The Irish Bride (3 page)

She shook her head with a gleeful grin. “We’re quite used to making our own decisions,” she said. “You have only to approve them.”

Growing serious again, Amelia added, “You won’t distress Mother, wilt you? None of this is her fault. It’s all Father. Why, oh why, wouldn’t he stop gambling?”

“I’ve known officers like that. It becomes more to them than a battle or their honor. It’s like a hunger that can never be satisfied.”

“Do you gamble, Nick?” Her eyes were intent as she worried a fold of her dress between her hands. He owed her his honesty.

“From time to time. But there’s no lust in me for the cards or racing. It’s an occasional pastime; nothing more.”

Her sigh was one of relief. “We didn’t know, you see. You’re something of a stranger to us.”

Nick put out his hand and shook hers. “I won’t be a stranger anymore. I need you to put me in the way of things here. Do that, and the Kirwans will be a paying proposition in no time.”

He was not so certain come the morning.

Chapter Two

Nick spent the morning poring over the accounts. After an hour, his head was pounding like the hooves of a charging cavalry squad. Neither his mood nor his headache improved when he discovered his father’s diaries in the back of his wardrobe.

With a resigned sigh, Nick tied a cold towel about his brow and began to read the diary for the last year of his father’s life. As it was written in the not-very-difficult shorthand that the late Sir Benjamin had invented, which Nick had first to decipher, it was not until Amelia came to tell him about luncheon that Nick closed the book.

“Have you found a thousand pounds lost in my arithmetic?” she asked with a hopeful laugh.

“Unfortunately, no. Not even that lost shilling.”

Amelia’s brow wrinkled as she bit her lip. “It’s bad, isn’t it, Nick?”

“Bad enough. But cheer up! We can always take in washing.”

“Or I could hire out as a maid of all work,” she said, responding to his tone. “And Emma is a marvelous cook, you know, though Mother doesn’t like her to do it. If it weren’t for Mrs. Beattie being in the family so long, we should have replaced her with Emma.”

Nick encouraged her to prattle in this light spirit as they came downstairs. He saw his mother look up and smile, the worried lines fading as she heard him laugh. Not for the world would he reveal what he’d read in the diary.

In addition to betting heavily on horses and losing large sums at cards, Sir Benjamin had been an adulterer. He had paid for his pleasures with diamonds or, more indirectly, with “loans” his estate could ill afford to make.

Reading between the lines, Nick had realized that his father’s wildness came partly from his nature and partly as a way to assuage his growing fears about his wife’s health. The notation of a dizzy spell or a visit from the doctor would be followed shortly by a visit to the mistress of the moment or by a romp with a stranger. Nick had often seen soldiers fend off thoughts of mortality by such a debauch; he could almost sympathize with his father. Nevertheless, it was Sir Benjamin who had fallen down dead of an apoplexy while his wife survived, indifferent health or no.

After luncheon. Lady Kirwan followed him into the study. She entered hesitantly. This had been Sir Benjamin’s sanctuary against domestic upsets and neither she nor her children had ever been welcome.

Nick stood up as soon as he perceived her. “Sit down here, Mother,” he said, bringing her to the chair behind the desk.

“No, that’s your place now. This one will do for me.”

“Nonsense. You’re not a tenant behind in the rent. You sit there, and I shall sit here.” He put aside the feeling that he was committing an act of sedition and perched on the edge of the desk, one leg dangling to the carpet.

His mother clasped her mittened hands in her lap and looked up at him. “In what case do we stand, son?”

“Well enough.” He spoke lightly, hoping to put her off.

“No, do not treat me so. Take me into your confidence.”

“I am, Mother. Believe me. All will be well. Father did play heavily, but he was honorable about his debts. Except for what he owed on the last night he played—

“The night he died,” Lady Kirwan said levelly.

“Yes. Except for those debts and a few bills from tradesmen and the like, he left nothing for me to pay. I confess I was afraid I should find myself owing more than that. Most of those debts I can pay immediately through what I made in the war.”

“I am relieved to hear it. Yet I wonder, what are we to live on?”

“You’re not afraid of starving, Mother? Things are not so dire as that. We shall have to be careful of expenditure for a few years until our estate regains its health. I shall have to look into matters more deeply to be certain, yet I believe that if we are thrifty, we can regain our former status within four years.”

