Lord Calne's Christmas Ruby Read online

  Lord Calne’s Christmas Ruby

  Jude Knight

  Copyright 2016 Judith Anne Knighton writing as Jude Knight

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  ISBN: 978-0-9951049-0-7

  Dedication

  To the man who thinks my value is above rubies. I have loved you all my adult life, since ten days after my nineteenth birthday. Forty-eight years and counting. The value you place in me, the respect you give me, has made me who I am. Thank you.

  Fashionable London holds nothing for wealthy merchant's niece, Lalamani Finchurch. Except perhaps for an earl with a twisted hand and a charming smile. Why, for all the fortune hunters she has fended off since returning from India, is the one man who seems to like her so against marrying for money?

  Philip has inherited an earldom so impoverished that his only two choices are to marry for money or to abandon Society altogether and return to his work as an engineer. Which is no choice at all, until a tiny woman with beautiful eyes and a fine mind dances with him on his last night in London.

  When they meet again in a small country village, they join forces to uncover larceny and deceit, to rescue Lalamani’s aunt from poverty, and to discover that pride is a poor reason to refuse a love for a lifetime.

  Chapter One

  Philip Daventry escorted yet another vapid debutante back to her Mama, who coyly remarked that dear Amanda had never been so pleased with a dance, and another would not be beyond the bounds of propriety. “Dear Amanda” giggled and nodded, but not without an anxious look at Philip’s twisted hand, the scarring hidden by the glove but the deformity in no way concealed.

  Philip made the excuse he was promised for the rest of the evening, and must, even now, find his next partner. Before he could extract himself, the mother declared both ladies would be at home to the newly minted Earl of Calne whenever he cared to call. “Amanda so enjoys a drive in the park, Lord Calne,” she hinted, broadly.

  Philip, who lacked a carriage, horses, and the inclination to give Miss Amanda any encouragement, pretended he had not understood, merely bowing and taking his leave.

  Now he would need to either seek an introduction to another partner, or hide so he was not caught in his untruth.

  The evening’s hostess, the Duchess of Haverford, was nowhere to be seen among the crush she called, “just a gathering of friends with perhaps a little impromptu dancing or a game of cards; nothing so formal as a ball.”

  Or so his uncle reported, when he insisted Philip attend. “Your man of business is right, Philip. You need to marry money if you’re to save what remains of the estate. No need for it to be a cold business affair. Men have fallen in love with heiresses before now. At least come with me this evening, and see if there is anyone you might be able to warm to.”

  Philip had allowed himself to be persuaded, but without much hope. He had been right. Every one to whom the duchess presented him simpered and tittered, and openly displayed their willingness to accept the position of Countess of Calne, while unsuccessfully hiding their distaste for his deformity. Their mothers or aunts or older sisters ignored the hand entirely, which was somehow worse, since their only interest in him was to show off the paces of their particular maiden with the enthusiasm of a fairground horse dealer and, he rather thought, with as much veracity.

  The evening was an off-season event. By far the largest part of the ton was already off on some country estate, enjoying the peace of early winter or the bustle and drama of a house party. Thank goodness. At least the experience had taught him the folly of breaking cover in the height of the Season, to be hunted by an even larger pack of matchmaking mothers.

  If he couldn’t find the duchess, perhaps Uncle Henry would introduce him to a suitable partner. His uncle had made himself scarce as soon as he had handed Philip over to the duchess. No doubt he had found some friends with whom to play cards or talk about politics and the war. Philip should have turned back when Uncle Henry admitted, in the carriage, that without his daughter to run interference, he would avoid the main dancing rooms and thus the snares and pitfalls of those who felt his widower status made him fair game. And Uncle Henry was thirty-five years Philip’s senior and not an earl, but merely the fourth son of one; a career officer with the Horse Guard.

  Mind you, Uncle Henry was neither crippled nor all but destitute, conditions which must count against Philip. He’d ordered everything marketable in his inheritance to be sold, but the earldom would still be in debt when the accounting was complete.

  While he had been pondering his sorrows, Philip had skirted the dancing floor, still without seeing the duchess or Uncle Henry, and the sets had formed for the next dance. Perhaps he would find the card room, and stay with Uncle Henry until it was time for the appointed dance. After which, he was leaving. This whole evening had been a mistake.

  A long hall with doors on either side led from the ballroom. He strode along, having learned earlier in the evening that strolling was an invitation to acquire a twittering female on either arm. Nodding politely as he passed those he recognised, he glanced in each room with an open door. A retiring room with chaperones drinking tea or ratafia, a group listening to a singer, two closed doors in a row and then a room set up with tables, and intent groups of two or four or six playing cards.

  Philip stood for a moment just inside the door, until the nearest group asked if he would like to join them. But Uncle Henry wasn’t in the room, so he declined politely and went back to his search.

  The next room was dark. The one after was lit, the door partly open, though not enough to see into the room. Women’s voices indicated the room was in use, and he paused to listen. He would not intrude on a private conversation.

