Lord Hunter's Cinderella Heiress Read online

  ‘I can’t do it. I can’t. She is just doing it so she can make a fool of me again. I won’t.’

  Sue squeezed Nell’s hand.

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past her but it will be worse if you don’t go. Here, don’t cry now, chick. Think—in two days you’ll be on your way back to school.’

  Nell pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.

  ‘I wish I could go tonight. I hate coming here. I wish I could stay with Mrs Petheridge always.’

  ‘Well, Ma and I are glad you are here summers at least.’

  Nell scrubbed her eyes and blew her nose.

  ‘Oh, Sue, I didn’t mean I don’t love you and Mrs Barnes. You know I do.’

  ‘Aye, you don’t have to say a thing, chick—we know. I wish for you that you could stay there year-round. Lucky your aunt doesn’t know how much you like that school or she’d have you out of there in a flash. Proper poison, she is, and no mistake. Now go stare down at your nose at the lot of them. Lord knows you’re tall enough to do just that. Bend your knees so I can get this over your head, now. Goodness, what do they give you to eat in them Lakes? I swear you’ve grown a size since you had to wear this just a month back.’

  Nell chuckled and slipped her arms into the sleeves, struggling against the constricting fabric. Thank goodness for Sue. She was right—Nell could survive two more days.

  This optimistic conviction faded with each downward step on the stairs. Her aunt was already in the drawing room and the familiar cold scrape of nerves skittered under Nell’s skin, almost painful in her palms and up her fingers, like sand being shoved into a glove. She kept her eyes on her pale slippers peeping out and hiding back under her flounce as she made her way to the sofa where she sat as meek and as stupid as a hen, praying that was the worst people thought of her.

  The door opened again and out of the corner of her eye Nell saw two pink confections enter the room, followed by an older couple. She had learned to look without looking and she inspected the two pretty, giggling girls and their mother, who wore a purple turban so magnificently beaded with sparkling stones Nell couldn’t help staring.

  ‘Stop gawping, girl!’ a voice hissed behind her. ‘Keep your eyes down and your mouth shut or I’ll send that slut of a maid of yours packing, cook’s daughter or not! And pull that shawl closed. You look like the village tart with your bosom spilling out like that. Ah, Mr Poundridge, and Mrs Poundridge! So wonderful you could come for supper. So these are your lovely daughters! Do come and meet Sir Henry’s daughter, Miss Helen. She is not yet out, but in such informal occasions she joins us downstairs so she can acquire a little town bronze. Sometimes I wonder what we pay such an exorbitant amount to that school for, but what can one do but keep trying? Perhaps your daughters could give her some hints on the correct mode of behaviour in company. Oh, what lovely dresses! Do come and meet our other guest tonight, Viscount Hunter...’

  Nell kept her eyes on her clasped hands as her aunt sailed off, dragging the Poundridges in her wake, only daring to raise her head when she heard her aunt’s voice mix with her father’s. None of them was looking at her except Lord Hunter. He stood by her father, flanked by the old suits of armour Aunt Hester had salvaged from the cellars, and together they looked like Viking and Celtic warlords under armed escort. She hadn’t seen him when she entered because she hadn’t looked and her mortification deepened as she realised he must have seen everything.

  Nell’s eyes sank back to her hands. The gritty, tingling pain and the clammy feeling was still climbing, and though it hadn’t happened quite so badly for a while, she knew there was nothing to be done but wait it out. If she was lucky it would peak before her legs began to shake. She tried to think of Mrs Petheridge and her friends at school, but it was hard. Her left leg was already quivering. She wanted to cry at how pathetic she was to let this woman win each time, but self-contempt didn’t stop her right leg from beginning to quiver as well. Think of brushing down Petra. No, Father was there, glaring. Think of Mrs Barnes and her cinnamon bread... No, her mother had died with an uneaten loaf by her bed, so she could smell it. Of Charles’s sweet smile as he helped her mount the first time they had come to the Wilton breeders’ fair; of how he had put his arm around her when Father had raged. If he were here, she might be able to bear this...

