecting his bride to shameless displays of affection (holding her hand and kissing her repeatedly). Percy showed admirable tolerance while Seelye narrated the scene with unrepeatable wit that entertained Clun till his sides ached.

Afterward, the baron finally surrendered himself to duty. It was past time to succumb to matrimony, given he’d already allowed his betrothal to ripen for more than a twelve-month. He sent word to the Earl of Morefield and set off immediately for Shropshire to prepare The Graces for its new mistress.
 

And at The Sundew, he’d accidentally met her.

Naturally, his lordship mistrusted his good fortune. She wasn’t bracket-faced, ham hock-ankled or even intimidated by him. She had pluck. What’s more, her misgivings about their betrothal indicated a certain amount of good sense. On the other hand, she’d bolted from London in a foolhardy, if not dangerously heedless, fashion to hide from him. So he might be forgiven his ambivalent first impression of her.

Clun rode through the inner courtyard to a smaller archway in the south wing that let out to the stable. There a boy too young to know the lord of the manor scampered up to admire his huge horse. The lord of the manor recognized the boy, or more precisely, he recognized the unmistakable family resemblance of another de Sayre male. The black-haired lad was a strapping youth of nine or ten years of age, Clun guessed. He might’ve been his, given Clun’s youthful enthusiasm for local girls and vice versa, but the stripling hadn’t had striking blue eyes.
 

Just to be sure, he asked, “Are you old enough to manage this brute?”

“I’m going on eight, my lord. And strong enough.”

Ah, Clun thought in relief, not of my making, but Rodwell’s.
 

One of the grooms came to the horse’s head and greeted his lordship.

“Though big for your age, you ought to let Jenks assist you,” Clun said with a wink to the groom. “What’s your name, lad?”
 

“Ted, my lord.” The boy bowed solemnly to him and Clun acknowledged it with a nod.

“Do you know your letters, Ted?”
 

“Papa’s teaching me when he has the time.”
 

“That’s well. Algernon can’t spell to save his life so he must rely on your good offices.”

Ted smiled up at the baron, not quite sure if he jested, and added shyly, “Even so, he’s a handsome horse, if I may say.”

“You may and Algernon thanks you. See to him with Jenks, will you?” Clun tousled Ted’s hair and strode off in search of his steward and half-brother, Tyler Rodwell.
 

Much as Clun looked forward to sleeping in his own bed, he couldn’t with Lady Elizabeth Damogan dashing about the woods, playing gypsy with who knows what sort of weasel-faced lowlifes lurking in the shadows. Nor would he delegate guarding his fiancée to anyone else tonight. Seeing to it himself would put his mind at ease.

Clun didn’t bother to make the long trip back to the front door. He walked to the back entrance on the ground floor, just as he had so many times as a young man. He let himself into the vestibule first and then through the inner kitchen door and stood watching Cook. She was a great pudding of a woman with graying blonde flyaway hair barely captured by an off-kilter mobcap. She gestured with a spoon to underscore some point she was making to Rodwell, who sat at the big worktable in the middle of the room, sipping tea in a mug. Rodwell stood up and bowed. Cook glanced out of the corner of her eye and froze when she saw the baron. The maids skidded to a halt and footmen leapt to their feet.

Clun smiled at one and all, a blanket pardon and reassurance.
 

The maids curtseyed and resumed their work; the footmen bowed and found work to busy themselves. Penfold and Mrs. Wirt, wringing her hands, bustled in and begged pardon for their dereliction. They would have had the entire staff lined up outside the front door to greet the baron properly the instant he returned, if not for their inattention.

“Pray, don’t trouble yourselves. I came on the sly,” Clun said. “Just to sneak up on you.”
 

The butler and housekeeper relaxed at his playful teasing and they excused themselves to oversee the flurry of activity his sudden appearance prompted.
 

The kitchen emptied of everyone but Clun, Cook and Rodwell.

“Can it be? Look, Roddy, our wee Master William is home at last! Oh dear! Beg pardon,” she dipped a curtsey as he approached. “Welcome home, your lordship!” Then rising on tiptoe, she grappled the large man into her far shorter, fleshier embrace and rocked him to and fro.
 

