Jack returned to Ferrington Hall late the following night. Having tended to his horse, he let himself in and moved quietly through the sleeping house. It felt a bit more like home, but he realized this was because he was more at home in himself after this foray into the world. He had used his skills and resources to take action, as he was used to doing across the sea. Perhaps this was the real meaning of home, he thought as he undressed in his bedchamber. A person confident in himself could be at home anywhere, even in the country of a critical great-grandmother.
His business had gone smoothly, and he had a marriage license in his pocket. This might be overreaching. But if the document was not required, it could be torn up. He needed now to see Harriet at a time and place where they could talk and were not surrounded by prying eyes.
The next morning, Jack woke early and wrote a note to her, suggesting such a meeting. As he sent it off with a stableboy, he felt like a gambler risking all in a final throw. He didn’t wait for a reply, wishing to avoid the Terefords until his fate was decided. Instead he went out and walked to the Travelers’ camp.
He found them gone. Only trampled grass and charred fire circles remained from their visit. Jack was sorry not to have bid them farewell. Mistress Elena had suggested they would come again next year, and he hoped to greet them then as a settled man.
Movement caught in the corner of his eye, and Jack turned to see Harriet, ethereal in pale-sprigged muslin, approaching from the wood, her face half-hidden by one of her parasols. He moved toward her, and they met in an open space where a caravan had been.
“Here you are,” she said.
“I am.” It lifted his heart to see her. As much of her as he could see at any rate. He purely hated her parasols. They were like portable draperies, ready to hide her face at a moment’s notice. “Let us go and sit in the shade,” he said. Where she could shut the dashed thing. He didn’t wait for agreement, just strode off to the shelter of the trees.
He led her to the little clearing near the edge of the camp, where they had sat before on the large, dry log among the murmur of leaves. That had been an easier time. “You won’t need that here,” he said, pointing at the parasol. He did not intend to talk through it or to it.
Harriet closed the lacy barrier and set it aside. “I was glad to receive your note,” she said, speaking quickly. “I am sorry for what happened. I wanted you to understand.”
“As I did about the things I told you when we first met,” he couldn’t resist saying.
She bowed her head, then gave one nod.
Sitting near her was unsettling. She’d roused him and hurt him, touched his heart and bruised his spirit. Her familiar face and figure brought back moments they’d shared. He’d thought she was his. Then he’d been ejected from that happy state. Yet she’d come to see him when he asked. “I wanted to—” he began.
She held up a hand to stop him. “Before anything else, I would like to tell you why I acted as I did.”
Seeing that she was trembling to do so, he nodded.
Harriet folded her hands, released them, gazed into the wood. “I don’t think you know. My mother was rejected by her family, just as your father was by his. My grandfather didn’t approve of her marriage to my father, even though Papa was a valued employee of his business. He wanted her to make a grand match.”
She spoke like someone repeating an old tale, one she’d chewed over many times before.
“He thinks that is what females are for,” she added with obvious bitterness.
Including Harriet herself, Jack knew.
“So he cut her off. From his money and his society. And more than that, he did everything he could to make sure Papa failed at any venture he undertook. There was a great deal Grandfather could do to ruin him. He is very influential.”
“How can you live with the man?” burst from Jack. The tale was worse than he’d realized.
Harriet’s face was stony. She didn’t look at him. “It is the most difficult thing I have ever done. But he approached Mama, you see, and offered to leave me all his money.”
“Which should have been partly hers from the beginning.”
“Yes. And she…”
“Couldn’t resist,” Jack put in. “Like a man thinking he was to be welcomed back into the family that had thrown his father out.”
Finally, she turned to him. He saw surprise and what might have been tenderness in her green eyes. They filmed with unshed tears as she nodded. She blinked them away.
“And perhaps, like that man, she found things weren’t so simple.”
“They were in fact the same as ever,” she replied. “Only now my grandfather’s ambitions focus on me, while he treats Mama like a pathetic failure.”
“You should turn your back on him and walk out the door.” It was what he had done in the face of Lady Wilton’s insults. Surely it was the only response to such tyranny?
“I would like to!” Her voice was fierce. “I would gladly go back to our small, frugal life. But Mama spent all our capital on my London season. Without consulting me.” Her fists clenched in her lap.
Jack’s urges to defiance died on his tongue. He had resources, an earldom. Her case was not the same. How right he’d been to take action.
“So Mama is terrified when Grandfather threatens to throw her out again,” Harriet added. “As he does if I try to oppose him in any way.”
The man deserved a thrashing.
“He is…was driving Mama to distraction with his threats. She’d taken to laudanum to ease her fears.”
A thorough thrashing, to be terrorizing that nice little lady in such a way. His own daughter, too!
“I had to do something,” Harriet said. Her tone and her eyes held pleading. “You must see that. I would do anything for my mother, as you would for yours, I’m sure.”
His bright, antic mother had died a slow, hard death, with disease eating at her insides. He’d done what he could, which hadn’t been enough, of course. That cruel process had certainly left him familiar with laudanum.
