Page 4 of How to Cross a Marquess (The Way to a Lord's Heart 3)

Their eyes met. Roger could tell that she was remembering, as was he, that his mother had wanted him to marry her. When she was a biddable girl, not the waspish young lady she’d become. Roger didn’t recall his mother’s reasons. He knew they hadn’t been related to the cold merger of properties that their fathers had proposed. They’d both rejected that scheme, five years ago. And of course they’d been right. Absolutely right.

“I must go,” said Miss Fairclough.

Strictly speaking, he ought to offer to escort her. But Roger didn’t care. He wanted his solitude back. And he knew she wouldn’t welcome his company. He settled for a bow from the saddle and watched her ride away. Really, she’d become a bruising rider in her years away.

* * *

Fenella urged her horse toward home, fuming, as she nearly always was after an encounter with Chatton. She was so tired of hearing about the notorious ride into the storm that had brought on his wife’s fever and led to her death. His position was quite unjust. The expedition really had been entirely Arabella’s idea. Fenellahadtried to talk her out of going. But the newly minted Marchioness of Chatton had not been a persuadable person. Indeed, Arabella had been spoiled and stubborn. Add discontent to that, and you had a volatile mixture.

Silently, Fenella acknowledged that she hadn’t liked Arabella at first. But she’d begun to feel sorry for a girl of nineteen taken so far from her home and discovering that she didn’t like the windswept coast of Northumberland or, indeed, her new husband. Fenella had watched the newcomer realize that a title didn’t make up for a lack of common interests or clashing temperaments.

With Fenella’s sympathies roused, and Arabella very lonely, they’d become friends of a sort, despite Arabella’s chancy nature. Wistful tales of London revealed that Arabella’s parents, particularly her mother, had engineered the marriage, intent on social advancement. Fenella suspected that they’d forced Arabella to relinquish a prior attachment, over which she sometimes wept. For the Crenshaws, Chatton’s position had been everything, his personality irrelevant. And so two young people had been yoked together with little chance of happiness, as far as Fenella could judge. It was sad. And none of her business, of course. Indeed, her history with Chatton made Arabella’s confidences awkward. Yet she couldn’t have rejected her, Fenella thought as she rode. It would have been cruel.

Three and a half years with her Scottish grandmother had taught Fenella a good deal about kindness. Which was ironic on the face of it, because many thought her grandmother a terrifying old lady. Grandmamma came from a long line of border lords who had harried the English and feuded with each other for centuries. She was as comfortable holding a pistol as a teacup. And she’d explained to Fenella that kindness could be quite a complicated exercise, requiring thought and care.

The time with her grandmother had made her feel older than her years, Fenella thought. Certainly more than a few years older than Arabella. Fenella often wondered what might have come to Arabella, and indeed Chatton, if she hadn’t died so young. But that would never be known.

On this melancholy note, Fenella reached her home and turned to the stables, where she left her mount. Looping up the long skirts of her riding habit, she walked to the side door of the great brick pile where she’d grown up. She’d missed Clough House while she was gone. Yet she wasn’t entirely glad to be back.

A housemaid met her on the threshold, as if she’d been waiting there. “The master’s asking for you, miss.”

“I’ll just change out of my habit,” said Fenella.

“He’s fretting.”

Fenella adjusted her grip on her skirts and started for the stairs.

Her father’s illness had changed him. He still growled and demanded, but the tone was querulous now. And too often bewildered. It had startled Fenella when she’d been called back home to oversee his care.

She was struck again by the irony of the situation as she walked up the stairs. Her two sisters had always gotten on better with Papa, mainly because he’d made no secret of his bitter disappointment that Fenella wasn’t born a son. “Third time’s the charm,” he’d used to mutter. “Only it wasn’t.” He’d shadowed the last years of her mother’s life over this supposed failing, and he’d seemed to feel that Fenella owed him extra obedience to make up for the lapse. And so he’d thought to marry her off like a medieval magnate disposing of his chattel. Well, he hadn’t managed that.

But Greta and Nora had families of their own to occupy them and had happened to settle far away. Everyone had thought it Fenella’s duty to come home, and so she had. Part of her had welcomed the chance. She didn’t wish to be forever estranged from her father.

How did it feel, Fenella wondered, to have the defiant daughter in charge of his sickroom? What if she’d accepted one of the offers of marriage she’d received in Scotland? Where would he be then? But they never discussed such things. They were not a family who spoke of their feelings, she thought as she entered his room. Before her stay with Grandmamma, she’d hardly recognized what her feelings were. “Hello, Papa,” she said.

“Where have you been?”

“Out riding.”

“Enjoying yourself, eh? Using my horses. With no thought for me lying neglected here.”

In fact, Fenella’s mount was her own, a gift from her grandmother, though the mare was eating the estate’s fodder, of course. “On the contrary, I made certain Simpson was with you.”

“That doddering excuse for a valet! I sent him away.”

Simpson had been with her father for as long as Fenella could remember. He was probably hovering behind the dressing room door right now in case he might be needed. Her father really was the most difficult of patients. “Shall I read to you?” she asked.

“Pah!” He shoved at his coverlet. “I want to be up out of this damned bed.” He tried to rise, and rediscovered the weakness in his right side, which he forgot from one day to the next. The drag of his arm and leg kept him from the outdoor pursuits he loved. And the vagueness of his mind made other favorite amusements, like cards, vastly frustrating for all involved. The doctor had said that her father would probably never recover from the bout of apoplexy that had felled him. Fenella didn’t blame Papa for cursing. But that didn’t make tending him any easier.

Her father fell back onto the pillows. “Why does no one come to see me?” he asked. “Chatton might stop by, I would think, knowing I’m ill.”

Well aware that he was referring to the current marquess’s father, and indeed to a time before they’d fallen out, Fenella didn’t know what to say. The first time he’d complained of this, she’d told him his old friend-foe was dead. But he never remembered.

“Or Pierson,” her father added. “Many’s the good turn I’ve done him. He might spare me half an hour’s visit.”

It would be good for him to see familiar faces, Fenella thought. But the Piersons had moved to Kent years ago. Her father had no friends left nearby. She’d send for the vicar again. His conversation could soothe, when it didn’t infuriate.

“But I’ve onlyyou,” he went on. “If you’d been a son, as you weresupposedto be, I wouldn’t be laid low like this. And no one to come after me on the estate.”

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