‘Why did Isabella jilt you, Gus?’ Wulf asked his brother as casually as he could manage when they were strolling in unfashionable Green Park to try to build Magnus’s strength back up a little at a time.
‘Why would I tell you that?’ his brother said after such a long time Wulf was wondering if he’d heard.
‘I need to know,’ he replied, fighting the instinct to say it didn’t matter.
‘Why?’
‘Is that all you’re going to say?’
‘Until you give me a better reason, yes.’
‘She told me to ask you,’ Wulf admitted gruffly.
‘Really? You did a lot of lurking in corners before she called a halt, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t think there’s a law against it,’ Wulf said defensively.
‘You remind me of yourself as a sulky boy, Little Brother,’ Magnus said and leaned against a tree with some of the careless ease and confidence he used to exude.
‘You remind me of yourself as a not-much-older insufferable know-it-all.’
Wulf had to know why his brother’s betrothal ended abruptly. Secretly he had rejoiced to hear it was all over between Magnus and Isabella, of course, but he realised he would have had to sail away and not come back again if the wedding had gone ahead. Funny, his heart had never told his head how much it didn’t want the wedding to happen while he had sat in a cramped cabin week after endless week willing the ship to return to England faster than wind and sail could get it there.
‘Ah, but I’m not the one with the burning desire to root through my brother’s private affairs,’ Magnus said with some of the old steel back under his cool society manners.
Wulf would normally have rejoiced that his brother was acting more himself, but right now he needed answers more than confirmation his brother’s spirits were beginning to revive. ‘I haven’t got any for you to find,’ he replied gruffly.
‘Isabella has my sympathy; I never realised you were a slow top.’
‘You were in the way. How could I barge past you and pounce on her like the wolf the Earl named me for?’ There, now he’d admitted he wanted Isabella and Gus smiled as if that was exactly what he’d been waiting to hear.
‘I didn’t even know you’d met Isabella until you galloped off to Cravenhill Park to confront her on my behalf, you blundering great idiot.’
‘We met on the night of your betrothal ball.’
‘You were there after all, then? Despite saying you weren’t going all the way to Haile Carr to be thrown out.’ Magnus raised his eyebrows in that infuriating fashionable habit he had before he fell to earth.
‘You’re my brother,’ Wulf said tersely.
‘I looked for you, Wulf, and made a point of telling Gres and the Earl if they tried to humiliate you I’d call off the wedding. I needed your support more than you’ll ever know and you stayed away and before I knew it you’d left for the New World. I felt more alone standing on that quayside watching you sail away than I’ve ever felt in my life.’
‘I’m sorry, Gus. I let you down as well.’
‘As well as who?’
‘Whom, Big Brother, whom.’
‘Do you want to live to get much older, Wulf?’
‘Tell me why you asked the most beautiful female I have ever laid eyes on to marry you when you don’t appear to love her and she doesn’t love you.’
‘Ah, now that sounds like a very personal interest indeed. Why does she want you to know?’
Wulf paced the just-about-green grass because he couldn’t stand still. He hadn’t managed to say it to Isabella yet, so how could he admit it to Gus? ‘You’re right, it’s very personal,’ he said tersely.
‘How personal?’
‘Too much—I have nothing to offer her. My name stinks even more since the Earl made things worse by making a show out of hating Mama so much he disowned his own son to punish her for looking at another man. No wonder the King wants to forget he ever had a friend whose marriage was an even bigger mess than his own turned out to be.’
‘I don’t think that’s possible, but Isabella won’t care about what the world thinks if she loves you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I know her better than you do from the sound of things. I also know you’d like to hit me, despite the fact I’m not up to brawling with you right now.’
‘Ah well, we always knew I wasn’t a gentleman.’
‘No, you believed what our father told you; the rest of us knew he was wrong,’ Magnus said and turned away to pace in his turn. ‘I don’t want you to despise me,’ he admitted at last.
‘You let me out of cupboards the Earl locked me in when we were boys and fed me when he forbade it. You even took his blows when you could and taught me to ride and drive up and down the local mews and got me to swim in the Serpentine because he wouldn’t take me to the country with the rest of you because I liked it and that would never do. If we live to be a hundred and quarrel like fishwives for the rest of our days, I couldn’t turn my back on you, Gus.’
‘I felt guilty because when the Earl took his anger out on you he didn’t have so much of it left for me.’
‘Gresley probably felt guilty about that as well, but he didn’t help me. You could always tell me what I want to know now and we’ll call it even.’
‘Clever, but I suppose I owe it to Isabella to tell you the truth, even if I do lose your esteem,’ Magnus said as if truly he believed he could.
