To Win the Lady Read Online Free PDF

for the heir
of an estate like yours to go off to war, especially when there is no second
son to take your place. But considering you served with distinction I’ll wager
he is very proud of you and now you are back safe and sound all will come
about.’
    ‘Perhaps, but
his last words to me were if I was such a codshead as to stand in the line of
fire I should deserve to be hit and he would not mourn my demise...’
    ‘I’ll wager you
said something equally hot-headed to him.’
    Richard
laughed. ‘Maybe I did.’
    ‘Why did you
join? You’ve never said.’
    ‘Pride, I
suppose. I was barely twenty and something of a scapegrace. I needed to sow a
few wild oats.’
    It was not
exactly the truth but as he had never told anyone why he had left it was all
the answer he intended to give. He had been nineteen when his father married
for a second time and the shock of it had stunned him. He could not understand
how his father could have so far forgotten the love he bore his first wife as
to marry Honoré Montellion, a French émigrée, as grasping and vicious as a
hawk.
    From the very
first she’d set out to marry stepson to daughter, a whey-faced, over-indulged
girl of fifteen; if her own children could not inherit because Richard was the
heir, then she was determined that the next generation would through a union
between Richard and Lucille. But when Richard had declined to fall in with her
wishes she had made his life a misery, finding fault with everything he did,
sending him on futile errands and alienating him from his father, who could see
no wrong in her and had encouraged her in the matchmaking. Unable to stay and
fight her without filling the whole house with discord and upsetting his
father, he had left home and enlisted.
    He looked at
his friend across the empty bottles and glasses on the table and smiled
ruefully. ‘If my father had carried out his threat to disown me and make my
cousin William his heir...’
    ‘Is the estate
not entailed?’
    ‘Not so he
can’t get out of it.’
    ‘He was bamming
you.’
    Richard was not
at all sure of that. His parting with his father had been acrimonious, to say
the least, and it had been with him all the years he had been in the army. They
had corresponded, to be sure, but neither had felt able to put his true
feelings on to paper and the letters had been stilted, full of battles and army
matters on Richard’s part, and politics and estate affairs on his father’s.
    But Honoré had
died in childbirth several years before and the war was over, which meant there
was no longer any excuse for staying away. And, if Richard was honest with
himself, he was more than a little homesick. It had grown worse since Maria
died; he saw his homecoming as a way of coming to terms with that, of accepting
that she was part of another life, another world which those who had been left
behind in England could never comprehend. He wanted to lock it away and begin
again.
    It was what he was
thinking about as he descended from the coach at The Barley Mow inn on the
Great North Road just north of Baldock, instructing Heacham, his man, to
continue on to the next stage with his luggage, from where he would easily be
able to hire a conveyance to take him to Dullingham House. The inn was quiet
and a few minutes later, having bespoken a bed for the night and left his
cloak-bag, he took his saddle, which he had obstinately brought with him, and
went out to the yard to hire a hack to take him to Rowan Park. It was a poor
beast and the fine saddle looked incongruous on it, but Richard set out
cheerfully enough. It was a new beginning and the day was set fair for new
beginnings.

Chapter Two
    It was a cloudless summer’s afternoon with a gentle
warmth quite unlike the searing heat of Spain; a slight breeze caressed
Richard’s cheek and lifted his hair from his neck. A couple of kestrels hovered
over Royston Heath, bees droned on the purple heather and the clop, clop of the
mare’s hooves almost lulled