Captain Durant's Countess

chapter 29


Maris had bitten her cheek raw as Reyn ruffled David’s feathers with his neighborly attentions. She couldn’t really be angry with him for disregarding her wishes and coming into the house. Like some protective sheepdog, he’d made it very clear to David that she was not alone, even if he was stretching the truth by miles. She was as yet unacquainted with any of her neighbors save those at Merrywood.

“What a bore he is,” David drawled once Reyn left.

Maris buttered a piece of toast she did not want. Her stomach was still in knots. “Do you think so? He does seem very devoted to his horses. I do not know him very well, but his sister has been all that is kind since I moved here last month.”

“Jumped-up climbers, no doubt. And he’s in trade.”

“Horse breeding is perfectly respectable for a gentleman. And I believe they are in some way connected to the Marquess of Wayneflete, although they do not speak of it.” Henry had done an extensive family tree for Reynold Durant to make sure there would be a drop of bluish blood, no matter how diluted, in any future Earl of Kelby.

David snorted. “Wayneflete is as far up River Tick as one can go without drowning.”

“Thank goodness one cannot be judged by the behavior of one’s relations,” Maris said with deceptive sweetness. “Let’s get to the point, David. Why are you here again so soon?”

“I thought you might be missing me.”

Maris gave an unladylike snort. “Cut line, David. Is it money? Mr. Woodley has assured me you are receiving a most generous allowance while we wait.” Involuntarily, she placed a palm across her stomach. “You can’t have run through it already.”

“Oh can’t I have?” David muttered. “But it’s not about money. This time.” He shifted in his seat, radiating discomfort. Maris had never seen him when he was not in perfect control of his emotions, not that he’d ever displayed anything but pique and cunning heretofore. What could have caused this sudden glimpse into his humanity? Who would have thought he even had humanity?

She found she was curious. “I’m listening.”

“I don’t quite know where to begin.”

Maris stopped herself from saying “the beginning.” She decided not to make anything easier for the man who had brought such heartbreak to the house of Kelby.

The silence stretched. Maris added jam to her uneaten toast. Finally David sighed.

“There is a woman, you see.”

There would be. David had left a trail of broken hearts behind him all his life. Maris looked up from her plate expectantly.

“She may come to see you.”

“See me? Whatever for?” Maris did not relish acquaintance with one of David’s castoffs, even if she did have some sympathy for the woman’s plight.

“Well, here’s the thing. I’ve explained the bloody circumstances about the bloody earldom to her, but she doesn’t believe me.”

“Imagine that. Someone finds you untruthful.”

“Don’t take such pleasure in my ruin. The woman has her hooks in me and I cannot see a way out.”

He did look hunted, less ruddy and cocky. And could it be his russet hair was thinning just a little? “Have you made her a promise of marriage?”

“Not lately.” He sounded nearly . . . amused.

“I fail to see what I can do to help you, David. Not that I want to. Mr. Woodley can explain as well as I our current situation. If she is suing you for breach of promise, he is the man to talk to.”

“I’m making a muddle of this, aren’t I? Here’s the thing—when I was barely one and twenty, I made the greatest mistake of my life. And she has the proof.”

Maris tried to remember when David was a young buck. He’d never paid her any attention during his visits to Kelby Hall, not that she’d wanted him to. “What are you talking about?”

“This woman claims she is my wife. Well, to be fair, she is my wife. I was of age at the time and we were married in church by her father, who certainly gave his permission.”

Maris suppressed a burble of laughter. “You married a parson’s daughter?” Incredible. Whatever she had been expecting, it was not this.

“It was not my choice, I assure you. She was pregnant, and the parson had a way with pistols. For a man of peace, he had a most violent streak when it came to Catherine. I offered them money, but they would not be swayed. Marriage it had to be if I valued my hide.”

David fiddled with his unused knife waiting for Maris to speak. When she found she could not think of a thing to say—surely “Congratulations” came too late—he went on. “So you see now why I couldn’t marry Jane two years ago when she found herself in the same predicament. Bigamy is a crime, what? Ironic that if I’d only waited to dip my wick in a while, all my problems would have been solved. Marriage to my sweet, stuttering little cousin, pots of money, the earldom secured.”