Wulf would turn a blind eye even if his brother confessed to murdering the Earl, but Isabella was right, he needed to know the secret haunting his brother. ‘Just tell me and we’ll deal with it,’ he urged.
‘We can’t, nobody can,’ Magnus said with a sigh that sounded as if it came from his boots. ‘But you still need to know, so I suppose I should tell you. It really began when Sir Edgar Drace died.’
‘I knew Lady Delphine was at the bottom of it somehow,’ Wulf said, remembering that night at Carrowe House when tension felt so tight between Magnus and Lady Delphine he almost expected to hear something snap.
‘Don’t interrupt if you want to hear more. I’d rather not tell this tale at all, so it’s up to you.’
‘Consider me silent as the grave.’
‘Don’t, you have no idea how often I wished Drace in one.’
‘He wasn’t much of an asset to the human race,’ Wulf said. ‘I had to report his fury at the poor for the sin of being poor too often to mistake him for one of those.’
‘Ah, but it wasn’t for the sake of suffering humanity I wanted him dead, Wulf. Drace made Delphi give up riding and she must not dance or drive or do any of the things I know she loved to do before he married her. He wouldn’t even allow her to visit Mama and the girls when he took her to stay with her parents for a few days. I hardly saw her, but when I called one day, she was wearing long sleeves and even they couldn’t quite cover up the bruises. When I challenged her about them, she told me the law allows a man to chastise his wife as long as he doesn’t kill her. He was a Member of Parliament and the magistrates might have looked the other way even if he killed her in a rage, so I did what she wanted and stayed away, but I hated him for being such a bully.’
‘As well you weren’t anywhere near when he broke his neck, then.’
‘I rode all night to find her as soon as I heard he was dead,’ Magnus admitted, ‘and I didn’t even stop to wonder why until I got there. She was so thin I could nearly count her bones through her skin, Wulf. She was nothing like the harum-scarum Delphi I used to run wild with all summer and missed when I was back at school. The plain truth is I love her, Wulf. All those years the real reason I hated Drace was because he got to her before I could.’
‘He and the Earl will be company for one another in hell,’ Wulf said and couldn’t find a single spark of outrage in his heart for his brother’s guilty secret so far.
‘Don’t make light of it. I should have found a way to make him stop beating and humiliating Delphi. I should have stopped the Earl doing the same to you as well, so don’t ever call me a good man again,’ Magnus said bitterly.
Wulf could see him shaking with the effort of sharing his dark truth and even for Isabella’s sake he couldn’t put his brother through more pain. ‘Never mind, Gus, Isabella and I will find a way past it,’ he said.
‘You both deserve the truth.’
‘I doubt I do.’
‘Then you need to hear my story, so you don’t hurt her like Delphi hurt me.’
Wulf was shocked by the idea he could turn bright and vibrant Miss Alstone into a pale shadow of herself. The thought horrified him.
‘What on earth did Lady Delphine do to you, then?’
‘She took me as her lover for every stolen moment we could snatch together in a summerhouse on a neighbouring estate unlived in for years, accepted my rampant adoration and all the pent-up love I’d only just admitted to myself, and enjoyed it as if that was what she was born for. She embraced her own sensuality and threw herself into being adored and I thought I’d found heaven on earth for six whole glorious weeks of bliss. I stayed at an inn a few miles away, but my horse could have found his way there blindfolded by the end of them.’
‘What happened?’
‘She told me it was over. It had been a pleasure to find out what the sins of the flesh really felt like and she thanked me politely, as if I’d given her a pretty fan or a lace handkerchief. And, oh, no, of course she didn’t love me and never had. I was a convenient lover when she needed to feel warm and wicked after all those years of cold and propriety with Drace. Now I’d taught her all I knew she had her eye on her next lover who, by the way, had far more money and power than I’d ever have.’
‘Bitch,’ Wulf gritted out and meant it.
‘No,’ Magnus argued. ‘Count, Wulf. Count backwards and use your brains.’
Wulf shook his head to clear it and saw what Magnus meant. ‘Her daughter?’
‘She’s mine,’ Magnus agreed as if more words would undo him.
‘Delphine’s passed her off as Drace’s and I doubt that’s much of a favour in the long-term,’ Wulf said with the snicker of his own supposedly illegitimate birth in the back of his mind.
‘She’s the image of me, poor little mite. Nobody could look at her and me side by side and mistake her for Drace’s get. That’s why Delphine brought her child to London when she came to visit us, then made her maid stay nearby with the baby instead of openly bringing my daughter to Carrowe House, where we Hailes couldn’t fail to recognise one of our own.’
‘So why haven’t you married her and claimed the baby as yours anyway?’
