Charles Vincent Debenham, fifth Viscount Wrenley, stood before his library fire with a glass of Madeira in his hand and looked from one to the other of his two younger brothers. His expression was not particularly pleasant. “If that is all you have to contribute, Edward,” he told the youngest, “you may as well keep your tongue between your teeth.”
“I like that,” retorted Captain Edward Debenham, an officer in the exclusive Horse Guards regiment. “Why ask for our opinions if you don’t want to hear ’em?”
The viscount eyed him with distaste. “I begin to wonder why.”
“Here, now, don’t start to quarrel,” put in Reverend Laurence Debenham, at twenty-seven the middle brother and accustomed to mediating disputes between the twenty-four-year-old Edward and the head of the family. “We shan’t get anywhere if you do that.”
“But Charles enjoys it so,” responded Edward, an irrepressible spark of mischief in his eye. “I hate to disappoint him. He expects it of me.” When Lord Wrenley looked sharply at him, he grinned.
The viscount surveyed his brothers. An impartial observer might have pronounced all three men uncommonly handsome. The Debenhams were tall and well-made, with very pale blond hair and eyes of clear gray. Each possessed the arched, aquiline Debenham nose, which could be seen repeated in the portrait gallery on the first floor of Wrenley, their country seat. But here the resemblance ended. Charles added to these outlines a raised eyebrow and a faint sneer, which lent his rather thin face a haughty distance. At thirty-one, he dressed with the austere elegance of a Corinthian, and had the shoulders and leg to carry it off. Laurence, as befitted his clerical profession, was more quietly attired; his pleasant face was rounder than his brothers’, and his gray eyes showed more kindness. He had particularly attractive hands, elegant and well-shaped, inherited from their gentle mother. Edward set off his dashing costume with a rakish air and careless manner that often irritated his eldest brother. He was the tallest of the three by an inch and had a spare, loose-knit frame. His crooked grin and wicked twinkle had been the downfall of many young ladies in all walks of society.
“You called us here to Wrenley,” continued Laurence hurriedly, before Charles could make the caustic remark so evident in his expression, “to help you decide what is to be done about Anne.”
“There is no need to repeat my own words back to me. And frankly, I begin to think I made a mistake. It is obvious that neither of you is going to be the least use.”
Laurence frowned, but Edward merely laughed. “You might have known that, Charles. We none of us know the first thing about schoolgirls.”
“No?” The viscount eyed him coldly. “From what I hear of your career in town, you, at least, know a deal too much.”
Edward’s eyes danced. “Not schoolgirls, Charles!”
The other turned away in disgust, taking a vermeil snuffbox from his waistcoat pocket and flipping it open with a practiced thumb.
“When does Anne arrive here?” asked Laurence. “I haven’t seen her since Mother died. It must be… why, three years.”
“She is to return from school next week.”
“Funny to think of little Anne grown up,” said Edward. “She must be… by Jove, she’s nineteen this year, ain’t she? What has she been doing in school all this time?” He looked apprehensive. “I say, Charles, she’s not a bluestocking, is she?”
“On the contrary, her school reports suggest that she is hardly literate. I left her there an additional year in the hope she might improve.” The viscount’s chiseled lips turned down. “She did not.”
“Did you truly hope so,” responded Edward, “or did you wish to put off being saddled with a chit of a ‘ward’?” He grinned as Charles glared at him.
“Is she… is she at all, ah, changed?” put in Laurence.
For one rare moment, the Debenham brothers were in complete sympathy as they heaved a collective sigh. Lady Anne Tremayne had been introduced into their household when she was barely a year old, after the tragic death of both her parents at sea. Their mother, Lady Wrenley, was the child’s godmother, and when no blood relation stepped forward to claim Anne, she had informally adopted her, eventually providing for her in her will. But almost from the moment of the girl’s arrival, she had been the despair of her new family. Suddenly blessed with three much older “brothers,” Anne had asked for nothing better than to follow their example in everything. For boys of six, nine, and thirteen, this had been a continuing trial, and moreover, it had made Anne an unusual, intractable girl. She had ridden and shot and hunted from the earliest possible age with a concentrated abandon that no scolding could eradicate. Lady Wrenley gradually took refuge in an invalid’s couch and a murmured stream of complaint, particularly after her husband’s premature death when his eldest son was barely sixteen. Charles, overwhelmed by his new responsibilities, had had increasingly acrimonious quarrels with Anne, until, at last, he insisted that she be sent to school to learn manners. This had accordingly been done when the girl was barely fourteen. And her ladyship’s death two years later had simply confirmed the arrangement.