David was married. He’d never kept his vows as far as Maris knew. “Did Jane know? Did Henry?”

“Poor Janie did. I had to tell her why I couldn’t marry her, didn’t I? And look what happened. I know you hold me responsible, and I reckon I am. I never expected her to take her life. I supposed Uncle Henry would send her off to Italy or somewhere for the duration. But she was too terrified to tell him.”

And Maris had not noticed the change that had come over her friend. She would never forgive herself for it. “But Henry did not know of your marriage.”

“No. It was the one thing I managed to keep from him, but shutting Catherine up all these years was no easy task, I assure you. Your pin money made some little progress there. Odd isn’t it? Hush money from one wife to another. Your husband was like a badger digging into my affairs. He kept a list of all my indiscretions, and read it to me every time I turned up. Did you know that? Called on the carpet like an errant schoolboy every time I darkened his door. Needless to say, I didn’t like that.” David examined a cuff. “I might have said a few things to him to raise his hackles.”

Henry had been nearly apoplectic after his last face-to-face meeting with his nephew. “You threatened to destroy the Kelby Collection.”

David shrugged. “I admit I don’t care about it. Can’t understand why he was consumed with all that old rubbish. But I know my duty. As earl, everything needs to remain for the next generation.”

The next generation. Maris pushed her plate away and stood up, too agitated to sit still a minute longer. She walked to the window. Reyn had disappeared down the lane long ago. “You said this Catherine was pregnant when you married.”

“Ah, yes. I have a strapping son. He’s sixteen this year, I believe.”

A son. She turned to David, trying to keep her composure. “You don’t know how old he is?”

“Well, I can count as well as the next fellow. He’s mine, all right. His damned mother was a virgin and he was born nine months after the benighted night I first took her. We had quite the hot affair for the month I spent in the country. She met me every day, sneaking out of the parsonage like a little spy.” He leered, and Maris looked away. “There is nothing like leading a complete innocent astray, Maris, though I don’t expect you share my sentiments. I would imagine you believe yourself to be one of my victims, don’t you? Unlike you, Catherine couldn’t get enough of me then, but no more. We’ve always lived apart. She and I do not get on very well.”

Maris expected not. Who could close both eyes while one’s husband carried on affairs as if he wasn’t wed?

So Henry had another heir besides his feckless nephew. That knowledge might have done much to soothe his ambition for the title. If Henry had known, he would have offered Catherine and her son residency at Kelby Hall. How he would have loved to watch a boy grow up there!

“Somehow Catherine caught wind of Uncle Henry’s death. She’s been after me for months now to move to the ancestral pile and set herself up as countess and groom young Peter as the heir. I told her it was no use yet, that you might cut me out of the earldom with the brat in your belly. Quite frankly, at this point I wouldn’t mind if you bore a son and saved me the trouble of strangling the woman. She’s not aged well at all.”

Maris bit a lip to keep from laughing. To think of suave, smooth David Kelby trapped forever in a miserable marriage. While he might be a villain, she somehow couldn’t see David’s long white fingers around his wife’s throat. It would take too much effort.

“Tell Catherine I should like to meet her. Have her bring your son. Is he at school?”

“Who has the money for school fees? I can’t send him and support my tailor, too. His grandfather has been tutoring him in that godforsaken village they live in. Catherine brags he’s bright enough. There’s nothing else for him to do, but study. No amusements to be found whatsoever. That was rather the reason I got entangled with Catherine in the first place. I was visiting my old friend Montague and there she was, fifteen, all blushes and blond ringlets. A regular Eve. A viper in my garden is what she is now.”

He had debauched a fifteen-year-old girl. Who was the snake? “Poor David,” Maris said, with just a trace of mockery.

