‘Because, my dear Miss Haddon, I am not received in polite society.’
‘But Lord Dreycott said that you have hardly been in the country for years,’ she protested. ‘None of them knows you.’
‘However, they will all have heard about me. And some of them will remember me. It was not simply my uncle’s reclusive nature that explained the lack of calls—we are tarred with the same brush. We will have a large number of biscuits to eat up, I assure you.’ His face showed nothing but faintly amused acceptance of this state of affairs.
‘Of course they will call. They have no reason not to—whatever have you done that they should react so?’
‘Being the man who debauched, impregnated and abandoned the Earl of Sheringham’s eldest daughter, is, you must agree, Miss Haddon, adequate cause for social ostracism in an area where Sheringham is the largest landowner,’ Ashley said. ‘The earl carries much weight, hereabouts. His son, Viscount Langdown, carries as much, and a horsewhip.’ Lina stared at him open mouthed and he smiled, went into the study and closed the door behind him.
She watched the panels, half-expecting Ashley to reappear and tell her that it had been a joke in poor taste, but the door remained closed. Behind her there was a discreet cough.
‘Trimble?’ Lina turned to the butler. ‘Surely his lordship is…surely that cannot be correct?’
The butler looked uneasy. ‘Perhaps I had better tell you about it, Miss Haddon.’ He held open the door to the salon. ‘We will not be disturbed in here.’
She followed him and closed the door. ‘He says he expects to be shunned by the neighbourhood,’ she said, her voice low as she joined Trimble in the furthest corner of the room. ‘He said he did something quite dreadful.’
‘Yes, indeed, refusing to marry his pregnant fiancée is not the action of a gentleman and must bring opprobrium upon any man,’ the butler said, his voice flat.
‘He really did such a thing? When?’ Lina stared in horror at the butler, but her mind was full of the picture of Quinn Ashley as she had just seen him. In his deplorably casual version of an English country-gentleman’s riding attire, with his frank speech and his amused smile, it was hard to visualise the new Lord Dreycott as the heartless seducer he freely admitted to being. But of course, to have insinuated himself into the bed of an earl’s daughter, he would hardly look like a ruthless rake.
‘Let us sit down, Trimble,’ she said. This was shocking news to absorb standing up. She had already spent one night under the same roof as a dangerous libertine, it seemed. Her mouth felt dry. Seduced, impregnated, abandoned…
‘The long-established staff here know the story,’ the butler said, perching uncomfortably on the edge of a chair. ‘His late lordship told us the truth of the matter. It seemed that Mr Ashley, as he then was, abandoned his pregnant fiancée ten years ago. Given that her brother was publicly threatening him with a horsewhip followed by castration, it seemed to his great-uncle that the prudent course of action was to send him off abroad with some haste. Once there, it seems, he decided he liked the life of a traveller and has seldom returned.’
Lina swallowed. She had no horsewhip-wielding brother to protect her. She had no one except a man whose promise to take care of her now seemed a cruel jest.
‘But he was not the father of her child,’ Trimble added with haste, no doubt reading her expression with some accuracy. ‘Please be assured I would not have allowed you to remain in the house if that were so, Miss Haddon.’
‘Why did she not marry the man responsible, then?’ she managed, relief making her feel faintly queasy.
‘Mr Ashley in those days was a charming, but somewhat unworldly, perhaps even innocent, young man,’ Trimble continued, not answering the question directly. ‘A studious, rather quiet gentleman, just down from university, his head full of books and dreams of exploration, as I recall him. I was only the first footman in those days, you understand. But, as his late lordship said, why would a beautiful, highly eligible young woman throw herself at the rather dull heir to a minor barony?’
‘Because she needed a gullible husband as fast as possible?’ Lina hazarded, distracted momentarily by the thought that Quinn Ashley could ever have been described as rather dull.
‘Exactly, Miss Haddon. Her parents, when they became aware of her condition, set her to entrap him and, I fear, he was all too willing to fall for her charms and into love. The flaw in their scheme was that they had picked on a romantic, idealistic young man who, when confronted by a passionate young lady positively begging to demonstrate her affection for him by the sacrifice of her virtue, struck a noble attitude—as he told his uncle afterwards—and refused to dishonour his bride-to-be.’
‘And then he realised what was happening?’
‘Not, so he said, until she ripped all her clothes off and became hysterical. Her father, when subterfuge was obviously impossible, offered Mr Ashley a very substantial dowry to wed her. He refused, broke off the engagement—and so they laid the child at his door and characterised him as a heartless seducer of virtue.’
‘But why?’ Lina thought for a moment. ‘Was the true father utterly impossible? Married, perhaps?’
‘They were unable to establish which of her father’s grooms it was, I regret to say.’ Lina felt her jaw drop. ‘She would still be in terrible disgrace when her condition became known, but the heir to a barony was a better father for her bastard than a choice of three stable hands.’
‘The poor baby,’ Lina murmured. ‘What became of it?’
‘I have no idea,’ Trimble said, his austere face hardening. ‘She, I believe, was married off with a very large dowry to an obscure Irish peer who needed the money.’
‘But Mr Ashley took the blame and did not reveal the worst of her shame,’ Lina said. ‘And that ruined his reputation.’
‘Exactly. He challenged Lord Langdown, who refused to meet him, threatening the whip instead. His late lordship attempted to intervene and was caught up in the scandal, his own name blackened by association. So you see, Miss Haddon, why we cannot expect callers from local society.’
‘They would have forgotten by now, surely?’ She did not like to think of Ashley ostracised for an injustice done to him ten years ago when his only sin had been to refuse to make an honourable sacrifice of himself. How could he have married the girl? There could have been no trust, no respect, in that marriage.
But he was a gentleman and a gentleman must not break off an engagement. Could he not have found some way out of the trap without abandoning her so brutally? Doubt began to gnaw at her strangely instinctive support for him. No, she decided after a moment’s thought, against a powerful earl Ashley would have had no leverage at all unless he had been prepared to tell the truth about his fiancée.
‘It might have been forgotten, if it were not for the fact that, once abroad, Mr Ashley rapidly set about losing what innocence was left to him, along with any shreds of his reputation,’ Trimble said in a voice scrupulously free from any expression. ‘The learned journals were only too happy to publish his writings from exotic parts of the world—but his late lordship used to read me stories from the scandal sheets with great glee. Not all Mr Ashley’s explorations were of a scholarly nature.’
‘What sort of stories?’ Lina asked, not wanting to know and yet drawn with the same terrible curiosity that made a carriage crash impossible to ignore. Harems again?
‘I could not possibly recount them to an unmarried lady,’ the butler said. ‘Suffice it to say that they make Lord Byron’s exploits seem tame.’
‘So he is not so safe, after all?’ She was fearful, and she knew that she should be, but a shameful inner excitement was fluttering inside her,