The Runaway Countess Read online

  So her father had been wrong in relying on fairy stories. But so had her mother. A rich husband was not all a woman needed.

  Jane tossed her trowel and garden gloves into a bucket and examined the house. Barton Park was not a large dwelling, but once it had been very pretty, a red brick faded to a soft pink, centred around a white-stone portico and surrounded by gardens, a mysterious hedge maze and a pretty Chinoiserie summerhouse. Now the stone was chipped, some of the windows cracked and the lovely gardens sadly overgrown. She hadn’t gone in the hedge maze at all since she moved back.

  Jane did her best. She and Emma lived on a small bequest from their mother’s family, which Hayden could probably claim if he wanted, but it was surely too insignificant to interest him. It paid for their food, a cook, a maid, fuel for the fires, but not a carriage or a team of gardeners. No grand parties, but she had had her fill of those in London. She had found she wasn’t at all good at them, either attending or hosting them. There could be money from Hayden, but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.

  Jane sighed as she pushed the loose tendrils of her brown hair back into her scarf. Emma was sixteen now. In a couple of years she should have a London Season, though Jane had no idea how to pay for it or how to weather London gossip in order to launch her.

  Not that Emma seemed in the least bit interested in a Season. She was a strange girl, always buried in books about botany or running off to the woods to collect ‘specimens’ or bring home new pets like rabbits or hedgehogs. She liked the quiet life in the country as much as Jane did. They both needed its peace. But Jane knew it couldn’t go on for ever.

  That was why she had forced herself to write to Hayden after all these years. It had taken days of agonising before she could take up that pen to write the letter and even more before she could send it. Then there was…

  Nothing. The days had gone by in silence with no answer at all from her husband.

  Her husband. Jane pressed her hand to her stomach with the spasm of pain that always came when she thought those words. She remembered Hayden as she had last seen him, sprawled asleep on the stairs of their London house. Her husband, as beautiful as a fallen angel. How horribly they had disappointed each other. Failed each other.

  She tried so hard not to think about him. Not to think about how things were when they first married, when she had been so naïve and full of hope. So dazzled by Hayden and what he gave to her. By who he was and the delights they found together in the bedchamber. She tried not to think about the babies, and about how losing those tiny, fragile lives showed her how hollow and empty everything was. She couldn’t even fulfil her main duty as a countess.

  During the day it was easy not to think about it all. There was so much work to be done, the gardens to be cleared, the meagre accounts to go over, a few neighbourhood friends to call on or join for tea or cards. But at night—at night it was so different.

  In the silence and the darkness there was nothing but the memories. She remembered everything about their days together, the good and the bad. How they had laughed together; how he had made her feel when he kissed her, touched her. How in those moments she had felt not so alone any longer, even though it was all an illusion in the end. She wondered how he was now, what he was doing. And then she wanted to sob for what was lost, for what had never really been except in her dreams.

  Yes. Except for those nights, life would be very tolerable indeed. But it wasn’t just Emma’s future she needed to think about, it was her own. And Hayden’s, too, even though the future had never seemed to be something he considered. He was an earl and also an orphan with no siblings. He would need an heir. And for that he would have to be free, as complicated and costly as that would be. She had to offer him that.

  And she needed to be free, too.

  Jane pushed away thoughts of Hayden and the unanswered letter. She couldn’t worry about it now. She scooped up the bucket and made her way along the overgrown pathway to the house. They were expecting guests for tea.

  As she stowed the bucket next to the kitchen, the door suddenly flew open and Emma dashed out. She held a wriggling puppy under one arm and the dirty burlap bag she used for collecting plants over the other. Her golden-blonde hair was gathered in an untidy braid and she wore an old apron over her faded blue-muslin dress.

  Even so dishevelled, anyone could see that Emma was becoming a rare beauty, all ivory and gold with their mother’s jewel-green eyes, eyes that had become a muddy hazel on Jane. Emma’s beauty was yet another reason to worry about the future. Emma might be happy at Barton Park, but Jane knew she couldn’t be buried in the country for ever.

