The Baron’s Betrothal: An On-Again, Off-Again, On-Again Regency Romance (The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Series) (8 page)

 
William had always considered Roddy fortunate to have been born beneath her contempt. He hadn’t been so lucky.

At times, the baroness had expressed affection for her little boy — mostly at church or in front of guests. More often, it was young William on whom she uncorked her bottled-up vitriol about disappointments in love, marriage and the baron he closely resembled. William, not Roddy, served as scapegoat for her undiluted venom against the “faithless, heartless man she was lovesick enough to have married.”
 

Often the baroness declared all de Sayre men “constitutionally incapable of love.” She took to referring to the castle’s portrait gallery as the Hall of Hard-Hearted Brutes, and as proof pointed out all the de Sayre wives’ miserable expressions to William.
 

She never raised her voice or expressed her resentment in reckless anger, which was far worse for her young son. She often prefaced her diatribes by saying calmly they were “plain truths told with brutal honesty.” Yet William knew something simmered noxiously beneath his mother’s composed façade and it left him feeling only wary of her.

The boy knew better than to admit aloud he didn’t love her. Nevertheless, one of Lady Clun’s few maternal instincts detected her son’s lack of affection. This betrayal she added to her litany of resentments, never acknowledging her own role in causing it. More times than he could count, the boy heard he was “no better than his father” and possibly worse, for “a son ought to love his mother with all his cold, little heart.” This, she said with a brittle trill in her voice, as if it were a great joke, all the while, her eyes glittered with moisture.

So young William learned to withhold himself from her as a matter of self-preservation, but his mother’s words penetrated his heart while it was still vulnerable. A parent’s harsh judgment of a child carries with it near-divine authority. Over time, it becomes a governing voice in that child’s head, whispering invective, raising doubts and quashing hope. Sadly, such a child might learn to ignore that belittling voice but he could not escape its corrosive effects. Thus it was with William Tyler de Sayre.

As William grew up, he still felt no love for his mother or absent father and concluded that perhaps his mother was right: he was cold and incapable of proper love. She reinforced this conclusion over the years in ways subtle and less so.

From his mother, William learned one more unforgettable lesson: no one inflicts more suffering than a woman embittered by disappointment in love. A resentful wife could drive off a husband and heap misery upon blameless children without a moment’s remorse.
 

Thus, years of observation and empirical evidence informed Clun’s definition of a happy marriage as a union founded on sensible, unemotional expectations. As a result, arranging his marriage to a stranger suited Clun to a fare-thee-well.

As for formal education, tutors had instructed Roddy and William together until the baron’s bastard was old enough to begin learning the estates’ management. With the baron’s approval, Roddy removed to The Graces permanently when he was fourteen. With his father’s blessing, he assumed responsibility for the de Sayre family holdings years later when the old steward died.
 

Soon after Roddy left the castle, the Hon. William de Sayre was sent up to Eton which, given his intelligence, precocious size and forbidding disposition, proved an uneventful rite of passage. When he came of age, he chose to attend the newly established military college for officers in High Wycombe. He was one of very few heirs apparent to do so, given the ongoing hostilities with Imperial France.
 

From that time on, William went home to The Graces, where Cook, who’d started at the castle, ruled the kitchen and made his visits joyful. Christmas Eve each year, he made a dutiful visit to see his mother. For the three or four hours they spent together, strolling the grounds, having a light tea and seeing her parrots in the aviary, both managed to hide their resentments from the other.

The previous baron had been living the life of a roué in London for years when William went off to war on the Iberian Peninsula in 1807. The baron never reproached his son for jeopardizing one of England’s oldest, uninterrupted hereditary titles. His father must’ve understood his need to escape the baroness, whatever the cost.

Fate compensated William Tyler de Sayre generously for his dismal childhood by granting him friendships with fellow cavalrymen, the Hon. George Percy, Lord Burton Seelye and Lord Jeremy Maubrey (now tenth Duke of Ainsworth). The four accepted one another — faults and all — and loved one another wholeheartedly. Their affection was most often expressed in merciless, ribald teasing and ridiculous dares that threatened life and limb off the battlefield. Fate was also kind enough to see all of them returned to England to continue their friendship in peacetime.
 

