at Margaret and bending his head to listen to something she said. It must seem to him that a crowd of strangers was invading his home.
He had been asked to leave his own home - by his younger brother's guardian. By his own first cousin - his mother and Viscount Lyngate's had been sisters. 'He is trouble, Mrs. Dew,' Viscount Lyngate said, his voice low. 'He can mean only mischief by remaining here. You must not allow yourself to be deceived by his charm, which he has always possessed in abundance. Your brother must be quite firm with him. He must be given a week's notice at the longest. He has had enough time to find another home and pack his belongings.' 'But this /is /his home,' Vanessa said, frowning. 'This is where he has always belonged. It would have been his if he had been born two days later.' 'But he was not,' Viscount Lyngate said firmly as they followed the others into a drawing room. 'And life is made up of what-ifs. There is no point in allowing ourselves to be distracted by them. What-ifs are not reality. The reality is, Mrs. Dew, that Con Huxtable is an illegitimate son of a former earl, while your brother is the Earl of Merton. It would be a mistake to be swayed by pity.' But if one never felt pity for a fellow human, Vanessa thought, one was surely not fully human oneself, was one? That made Viscount Lyngate a little less than human. She looked at him, still frowning. Did he have /no /feeling for others, even his own cousin?
But he had moved away from her to stride forward to Stephen's side.
Stephen was gazing admiringly at Constantine Huxtable. So was Katherine.
Margaret was regarding him kindly. Vanessa smiled at him, though he was not looking her way.
What a dreadful day this must be for him. The fact that he was meeting four new cousins, all of whom would surely be kindly disposed toward him, must seem poor comfort.
For a few minutes Vanessa had forgotten her initial awe at a mansion that was magnificent beyond anything she had dreamed of. But the awe returned suddenly. The drawing room was large and square with a high, coved ceiling, painted with some scene from mythology and trimmed lavishly with gold. The furniture was elegant and the draperies of wine-colored velvet. Paintings in heavy gold frames covered the walls.
There was a large Persian carpet underfoot, fringed by wood so highly polished that surely one would see one's face in it if one bent forward.
Vanessa felt a surge of unexpected longing for Rundle Park - as if she had abandoned Hedley there.
She must not - she /would /not - forget him.
Her eyes rested upon Viscount Lyngate, who even without his greatcoat still looked large and imposing and virile and masculine. And handsome, of course. And very much alive.
She resented him greatly.
Elliott and Con Huxtable had been the closest of friends all their lives - until just a year ago, in fact. The three-year gap in their ages - Elliott was the elder - had not mattered one whit. They had lived only five miles apart, they were cousins, neither had had many other playmates in their neighborhoods, and they had enjoyed doing the same sorts of things - mostly outdoor sports and other vigorous, energetic games that involved climbing trees and diving into pools and wading through muddy bogs and devising other such strenuous activities that had filled their days with exercise and fun and got them into a great deal of trouble with their respective nurses.
When they grew up, they had remained close friends and had continued to enjoy life together, even if doing so had meant frequently stirring up mischief and mayhem and putting themselves in danger and raking their way to an admiring reputation among their peers and a less approving notoriety among society in general. They had both been great favorites among the ladies.
They had been two young blades sowing their wild oats together, in fact, never doing anyone any great harm, including - by some miracle - themselves.
They had been young gentlemen, after all, and had known where to draw the line.
Even after Con's father died they had remained friends though Con had started to spend more and more of his time at Warren Hall with Jonathan, of whom he had been inordinately fond. Elliott had missed him but admired his devotion to the handicapped boy. It had even struck him that Con was growing up and settling down faster than he was. Elliott's father had been the boy's guardian, of course, but he had been slack in his duties, trusting Con to look after the boy's needs and oversee the day-by-day running of his estates with the aid of a competent steward.
And then Elliott's father had died too.
And everything had changed. For Elliott had made the decision to take his new responsibilities seriously, and one of those responsibilities had been Jonathan. So he had spent some time at Warren Hall, acquainting himself with the nature of his duties there, though he had fully expected to be able to turn over the unofficial guardianship to Con again. He had even felt somewhat embarrassed that his uncle had not made Con the official guardian. He was old enough and quite capable enough, after all. And Jonathan had adored him.
But Elliott had soon made the painful discovery that Con had abused the trust Elliott's father had placed in him, embezzling funds and stealing costly family jewels for his own gain, safe in the knowledge that Jonathan would never know the difference. And then there were the debaucheries Elliott had become aware of - house- maids impregnated and dismissed, laborers' daughters ruined.
Con was not the person Elliott had always thought him to be. There was no honor in him after all. He preyed upon the weak. He was the very antithesis of a gentleman. It was no excuse that through no fault of his own he had narrowly missed being his father's heir.
His villainy had been an excruciatingly painful discovery. /Not /that he had ever admitted to the thefts or the debaucheries.
Though he had not denied them either. He had merely laughed when Elliott had confronted him with his findings. 'You may go to the devil, Elliott' was all he had said.
They had been bitter enemies for the last year. At least, for Elliott it had been bitter. He could not speak for Con.
Elliott had, of course, taken Jonathan's care and the running of his estates directly into his own hands and had spent as much time at Warren Hall as he had at Finchley Park, it had seemed. There had been precious little time left for himself.
Con had made that year almost intolerable for him. He had done all in his power to set obstacles in the path of his erstwhile friend and to influence Jonathan to defy Elliott's wishes. That had not been a hard thing to accomplish - the poor boy had not even realized he was doing it.
Naively perhaps, Elliott had hoped that the worst of his burden was now behind him, for even though the new Merton was a minor and totally unprepared for the life and duties that would be his, and even though he had three sisters who were equally unprepared, /at least /there would no longer be Con Huxtable as a thorn in his side.
Or so he had thought. He had told Con to leave.
But he was still here. And he had chosen to greet the new owner of Warren Hall and his sisters with all the power of his great charm.
Common decency ought to have dictated that he leave before the new earl took up residence, even if he /was /a distant relative. But one ought to have known by now not to expect common decency from Con Huxtable.
Elliott left Mrs. Dew's side and crossed the drawing room with determined steps. 'Indeed it /is /all rather splendid,' Con was saying, apparently in answer to something one of his young cousins had said. 'My esteemed father saw fit to pull down the old abbey-cum-fortress-cum-hall soon after he succeeded to the title and to put up this testament to his wealth and taste in its place. Later he filled it with treasures from his travels as a very young man.' 'Oh, but I /wish,/' Katherine Huxtable said, 'I might have seen the abbey.' 'It /was /nothing short of criminal,' Con agreed, 'to have pulled it down, though perhaps one would not really have enjoyed its drafty corridors and dark, narrow-windowed chambers and archaic sanitation rather than the opulent comforts of this building.' 'If /I /had been doing it,' Merton said, 'I would have left the old hall standing and built this house close by. History is all very well, and historic buildings really ought to be preserved, as Nessie is always saying, but I confess to enjoying the comforts of modern living.' 'Ah,' Con said just as Elliott was about to try maneuvering him closer to the window, where he intended to have a private word with him, 'here is the tea tray. Set it down in the usual place, Mrs. Forsythe. Perhaps Miss Huxtable will be so good as to pour.' But then he smiled ruefully and
