Courting Julia Read online

  There was a woman standing on the steps leading down to the formal gardens. Aunt Millie? But he realized the ridiculousness of the thought as soon as his eyes focused properly on her. She was too young a woman. She was rather lovely, too, by Jove. She was not wearing a bonnet. The breeze was blowing her short dark curls back from her face. It was also blowing her light muslin dress against a very pleasing figure indeed. Shapely but not too voluptuous. Just very—feminine.

  Good Lord, he thought, leaning forward suddenly. Good Lord, it was Julia. She had been little more than a child the last time he saw her. But of course that had been six years before. His lips thinned as he remembered all his former disapproval of the girl. Hoyden, daredevil, show-off, pest. And of course, Uncle's great favorite. The apple of his eye despite the fact that she was no direct relation but the daughter of an irresponsible adventurer.

  Well, perhaps she had changed. He had not seen her for six years. By the time the carriage had come to a stop and the steps had been lowered and he had got out, she was standing on the lowest of the horseshoe steps, looking at him. Her eyes were almost on a level with his.

  “Good afternoon, Julia," he said, touching his hat and inclining his head to her. “How are you?"

  She was looking rather flushed, perhaps by the wind. “Hello, Daniel," she said. “How did you find out?”

  Her manner was faintly hostile, he thought. And definitely aggressive. Her bonnetless state and the absence of a shawl that might have prevented the wind from doing such revealing things to her muslin dress—both details that had dazzled him before he realized who she was—suddenly seemed offensive to him. Typical of Julia. Typically immodest. He raised his eyebrows and made his tone deliberately frosty. “I beg your pardon?”

  “How did you find out?” she asked again.

  “Find out what?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “I was in the area. I decided to call to see how my uncle is. Is he well?”

  “In the area!” she said scornfully. “What a ridiculous bouncer. And you know very well how Grandpapa is. It was Aunt Millie, was it not? She wrote to you.”

  “I did receive a letter from my aunt last week,” he said. “Are you going to keep me on the steps for the rest of the afternoon, Julia, or am I to be permitted to go inside?” He let his eyes roam over her to make her aware of the impropriety of her appearance. But it was useless to try to embarrass Julia, of course.

  “You had better turn around and go home again,” she said. “He does not want to see you. He wants to be left in peace. He gave strict instructions that no one was to write to you. Or any other member of the family.”

  “Did he?” He was beginning to feel irritated. “Clearly my aunt felt the need of the support of another member of the family, though, Julia. You will excuse me?” He set one foot on the bottom step.

  “You are not going to upset him,” she said. “I will not allow it.”

  He disdained to argue further with her. He walked around her and up the steps. “Thank you for your warm welcome,” he said. “It was graciously done, Julia.”

  “There is no need for the sarcasm,” she said, trotting up at his side when it became apparent that she had lost her audience at the bottom of the steps. “He is very ill, Daniel. He is d-dying. I don’t want him upset.”

  He is d-dying. It was a little too carefully done. He realized the truth immediately, of course. She had been quite clever. She had thought to have his uncle all to herself until his death. She had probably persuaded him that no one else cared to come to visit him when he was so ill. She had probably persuaded him to leave her something of a fortune in his will. Doubtless she had succeeded. She had always been the favorite anyway. Now she did not want him coming along and threatening to upset her plans.

  He stepped into the tiled hall and nodded to the butler, who was hurrying toward him from the back stairs. The man recognized him even after six years and called him by name.

  “How do you do, Bragge?” the viscount said. “You will see about having a room made up for me and having my bags sent up? I would like to pay my respects to my uncle without delay. Is he up?”

  “No, he is not up,” Julia said indignantly from behind him. “He has not been up for a month.”

  The viscount ignored her. “Is he awake, Bragge?” he asked. “Perhaps you will go up and see. I will follow you. You may announce me if he is.”