The four horsemen served with distinction in the Royal Horse Guards Blue of the Household Cavalry, earning praise from their commanding officer, Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge. It was he who bestowed on them the now-famous sobriquet the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.’ Uxbridge had a genius for self-promotion and uplifting war propaganda and their extraordinary valor reflected well on his command and made for irresistible copy in newsprint. So Uxbridge exploited them without compunction. For his part, Wellington tolerated Uxbridge’s notorious Four Horsemen, reviewing newspaper accounts with characteristic sangfroid while on the battlefield with fighting underway.
 

When the war had ended, Lord Clun came home to England, sold his commission and sought to settle into civilian life. Meeting his bride-to-be helped silence some of his natural pessimism about marriage. But not most of it. For in Elizabeth’s attitude, he recognized the hopefulness of a born romantic and feared the worst.

Thus preoccupied, Clun followed Roddy over stiles and hand-piled rock walls to cross the fields. They headed for the forest’s edge.
 

The baron considered his brother as they walked single file. Even as children, Roddy had addressed his younger brother without malice as ‘Master William’ and after their father died as ‘Lord Clun.’ Now that Clun was back to stay, he wasn’t sure what degree of intimacy Roddy would accept in their connection.
 

Walking the property, Roddy observed all the formalities of a steward with his lord. In turn, Clun respected Roddy’s privacy. He refrained from asking after Ted though he was certain there was no Mrs. Rodwell. Nor did he ask Cook to betray any confidences. The brothers had plenty of time to renew their acquaintance and set aside this formality. Or so Clun wished.

The baron tramped into a surviving stand of primeval forest and breathed in the clean scent of the woods. He dawdled to look up in awe at the vaulted forest canopy while Roddy ranged ahead.

* * *

Elizabeth watched the strapping, black-haired man walk briskly along a narrow path through the forest on the opposite side of the stream not a stone’s throw away. His attire was more distinctly rural than he’d worn previously. She stood with a pail of water in hand. When he finally looked up, she smiled tentatively, then squinted and shaded her eyes.
 

“Good day, Lady Elizabeth,” he bowed when he saw her. His voice sounded strange.

“Mr. Tyler, is that you?”
 

“Ur, no-oo.” The man looked over his shoulder as if she might be addressing someone else. He resembled Mr. Tyler and yet she felt certain he was not.

“Do I know you, sir?” She pursued, growing uneasy.
 

“Not as yet, my lady. I am Rodwell, the baron’s steward, at your service. His lordship’ll be along in a moment,” he said with a smile.
 

She set down her pail. She couldn’t possibly escape meeting Lord Clun now. She was trapped. Even if she gathered her things and took off on foot, she had nowhere else to hide except the cottage. His cottage.
 

The affable, irksome Mr. Tyler had mentioned having a half-brother and, of all the wretched luck, his sibling was Lord Clun’s steward. Mr. Tyler must’ve mentioned her — and her connection to the baron — because the steward addressed her by name and assumed she wished to see Lord Clun, which she most certainly did not.

Elizabeth stood poised to run, heart racing, bucket forgotten, waiting for his lordship to limp into view, coughing up phlegm and complaining of gout or chilblains. (She shuddered.) Instead, Mr. Tyler ambled up with head down, switching the brush at his feet with a stick.
 

“Your lordship—” the steward warned.
 

That’s odd.

Mr. Tyler glanced up. “Yes?” His gaze swung from Rodwell to her. “Oh,” he said slowly. “Hello, Lady Elizabeth. Are you well?”
 

Odder than the steward addressing Mr. Tyler as “your lordship” was the fact that he responded to it just as naturally. It took no time to solve the puzzle. She went rigid with outrage.
 

“I am quite well, Lord Clun,” Elizabeth spat out the last two syllables. She spun on her heels, hoisting her bucket, frock and petticoat with one hand and scrambled up the muddy embankment with the other.

“Oh! I should’ve known!” She mimicked, “‘The baron’s coming! Up against a tree! Down in the dirt!’ Of all the odious, infantile…” She flounced off sputtering, shaking her fist in the air.
 

