Lord Haven's Deception Read online

  And then life could settle into its proper gentle rhythm. She could find the peace she longed for.

  Chapter One

  He was a big man, broad-shouldered and tall, but his shoulders were bowed as though with the weight of the world. He trudged up the muddy path, weary and downhearted, but one look up, one glance at the welcoming light coming from the neat stone cottage and the curl of gray smoke from the chimney, and his heart lifted. Mary was there. Mary was there and she would have supper waiting, and the cottage would be warm and the baby would be sleeping.

  His step lighter, he approached the cottage, kicked off his muck-caked boots outside the door on the stone doorstep and padded sock-footed through the door. The woman at the fire turned, giving him a smile that would melt a Yorkshire snowdrift.

  “Gerry, you look that tired. Has it been a hard one, then?”

  All the troubles of the day, all the weariness of long hours, conflicts, hard work with no appreciation, dropped away from him in the welcoming atmosphere of Haven Home, his farm. “Aye, that it has, Mary.” He began to shrug out of his heavy coat and she came from tending the supper to help him, lifting the damp woolen coat off his shoulders and hanging it on a hook behind the door.

  “Sit you down, then. Supper’s ready. Yer favorite, stew and dumplin’s.”

  “Ah, Mary, you know the way to a man’s heart. You’re a rare gem.”

  Dimpling and blushing, Mary shooed him toward a low chair at the scarred table by the window. The glass was covered by the steam from the evening’s meal, but there was nothing outside he wanted to see anyway. Cold, hard reality was outside. Burdensome responsibility, nagging harpies, uncooperative workers; all those were left outside the door. It was inside this little cottage that life started.

  Mary dished up a full bowl of fragrant stew, making sure he had a large helping of the light and fluffy dumplings for which she was famous throughout the valley. Gerry knew he was a lucky man. Many would give much to have Mary cook them their evening meal, and he was the lucky sot who enjoyed the pleasure. He watched her as he ate; she dished her own meal up in a smaller bowl and sat down at the opposite end of the table, but then popped up again and served him a large tankard of ale and herself a glass of buttermilk. Finally she sat and stirred her stew to cool it some, nodding with satisfaction as she tasted. She was plump and still pretty, was Mary, even though life had not been easy, and childbirth the greatest challenge of all.

  “The babe asleep?” he muttered around a mouthful.

  “Aye, that she is,” Mary said after swallowing. She took a long draught of buttermilk, leaving creamy flecks on her upper lip. He licked his own lips and turned his attention back to his meal. “But if you’re very quiet,” she continued, “you can have a wee peek after yer supper.”

  “I’ll not disturb her, I promise.” They ate the rest of their meal in companionable silence. That was one of Mary’s many attractions. She did not demand conversation, as did most of the women he had met in his life. He could be silent and she would not accuse him of being taciturn or moody. He could just be himself and it was good enough.

  Finally pushing away from the table, his appetite sated, he glanced around and, as if she read his mind, Mary brought him his pipe. He seldom smoked, only ever while at his ease in front of the fire at the cottage hearth, but tonight he needed its subtle comfort. His large hands circling her waist, he pulled her down into his lap, where she landed with a soft oof expelled in her surprise. He kissed and nuzzled her ear, but she pulled away from him and stood, facing him.

  “No, me lord, no.” She twisted her hands in her apron and her soft features showed her unhappiness. She took a deep breath and said, “Lord Haven, you an’ me bin friends since childhood, but you be the lord o’ the manor and I am just Mary Cooper, widowed farmer’s wife. An’ I told you there would be none o’ that. It is not fitting, and I will be no man’s strumpet.”

