The Kent Heiress Read online

  “Now, now, my love,” he had soothed, taking her into his arms and patting her back comfortingly, “you shouldn’t bother your pretty head about such things. You are my wife. No one can take your place. Never you mind what people say. They’ll respect you all the more for taking no notice.”

  Sabrina had thrust him away so fiercely that he staggered back. Her pale coloring made her look fragile, but she was really quite strong. She was tall for a woman and, although slender, was well muscled from much walking and riding. Had they been in England at the time, Sabrina might have left William in her first fury and returned to Roger and Leonie. However, she and William were in Vienna, and there was no easy way home.

  That difficulty alone might not have discouraged Sabrina, but as her immediate rage cooled she recalled that she and William were not private citizens. They were members of the British diplomatic staff in Austria, and as such her actions might reflect on her nation as well as on her husband. Her obligations to William might be ended, but those to England were not. But she could not, would not, be wife to a man who betrayed her. He would have to learn that. Three years ago, in Vienna, she had been young enough to believe that William’s addiction to chasing other women could be cured.

  At first her course of treatment had seemed to work well. Sabrina had turned herself into the ice maiden she outwardly resembled. In fact, an igloo would have been warm and comfortable compared to William’s home. In public she was formally polite; in private she did not see or hear her husband at all. He no longer existed. She did not inquire whether he would be home for meals or inform him when she would be out. There was never a place laid for him; the servants were soon totally demoralized from receiving no instructions, and Sabrina’s door remained locked.

  William’s first reaction was contempt; he had handled sulky beauties before. He had not been married to them, however. When it finally occurred to him that the situation would not pass in a few days but was permanent, his idea of a cure was to slap Sabrina into submission. She defended herself so ferociously, however, with teeth and nails and kicks and bric-a-brac that he ended as bruised as she—and in more delicate spots. In fact, William had been totally unprepared for her reaction. Apparently be had believed that a single slap would reduce her to whimpering tameness. Her violence intrigued him. It was after the fight that he cut short his illicit affair with an Austrian beauty and began to try to win Sabrina back.

  He had been contrite, wryly apologetic, explaining that he had not thought she would care. Everyone did it, after all; however, if she felt so strongly, of course he would not, ever again. It had seemed reasonable enough to Sabrina at the time. She had known before she married William that he was “quite a lady’s man”. Roger had warned her; her foster brother, Philip, had warned her; Leonie had warned her. Actually, Roger had wished to forbid the courtship altogether. Leonie, too, had not been happy about it, but William had insisted so passionately that his affections were fixed at last and had behaved so impeccably that they had yielded. Besides, there was little else they could do. The damage was already done. Sabrina was head over heels in love with her practiced charmer.

  She had still loved him in Vienna, so it was not surprising that his peace overtures were accepted. And for a precious half year it had worked—or she had not caught him. Part of that time they had been back in England. Sabrina felt a thousand years older, but she was only seventeen. Perhaps he had been faithful; perhaps it was only easier to be discreet in England. He was as loving and attentive as when they first were married, but she had seen the anxiety in Roger’s and Leonie’s eyes—and she had seen Philip, once as much a lady’s man as William, become as steady a husband as Roger ever was.

  Sabrina smiled again when that thought crossed her mind. Megaera had a temper as hot as her flaming hair and could shoot a pistol as well as a man. It would be dangerous to cross her. The smile died. Philip was not faithful because he was afraid of his wife. He was faithful because he adored her. They were friends, too, just as Roger and Leonie were friends.

  Tears welled into Sabrina’s eyes, and she looked hastily down at her dressing table. Mechanically she began to choose rings and slide them up on her long white fingers. The skin on her hands was so delicate that a tracery of blue veins was visible below the surface. The tears did not fall. It was too late for tears. Still that was the most painful part—she had not wanted her husband to be her friend. She had scorned the realism with which her cousin Leonie regarded her husband. She had some romantic half-baked dream of a marriage in which her husband would always be her lover.

