‘It’s only going to be for six weeks, Georgia,’ Miss Leonora Haverstock, her children’s governess, said, but it felt like for ever.
‘How does my father-in-law think taking my girls back to Mynham will help me get better from the influenza, Leonora? Missing them and worrying about them living under their grandparents’ roof for the next month and a half will make me feel worse.’
‘He is right, though. You are still pale and you have lost weight and as you were feverish for nearly a fortnight even I was worried about you,’ Leonora replied cheerfully. But Georgia suspected she was dreading six weeks at stiff and stately Mynham with two lively young pupils to keep out of the Duke and Duchess of Ness’s way.
Edgar had named his father as his children’s guardian in his will so Georgia had to give in when the Duke refused to be talked out of this plan for her to recover in peace, as if it would be anything of the kind. Edgar’s last cruelty against her stung afresh as she had no choice but to go along with the Duke’s ridiculous idea for her to convalesce alone.
‘I was feeling so much better when the Duke called on his way back from Brussels with news of the Allied victory at Waterloo, but then I started to cough and couldn’t stop. He seems to think I will be a permanent invalid if he doesn’t interfere, but I’m as strong as an ox.’
‘Maybe you are, but you don’t look it right now. You probably do need to breathe clean air and get plenty of rest.’
‘Perhaps,’ Georgia conceded with a glance out of the window at the usual haze over the city, which gave it a yellowish tint even on a fine day, ‘but not without my girls. I will just worry about them under the Duke’s roof without me.’
‘I don’t suppose he knows how a true mother feels about her children, Georgia, since the Duchess doesn’t strike me as the maternal type, although everyone says she doted on your late husband so maybe I am misjudging her.’
‘No, she could hardly ignore her elder son and spoil the younger one if she cared about them, but I suppose you’re right and the Duke truly doesn’t realise I love my children dearly,’ Georgia said with a sigh. ‘He is always accusing me of spoiling them, but you know how careful I am not to do so. I’m so afraid he will decide I am an unfit mother and not give them back to me.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, Georgia, stop imagining the worst and concentrate on getting better so you can convince him you must have us all back here soon. In the meantime Nanny and I will care for them as if they are our own and the weeks will fly by. It makes sense for you to leave the city until it is cooler and the air is cleaner.’
‘I suppose I might as well,’ Georgia said listlessly. ‘I know you will do your best to stop them being glowered at by their grandfather or petted by their grandmother, but they are a duke and duchess, don’t forget.’
‘And I am the daughter of a bishop. Even His Grace seems in awe of my saintly papa’s spiritual authority as opposed to his temporal kind,’ Leonora said with a fond smile and Georgia wondered all over again why her friend had left the Bishop’s Palace to become even a very superior governess.
When she had interviewed her Leonora said she didn’t want to marry and, as she didn’t want to devote her life to good works either, she had given teaching a try and found out that she enjoyed it. Georgia suspected there was a lot more to Leonora’s story, but didn’t want to pry. She was so lucky Leonora was very good at her job and had become a friend as well.
‘You have already taught my girls more than they wanted to know so my father-in-law should approve of you,’ she told her.
‘Having a bishop in the family helps and I dare say it’s the main reason you employed me in the first place,’ Leonora replied with a rueful smile.
‘It did help convince the Duke that Millie and Helen were in safe hands, but the main reason I chose you was because I like you.’
‘Thank you, I like you, too—especially when you are not being such a tragedienne as you are today and imagining the worst.’
‘Stop trying to cheer me up when I don’t want to be cheered, Leonora. Today I want to throw things and lose my temper and have the hysterics like my mother-in-law does when her life doesn’t run exactly as she expects it to.’
‘You are not helping me look forward to a month and a half at Mynham.’
‘I know, but if I hadn’t been so foolish as to get the influenza at a ridiculous time of year we would all be in Weymouth by now. Staying there with you and my girls would do me far more good than wandering about the country missing them ever will. I know it’s not a fashionable watering place nowadays, but the girls love the sea and sand.
‘Oh, ignore me. I know it’s no good talking about it because the Duke won’t hear of that idea and I can’t go there on my own.’ Even thinking about it started another coughing fit. ‘Confounded cough!’ she spluttered as Leonora passed her a glass of the lemonade Cook had made so often that Georgia wondered the markets hadn’t run out of lemons yet.