  He flinched, for the verbal slap hit him hard. He never meant to make Mary think that was his intent. It had been the impulse of the moment, the whim of the instant. “Mary, I’m sorry. You know I never meant to make you feel uncomfortable. I got carried away.” With a deep sigh of regret he stood and laid the pipe down on the table. He knew from past experience that all comfort would be gone now. His miserable error had reminded Mary of the gulf that separated them, and how this little homey scene would be perceived if it were known that the widow Mary Cooper, who lost her husband even before their babe was born, was entertaining the master of Haven Court, his lordship, Viscount Geraint Walcott Haven, family name Neville, descendent of the ancient earl of Warwick and relative of the current earl. He surrendered to the inevitable, feeling the mantle of his unwanted rank and power slipping back onto his broad shoulders. “I will be going back to the house now.” He could not meet Mary’s eyes, for he knew he had made her uncomfortable. “M’mother will be looking for me. Kiss the babe once for me, will you?”

  “That I will, Lord Haven.”

  “Gerry. You used to call me Gerry when we were children, Mary, and just now you did the same.”

  “But we’re not children anymore, me lord.” She stiffened her back and shook her head, gazing at him with sad eyes. “Not for many years now. ’Twas my mistake to call you that when you came in tonight. I would have both of us remember who we be.”

  Haven moved to the rugged door and shrugged himself into his coat. He opened the door and pulled his boots onto the mat just inside and slipped his feet into the sodden leather, grimacing at the cold dampness. Straightening, he glanced over at her hesitantly. “I may come back again, mayn’t I? For supper? Sometime soon?” He held his breath while Mary, looking undecided, watched him. “Please, Mary,” he said humbly. “I’ll not forget myself again, I promise. The childish play-acting is over. We are just friends; I know that.” Sometimes he felt that the comfort and warmth of this little cottage and the companionship of its inhabitant, his old friend Mary Cooper, was the only piece of his life that made sense, the only part that felt real and wholesome.

  “Aye, that you may.” The baby whimpered in her sleep and Mary retreated to the cradle in the corner near the fire. She fussed a moment, pulling a blanket up over little Molly, but then looked back at her friend, her childhood companion. “It is yer own property and I canna stop you, after all. But do not be thinkin’ it means anything beyond friendship, Ger . . . Lord Haven. I want no man in my bed, not with Jem so recently gone above. And when I do—if I ever do—it will be marriage, and to someone of me own station in life. I’ll not have you misunderstand me.”

  Her tone left no room for argument. If he was realistic, he knew she was only telling him the truth as the world outside the cottage door would see it. He was the lord of Haven Court, the hereditary holder of one of the largest estates in Yorkshire. When he married—if he married—it must be to a woman who could fill the position of viscountess, as grim as a marriage contracted under those terms sounded to him. As he stood there in her doorway he realized that he had not told Mary of the overtures made on his behalf in aid of that aim, and decided then and there that there was no point in telling her until there really was something to tell. He already knew that the young lady being courted on his behalf was not going to be to his liking; he had seen a miniature of her and a more pinched-face, sour spinster he had never seen.

  Ah, well, he might just marry her anyway, just to shut everyone up. What difference did it make? He was never going to find the woman of his dreams. The fantasy of cuddling a loving and welcoming woman in his arms and bed within the bonds of wedlock had died years before. It seemed he might have to settle for a marriage of convenience or none at all. And it could not be no marriage. He owed his title its continuation, or so his family told him time after time. Mary moved toward him and put her hand on the door, as if hastening him out.

  “I understand, Mary. I really do.” He put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed, but let it drop with no further caress. Mary was his oldest and dearest friend, the pl
aymate of his childhood, and he would not hurt her for the world. Her husband, Jem Cooper, had been a good man and a good tenant and his death had hurt Mary deeply. Though she spoke of it as recent, it was more than a year now.

  Haven stepped out the door into the crisp late-March air and breathed in deeply, readying himself for the walk back to the house. The door closed softly but firmly behind him and he heard the latch fall into place and the bolt snick. Mary was shutting him out of her life a little more every time he slipped and moved to kiss or caress her. He must not let that happen again. Not for the world would he make her uncomfortable in her own home.