Harriet sat straighter. “And so, I…pushed for the engagement, the sort Grandfather insists upon, to a title.”
She spoke as if it could have been any match, any man, as long as he was noble. The idea brought a sharp pain.
“He’s so eager to climb the social ladder,” she added. “He thinks the high sticklers will welcome him in if I am a countess.” Her laugh was harsh. “I would almost do it, just to watch when he realizes he’s wrong.”
“But it wouldn’t be worth it,” said Jack. He kept emotion out of his voice, but he couldn’t help hoping for some contradiction. Marriage to him could not be such a grim prospect? Could it?
Harriet turned and blinked at him as if startled. “I didn’t mean… I wasn’t speaking…”
“Of me.” Had he been reduced to a mere counter in her game to best her grandfather?
“I was desperate about Mama. I followed an impulse. It was wrong of me. I’m sorry.”
He appreciated the apology. But it was not enough, any more than his regrets had been for her.
“I didn’t see how it would involve…”
“Me,” he said again.
“A number of complications,” she corrected. She bit her lower lip in the way she did when torn. “And you. I am very sorry, Lord Ferrington. I will make things right at once…”
“If you had simply told me all this in the beginning, I would have agreed to help,” he interrupted. He didn’t want to discuss how the engagement was to end.
She stared at him, lips slightly parted. “You would?”
“Of course. Why not?”
“But it… Why would you?”
“Because I despise domestic tyrants? Like Lady Wilton. And would be glad to see them all thwarted.”
She looked a bit dazed.
“I would have been happy to join in the, er, rebellion,” Jack added.
“It didn’t occur to me that I might…”
“Ask for help?”
Those three words appeared to startle her, as if they were in a foreign language that she ought to know but didn’t. Then she shook her head. “With Grandfather? No.”
“Because he seems to hold all the power.”
“He doesn’t seem to. It is a fact.”
“Perhaps not…”
“If you had seen what he did to my father! You know nothing about it.” She made a slashing gesture. “It is so much easier for you.”
He acknowledged it with a nod. “Still, we could have plotted together.” He rather liked the sound of that.
“We are not speaking of some children’s game,” she answered wearily.
Jack caught a glimpse of how she would look in future decades, when life had piled on even more trials—still lovely, perhaps even more so in her courage and determination.
“I have to find some other…”
“I see how a false engagement fit your circumstances perfectly,” he interrupted.
“False,” she echoed.
“Your grandfather is satisfied, and your mother seems happy.”
“She’s delighted,” said Harriet in a toneless voice.
“That’s good then.”
“How? Neither of these things will be true in the end.”
It would feel like an end indeed if he was rejected by Harriet Finch. But she didn’t look happy about her statement. And what about the kisses? The kisses didn’t fit into this story. His senses flared at the memory. They had been real kisses, not feigned embraces to lure him in. He could not have been deceived about that. He knew passion when he experienced it. His spirits stirred. There was more to all this than she was saying. How to discover it? He racked his brain. The silence had stretched on too long, and Harriet started to reach for her parasol. “I came to England because I longed for a family,” he said.
Her hand went still.
“Not to swan about being an earl. I don’t care about that. But to become part of a clan. I’ve always wanted that, since I was a boy. My own family was so fractious, you see. Often more a thing to be endured than enjoyed.”
Her green eyes were fixed on him.
“I did not find what I was looking for, of course. Lady Wilton had no welcome for me. Quite the opposite.”
“We cannot choose our families,” said Harriet tonelessly.
“Lady Wilton will always be my relation,” Jack acknowledged. “And I doubt we will ever feel much affection for each other. But here’s the thing I’ve been thinking recently: I should like to build another sort of family.”
“Build?”
Jack nodded. He had been pondering this subject. “I think it would be…will be work. Not an easy task. But well worth it.”
Harriet sighed. “It sounds grand. And, of course, one’s friends can be a kind of family. But in the end, the ‘relations’ determine what can be done.” Her lips turned down. “For females, at least.”
“I understand that.”
This earned him a flashing glance.
“You did not ask where I have been,” Jack went on.
“I have no right to do so.” But there was curiosity in her tone.
“Tunbridge Wells,” he told her.
“The duke thought… Why would you go there? It is a dreary place.”
“Did you find it so?”
“Yes, I was so glad to leave for school. I only regretted abandoning Mama there.”
“She’s quite fond of the place, actually. She told me so.”
“What? You must have misunderstood her. Mama often says things to be polite.”
“She had no need to do so with me. I’d never heard of the town until she told me the happiest time of her life was at a house in Tunbridge Wells.”
Harriet tried to take in this incredible assertion.
“It was after you had gone off to school,” he added apologetically. “She had a room at the front of the house to show off her fancywork, which was very much admired.”
Harriet remembered that chamber. She hadn’t thought much about it, being wrapped up in her own youthful concerns.
“And, indeed, I found many ladies there remembered her fondly,” said the rogue earl. “They all wanted to know how she was getting on. You, too, of course.”