* * *

Lord Clun realized immediately this was an unfortunate turn of events. Nevertheless, he enjoyed watching her slip and churn mud as she clawed her way up the opposite bank.

“Well-turned ankles, my lord.” Roddy noted under his breath.

“Mmm, yes.” Clun made his way to the water’s edge to judge the stream’s depth. “Forgot to mention she didn’t know who I was precisely.”

“So I gathered, Mr. Tyler.” Roddy deadpanned and accepted his lordship’s coat and waistcoat as he shed them. “The ford’s not a quarter mile downstream.”

“I’ll ruin my boots but I think it best to strike while the lady’s hot.”
 

He stepped in resolutely.
 

Argh!
 

Just as cold as he remembered.
 

The water reached his upper thighs — and shrank his man parts — as he waded across the stream hissing and cussing aloud at the God-awful cold. Once on the other side, he called back, “Will you have hot bath water waiting? Give me a half hour’s grace.”

“I will, my lord,” Roddy said.

Chilled to the bone, the baron struggled up the slick embankment after his furious
fiancée
. His mud-clotted boots squelched with every footfall. His buckskins clung wet and cold. He swore a blue streak all the way to the cottage and pounded on the door.
 

She swung it open and curtseyed, “Your lordship, what an honor!” She held a hand behind her back and he hoped it wasn’t a gun.

“Please, Bess.”

She brandished a long, two-tined fork in his face. “I have never given you leave to use my Christian name — much less a pet name — whoever you are!”

“Let me explain.”

“Why should I, you lying, deceitful—”

“Now, none of that. I didn’t lie.”

“No, ‘Mr. Tyler’?”

“Well, I omitted my surname and you leapt to a conclusion I was loath to correct.”

“Oh, yes, let’s discuss loathing, shall we? You came thundering down a hill yelling at me, ‘The baron’s riding by!’ Did you not?”

“Well, I was, wasn’t I?”

She slitted her eyes at him and poked the fork in his direction. “
You
had me lie face down in the dirt, with insects crawling on me, while you pretended to greet yourself.”
 

Clun couldn’t help one coughed laugh before he sobered up to look contrite.
 

“And what about ‘albino monkey hands with foppish amounts of lace’?”
 

He snorted and struggled to school his features.
 

“You, sir, are detestable.”

* * *

He
was
detestable and yet Elizabeth couldn’t detest him satisfactorily.
 

She let fly her recriminations.; yet even as she upbraided him, a corner of her mind assimilated a far more pleasant shock.
He
was Lord Clun. Not some ancient, swollen, monkey-pawed wineskin suffering all the symptoms of decrepitude.

“Now, now, careful harridan or you’ll put someone’s eye out,” he said and sent a shiver down her spine.
 

Furious as Elizabeth was, his voice sang deliciously over the word ‘ha
Rrr
idan’ and made it sound as sweet as a term of endearment.

He dared insult her yet she wanted to smile.
 

Again, the mellifluous quality of Lord Clun’s deep voice captivated her. His English was standard-issue upper class but within the sound of his words was a sensual something that disturbed her in the pleasantest way. The subtle roll of his r’s and the slightest whisper of a trill in his th’s, made his speech play like water slipping over stones in a stream. His Welsh-infused voice was deep, melodic and profoundly seductive. His every utterance, even crabby name calling, was a pleasure to hear. Only let him speak — recite a dictionary or even legal notices in the newspaper — and if he kept at it long enough, she would swoon in his arms. In addition to the natural music in his speech, a teasing tone every so often belied his gruff rebukes and scowling demeanor.
 

Lord Clun might do nicely.

Elizabeth tried to remain outraged as she faced him, fork in hand, because she knew righteous indignation gave her the advantage. He’d hoaxed her and for that he must grovel. Still, she could not ignore the waves of relief she felt. Only consider, Mr. Tyler, the man she’d mourned as a Hopeless Ineligible, was her intended. On the whole, she began to feel more sanguine about their marriage.
 

Still, on principle, she held him at tine points.

When next she glanced up at his face, she found his lips turning blueish-gray. She looked down, took in his sodden breeches and ruined boots and noticed the chill in the air. He stood before her, wet, suffering and smiling cautiously, attempting perhaps to gauge her mood.