Chapter Text
Philip was half in his cups when he got off the train.
And the half that was out of his cups was most certainly not his good half.
At eight-and-twenty, Philip had learned that the best way to deal with one’s problems was to be at least a little drunk, even if that meant downing a decanter of sherry at nine in the morning. The sweetness made it go down easier, no matter the fact that it didn’t go at all with the scraps of food grabbed from anywhere that he called breakfast.
As he looked up at the behemoth manor before him, he was sure that the opulent Sandon Hall would have made him lose said breakfast if he had been sober. No, better to have gone for the sherry, as it gave him the convenient ability to laugh in the face of his misfortune.
“My lord.” Philip turned to glare over his shoulder as Lewis, his valet, addressed him with the new formality he’d have to get used to.
That’s right, a sardonic voice teased in the back of his mind, you’re a lordling now. A bloody earl.
With a rueful sigh, Philip yanked the bowler hat from his head, thrust it at Lewis’s chest, and marched up the pearly white steps to his own personal Hell.
He needed to fire the butler.
The man, Green, was short, white-haired, and could hardly walk a straight line—which was most likely because he could see no more than two feet in front of him even with the bottlecap-thick glasses he wore.
“Sandon was built only one hundred years ago,” Green said, “so the manor is quite up to date.”
The decades-out-of-date décor, stomach-turning creaks in the hardwood floors, and suspicious dripping sound in the main salon all begged to differ.
“How many people take residence here?” Philip asked as he curiously poked at a porcelain vase on a side table. Dreadfully old as everything was, at least the place was meticulously clean.
“Thirty-six staff members, including myself,” Green replied. “As well as the countess, her lady’s maid, and now you and your valet, sir.”
The countess. She was a granddaughter of a baron, Lord Barnard, and her father was the heir, but she had no brothers. It would, ironically, end up yet another title gone to a far-flung cousin. Perhaps the girl was cursed.
Philip had been on the continent during the late earl’s wedding, so he could only imagine the sort of chit that would agree to make her bed with a ruffian like his cousin Sidney. The man was almost a full two years younger than Philip, half as handsome, completely devoid of masculine charm, but about ten times as wealthy.
God rest his merry soul, of course he’d get some pretty, soulless thing to marry him for money.
“Where is the countess now?” Philip asked. “I would like to discuss our living arrangements.”
Green looked positively bemused, though the nervous flick of his gaze toward the back garden door told Philip that she was outside. “Sir?”
Philip frowned at the garden door, then the porcelain vase, then the old décor, and he swore the dripping sound was growing louder. Thirty-six servants. Thirty-six—plus four—mouths to feed. Thousands of acres of land with hundreds of tenants.
And a letter from the Bank of England with the psychic weight of a thousand tons burning a hole in his coat pocket. Through generations of hands-off management, the earldom found itself several tens of thousands of pounds in debt at nine percent interest. If Philip didn’t figure something out immediately, he was going to drown in a burden he never asked for.
The last thing he needed was a money-hungry widow on his hands.
“She is going home,” Philip decided, voice tight in his throat, “to her father. Lord knows I will not be responsible for her.”
It was unsurprisingly easy to locate the countess in the back garden, as the intricate drapes and pleats of her full mourning gown and veil absorbed the afternoon light like a starless sky. Unmoving and ominous, the sight of her shadow-like form made Philip pause at the top of the stairs.
He had absolutely no idea what kind of figure hid beneath all that unembellished wool and crepe, so he conjured one of his own: something birdlike, perhaps, to make her look like the harpy she undoubtedly was. She had to be young if she was Sidney’s widow, as a man of six-and-twenty typically had an ego fragile enough to require a gap of no less than two years between himself and his bride. To that end, she was probably regrettably dim.
When he started down the steps, she turned. Startled, he wondered if he made a sound, but the steps were smooth, every inch of stone swept impeccably clean, and it hadn’t rained in days.
Had she sensed him?
The top half of her face was covered by her mourning veil, and he couldn’t see through the crepe in such bright light. As he crossed the manicured lawn to introduce himself to her, he felt an odd stirring within him, something that told him to turn back and run.
Perhaps it was the fact that he didn’t bother to send condolences when Sidney died. He really, truly might have done so if he didn’t hate Sidney as much as he did. Growing up so close in age, one of them destined for a wealth beyond anything the other could imagine, made both Sidney and Philip look for and internalize every reason to despise one another. That led to an adolescence of insults and too-rough-to-be-play fighting, which simmered into an adulthood of pretending the other didn’t exist until the rich one up and died.
Perhaps, by staring a widow in her veil-covered face, Philip was made uncomfortable by the fact that he was arguably a bad person.
He wondered if she was sizing him up under the veil. She had the advantage of seeing all of him while he saw almost none of her.
“My lady,” he greeted, bowing just enough to earn himself a perfunctory curtsey. “My condolences for your loss.”
At full height, Philip stood about a head taller than the countess. She looked relatively slender and a single wisp of reddish-brown hair fell forward from her veil, though he couldn’t determine much of what she looked like below the torso or above the lips.
