LITMIR.BIZ

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to arrange a match between the pair of you. He is giving a house-party at Markham Hall next week, and I would wish you to join it so that you might become acquainted with her. I hope you grasp that the matter is urgent. I am not prepared to allow you to continue your irresponsible way of life any longer.

      ‘You may leave. I want no verbal assurances from you, only deeds.’

      His father sat down and began to write, lifting his head up only to say, ‘You know where the door is, Hadleigh. Kindly use it. I have no wish to see you again until you have done all that I have just asked of you.’

      So, here he was, several hours later, about to give Caroline her congé, not as he had once imagined, at his wish, but at his father’s. If I had any courage at all I would have told him to go to the devil and set out to make my own fortune. But how? I am trained for nothing. I wanted to be a soldier. That was denied me. I was the heir, Ritchie was to be the soldier. I asked my father to allow me to manage our estates at Eddington in Northumberland, but was told that that was cousin Arthur Shaw’s job. What’s more, he said, he had no wish to deprive him of it in favour of an untrained, overgrown schoolboy.

      Russell’s unhappy train of thought stopped at this point. He had no mind to revive for himself the misery which had resulted from his father’s other brutal interference in his life thirteen years ago. Not that that was entirely his father’s fault, but had he been kinder then…who knows, things might have been different.

      No, I will not think of that…The past is dead and gone and that time will not return again. What time had done was to bring him to Caroline’s door before he was ready to face her. The unhappy truth was that he disliked the notion of telling her that he wished to end their liaison so much that he had continually put it off. Now his father had forced his hand and he must bite the bullet.

      Somewhat to his surprise there was a hackney carriage standing in the street outside and Caroline’s little page was loading bags into its boot. He ran briskly up the steps, his door key in his hand and let himself in, calling her name with an urgency which surprised him. He was even more surprised when the drawing room door opened and Caroline, looking as lovely as ever, walked into the hall, dressed for the street and carrying a large leather bag.

      ‘You?’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought that you had forgotten that I lived here. Have you any notion of how long it is since you last visited me?’

      Shame struck Russell all over again. It was truly his day to feel like a cur! Oh, he would pay her off with a lump sum, but the cruel fact remained that he was casting her off.

      ‘Not lately, I know,’ he almost stammered. He had stammered as a boy until a tutor with a cane had banished it—lately it had begun to come back again.

      ‘True,’ she said, smiling at him coldly. ‘Well, I will relieve you of the need to visit me again. I have tired of your capriciousness and have decided to leave you. I was about to post you a letter informing you of my departure. Fortunately that will no longer be necessary since I can now tell you so in person.’

      ‘Leave me?’ he heard himself saying witlessly.

      ‘Yes, leave you. It has been borne in upon me for some time that you have tired of me and did not know how to tell me so. I entered on our liaison for the foolish reason that I was in love with you. Oh, I knew that you would never marry me, but you assured me that you had decided that you would never marry anyone. I stupidly believed that that meant that we could play house together until we became Darby and Joan. I am still in love with you, but I refuse to be a millstone around your neck. I have recently met a worthy merchant who has decided to make an honest woman of me. We are to marry next week.

      ‘And, no, I want no farewell presents from you of any kind. The one wish that I have to leave you with is that I hope that you may never suffer as I have done in loving someone as hopelessly as I have loved you. Farewell, Lord Hadleigh. Let us remember the happy days we had together and wish each other well. Now I must leave. The carriage, and my new life, awaits me.’

      ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not like this.’

      ‘You mean that you would have preferred to cast me off, and not me you?’

      ‘No,’ he said again, but, of course, she was right.

      She reached up to pat his cheek with her gloved hand. ‘Remember me a little, is all I ask.’

      With that she was gone, out of the house and out of his life.

      The decision had been made for him, but Russell felt no better for that—only worse, seeing that this was the second occasion on which a woman had abandoned him. Between his father and his mistress he had been shown a vision of himself with all his shortcomings made plain. All that remained was for him to go to Markham Hall to court a woman whom he had no wish to marry in order to recover his father’s favour. Woman was perhaps a misnomer. He seemed to recall that Angelica Markham was only eighteen years old.

      He arrived home to find that his father was out, so he could not inform him that his long-standing affair with Caroline Fawcett was over. At a loose end—as usual, he thought bitterly—he wandered into his father’s study, intending to ask his secretary, Mr Graves, when he would return. The secretary was not there, either. He began to leave, but something, he never knew quite what, led him to walk to the secretary’s tall desk, which stood before the window, to examine the papers on it.

      There was a small pile of them that contained the accounts and the other details of the family estate at Eddington. Moved, again by he knew not what, he began to inspect them, the accounts first.

      When he was at Oxford he had discovered that he had a bent for mathematics. Where others of his age found the subject boring and spent more time either amusing themselves or preparing for a political life by concentrating on the classics, he had played with numbers. They had always fascinated him. He remembered Dr Beauregard saying…

      No, forget that, forget everything to do with Dr Beauregard, particularly his daughter.

      He could not, alas, forget what lay before him while he rapidly totted up the lines of figures. Now, having done so, he thought, nay, he was sure, that something was wrong. He added them up again, to reach the same answer and to turn back to an earlier sheet. He had just finished checking that when the door opened and Graves came in.

      ‘Ah, m’lord, were you looking for me, or your father?’

      ‘My father, but I find that I do have a question for you about these accounts.’

      ‘Indeed, m’lord. I wonder what you think that you have found.’

      ‘If I am not mistaken, Graves, there are some discrepancies here which I ought, perhaps, to discuss with you.’

      Graves, who was well aware of the lack of consideration and respect which the Earl had for his heir, always addressed Russell in a manner which showed that he shared his master’s opinion of him. He shook his head and there was a slight hint of mockery in his answer.

      ‘I, too, have checked these figures and have discovered nothing untoward. I fear that you must be mistaken.’

      ‘I, however, fear that I am not,’ returned Russell in a voice which Graves had never heard before. ‘You will do me the courtesy—’

      Graves did the unforgivable: he not only interrupted his superior, but refused to do as he had been ordered. ‘I am a busy man, m’lord. I have gone through these accounts and reports most carefully and find nothing wrong with them. May I suggest that you raise this matter with your father, who, I assure you, has the utmost faith in my ability and my integrity. He, too, always checks my work, and that done for him by Mr Arthur Shaw, his agent at Eddington, and so far all has been to his satisfaction.’

      For a moment Russell was tempted to seize the impudent swine before him by his cravat and threaten to throttle him if he continued to refuse to discuss the matter. Only the thought that his father would be sure to take Graves’s part prevented him. Yes, he would speak to his father, but he knew full well that his answer would be the same as his secretary’s: a refusal to listen to what his

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