The Proud Viscount Read Free Page A

would upset everyone, from Lord Barlow down to the stable hands. “Not to be trusted,” was the way they were given to phrasing it. What they meant was that Richard had met his death riding that horse, and no one was sure whether the horse or Richard’s illness was to blame. They preferred to think it was the horse. Rossmere had ridden Ascot for the last year, and he knew better.
    The horse was half-wild, of course. Always had been. Rossmere remembered riding him several years ago when he’d visited Richard. There was no sign during his “good” times that Richard was sick at all. Actually, Rossmere had considered Ascot the sole indication. An odd concept, perhaps, but one he felt quite certain about. Ascot was infected with the untamed wildness that seized Richard during the black times. In the man this primitive turbulence was horrifying; in the horse it was awesome.
    Ascot’s wildness was not a challenge to him. Rossmere had no interest in “conquering” the beast, or mastering its unruly temper. Quite the opposite, in fact. His blood raced with the excitement of allowing Ascot his head, of storming across fields and soaring over fences at a speed and height he’d not known before, even in his younger years, when the best of horses were available to him.
    Rossmere liked to remember Richard in the “good” times, riding Ascot as he himself did now, filled with the glory of unrestricted movement. But he never forgot that Richard didn’t always have that freedom. From the first sign of an impending episode, he was locked safely in the farthest wing of Willow End, cared for by a stout manservant and no other. If Rossmere had wondered why Richard was imprisoned at Willow End and not his own estate of Graywood, he had never given voice to his question.
    For this visit Rossmere had been given a suite in the east wing. Both the sitting room and the bedroom were hung with tapestries depicting various Greek and Roman myths, their predominant colors of brown and blue heavy against the tan walls. Various details lightened the rooms, though: the vases of summer flowers, the light draperies at the windows, the height and intricacy of the ceilings.
    While he allowed Lord Barlow’s valet to adjust the fit of his coat, he gazed out over the park where the ground rose toward the downs. They had raced there once, he and Richard. Ascot had triumphed over his own hack without the slightest difficulty, and Rossmere had found himself longing to ride the huge black stallion. As though aware of his thoughts, a tendency Richard exhibited from time to time, he’d dismounted and beckoned the viscount to take over Ascot. “You’ll do well with him,” he’d said, though the general wisdom at the Graywood and Willow End stables even in those days was that no one but Richard could manage the wild horse. No doubt it was that incident that had prompted Richard to add the codicil to his will giving Rossmere the horse.
    Because everything else had gone to Lady Jane.
    For one brief moment, when the letter came from his godmother informing him of Richard’s death, he had allowed himself to hope that he would be his cousin’s beneficiary, that all his financial embarrassments were over. That tiny, suspended moment between reading one sentence and the next had betrayed him. To have considered his own situation when his poor cousin lay dead might have been human, but it disgusted him, showing him how poverty had eroded his humanity. Rossmere had vowed then that it wouldn’t happen again.
    As he strode through the corridors of the house, he caught glimpses of the small army of servants who kept the place immaculate. He’d been raised to that kind of luxury, where his every whim was accommodated and his pockets were perpetually full. He was reduced now to two loyal family retainers who served him at Longborough Park, but he’d found that there were certain compensations for his present position.
    One of them was that he wasn’t expected to