  ‘Where are you going in such a hurry?’ Jane asked.

  ‘I saw a patch of what looked like the plant I’ve been seeking by the road yesterday, but I didn’t have time to examine it properly,’ Emma answered briskly. ‘I want to collect a few pieces before they get trampled.’

  ‘It looks like rain,’ Jane said. ‘And we have guests coming to tea soon.’

  ‘Do we? Who? The vicar again?’ Emma said without much interest. She put down Murray the puppy and clipped on his lead.

  ‘No, Sir David Marton and his sister Miss Louisa. Surely you remember them from the assembly last month?’ Their last real social outing, dancing and tepid punch at the village assembly rooms. Emma would surely remember it as she had protested being put into one of Jane’s made-over London gowns and had then been ogled and flirted with by every man between fifteen and fifty. Sir David had danced with her once, too, then he had spent the evening talking to Jane.

  ‘That old stick-in-the-mud?’ Emma said with a scoffing laugh. ‘What is he going to do, read us sermons?’

  ‘Emma!’ Jane protested. ‘Sir David is hardly old—I doubt he is even thirty. And he is not in the least bit sermon-like. He and his sister are very nice.’

  ‘Nice enough, I suppose, but still very stick-in-the-muddy. When he danced with me at the assembly he kept going on about some German philosopher with terribly gloomy ideas. He didn’t know anything about botany. And his sister only seemed to care about hats.’

  ‘Nevertheless, they are nice, and they are to be our nearest neighbours since they took over Easton Abbey,’ Jane said, trying not to laugh at her sister’s idea of proper social discourse. ‘You need to be here when they call. And properly dressed, not drenched from getting caught in the rain.’

  ‘I won’t be gone long at all, Jane, I promise,’ Emma said. ‘I will be all prim and proper in the sitting room when they get here, ready to talk about German philosophy over cakes and tea.’

  Jane laughed as Emma kissed her cheek and hurried away, Murray barking madly at her feet. ‘Half an hour, Emma, no more.’

  ‘Half an hour! I promise!’

  Once Emma was gone out the garden gate, Jane hurried through the kitchens, where their cook was making a rare fine tea of sandwiches and lemon cakes, and went up the back stairs to her chamber. Emma wasn’t the only one who needed to mend her appearance, she thought as she caught a glimpse of herself in the dressing-table mirror. She could pass as the scullery maid herself.

  And somehow it seemed so important that Sir David and his sister not think ill of her appearance.

  As she tugged the scarf from her hair and untied her apron, she thought about Sir David and their recent meetings. He was a handsome young man, in a quiet way that matched his polite demeanour. With his sandy-brown hair and spectacles, he seemed to exude an unobtrusive intelligence that Jane found calming after all that had happened before in her life.

  She enjoyed talking to him and he seemed to enjoy talking to her. When she had declined to dance at the assembly, saying only that her dancing days were behind her, he did not press her. But he was kind enough to dance with Emma and listen to her talk about plants, even though Emma seemed to find him ‘stick-in-the-muddy’.

  So when Jane had encountered him and his sister in the village, it seemed natural to invite them to tea. Only to be a friendly neighbour, of course.
There could be nothing more. She was a married woman, even though she had not seen her husband in years.

  She was a married woman for now, anyway. And she could not quite deny that when David Marton smiled at her, sought her out for conversation, she felt something she hadn’t in a long time. She felt—admired.

  Even before she left London she had begun to feel invisible. The one person whose admiration mattered—her husband—didn’t see her any more and all the chatter in the fashion papers about her gowns and her coiffures didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered beyond Hayden’s indifference. She started to feel invisible even to herself, especially after she had failed in her main duty to give her husband an heir.

  Back home at Barton Park she had started to feel better, slowly, day by day. She had started to feel the sun on her skin again and hear the birds singing. The weed-choked gardens didn’t care what she looked like and Emma certainly didn’t. Things seemed quite content. So it had come as quite a surprise how much she enjoyed Sir David’s quiet attentions.

