Karen Ranney Read online

  “Practical? Logical?” Enid asked.

  Virginia walked to the window, trying to find some way to respond.

  “Do not think Jeremy will support us, my dear. He will banish us from this house with a quickness that will surprise you. What he doesn’t do, his harridan of a wife will. They’ll care nothing for what happens to us.”

  “Would you?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder at her mother-in-law. “If the situation were reversed, would you care for Jeremy and his wife?”

  “And their brood of children?” Enid sighed deeply. “I don’t know. They’re badly behaved children.”

  Virginia bit back a smile. Yes, they were, and she dreaded any occasion when she had to encounter Jeremy’s seven children.

  If Lawrence had left behind one child, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.

  Her mother-in-law was a planner, witness her brilliance in arranging a marriage between Lawrence, an invalid, and an American heiress. One thing Enid hadn’t been able to do, however, was inspire Lawrence to bed his wife on more than one occasion.

  She rarely called Enid “Mother,” falling back on a habit of not addressing her at all unless it was in the company of others. Her own mother had died at her birth, a fact she’d been reminded of endlessly as a child. Not by her father, who seemed surprised when she was trotted out for his inspection at Christmas and during his one summer visit. A succession of nurses and governesses, all hired to tend her and keep her out of her father’s way, ensured she knew her entrance into the world had been accompanied by the greatest tragedy.

  She couldn’t even imagine her mother’s disembodied voice on this occasion. Would she have sided toward logic and survival? Or would her mother have been horrified at Enid’s suggestion?

  “Something must be done,” Enid said. “You know as well as I.”

  The title was going to pass to Lawrence’s cousin, Jeremy. He was a perfectly agreeable sort of person, pleasant to Virginia when they met. She didn’t see anything wrong with him assuming the title. The problem was, everything Lawrence had purchased since receiving the bulk of her estate: the numerous houses, parcels of land, dozens of horses, farm equipment, and furnishings. Lawrence had ensured they would also go to his cousin by willing them to the “male heir of his body.” Without an heir, the property traveled back up the family tree to Jeremy.

  Without any cash or assets they could sell, they’d be penniless.

  All she had was her quarterly allowance, and it wouldn’t buy more than a few bottles of perfume. She had her mother’s jewels, but they were more sentimental than valuable since her mother evidently had not been ostentatious in her dress. One good ruby brooch and a carnelian ring could be sold. How much would those bring her? Not enough to care for all the people who needed to be supported.

  They were in dire straits, indeed.

  Unless she produced an heir to the estate.

  What Enid was proposing was shocking. Somehow, she needed to get with child and quickly enough that he would be viewed as Lawrence’s heir.

  “It’s a solution to our dilemma,” Enid said. “Have you given any thought to it?”

  She nodded. She’d thought about nothing but their situation in the last four hours. God help her, but here in this room with her husband’s body in a casket, she’d thought about nothing but him.

  Macrath.

  Chapter 2

  London

  A year earlier

  When they’d arrived in London, Virginia had no idea she’d be heartily tired of the city within the month.

  Tonight’s ball was the third in two weeks, and the tenth engagement. Through it all, she saw the same people in different attire. The muscles of her face ached from smiling. Her feet hurt from walking on hardwood floors in her thin kid slippers.

  She wanted to put her feet up, first, and second, she couldn’t wait to read the broadsides her American maid had smuggled to her. Her father had come to her room, interrupting them, so she’d folded them quickly and stuffed them into her reticule, and all night she’d been dying to see what the talk of London was now.

  She slipped away, retreating to their host’s library. Settling into the corner of the settee and tucking her feet beneath her, she retrieved the broadside and smoothed it with her fingers.

  On Monday an inquest was held at the National School, before Mr. Worley, coroner, to inquire into the cause of the death of Thomas Newbury, a boy who was found dead with his throat cut in a pea-field, near Haversham.

  A sad, a cruel dreadful deed,

  To you I will unfold, The murder of a little boy,

  As base as e’er was told;

  Murdered by a cruel man,

  At Haversham we hear,

  Near the town of Newport Pagnell,

  In the county of Buckinghamshire.

  “There’s a better light over here,” a masculine voice said.

  Startled, she dropped the paper, then bent to pick it up, pressing it against her chest.

  “I do apologize,” she said. “I thought the room was empty.”

  She glanced toward the two massive leather chairs arranged in front of the fireplace. The speaker wasn’t visible.

  “As you can see, it’s not,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your . . .” Her words trailed off.

  “Reverie? Contemplation? Solitude?”

  “Yes, all that,” she said. “Your musing. Your considerations. Perhaps even your meditations.”

  He peered around the side of the chair, his smile surprising her. Or was it his intent blue eyes she saw first?

  Her father always said she looked half finished. God had certainly taken the hue from her pale blue eyes and given it to this man. His eyes were such a startling blue she noted them from across the room.

  The color reminded her of midnight over the Hudson, when the sky seemed like a curtain behind which a celestial lantern hid, revealing the night to be not black at all, but a deep and rich blue.

  “My escape, most like,” he said. “Are you doing the same?”

  “I’m afraid I’m doing worse than that,” she said.

