The Ruthless Rake Read online

  It annoyed him because he knew that it was only greed for money and more money that made her share her favours.

  The Earl had a good idea who Michelle’s paramour might be.

  He was aware that a wealthy tradesman had been interested in her long before he had appeared on the scene. She had made fun of her middle-aged vulgar admirer. But he was rich and generous!

  Michelle could not resist taking and taking.

  The Earl made a decision. He was no longer interested in Michelle. He would send her the usual farewell gift and his secretary would see that she vacated the house he had installed her in as speedily as possible.

  There was a red-haired dancer in the chorus who had a vivacious vitality that attracted him and he decided to make her acquaintance on his return to London.

  Michelle was then dismissed from his Lordship’s thoughts as if she had never existed.

  The narrow streets the Earl was driving his horses through with great expertise were thronged with coaches and drays.

  Women in ragged shawls and straw bonnets, pockmarked beggars, shifty-eyed pickpockets and tightly stocked young men with tall fluffy beaver hats cluttered the dirty pavements.

  The Earl reached the fashionable roads and squares of Mayfair.

  Here a wealth of servants with cockaded hats sat red-nosed on the draped boxes of coaches bearing their Masters’ Coats-of-Arms or stood erect with tall silver-topped canes.

  The bedizened flunkeys invariably had a following of noisy bare-footed urchins, who half-jeeringly and half-admiringly pursued them wherever they went.

  Running beside a vehicle or swinging themselves on behind it, they would risk the lash of the whip with an impudent gesture and a bawdy word of derision.

  On reaching Rothingham House, the Earl stepped down from the phaeton and, passing through a line of bowing servants, found his butler waiting for him in the hall.

  “Bring me wine to the library, Meadstone,” he said, “and order the four-in-hand with fresh horses. I shall leave in half an hour.”

  “The luggage in the charge of your Lordship’s valets has already gone ahead, my Lord.”

  “Good!” the Earl exclaimed as he walked across the hall.

  He entered the library, a long room overlooking a small flower-filled garden at the back of the house.

  A flunkey brought a decanter of wine on a silver salver and set it down on a small table.

  Meadstone then poured out a glass and handed it to the Earl.

  He sipped it slowly before he said,

  “I noticed last night that one of the footmen, Henry, I think, was badly powdered and his stockings were wrinkled.”

  “I regret, my Lord, that I did not notice Henry’s appearance until he was already in the dining room,” Meadstone apologised.

  “Why?”

  “Why did I not notice him, my Lord?” Meadstone hesitated before he continued. “Henry was a trifle late on duty, my Lord.”

  “Dismiss him!”

  “Dismiss, my Lord?”

  There was a note of dismay in the butler’s voice.

  “Immediately! I pay for perfection and I expect it!”

  “But, my Lord – ”

  “I said immediately.”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  There was silence while Meadstone refilled the Earl’s glass and then with an effort he said respectfully,

  “I hope your Lordship will find everything in good order at King’s Keep. It will be like old times to know that it is back in your Lordship’s hands.”

  “It must have altered a great deal since I was there,” the Earl said. “Do you realise, Meadstone, I was nine when I left the country, twenty-three years ago.”

  “I remember it well, my Lord. Your father, his late Lordship, was in straitened circumstances that year.”

  “He was always in straitened circumstances,” the Earl observed and his voice was harsh.

  “Indeed, my Lord, things were very difficult –­ very difficult indeed.”

  “Did you ever get paid all you were owed?” the Earl enquired.

  “Not until you reimbursed me, my Lord, on your return from abroad.”

  “Why did you not leave and find other employment?” the Earl asked. “There must have been six or seven of you here struggling on year after year, my father living on what he could sell. The mirrors, the furniture, the pictures, never paying his debts except with promises. Why did you stay?”

  Meadstone looked embarrassed.

  “I think your Lordship knows the answer,” he replied at length. “We belonged, as one might say. My father and his father before him had served the Roth family. It’d not have been right for us to have left when things were hard.”

  “Hard!” the Earl ejaculated. “Unpaid, half-starved!”

  He paused and looked at the butler.

  “Yes, I do understand,” he said gently, “and all I can say, Meadstone, is thank you – thank you all. We have come through the hard times and now I will see that there are no more of them.”

  “You suffered too, Master Ancelin,” Meadstone said, relapsing his formality and addressing the Earl in the manner he had done when he was a child.

  “We will not talk of that!” the Earl said sharply. “Come, Meadstone, I must change before I set out for the country. Is there anyone to attend to me?”

  “I will do so myself, my Lord, and there is a young footman I am training, if you will permit him to watch.”

  “I am sure he will find it most instructive,” the Earl answered.

  He drained his glass and turned towards the stairs.

  “To tell the truth, Meadstone,” he said, “I feel quite apprehensive at the thought of seeing King’s Keep again. One should never walk back into the past. There is always a chance one will be bitterly disappointed.”

  “Not with King’s Keep, my Lord,” Meadstone said. “It has survived for three hundred years. I don’t think your Lordship’ll be disappointed.”