  She leaned towards the mirror to peer more closely at her reflection.

  ‘No one in London would recognise you now,’ she said with laugh. And, indeed, no one would recognise the well-dressed Lady Ramsay in this woman, with her wind-tossed hair and the pale gold freckles the sun had dotted over her nose. She reached for her hairbrush and set to work.

  She suddenly felt giddily schoolgirlish in how much she looked forward to this tea party.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Ramsay? By Jove, it is you! Blast it, man, what are you doing in this godforsaken place?’

  Hayden slowly turned from his place at the bar. He had just been asking himself that very thing, What was he doing in a country inn, sipping at tepid, weak ale, running after a woman who clearly didn’t want him, when he could be in London, getting ready for a night out at balls and gambling clubs?

  He had just come to the startling realisation that a night out gaming and drinking wasn’t something he would miss very much when he heard those shouted words. They were a welcome distraction from his own brooding thoughts.

  He turned away from the bar and saw Lord Ethan Carstairs making his way across the crowded room towards him. Lord Ethan was not what Hayden would call a friend, but they were often in the same circles and saw each other at their club and across the gambling tables. Lord Ethan was rather loud and didn’t hold his liquor very well, but he was tolerable enough most of the time. Especially at moments like this, when Hayden needed distraction.

  ‘Lord Ethan,’ he said. ‘Fancy seeing you here. Can I buy you an ale?’

  ‘I won’t say no to that,’ Ethan said affably as he leaned against the bar next to Hayden. To judge by his reddened cheeks and rumpled hair, and the dishevelled state of his expensive clothes, he had been imbibing the ale for quite a while already. ‘My damnable uncle is making me rusticate for a while. Says he won’t increase my allowance until I learn some control and I am completely out of funds.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Hayden asked without much interest as he gestured to the innkeeper for more ale. Everyone knew that Ethan’s Puritanical uncle, who also held the Carstairs family purse-strings, disapproved of his nephew’s wild ways. Hayden sympathised. His own father had so often been disapproving.

  And now here he was, drowning his doubts in drink. Just like his father. That was certainly something he did not want to think about.

  ‘Most unfair,’ Ethan grumbled. He took a long gulp from his glass, the reached into his pocket and took out a small, gold object he twirled through his fingers. Hayden recognised it as an old Spanish coin the man often used as a lucky charm at the card tables. ‘I’m on my way to some country pile to wait him out. But what are you doing so far from town?’

  Hayden shrugged. He might as well tell the truth. All of society would know soon enough, when he either came back to London with Jane by his side or instigated scandalous divorce proceedings. ‘I am on my way to Barton Park to see Lady Ramsay.’

  ‘By Jove!’ Ethan sputtered. ‘I had forgotten you were married.’

  ‘My wife is delicate and prefers the country for her health,’ Hayden said, as he always did when someone asked about Jane. They seldom even bothered any longer.

  ‘I see. I remember they said she was a pretty little thing.’ Ethan’s gaze narrowed, and for an instant it was as if the ale-haze cleared in his bloodshot-blue eyes. ‘Barton Park, you say?’

  ‘It’s her family home.’

  ‘I think I have heard of it. Isn’t there some tale of treasure or some such there?’ Ethan laughed, and that instant of clarity vanished. ‘We can both rot here in the country for a while, then. Damnable families.’

  Damnable families. Hayden almost laughed bitterly as he sipped at the terrible ale. He wasn’t even sure what it felt like to have a family, not now. He had been alone for so long it seemed like the only way he could be. The only way he could avoid hurting anyone else.

  Once, for a moment, he had seen what it could be to have a real family. He had a flashing memory of a sunlit day, of Jane with her dark hair loose over her bare shoulders, smiling up at him. She took his hand and held it against the warm skin of her stomach, where he could feel the swell of their child. The first child that was lost.