  “Really, Miss Finchurch, I cannot imagine what Lady Carngrove is thinking, bringing you here to mingle with your betters.”

  Another voice; a vicious purr somehow familiar to Philip. “Perhaps she imagines the perfume of Miss Finchurch’s wealth will overcome the stench of her origins?”

  Definitely not the card room. Harpies of this stamp would not attack so openly in front of an audience, and Uncle Henry would not stand by while they did. Philip should do something. While he hesitated, those inside continued to talk.

  “I do not believe so, girls. Lady Carngrove intends all that lovely money for her darling Ceddie. As if he would even consider such a thing! Why, Miss Finchurch is quite old!”

  The next voice was crisp, but with a bubble of a laugh running through it. “My goodness, I must really worry you, for you to descend to such a puerile level of nursery bullying.”

  Philip grinned. The victim was not entirely helpless then.

  Before the babble of rejoinders sorted themselves out, he pushed the door open. “Miss Finchurch? Ah, there you are.” It was a small reading room, lined with bookshelves and with comfortable chairs grouped around low tables, just the right height for a drink and a book.

  The target of the others’ spite was clearly the one at bay, seated by the fire with an open book on her lap. She turned her face to him an instant before the others. Old? True, she was not a girl fresh from the schoolroom, but rather a lady in her mid-twenties, unlined face a perfect oval
, with large brown eyes under arched brows, a tilt-tipped nose, and a quantity of light brown hair pulled up into a confection of hair atop her head, a few strands pulled loose to frame the delightful whole.

  She met his smile with a quizzical tip of the head, and he ignored the five ladies standing over her. “Our dance is in a few minutes, Miss Finchurch, so I came to find you. Would you care to take a short stroll while we wait?”

  Would she take the rescue, he wondered, glancing from her to the others? Three were strangers. One, he vaguely recognised. But the remaining woman… He nodded a polite but cold acknowledgement to Lady Markhurst, who had pretended to accept his courtship when he was last in Society four years ago, after recovering from the injuries that ended his army career and brought him home to England.

  Lady Markhurst had soon made it clear his only attraction was his unwed cousins, one an earl and one the heir to an earl. Philip wasn’t close to either, and had not seen her since she discovered that fact. He assumed her pursuit was unsuccessful; certainly, she had wed before the end of that season, to a lowly and rather elderly baron who proved to be not as wealthy as rumour had painted.

  Clearly, Philip’s attractiveness had increased with his accession to the title, since Lady Markhurst fluttered her fan and her eyelashes, and fingered the diamond drop dangling from her ornate necklace into the valley between her breasts. “Why, Lord Calne. Surely you cannot intend to dance with a merchant’s daughter. Your inheritance cannot be in such a dire state as that. Let me save you from such a fate by offering myself as a partner instead.” The throaty note in her last sentence made it a naughty innuendo.

  He ignored Lady Markhurst and her outstretched hand, offering Miss Finchurch his bad arm, which functioned well enough as a prop for a lady. Lady Markhurst’s face flushed and then whitened. She had not learned to control her temper, then.

  Miss Finchurch made up her mind, set her book to one side, and stood to slip her hand into his elbow, and he turned to the door. Lady Markhurst launched another attack before they reached it.

  “Do be warned, Miss Finchurch. The Calne title comes with a bankrupt estate and a crippled earl.”

  Miss Finchurch gripped his arm, making him wince, and she sensed it, too, the fires she was about to turn on Lady Markhurst doused by her concern for him. He took another step towards the door.

  “Ignore Lady Markhurst, Miss Finchurch. I would say her disappointment in her ambitions has made her bitter, but she was always a scold.”

  His mother would have punished such rudeness, but he was well compensated by the gasps from behind him as he whisked Miss Finchurch into the hall and pulled the door closed. She was tiny; perhaps no more than five feet tall, the top of her head barely on a level with his shoulder, and he shortened his steps when he realised she was near running to keep up with him. She was, however, by no means quelled. “You and Lady Markhurst are old friends, it seems, Lord Calne.”

  “Not since I discovered her heart was made of the same substance as the stones in her necklace.”

  Miss Finchurch laughed, an amused gurgle. “Paste, you mean? Very appropriate! Cold, hard and false.”

  “Paste? Really?”

  “I am the daughter and niece of diamond merchants, Lord Calne. I would need to examine the smaller stones more closely, but the drop is decidedly not a diamond. Perhaps it is ill bred of me to disclose the lady’s secrets, so I shall compound the error by making it clear I am not looking for a husband, and if I were, I would not accept a fortune hunter under any circumstances.”

  A game of truths, was it? “Nor am I looking for a wife, Miss Finchurch. Especially one prepared to take a destitute cripple for the sake of his useless title. But a dance might be safe enough? I have managed several tonight and am as yet unwed.”

  That earned him the gurgle again, and they took the positions for a long dance, Philip apologising in advance for being unable to grasp with his withered left hand.

  Miss Finchurch assured him she would grasp well enough for them both. “What happened, Lord Calne? Or were you born with it? Or should I not ask?”

