Page 1 of Scandalous Nights With the Earl

Chapter One

Hampshire, England. 1820

Phillip James Kellan Moreland, the eighth Earl of Elmsworth, arrived at his estate in Hampshire just after midday on a cold May afternoon, the wind up and heavy rain pooling on the ground. He could barely look at the place, dark against a leaden sky, the crenulated palisades of stone even more unwelcoming than they had been when he’d left, four years prior.

Home.

The very word made him frown.

His younger brother was no longer in residence. He’d had a letter from Oliver a few years earlier explaining that his personal circumstances had changed substantially and because of it he had installed a farm manager at Elmsworth in his stead. The accounts Phillip had looked over briefly in London before returning to Hampshire had shown that the manager was doing a fine job, and he was thankful for such an easy turn of fortune. Still, he had little heart to be here again.

Gretel, his wife, was dead. Lying under a gravestone four thousand miles away, the earth of another land all around her.

Fisting his fingers, he breathed in hard, glad at least for the solitude and seclusion Elmsworth would bring. He did not wishfor conversation, laughter or questions. He did not want to hear once again from some well-meaning soul about how time healed loss and made living easier.

‘Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.’

He remembered these words from his schooling years at Eton. For a while, they had been etched into the wood of a drawer base by the side of his bed. He had put them there himself with the sharp point of his knife, Miranda Moreland’s last letter resting on top.

Mama’s instability had baffled him until finally he’d had enough, and he’d made a paper plane of her last tangled missive on returning home one summer and sent the nonsense into the pond she had drowned in. Oliver had been more sensible, Phillip thought then, for his brother had read his letter once and then burnt it. He had no idea as to what had happened to his father’s.

All he did know was that his mother’s sickness had reached out to hurt each of them years after her death and turned them all into people they had not wanted to be.

‘Thun-der-ation.’ He said the word slowly, breaking it into the same drawn-out syllables they seemed to favour in the American south. But there was no sense in wallowing in all that he had hated here, and at the age of almost thirty-three it was far past time to move on. The sombre sameness of the place brought everything back, that was the trouble, the inescapable sense of doom making him uneasy. He knew he had been called the Arrogant Earl in Society because of his distaste for the constant expectations. But tradition was a hard taskmaster and with the Moreland blood flowing in his veins he had no other pathway available to him but to return to England and make the best of it.

His attention was caught by a carriage that stood on the circular driveway before the manor, looking to all intents and purposes as if it had just arrived. There were two footmen hovering around the back of the conveyance and a driver wasat the front checking on the team of horses whose breath was steaming in the cold.

Visitors. Now? He swore as he stepped down from his own carriage and walked into the house to be met by a group of elderly females all fanned around a younger one lying prostrate on the long sofa in the green salon just off the entrance hall. He could not see her face but the expressions on those beside her told him there had been some sort of major mishap.

Mrs King, his housekeeper, turned and saw him first, a comical expression of shock widening her eyes and her mouth falling open.

‘My Lord Elmsworth? You are returned home at last?’ Disbelief lay in every word.

The other elderly ladies instantly looked across as well, three sets of identical watery blue eyes fixed upon him.

‘Indeed I have. Is there a problem here, Mrs King?’

The young woman lying down was now visible. Her cheeks were pale and her eyes reddened. As she recognised his presence, consternation appeared on her face. She tried to sit up, swivelling her feet to the floor, and her complexion became paler still.

‘I would lie down again if I were you, Miss…?’

He waited as one of the older women furnished her name.

‘Mrs St Claire, Lord Elmsworth.’

‘And… I am…never…sick.’

This quiet rejoinder from the patient had him observing her more closely. It was true. She did not give the appearance of one of the thin, pale and fragile butterflies Society lauded. She was curvaceous, the line of her bodice showing off a generous bosom. He felt a hot and unfamiliar flicker of interest inside and it shocked him.

‘Well, you are indeed most ill now, my dear.’ The ancient woman nearest to her said this.

‘Because the meal last night…was tainted.’ The patient’s glance met his own, direct and honest and with a good sprinkling of horror within it.

‘She has been sick all night, my lord, and then three times again this morning. She is so sick she cannot keep anything down at all, which is why we called in to your estate for help.’

‘But… I…am…feeling better…’

Phillip saw her chin tremble even as she said it and tried to school the scowl he knew to be on his own face.