  An eyebrow lifted. “Are you absconding with something belonging to our hostess?”

  “Of course not.”

  She debated whether to confess. To her father, a broadside was coarse and common. No one in proper company ever confessed to reading them. Nor was she to associate with people who did so.

  “I was reading a broadside,” she said. “About a horrible murder.”

  “Were you?” He didn’t frown in dismay at her. Nor did he suddenly seem coolly aloof. He merely relaxed there, a handsome stranger who had evinced more curiosity about her than anyone had since arriving in England.

  She stood, walked to the two chairs, and without invitation sat in the one beside him. What a handsome man he was. His mouth and eyes seemed paired in humor. His face was lean, the planes of it sharpened rather than shaped. Nothing about him was soft or genial, but she wanted to smile at him as she stared.

  While she couldn’t tell since he was seated, he seemed to be tall. His shoulders were broad enough, taking up the width of the chair. His legs were stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. If there had been a roaring fire in the fireplace, she could understand why he’d escaped the entertainment. Since the evening was a temperate one, he must have retreated here for privacy.

  She wanted to apologize for intruding. Instead, she handed him the broadside.

  “It’s about a murder of a young boy.”

  “Are you given to studying murder?”

  She sighed. “I’m not very brave,” she confessed. “I don’t think I could bear an actual murder. But I do like reading about things that would terrify me otherwise. Besides, I’m very interested in what’s going on around me. How can anyone not want to know what’s happening in the world?”

  “I thank providence for people like you.”

  “Do you?” she asked, surprised. “Why?”


  “I own a company in Scotland that prints broadsides.”

  She sat back, clasping her hands together on her lap. “Are you jesting? Or making fun of me? I realize a great many people don’t think highly of broadsides, but why would you say such a thing?”

  He handed back the paper, smiling at her. “I wouldn’t think of making fun of you,” he said. “What man in his right mind would ridicule a beautiful woman?”

  Now she truly knew he was jesting. No one ever called her beautiful. Smart, perhaps, when she was dressed in the fashions her father had ordered. Perhaps even handsome when her hair was done correctly and she stood straight and tall, as her governess always instructed. But she’d never been called beautiful. Not even once, by the kindest person.

  Her cheeks warmed and she was instantly filled with two conflicting wishes. She wanted to flee as quickly as she could. Yet she wanted to stay and talk with him at the same time.

  “It’s called the Sinclair Printing Company,” he said. “We operate in Edinburgh. Have you ever been there?”

  “This visit to England is my first outside New York,” she said. “I’m from America.”

  “I discerned that,” he said with a smile. “From your accent. It sounds almost English, but it’s not.”

  “You are not the first person to say that,” she said, looking down at her reticule. “My nurse was English and maybe I speak the way I do because of her. But everyone else has an accent, too. Such as yours. I could tell you were from Scotland.”

  He leaned his head back against the chair, his hands resting on the arms, the pose of a man at ease.

  She didn’t feel the least relaxed.

  For the first time since she’d come to England, she was speaking with a truly handsome man. Even better, he was talking to her, and they were conversing about something more important than the weather.

  “Do you print newspapers as well?”

  “We do. Well, I don’t. I don’t run the company anymore. I’m involved in something else.”

  His name was Macrath Sinclair and he was in London, he told her, to escort his sister.

  For the next hour they talked of politics and broadsides, books and plays. Each thought London overwhelming at times, with traffic an endless obstacle. Each thought Londoners unbearably arrogant, topped only by the French, who were arrogant and smelled bad. Neither had an affinity for English food, or the melodramas of the day, preferring to read instead. His humor was dry yet he was polite enough to laugh at her few jests. They talked of everything, some subjects not considered proper in mixed company. She was, however, as she’d told him, fascinated with history and, too, intrigued by English politics.

  “I’m an American,” she said, “and supposed to mind my manners. I’m not to be too inquisitive.”

  “Have you always minded your manners?”

  She smiled. “I have, yes.”

  “That’s right. You’re not very brave. Are you really so cowardly?”

  She sighed again.” I hate heights,” she said, “and spiders.”

  He merely smiled at her, so charmingly that she found herself breathless.

  With great regret, she left him finally, glancing back as she made her farewells, thinking that the miserable voyage to England had been worth it if only for this night.

  Chapter 3

  London

  July, 1869

  The eastern sky was growing pink. A day would pass, then another, and finally Poor Lawrence would be laid to rest.

  “Can you think of some other answer?” Enid asked.

  Virginia turned to face her mother-in-law.

  “The law does not see women as people, Virginia, but only as a man’s limb. His leg, his foot, or whichever appendage you want.”

  For a moment, a ghost of a smile appeared on Enid’s lips, then vanished.

  “Your entire inheritance is gone, Virginia. Everything your father left you.”

  “Did Lawrence do it on purpose?” she asked. “Did he want us desperate?”

  Enid tapped her fingers against her lips as if holding back improvident words. Finally, she sighed deeply. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I would hope he hadn’t.”

  They regarded each other somberly.

  “Search your memory, Virginia. Is there no friend of Lawrence’s? Or a person who might have come calling on my girls?”