  Horribly, she had achieved it! She had unerringly picked a man who was only capable of being a lover. When pursuit and wooing were no longer necessary, William lost interest—especially in a woman bound to him by law.

  It was quite clear what had attracted William, to diplomatic life. He was perfectly suited to it. He never tired of dressing and dancing and making elegant conversation. He could pursue indifferent or hostile men for friendship as eagerly—and successfully—as he pursued women for love. Sabrina laughed shortly and stood up. She loved the diplomatic life, too. She adored the fun of disseminating information William wanted spread—oh, so innocently, as if she were telling secrets overheard—and gathering hints and rumors to pass back to the British Foreign Office. She knew she was the perfect diplomatic wife. If only William…

  Still, it wasn’t worth the effort to hold him. It would go on forever and become more and more degrading. Sabrina took a last look at herself in the mirror and grimaced again. Perfect, exquisite—white on white—an ice-white moiré, embroidered with snow crystals in silver, dropped low off shoulders as white as the dress. The cashmere shawl, bleached to the whiteness of snow, and as soft, draped gracefully over her arms. The only touches of color were her blue eyes, the glittering points of blue fire where her sapphires burned amid the white glitter of diamonds, the delicate rose of her lips, and the pale, pale gold of high-piled hair.

  No, Sabrina thought her problem was not in behaving normally to William tonight. Her problem was with the future. Sabrina wanted and needed to be loved. She had grown up in a household filled with love. She had seen a new love ripen between Philip and Megaera just as rich and fulfilling as that between Roger and Leonie, although different in detail. Too late she knew that she wanted that for herself, and it was impossible to attain with William.

  All afternoon Sabrina had struggled with that realization. Now it was easy enough to understand why she had never considered taking a lover to pay William back for the shame and pain he had inflicted on her. A lover was not the answer to her need. Sabrina shivered. How peculiar that word was—lover. Usually the last thing a woman obtained from a lover was love.

  After the political crisis was over, she could leave William, go back to Stour Castle, and live with Roger and Leonie—but that would not be a normal life, no matter how much they loved her. Anyhow, that was not the kind of love she needed. There was another difficulty there. If she confessed her misery to her guardians, they would blame themselves. It was their fault in a way. They should have known better than to allow her to marry William, no matter how infatuated she was. How could they have been so stupid, so careless? Sabrina blocked that train of thought hard. There was no use putting the blame on others, particularly on those who loved her only too well. Or who took the first opportunity to be rid of her? No! That was insane.

  It was her problem, and she even knew the solution. Roger was a very influential man. He could pull strings as strong as ropes in the government, and likely, even reach into the Church. Her marriage could be annulled or she could obtain a divorce. Unfortunately the cure was at least as bad as the disease and might be worse. A divorce would not permit her to remarry, and even if an annulment could be obtained, she would have made herself into a pariah. There would be very few men who would be interested in marrying a woman who had put away her husband for infidelity. Everyone would know the true cause, no matter what the formal reason w
as given for breaking the marriage. In addition, an annulment initiated by his wife might ruin William’s career, and Sabrina did not really want to hurt William. He could not help being what he was.

  That sounded very noble, Sabrina thought cynically, but the truth was that she did not wish to lose the excitement of the diplomatic life, either. And she would be ruined far more completely than William. He might well be taken back into the service as soon as the scandal died down. Her situation, even though she was the injured party, would be far worse. Not only would she be deprived of the foreign travel and excitement that she loved, but she might even be excluded from English society—déclassé because her husband was a lecher and she had dared to complain.

  A scratch at the door broke the bitter thought and made Sabrina start. She had not realized how long she had been lost in unpleasant daydreams. “Entrez,” she called, thinking that it was very useful that she had been raised in a bilingual household. Her French was pure, accented only slightly by the patois of the Côte d’Or, and as fluent as her English. She was, thus, a great favorite with both the embassy wives, who needed an interpreter, and the Russian ladies, who made heavy weather of the halting French of many English wives and daughters.

