The Unofficial Suitor Read online

  THE UNOFFICIAL SUITOR

  Charlotte Louise Dolan

  About the Author

  Publishing Information

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  Chapter 1

  Mr. Carneby kept a well-ran, albeit modest establishment in Falmouth. Returning from a short business trip, he was therefore not expecting the door of his town house to be flung open and his housekeeper to hurry down the steps to meet him, her normal manner of quiet dignity and reserve quite forgotten.

  “Oh, sir, I am so glad you are home at last. There has been a strange man coming around for three days asking for a Richard Hawke. I have told him over and over that he must have the wrong house, for there is nobody living here but our Mr. Carneby, and no one in this household has heard of anyone by the name of Hawke, but he wouldn’t listen. He ... he ...” She was unable to continue, as if afraid of his reaction to what she was trying to say.

  Not wishing to satisfy the idle curiosity of casual passersby, Mr. Carneby left his companion to pay the coachman and bring in the luggage, and taking his flustered housekeeper by the arm, escorted her back into the house. He smiled calmly to reassure her. “Now then, Mrs. Roberts, just what did this man say?”

  “He wouldn’t take no for an answer, Mr. Carneby.” Her voice trembled, but she managed to go on. “I told him you was a gentleman as likes your privacy, and you didn’t care to have strangers coming around uninvited. I told him you didn’t even make me privy to your comings and goings, and I had no idea if you would be home today or next week or not for a month, but he insisted ...” Her voice ended in a self-pitying wail.

  “He insisted on what?” It was getting harder and harder to mask his impatience with the housekeeper, who by now should have calmed down but who instead was wringing her hands and looking as if a sharp word from him would make her fall entirely to pieces.

  “Oh, sir, he insisted, and there was nothing I could do, what with you being gone and Tuke with you, and no one in the house but Betty and me, and her with no more backbone than a wet sponge, going on and on about what a handsome gentleman he was. And then when he said he was Viscount Westhrop—I couldn’t stop her, sir, indeed I couldn’t! And I told her I wasn’t to be blamed, and I told her it would be all on her head, and she said it didn’t make her no mind, it would be worth it and all, just to have a chance to look at a real lord.”

  He weighed the odds of being able to get some sense out of his housekeeper, and decided they were minimal. It was obvious he would have to seek out this Viscount Westhrop, whoever he was, and discover the nature of his business with Richard Hawke. “Did you manage to find out where this handsome lord is staying, Mrs. Roberts?”

  She looked at him in dismay. “But that’s what I’ve been telling you—Betty let him into the house! He’s been in your study since ten o’clock this morning, and he refuses to budge!”

  “The devil you say!” What had been idle curiosity before rapidly became rage. The idea that someone had been sequestered alone all day in a room containing his private papers—even if the said papers were safely hidden in a wall safe—the possible consequences of such a rash act did not bear contemplating. “Send Betty to me at once.” He stalked down the hall to confront the waiting stranger.

  Having cast her fellow servant to the wolves, the housekeeper apparently had some slight twinges of conscience. “You won’t be punishing Betty too hard, will you, sir? She means well, and she’s a good worker, just that she’s a bit of a pushover for a handsome smile and charming tongue.”

  There was no point in telling the silly woman exactly what he thought of her part in this whole affair. All it would accomplish would be to cast her into hysterics, which he definitely did not need at this moment. He contented himself, therefore, with a scowl, which was adequate to stop the housekeeper’s babbling and send her scurrying to the kitchen in the basement.

  Opening the door of his study quietly, he stood ready to catch the intruder in the act of riffling his desk or tapping the walls looking for a secret panel. But at the first glimpse of the young man dozing in an easy chair by the fire with his long buckskin-clad legs stretched out in front of him, the man calling himself Mr. Carneby forgot all worries for the safety of his business papers.

  With a relaxed smile replacing the scowl of moments before, he shut the door gently behind him. “Well, Perry, so now you have become a house-breaker. I always predicted you would come to no good end.”

  The other man was instantly alert and on his feet. “Richard, you wretch! I knew that stubborn old woman was lying through her teeth, claiming she didn’t know you!” He closed the space between them and they stood there for a moment grinning, each inspecting the other until, unable to resist, they pounded each other on the back in an exuberance of good feeling.

  The first intense emotion spent, they returned together to the chairs by the fire, where Richard seated himself calmly and the younger man threw himself back down in the same relaxed sprawl he had favored earlier, giving a great sigh of relief.

  “Confound it, Richard, I’ve been worried for days that you might be dead or in trouble. All Captain Rymer would say when I asked him your direction was that I should look for a Mr. Carneby in Falmouth, who might be able to give me word of you.”

  “Ah, I was wondering how you tracked me down. And how did you find Captain Rymer?”

  “It’s more a case of his finding me—in New Orleans—brought me a letter from the family lawyer informing me of my inheritance.”

  Before he could go on, there was a light knock, and a very anxious face appeared around the corner of the door. Then the slight figure belonging to the face slid into the room, her head tilted down so that all they could see was her mobcap. “You wished to speak to me, Mr. Carneby?” she whispered.

