her long pale tresses ripple over her shoulders in a romantic veil.
Gervase met Annabel’s eyes, and saw the same trenchant purpose infusing Belinda repeated there.
Increasingly wary, he shifted his gaze to the third and youngest of the three, lowering it to her sweet, delicate face, still very much that of a child. Jane was barely ten, and had always been devoted to him. Confined in neat plaits on either side of her small face, her hair was a darker brown than the others’, more his coloring, but her eyes were Sybil’s blue.
Meeting those usually innocent orbs, Gervase was faintly stunned to encounter unwavering, resolute determination-further accentuated by the set of her little chin.
Keeping his own expression impassive, he glanced again at the other two, mentally at sea. What on earth had changed them? Why…why had they lost faith in him?
He suddenly comprehended that he was treading on ground that wasn’t as firm as he’d thought. He had to go carefully.
Where to start?
He let the silence stretch, but while Sybil fidgeted, her daughters were made of sterner stuff. They just waited for him to speak, their gazes locked on him.
“I’ve just heard from Gregson that the three of you were caught leaving the mill last night, apparently after sabotaging it. The mill is still out of action, and John Miller is in danger of losing what little hair he has left. I’ll admit I’m having trouble believing that the three of you could be so unthinking as to deliberately cause Miller and all those who rely on the mill so much unnecessary trouble for no good reason. So I assume you have an excellent reason for what you’ve done-I hope you’ll share it with me, so I can explain your actions to the rest of the neighborhood.”
Belinda’s chin tilted a fraction higher. “We do have an excellent reason-for the mill and all the rest.” She briefly scanned his eyes, confirming that he had, indeed, guessed about “all the rest.” “However,” she continued, “you might not wish to make that reason public. We had to find ways to bring you back from London, and preferably keep you here, although as of yet we haven’t managed the latter.”
“We thought we’d be able to make you stay by creating a mystery by ringing the bells,” Annabel said, “but you just took away the ropes. So we had to think of something else.”
“None of the other things we did kept you at home.” Jane looked at him severely, as if that were his fault. “You just came home and fixed them, and then left again-back to London.”
It was, apparently, his fault.
He was starting to feel a little disoriented. “Why do you want me to stay at home?”
Belinda shifted, lips pressing together; he could see she was hunting not for just words but for how to explain. The other two looked at her, deferring to her. Eventually she met his eyes. “We asked you to stay, each of us every time, but you always just smiled and insisted that you had to go back to town. We suspected-well, everyone in the neighborhood knew-that you were going there to find a wife. We didn’t want you to do that, but we couldn’t just say so, could we? You wouldn’t have listened to us, that was obvious. So we had to find some other way of stopping you.”
He stared at her. “You don’t want me to find a wife?”
“We don’t want you to find a wife in London.” Belinda capped the statement with a definite nod-repeated by the other two, one after the other.
It was, indeed, as Sybil had guessed. Compressing his lips, he battled to shore up a patience that six months of mayhem-let alone all the futile racing back and forth-had worn wafer-thin. “Sybil has just told me about the situation with the Hardestys.” He managed to keep his tone even, his diction not so clipped that it would cut. He was still very fond of them, even if they’d temporarily turned into bedlamites. “You can’t seriously imagine that I would marry a lady who I would subsequently allow to send you away.”
Yes, they could. Yes, they did.
They didn’t say the words. They didn’t have to; the truth was writ large in their eyes, in their expressions.
He felt positively insulted, and didn’t know what to say-how to defend himself. The idea that he needed to was irritation enough.
“I’m older, and wiser, and far more experienced than Robert Hardesty. Just because he’s married unwisely is no reason whatever to imagine I’ll do the same.”
The look Belinda bent on him was as contemptuously pitying as only a younger sister could manage; it was mirrored to an unsettling degree by Annabel and Jane.
“Gentlemen,” Belinda stated, “always think they know what they’re doing when it comes to ladies, and they never do. They think they’re in charge, but they’re blind. Any lady worth the title knows that gentlemen, once hooked, can be led by the nose if the lady is so minded. So if an attractive London lady gets her hooks into you, and decides like Lady Hardesty that having girls like us to puff-off isn’t a proposition she wants to take on, where will that leave us?”
“Living in the North Riding with Great-Aunt Agatha,” Annabel supplied.
“So it was obvious we had to take action,” Jane concluded. Her eyes narrowed on Gervase. “Drastic action- whatever was necessary.”
Before he could even think of a reply, Belinda went on, “And there’s no use citing your age as any indication of your wisdom in such matters. You’ve spent the last twelve years out of society-it’s not a case of your skills in this regard being rusty so much as you’ve never developed the relevant skills at all.”
“It’s not the same as if you’d spent those years in London,” Annabel informed him, “watching and learning about choosing a wife.”
“This is not a battlefield on which you have any experience,” Jane declared in her most serious voice. “In this theater, you’re vulnerable.”
She was obviously reciting arguments they’d discussed at length; just the thought was horrifying. Trying to assimilate their unexpected and peculiarly female point of view was making Gervase giddy.
He held up a hand. “Wait. Just stop. Let’s approach this logically.” He cast a glance at Sybil, only to surmise from her attentive expression that however much she might deplore her daughters’ actions, she didn’t, materially, disagree with their assessment. No help there. He drew breath, and stated, “You’re worried that, like Robert Hardesty, I’ll fall victim to some fashionable London lady who will take a dislike to you and convince me to send you to live with Great-Aunt Agatha.”
All three girls nodded.
“To prevent such an occurrence, you made sure I had no time in the capital during which to meet any such lady.”
Again three definite nods.
“But you know I need a wife. You understand that I have to marry?” Not least to secure the title and the entailed estate, given he was the last male Tregarth.
“That’s obvious,” Belinda informed him. “Aside from anything else, you’re never going to manage the social obligations adequately on your own, and Mama can help only so far. Once we wed, she’ll live with us, so you should marry as soon as possible so your countess can learn the ropes.”
“Besides which,” Annabel put in, “you having the right lady as your countess will make it much easier for us to make our come-outs properly. We’re now titled ladies, and poor Mama is going to have a time of it if she has to manage our come-outs on her own.”
“And, of course,” little Jane continued, her voice lighter than the other two, “there’s the fact you need to sire an heir, or else when you die the estate will revere…” She stopped, frowned.
“Revert,” Gervase supplied.
She thanked him with a serious little nod. “Revert to that disgustingly fat, dissolute reprobate, the Prince Regent.” She met Gervase’s gaze. “And no one would want that.”
Gervase stared at her, then glanced at the other two. Clearly he didn’t need to explain the facts of his life- familial or social-to them. “If you understand all that, then you must see that in order to find the, as Annabel put it, right lady to be my countess, I need to go to London-”
He broke off as all three vehemently shook their heads. It wasn’t just the action, but the look in their narrowing eyes, and the set of their firming lips and chins, that stilled his tongue.
“No,” Belinda stated. “No London ladies. Now that you understand our position, you must see that we can’t allow you to simply swan off and search by yourself in London.”
“If you do,” Annabel prophesied, “you’ll be caught.”
