A Duel With Destiny Read online

  “I would like to take you North with me,” the Earl said gruffly. “I was proud of you tonight, my dear. Although my son has three children, you are my eldest granddaughter.”

  “I am glad about that,” Rowena said, “and I would love to meet my cousins. But you must realise it is impossible. Papa would be so hurt – which is why I must never let him know that I came to you for help.”

  The Earl held her hand and after a moment Rowena said,

  “Hermione is going to be very beautiful and Lotty is very like Mama. Perhaps one day you could receive them.”

  “We must think about it,” the Earl said. “Perhaps when you are married to Swayne you will come and stay with me.”

  Rowena jumped as if she had been stabbed.

  “Marry the Marquis?” she exclaimed. “You know, Grandfather, that is the one thing I am determined not to do!”

  “But you love him?”

  There was silence in the carriage.

  Then after a moment Rowena admitted,

  “Yes, I love him, but I also despise him. We could never find happiness together when all the time I was aware that he would never have married me except that I have your blood in my veins.”

  There was so much unhappiness in her voice that the Earl’s fingers tightened on hers before he said,

  “You don’t think that you are asking too much? Blood is thicker than water, my dear, and all of us who belong to the great families have a deep pride in our history and in our antecedents.”

  She knew that he was speaking about his reason for not accepting her father when he wished to marry her mother.

  After a moment Rowena answered,

  “Mama was ideally happy, despite knowing that Papa came from very ordinary stock. If the Marquis had been prepared to marry me when he thought I was just ‘Miss Winsford’, I know we too would have been happy together. But now there is an insurmountable barrier between us that nothing he can say or do could ever bridge.”

  “It’s a pity,” the Earl said. “He may be rather puffed up with his own conceit, but the Duke was telling me tonight that he was an excellent soldier and leader of men.”

  “You spoke about him to the Duke?”

  “I was interested to learn His Grace’s reaction,” the Earl remarked.

  Rowena was sure that the Duke had been right. The Marquis would be a good soldier. He would be reliable and also a strong Commander who would never accept defeat.

  He would win against all odds, she thought, except where she was concerned.

  As she had told her grandfather, there was now an insurmountable barrier between them.

  She knew that, even if the Marquis went down on his knees and begged her to be his wife, she could never feel about him what she had felt when he first kissed her and she had known that there was for her nothing and nobody in the world but him.

  Alone in her bedroom she sat at the mirror gazing at her reflection and thinking that this was the last time she would see herself looking so fashionable and that diamonds would never again flash around her throat.

  The diamonds were, of course, part of the Dunvegan collection.

  Before they had set out for Carlton House the Earl had taken a number of boxes from the safe and opened them for Rowena’s inspection.

  The jewels, although many of them were heavily set, were magnificent. There were necklaces in emeralds, sapphires and amethysts.

  The diamond collet was the simplest, even though the large blue-white stones were doubtless more valuable than some of the others. Rowena had asked if she could wear it and her grandfather had clasped it round her neck.

  The gown she wore had been brought hastily to the house with several others from an expensive Court dressmaker in Bond Street.

  Fortunately they required little alteration and the one she chose to go to Carlton House was in fact the most beautiful gown she had ever seen.

  “How can I thank you, Grandfather?” she had asked when she put it on to show him.

  “You make me think of your mother,” he replied simply.

  She knew that that was all the thanks he required and the reason why he was taking her with him, as she had asked, to Carlton House.

  When she daringly kissed him goodnight before she went upstairs to bed, she had thought that he was surprised but at the same time pleased.

  “Thank you, Grandfather,” she said. “It was a great adventure to be with you and to meet not only the Prince Regent but all those other interesting people. I shall never forget how kind you have been!”

  “I shall remember it too,” the Earl beamed.

  Rowena looked at him for a moment.

  Then she asked the question that was uppermost in her mind.

  “Grandfather, is the pride that you and the Marquis feel in your families worth the heartache and unhappiness that it causes when it comes into conflict with love?”

  The old man looked at her from under his bushy eyebrows.

  Then he replied,

  “Our ancestors have fought and died for that pride all down the centuries. It is ingrained in us. It is something that is inescapable and if we denied it, we would feel that we were renegades and traitors.”

  He spoke with a sincerity that was impressive.

  Rowena gave a little sigh.

  “I understand,” she said, “at least, I think I do. I suppose I am one of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who must suffer under that pride.”

  “Yet for many others,” the Earl answered, “it has been the dominant influence in their lives and has brought them satisfaction and at times a glory that was greater than any personal gratification could ever bring.”

  There was a finality about the way he spoke that told Rowena there could be no more argument about it.

  As she went up to bed, she lay thinking over his words, realising that he spoke not only for himself but also for the Marquis and perhaps all the other noble families who dedicated themselves to their duty.

  And yet, Rowena longed to argue, there were many families whose members had married those considered to be parvenus and of inferior blood.

