The Taste of Innocence

The Taste of Innocence

STEPHANIE LAURENS

1

February 1833

Northwest of Combe Florey, Somerset

He had to marry, so he would.

But on his terms.

The latter words resonated through Charlie Morwellan’s mind, repeating to the thud of his horse’s hooves as he cantered steadily north. The winter air was crisp and clear. About him the lush green foothills of the western face of the Quantocks rippled and rolled. He’d been born to this country, at Morwellan Park, his home, now a mile behind him, yet he paid the arcadian views scant heed, his mind relentlessly focused on other vistas.

He was lord and master of the fields about him, filling the valley between the Quantocks to the east and the western end of the Brendon Hills. His lands stretched south well beyond the Park itself to where they abutted those managed by his brother-in-law, Gabriel Cynster. The northern boundary lay ahead, following a rise; as his dappled gray gelding, Storm, crested it, Charlie drew rein and paused, looking ahead yet not really seeing.

Cold air caressed his cheeks. Jaw set, expression impassive, he let the reasons behind his present direction run through his mind—one last time.

He’d inherited the earldom of Meredith on his father’s death three years previously. Both before and since, he’d ducked and dodged the inevitable attempts to trap him into matrimony. Although the prospect of a wealthy, now over thirty-year-old, as-yet-unwed earl kept the matchmakers perennially salivating, after a decade in the ton he was awake to all their tricks; time and again he slipped free of their nets, taking a cynical male delight in so doing.

Yet for Lord Charles Morwellan, eighth Earl of Meredith, matrimony itself was inescapable.

That, however, wasn’t the spur that had finally pricked him into action.

Nearly two years ago his closest friends, Gerrard Debbington and Dillon Caxton, had both married. Neither had been looking for a wife, neither had needed to marry, yet fate had set her snares and each had happily walked to the altar; he’d stood beside them there and known they’d been right to seize the moment.

Both Gerrard and Dillon were now fathers.

Storm shifted, restless; absentmindedly Charlie patted his neck.

Connected via their links to the powerful Cynster clan, he, Gerrard, and Dillon, and their wives, Jacqueline and Priscilla, had met as they always did after Christmas at Somersham Place, principal residence of the Dukes of St. Ives and ancestral home of the Cynsters. The large family and its multifarious connections met biannually there, at the so-called Summer Celebration in August and again over the festive season, the connections joining the family after spending Christmas itself with their own families.

He’d always enjoyed the boisterous warmth of those gatherings, yet this time…it hadn’t been Gerrard’s and Dillon’s children per se that had fed his restlessness but rather what they represented. Of the three of them, friends for over a decade, he was the one with a recognized duty to wed and produce an heir. While theoretically he could leave his brother Jeremy, now twenty-three, to father the next generation of Morwellans, when it came to family duty he’d long ago accepted that he was constitutionally incapable of ducking. Letting one of the major responsibilities attached to the position of earl devolve onto Jeremy’s shoulders was not something his conscience or his nature, his sense of self, would allow.

Which was why he was heading for Conningham Manor.

Continuing to tempt fate, courting the risk of that dangerous deity stepping in and organizing his life, and his wife, for him, as she had with Gerrard and Dillon, would be beyond foolish; ergo it was time for him to choose his bride. Now, before the start of the coming season, so he could exercise his prerogative, choose the lady who would suit him best, and have the deed done, final and complete, before society even got wind of it.

Before fate had any further chance to throw love across his path.

He needed to act now to retain complete and absolute control over his own destiny, something he considered a necessity, not an option.

Storm pranced, infected with Charlie’s underlying impatience. Subduing the powerful gelding, Charlie focused on the landscape ahead. A mile away, comfortably nestled in a dip, the slate roofs of Conningham Manor rose above the naked branches of its orchard. Weak morning sunlight glinted off diamond-paned windows; a chill breeze caught the smoke drifting from the tall Elizabethan chimney pots and whisked it away. There’d been Conninghams at the Manor for nearly as long as there’d been Morwellans at the Park.