  He knew now that that was the most perfect moment of his life, but it had only been an illusion. Jane was done with him now. But he wasn’t done with her. Soon enough she would see that.

  ‘I have to be on my way,’ Hayden said. He pushed his half-full glass away. ‘Good luck with your rusticating, Carstairs.’

  Lord Ethan blinked at him. ‘Same to you, Ramsay. Maybe we’ll meet again soon.’

  Hayden nodded, though really he was quite sure they wouldn’t. He left the stale-smelling room behind for the innyard. As he waited for a fresh horse to be brought around, one of the servants said, ‘It looks like rain is coming, my lord. Might be best to wait to ride out.’

  Hayden peered up at the sky. It had been a pale blue when he arrived at the inn, hazy with country sunlight, but now he saw the servant was right. Grey clouds were gathering swiftly and the wind was colder.

  But the thought of going back inside to drink some more with Ethan Carstairs was most unappealing. He had already waited too long to go after Jane—he needed to get on with the business of confronting his wife.

  ‘I haven’t far to ride,’ he said as he swung up into the saddle. But he hadn’t been gone long from the inn when the lowering skies burst open on a clap of thunder and rain poured down.

  Hayden was glad of the cold, it seemed to drive him onwards and cleared his head. He galloped faster down the narrow, rutted lane, revelling in the speed and the wildness of the nature around him. All too often in London he felt closed in, trapped by the buildings and the noise, by all the people watching him.

  Here there was nothing but the trees and the wind, the dark clouds sweeping in faster and faster over his head on the rumble of thunder. Maybe that was why Jane had run here, he thought as his horse leaped over a fallen log in the road and galloped onwards even faster. Just to be able to breathe again.

  He urged the horse on, trying to outrun the raw anger that had burned in him ever since he had read Jane’s letter. Even if she was tired of her London life, she had duties, damn it! Duties as his wife and countess. She had left them, left him, behind. And now she wanted to abandon them permanently.

  She had to see how impossible her suggestion of divorce was. He had to make her see.

  A bolt of sizzling blue-white lightning suddenly split the sky, cleaving a tree beside the road only a few feet away. With a deafening crack, a thick branch split away and crashed into the road. Hayden’s horse reared up and the wet reins slid from his hands at the sudden movement.

  He felt himself falling, the sky and the rain and the mud all tumbling around him. He crashed to the ground and pain shot through his leg as it twisted under him.

  Hayden cursed as loudly as he could, but he was drowned out by the shout of the thun
der. The horse scrambled to regain his footing and ran away down the lane. Hayden tried to push himself up, to balance on his good leg, but he fell back to the mud.

  He shoved back his sodden hair and stared up into the leaden sky. He laughed at the storm. It seemed even nature wanted to keep him away from Jane.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he heard a woman call. He twisted around to see her running towards him through the misty sheets of rain, like a ghost.

  She looked vaguely familiar, not very tall and too slender in a faded, rain-spotted dress. A loose braid of wet golden hair lay over her shoulder and a barking puppy ran in circles around her. But despite that nagging sense that he should know her, he didn’t really recognise her as she ran down the lane towards him.

  Until she knelt beside him, completely careless of the rain. She stared up at him with bright green eyes, pale and clear. He remembered those eyes. He had seen them at his wedding when Jane proudly introduced her sister. She had been younger then, scrawny and awkward. Now time had moved on and she had grown up.

  And he remembered that Jane had written that her sister lived with her now. He had to be close to Barton Park.

  ‘Emma?’ he said.

  She sat back on her heels, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. ‘Yes, I am Emma Bancroft. How do you…?’ Suddenly she gasped. ‘Ramsay? What in the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Does your sister let you curse like that? Most unladylike,’ he said, suddenly aware of the utter absurdity of his situation. He was sitting in the rain, in the middle of a muddy country lane, arguing about propriety with the sister-in-law he hardly knew.

  He laughed and she frowned at him as if he was an escaped bedlamite. He certainly felt like one.