The Heiress Read online

  “Yes,” Jamie said calmly. “I think it is time we remembered what we are about.” With his back rigid, he walked around the table to escort Berengaria from the room.

  It was only minutes later that he was alone with his sister.

  “Why did someone not tell me?” Jamie asked, standing before the tiny, crumbling window in Berengaria’s room. Reaching out his hand, he broke a piece of stone away. Water damage. Years ago, while he’d been away, the lead gutters had been sold off the old stone keep, so the water seeped into the stone.

  Turning, he looked at his sister as she sat serenely on her cushioned chair, a chair more suited for a peasant’s hut than what had once been the keep of a proud and glorious estate. “Why did no one tell me?” he asked again.

  Berengaria opened her mouth to give the explanation she’d planned to give, but instead, she told the truth. “Pride. That great Montgomery curse of pride.” She hesitated, then smiled. “That pride that is now making your stomach churn and bringing out the sweat on your brow. Tell me, are you toying with the dagger Father gave you?”

  For a moment Jamie didn’t know what she was talking about but then realized that he was indeed holding the beautiful golden-handled dagger his father had given him long ago. The jewels in the hilt had been replaced with glass years ago, but if the dagger were held just so in the sunlight, one could see the gold that still coated the steel handle.

  He gave a laugh. “I had forgotten how well you know me.” With one easy movement, he sat on a cushion at her feet and leaned his head against her knee, closing his eyes in pleasure as she stroked his hair.

  “I never saw any woman who could compare with you in beauty,” he said softly.

  “Is that not a vain thing for you to say as we are twins?”

  He kissed her hand. “I am old and ugly and scarred, whereas you are untouched by time.”

  “Untouched is true,” she said, trying to make a joke about her virginity.

  But Jamie did not smile. Instead, he put his hand up before her face.

  “It is no use,” she said, smiling sweetly, catching his hand. “I cannot see lighted twigs before my face. There is no sight for me, and no man wants a blind wife. For all the use I am to the world, it would have been better had I died at birth.”

  The violence with which Jamie arose startled her. “Oh, Jamie, I am sorry. I did not mean—It was thoughtless of me. Please, come sit down again. Let me touch you. Please.”

  He sat down again, but his heart was pounding. Pounding with guilt. He and his sister were twins, but Jamie had been quite a bit bigger than his sister and so had taken hours to be born. When Berengaria was finally allowed out, the umbilical cord was found to be wrapped around her neck, and it was soon discovered that she was blind. The midwife said it was Jamie’s fault for taking so long to be born, so all his life Jamie had lived with the guilt of what he’d done to his beautiful sister.

  And all their lives he had been close to her, never once losing patience with her or tiring of her company. He helped her in everything, encouraging her to climb trees, to walk miles into the hills, even to ride a horse alone.

  Only their brother, Edward, thought Jamie less than a saint for helping his blind sister. Whenever anyone remarked on how good Jamie was to give up time with his rowdy boyhood companions to take his blind sister berry picking, their older brother would say, “He stole her sight, didn’t he? Why shouldn’t he do what he can to give it back to her?”

  Jamie took a deep breath. “So no one told me what Edward was doing out of pride?” he said, coming back to the present. Guilt still weighed him down. Guilt over leaving his sister who needed him so much, guilt for what had happened after he left.

  “You must cease this flagellation of yourself,” Berengaria said, pulling Jamie’s thick black hair with both her hands, making his head come back so he looked up at her. It was difficult to believe that those perfect, lushly lashed blue eyes of hers could not see.

  “If you give me a look of pity, I shall snatch you bald,” she said, pulling harder.

  “Ow!” He laughed as she released his hair, then he pulled one of her hands to his chest and kissed it. “I cannot help the guilt I feel. I knew what Father and Edward were like.”

  “Yes,” Berengaria said with a grimace. “Father never took his nose out of a book if he could help it, and Edward was a pig. There wasn’t a village girl over the age of ten who was safe from him. He died young because the devil liked him so well he wanted him near him forever.”

  In spite of himself, Jamie laughed. “How very much I have missed you these months.”

  “Years, my dear brother. Years.”

  “Why do women always remember the most inconsequential of details?”

  She tweaked his ear and made him yelp. “Now stop telling me of your women and tell me of this task you have taken on.”

  “How kind you are. How you make escorting a rich heiress across the country sound like a knight’s holy quest.”

