The Golden Lord

“’Tis conniving tricks and cheats,” said Keel, thumping his fist on the edge of the desk. “I do not care if you are a peer, Claremont. No true gentleman would win as often as you do.”

“But I do not cheat, sir,” protested Brant. He didn’t cheat, not only because it was dishonorable and ungentlemanly, but also because he didn’t need to. “I never have, not once.”

“Don’t compound your iniquities by lying to me,” said Keel sternly. “Tonight’s game shall be your last here. I will not let you turn Harrow into a veritable Devonshire House of gaming. You are a sharpster, Claremont, a shark who preys upon the trust of your fellows for your own gain, and I shall not tolerate it any longer, or you, either.”

“You are sending me down, sir?” asked Brant, striving to keep the growing, giddy joy from his voice. “I am to leave Harrow?”

“As soon as is possible,” said the headmaster disdainfully. “By tomorrow noon at the latest. Until then I shall instruct Mr. Conway to keep the others in your house away from you. By your actions, you have demonstrated that you are no longer a young gentleman worthy of Harrow. I shall recommend to your guardian that a private tutor might continue with your preparation for admission to university.”

But Brant knew there had never been a question of him going to one of the grand universities at Cambridge or Oxford. His father’s estate was simply too impoverished to afford such a luxury, any more than Brant could expect to make a Grand Tour of the Continent like other peers his age. The disinterested solicitor who served as his guardian had explained it all with perfect clarity: when Brant left Harrow, his education was done.

No, he was done now. He scarcely listened to Dr. Keel’s final admonitions, too amazed by how swiftly one world was closing against him and another beckoning with possibilities. But outside in the shadows of the empty courtyard, returning to his boardinghouse for the last time, he could look up at the stars overhead and laugh with relief and exhilaration and a kind of fierce, wild joy.

He was a fifteen-year-old orphan with scarcely a shilling to his titled name. He could recite much of Homer, Aristotle and Shakespeare from memory, but he could no more read nor write than the commonest plowman. He had neither friends nor family to guide his choices and ease his path, and his two younger brothers were half a world away, if they even still lived. All he had to make his way was his title, his charm, his face and a gift for card-playing.

But he was free. He was free. Now, finally, he was done biding his time with school. Now he could make his own future and fortune, and keep the pledge he and his brothers had made to one another so long ago.

And best of all, his secret and his shame would now be safe forever.

Chapter One

Bamfleigh, Sussex

June, 1803

J enny Dell was exceptionally good at doing things silently and in the dark. She had to be, or else she never would have lived as long, and as grandly, as she already had.

Without so much as a candle to guide her, she now hurried across the dark chamber, her bare feet as quiet as a cat’s paws. While the innkeeper and his wife had been all kind welcome when she and her brother had first taken the house’s best rooms, Jenny knew that same welcome could turn as sour as vinegar wine if they realized she and Rob were leaving them now, in the middle of the night, and quite forgetting the nicety of settling their reckoning.

Jenny was sorry about that, for she’d liked this inn and the rooms that overlooked a pasture filled with sweet-smelling pink clover. But Rob had had his reasons, even if he hadn’t explained them to her just yet. Once he did, he’d be sure to remind her that there was always another inn or grand house waiting over the next hillside, filled with more folk eager for the amusing company of two genteel young persons like Jenny and Rob, and willing to share their own good fortune in return. And where, truly, was the harm in that?

Swiftly, Jenny pulled her three gowns from the clothespress and folded them into her little traveling trunk. Though limited by their travels, her wardrobe was always of the latest fashion, costly Indian muslins with silk ribbons, fine Holland chemises, the softest Kashmir shawl. Rob didn’t believe in skimping when it came to clothes. “Quality knows quality,” he’d say, and indeed Jenny did find it easier to play a lady when dressed like one. Rob was clever about such matters, just as their father had been before him. She shouldn’t forget that, especially now.

Somewhere in the inn a clock chimed three times and Jenny quickened her pace. The last of the men in the taproom had staggered home and the rest of the inn might be sleeping, but Rob would soon be waiting for her on the high road with the chaise. She closed and locked the trunk, and threaded a twisted bedsheet through the leather handles with well-practiced efficiency. Cautiously she pushed the window open—here, as at most country inns, the best rooms came with the most privacy—and tossed the bundle of her traveling cloak, stockings and shoes onto the grass below. Next went the trunk, lowered carefully down to the ground to avoid making too loud a noise when it landed.

She took two deep breaths to steady her racing heart, then clambered out the window, swinging down off the sill to drop into the grass. She untied the sheet from the trunk’s handles, gathered up the bundle of clothes and shoes, and ran barefoot across the sweet-smelling clover, her long, dark braid flopping over her shoulder and the trunk thumping awkwardly against her leg. The road wasn’t far, and even on this night with only a sliver of a moon, she easily spotted the hired chaise waiting in the shadows.

“Did anyone see you, pet?” asked Rob as he took her trunk and pulled it up into the chaise.

“Nary a soul,” she said breathlessly, climbing up onto the seat next to her brother. “Everyone was safely abed. Now will you tell me why we had to flee tonight, and so sudden?”

“Because we had no choice,” he said, no real answer at all. “Because we had to.”

Jenny frowned impatiently. Most everything they did was because they had to, wasn’t it? Their existence was precarious enough without Rob keeping the details from her like this.

“Here I thought we were doing so well with Sir Wallace,” she said. “The way he sought your opinion on those fusty old books in his library, I was sure we’d be snug there for at least a fortnight, and leave with a bit of gold in our pockets for your trouble, too.”