  “Grandpapa is resting,” Julia said. “I shall go up, Bragge, and peep in on him. If by chance he is awake, I shall tell him of Lord Yorke’s unexpected arrival. Perhaps tomorrow he will be feeling strong enough for a brief courtesy call before his lordship continues on his way to wherever he is going.”

  It seemed, the viscount thought, that they had got themselves into the ridiculous situation of communicating through a third party. “Thank you, Bragge,” he said. “Miss Maynard will conduct me upstairs.” He turned to her and indicated with one imperious hand that she was to precede him to the staircase. She glared at him for a moment and then turned abruptly and strode away. Oh, Lord, she strode. Was it any wonder that she was still unmarried? She must be—oh, twenty at the very least.

  He followed her up the stairs, his eyes on the angry sway of her hips, and along the corridor to the master bedchamber. She turned to him and glared again and spoke in a pointed whisper.

  “He will be sleeping,” she said. “I will not have him woken up. Do you understand me? He was very tired when I left him half an hour ago.”

  “What do you think 1 am planning to do, Julia?” he asked, disdaining to whisper. “Invite him to waltz with me?”

  She was not amused. But then neither was he. She whisked herself around and proceeded to open the door very slowly and without any perceptible sound. She opened it a little, stepped inside, and half closed it behind her back. He heard a deep, gruff voice and then hers. He set a hand flat against the door and pushed it open against the pressure of her hand on the other side. She glared at him yet again.

  “Here is Daniel come to see you, Grandpapa,” she said, and she hurried across the room to bend over the bed and fuss with the bedclothes. “He was in Gloucestershire and thought he would come to call on you.”

  “Actually,” the viscount said quietly, stepping forward, his hands clasped behind his back, “I heard that you were poorly, sir, and came down without delay. I thought I might be of some use.”

  “Don’t exert yourself, Grandpapa,” Julia said, smoothing a hand over the sparse white hair on his head.

  “Millie, I suppose,” the earl said. “Dratted woman. There was no need for you to drag yourself away from the pleasures of the Season, Dan. Dying can be done just as well alone.”

  “But it is probably done a little more comfortably when there are family members close by,” the viscount said. “1 don't spend much time in town, sir. Usually I give the Season a miss altogether. It is no great hardship to be away from there.” He thought of Blanche with a pang of regret.

  “Hm,” the earl said. “Well, I’ll try not to keep you here long, Dan.” He attempted a chuckle and coughed instead. “A few days ought to do it nicely, I think.”

  “Grandpapa.” Julia dropped a kiss and a tear on his forehead. A nicely affecting scene, the viscount thought. “Don’t talk so. Don’t talk at all in fact. Didn’t you sleep?”

  “I’ll be sleeping long enough, Jule,” the earl said, “I have been thinking. I want to see Prudholm. Tomorrow. No later than tomorrow. Is he at the house?”

  “He is staying in the village,” Julia said. “Leave it for a while, Grandpapa. You need more rest.”

  “When a man is close to the greatest event of his life,” the earl said, “he has more need of his solicitor than his rest, Jule. Tomorrow. In the morning?”

  “Prudholm is your solicitor?” the viscount asked. “I shall see that he is here, sir, bright and early. Now if you will excuse me, I would like to wash and change and pay my respects to my aunt. 1 shall look in on you tomorrow if you are strong enough.”

 
“If I am alive, you mean,” the earl said, chuckling. “You may be an earl by tomorrow, Daniel. You will like that well enough, I daresay, eh?”

  Julia was glaring at him again, the viscount saw before he turned to leave the room. Doubtless she thought he had come merely to gloat over the imminence of a new and grander tide. Doubtless she was terrified that the summoning of the solicitor was a sign that the old man was going to change his will. Was she so confident that it was in her favor now?

  “I shall see you at dinner, Julia,” he said with exaggerated courtesy. “What time is it served?”

  “Six o’clock,” she said. “We keep country hours here.”

  He bowed and left the room.