  He paced down the path, the cold wind whipping red into his cheeks as he steeled himself for what lay ahead of him at Haven Court, his true home. The journey to his estate and back to his true identity, that of Viscount Haven, lord of the district and most prominent aristocrat for miles around, was more mental process than physical, and he spoke to himself sternly as he went.

  “Now, Haven, you have a houseful of women, it is true, and more expected, but that is no reason to run away.” He walked up from the farm across the long moor as the sun bid its final adieu to the Yorkshire hills, coloring the sky in shades of porphyry and cobalt, strings of kohl lining the streaky clouds on the horizon. “They cannot plague you if you don’t let them. Their nattering and gossiping must not drive you to hide away in your library again, nor must you let them nag you into actions you do not want to take.” He walked on, but his pace slowed. “Mph,” he grunted. “Easier said than accomplished, my cowardly lad,” he muttered out loud to that self-righteous, priggish voice in his head. A grandmother, mother and two sisters meant he was the only male in the house who was not a servant. He was outnumbered and out-talked, harried and nipped at like a bear baited by terriers.

  The shadows of the scattered ancient oak trees, planted in this barren landscape almost two hundred years ago by one of the early Viscount Havens and bent and gnarled by the insistent wind that swept down the moor, grew longer and then faded into a uniform darkness. He followed a low stone wall, climbed the final hill, skirted rocky outcroppings and strode over the rise, then stood on the prominence gazing down at Haven Court, the ancestral home of Viscount Haven for over three hundred years, since the first Viscount Haven was created. It was a priory before that, stretching back to its first years as a Catholic retreat built shortly after the Norman conquest.

  It was a lovely home, he supposed, from the original square, turreted section to the long, low additions, two of them, that held more modern rooms along with the kitchens and servant quarters. Visitors always congratulated him on the beauty of the old gray walls covered in ivy and the three floors of windows, blazing with the last light now in the early spring evening. Just beyond Haven Court was the dower house, Haven Wood, where his grandmother nominally made her home, though she was at the Court more than in her own home.

  He shrugged. He preferred the Haven home farm cottage, with its snug dimensions and low ceilings, but if he dared say that his mother, grandmother and sisters would ring a peal over his head as usual, so he would keep his silence.

  He picked up his pace again, determined anew to take control of his distaff relatives and exert his authority as master. When had he lost that control? Had he ever had it? And did it matter? He suspected that he never was the “master of the house” in its true sense. Perhaps it was too late. If he married, would that make one member of the household for his side, or would his wife join the women against him and make the harrying that much worse? He supposed he would not know until he met the prune-faced Miss Dresden, his proposed bride.

  He entered through the high roman-arched doorway into the great hall, a part of the turreted old section, to find the manse a buzzing hive of activity. Servants rushed back and forth up in the gallery and on the main floor, their footsteps echoing hollowly in the high-ceilinged room; a maid carrying a folded shawl and stoppered bottle pushed past him. Somewhere a woman wept. Hmm, in the drawing room, Haven thought. The weeping changed to a wail. He frowned and moved toward the sound. Though his instincts were to shrink away from aristocratic female sensibility, womanly pain aroused all his protective instincts; he could not ignore it. He entered the drawing room to find an older woman weeping, attended by his mother and eldest sister, Rachel.

  His mother looked up from her seat by the troubled female, her lips pursed and frown lines etched deep on either side of her mouth. “Haven! Finally! Why were you not home two hours ago? You knew we had company coming.”

  That was the very knowledge that had made him delay his return home until the last possible moment. The maid he had seen rush by him in the hall was draping the woolen shawl over the woman’s arms, aided ineffectually by Rachel.

  “I didn’t think my absence would cause such a commotion,” he said, only half joking. The woman set up a new wave of bawling, reminding Haven forcibly of a sheep in prenatal distress.

  “Do not jest,” Lady Haven said over the racket. “Lady Mortimer is very much upset. Her niece is missing! Just imagine, the girl went missing at the last stop, an inn some miles from here down the Derbyshire road.”

