‘Hear what, Grandpapa?’
‘My will…’
‘But surely that happens…’ She stopped in dismay. ‘Oh, please, do not tell me you are unwell.’
‘I am old, Bella, and I have been thinking that I ought to make my peace with the past and ensure the future. Your future.’
‘Mine?’ she queried. It had never entered her head to wonder what would befall her after her grandfather died. She supposed, if it happened before she was married, he would leave her in the care of whoever succeeded, but until recently she had not given a thought to who that might be. Louis was the oldest of the great-nephews, but he was the son of a daughter. On the other hand, Edward was the elder son of a son and he bore the family name of Huntley, which Louis did not. She had no idea how these things were managed, but she could very well see quarrels ahead. No doubt her grandfather had seen them, too, and this was his way of dealing with them. But where did James, also on the distaff side, and Robert, Edward’s younger brother, fit into it?
They were all honourable men and would make sure she had a roof over her head and did not starve. Suddenly she was filled with apprehension. Her grandfather must be having doubts about that or he would not be writing to them. She found herself looking at him, her heart thumping, the letters unfinished.
‘Yes, my dear. You know when I am called to account, I do not want to be found wanting as far as you are concerned. You are a female and a very young and comely one.’ He paused to scrutinise her from top to toe as if he had not looked at her properly for a long time. He saw large hazel eyes set in an oval face surrounded by dark ringlets, a proud neck, sloping shoulders and a trim figure dressed in a light green merino wool gown. She was taller and thinner than he would have liked, but he supposed she would fill out as she matured. He favoured women with a little more meat on them. ‘And marriageable. You will need advice and instruction…’
‘There is Miss Battersby, Grandpapa.’
‘Pah! Her head is full of romantic notions. She would marry you off to the first young gallant with a ready smile and a twinkling eye.’
‘She is not such a fribble and neither am I.’
‘Perhaps not. But I am not going to take the gamble. I want to see you married before I go.’ He paused. ‘You know, being a female, you cannot inherit Westmere directly?’
‘Yes, Grandpapa, and although I would rather not think about it, I am sure you will make provision for me. I am in no hurry to marry.’
‘You may not be, but I am. That is why I have sent for those four. You shall marry one of them.’
‘Grandfather!’ She was shocked to the core. ‘You are surely not going to instruct one of them to wed me?’
‘No. The choice will be yours.’
The conversation was becoming more and more bizarre and her senses were reeling. She leaned back in her chair, the letter-writing forgotten. She could not imagine herself married to any one them. Although they were not first cousins, she had always looked on the young men as kinsmen, part of the family who came and went and sometimes stopped to chuck her under the chin and ask her how she did. The idea of being married to any one of them was past imagining.
‘Grandpapa,’ she said, trying to control the quaver in her voice. ‘They are so much older than I and men of the world. I am persuaded not one of them will want me for a wife.’ Indeed, she hoped and prayed that was the case.
‘Oh, indeed, they will. I guarantee they will all be paying you fulsome compliments and begging you for your hand inside of an hour, if not before.’ He chuckled suddenly. ‘The one who comes up to the mark shall be my heir.’
‘Grandfather!’ She was horrified. ‘I am to be bartered for a legacy?’
‘Pity you weren’t a boy,’ he said, ignoring her outburst. ‘You’d have inherited right and tight and no questions asked. I can leave the blunt to you, but where’s the sense in that? You couldn’t have the managing of it. It has to go to your husband and it were better he were one of the family.’
She could hardly take it in. She had assumed the estate was entailed, but it could not be if he could dispose of it as he had suggested. ‘But I do not want any of them. I do not love them.’
‘Love, bah! Old Batters been filling your head with nonsense, has she? Love has nothing to do with marriage.’
‘I am persuaded you loved your wife.’ Bella had never known her grandmother, the Countess, but Ellen had said she had been a beautiful woman but rather cold and haughty. According to Ellen, she had died of a broken heart, though when Bella had questioned her as to why, she had closed her mouth and refused to say another word. But broken hearts and haughtiness hardly went together, and Bella often wondered which was nearer the truth.
‘No. Arranged marriage, hardly knew the woman, but we became comfortable with each other. That’s the most important thing, you know, to be comfortable.’
‘Well, I am sure Papa loved Mama.’
‘And look where it got him. Dead himself a couple of years after her. A wasted life. All wasted lives…’ His eyes clouded as if he were looking back into past unhappiness. ‘His first wife was not at all suitable. I told him no good would come of it, that he was hardly out of leading strings and should see more of the world before he committed himself, but he would not listen. I let it go. I shan’t make the same mistake with you.’
She had never dared to ask about her father’s first wife—all she knew, and that was from Miss Battersby, was that her father had married the local doctor’s daughter when both had been very young and that she had died after ten years of marriage and almost as many miscarriages. Begetting an heir had been more important than looking after her health. The heir had been the thing. Her father had married again with almost indecent haste and Isabella had been born a year later. It had been four more years before the longed-for heir had come and he had been dead in the space of a se’ennight, together with his mother. When her father had followed, Bella had been the only one left, except for her grandfather’s great-nephews.
Louis was the son of Elizabeth, the elder of Sir John’s daughters, who had married the French Comte de Courville and had lived in France until the Comte had been guillotined in 1793. Elizabeth had brought six-year-old Louis, now the new Comte, and her baby daughter, Colette, to live in England. Bella had seen very little of Louis as a child—his ambitious mother had been too busy making sure he was seen and noticed in Society. And she had succeeded all too well.
According to Miss Battersby, the fount of all gossip, Louis had made a name for himself as a rakeshame and a gambler and had a different woman on his arm almost every time he went out, but they didn’t seem to mind that because he was generous to a fault. Where did his income came from? Bella was not at all sure. Did he need the Westmere inheritance? He was hardly husband material; she did not even like him much.
James Trenchard, the son of Helen, the second daughter, was a widower with twin daughters of six, Constance and Faith. James had inherited his father’s fenland acres and was a farmer from the top of his low-crowned hat down to his mud-caked boots. He was sturdy and reliable but certainly did not excite her senses.
Then came brothers Edward and Robert, progeny of Sir John’s only son. Edward—Sir Edward since his grandfather’s death—cut a very fine figure, not foppish at all, but well dressed in a muted kind of way. He was tall, well built and dignified. ‘Stiff-neck’ was her grandfather’s description of him but Bella thought that was unkind. She had always looked on him as a sort of favourite uncle. He was, in Ellen’s words, ‘a catch’ but as Charlotte Mellish, a Society beauty by all accounts, seemed already to have caught him, he would not offer for her.
Robert she liked as a kind of common conspirator in their childhood scrapes. It had been Robert who had pulled her out when she had fallen through the ice into the dyke one hard winter when they had been skating, who had taken the blame on his own shoulders,