‘Trust me to look after them and concentrate on getting better, Georgia,’ Leonora said when she finally managed to stop and sat back, feeling dispirited and exhausted.
‘I do trust you, but the Duke has no idea how little girls think or behave. His only concern is they don’t cause him any trouble or besmirch the precious Jascombe name in any way.’
‘How could a few childish misdeeds do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Georgia said miserably, but after spending most of her marriage under their roof she knew the Jascombes’ ideas of proper behaviour were skewed.
‘The Duke is always watching for proof they will follow in their father’s footsteps one day. He knows Edgar had a twisted soul, although he would not dream of admitting it out loud. He thinks it’s his duty to make sure the taint isn’t passed on to Edgar’s daughters.’
Six months after she employed her she had told Leonora why she was so intent on not spoiling her girls so she would understand why Georgia was stricter with them than she wanted to be. At least Leonora knew why she didn’t want her girls to suffer a repeat of their father’s peculiar upbringing under the Duke’s roof. That was why Georgia lived in London, close enough to Mynham for the Duke to believe he was keeping an eye on them, far enough away to stop him interfering in their day-to-day lives.
Sometimes it was too close, though, and she had always dreaded the Duke would decide she might as well live at Mynham instead so he could keep a keener eye on her and her daughters. The idea of ever having to do so again made her shudder even when she wasn’t ill and set off yet another coughing fit now.
‘Then he worries too much and so do you,’ Leonora said bracingly. ‘Your girls have such good natures under the mischief. I am sure they are nothing like their father and more like you.’
‘Thank you, but it’s the mischief that concerns me. The Duke thinks little girls should sew samplers and learn insipid accomplishments and never speak unless they are spoken to, but it’s the Duchess I am really worried about. She will try to spoil them until they think nobody else’s pleasures matter but theirs, like their father. Promise to stop her treating them like lapdogs because they are Edgar’s children and never mind if he hated fathering girls.’
‘I will try, but don’t you think they would be bored in half a day if Her Grace tried it?’
‘True,’ Georgia said ruefully. ‘Thank you for being so patient with me, Leonora. I do know how annoying I am being and none of this is your fault.’
‘You have been ill so I shall graciously forgive you this once, but I can hear the Duke’s men and horses are getting restless so we really must go now.’
Georgia insisted on seeing them off and never mind her slightly wobbly legs and any other symptoms her stupid illness had left behind. Despite the fears that refused to die after Leonora’s reassurances, Georgia kissed her girls and hugged them and told them they would enjoy themselves at Mynham. Then she stood in the street, frantically smiling and waving until the Duke’s second-best travelling carriage had turned out of the quiet street where they lived and was lost to sight.
That was when she let her shoulders droop and went back to her silent and empty-feeling town house and six weeks felt like six years. As soon as she heard the clock ticking in the silence she knew she couldn’t stay here alone and rang for her maid.
‘It’s too late to find decent lodgings in Brighton and I can’t endure Weymouth without my girls, so we might as well go to Yorkshire and stay with my parents for a week or so, Huggins.’
‘By easy stages, my lady,’ her maid said with a sharp look at Georgia’s pale face and teary eyes.
‘Oh, yes, we wouldn’t want to risk me having a relapse, would we?’
‘No, my lady, we would not,’ Huggins said with surprising firmness.
Her maid must be worried to have let even a hint of feeling show. Huggins had done such a good job of keeping those to herself during Georgia’s marriage that perhaps the Duke was right and she really did look ill.
‘If you can be ready for us to depart by tomorrow morning, we might as well begin our leisurely journey home to Riverdale as soon as we can so I can cosset myself like an invalid,’ she said listlessly.
‘Yes, my lady,’ Huggins said in her usual impassive way.
Georgia knew she was being silently rebuked for making light of her illness and what would be their first visit to her old home in four years. Going back downstairs while Huggins got on with packing in peace, Georgia stared moodily out of the drawing room windows and wondered how it would feel to be in her old home and not see Max every day. She had done so most days when they were growing up.
His brother’s land ran alongside her father’s more modest acres and the two of them had run wild over both estates as children and had all sorts of adventures behind their parents’ backs. Max would be busy at Holdfast Castle even further north as he tried to make good the damage its previous owner had done to the poor old place.