  “Yes, Betty. Send my valet up with some brandy for my guest and tell Mrs. Roberts he will be staying for dinner.”

  Her head jerked up, and she stared at him dazedly, her mouth hanging open in disbelief. Then she seemed to grasp the reality of her reprieve and scurried out before anyone could snatch her luck away.

  “So you are the mysterious Mr. Carneby,” his friend mused. “What is the point of this masquerade?”

  “I prefer to keep my business dealings private. I find it simpler if people know only as much about me as I choose to let them know.”

  “So everyone here knows you as Mr. Carneby?”

  “In Falmouth? Yes.”

  “Something about the way you say that makes me wonder who I should look for when I am not in Falmouth.”

  As Richard had anticipated, Perry did not even bother to glance up when the door opened and the “valet” entered with a tray containing a bottle of brandy and two glasses. At the sight of the visitor, John almost dropped the tray he was carrying, but he made a quick recovery, pouring them each a glass of brandy as neatly as if he were indeed a servant.

  It was all Richard could do not to spoil the coming surprise by laughing out loud. “Well, that would depend on where you were looking, to be sure. In Portsmouth, it might pay you to look up the ever-so-respectable Mr. Rawlynson. Or if you happened to be in Dover, there is a Mr. Hanchett there who some people suspect of being a bit of a Frenchie but who others insist must be part Spanish or Portuguese. He frequently knows my direction.”

  “And in London?”

  “In London? I do not believe that there is anyone in London for you to ask. The time is not yet ripe for London to know of me.”

  As Richard watched, his young friend became aware that the “servant” who had handed him the glass of brandy was still standing there, intruding on their private conversation.

  Perry looked up in sharp annoyance, which was immediately replaced by amazement and
then sheer delight. “Tuke? John Tuke? I can’t believe it. I thought you cocked up your toes in Baton Rouge, after that wily little Frenchman carved you up like a piece of cheese.”

  “As you can see, my dear Peregrine, I am still here, but I would not waste any time looking for that little frog. Hawke has his own ideas about who is to stay and who is to depart this world.”

  “And you have become Richard’s valet? Shame on him for treating an old friend thus.”

  John Tuke retired to stand leaning negligently against the mantel. “It suits me to play the role.”

  “It sounds as if you, too, have come up in the world, Perry,” Richard drawled. “Or were you also using an alias when you told my housekeeper you were a peer of the realm?”

  “No, it’s true, for my sins. You see before you the ninth Viscount Westhrop.”

  “You never mentioned you were in line for a title.”

  “Didn’t think I was. With two uncles, three cousins, a father, and one older brother ahead of me, there were no objections when I was ten and my mother’s younger brother offered to take me to America with him and give me a start in life. After all, there were seven apparently healthy men between me and the title, none of them given to taking the slightest risk.”

  He laughed. “To be sure, my cousin Gerald managed to scandalize the entire family by falling into the Thames while returning from an evening drinking with his cronies at Vauxhall, but other than that, they all managed to die peacefully in bed. It’s a good thing they did, or despite the fact that I’ve been in America for the last fifteen years, there would probably be whispers that I’d dispatched them all in order to inherit the title.”

  Perry sobered up. “And the truth is, I don’t want to have anything to do with that wretched title. I intend to give it up as soon as possible. I’m an American now. That’s the way I’ve thought of myself for years. I’ve still got one cousin left over here. Edmund was always a self-righteous prig when we were growing up, and a tattle-tale of the worst sort—let him play lord of the manor.”

  “So, why did you come back if not to accept your rightful place in society?”

  Richard heard the slight touch of mockery in Tuke’s question, but luckily their young friend appeared not to notice.

  “Mainly because of my grandmother, Lady Letitia. She sent a tear-stained note along with the lawyer’s letter, piteously begging me to come home. I was halfway across the Atlantic before it occurred to me that such maudlin sentimentality is totally out of character for her. She is probably laughing up her sleeve at having tricked me, but not even her clever scheming can make me stay in England. There is no way I can give up what I’ve found in America.”

  “And what is that?” Richard asked, giving Tuke a sharp look, which silenced whatever sarcastic remark he was about to make.

  “Freedom to do as I please, and ... and room to do it in, I suppose you could say. It’s hard to explain—everything is so big there, and so cramped and crowded together here. Do you know, I own twenty thousand acres of virgin land in Kentucky, and they expect to tempt me to stay here for the sake of an old manor house and a few hundred acres of used-up land. It’s incredible country, Hawke—I wish you could have gone upriver with me to see it. I’ll wager that Kentucky alone is almost as big as England, and yet I doubt if there are as many people in it as there are in this little corner of Cornwall. And it’s a glorious country, teeming with game—I could shoot a deer every day if I were so inclined, and nobody to say me nay, and there are bears and foxes and wild turkeys—”

  “Be that as it may, I confess I fail to see the advantage of living in a country with no people,” said Richard.

  “You’re joking!” Perry exclaimed. “You’ve been to America—you’ve seen its beauty—and the continent is so vast, we haven’t even begun to find out what’s there. How can you be content to live in stuffy old England when there’s a whole new world to explore? Where’s the spirit of adventure you used to have?”