“I must breathe, Cook. Truly. Or I’ll collapse.”
 

Her head rested just at his chest, “Nonsense. You look fagged out and in need of this.” She clasped him in one last crushing hug that squeezed a boyish grin from him. “There now!”
 

Cook had known and loved Clun from earliest childhood. Even after he grew into hulking manhood, she continued to treat him as if he were a small boy, indulging and chiding as she saw fit. Cook, and only Cook, dared do so.

She held him at arm’s length and took in his spattered boots, sweat-stained linen shirt, open waistcoat, rumpled redingote and greatcoat. “Back in one piece, Lord be praised! What took so long, my lord? Looks as if you just mopped up old Boney today, but you finished him off last year at least.”
 

Clun snorted. Like Mrs. Wirt, Cook spoke of his lordship as if her ‘wee Master William’ had single-handedly brought Napoleon Bonaparte to his knees. Her confidence in his ability, conveyed at her insistence in each of Roddy’s letters, had amused the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse no end. And while Clun may have grimaced at her effusions, he loved her all the more for them. He received scant acknowledgement from either parent. His mother’s few letters were full of reproach for endangering the direct de Sayre line with his ‘antics.’

“Where have you been?” Cook narrowed her eyes and scanned him again. “At hard labor from the looks of it.”

“Why not? Aren’t I full of surprises?” He pulled his sweaty hair from his brow.

“Always were.” She beamed at the big man seating himself at the table. “Roddy, doesn’t our baron look fine?”

“I’ve been riding for days, Cook. I look a mess,” he said and gestured for Roddy to sit again. “Roddy, how are you?”

“Quite well, my lord. Thank you for asking.” Tyler Rodwell was not quite so large as the current baron, and his eyes were vivid blue. Otherwise, Clun and his bastard half-brother closely resembled their father, William Tyler Powys de Sayre, the late Baron Clun.
 

“Roddy told us you’d be home next month with bride in hand. What a treat to have you sooner!” Cook clasped her hands before her ample bosom and smiled. “Where is she then?”

“Unusual girl, Cook. An earl’s daughter.”

“I’m not at all surprised. Who could resist you?” Cook said with a conviction that made both men snigger like schoolboys. Clun blushed, too, a sensation almost wholly unfamiliar except in the company of his childhood ally and buttress, Cook.

“Will you and your baroness live at The Graces, my lord?” Roddy asked.
 

“Haven’t worked out the details. In fact, there’s a minor issue I would discuss with you now, Roddy.”

“You must be hungry. Shall I warm you something to eat?” Cook asked.

Clun had eaten his fill at the cottage with his betrothed but rather than disappoint Cook, he said, “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. We’ll only be a moment.”

Cook banged pots and pans onto the stove and stoked the fire within, whistling merrily as she flew back and forth gathering the makings of a hot meal.

The two men left the ground floor kitchen through a passageway to the servants’ staircase that led up to the double-height main hallway and after walking a distance entered the first floor bookroom. From a tinderbox on the mantle, Roddy took a flint and steel to light the coal with kindling in the hearth. He used a punk to light beeswax tapers around the room. In the bright, flickering candlelight, touches of gold leaf on the leather bindings of books glowed, the polished brass banisters around the balcony shone.
 

Clun sighed with pleasure. Nothing was shrouded; no maids scurried to and fro doing last-minute cleaning. Mrs. Wirt had kept this room dusted and in perfect order year after year, as if the baron might return any minute from war and want to sit at his desk. She knew his library was, beside his bed, his favorite place on earth.
 

Its sixteen-foot ceiling notwithstanding, this room had a warmth and intimacy Clun loved. The rest of the saloons on the first floor felt more like grand concourses meant for crowds of strangers. This was his lair, his private sanctuary.

Roddy sat in a comfortable chair before the wide desk; Clun sat behind it, feeling the smooth leather inlay and the silken surface of well-polished wood. The steward waited for the baron to speak.

“I stopped in at The Sundew,” Clun began. “You didn’t by any chance hear of a female in the vacant cottage near there, by the home wood?”

“Just this week, I heard rumors of someone thereabouts and was going to check on it,” Roddy said.
 