Charlie stared at the Manor for a minute more, then stirred, eased Storm’s reins, and cantered down the rise.

“Regardless, Sarah, Clary and I firmly believe that you have to marry first.”

Seated facing the bow window in the back parlor of Conningham Manor, the undisputed domain of the daughters of the house, Sarah Conningham glanced at her sixteen-year-old sister Gloria, who stared pugnaciously at her from her perch on the window seat.

“Before us.” The clarification came in determined tones from seventeen-year-old Clara—Clary—seated beside Gloria and likewise focused on Sarah and their relentless pursuit to urge her into matrimony.

Stifling a sigh, Sarah looked down at the ribbon trim she was unpicking from the neckline of her new spencer, and with unimpaired calm set about reiterating her well-trod arguments. “You know that’s not true. I’ve told you so, Twitters has told you so, and Mama has told you so. Whether I marry or not will have no effect what ever on your come-outs.” Freeing the last stitch, she tugged the ribbon away, then shook out the spencer. “Clary will have her first season next year, and you, Gloria, will follow the year after.”

“Yes but, that’s not the point.” Clary fixed Sarah with a frown. “It’s the…the way of things.”

When Sarah cocked a questioning brow at her, Clary blushed and rushed on, “It’s the unfulfilled expectations. Mama and Papa will be taking you to London in a few weeks for your fourth season. It’s obvious they still hope you’ll attract the notice of a suitable gentleman. Both Maria and Angela accepted offers in their second season, after all.”

Maria and Angela were their older sisters, twenty-eight and twenty-six years old, both married and living with their husbands and children on said husbands’ distant estates. Unlike Sarah, both Maria and Angela had been perfectly content to marry gentlemen of their station with whom they were merely comfortable, given those men were blessed with fortunes and estates of appropriate degree.

Both marriages were conventional; neither Maria nor Angela had ever considered any other prospect, let alone dreamed of it.

As far as Sarah knew, neither had Clary or Gloria. At least, not yet.

She suppressed another sigh. “I assure you I will happily accept should an offer eventuate from a gentleman I can countenance being married to. However, as that happy occurrence seems increasingly unlikely”—she gave passing thanks that neither Clary nor Gloria had any notion of the number of offers she’d received and declined over the past three years—“I assure you I’m resigned to a spinster’s life.”

That was a massive overstatement, but…Sarah flicked a glance at the fourth occupant of the room, her erstwhile governess, Miss Twitterton, fondly known as Twitters, seated in an armchair to one side of the wide window. Twitters’s gray head was bent over a piece of darning; she gave no sign of following the familiar discussion.

If she couldn’t imagine being happy with a life like Maria’s or Angela’s, Sarah could equally not imagine being content with a life like Twitters’s.

Gloria made a rude sound. Clary looked disgusted. The pair exchanged glances, then embarked on a verbal catalogue of what they considered the most pertinent criteria for defining a “suitable gentleman,” one to whom Sarah would countenance being wed.

Folding her new spencer with the garish scarlet ribbon now removed, Sarah smiled distantly and let them ramble. She was sincerely fond of her younger sisters, yet the gap between her twenty-three years and their ages was, in terms of the present discussion, a significant gulf.

They naively considered marriage a simple matter easily decided on a list of definable attributes, while she had seen enough to appreciate how unsatisfactory such an approach often was. Most marriages in their circle were indeed contracted on the basis of such criteria—and the vast majority, underpinned by nothing stronger than mild affection, degenerated into hollow relationships in which both partners turned elsewhere for comfort.

For love.

Such as love, in such circumstances, could be. Somehow less, somehow tawdry.

For herself, she’d approached the question of marriage with an open mind, and open eyes. No one had ever deemed her rebellious, yet she’d never been one to blindly follow others’ dictates, especially on topics of personal importance. So she’d looked, and studied.

