The Honourable Earl. Mary Nichols

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      “Do you come often to Chelmsford?” he asked.

      “Occasionally, when I need something I cannot buy in the village.”

      “Which village?”

      He was flirting with her. She ought not to be talking to him at all, but they were unlikely to meet again, so where was the harm? She stopped at the door of the library. “Here we are. Thank you for your escort, sir.”

      He bowed, which was not easy considering he was holding an umbrella, and it made her laugh. “You should laugh all the time. It lights up your eyes.”

      “Sir, you are too forward.”

      He sighed. “It was ever thus with me. Shall we meet again?”

      “That, sir, is in the hands of Providence.”

      “Then I hope Providence will be kind to me.”

      The Honourable Earl

      Mary Nichols

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

       MARY NICHOLS,

      born in Singapore, came to England when she was three, and has spent most of her life in different parts of East Anglia. She has been a radiographer, school secretary, information officer and industrial editor, as well as a writer. She has three grown children and four grand-children.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

       Prologue

      1753

       T he rambling old vicarage was eerily quiet, but then it was five o’clock in the morning and eight-year-old Lydia, watching by the window, saw the first flush of pink on the horizon above the marshes and knew it would soon be dawn. There was a thick mist above the ground and the trees in the coppice on her left appeared to be growing in the air and the rooftops in the village of Colston to her right seemed to be floating without walls to support them. Nearer the house the stables were solid enough and the ground beneath her window, though damp, was becoming more visible as the light strengthened.

      Perhaps he would not go. Perhaps friendship had prevailed and nothing untoward would happen. Perhaps Freddie, her beloved brother, and his great friend, Lord Ralph Latimer, had made up their quarrel and there would be no duel. She could not imagine anything terrible enough to make the two young men hate each other. And yet, earlier that evening when she had found Freddie in the bookroom, cleaning their father’s pistols, and had asked him what he was doing, he had been grim and angry.

      ‘It is time you were in bed and asleep, Lydia,’ he had said. ‘I must do what I must do.’

      ‘But what must you do?’

      ‘Nothing. Go to bed. If Father catches you here, he will be angry.’

      ‘He will be angry if he sees you with those pistols. You know he never allows anyone to touch them.’

      ‘They will be back in their case before he misses them.’ He had paused to peer into her face. ‘Unless you tell him.’

      ‘Oh, no, Freddie, I would never do that. But why are you so angry?’

      ‘I am not angry. At least, I am not angry with you, but I shall be if you do not go upstairs this minute and forget you ever saw me.’

      ‘But guns are dangerous things, you might be killed.’

      ‘So if I am, honour will be satisfied.’

      It was then she realised that he meant to fight a duel. Mistress Grey, her teacher and mentor, was a great reader of romantic fiction in which duels frequently featured and she often left her books lying about. Lydia had devoured them as she did all manner of reading matter, her curiosity about everything insatiable. Sometimes there were reports of duels in the newspapers which she had been forbidden to read. But forbidding Lydia to do something was tantamount to an invitation and she read them clandestinely after they had been sent to the kitchen to be used to light the fires.

      ‘But who has doubted your honour?’

      ‘Ralph,’ he had said morosely.

      ‘But he is your best friend. You have always done everything together—you are even together at Cambridge. How can you fight him?’

      ‘I have no choice. He has insulted me. And…’ He stopped, as if remembering his listener was only an eight-year-old. ‘Now go to bed and not a word to anyone or I’ll have your hide.’ And when she smiled at this empty threat, had added, ‘I mean it, Lydia. It is not a jest.’

      She had crept to her room and undressed, slipping into bed beside the five-year-old Annabelle, but she could not sleep. She knew that Freddie was impulsive and headstrong, as she was herself, or so Mistress Grey told her often enough, but surely he would not put his life at risk or shoot Ralph? Ralph was the son of the Earl of Blackwater; there would be a terrible outcry if anything happened to him. She would not even begin to think of the possibility that it might be Freddie who came off worse. And duelling had been outlawed, hadn’t it? She must do something. But what? Freddie had forbidden her to tell their father and, in any case, she would do nothing that would get him into trouble. She could tell Susan or Margaret, her older sisters, but they would certainly go to their father with the tale, and she could not worry her mother with it. After all, the two young men might come to their senses if someone were to jolt them into seeing the foolishness of their ways. And, lying sleepless in her bed, it seemed to her that she was the only one who could do it.

      She had dressed in the dimity dress she had worn that day, tied her thick brown hair back with a ribbon and seated herself on the deep window ledge of her bedroom to wait for Freddie to make a move, praying that he would not, but fearing the worst.

      She heard a sound below her window and looked down to see Robert Dent, another of Freddie’s friends, riding up to the house. He stopped beneath her brother’s window and threw a handful of gravel at it. A moment later Freddie’s head appeared in the aperture. ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ he hissed. ‘Go round to the stable.’

      In less than a minute she heard the door of her brother’s room being opened and shut very softly. She crept to her own door and, as soon as she heard the front door open and close, grabbed a cloak from her closet and hurried downstairs. She had never saddled her pony herself, but she had watched the groom do it often enough and felt sure she could manage it. She had to be quick because she was not exactly sure where the duel was to take place.

      In her haste she stumbled over her father’s walking stick which he had propped against the wall in the hall. She stopped to pick it up and replace it, then reached for the door latch.

      ‘Lydia! Where do you think you are going?’

      She froze as her father, with a dressing gown over his nightshirt and his grey hair awry, came down the stairs behind her. Slowly she turned to face him. ‘I…I thought…I thought I heard a fox in the hen run.’

      ‘I hear nothing. And you are dressed.’ He grabbed her arm and almost dragged her into the room he used for a study, where he kept his books and composed his sermons. ‘Now, you will come in here and tell me what this