  But the answer was obvious. They had had something to offer that was advantageous for the whole family and not just for one member of it – a great fortune, acres of land, magnificent buildings or streets and squares in London whose rents swelled the family exchequers.

  ‘And I have nothing!’ Rowena said to herself wistfully, ‘except a pretty face and that is not enough.’

  The memory of how the Marquis had tried to explain that he could not offer her marriage haunted her as it had done night after night ever since it had happened.

  She could see him standing by the window as he spoke, choosing his words with care and she could hear his voice saying,

  “I should have explained to you before that marriage and love in the world I live in are two very different things.”

  Then, as the meaning of what he was saying had seemed like a knife-thrust into her heart, he had gone on,

  “It is a question of noble blood being matched by noble blood, of putting the family first and being true to one’s inheritance.”

  That was what he truly believed and what her grandfather had believed when he had turned her father away from the house and forbidden a marriage between him and her mother.

  Rowena knew that nothing she could say or do would alter their feelings or dissuade them from sacrificing their emotions to what they believed was a sacred trust.

  She only hoped, as she lay in the darkness, that the Marquis was suffering as she was, knowing that when he had refused to marry her he had destroyed their only chance of happiness.

  ‘If he had been more perceptive,’ Rowena told herself, ‘if he had been in the least fey, he would have known that I was not the commoner I appeared to be, but that I too had blue blood in my veins – as blue as his.’

  Then she told herself that he would have been superhuman if, after staying in their house as he had for so long, he had been able t
o imagine for one instant that they were other than they appeared to be.

  Yet, when he came downstairs, he must have seen her mother’s portrait in the study and, while she had been exceedingly beautiful, he should have recognised that there was an aristocratic look about her features.

  Then Rowena laughed and it was a sound without any humour in it.

  She had the same features – she in fact had the same look – in fact they all had!

  But the Marquis had not recognised it because it had not been written down in the Family Tree they did not possess! Where genealogy was concerned it was not instinct or feelings that counted but hard facts.

  ‘I hate him! I hate him!’ she told herself again.

  Then, remembering how magnificent he had looked that night with his decorations on his breast, she thought despairingly that whatever she said or did his image was engraved on her heart for all time.

  *

  Driving in the Earl’s carriage out of London Rowena calculated that if, as she had instructed him, the coachman put her down at the crossroads that led to Little Powick, she would be able to leave her trunk in one of the adjacent cottages and walk home in under twenty minutes.

  She would be back in the house by four o’clock and she was quite certain that not only would her father still be out on his rounds but Hermione and Mark would not yet have returned from their lessons.

  This meant that she would be able to change into her ordinary clothes.

  It would be fatal for them to see her as she was now arrayed in one of the beautiful afternoon gowns that her grandfather had given her and wearing a chip-straw bonnet trimmed with flowers that had Bond Street written all over it.

  She had not liked to disappoint her grandfather by refusing to wear a gown he had given her when she said goodbye.

  He had been so kind and so generous that she wished in the short time that she was with him to do everything to please him.

  She knew that he was thinking that she looked like her mother as she kissed his cheek in the hall and he saw her into his carriage.

  “I should really return by stagecoach,” she said.

  “I will not have you travelling alone in a public conveyance,” he retorted almost fiercely.

  Rowena had given in without argument, but she realised that it created problems that she would somehow have to overcome.

  It was very difficult, she thought, to avoid hurting her grandfather without at the same time hurting her father.

  There was no doubt that the Earl still deeply resented the man who had taken his daughter from him and there was nothing that Rowena could say or do that could make the hurt seem any less.

  But, although she felt that she ought not to accept any clothes from the Earl other than the gown she had required to go to Carlton House, she had not been able to refuse when he had chosen for her several other dresses and two extremely alluring bonnets.

  ‘I will share them with Hermione,’ she thought.

  Thinking it over she decided that if she wore them occasionally and without any fuss her father probably would not even be aware that she looked different.

  It was impossible, however, not to feel a very feminine thrill at being well dressed for the first time in her life.

  It was exciting too to travel in the Earl’s comfortable, if slightly old-fashioned, carriage drawn by four well bred horses.

  They were not in any way the equal of those owned by the Marquis, any more than the elderly grey-haired coachman resembled Sam, but to Rowena they represented the height of luxury.

  Having left Dunvegan House she sat back to enjoy the drive and savour for the moment the feeling not only of being rich but also of being dressed as became a Lady of Quality.

  ‘No one in the village,’ she thought, ‘would ever believe where I was last night.’

  She knew it would be difficult not to tell Hermione all about the Carlton House fête and describe to her the gowns and jewels of the Prince Regent’s guests and, of course, the Prince Regent himself.

  He had been even fatter than she had expected from the descriptions she had read in the newspapers and the cartoons she had seen from time to time.