She now believed that when it came to marriage there was something better than the conventional norm. Something finer; an ideal, a commitment that compelled one to grasp it, a state glorious enough to fill the heart with yearning and need, and ultimately with satisfaction, a construct in which love existed within the bonds of matrimony rather than outside them.

And she’d seen it. Not in her parents’ marriage, for that was a conventional if successful union, one without passion but based instead on affection, duty, and common cause. But to the south lay Morwellan Park, and beyond that Casleigh, the home of Lord Martin and Lady Celia Cynster, and now also home to their elder son, Gabriel, and his wife, Lady Alathea née Morwellan.

Sarah had known Alathea, Gabriel, and his parents for all of her life. Alathea and Gabriel had married for love; Alathea had waited until she was twenty-nine before Gabriel had come to his senses and claimed her as his bride. As for Martin and Celia, they had eloped long ago in a statement of passion impossible to mistake.

Sarah met both couples frequently. Her conviction that a love match, for want of a better title, was a goal worthy of her aspiration derived from what she’d observed between Gabriel and Alathea and, once her wits had been sharpened and her eyes had grown accustomed, from the older and somehow deeper and stronger interaction between Martin and Celia.

She freely admitted she didn’t know what love was, had no concept of what the emotion would feel like within a marriage. Yet she’d seen evidence of its existence in the quality of a smile, in the subtle meeting of eyes, the gentle touch of a hand. A caress outwardly innocent yet laden with meaning.

When it was there, love colored such moments. When it wasn’t…

But how did one define that love?

And did it mysteriously appear, or did one need to work for it? How did it come about?

She had no answers, not even a glimmer, hence her unwed state. Despite her sisters’ trenchant beliefs, there was no reason she needed to marry. And if the emotion that infused the Cynsters’ marriages was not part of an offer made to her, then she doubted any man, no matter how wealthy, how handsome or charming, could tempt her to surrender her hand.

To her, marriage without love held no attraction. She had no need of a union devoid of that finer glory, devoid of passion, yearning, need, and satisfaction. She had no reason to accept a lesser union.

“You will promise to look, won’t you?”

Sarah glanced up to find Gloria leaning forward, brown brows beetling at her.

“Properly, I mean.”

“And that you’ll seriously consider and encourage any likely gentleman,” Clary added.

Sarah blinked, then laughed and sat up to lay aside her spencer. “No, I will not. You two are far too impertinent—I’m sure Twitters agrees.”

She glanced at Twitters to find the governess, whose ears were uncommonly sharp, peering myopically out of the window in the direction of the front drive.

“Now who is that, I wonder?” Twitters squinted past Clary, who swiveled to look out, as did Gloria. “No doubt some gentleman come to call on your papa.”

Sarah looked past Gloria. Blessed with excellent eyesight, she instantly recognized the horse man trotting up the drive, but surprise and a frisson of unnerving reaction—something she felt whenever she first saw him—stilled her tongue.

“It’s Charlie Morwellan,” Gloria said. “I wonder what he’s doing here.”

Clary shrugged. “Probably to see Papa about the hunting.”

“But he’s never here for the hunting,” Gloria pointed out. “These days he spends almost all his time in London. Augusta said she hardly ever sees him.”

“Maybe he’s staying in the country this year,” Clary said. “I heard Lady Castleton tell Mama that he’s going to be hunted without quarter this season from the absolute instant he returns to town.”

Sarah had heard the same thing, but she knew Charlie well enough to predict that he would be no easy quarry. She watched as he drew rein at the edge of the forecourt and swung lithely down from the back of his gray hunter.

The breeze ruffled his elegantly cropped golden locks. His morning coat of brown Bath superfine was the apogee of some London tailor’s art, stretching over Charlie’s broad shoulders before tapering to hug his lean waist and narrow hips. His linen was pristine and precise; his waistcoat, glimpsed as he moved, was a subtle medley of browns and black. Buckskin breeches molded to long powerful legs before disappearing into glossy black Hessians, completing a picture that might have been titled Fashionable Peer in the Country.