Perhaps, as one of the others had suggested, the intruder had been quite mad. Or it was all some bizarre hoax. After all, neither Dev nor Richard had known what the man was talking about; they had been as much in the dark as she. And Richard had been friends with Michael since before Rachel herself had met him. Surely he would know if Michael was somehow involved with a highwayman. But Rachel could not escape the thought that a wife should not have to depend on someone else’s knowledge of her husband to be sure of him. Surely she, as his wife, should know him the best of all! Rachel felt sure that if Miranda had been in her situation, she would have known exactly what Dev was involved in.
Rachel sighed as she sat down in front of the vanity and began to brush out her hair. She studied her reflection in the mirror as she did so. She was still an attractive woman, she told herself. Her hair was thick and black, and moonstruck admirers still wrote odes to her green eyes. She had retained the slim figure of her youth, and no wrinkles marred her skin. She was twenty-seven, still young.
She paused in her brushing for a moment, looking intently into the mirror. Had she changed since the day Michael had met her? But she knew the answer to that question—the change had all been inside her.
Her hand tightened involuntarily on her brush. She had married as she was supposed to, as Society expected and her father had demanded. But in doing her duty, she had given up her hopes and dreams. She had denied the longings of her heart.
Rachel could still remember the awful pain of her decision. There had been nothing else she could do, she knew. Her father had been right; had she not married Michael, it would have been scandal and ruin for her family and herself—as well as for Michael, who had been entirely innocent in the whole matter. She had done what she had to do, but in doing so she had condemned her heart to despair. She had married Michael and had said goodbye to the man she loved.
2
Rachel remembered with clarity the evening that she first met Michael. It had been at a rout of Lady Wetherford’s, a boring crush of an affair, attended, it seemed, by half of London Society. She could not remember exactly who had been there; indeed, she only vaguely recalled Lady Wetherford introducing her and her mother to Lord Westhampton. Her first impression of him had been merely that of a tall blond man, several years older than she and good-looking in a rather nondescript way. Knowing Michael as she did now, Rachel felt sure that he had been impeccably but plainly dressed, his clothes dark and formal and nothing that would attract attention. He would have been the perfect picture of an English gentleman, for, indeed, that was what Michael was.
But Rachel had paid little attention to him, smiling—for that evening she had been able to do little else but smile, so radiant was the feeling inside her—and returning the usual polite chitchat about the weather and the crush of the party and the opera, which she had attended the evening before. All the time they had talked, her senses had been tuned to the rest of the room, seeking out the same person whom she sought at every social occasion, the man who had engendered her radiant joy that night. For she remembered the evening, not because of Michael, but because that was the night when Anthony Birkshaw had told her that he loved her.
Even now, a faint smile touched Rachel’s face at the memory.
Rachel was nineteen, and in the midst of her first Season. It was a year late in coming, a result of her family’s usual state of impecunity. Cleybourne, her older sister’s husband, had given her mother the money for Rachel’s debut the next year, and Rachel was well aware that it was up to her to do her best to recoup the family’s fortunes. Few expected her to attain her sister’s success, for Caroline had married a duke, the highest rung on the ladder of nobility. But Rachel had the Aincourt good looks and a pleasing personality, and her family was one of the best in England—albeit one seemingly incapable of holding on to money. It was generally expected that she, too, would make a good marriage.
Rachel did not question her role in such plans. It was, after all, the way people of her class married. There were no longer the arranged marriages of old, of course, where a wedding was primarily an alliance of two families for purposes of wealth, power and political advancement, and the couple might not even have met each other before their wedding day. But, still, the aristocracy did not marry for love, as her mother had drummed into her head from childhood; they married for the good of their family, both present and future.
In the case of the Aincourt family, this dictum nearly always translated into marrying wealth. For generations the earls of Ravenscar had gained and lost money, but more gold, it seemed, left their hands than entered them. The reason for this, Rachel’s narrowly and dogmatically religious father believed, was a Papist curse laid on the head of the first Earl of Ravenscar, who was given Branton Abbey during the Dissolution by his friend King Henry VIII as a reward for his loyalty and friendship. Edward Aincourt, Lord Ravenscar, had torn down the abbey and used its stones to build his family’s home. The Abbot of Branton, legend said, had had to be dragged out bodily from the abbey, and as Ravenscar’s men had done so, the abbot had laid a curse upon the earl and all his descendants, declaring that “none who live within these stones shall ever know happiness.”
Whether it was the result of the curse or simply the nature of a family too given to pride and profligacy, it was true that the Aincourts had rarely been happy in affairs of either the heart or the purse. It was good, everyone agreed, that the Aincourts were also a family tall and graceful in stature and of handsome mien, for they were always able to replenish their fortunes through marriage—though there were those who pointed out that it was perhaps this tendency that doomed them to live out the curse’s prophecy of unhappiness.
In this particular generation of Aincourts, the lack of money had grown acute. The earl, a religious man of stern views, had not extended his religious beliefs to living an ascetic life. He loved to live well and buy beautiful things, as had his father before him, and as a result, the family fortunes had declined at an ever greater rate. It was generally considered up to the daughters of the family to provide for the family, as the earl had parted with his only son, Devin, the heir to the family title and what remained of the family fortune. Devin had, in his teen years, given himself over to a life of what his father deemed pagan excess, for years loving a married woman and refusing to marry as his father wished.
So Rachel dutifully expected to marry as her father determined, but she could not help but dream secretly that her marriage would turn out to be one of love as well as duty, as her sister Caroline’s had been. Everyone knew that the Duke of Cleybourne loved his wife to distraction, and she had seemed to love him in return, though later the truth of her feelings had been proven to be more shallow. At the very least, Rachel intended to enjoy her time on the marriage market, wearing the new dresses and ball gowns bought for her debut, going to parties and balls and fetes, enjoying the plays and operas and other amusements that London had to offer a girl who had spent most of her life on a crumbling estate in Derbyshire.
Rachel was an immediate, dazzling success. Her life was a whirl of social activities that would have left anyone but a vibrant young girl exhausted. She received her invitation to Almack’s. Every dance saw her card filled within minutes after her arrival. She had a choice of corsages sent by hopeful suitors for every ball, and there was never a shortage of young men calling at her house.
But Rachel had eyes for only one man. She met Anthony Birkshaw two weeks into the Season, and as soon as she saw him, she knew that this was the man of her dreams. He was a well set up young gentleman a few years older than she, with a frank and open manner that charmed her instantly. His hair was dark brown, thick and falling carelessly over his forehead, and his eyes, she thought, were those of a poet—large and brown, rimmed with thick, sooty