‘Delphi won’t say yes. Delphi’s woman sent me a letter begging me to visit her mistress a couple of months after Delphi gave me my marching orders. I delayed because I knew it would hurt to see her decked out in the spoils of her next love affair. By then she was visibly with child and had to admit it was mine because there was no chance the baby was Drace’s, never much chance he was capable of siring one at all actually.’
‘A boy would have taken his title and estates, though.’
‘She promised to admit the child wasn’t her husband’s if she birthed a boy because she couldn’t live with the imposture if her child took so much from the true heir. Thanks to her parents’ insistence their private fortune was settled on her and any children when she married that apology for a gentleman, she didn’t need his money, but my little girl saved her the trouble of confessing what she sees as her sins.’
‘You’ve seen the child?’
‘Yes, and loved her the moment I laid eyes on her, Wulf. I can’t claim her because her mother won’t let me. I’ve tried everything to convince Delphi to marry me, but she refuses to even consider it.’
‘She’s a fool, Gus,’ Wulf told him.
‘No, I’m the fool. If only I’d stayed away for a few months after Drace’s death, she would have had to marry me when I got her with child as there would be no question of it being his in law. Delphi’s rejection was bad enough, then Father found out and she still wouldn’t marry me. That would be to admit what we did when her husband’s body was hardly cold in his grave and she couldn’t brave the censure of the polite world for being so wicked and actually enjoying herself for once in her life. She thinks she can pretend we didn’t do anything of the kind, that her daughter will grow to look more like her as she gets older. According to Delphi, a baby’s brown eyes can turn green or blue and her hair will pale into something less like mine. She will grow up a baronet’s posthumous daughter unless we put doubts in people’s heads by marrying each other.’
‘She’s an idiot and doesn’t deserve you.’
‘Drace had to beat and abuse her to make himself want a woman enough to even try to get her with child, Wulf. Then I threw myself at her like a greedy boy before she had hardly even taken in the fact her prison door was open. The longer it goes on the worse the puzzle and any scandal gets when we’re found out. I suppose I’m not much of a catch anyway.’
‘You would make yourself one if she said yes,’ Wulf told his brother. ‘You might have been raised a gentleman, but you’d work for love if only she would let you.’
‘Well, she won’t, not even when the Earl decided to blackmail me with our lovely little secret. If I didn’t marry a fortune and hand it to him, he said he would tell the world Lady Drace’s daughter is my bastard.’
‘So you offered for Isabella?’ Wulf whispered as if saying it out loud might break them both.
‘I should have let him do his worst.’
‘He would have done it. He would have ruined the woman you love out of pique if you didn’t do as he bid you.’
‘Yes,’ Magnus admitted bleakly. ‘So I let Isabella be the ransom.’
‘Did she know?’
‘Not then. When I asked her to marry me, you can imagine how relieved I was when she said no. Then she came back to me with a scheme to pay the old devil part of her dowry on condition Aline, Dorrie and Theo lived with us. I hadn’t told her about Delphi and our affair, of course, but Isabella saw through the old man’s surface charm and insisted he assign guardianship of Dorrie and Theo to me before he’d get a penny of her dowry. Isabella insisted she didn’t want to be in love and a rational marriage would suit her very well. I suppose she could see how unhappy the girls were at Carrowe House under the Earl’s thumb, too, and we were such good friends, Wulf. And once I’d offered for her, how could I withdraw? So we agreed to wed and I believe that must be where you came in.’
‘You nearly married her.’
‘I expect we would have come to our senses sooner or later.’
‘Don’t lie, you would have wed Isabella because you couldn’t marry Lady Delphine and no woman deserves that.’
‘Isabella least of all?’
Wulf glared at the tree Magnus was leaning against as if he needed it to hold him up. ‘I love her,’ he confessed at last.
‘Shouldn’t you be telling her instead of me?’
‘Yes,’ Wulf grumbled. ‘How did she find out about Lady Delphine?’
‘Another letter.’
‘Lady Delphine’s maid seems to be on your side.’
‘Not noticeably.’
‘Then why interfere?’
‘Because of the child and maybe she wants her mistress to be happy and cared for despite herself as well. Perhaps I never deserved to be happy after what it did, but you deserve Isabella.’
‘I don’t, but living without her is worse than offering for her so she can turn me down.’
‘You’ll always regret not taking a chance, but how are you planning to make this grudging proposal?’
‘You’re not the only Haile who can offer an elopement to a lady.’
‘However you offer for her be sure you make her happy, Wulf. I might have to kill you if you don’t. If Carnwood or Shuttleworth or your friend Kenton don’t get there first, of course.’
‘She has to say yes first,’ Wulf said gloomily.