  Two days. Just today and tomorrow. Her right leg calmed and she pressed her palm to her still-shaking left leg. In two days she would see Anna and sit in Mrs Petheridge’s cosy study with the chipped tea set and ginger biscuits, helping the girls who cried for home or who threw things, because she was good with them. She breathed in, her lungs finally big enough to let the air in, and the clamminess was only down her spine now and between her breasts under the scratchy shawl.

  ‘Your father has agreed to sell me Pluck as well. Will you miss her?’

  The sofa shifted and creaked as Lord Hunter sat and she looked at him in shock.

  ‘What?’ Her voice was gritty and cramped and his golden-brown eyes narrowed, but he just crossed his arms and leaned back comfortably.

  ‘I went to look at her as you suggested and I have to admit she is a beauty. By the length of those legs she might even turn out to be half a hand taller than her mother, but time will tell. I’m hoping she will win me points with Petra. What do you think?’

  Think. What did she think? That any minute now her aunt would come and sink her fangs into her for daring to talk with someone. What was he talking about? Petra and Pluck. He was taking Pluck, too. It had been her idea. Yes, yes, she would miss her, but she would be gone by then, just two days. Oh, thank goodness, just two days. Just two. Say something...

  ‘I think...’ Nothing came and her legs were starting to shake again.

  ‘Do you know I live right next to Bascombe Hall? Were you ever there?’

  Why was he insisting? She wished he would go away! Bascombe Hall...

  ‘No. Mama and Grandmama didn’t get along.’ There, a whole sentence.

  ‘No one got along with your grandmama. She was an ill-tempered shrew.’

  She stared in surprise. How did he dare be so irreverent? If she had said something like that...

  ‘That’s better,’ he said with approval, surprising her further. ‘I understand you inherited the property from your grandfather, but that your father is trustee until you come of age. Since she never made any bones about telling everyone she had disapproved of her daughter’s marriage to Sir Henry, I’m surprised she didn’t find a way to keep you from inheriting.’

  ‘She did try, but the best she could do was enter a stipulation that if I died before my majority at twenty-one, my cousin inherits. Once I’m twenty-one there is nothing she can do.’

  ‘Well, with any luck she’ll kick the bucket before that and save you the trouble of booting her out of the Hall.’

  She pressed her hand to her mouth, choking back a laugh. Surely he hadn’t said that! And she hadn’t laughed... She rubbed her palms together as the tingling turned ticklish. That was a good sign; it was going away. Had he done that on purpose? He couldn’t have known.

  ‘I keep hoping she might actually want to meet me. Is she really so bad?’

  His mouth quirked on one side.

  ‘Worse. I know the term curmudgeon is most commonly applied to men, but your grandmama is just that. You’re better off being ignored.’

  Oh, she knew that.

  ‘Had you ever met my grandfather?’

  He nodded.

  ‘He was a good man, very proper, but he was the second son and he only inherited it when your great-uncle died childless. Those were good years for us.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked, curious at this glimpse of the relations she had never met.

  ‘Well, the Bascombes control the water rights in our area, which means all our crops are dependent on them for irrigation and canal transport, and f
or those few blissful years we had a very reasonable agreement. When he died your grandmother made everyone in the area suffer again. Thankfully your father is trustee now, which means he has the final say in any agreement.’

  ‘But if I’m the heir, I can decide now, can’t I?’

  ‘Not until you’re twenty-one and by then you will probably be married, so do try to choose someone reasonable, will you?’

  A flush rose over her face and she clasped her hands again. Charles’s smile shimmered in front of her, warm and teasing.

  ‘I don’t think I shall be married.’