Admittedly, she did have very pretty lips, heavier on the bottom than the top and with a deep cupid’s bow. And when they moved, they formed an intriguing pout that even better men than Philip could get lost in.
Wait—her lips had been moving. She was talking, and instead of listening to her, he’d been gawking at her. If she were any other woman, he would have shrugged and kissed her or otherwise attempted to seduce her. But as it stood, she was a burden to the estate, and if her father would take over as her guardian, that would be one less problem for Philip to solve.
“—tenants,” she finished. Then, she was blinking up at him expectantly, and he was at a total loss for words.
Other than, perhaps, the worst words he could have possibly said. Feeling disarmed, he let out a breathless laugh and said, “Are you able to move back to your father’s home?”
Her shoulders shifted; she was physically taken aback by the non sequitur. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your father,” Philip repeated, doubling down because he was too distracted by his own mounting predicament to be all that concerned with her feelings. “Is he well? Would he be willing to house you?”
“House me?” she repeated, voice freezing over as she appeared to grow increasingly incised. Her next words were sharp, honed, as if she was preparing for a sparring match. “My lord, my home is here—”
Philip, however, had no time or interest in verbal sparring with his cousin’s widow. “Not for long, I’m afraid. I will be selling it.”
Her lips parted in what appeared to be horror, which he attributed to the fact that she was likely hoping for the comfortable life of a countess. Of course she was, Philip reasoned; her family didn’t know the luxury that Sidney offered her.
She surprised him by inclining her chin in a challenge. “You cannot.”
He raised a brow. “I rather think I can. I’m the earl.”
She stared at him for a long, hard moment that chilled him to the core. He told himself that it was the veil, that it made her eyes look like the soulless shadows of a demon’s, not a woman’s.
Which was ironic, because he could have sworn that she called him a demon as she brushed past him, slinking out of the garden like a cat.
For all the meticulous cleaning of the manor, Sidney’s old study was a godforsaken mess. Philip had to wade through stacks of unbound papers—letters, notes, receipts—just to get to the desk, and then he had to hunt around every shelf and unlocked drawer to find the key to the glass cabinet in which the account books were kept.
Each leather-bound book contained decades of information about the estate, maintained in a double-entry bookkeeping system. Boarding school taught him Latin and history, not accounting and management; this would take him weeks to parse through.
He wondered if it might benefit him to burn the whole place to the ground. He was on the brink of ruin, anyway, so he might as well plot to go out in spectacular fashion.
Late morning faded into early, then mid afternoon. Cook had prepared tea and a tiered tray of sandwiches and desserts, claiming that the new earl needed refreshments from his journey if he was going to skip formal tea. He shooed away the tea and requested coffee, which the kitchen did not have (“But we will send one of the footmen to purchase some in town, my lord,” Green assured him), but he picked at the tiny treats while he attempted to make order out of chaos.
Hours later, with a headache and straining eyes, Philip desperately needed a break from the dark, musty room with its suffocating dark wood panels and heavy maroon drapes. He summoned Green just to ask, “What time is supper served?”
“Whenever you like it, sir.”
“Does the countess not have a preference?”
Green smiled with all the fondness of a charmed grandfather, and shook his head. “Her ladyship has dined alone ever since the passing of the last earl.”
Sidney’s body had hardly run cold by the time the telegram arrived in London. Clear, concise, and written by one of the family solicitors, it had a single paragraph that boiled down to one unfeeling line:
With the regrettable passing of your first cousin, Lord Sidney Ryder, you are henceforth the 5th Earl of Harrowby.
That was two nights ago. And, since the letter was written in no uncertain terms, that meant Sarah wasn’t with child.
Thank God, he remembered thinking, because playing steward to a newborn earl sounded somehow worse than actually being the earl. The fact that she wasn’t pregnant, too, meant that he could send her home and get to work, stripping the estate and land of whatever value was left in order to save himself.
Damn Sidney for getting the last laugh.
Frustrated, Philip reached for one of the finger-sized rolled sandwiches. He bit into it, shaking his head as something smooth and sweet touched his tongue.
“What is this?” he asked, mouth full, and gestured with the unbitten end.
“Fruit and cream, sir,” Green replied. “Her ladyship prefers them.”
He made a noise of acknowledgement at the utterly strange choice, but he still found himself finishing the sandwich and reaching for a second of the same kind. “They were married for six months, weren’t they? Does she really need to be in mourning for two years, given that?”
Green’s expression remained entirely deferential. “It was her choice to do so, sir. She insisted on the traditional full mourning.”
Philip hadn’t a clue why. The woman he met that afternoon—could she really have loved a man like the one he knew Sidney to be?
He was already planning to write to her father the next morning, intending on having her out of the manor as soon as possible. Perhaps he could coax her out of her self-imposed shell, if only to make her last few days in Sandon pleasant ones. Just a few days, and then she would be gone forever.
“Tell her that I’d like to dine with her. We’ll have a proper dinner tonight,” he informed the butler as if he knew what that meant, as if he wasn’t an imposter masquerading as a lord, and as if he had any desire to be proper instead of untangling the mystery that was his cousin’s widow, layer by layer, until he had her in his bed.