Lady Caro Read Free Page B

spotted with puddles. The leaves of the oak and chestnut trees were beaded with water. Rolling fields, lushly green in the rain’s wake, were decorated with golden patches of ragwort. Creamy honeysuckle and pink dog-rose poked from hedgerows, and delicate blue harebells were scattered along the roadside.
    The viscount had wanted this solitary ride through the pretty countryside to sort out his troubled thoughts. By now he had reluctantly reconciled himself to the necessity, although not the desirability, of marrying. Titles carried with them obligations, and it was his duty as heir to the earldom to marry to produce children. He had always hoped for a love match, but his father was right. At eight and twenty, after years of having found the marriage mart’s finest offerings wanting, he was unlikely to fall hopelessly in love again as he had with Estelle. Since he must make a loveless marriage sooner or later, he thought gloomily, it might as well be sooner and set his father’s mind at ease.
    Ashley was much troubled, too, about the possibility that Henry Neel could have been involved in William’s death. There had been bad blood between the two cousins for as long as Ashley could remember, and their hatred had intensified with the years. William, the high stickler, had regarded Henry’s scandalous career at the gaming tables and in the boudoir as an unforgivable blot on the Neel family honor, and had let him know it at every opportunity. Henry, in turn, had delighted in goading the humorless William into a fury whenever he could.
    Ashley was positive that the key to William’s death was an evil-looking man that his good friend, Mercer Corte, had seen near Bourn House early on the morning of William’s race. Corte had been returning home, a few doors down from the Bourn House on Curzon Street, at about four a.m. when a hulking figure, moving with astonishing quietness for a man of his size, had emerged from the path that led to the Bourn stable.
    “I knew immediately that he could be up to no good,” Mercer had told Ashley later. “I’ve never seen an uglier-looking blackguard. His right ear was missing. He had two ugly scars on his face, one on his forehead and the other down his left cheek, and his nose was flattened. He was clearly a man who belonged in the rookeries of St. Giles, not on Curzon Street.”
    Ashley was certain that the one-eared man must have been the one who had tampered with the Wheel of William’s curricle, but had he been hired to do so by Henry? To answer that question, Ashley would have to locate the man among the tens of thousands crowded into London’s slums, a virtual impossibility if one did not know where to begin looking.
    Ashley’s equipage reached the high iron gates of Bellhaven. A stout porter hurried out of his stone cottage, which was half covered with ivy. The viscount wondered whether his lack of attendants and baggage would appear suspicious enough for the gatekeeper to deny him entrance. But the man merely said, “Aye, and ye must be Lord Vinson.”
    “How did you know?” the surprised Ashley asked.
    “Ye be a day late. The others came yesterday. Only other body ’pected today be his lordship’s solicitor.” The porter cast an appraising eye over Ashley’s quietly elegant attire and expensive rig. “An ye be no solicitor.” The man swung wide the gates so that Ashley could drive through them. “This road takes ye to the house, but it be a fair piece.”
    Ashley urged his horses up a broad avenue, lined with linden trees, that wound through Bellhaven’s park. As he drove, he considered again his father’s list of marital eligibles. Neither Lady Margaret White nor Elizabeth Trott would be at Bellhaven. But the beautiful Kelsie sisters, Mary Milbank, and Emily Picton would. The first three held no attraction for him, and Emily Picton was spoken for. That left only the marquess’s daughter Caroline, and Ashley had come by default to pin great hopes on this unknown