The idea of staying in her old home when he wasn’t nearby felt so wrong that she wasn’t sure she even wanted to be there without him, but there was nowhere else she wanted to be so she might as well go there. Max would have listened to her worries and made her feel better, but he wasn’t there any more. She couldn’t tell her parents about them, either, since she hadn’t confided in them at the time.
Yet she couldn’t stay here listening to the silence either, so she sighed mournfully and decided she must have faith in Leonora and just make sure she was well enough to take charge of her daughters again at the end of summer.
It had felt so odd to be home, yet not feel at home there, Georgia decided as her neat carriage took the detour she had impulsively ordered the coachman to make when she saw a sign pointing to the nearest town to Holdfast. Riverdale Manor had felt familiar and so strange without Max this last week and she had been glad to leave it for a visit to Aunt Isobel, her father’s sister, who lived in Edinburgh.
Her parents were much as they had always been—her mother still thought she had married beneath her and her father endured being her wealthy, but not very convenient, husband with his usual patience and far too much humility.
Max’s brother Zachary, Viscount Elderwood, and his unconventional wife were in Cumberland with her maternal grandparents so Flaxonby itself was shut up and looking a bit forlorn.
At Flaxonby Dower House Max’s mother, the Dowager Viscountess Elderwood, was preoccupied with her grief-stricken younger daughter Becky and Becky’s five-month-old baby girl. Becky’s beloved Captain Jack Sothern had been killed at the terrible battle near Waterloo and she was inconsolable.
Georgia felt guilty on two counts about her brief visit to the Dower House. First, because she had been secretly delighted when her own mother had gone home after Edgar had died so Georgia could stop pretending to her nearest and dearest; second, because she was glad Becky was too devastated by that tragedy to see anyone.
The two of them had never got on and had less in common than ever now, yet if she had stayed at Riverdale much longer they would have been lumped together as bereft young widows. She might have been expected to know how to comfort Becky in her first appalling grief, but Becky was mourning a husband she adored. Pretending she understood would make Georgia a hypocrite.
Staying at Riverdale had made her realise how much she had changed since she left it as a naive young woman intent on making the fine marriage her mother had always dreamt of for her. She knew how mistaken her mother was in thinking a title and ancient bloodlines made for a good marriage now and she felt impatient with the comparisons Mrs Welland kept on making between her own genteel family and her husband’s supposedly humble one.
Marriage to an aristocrat had taught her rank was just names, power and wealth, so her mother’s objections wouldn’t stop Georgia from visiting her darling Aunt Isobel now she was in the north. Aunt Isobel’s late husband had been a merchant who did business with Georgia’s grandfather, so of course Mama thought the connection was undesirable, but Georgia had always loved her stays with Aunt Isobel as a child.
Now her aunt was a widow and a devoted grandmother. She had always welcomed Georgia into her fine home to enjoy the delights of the Scottish capital for a week or two and forget the stuffy southerners her brother had married into. Georgia had always secretly liked Papa’s family much better than her mother’s staid and self-important relatives.
Papa was a good and gentle husband and her mother had been lucky to have stumbled on one of those more or less by accident when she was on the lookout for a wealthy catch. Would that her daughter had been so fortunate when she blundered into marriage for all the wrong reasons as well.
Georgia stared out of the carriage window at a heavily wooded landscape that told her they were not on the Holdfast Estate yet since so many mature trees had been felled by the previous owner it was easy to tell when you were on Holdfast land. So she could go back to thinking how uncomfortable it had felt at Riverdale with her parents as divided by stupid differences in birth and rank as ever.
She had no right to upset the status quo the two of them had established when she had no idea how a real marriage should run. Maybe that was why it was such a relief to get away from Riverdale and all that was the same and should be different. It was probably why she was so restless there, not because Max no longer lived next door as he had when they were children. She was on her way to see him, but he was her best friend when they were young so it would be rude not to call when she was passing.
All of a sudden Max’s grim northern stronghold was looming on the horizon and she must have been wool-gathering not to notice the trees thin out, then disappear except for a few ragged stands of birch and alder the previous owner must have been unable to sell. There were signs of Max’s care for his beloved acres in sapling woods planted on less productive acres, but it would be decades before they provided shelter and centuries before they were mature and he had only been here five years.
Holdfast was visible long before it would have been before all saleable trees were felled and even the most fanciful debutante would not see it as a fairy tale palace now. Perhaps that was why Max hadn’t been snapped up by an eager young lady with Holdfast Castle looking so dour and forbidding they didn’t want to live there. Max obviously loved it and must have become immune to the chill winds that would whistle around it for much of the year.