  “I am not aware that I ever had any spirit of adventure,” Richard replied.

  “You must have had, to do the things you did. You took more chances than any man I’ve ever known.”

  “It seemed the only way to achieve my goals.” Richard did not bother to explain that having started with nothing, he had needed to seize every opportunity that came his way, no matter what dangers were involved—and it had paid off royally.

  “You can’t be serious.” Perry was looking at him in amazement, but then Perry had started with a silver spoon in his mouth, and a name and a family behind him. For him the risks had been attractive options, to take or not as the mood seized him.

  “I am completely serious. I have had enough of what you choose to call adventures for any ten people. And contrary to what you may think, the only dream I have ever had has been to live the quiet life of an English country gentleman. Having now acquired sufficient wealth to turn my dream into reality, I intend to have a thoroughly peaceful life—no excitement, no adventures, no unexpected surprises.” He glanced at Tuke, and their eyes met in silent agreement. Richard knew that the older man understood him as no one else ever could.

  Tuke had been with him from the beginning, and as a young ensign, had been the only ship’s officer to take pity on the skinny boy impressed into the merchant marine, helping him over the rough time he’d had adjusting to the hard work and privations of life at sea.

  And the fates in return had decreed that only the two of them should survive the pirates’ attack on their ship. As a result, and more to the point, only Tuke shared the memory of what it felt like to be sold into slavery.

  For a moment Richard could smell again the stench of sweaty, unwashed bodies in the stuffy slave quarters, hear the rattle of chains as someone shifted in a futile effort to find a comfortable position on the hard-packed dirt floor that served as a communal bed.

  As if it were yesterday, Richard could feel the utter exhaustion of his body, driven beyond the limits of endurance. He could feel the never-ending hunger twist his belly unmercifully, hear the crack of the overseer’s whip, feel its sting across his shoulders...

  From a great distance he heard Tuke conversing with Perry, and in his rational mind Richard knew he was safe in England and half a world away from the Caribbean island where they had been forced into slavery. But it was hard to shake off the memories.

  He thanked God once again for John Tuke. If their mutual experience was not enough to bind them together, there was also the knowledge that neither of them alone could have found the means of escaping from slavery and then from the island that was actually a more effective prison than the plantation had been.

  He had been the one to formulate their plan of escape, but it had been Tuke’s strong right arm that had enabled them to carry it off.

  “How utterly boring such a life sounds. Every bit as tedious as what my family plans for me.” Perry’s mouth curled in an impish grin. “It’s too bad I can’t give you my title, Richard. You would undoubtedly make a superb lord. Far better than I would, I’m afraid. You have the natural arrogance for it.”

  “As to that, I would not accept the title if you could give it to me instead of to your cousin. I have about as much use for the English aristocracy as I have for unnecessary risks—both are utterly pointless. I suppose in that respect, some of my experiences in America have changed me. I can no longer judge a man according to his rank, as opposed to his achievements.”

  “I would have thought that would be the logical next step in your dream—first buy a nice manor house, then marry a lord’s daughter.”

  “Me? Marry into the aristocracy? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Of course you. Any woman, no matter how high her degree, would be lucky to have you for a husband, Richard.”

  “Ah, but you miss the point Perry. I, on the contrary, do not feel your titled ladies are good enough for me. I admit, I have decided it is time I married and started acquiring heirs, but I have no need of a frivolous wife—a spo
iled, feather-headed society miss who would do her best to squander my hard-earned riches and would expect me to be grateful for the privilege of providing her with the blunt to buy herself enough bonnets and dresses and shoes for any ten women.”

  “So? What more can you expect from a woman than that she be pleasing to the eye? They are, after all, the weaker sex.”

  “That is where you are out, my boy. I think, if the truth were known, many of them are far stronger than us mere males. I knew an incredible woman once. Her name was Molly—” He caught Tuke’s look of surprise that he should mention her name for the first time in years.

  “Sounds like a comely Irish maid my uncle used to have. She was well worth remembering, too—biggest, softest blue eyes—”

  “She was not Irish.” Richard did not explain that she had been a mulatto and a slave and far from beautiful. There was no way that Perry’s understanding would stretch that far. “But she was the bravest person I have ever met—and the strongest, and the most practical.” And the most loving, he added to himself. She had become like a mother to him and had stolen extra food for him from the kitchens where she worked, thereby saving him from the gradual starvation that was the fate of most of the slaves. It was due to her efforts that he had not ended up weak and stunted, but had grown to a man’s full size and strength. “And I am afraid she spoiled me for lesser women.”

  “So why didn’t you marry this paragon, then? Or wouldn’t she have you?”

  Richard answered simply, “She died,” and Perry’s light-hearted smile was wiped from his face.

  Richard did not go on to explain how she had died, sacrificing her life for him when the escape attempt had almost failed. He had thought he could get all three of them safely away, and when it had become obvious that all three would be caught, she had turned back and sent him on with Tuke. By deliberately creating an easy trail to follow, she had led their pursuers astray, giving him and Tuke their chance to escape.