  “I would not bet on it,” the Earl replied, but he was not sneering.

  Chapter Two

  The Earl awoke early and lay for a while in the huge four- poster bed in which generations of Roths had been born and died, thinking about his home.

  He then rose and crossing the room pulled back the curtains over the mullion windows and looked out into the April sunshine.

  He thought, as he had done last night when he arrived at King’s Keep just as the sun was setting, that there was no more beautiful place in the whole world.

  Wisps of morning mist still lay over the two silver lakes linked by a bridge that carried the drive into the Park. Under the great oak trees a carpet of daffodils was a golden herald of spring.

  There were daffodils too sloping down to the lakes to join the kingcups and the wild iris, which were just coming into flower, and there were daffodils impudently peeping between the shrubs that bordered the green lawns.

  “Velvet not grass,” as one Royal admirer had once said of them.

  King’s Keep had originally been a Monastery, but after it had been looted and left half-ruined by Henry VIII, the land had reverted to the Crown.

  Sir Thomas Roth, a courtier to Queen Elizabeth, had purchased all that was left of the Monastery and erected a great house worthy of his position at Court and a monument to his huge fortune.

  In this building he had kept two of the inner courts that rested upon the foundation of the monastic cloister, but there was nothing Medieval about the house itself and King’s Keep became one of the most breathtakingly beautiful buildings in the whole country.

  It was situated almost in a hollow between two hills covered with woods.

  “A diamond in a green setting,” someone had said of it poetically and one of the many Kings who had stayed there had commented enviously, “It is too good for a subject!”

  The house had changed its name when Charles II as a young Prince had hidden in one of its secret chambers for three nights from the Cromwellian troops. On leaving he had s
aid to Sir John Roth,

  “When I become King, this house shall be renamed ‘King’s Keep’, for it has indeed kept me safe.”

  Sir John was dead when the restoration came, but his son became the first Earl of Rothingham and King’s Keep was a favourite place for the King and his roistering courtiers to take their lady loves.

  The first Earl was not a particularly good poet, but eloquent and he had carved over a bedroom door,

  “King’s Keep,

  Where morals sleep

  And lovers meet.”

  It must have been the first Earl who had brought a new raffish strain into the Roth blood.

  The portraits of the previous owners of King’s Keep were of good-looking staid men with an air of serious concentration about them, but the first Earl distinctly resembled his present successor.

  All down the succeeding centuries there had been Rothinghams looking like handsome buccaneers who had sailed round the world in search of adventure, leaving behind them legends of their conquests of the fair sex and of their phenomenal good fortune as gamesters.

  It was unfortunate, the Earl thought dryly, that his father had been the exception where ‘the luck of the Roths’ was concerned.

  He had been a gamester but an unfortunate one. While he was still quite young he gambled away a large amount of the family fortune.

  He had, however, the attraction that all the Roths possessed for women and his wife was not only beautiful and well-born but had also brought him a large dowry.

  He contrived to run through that in a few years and when she died bearing her second child, his wild extravagances brought him to the verge of bankruptcy.

  King’s Keep, as the Earl had related to the Prince, was only saved by a cousin, Colonel Fitzroy Roth, who took it over at the earnest plea of his relatives, who feared to see a whole page of English history disappear on the green baize of the gaming tables of St. James’s.

  The Colonel saved the estate, the house and its contents from the hands of the usurers.

  The Earl, walking through the Great State rooms thought how easily the beauty of King’s Keep might have been lost forever like the priceless treasures that had filled Rothingham House in Berkeley Square.

  It still hurt him even now to think of what his father had thrown away.

  Roth Square in Bloomsbury, Roth Avenue in Islington, Roth Street off Piccadilly, they had all been dissipated in nights of wild gaming or sold for ridiculous sums so that more guineas could be lost on absurd and eccentric wagers at which his father never had a chance of being the winner.

  He had died still challenging the fates.

  “I wager you two monkeys that I live until after midnight.”

  It was a bet that fortunately was not accepted.

  His luck had not changed and he died at two minutes to midnight in a room where he had even sold the carpet off the floor.

  Last night after he had finished dinner the Earl had walked through the house and thanked God that one of his relations had possessed enough pride in the family to keep some of its possessions intact.

  He had moved through the salons with their fine carvings, their paintings by Van Dyck, Lely, Rembrandt and Poussin, their inlaid furniture and unique collection of porcelain. He had looked at the great banqueting hall with its painted walls and magnificent ceiling which was considered to be Verrio’s masterpiece.

  He had even visited the State bedrooms with their huge four-poster beds, Vanderbank tapestries and French commodes brought to England at the beginning of the century by his grandfather.

  It was the Fifth Earl to whom the house owed its greatest glory.

  There was little he could do to improve the exterior with its magnificent ornamented stone work on the roof, its urns, its statues and its pointed towers that silhouetted against the sky and gave King’s Keep a strange almost fairylike silhouette.