“Four years?” Her mild eyes filled with tears.

“Come. That’s not so long. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Lady Kirwan shook her head, her jet earrings swaying. “Yes, there is. I’m afraid for the girls. If we are impoverished, how are they to get husbands?”

“Early yet to think of such things. They’re hardly out of the schoolroom.”

“They have been out longer than you realize, Nick. Besides, what has that to say to anything? I was married myself long before I reached Emma’s age.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “And it’s grateful I am to you for it.”

Nick had done it to make her smile and so she did, though the tears still stood in her eyes. “But my father had a thousand pounds to go with me. How shall we find them decent young men without a like sum?”

“It sounds uncommon like you have someone in your eye, Mother. Tell me who it is. I knew most of the young men for forty miles around before I went away.”

“It is less who I have in mind than who it is your sisters have chosen.”

“Have chosen?” Nick echoed. “Can it be they’ve already given their promises?”

“Oh, no,” Lady Kirwan said. “No, I don’t believe it’s gone so far as that. They would have told me so if it had.” She smiled proudly. “I cannot think of many mothers who have such confidences from their daughters as I have. These last months have drawn us ever closer.”

“Mother,” Nick said. “Why didn’t you write to tell me things had become so bleak? I would have come home at once. Wellington had enough officers and to spare without me.”

“I couldn’t have asked it of you. My father said that every man should have his war to fight if he was ever to hold up his head among men. I couldn’t have stolen your war from you.”

Her eyes glowed with such loving pride that Nick could hardly bear to meet her gaze. He knew too much about himself to feel any arrogance about his war service. Yes, he had acquitted himself well time and again. He’d been mentioned in dispatches and had the right to wear more than one decoration. Once, after a particularly hideous affray, the great Duke, despite his dislike of the Irish under his command, had shaken his hand.

Yet his clearest memories were of the fear, loathing, and hatred toward his enemy that had filled him again and again, combining to turn him into something less than an animal. He’d looked into men’s eyes as he had killed them and known no remorse. He had picked his way over the bodies of his comrades to close with the enemy and had never given the groaning wounded a second thought.

He’d committed no atrocities, nothing that contravened the laws of war, but he’d washed blood from his hands and sponged it from his uniform over and over. If he could have killed Napoleon thus, breast to breast, he would have done it and rejoiced, but killing instead the emperor’s duped soldiers left him feeling soiled, weary, and sick.

“Yes,” he said, staring out the window. “I have had my war.”

Lady Kirwan laid her hand on his knee. “What is it?”

He couldn’t tell her. She had never experienced the horror that would have given her common ground with her son. No woman could understand what he had seen and done. Even now, the memory of his war service was sharper than his memory of last night’s homecoming.

“You were going to tell me the names of my sisters’ suitors. Dare I hope even one of them is rich as Midas?”

“Neither of them,” she said with a sigh that seemed yet to have something of happiness in it. “Emma is very fond of Robbie Staines, Lord Bellamy’s youngest boy. It will never do, of course. I’m afraid he’s so very shiftless that they are sending him to his uncle in Boston,”

“That sounds like Robbie. He’s some years younger than I am but I never heard any good of him. How did Emma come to grow fond of such a shabby fellow?”

“She is bosom friends with his sister. They were much thrown together when Emma visited Belmont last summer. I’m afraid her heart is deeply engaged. I believe that if she had the money, she would follow him to America.”

“Then that is the first good to come out of our lamentable situation. And Amelia? She, I know, has had sense enough to choose some man of property.”

“She has not said as much to me, yet I feel there is some thought in her mind of—”

“Yes?” He felt sure Amelia had picked someone even less eligible that Robbie Staines. There had been so little good news of late that he would not have been surprised to find her enamored of old Barry the groom.

“On St. Brigid’s Day, she visited our neighbors as my representative, for I was taken ill with a fever. She stopped to see Mrs. Daltrey, who had fallen the week before. The dairy floor was wet and she slipped down. Wrenched her back so that she could hardly walk.”

“Mother ...,” Nick began, when it seemed as though she’d pause on this point forever.