“Oh, I’m sure you feel I’ve gotten just what I deserve for all the trouble I’ve given you. It’s a pity Uncle Henry isn’t here to laugh at me.” David’s face shifted to its usual unpleasant expression. “I warn you, though, should you try to trick me and foist off some local milkmaid’s babe as your own son, I’ll know. I’ll be watching. So, I imagine, will Catherine. Nothing is going to deprive her of seeing her child in his rightful place at last.”

“Goodness. I’m quaking.” And Maris was. With repressed laughter. The solution to her current agony was plain as the sneer on David’s face. A reprieve for her ever-present conscience. But before she made an irrevocable decision, she must meet with Mrs. Catherine Kelby and her son.

Maris wouldn’t say anything to Reyn. Not yet. But after last night, the thought of living her life without him in it was impossible. What did she care if she caused a frightful scandal? There would be a new Countess of Kelby, a new heir. At the rate David was going, he was bound to be shot soon by a jealous husband or contract one of the inevitable diseases that ran rampant throughout society for men with his proclivities. Even if he lived a long life and was an unsatisfactory earl, he had a son who might be worthy.

“What is Peter like?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.” Despite David’s blasé tone, the tips of his ears turned red.

“You don’t know your own son?” Maris asked, aghast.

“You can’t expect me to bury myself in the country to chat up a pimple-faced boy. I saw him a few years ago and he didn’t have two words to say for himself. His mother is probably lying when she says he’s intelligent. I saw no evidence of it myself.”

Poor Peter. But maybe not. No one would think David Kelby to be a good influence on a young man. Perhaps it was a mercy he lived out of the way with his mother and grandfather.

“Anyway, you can judge for yourself. Catherine should arrive at Kelby Hall any day now. I tried to stop her to no avail. She thinks your pregnancy is some sort of trick I’ve used to fob her off, but one look at you should shut her up. Unless you’ve got a pillow stuffed under your dress and got that idiot Crandall to lie for you. Do you know he had the gall to accuse me of having something to do with Uncle Henry’s death? Just because I was visiting a friend at the Hall the night he died.”

“A female friend, I presume.” His spy.

“Jealous?” David waggled an auburn brow. “We did have some good times, didn’t we, my dear? Though you lost your nerve after so brief a time. I never did get to teach you a fraction of what a woman needs to know to please a man. I wonder how you managed to entice my old uncle back into your bed. It was my understanding he was quite beyond performing his husbandly duties.”

Maris stood straighter. “Your informant was incorrect, David.”

“Was she? I wonder. Maybe you had a fling with the gardener or a footman, perhaps even with Uncle’s permission. I wouldn’t put anything past the old boy to cut me out. He might even have watched from the sidelines.”

“David! You are disgusting!”

He was getting dangerously close to the truth, but he could have no way of knowing.

“So my wife tells me every chance she gets, which, thank God, is not often. I will arrange to send her here when she darkens Kelby Hall’s door. As for myself, I’m bound for London this day. The Season, you know. There might be some pretty girls to lure into the bushes. An earldom is so very useful to throw a bit of added glitter into the mix. The mamas have such hopes for their daughters when they see me coming.”

He was delusional. At almost thirty-eight, he was showing the years of dissipation. His dark red hair was graying, his mouth bracketed by deep lines, his middle a bit thicker than she remembered. Once, Maris had thought him handsome, but she’d realized too late that his charm had ever been false.

“Happy hunting, then,” she said lightly. “How disappointed they will be to discover you have a wife and child tucked away.”

“There’s no reason yet for anyone to know. If I’m lucky, Catherine’s coach will tumble down a ravine and I’ll be a grieving widower. Oh, don’t look at me like that! Murder is not my style, Maris, else I should have snuffed out Uncle Henry years ago.”

“How reassuring.” Maris went to the bellpull and Aloysius appeared instantly. “Please see my nephew-in-law out, Aloysius.”

The young footman gave David a dark look. “With the greatest of pleasure, my lady.”

David threw back his head and laughed. “Such fierce loyalty. I’m gone. For now. But you have not seen the last of me.”

Maris collapsed in her chair once he was on his way. It might not be long before she was perfectly safe from him. If she weren’t afraid of being able to get up without assistance, she might even get down on her knees and pray.