“We were.” Rob pulled the horse away from the tall weeds he’d been grazing and snapped the reins across the animal’s back to hurry him along. “I’d expected us to be invited as guests to Wallace Manor this very day.”

“I know,” said Jenny. “You’ve warned me before that we were perilously short of funds.”

“Well, yes.” Rob sighed, both for the shortness of their funds and the peril attached. “But there were certain, ah, complications that made it better for us to move along tonight.”

“Mrs. Hewitt?” guessed Jenny, pulling on her stockings and shoes as the chaise began moving faster. “Was she your complication?”

“Yes, and a powerfully difficult one, too.” Rob scowled. “All the time she’d been saying she was a lonely widow and coaxing me along, she’d neglected to tell me she’d another beau, a great, strapping grenadier who appeared out of the wainscoting. And I must say, Jen, he did not like my competition.”

“Did he call you out?” asked Jenny anxiously. She knew Rob always carried a pistol, a beautiful French-made gun that he’d won gaming, though he kept it hidden because he knew she didn’t approve. “You did not fight a duel, did you?”

“What, over Mrs. Hewitt?” asked Rob indignantly. “Faith, Jen, grant me more wit and judgment than that!”

Jenny shook her head, wiping the dirt from her fingers with her handkerchief. Although the name stitched on the linen was Corinthia, instead of her own—left from a highly profitable sojourn in Bath last winter when they’d posed as the Honorable Peter Beckham and his sister Miss Corinthia Beckham—she’d liked the Bruxelles lace edging too much to toss it away, even if it meant she’d kept the handkerchief far longer than she’d kept the name.

“So that is why we’re leaving now,” she said with a certain resignation, tucking the handkerchief back into her bodice. “So that you won’t have to defend your honor and Mrs. Hewitt’s virtue.”

None of this was, of course, anything new. Although Rob was twenty-five and clever as could be, he still had not one whit of sense regarding women, and if he continued to follow after their father, he never would. With his bright blue eyes and curling black hair, her handsome brother attracted the fair sex like flies to honeycomb. In that first glow of fliration he could always find some special feature or comely grace in every female he met, whether old, young or in-between. He was the most charming of rascals, for he honestly loved each new woman in turn, almost as much as they loved him.

Now Rob sniffed, wounded. “I’d always thought, Jenny, that you preferred to have me as a live coward, instead of an honorable corpse.”

“I do,” said Jenny quickly, patting her brother’s arm to reassure herself as much as him. “But I’d also rather you kept your breeches buttoned in the process. Now I’ll just have to pray that she didn’t pox you as a parting gift.”

“What could I do, Jen?” he asked forlornly. “The dear little widow played me false. If only she’d been true! You know I would have been as happy as the cows in that sweet clover near the inn if I could but spend the rest of my days with her in Bamfleigh.”

“You would not,” said Jenny matter-of-factly. “You’re just the way Father was. You like variety too much ever to be faithful. You’ll never stop your roaming.”

“For the right lady, I would,” he said confidently. “And you will, too, Jen, though with a gentleman, of course. You’re too young now, but I’ll wager five guineas that the first time you fall in love, you’ll be as moon-struck as every other Dell since Noah trundled down from the ark.”

“I’m nineteen, Rob, more than old enough to fall in love if I pleased,” she said wearily. This wasn’t a new conversation between them, either, nor was it one that Jenny particularly wished to revisit. “It’s more a matter of being sensible than too young. Just because I’m a Dell doesn’t mean I must be a ninny about men.”

Rob answered only with an incoherent grunt, and they fell into an uneasy silence that seemed to match the rocking haste of the chaise through the night. With a sigh, Jenny drew her shawl over her shoulders and propped her feet on the curved top of her trunk, letting both time and distance speed by in a leafy blur.

Rob would never understand her, or that she could want something different from life than he did himself. How could he know that the pastoral existence near the clover field that he’d described in jest was far more appealing to her than the charms of any mere lover could be? Her own snug cottage, a hearth that was hers without any fudging or dissembling: that would be her paradise. All her life she and Rob had spent roaming, first with her father and then by themselves, and wistfully she tried to imagine living in one place long enough to be able to call it home.

“I only hope, Jen,” said her brother at last, as if the conversation had been continuing all along, “that when you do fall in love, you have the decency to do it with some rich old codger who’ll put us both in his will.”

Jenny grumbled. “Oh, yes, so we’ll all three live happily ever after.”

“Don’t scoff, Jen,” said Rob easily, sorry proof that he’d been considering this all along. “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich sweetheart as a poor one.”

“And don’t you scoff, either, Rob,” said Jenny sharply. She would flirt, and smile, and flatter, and beguile, yes, but she would not seduce, and though she’d yet even to attempt the last with any man, when she finally did, she wanted it to be because she loved him and not because her brother had told her he was rich. “I’ll play whatever role you wish, short of that. Didn’t we agree ages ago that I’d never be the bait for one of your codger schemes, not when I must—”

“Hush,” said Rob sharply, lowering his voice. He turned to look over his shoulder, his hair blowing back across his forehead. “Do you hear another horse behind us?”

“What, on the road at this hour?” She turned around, as well, holding on to the back of the seat as she peered into the night.

“It’s that infernal idiot grenadier, I know it, still looking for his satisfaction and my head.” He slapped the reins again, urging the horse into a faster pace. “Blast the man for being such a prideful idiot!”

“We must be close to the crossroads to London,” said Jenny, her heart racing as the chaise’s tall wheels rocked precariously over the rutted road. “Couldn’t we turn south, the way he wouldn’t expect us to go?”