Runaway Miss. Mary Nichols

had it he was mad as fire because it was a boy. Wife two died in an accident with a coach and wife three was murdered by an unknown assailant who has never been caught. Her brother maintained at the time Bentwater himself was the culprit, but no evidence was found and it was put down to the man’s grief. Naturally, his lordship has been finding it hard to persuade a fourth to take the trip to the altar.’

      He could not imagine any young lady of twenty years, with an ounce of spirit, agreeing to marry Lord Bentwater. The man was positively repulsive. Nor would any mother worth her salt allow her daughter to be used in that way—Sir George had said as much. ‘What do you suppose will happen if she cuts up rough and refuses the old rake? They can hardly drag her to the altar.’

      ‘No idea. Presumably Sir George will have to find another way to redeem his vouchers.’

      ‘If we had not agreed to play, the situation would not have occurred.’

      ‘If we hadn’t played, they would have found someone else, if not tonight, then some other time. I’ll wager Bentwater didn’t just think of that on the spur of the moment, he has been planning it for some time. And I fancy anyone trying to thwart him will find he has made a mortal enemy. If you are thinking of intervening, Malvers…’

      ‘Not I. I do not have twenty thousand pounds to throw away.’ Why did everyone assume that, because he had inherited a title, he was a wealthy man? It was far from the case.

      ‘You wouldn’t be throwing it away. You would be gaining a wife and, according to Sir George, she has a fortune. I say, you aren’t married, are you?’

      ‘No, never had the time. I’ve been soldiering all my adult life.’ The late Viscount had had very little time for his younger son, whom he considered soft and too attached to his mother. He had packed him off into the army to ‘harden him up and make a man of him’. The life of a soldier had certainly hardened him, had taught him not to shudder at man’s inhumanity to man, to deal with wounds and indiscipline in a measured way, but under that hard shell the core of him remained what it had always been: sympathetic to the plight of others, especially those not able to defend themselves.

      He had been known to give up his own billet for a soldier who was ill, but should that same man let him down his wrath could be terrible. Being an officer, it had sometimes been his duty to order punishment for misdemeanours among his men, even when he felt sorry for them, but showing it would have been interpreted as weakness and he would have forfeited their respect. He was not to be duped or crossed, but anyone with a genuine grievance would find in him a ready listener. He could fight ferociously, but at the end of a successful battle could spare the life of an enemy, when others would have slaughtered him with no compunction. The two sides of his nature—the hard, somewhat cynical soldier and the compassionate, caring man—were often in conflict with each other, which made him something of an enigma to those around him.

      ‘So, have you only recently come into your inheritance?’

      ‘Last year. My elder brother died and my father only a week later, of the shock, you know.’ Lawrence, seven years older than Alex, had been the apple of his father’s eye, a hard-riding, hard-drinking autocrat, and his death in a hunting accident had caused their father to collapse of a heart attack from which he had not recovered.

      ‘My condolences.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      ‘Your brother had no heir?’

      ‘No.’ Lawrence had married as society and family convention dictated, money and rank being uppermost in the arrangement, and that had been a disaster. Lawrence had found himself trying to satisfy a wife who would never be satisfied. As far as Constance was concerned, she had married a title and the fact that her husband’s pockets were not bottomless carried no weight with her. The more he tried to please her, the more she demanded.

      ‘Why did you marry her?’ Alex had asked him after one particularly acrimonious dispute over her extravagance and the disreputable friends she encouraged.

      ‘Because it was expected of me. As the elder son I must have a wife in order to beget a legitimate heir to carry on the line.’

      He knew that. ‘But why Constance? Why not someone else?’

      ‘She seemed eminently suitable—old established family, good looks—and she set out to charm me. Once the ring was on her finger, I realised how false that charm was. Too late. Just be thankful you are a second son, Alex, and can please yourself.’

      Matters went from bad to worse, until the prospect of a career in the army was a welcome escape from the tensions in the house. The men under his command had become his family. They lived, ate, played and fought together and his care of them was repaid with staunch loyalty. He had seen some of them die, seen courage and stoicism and cruelty too. He had watched those women who had been allowed to accompany their men combing the battlefield after every encounter with the enemy, ready to tend their wounds. He admired their devotion, their stoical acceptance of the hard and dangerous life in order to be with their men, to endure heat and drought, rain and snow, to cook for them at the end of a day’s march, tend their wounds, even carry their kit if they were too exhausted to do so. He had found himself comparing the steadfastness of these ragged uneducated women with some of the officers’ wives who considered it their God-given right to ride in carriages, take the cosiest billets and the best of whatever food was going. And their men, fools that they were, pandered to them, just as Lawrence had done. It hadn’t made Constance love him any the more; Alex suspected she despised him. In his opinion, it was the miserable state of Lawrence’s marriage and his wife’s inability to give him a child that had led to his brother’s heavy drinking and ultimate demise. Alex was determined not to let that happen to him.

      He had come home after Waterloo to find his mother in mourning, his sister-in-law run off with her latest lover and the estate struggling to pay its way. But he’d be damned if he’d marry for money, which was what the family lawyer had suggested. He had taken over Lawrence’s mantle, but he was determined not to fall into the same trap his brother had. If he ever married, and he was certainly in no hurry to do so, he would need to be very, very sure…

      ‘So, what are you doing in London?’ Maddox’s voice interrupted his reverie.

      ‘I had business to transact.’ He had to bring the Buregreen estate back into profit, but, since his father had never allowed him to have anything to do with the business of running it, he knew next to nothing about how it could be done and he needed the help of a good steward. He had come to London with that in mind and had already engaged a man who had been recommended by his lawyer. ‘And my mother had an idea a little town bronze…’ he added with a wry smile.

      ‘Then why not come to Almack’s with me on Wednesday? It’s the place to be seen if you’re hanging out for a wife. We could take a peep at Sir George’s stepdaughter.’

      ‘I am not hanging out for a wife. I would as lief not marry at all.’

      ‘But every man must marry,’ Maddox said. ‘Any man of substance, that is. It is his duty to find himself a wife to carry on the line, someone from a good family of equal rank and with an impeccable reputation. That is of prime importance. Of course, it helps if she is also decorative…’

      ‘Duty?’ Alex queried. ‘I did my duty as a soldier.’

      ‘So you may have done, but there are other kinds of duty, don’t you know? What would happen to all the great country estates if there were no sons to inherit? They’d go to distant cousins, that’s what, and eventually be dispersed. Who would run the country then, eh? Mushrooms, jumped-up cits, men without an ounce of breeding. It wouldn’t do, my dear fellow, it simply would not do.’

      Alex had heard that argument from both his mother and aunt since he had come back from Waterloo. ‘I did not expect to inherit, I wasn’t brought up even to think of it. And what I’ve seen of marriage does not dispose me towards venturing into it.’

      ‘You sound as if you have been bitten, my friend.’

      ‘Not me, but I have