  How refreshing to meet someone who said outright what everyone else speculated about in whispers behind his back. Philip answered as simply. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were crossing a newly repaired bridge in Sicily. But the French had set dynamite, and it blew up, with half the baggage train. I lost the use of one hand.” His writing hand, but he could manage well enough with his right, after years of tutors who had punished the use of the other. “Many lost more.” His brother-in-law for one, which directly led to the deaths of his sister and her baby. She had gone into labour shortly after the news reached her in Malta, and when the child was born dead, she had turned her face to the wall and died. Or so Philip had been told when he recovered from the fever, by which time he was in England, in his uncle’s care.

  “You were in the army?”

  “With the Engineers.” And in charge of the repair of the bridge. He should have detected the sabotage. The deaths—all the deaths, not just those of his family—were his fault.

  Their turn came in the figures of the dance, giving him time to bludgeon his mind into accepting that the room was not caving in on him; that the glittering crowd were not about to turn on him to demand his immediate conviction for dereliction of duty.

  Either something in his face caused Miss Finchurch to take pity on him, or she was bored with the subject, because when they stood out next, she reopened the conversation by asking whether he enjoyed this kind of entertainment in a voice so doubtful he laughed.

  “No more than you, I suspect, Miss Finchurch, though more so since fate handed me a partner who does not send me to sleep with talk of fashion and gossip. Tell me, what is a diamond assessor doing in a Haverford House entertainment? You came with Lady Carngrove, those vixens said?”

  “My aunt.” The mournful tone suggested this was not a circumstance for congratulation. “I live with her. At the moment.”

  He sensed tragedy and, come to think of it, she had referred to her father and uncle in the past tense. But she did not wear black, which hinted her bereavement was not recent. He was uncertain whether to express his commiserations.

  “I lived in India until eighteen months ago. My parents died there when I was a child, and my uncle raised me. When he died, I returned to England, and to my mother’s sister. And thus, you have my whole history, my lord.”

  “I grew up in various ports around the globe,” he offered in return. “My father was a naval officer, and my mother took me and my sister in his wake. I was intended for the navy myself, but I…” He had been about to tell her about his terrible mal de mer, which was not something he disclosed to anyone if he could help it. “I discovered I loved designing and making things: useful things like roads and canals and bridges. So, I trained as an engineer at the Royal Military Academy, and there you have my history.”

  “Ah,” Miss Finchurch reminded him, “but I brought mine up to date. You neglected the small matter of your title. Did you always know you were to be an earl?”

  “Not at all. My father was a younger son, and I barely knew my uncle and cousins. The earldom was safe in their line, with an heir and his younger brother, and the heir betrothed. It would be yet if the two cousins had had the sense not to travel together in a racing carriage through a forest in a storm, several weeks after their father died. The lawyers had the dev-- a difficult job finding me, because the last address my uncle had for my father was before he died, and that was eight years ago, and in South Africa.” They’d been surprised to find their lost heir in the north-west England, working on an aqueduct for a canal. But not as surprised as Philip had been to find he was now the Earl of Calne.

  Miss Finchurch raised her brows, and her eyes smiled if her lips didn’t. “I feel you would prefer commiserations on your new title rather than congratulations.”

  He did not bother to suppress his bark of laughter. “You are correct,” he told her, “and the s
ooner I can get back to my real work the better.” Winter had put a stop to canal building, or he’d be there now. Still, meeting Miss Finchurch had made the evening bearable, and would be one of the pleasanter memories of his expedition into the foreign landscape of high Society.

  “What is your real work, my lord?”

  Philip needed no more encouragement to give her a quick overview of the canal, and especially the aqueduct that would take it across a valley to join with the Bridgewater. At least, he had intended a quick overview. But her intelligent questions lured him into a far deeper discussion, which they continued when the music ended, strolling through the rooms to avoid being caught up in any other group. When a lady who must be her aunt retrieved Miss Finchurch, shooting Philip a resentful glare, he let her go with real reluctance.

  What a lovely woman Miss Finchurch was, and what a pity he was too poor to think of pursuing the acquaintance.

  Chapter Two

  “You need not think of Calne, Margaret,” Aunt Cecilia told Lalamani Finchurch in the carriage on the way home. “The whole ton knows he has not a feather to fly with. But your uncle will not consider him for you, even though you are an heiress, and the best such a poor specimen of a man might hope for. You are to wed Cecil as soon as he is of age.”

  Lalamani didn’t comment. No point in reminding Aunt Cecilia that she used her second name, not her first. Nor would she say Lord Calne had offered no flattery nor promised to visit, but had instead discussed aqueducts and canals, those he had built and those he planned to build. She would certainly not argue that Calne was a fine, fit, elegant man whose withered hand did not disable him, his enthusiasm and intelligence far more to her taste than the lazy and effete gentlemen who flattered her out of one side of their mouths while sneering from the other. Above all, she would not point out she was twenty-three, nearly twenty-four, and neither her marriage nor her fortune were under her uncle’s control.