  The door opened to reveal a small, round woman, neatly gowned in gray merino topped with a black spencer. Her face was good-natured with a short, pert nose twinkling blue eyes, and a pretty mouth. If it had not been for the few streaks of gray in her simply dressed brown hair, and her mature body, she would have looked little more than a girl. Cocking her head to examine Sabrina critically, she nodded curtly.

  “Verra nice. Himself is below all ready and wonderin’ what’s keepin’ ye.”

  Involuntarily Sabrina smiled. “I told you to go to dinner, Katy.”

  “I’ll go when I’m ready. Ye needn’t fash yersel’ that I’ll starve.” Her eyes were troubled as she opened the door wider and stepped back. “Go down now, luv. Ye can’t hide from life.”

  “I wasn’t hiding,” Sabrina said, rather indignantly. “I was thinking.”

  “This isna the time for it, Brina. Himself is all atwitter. There’ll be someone important at this party, I’m thinking.”

  “Really?” Sabrina felt brighter at once. She dropped a kiss on Katy’s cheek and moved quickly past her and down the corridor toward the stairs.

  Katy watched her go, then closed the door and stood with her back to it. The good humor had faded from her face. If she had not been a faithful daughter of the Church, William, Lord Elvan, would have been dead by her hand. But murder was a deadly sin, and she had been taught a sin never solved anything, only brought more trouble. Nor would it do any good to show her rage against the man to her beloved nursling. Brina had not quite made up her mind and to speak against him would only make the stubborn girl defend him. That might push Brina in the opposite direction from the path Katy wanted her to take.

  “Wanted” was too strong a word. Katy was as undecided as Sabrina herself, as aware as Sabrina of the dreadful results of “her child’s” leaving her husband. What Katy wanted was that Brina should be happy, and it was quite clear that she would also be forced to leave the life she loved if she left William. That certainly would not make her happy. And Brina deserved happiness. She had tragedy enough in her short life.

  Katy shook herself and moved into the room, beginning to tidy the slight disorder Sabrina had left on her dressing table. As she closed the jewel box, hung up a dressing gown, and collected discarded garments for laundering, Katy’s mind slipped back into the past.

  Like her cousin and guardian, Lady Leonie, Sabrina was a granddaughter of the earl of Stour. In fact, if Brina’s father had lived six months longer, Brina rather than Lady Leonie would have inherited the vast estates of Stour. Katy clucked her tongue. Good luck to Lady Leonie and no harm to Brina. Leonie would have turned every penny over to her cousin if she thought Brina wanted it or if it could do her any good. Cut out her own heart for Brina, Lady Leonie would.

  It was not the estates that mattered, but how Lord Stour had died. He had been bringing his family back from Ireland to England when a sudden squall struck the vessel in which they were traveling and the boat sank. Lord Stour, his wife and his son had drowned. The nursemaid with Stour’s two little daughters, Alice and Sabrina, had found temporary safety in a lifeboat. This tiny craft had been blown far north of the vessel’s route and had finally capsized in the surf near the island on which Katy lived.

  The nursemaid was devoted to her charges. She clung to them even in the face of death, protecting them as well as she could from the battering waves. No one knew exactly what happened, but it was likely that the elder child, nine-year-old Alice, had become hysterical, had been torn loose from the nursemaid’s grasp, and had drowned. The little one, Sabrina, not yet four, had clung trustfully to what was safety to her and had survived. But the beach onto which the nursemaid finally crawled was deserted at night, and the woman was nearly dead from exposure and exhaustion. She had collapsed there. By the time they were discovered, the nursemaid had taken a fatal chill.

  She lived three days, raving with fever. There was little Katy’s parents could do for her. Over and over the nursemaid cried for the child she had lost. Once or twice she said the name “de Conyers” and “Stour”, but she gave no more information. At first they had hoped she would recover. By the time they realized she was dying, she could not respond to questions. Thus, she never said enough for Katy or her parents to make head or tail of the child’s identity.