  But he had an undeniable charm and she realised as she watched him at the supper table that he was extremely intelligent and that even the most distinguished guests present were hanging on his words.

  ‘I can understand the Marquis liking him and wishing to be in his company,’ she mused.

  Then she told herself that what the Marquis liked or did not like was no concern of hers and the sooner she stopped thinking about him so often the better.

  The carriage was soon out of the City and now they were on the dusty lanes that Rowena had travelled over so slowly in the stagecoach.

  She calculated now that they would reach the crossroads earlier than she expected and she hoped that there would be few people to see her as she hurried through the village.

  ‘They will certainly think me very smart,’ she thought.

  Then she remembered that at this time of the day the men and women were in the fields helping with the harvest.

  There would doubtless be only the very old and half-blind and a number of children about.

  ‘I am worrying quite unnecessarily,’ Rowena told herself.

  But she knew that she had no wish that anyone should ask where she had been or why she had arrived home in such an unusual manner.

  The horses were travelling fast and Rowena found herself wishing that she could sit beside the coachman on the box.

  She had always hated being shut up inside a carriage and, although she had been so worried and so anxious about Mark, it had been an experience she would never forget to drive with the Marquis in the phaeton behind his magnificent team of chestnuts.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly the horses were drawn in sharply and the carriage came to a standstill.

  “What has happened? What is the matter?” Rowena called out.

  The thought of highwaymen flashed through her mind.

  She realised that the coachman was shouting in a somewhat hoarse voice and she bent forward to look out of the window.

  As she did so she gave a gasp.

  Standing across the road so that it was impossible to pass was a phaeton she recognised, drawn by four horses.

  They were moving restlessly backwards and forwards.

  A groom was running towards her carriage and, when she realised that it was Sam, she sat back quickly on the seat, feeling her heart beating tempestuously.

  “What be it? Why be you a-holdin’ us up?” she heard the old coachman ask.

  “I’ve a message for Miss Winsford.”

  Sam came to the window of the carriage.

  “’Is Lordship asks, miss, if you’ll transfer immediately to ’is phaeton. Sommat ’as ’appened of the utmost importance.”

  ‘What is it?” Rowena asked. “An accident?”

  “’Is Lordship didn’t say, miss. He only asks if you’ll come quick-like.”

  Rowena looked at Sam and asked,

  “What is it, Sam? You must know.”

  Then despite herself she gave a little cry.

  “It’s not – Master Mark?”

  “I don’t know, miss, and that’s the truth,” Sam replied, “but ’is Lordship wouldn’t say ’tis important if it aint.”

  “What can have occurred?”

  They were by now near to Little Powick and it seemed pointless to argue when the Marquis could easily follow her to the crossroads and pick her up when the carriage left her there.

  Equally she was exceedingly reluctant to do as he wished unless it was something that concerned the family –

  She had a sudden feeling of fear that her father might have been in an accident.

  Suppose he had been involved in the same type of collision that had injured the Marquis?

  “I will come and speak to his Lordship,” she said, making up her mind.

  Sam opened the door of the carriage and she stepped
out onto the road.

  As she walked towards the Marquis, she heard Sam ask the footman to help him with her trunk.

  She reached the phaeton and looked up at the Marquis who seemed very high above her.

  “What has happened? Has there been an accident?”

  Although she tried to speak coldly, she could not help a note of agitation creeping into her voice.

  “Get in and I will tell you,” he replied.

  For a moment Rowena hesitated and then she realised that Sam and the footman were just behind her.

  Tentatively, because there seemed to be nothing else she could do, she put one foot on the step and the Marquis stretched out his hand.

  Although she had no wish to take it, she needed his assistance to climb up into the seat beside him.

  She sat down and as she did so the Marquis took a guinea from his pocket and threw it down to the Earl’s footman who had deposited her trunk at the back of the phaeton.

  He caught the gold coin, grinned and touched the brim of his hat.

  “Thank you, my Lord.”

  The Marquis drew his horses back into the centre of the road and they moved off.

  It all happened so quickly that Rowena realised that she had not thanked her grandfather’s servants and in fact even now did not understand why she had been persuaded to change vehicles.

  “Where are we going?” she asked after a moment as the Marquis did not speak.

  He made no reply and she urged him,

  “I insist on your telling me why you stopped me in this extraordinary manner. If it is bad news, I would rather hear it at once than frighten myself into imagining things that may not have happened.”

  “Let me set your mind at rest by telling you that there has been no accident.”

  “Then you have no right to stop me in this ridiculous way.”

  “I think I have every right!”

  There was something in the way he spoke that made Rowena look at him suspiciously. She thought as she glanced at his profile that his chin was firm and perhaps even more aggressive than usual.

  It certainly seemed very square above the whiteness of his intricately tied cravat and she imagined too that his mouth was especially firm.

  “I thought that you realised last night that I had no wish to see you again,” she said.