“It was at his mother’s cottage that I’m afraid Amelia met Arthur Daltrey.” She seemed reluctant to mention his name, as though fearful of making the man himself appear.

“Arthur Daltrey? I know that name. One of our farmers, isn’t he?”

“He was. He now owns Badhaven.”

“Owns it? His father rented from us.”

“I’m afraid your father sold it outright when he lost a bet to one of his cronies. Which of two raindrops on a window would reach the sill first, I think.” Her voice held no distaste. He heard rather a fatalistic acceptance of whatever came her way. Only for her children’s sake could she rouse herself to take an interest. Nick realized the true cost of his father’s improvidence and vowed that no wife of his should ever have cause to weep over his thoughtlessness.

“I wouldn’t have thought Amelia would fall in love with a farmer,” he mused. “A poet, perhaps, or a revolutionary. Someone utterly humorless to balance her own merry spirits.”

“I have not seen him, but I have heard that Arthur Daltrey could turn any girl’s head. He’s said to be the handsomest man in the county and perhaps he was, before yesterday.” She fluttered her lashes at him, like a girl teasing a boy.

“You’ll make me blush,” Nick said.

“I say it without prejudice—or at least, not much. I have the handsomest son in the West.”

“Why not the whole of Ireland?”

“I haven’t been to Dublin for some time so can’t speak to the truth of it. But from Cork to Ballina, there’s no finer man than Sir Nicholas Kirwan, now that he’s come home. And Arthur Daltrey can just whistle for the girls now.”

“Amelia can’t be serious about him. One of our own farmers?”

“It’s difficult to know with Amelia,” Lady Kirwan said. “She doesn’t show all she feels. I don’t believe she has seen him often, but I myself saw them together two weeks ago. She’d been out riding but they were standing with their heads together, talking under a tree.”

“I’ll have a word with her.”

“Carefully,” Lady Kirwan warned. “Remember Romeo and Juliet. Sometimes all love needs to blossom is opposition.”

“I’ll bear it in mind. Well, m’lady, since neither of my sisters seem poised to bring the family fortunes up to snuff, it may well fall to my lot”

“What will, Nick?”

“The necessity of marrying for money. Show me a woman with three or four hundred pounds of her own and I’ll wed her out of hand.”

“Oh, Nick. Don’t joke about such things. Someone might think you are serious.”

* * * *

Desperate for fresh air and movement, Nick went out riding in the afternoon. Stamps, used to constant exercise, greeted him with an impatient whicker the moment he entered the sunlight-strewn stables. Nor did Nick care to stay in, hunched over his father’s crabbed handwriting any longer. The mist that had hung over the hills in the morning had lifted, leaving the air cool and soft. Nick took great, gulping breaths of it as he rode, finding it more heartening that a dram of poteen fresh from a cottager’s still.

He found moments from yesterday’s meeting playing in his mind as they trotted along the lanes. Blanche Ferris gleamed in his imagination like a gilded goddess in the dark recesses of a temple. She seemed to possess all things desirable in a woman—beauty, charm, a sweet helplessness that left a man feeling the stronger for her weakness.

If she had faults, they were girlish and would be eradicated by the joys and sorrows of womanhood. And if her father should prove to be as wealthy as promised by that mill owner so simply mentioned, then surely heaven had marked Blanche out for his bride. “Providence set her in my path yesterday,” he told a cow looking over the gate.

Nick decided then and there that he would call upon the Ferrises tomorrow. Assessing himself, he knew he could offer little beyond a title, yet such things had considerable merit in the eyes of the merchant class. The title was hereditary, so that Mr. Ferris’s grandson would have that all-important “sir” before his name.
Hell, I’ll even name the lad... wait. She said her father’s name was Augustus. No, I’m damned if I will.

A shadow showed against the gray stone wall as he came around the corner. It slipped among the tangle of trees where the wall ended.

Even in the depths of reverie, his soldier’s senses, honed by ambush and melee, never slept. Instantly on the alert, Nick gripped Stamps hard with his knees, keeping a deceptively loose hand on the reins. He let his right hand fall with apparent casualness to his thigh, but in truth he was feeling for the pistol butt in the holster by his knee. His father had taught him that it was never wise to travel without the means to put one’s horse or one’s enemy out of his misery.