  The little girl had been very sick too, but Katy tended to her with a passionate devotion engendered by the loss of two infants of her own, and again Sabrina survived. The Larsons knew from her rich clothes that she came from a fine family, but she could tell them nothing of value in tracing her people. Her name was “Brina”, and she chattered volubly of Mama and Papa and William and Alice and Nurse, but not of where the lived—her answer to that was “with Mama and Papa in the house” because some of her “friends” lived “outside the house”, presumably in cottages on the estate.

  The Larsons did what they could, asked every person with whom they came in contact whether the names “Stour” or “de Conyers” meant anything, but they lived in an isolated area on a small island, and they could not afford to leave their work to inquire too far afield. Meanwhile they kept the child, unsure of how much to tell her or whether it would be a kindness or cruelty to remind her that she was not theirs, that she might be nobly born.

  As the months passed, hope of finding her people dimmed, and they even began to wish—for their own sakes—that Brina’s family would forget her. She was a delight to them all. Sugar baby, Katy called her, for her whiteness and sweetness of disposition. It was natural that she should be most precious of all to Katy Petersen, who had lost her husband a few months before and had no living child of her own. The months added up to years. Katy almost forgot that Brina was not her daughter. She taught the child to spin and sew and knit, and Brina did all the chores that any six- or seven-year-old was expected to do in an isolated fishing and farming community.

  By 1795, although Katy and her parents still asked about “Stour” and “de Conyers,” they did so by habit, certain there would be no result. In the spring, however, a stranger not only rode into their village but dismounted and asked for Katy’s house. In that instant Katy knew that Brina was lost to them, lost forever. It wasn’t like her sister marrying a man on another island or her brother going off to sea. They came back to visit, even if infrequently, and she could imagine what their lives were like. When Brina left, it would be as if she had died. She could never come back, and even if she could, she would be a different person.

  But it had not happened that way. The stranger had not taken Brina away, and when at last Lady Leonie and Mr. St. Eyre had come, they had asked Katy to stay with Brina and with them. They had taken Katy and the child to the inn with them that night, and their patience and tenderness were a marvel. They had no
t tried to change Brina’s ways all at once. Mr. St. Eyre had to leave the next day; he had business affairs and government duties that could not be put off, but Lady Leonie stayed at the inn for over a month.

  Little by little, Lady Leonie had introduced new clothes, new ways of speaking, sitting, eating. It was all a game that Brina soon came to love, all done with laughter, and not a word implied contempt for the old ways or shame for lapsing back into them. Although she never said it in words, what Leonie was telling Brina over and over was that to each person in each place there was a “right” way. When a person changed place, new “right” ways must be learned. That did not mean the old ways were wrong. In fact, the new ways would be wrong in the old place. Brina must remember both ways—and all new ways—and use each in the right place.

  Toward the end of the month, Leonie had asked Katy to join her in her parlor after Brina was asleep. This is the end, Katy thought. Now I’ll be sent away. But it was just the opposite. Lady Leonie begged her to come with them to England so that Brina’s life would not be completely broken again.

  “I would like it best if you would live with us, Katy,” she said. “Roger and I thought we would settle on you a sum that would bring an income of about three hundred pounds a year—” She misunderstood the shock mirrored on Katy’s face and hurried on, “Oh, please, do not be offended. I know money cannot pay for what you have done for Brina, but it is all we have to offer. We cannot let you keep her.”

  “I know that!” Katy exclaimed, horrified now at the thought of what she had wished to deprive her darling. “Ye dinna need give me aught. I’ll come—but what will I be?”

  Not being stupid, Katy had already seen the difficulty. She could learn the new ways, too—perhaps she could—but to ape the actions and manners the great was unnatural and made her miserably uncomfortable.

  “What do you mean?” Leonie asked.