  Macrath. In this room, he seemed even more substantial than Lawrence in his casket.

  Had Lawrence any friends? She’d never seen any visitors to the house. The closest to a friend was his attendant, but Paul was paid to be devoted.

  As far as her sisters-in-law, Ellice was only sixteen and Eudora didn’t seem interested in attracting a suitor.

  “You do agree, don’t you, Virginia?” her mother-in-law asked now.

  “I’m not sure I can do such a thing,” she said.

  But, oh, to see him again. To smile at him once more.

  “May I speak frankly, my dear?”

  When had she not?

  “Sexual congress needn’t last long,” Enid said.

  Poor Lawrence hadn’t been interested in sexual congress. Or perhaps he simply resented being a pawn in his mother’s schemes. She had evidently been included in that resentment. Poor Lawrence had retreated to his suite of rooms early on in their marriage, rarely emerging.

  “Seduction isn’t all that difficult, Virginia. All you need do is suggest your willingness and the male will do the rest.”

  She had the most absurd wish to giggle. Her mother-in-law was giving her lessons on debauchery.

  “However, you need to copulate regularly. You’re young and healthy. Nothing should prevent your getting with child.”

  She felt like a chicken, scolded because it hadn’t recently laid an egg.

  “Is there no one to whom you could appeal?” Enid asked. “No one at all? Wasn’t there someone before you married Lawrence?”

  Macrath. Dear God, was she a terrible person for having kept him in her heart all this time?

  She turned and faced the window again. Streaks of yellowish light bathed the street in front of the town house, stretching to illuminate the park in the middle of the square. She wanted to throw open the sash and breathe in the cool dawn air. She wanted to be gone from this place, from Poor Lawrence.

  “Yes,” she said, speaking to the window. “I know of someone.”

  Macrath.

  Was he married? Nearly a year had passed since she’d seen him, and yet she could conjure him up so well he could be standing there, his dark blue eyes intently fixed on her.

  What would have happened if her father had allowed her to marry Macrath Sinclair? Would her life be filled with joy, or the insane excitement she always felt when he was near?

  Her heart stuttered around Macrath. Her palms became moist. Her emotions were too close to the surface, almost as if she were preparing to shout in joy or weep in despair.

  A magnificent man, Macrath Sinclair, one who’d commanded her thoughts even during her marriage.

  She’d almost been brave once, because of Macrath.

  “He lives in Scotland,” she said, feeling her heartbeat escalate as she spoke.

  “All the better, then,” Enid said. “Far enough away no hint of scandal will touch you.”

  “No hint of scandal?” she asked, turning. “What kind of a widow would travel in such conditions?”

  “One who does so in secrecy,” Enid said. “In the dead of night, if need be.”

  “Could we not appeal to Jeremy’s generosity?” she asked.

  The Dowager Countess of Barrett sighed audibly. “I have already done so. He is sensitive to our plight, he says, but will not attempt to break the entail. Don’t expect any help from that quarter.”

  Now was the time for her to protest, to say Enid’s suggestion was foolish. Try as she might, she couldn’t see a brighter future for them, not with Poor Lawrence spending her fortune in such a profligate way.

  “Do you have the courage,
Virginia?”

  No, she didn’t. But what other option was there in the face of such unfair laws? A woman had no rights to anything, least of all her own money.

  The door suddenly opened and her two sisters-in-law entered. Virginia was engulfed in a flurry of weeping, black silk and arms enfolding her in a comforting embrace.

  “Dearest Virginia,” Eudora said. “How are you faring?”

  Enid’s oldest daughter was tall, gliding when she walked. Her demeanor and poise was of a woman twice her age. Every once in a while, however, Eudora smiled, and the expression hinted at a younger and more carefree girl, one capable of mischief.

  She wore her hair parted in the middle and swept into rosettes on either side of her head. A matronly style but one suiting her, as did the black she now wore. Even dressed in mourning, one noticed her dark eyes and long lashes, a creamy complexion, and full pink lips.

  “Is she Mediterranean?” someone had once asked about Eudora, and the question had reminded Virginia of lithographs she’d seen of Roman women, even to the prominent nose and regal looking brow.

  If Eudora had any flaws at all, it was that she loved to shop. A few times each week Virginia accompanied her, walking through the Pantheon, the Burlington Arcade, Davie’s warehouse on St. Martin’s Lane, or the Soho Bazaar.

  They invariably returned empty-handed from each one of their outings, simply because Lawrence refused to give them any pocket money and Virginia’s quarterly allowance wasn’t that large.

  “Oh, sister, was it awful?” Ellice asked.

  Ellice was the opposite of her taller older sister. She fidgeted. She squirmed. She could not sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. Her brown eyes were always sparkling with curiosity. “Why do you suppose” was the phrase starting most of her conversations. Her brown hair was always coming loose, and she was forever being lectured by her mother on comportment, manners, what to say and when. Unfortunately, she had, on more than one occasion, offended people by speaking what was on her mind.

  If Eudora was Enid’s joy, Ellice was her trial.

  Virginia had never considered they might be the saving grace of her marriage. Eudora and Ellice had become her sisters in truth.