The Heiress Read Free Page B

mind had long ago slipped away. “One time I asked Mother about that.”
    Jamie was surprised. “And what did she say?”
    â€œShe waved her hand and said, ‘There were so many lovelyyoung men that summer I’m afraid I cannot remember who was what.’ ”
    The maleness in Jamie reacted first, making anger surge through him, but he knew his mother too well to take offense and so relaxed and smiled. “If her family found she was pregnant, who better to marry her to than Father? I can hear his mother, ‘Come, dear, put down that book. It’s time to get married.’ ”
    â€œDo you think he read on his wedding night? Oh, Jamie, do you think
we
are … ?” Her eyes widened.
    â€œEven scholars put down their books at times. Besides, look you at us and our cousins. We are alike. And Joby is the mirror image of Father.”
    â€œYes,” she said, “so you have thought of this, too?”
    â€œA time or two.”
    â€œPerhaps every time Edward pushed you into a pile of horse dung? Or tied you to a tree branch and left you? Or destroyed your possessions?”
    â€œOr when he called you names,” Jamie said softly, then his eyes twinkled. “Or when he tried to marry you to Henry Oliver.”
    At that Berengaria groaned. “Henry still petitions Mother.”
    â€œDoes he still have the intelligence of a carrot?”
    â€œMore of a radish,” she said bleakly, not wanting anyone to see her despair that the only honest marriage proposal she’d ever had came from someone like Henry Oliver. “Please, no more talk of Edward and how he decimated what little we had. And definitely no more talk of—of that man! Tell me of your heiress.”
    Jamie started to protest but closed his mouth. “His” heiress had everything to do with the gambling and whoring andgeneral depravity of his “brother” Edward. In Jamie’s mind no one as degenerate as Edward deserved the title of brother. While Jamie had been away fighting for the queen, performing tasks for the queen, endangering his life for the queen, Edward had been selling off all that his family owned so he could afford horses (whose legs or necks he broke), fine clothes (which he lost or destroyed), and his never-ending gambling (where he invariably lost).
    While Edward had been rapidly bankrupting the family, their father had imprisoned himself in a tower room to write a history of the world. He ate little, slept little, saw no one, spoke to no one. Just wrote day and night. When Berengaria and Joby confronted their father with proof of Edward’s excesses, including deeds of land he’d signed over to pay his debts, their father had said, “What can I do? It will all be Edward’s someday, so he may do what he likes. I
must
finish this book before I die.”
    But a fever had taken the lives of both Edward and their father. One day they were alive and two days later they were dead.
    When Jamie returned for the funerals, he found what had once been a moderately profitable estate now unable to support itself. All the land except what the old keep was standing on had been sold. The manor house had been sold the year before, along with all the fields and all the cottages where the farmers lived.
    For days Jamie had been inconsolable in his rage. “How did he expect you to live? If there are no rents or crops, how did he expect you to feed yourselves?”
    â€œWith his gambling wins, of course. He was always sayingthat he was going to win next time,” Joby had said, looking both prematurely old and heartbreakingly young. She raised an eyebrow at her brother. “Perhaps you should spend less time ranting about what you cannot change and do what you can with what you have.” She had given a meaningful glance toward Berengaria.
    Joby meant that no man wanted a blind wife no matter how beautiful she was or even what her dowry was. Always it would