  “Went missing?” The hesitant farmer was gone in an instant. He stepped forward, knelt on the rug, and said, gently but firmly, “Lady Mortimer, what does my mother mean by ‘went missing’? Where is Miss Dresden?”

  His tone brooked no argument and the older lady pulled herself together, sniffling into her handkerchief for only a moment longer before saying, “It was at that horrid, wretched inn. My niece went down to the kitchen to bespeak another pitcher of hot water—we stopped there this afternoon to refresh ourselves before making our entrance to Haven Court, you see—and when she was so long I called the maid, but she didn’t know where my niece was, and so I called the landlord’s wife and she did not know where Jane was, either, and then I called—”

  “Enough!” He stemmed the tide of her rising hysteria before it took hold of her again. “I understand; no one knew where she was. Was there any sign of what happened to her?”

  His deep voice acted like a pitcher of cold water dashed in her face. She pulled herself together—he had the impression she was not normally a scattered kind of female—and said, “No, there was no one who had seen her, but a stable lad found th-this slip of paper on a nail in the stable.”

  She handed him a crumpled bit of paper that was much stained with her tears. Haven read it and frowned. The girl is ars, it read. If you want ta see her agin, then do as yer told. We’ll contact yer. He shook his head. Ransom? Was this a kidnapping? But something about the note— He turned to stride from the room but thought twice; he moved back to Lady Mortimer and put one hand on her shoulder. “My lady, I will find Miss Dresden, I promise you that, and I will ensure that she will be unharmed. I will punish most severely whomever is responsible for this deed He will feel the sting of my lash, or worse.”

  As he strode away he could hear his mother’s harsh voice crying out, “Haven, you have left a trail of muck on the Aubusson! Haven! How many times . . .”

  • • •

  The full moon rose above the Yorkshire hills and Mary Cooper rocked her baby as it suckled. As she rocked, she sang an old lullaby that she remembered from her own childhood: “Sweetly sleep, my babe, my own, your da will protect you and keep us from harm.”

  But he wouldn’t. She stifled a sob and cleared her throat, concentrating fiercely on her blessings to counteract her melancholy. Ah, but it was hard not to think of what could have been. At this time of the evening, the quiet, soft time of crackling fire and warm darkness, she thought of Jem and missed him. If he were there he would be sitting by the fire whittling something, for his hands were never still. He could not read nor write, but neither could he abide laziness, which was why Lord Haven had kept him as the home farm manager for so many years. Jem had been a fair bit older than her, but a more loving husband she could not have wished for. He was not handsome in any sense other than “handsome is as handsome does,”
he was intelligent but not learned, gentle but not genteel, and he was her husband. He was as unlike Gerry as could be, she supposed, and yet like him in so many important ways. Having Gerry as a childhood friend had taught her what she wanted in a man and husband and she had found it in Jem.

  Lord Haven. She rocked the baby and thought about her childhood friend, Gerry, now the grand and powerful viscount, Lord Haven. She worried about him, for the carefree boy he once was had been replaced by a rather dour, hardworking, but cynical man. Not that that was his natural demeanor. Around her he was a gentle and considerate friend, but his reputation in the village was of a hard man with little to say, true Yorkshire to the bones.

  As a youth he had not been sent to school as perhaps he should have been. His father was a weak man under the thumb of his controlling wife and strong-willed mother; they both wanted Gerry home, so he was schooled by the local vicar. But there came a time when it was appropriate for the Haven heir, Baron Lesley as he was then, to go to London and take part in the usual entertainments of a viscount’s son. He didn’t want to go, but he went. The tales he brought back from that far-off mythical place, a place of great lords and ladies, brilliant ballrooms and the tonnish elite, were stories of frozen ladies with perpetual sneers on their handsome, painted faces, and of ridicule suffered by the cloddish country lad who had no experience of aristocratic females and all of their wiles. After three Seasons, and upon ascending to his father’s title, he refused to return except for the necessary business he must occasionally tend to in the south.