The brothers sighed again as they thought of her. In a remarkably handsome family, Anne had been an anomaly since her little-girl prettiness gave way to a gawky, awkward adolescence. They all remembered her, vividly, as a tall unattractive girl, all knees and elbows and unkempt red-blond hair, distressingly likely to indulge in fits of temper at the slightest provocation.
“I haven’t the faintest notion,” drawled Lord Wrenley.
“What do you mean?” Laurence stared at him. “How was she when you last visited the school?”
“I have not visited it.”
Even Edward looked surprised.
“Not this year, you mean?” added Laurence.
“Not at all.”
They gazed at him incredulously. “B-but… during her holidays?”
“She has always asked leave to spend them with one of her school friends since Mama died. I saw no reason to deny her.”
“My dear Charles, you cannot mean that you have not seen Anne since our mother died?”
“Can I not?”
“But that is more than three years! Has no one been to visit her in three years?”
Lord Wrenley shrugged, looking slightly self-conscious. “She would not have welcomed a visit from me. We did not part on good terms, you know. And in any case, we hardly knew one another even before that.”
“Hardly…? You are her guardian! And she was a child when she left. I daresay she has changed a great deal. It was your duty—”
“Don’t prate to me of duty,” interrupted the viscount in a dangerous tone, and Laurence subsided. He knew that his brother harbored a lamentable bitterness over his premature family responsibilities. At sixteen, Charles had stolidly taken over for his dead father, but he had rid himself of each task as soon as practicable, and he had never shown any signs of enjoying his new position. On the contrary, it had changed him all out of recognition, in Laurence’s opinion. In the place of an indulgently superior older brother, there had appeared a rigid, distant disciplinarian who had seemed only too eager to dispense with the encumbrance of their presence. Flashes of the old Charles occasionally appeared, but with decreasing regularity.
“I would have been happy to visit Anne,” Laurence dared to add, before being silenced by the viscount’s hard look.
“Well, I don’t see that it matters now,” said Edward unheedingly. “Anne’s coming home. What’s to be done with her?”
Lord Wrenley turned away from his brothers and looked down at the fire, mastering his anger with a visible effort. The prospect of being saddled with a schoolgirl, just now when he had succeeded in ordering his life to his own satisfaction, filled him with rage. “That, Edward, is what I asked you both down to Wrenley to discuss,” he drawled finally.
“Yes, well…” The military branch of the Debenham family seemed at a loss.
“She must be brought out, of course,” said Laurence. “That is the customary procedure.”
“That’s it,” agreed Edward. “Find her a husband. Mama left her a tidy fortune, so it shouldn’t be difficult to get someone.” Laurence frowned, but his younger brother didn’t notice. “Do you remember the day Anne came upon that party from the Grange down by the trout stream? One of the ladies frightened her horse; I forget how. They say the squire still hasn’t recovered from the language she used. It positively set his hair on end. And she had a great purple bruise over her eye where she had fallen from the apple tree.” He chuckled reminiscently; Laurence groaned.
“She always swore she’d be a jockey,” continued Captain Debenham, “and I have to admit, she could ride. But, you know, Anne in a drawing room…” His voice trailed away, and he shook his head. “Her clothes were always thrown on by guess, and if she ever put a comb to her hair, I couldn’t tell it. She hated dancing lessons, too.”
“We must suppose that five years in a young ladies’ seminary have changed that, at least,” replied the viscount.
“Yes, but you know, Charles,” continued the other, “she ain’t at all pretty.”