She shivered at the thought of living here when winter came, so she must have gone soft living in the south. London seemed very far away today and she had been drawn to her native north since she got here, but nowhere felt like a home without her girls.
She knew Millie and Helen were safe and cared for with Leonora and their nanny, but as Holdfast loomed ever closer Georgia knew she was a bad mother because she wanted her daughters to be missing her nearly as much as she did them. She shifted against the comfortable squabs and stared at the stronghold of Max’s ancestors to try to forget how selfish she was.
Max had put a great deal of work into the stony old place since she last called here on her way to Aunt Isobel’s four years ago. How happy they had been to get out of the carriage for a while when Helen was eighteen months old and even Millie was only three going on four. Back then the journey north had felt endless even with Nanny’s help and Georgia had resolved not to do it again until they were bigger and easier to keep amused.
When they had got here they had toddled gamely around a real castle with delighted squeals and chuckles for the giant play house Mama had brought them to so there was no chance to talk to her old friend properly, which had suited her perfectly. She should have come back sooner, though. If she had done so, maybe she would not have been in London to contract a stupid illness this spring and her daughters would have loved to visit a real castle even more than they did when they were little.
To stop missing them so bitterly, she watched the sun shine on renewed roofs and repaired windows. A pleasure garden was being rescued from the undergrowth that had still engulfed the sheltered side of the castle the last time she was here. She wondered if Max would love this place less and leave it more often if he wasn’t a grandson of the last of the DeMayne line and a splendid heiress when she married Max’s grandfather, the spendthrift Lord Elderwood who had gambled his wife’s grand heritage away along with most of his own.
She missed her oldest friend and had only just realised she resented this place for keeping him hundreds of miles away from her. There she was again, being selfish, when she should be glad he had found such a strong purpose in life. She had her girls to give her life meaning, but without them it felt hollow. She shook her head, furious with herself for the self-pity behind that depressing thought.
Maybe she had taken this diversion with a sneaky hope she could unburden herself to him again, but she had burdened him with too many problems in the past and he was a busy man. She practised her best social smile in her reflection in the carriage window and decided twenty minutes would be quite long enough to call on an unrelated gentleman. Nobody could accuse her of ignoring an old friend while she was passing now and she could get to the part of this enforced holiday she was actually looking forward to as soon as that time was up.
Max hammered the final nail into the last new oak floorboard and sat back on his heels to survey his handiwork. As soon as they were stained to match the originals nobody would know the rain had got in through a broken window and spoiled some of them. His little sister’s new home was a step closer to being ready. Perhaps he could afford to hire a carpenter now the estate was beginning to pay its way, but when he had first come here he had to learn skills a gentleman wasn’t supposed to and he enjoyed this one. The physical effort of his life here had been the perfect fit for him when he agreed to take it on five years ago.
He shrugged off the memory of Georgia weeping in his arms the day after Jascombe’s funeral. He had spent too many days working like a demon to get her and her wretched marriage out of his head and heart back then and he was done with wanting what he couldn’t have. He was glad his younger sister Becky had asked to share his home so she and her baby daughter could have a new start somewhere without any deep connection to her darling Jack.
It would be a new beginning for him as well. Not that he wanted to leave Holdfast, but he had to stop yearning for impossible things. He loved this place as he never thought he would when he accepted it from his brother and sister-in-law, mainly because it seemed to need him as much as he needed something worthwhile to do.
Working hard on it had stopped him having sleepless nights or dreaming that Georgia needed him again and he couldn’t get to her in his nightmares. Five years on he belonged in this sometimes harsh, always beautiful land as he never had in his brother’s grand neo-classical mansion. Max had no vocation for the church and had never wanted to join the army or navy and see the world while fighting his fellow man, but Holdfast had been so forlorn it called out to him. Yes, it was time to put the past behind him.
He needed to find a wife to run it and share his life, someone in tune with his hopes and dreams who wanted to hear their children chase up and down the corridors and play hide and seek in Holdfast’s quirky corners. Becky’s little girl should not play alone when she was big enough to and it was time he came fully alive along with his castle. It was good enough now to ask a hardy lady to share his life and ancient home. He just needed to find one who was happy to raise their children in less splendour than his DeMayne ancestors had kept in Holdfast’s glory days.