  The Earl of Beaconswood spent almost an hour alone the next morning with his solicitor, keeping his doctor waiting downstairs for all of half an hour. The doctor was with him only ten minutes before reporting to Julia and to the Viscount Yorke that his lordship was comfortable and free of pain provided he was given his medication regularly, but that he was weakening.

  It was the same report as he had given daily for the past month.

  The earl was civil to his nephew when the latter called upon him for ten minutes after luncheon. He barked at his sister and made her cry when she bumped against his bed while shaking pillows that he had protested did not need shaking. And he lay awake for an hour listening to Julia read the opening of A Pilgrim’s Progress. It was a damned sight more entertaining than that Gulliver drivel, he gave as his opinion, though Julia had the impression that he had not been listening at all. He stared at her broodingly and she waited for him to start talking about Sir Albert Dickson again. But he did not do so.

  The earl ate a little dinner when Julia coaxed him with some of his favorite delicacies, and he bade a civil good night to her and to the viscount and his sister. He even added that Millie had a good heart after growling at her again when it looked as if she was approaching his pillows. He took his medicine obediently before Julia left.

  But he did his dying alone as he had wished to do, without either noise or fuss. His valet, who had dozed the night away in his master’s dressing room, the door wide open so that he would hear the slightest noise, found his master dead in the morning when he tiptoed into the room to check on him in the early dawn light.

  It looked for all the world, the valet explained to everyone belowstairs later in the morning, as if the old earl was merely sleeping peacefully. Everyone else agreed, even Aunt Millie, who had to be carried away by a stout footman when she had the vapors although she had insisted on viewing the body, and Julia, who wept soundlessly until Lord Yorke quietly directed the housekeeper to take her back to her room and call her maid to stay with her there.

  It was the viscount—or rather the new Earl of Beaconswood—who, after consulting his uncle’s solicitor, wrote to all his relatives to summon them to Primrose Park for the funeral if at all possible, but certainly for the reading of the will. It was the new earl who set in motion arrangements for the funeral.

  Julia was left alone to grieve.

  2

  The older generation always came faithfully to Primrose Park during the summer. Rarely did any of them miss. The younger generation had all come too while they were still children. The summers had always been wild, delirious times for Julia. She had played her heart out and wondered how she had lived for ten months without them and without any significant companionship except that of her grandfather and Aunt Millie. And yet when summer ended and they all went back home again, she had always returned cheerfully and even gratefully to the quiet life of Primrose Park and the warm and active one of her imagination.

  The cousins had not come so often since they had started to grow up, especially the male cousins. There were other things to entice them away, like Brighton or one of the other spas, or parties at the homes of school or university friends. And Susan had married two years before and now had obligations to her husband’s family as well as her own.

  But they all came at the news of the death—just as the old earl had predicted they would. Not one of them stayed away, except Susan’s husband. Most of them arrived in time for the funeral, but they were all there for the reading of the will, ten days after the death of the old Earl of Beaconswood. The new earl summoned them and they came, shocked and grieving and rather angry at the fact that they had not been warned or given the chance to come sooner.

  Aunt Sarah, the Viscountess Yorke, Daniel’s mother, was the first to arrive with her daughter, Camilla. Aunt Sarah was clearly annoyed.

  “The old fool,” she said of her deceased brother-in-law in Julia’s hearing, though she was talking to her son. “He could not have informed his closest family that he was ill, I suppose, and had the comfort of our presence here while he was dying. Sometimes I wonder why I married into such a strange family when I had other choices. And why did you not let me know, Daniel? I take it unkindly in you to come rushing down here without a word to me.”

  “Mama,” he said soothingly, “you and Camilla were in Bath and I was in London. Besides, Aunt Millie urged secrecy.”

  Aunt Sarah made a sound indicating her contempt of her sister-in-law’s urgings. She was, Julia had always found, an abrupt, forceful, rather unsympathetic person.

  Camilla smiled and kissed her brother and hugged Julia, murmuring words of sympathy in her ear. Camilla was still nursing a broken heart over the death in battle of her officer fiancé two years before. She was twenty-four years old.

