LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      A London ballroom—St Nicholas’s Day,

      6th December 1820

      Hal twisted the sprig of mistletoe idly between his fingers and took another cleansing breath of the cold night air. The heat in the tedious Renshaw ballroom was stifling, but then again, as it was quite the crush inside no doubt everyone would laud the evening as a resounding success. There was nothing guaranteed to cause more excitement in town than two hundred sweating aristocrats stuffed into their winter finery and all forcing themselves to be cheerful in deference to the season.

      For Hal, it also signalled the start of a month of sheer hell, as now he was the Earl of Redbridge he would be expected to attend every single one of the festive functions between now and Twelfth Night. It was, apparently, a Redbridge tradition, and the only one his mother was determined to continue even though her tyrannical husband was mouldering in the ground, and she had happily ignored all his other edicts since his death last year. In fact, she was so looking forward to it, Hal couldn’t bring himself to complain, even though it culminated in him hosting the final, most opulent and eagerly anticipated ball of all at his Berkeley Square house on the sixth of January. Twelfth Night. The official end of the Christmas season.

      In previous years, he had always managed to make a hasty exit from the short but frenetic festive season. He had danced and flirted with a few game girls, then disappeared to his club or to a gaming hell or to the bedchamber of whatever willing widow or wayward wife he happened to be enjoying at that particular time. Now he was stuck. Shackled by an ingrained sense of duty to his mother, who was enjoying life to the full now that she finally had her freedom and her period of mourning was over. Although like him, she hadn’t seemed to mourn much. His father had been a mean-spirited, dictatorial curmudgeon who criticised absolutely everything his wayward children did. But he had made Hal’s gentle mother’s life a misery.

      Hal had lost count of the number of times he had heard her crying, all alone in her bedchamber, because of yet another cruel or thoughtless thing his sire had done to her. However, if he went to her when she was crying, she would pretend nothing was amiss. ‘Pay it no mind, Hal. Marriage is meant to be filled with trials and tribulations.’ Something which did not make the prospect of it particularly enticing.

      If he went to his father and called him on it, after the tirade of abuse which always accompanied such impertinence, his father would shrug it off as the way of things. A wife was a means of getting heirs. Nothing more. That duty discharged, they were merely doomed to tolerate each other. That was the inevitable way of things. And surely it was long past time Hal stopped sowing wild oats, settled down to do his duty to the house of Stuart and begat some heirs of his own to continue the legacy? And whilst he was about it, he needed to start learning about estate management and how to do proper business, which in his father’s world usually meant ruining people and feasting off their carcasses in order to amass an even larger fortune than he already had.

      ‘The world runs on coin, Henry, nothing else matters. Or do you intend to be a shocking and scandalous disappointment to me for ever?’

      A silly question, seeing as Hal had no appetite for either cruelty or proper business. Instead, he had made it his life’s mission to thoroughly disappoint his father at every given opportunity as a point of principal, and the single most thorough way of doing that was to be creating frequent scandals. Hal enjoyed the spectacle of his livid father’s purple face as much as he did bedding a succession of wholly unsuitable, and gloriously unmarriageable, women. Reckless wagers at the card table came a close second. His father abhorred the careless use of good money on anything so frivolous and unpredictable. Money was for making more money to add to the heaps and heaps they had already, because money meant power and his father adored being powerful above all else. Even if that meant making everybody else miserable or his only son hate everything his father stood for. As the years passed, the gulf between the Earl and his scandalous only son had widened so much there might as well have been a whole ocean between them. A state of affairs which suited Hal just fine. Being scandalous had become so ingrained, such an intrinsic part of his own character, now his father was dead he actually missed misbehaving. It was as if a part of him was missing.

      It was not the only thing in his life which had changed since he had inherited the title. He also had to run the enormous estate he now owned, something he never expected to relish, and the vast and varied business investments were a constant source of amusement. Because it turned out Hal had a natural talent for making more money by considering investment opportunities his father would never have dared touch, and without having to resort to those abhorrent proper business tactics his dreadful father had used, Hal had been feeling a trifle odd for months now. Yet could not quite put his finger on why.

      The sad truth was simply having fun really wasn’t fun any more. Since he had become the Earl of Redbridge he had found the gaming hells had lost their appeal, as had the bawdy widows and wayward wives. Instead, he found himself wanting to dive into his new ledgers rather than a willing woman’s bed. He enjoyed reading the financial news and, to

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