  When he had returned from a grand tour of Europe, he had brought back with him Italian artists, plasterers and gilders who had painted and gilded the ceilings and added some magnificent marble chimneypieces to the elegant salons.

  If the Earl had been afraid that he might be disappointed in King’s Keep not having seen it since the age of nine, his fears were ungrounded.

  It had always seemed to him grand and impressive and yet a place he belonged to.

  To see it again was to remember how much it had been in his thoughts during his exile from England after his father’s death.

  In the sweltering heat of the Indian plains he would find himself remembering the soft drip of water from the fountains with their stone cupids or the rustle of the leaves in the shrubberies where he had sat as a small boy watching the little red squirrels running up the trees to hide their nuts.

  Sometimes he would dream that he was playing hide-and-seek amongst the secret staircases, the priest holes and the great chimney-breasts and that he was pursued by those who would do him an injury, but from whom he knew he was safe so long as he remained within King’s Keep.

  ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’ he said to himself after dinner.

  He walked across the lawn towards the lake and then turned to look back.

  The house glowed like a great jewel against the darkness, the stars shone overhead, the lights from innumerable windows were golden and glowing.

  “Mine!” he called out aloud with a note of elation in his voice, “and I will never let you go.”

  He knew now that it was for King’s Keep he had worked so hard those long years in India.

  He told himself at the time it was because he would never face again the humiliation of being poor and knowing that so many things were unobtainable because he could not pay for them.

  He wanted money because he loathed feeling debased in knowing that the name Rothingham was synonymous with debts, broken promises, duns hammering on the door and the threat of the Fleet Prison.

  That, he told himself, was something he would never endure again, but he knew now that there was a great deal more to his overwhelming ambition to make money and to the determination in himself that would not let him rest.

  It was because always at the back of his mind there was King’s Keep for him to inherit and where he could live, if he could afford it.

  He thought of the long hours he had spent learning the art of buying and selling and of the people he had to associate with. How he had been forced to ingratiate himself with those who had neither breeding nor honesty and how by sheer tact and diplomacy he had persuaded them to count him in as a partner.

  The dandies, the bucks and the Noblemen who surrounded the Prince of Wales, the Earl thought, would be surprised if they knew to what depths he had stooped in his determination to make a fortune and how ruthless he had been.

  But he, at least, had the luck of the Roths!

  The impossible had become possible and in the most desperate gambles he had proved a winner and then almost like a tidal wave he had found himself swept from financial success to financial success.

  As he looked at King’s Keep, he had the absurd feeling that he wanted to put his arms round it and hold it close.

  It was more lovely than the face of any woman he had ever seen, more perfect in its symmetry than any female body and more comforting in its solidity than anything else in his life.

  ‘This is what I have always wanted,’ he thought.

  He wondered why something cynical within himself laughed at his own enthusiasm.

  ‘Would you be content to rusticate here as your grandfather did?’ his heart asked.

  He thought of how his grandfather had embellished King’s Keep as another man might have embellished the woman he loved with jewels and gowns.

  As he remembered the fifth Earl, he raised his eyes to where, on top of one of the hills sloping upwards towards the sky behind the house, he saw the dome of an Observatory.

  It was from there that his grandfather had studied the stars, finding them far more interesting than people and far more enthralling than Society.
/>   ‘Now I have King’s Keep,’ the Earl asked himself, ‘what else?’

  He walked back to the house and much later had gone to bed full of plans for tomorrow.

  He would see his estate agent and his farm manager. He would inspect the stables and he was certain that there, if nowhere else, he would wish to make improvements.

  His cousin would have kept only a small number of horses and his grandfather had not been a racing man.

  The Earl was determined that his success on the turf these last three years should be but a beginning of his association with ‘the sport of Kings’.

  Tomorrow he would talk about engaging more trainers and grooms. He already had an idea of buying new bloodstock and breeding from his own mares.

  He had fallen asleep with a hundred different ideas in his mind and now this morning, looking out over the lake, he asked himself why he was in such a hurry.

  King’s Keep had retained its identity through many centuries, and now he wanted the peace of it to bring him a sense of security, something that he had never felt since he was a child.

  He rang for his valet and was downstairs for breakfast so early that the servants looked at him in surprise.

  They had been well trained as the Earl had noticed last night with approval.

  The food was well cooked although lacking perhaps the subtlety of the chef he employed in London, who was noted as one of the best in the Beau Monde.

  Nevertheless every dish, and there was a large number of them, was delicious enough to tempt his appetite.

  The silver was magnificent and the three footmen on duty were bright-faced country lads all over six foot and appeared to be proficient in their duties.

  “I shall be giving house parties, Barnham,” he said to the butler as he seated himself at the breakfast table. “The staff must be increased. I imagine that the Colonel did not require a Groom of the Chambers or a Major Domo?”

  “No, my Lord, I managed the household, your Lordship might say, for the late Master.”

  “Well, for the moment continue to do so,” the Earl replied, “but we shall require more footmen and doubtless the housekeeper will want to engage new housemaids.”