Harriet doubted that last statement.
“So I purchased the house for her.”
“You…you what?” She couldn’t have heard him properly.
“I shall settle an income on her. I asked my new man of business about it. That sounds grand, doesn’t it? I recently acquired an advisor on Tereford’s recommendation. Someone up to every rig and row of English practice, as he put it. He’ll set things up.”
“You can’t,” she declared.
“It’s quite possible. And will be legal and permanent. So there can be no threatening to take it away later as your devilish grandfather does. That will put a spoke in his wheel,” he finished with evident satisfaction.
“Wheel?” echoed Harriet, still astonished.
“If your mother has an income and a household of her own, your grandfather can’t threaten to throw her out.” He shrugged. “Well, he could, but she can ignore him.”
“I can’t allow you to do that,” Harriet said.
“Why not?”
“It’s not right.”
“I don’t see that.”
“You are not… We are not… People make such arrangements for family members or old retainers.”
“You mustn’t call your mother that. She’d be livid.”
“Will you be serious?”
“I’m perfectly serious.” He certainly looked it.
“What would people think?”
“The matter won’t be published in the newspapers,” he said. “It will be a private transaction. No one will know unless we tell them.”
“No. I forbid it.”
“Well, you know, you can’t really stop me.”
Harriet groped for words.
“What’s the point of having a fortune if you don’t do what you like with it? That’s what I say.”
“Lord Ferrington,” she began and stopped. “This just isn’t done.”
“In fact, it is done. I saw to that before I returned.”
“This isn’t a matter of wordplay!” Harriet cried. “It is outside the bounds of…”
“Polite society?” he interrupted.
“Exactly.”
“People who are interested in being accepted by polite society would be moved by that consideration,” he replied. “I’m not. Are you?”
“Not moved?” asked Harriet, bewildered.
“Not interested in being accepted.” He held her gaze. “You spoke once of running away to a different sort of life.”
It had felt like flying, Harriet remembered. “Then I found I could not abandon Mama.”
“Of course not. But if her future is settled, perhaps we could talk of…”
“Running away?” He could not mean that, yet Harriet’s heart beat faster at the idea.
“If you like,” he answered. “But before that—love.”
For the first time, her rogue earl looked anxious. Harriet went still.
“We talked and danced and even became engaged without mentioning it,” he continued. “I am sorry for that. I ought to have said long before now that I love you with all my heart.”
Harriet’s breath caught. She’d longed to hear those words. And to tell him she felt the same. Except. “You decided my mother’s future and went off to settle it without telling me or asking my opinion.”
“I didn’t think you would…”
“Would what?” she asked when he stopped. “Agree with you?”
“I thought if I eased your mother’s worries, we could…consider the future without impediments.”
“And so, you acted for Mama and me. In our best interests.”
Ferrington clearly caught her tone.
“Much as I did when I forced our engagement without including you,” Harriet continued. She nodded at his evident surprise when she acknowledged the similarity. “If I could build a different sort of family—as I, too, have dreamed of doing—it would require mutual decisions,” she continued.
The rogue earl nodded. He raised his right hand. “I solemnly promise that from this moment, we will always conspire together rather than separately.”
Harriet liked the sound of that. Even though he was presuming a bit.
“If that is, you consent to conspire with me.”
“I…believe that I do.”
Looking as if he didn’t quite dare to hope, he said, “To be perfectly clear, when we say conspire, we mean as husband and wife.” He shifted. “Should I kneel?”
“You needn’t. And yes. That is what we mean.”
Ferrington’s smile was brilliant. “So, we have a deal?” He offered his hand, as he would have to seal a commercial bargain.
Harriet did not take it. “I hate that word,” she said. “It is my grandfather’s word.”
He gestured as if warding off all such associations. “What do you prefer?”
She leaned closer. “This,” she said and kissed him.
His arms came around her and pulled her closer. This kiss was sweeter than any before it as they gave themselves up to the promise of the future. They were both breathless when it ended.
“A pact well sealed indeed,” said the rogue earl. “We shall make every agreement precisely so.”
Harriet laughed.
“But there is something you have not said,” he added.
She did not pretend to misunderstand. “I love you,” she answered. “I have loved you for a long time, since soon after I met Jack the Rogue.”
“And I fell head over heels for Miss Snoot. Perhaps we will name our children thus. Rogue and Snoot.”
“No, we won’t,” replied Harriet, flushing a little.
“As you wish, my love. Now and always.”
This required another kiss, which inspired several increasingly torrid embraces. It was quite some time before they reluctantly left the clearing.
“This place seems so empty now,” Harriet said of the Travelers’ field. So much of their history together had involved the camp and its environs. An ending and a beginning, the crushed grass seemed to say.
“They’ll be back. They found a safe haven on my land.”
He said my land quite naturally now. He was settling into his position as an unconventional earl. Could there also be a rogue countess? Harriet wondered. She didn’t see why not.