“It happens to be true, but I won’t have her disturbed. Even if you catch her red-handed with a fourteen-point stag, you mustn’t detain her for poaching. Or run her off.”

“No?”

“No, she’s harmless. Merely having an adventure before settling down.” Clun rubbed his cheek stubble, unsure how to explain what he must. “With me.”
 

“She’s your—” Roddy said, eyes wide.

“So it would seem. Lady Elizabeth Damogan, the earl’s daughter.” Clun shifted uncomfortably in the chair and in a sepulchral tone added, “My betrothed.”

“As you wish, my lord.”
 

“I’m concerned for her safety,” Clun said.
 

“Not to worry. Folks give her a wide berth. They say she’s…That is, I thought, well…No matter. Congratulations.”

“What did you think, Roddy?”

The steward looked across the desk’s expanse at the baron and glanced away. “Not for me to say, my lord.”
 

“I won’t be angry, hardly know her myself.”

“I thought perhaps she was,” Roddy tapped his temple, “touched. They say she sings and dances like a fairy around the cows…An earl’s daughter, you say.”
 

“So I did.” Roddy’s elliptical comments amused Clun. They also confirmed his impression. Lady Elizabeth Damogan made a strong if strange first impression. “Touched, you say. Wouldn’t she have to be to marry me?”
 

“Now that won’t do, your lordship.” The steward’s tone slipped momentarily into that of a scolding older brother. “The lady’s damned fortunate. You’re a good man. You do your duty. You know what you’re about.”

“I appreciate your confidence. And I’ll need your discretion. I’d rather no one else knows we aren’t quite married yet.”
 

“Of course. Will you wed in London or at the castle?”
 

“Here, quickly and quietly, under the circumstances. No need to disturb the baroness, is there?” The half-brothers referred to Clun’s mother as ‘the baroness.’ Among his friends in the cavalry, Clun habitually called her the Fury.
⁷
 

“Has she met your lady yet?” Roddy asked.

“She has not, nor will she, until after the lady is my baroness and she’s the dowager.”

“Think that wise?”

“I think it imperative. Can’t have the chit cry off because of her, can I?”

“Who’s to say she would? Perhaps they’ll rub along.”

“No, there’s not a chance on God’s green earth of that, Roddy. And if it ever comes to blows, I’d lay odds on my lady. She’s the ferocious type, no doubt of it.” Clun chuckled, remembering how four men jumped when his green-eyed Amazon had slammed her hand down on their table and demanded back her baubles and coin.
 

* * *

At that very moment, the Amazon in question was confronting the sobering reality of her circumstances.
 

Elizabeth had arrived more than a fortnight ago after a dreadful journey by mail coach. Despite her brave words to Mr. Tyler, she used money not mother wit to supply most of her needs so far. She traipsed back and forth to the village of Clun southwest of the estate for supplies almost daily.
 

She had, in truth, shot a deer; however, she hadn’t meant to. She ‘borrowed’ one pistol from a boxed set of two Manton’s in her father’s study before she fled, intending it only for self-defense. The day after she arrived, she went outside to practice with it. (A sensible plan.) It was surprisingly heavy in the muzzle and cumbersome to hold. (She dropped it.) It discharged and she survived unscathed. (Thank Heaven.) The doe hiding in the woods nearby did not. Elizabeth didn’t realize this until the mortally-wounded animal broke from the bramble in a final panic and ran a few yards toward her before collapsing.
 

That irksome Mr. Tyler was right, she couldn’t kill her own meat intentionally. The accident had shaken her resolve to stay, but she plucked up her courage and made a practical decision to see that the doe’s death wasn’t all for naught. She hastened to the village butcher and sold him the carcass for half a haunch and credit for game birds and beef, redeemable at a later date. The butcher agreed. All conceit aside, it was clever of her.
 

Free meat and fowl notwithstanding, if she hadn’t wrested back what remained of her money from the villains, she’d have been hard pressed to go on. She already spent nearly all her money, save coach fare back to London, when Mr. Tyler came along. It was no exaggeration to say he was her hero. That is, until he revealed himself to be arrogant and dismissive of her abilities. After that, he put her teeth on edge.