  ‘Well, you’re still young, but eventually—’

  ‘No,’ she interrupted and he remained silent for a moment. He shifted as if about to speak, but she made the mistake of looking up and met her aunt’s gaze. Pure poison, Sue had said. She pressed back against the sofa and drank in some air. The man next to her shifted again, half-rising, but then the door opened and the butler announced supper.

  * * *

  Hunter smiled at the pretty little brunette who was chirping something at him. She didn’t require any real answers and he could cope with her flirtatious nonsense to her utter satisfaction with less than a tenth of his attention.

  Tomorrow he would have to return to Hunter Hall. It had been cowardly to escape the day after Tim’s funeral, but as he had watched his brother’s grave being filled with earth, the thought that it was over, all of it, pain and love, hopelessness and hope, had choked him as surely as if it was he being smothered under the fertile soil. He had needed some distance and the negotiations with Sir Henry over the fees for access to the waterways controlled by the Bascombe estate had provided an excuse to disappear. At least in this Sir Henry appeared to be reasonable, unlike his dealings with his daughter, and it appeared they would not be required to pay exorbitant waterway fees to the Bascombe estate, at least until the girl inherited.

  No wonder Sir Henry had let drop that he was concerned his daughter, who would come into the immense Bascombe estate in four years, would be easy prey for fortune hunters. After her performance that afternoon Hunter had assumed that was because Sir Henry wasn’t confident he could keep such a mature little firebrand under control. But it was clear this girl would probably throw herself into the arms of the first plausible fortune-hunting scoundrel simply to escape this poisonous household.

  He glanced down the table to Sir Henry’s daughter. She was barely eating, which was a pity because she was as thin as a sapling. She definitely didn’t look strong enough to have ridden Petra so magnificently that afternoon. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the fact that he knew she was an only child, he could easily believe this girl was a pale twin. No wonder she had recoiled at being called plucky. When she had entered the dining hall that evening he had stared with disorientation at a completely different person from the pert and intrepid horsewoman. A prisoner on the way to the guillotine had more jump in their step than the pale effigy that had somehow made her way to the sofa in the corner. Her skin had been ashen under its sun-kissed warmth, almost green, and he wondered if she was going to be ill. Perhaps someone petite might have looked fragile, but she just looked awkward.

  He had almost started moving towards her when her aunt had reached her, and though he had only been able to make out part of her words, the vitriolic viciousness had been distressingly apparent and the coy comments to the Poundridges had almost been worse. She had humiliated the girl in public without compunction and Sir Henry had stood unmoved as a post.

  It wasn’t until he sat down by her that he had noticed she was shaking and immediately he was back with his brother. Tim’s legs would leap like that at the onset of the attacks of terror; that was how he could tell it was starting. He hadn’t even been able to hold his one remaining hand or touch him because of the constant pain. All he could do was sit there with him until it stopped. Not that it had helped in the end. To see that stare in the girl’s face and the telltale quiver of her legs had been shocking. She had finally calmed, but he hadn’t. He was still tight with the need to do damage to that vindictive witch. That poor girl needed to get away from this poisonous house.

  He glanced at the girl again. She still wasn’t eating, just sitting ramrod straight, staring down at her plate. But there was a stain of colour on her cheeks as the aunt leaned towards her. She was at her again, the hag, he thought angrily. Why doesn’t her father do anything about this? If she had been his daughter he would have ripped this woman’s head from her shoulders long ago.

  Something the pink-festooned brunette said to him required his attention and he turned to her resolutely. This wasn’t his affair and it wasn’t as if he had been so successful helping the people who mattered to him. It had been his father’s death that had partially released his mother from her humiliation, not any of his puny efforts to protect her. And Tim... He might have saved his brother’s broken body from a French prison, but he had failed on every other level. This girl was just another of a multitude of cowed women, just like his mother, beaten down until they could no longer imagine standing up for themselves. There was nothing he could do to change the trajectory of her fate.