  Aunt Eunice and Uncle Raymond, Lord and Lady Bellamy, arrived the day before the funeral as did Uncle Henry and Aunt Roberta, Lord and Lady Hemming, brother and sister-in-law of the late countess, with their son and daughter, Malcolm and Stella Stacey. Julia hugged Stella, two years her junior and always her playmate during their girlhood. Malcolm bowed over her hand but did not smile. Malcolm had never been a smiler. But then everyone knew that he was painfully shy.

  Aunt Eunice spent the rest of the day in tears, exclaiming at the cruelty of a brother who had not sent for his own sister during his dying days. Uncle Henry set an arm about Julia’s shoulders and sympathized with her on her loss. She must come back to live with him and Aunt Roberta, he said. His kindness succeeded only in dissolving Julia in tears. Again.

  Poor Grandpapa. She shed many tears over him, most of them in private, during those days leading up to his funeral and during the few days following while they all waited for the remaining members of the family to arrive for the reading of the will. She missed him. She felt orphaned anew despite the fact that she was one and twenty years of age. Suddenly she felt as if she had no one left of her very own.

  It was a bleak and rather a frightening feeling. And an unnecessary one, she supposed. Not only Uncle Henry, but also Aunt Eunice and Uncle Raymond had offered her a home. But of course they offered out of a kindness she could not accept. She could not become a charity case to people who had no real obligation to her at all. Especially when she was twenty-one years old. Grandpapa had understood that. That was why he had urged marriage on her so persistently.

  It was equally bleak knowing that another man now held Grandpapa’s title and gave the orders that Grandpapa had always given and commanded the type of respect and deference that had always been Grandpapa’s. Daniel. Julia resented him. Unreasonably so, perhaps since he certainly did take charge of affairs that would have been difficult for her and Aunt Millie to handle alone. Daniel was extremely efficient.

  Julia resented him nonetheless. But then she had always resented Daniel. Or almost always. He had always been old enough to despise her. When she was a child, he had been a boy and not at all interested in playing games of house or school or chasing. When she became a girl, he had been a young man and already, from the age of fourteen, a viscount. He had not been interested in his girl cousins and their squeals and giggles or in the sort of wild games the boys and girls played together. He had grown up fast. Too fast.

  Daniel had always had a way of looking contemptuously at h
is younger cousins—especially at Julia. She could remember bristling with resentment at the way he had always looked at her when he saw her riding astride or swimming in the lake or playing cricket, her dress tucked up at the waist so that she would not trip over the hem. He had always given the impression that he would respect a worm beneath his boot more than he respected her.

  So she had always resented him. And set out to shock him whenever she could. And paradoxically she had also tried to impress him. For despite everything Daniel had always been the older cousin, the very handsome older cousin. When she was fifteen she had often spent an age changing from one dress to another before her looking glass until she was satisfied with her choice and dressing and redressing her hair until it was just so. But the only time he had noticed her that summer was the time when she had come racing and giggling up onto the terrace a foot behind Gussie, her face flushed, her dress creased and dusty, her hair flying in all directions and Daniel had been standing there looking as immaculate as usual.

  “Really, Julia,” he had said, his eyes moving over her in disgust, “isn’t it time you started to grow up?”

  After he had strolled away, she had crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue and made Gussie hold his nose in an attempt to stifle his laughter. And she had been glad when Daniel had not come back the next summer—or the next or the next. She was glad he had never come back. She wished he had not come back now. Conceited, cold, humorless—earl. She hated now to think that he was the new Earl of Beaconswood.

  Frederick and Lesley Sullivan, sons of Aunt Eunice and Uncle Raymond, arrived the morning after the funeral, and seemed not one whit upset at having missed it. Or rather, Frederick did not. But then Frederick did not take anything very seriously. He was a rake. At least that was how Gussie described him and Julia had no reason to doubt the truth of it.