  * * *

  ‘Are you really fool enough to try and flirt with Lord Hunter? Do you really think someone like him will be interested in you?’ Aunt Hester hissed under cover of the conversation. Her witch’s smile was in full bloom, the one she used while spewing hate in company.

  In a year this would be her life, Nell thought. She would be eighteen and for three long years until her majority she would have to suffer the whip of her aunt’s tongue and her father’s anger and indifference. No, she couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t.

  ‘He doesn’t need your money, so don’t think you can snare someone like him just because you’re an heiress. Like mother, like daughter. That’s how your slut of a mother caught Henry, you know...’

  Nell stood before her mind registered the movement.

  ‘You will not speak about Mama. Not a word. Not ever.’

  She hardly recognised her own voice. It was low, but the room fell into shocked silence. Her aunt’s face was turning the colour of fury, but Nell was far away. Soon the walls would collapse on her, but for a moment time had stopped and she could walk through this frozen little world out into the night and keep walking until she reached Keswick.

  Then she saw Lord Hunter’s face. There was a smile in his honey-brown eyes and he raised his glass towards her and time moved again and she realised what she had done. Her aunt surged to her feet, which was a mistake, because she was much shorter than Nell.

  ‘If you cannot behave in a ladylike fashion, you will beg everyone’s pardon and retire, Helen.’ The words were temperate but the message in her aunt’s eyes wasn’t. I’ll deal with you later, they said.

  Nell almost hung her head and complied, but looking down at the purply-red patches on her aunt’s cheeks, the thick lips tinted with the pink colour she favoured, she felt a wave of disgust, not fear. She took a step back and turned and curtsied to the others.

  ‘I apologise for not behaving in a ladylike fashion. I hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. Goodnight.’ She turned back to her aunt. ‘I will never listen to you again. Not ever. You have no voice.’

  She heard her father bellow her name, but didn’t stop. She would leave for Keswick in the morning and she would never return.

  Chapter One

  London—1820

  ‘There’s no one there, miss,’ the driver of the post-chaise said impatiently as Nell stared at the empty house and the knocker-less door. How could this be? Her father’s last letter had been sent just two days ago and from London. As far back as she remembered he always spent the week before the Wilton horse-breeders’ fair in London, assessing the latest news and horses at Tattersall’s.

  ‘We can’t leave the horses standing in this rain, miss; they’ve
come a long way.’

  Nell turned back to the post-chaise. The driver was right. The poor horses had made excellent time over the last stage and they must be exhausted. But where could she go?

  ‘Do you happen to know where Lord Hunter resides?’

  The words were out before she could consider and the driver cocked a knowing brow.

  ‘Lord Hunter, miss? Aye, I do. Curzon Street. You quite certain that’s where you’ll be wanting to go? Not quite the place for a respectable young lady.’

  Nell breathed in, trying to calm her annoyance and fear. Nell knew memories were often deceptive, but she had found it hard to reconcile her memory of the troubled and irreverent young man with Mrs Sturges’s report of a noted Corinthian addicted to horse racing, pugilism and light women. Nevertheless, it was clear the driver shared Mrs Sturges’s opinion of her alleged fiancé’s reputation. Mrs Sturges might teach French and deportment, but she was also the school’s resident expert on London gossip, and when Nell had received the shocking newspaper clipping sent by her father, she had immediately sought her advice. Mrs Sturges had been delighted to be consulted on such a promisingly scandalous topic as Lord Hunter.

  ‘He is a relation of mine, so, yes, that is precisely where I’ll be wanting to go,’ Nell lied and leaned back into the chaise as it pulled forward. She, like the horses, was tired and hungry and just wanted to sleep for a week, but she was not going to back down now. She was twenty-one and financially and legally independent, and no one...no one!...was going to decide her fate any longer. She didn’t know whether it was her father or Lord Hunter who was responsible for the gossip in the Morning Post, but she wasn’t going to wait another moment to put a stop to it.