  “It is if you are involved. How Edward and you could be brothers bewilders me.”

  “As he was born five months after our parents’ marriage, I sometimes wonder who his father was,” Jamie said with great cynicism.

  Had anyone else said this, Berengaria would have defended her dear mother, whose mind had long ago slipped away. “One time I asked Mother about that.”

  Jamie was surprised. “And what did she say?”

  “She waved her hand and said, ‘There were so many lovely young men that summer I’m afraid I cannot remember who was what.’ ”

  The maleness in Jamie reacted first, making anger surge through him, but he knew his mother too well to take offense and so relaxed and smiled. “If her family found she was pregnant, who better to marry her to than Father? I can hear his mother, ‘Come, dear, put down that book. It’s time to get married.’ ”

  “Do you think he read on his wedding night? Oh, Jamie, do you think we are … ?” Her eyes widened.

  “Even scholars put down their books at times. Besides, look you at us and our cousins. We are alike. And Joby is the mirror image of Father.”

  “Yes,” she said, “so you have thought of this, too?”

  “A time or two.”

  “Perhaps every time Edward pushed you into a pile of horse dung? Or tied you to a tree branch and left you? Or destroyed your possessions?”

  “Or when he called you names,” Jamie said softly, then his eyes twinkled. “Or when he tried to marry you to Henry Oliver.”

  At that Berengaria groaned. “Henry still petitions Mother.”

  “Does he still have the intelligence of a carrot?”

  “More of a radish,” she said bleakly, not wanting anyone to see her despair that the only honest marriage proposal she’d ever had came from someone like Henry Oliver. “Please, no more talk of Edward and how he decimated what little we had. And definitely no more talk of—of that man! Tell me of your heiress.”

  Jamie started to protest but closed his mouth. “His” heiress had everything to do with the gambling and whoring and general depravity of his “brother” Edward. In Jamie’s mind no one as degenerate as Edward deserved the title of brother. While Jamie had been away fighting for the queen, performing tasks for the queen, endangering his life for the queen, Edward had been selling off all that his family owned so he could afford horses (whose legs or necks he broke), fine clothes (which he lost or destroyed), and his never-ending gambling (where he invariably lost).

  While Edward had been rapidly bankrupting the family, their father had imprisoned himself in a tower room to write a history of the world. He ate little, slept little, saw no one, spoke to no one. Just wrote day and night. When Berengaria and Joby confronted their father with proof of Edward’s excesses, including deeds of land he’d signed over to pay his debts, their father had said, “What can I do? It will all be Edward’s someday, so he may do what he likes. I must finish this book before I die.”

  But a fever had taken the lives of both
Edward and their father. One day they were alive and two days later they were dead.

  When Jamie returned for the funerals, he found what had once been a moderately profitable estate now unable to support itself. All the land except what the old keep was standing on had been sold. The manor house had been sold the year before, along with all the fields and all the cottages where the farmers lived.

  For days Jamie had been inconsolable in his rage. “How did he expect you to live? If there are no rents or crops, how did he expect you to feed yourselves?”

  “With his gambling wins, of course. He was always saying that he was going to win next time,” Joby had said, looking both prematurely old and heartbreakingly young. She raised an eyebrow at her brother. “Perhaps you should spend less time ranting about what you cannot change and do what you can with what you have.” She had given a meaningful glance toward Berengaria.

  Joby meant that no man wanted a blind wife no matter how beautiful she was or even what her dowry was. Always it would be Jamie’s responsibility to provide for her.

  “Pride,” he said now. “Yes, you and Joby had too much pride to call me home.”

  “No, I had too much pride. Joby said … Well, perhaps it is better left unrepeated what Joby said.”

  “Something about my cowardice at leaving you two at the hands of a monster like Edward?”

  “You are kinder to yourself than she was,” Berengaria said, smiling, remembering exactly what Joby had said. “Where does she learn all those dreadful words?”

  Jamie winced. “No doubt about Joby being a Montgomery. Father was right when he said that Job had not been through so much as he had with his youngest child.”

  “Father hated anything that took him from his precious book.” There was bitterness in her voice. “But Joby could read aloud to him and I could not.”

  Jamie squeezed her hand, and for a moment they were lost in unhappy memories.

  “Enough!” Berengaria said sternly. “Heiress. Tell me of your heiress.”

  “Not mine by any means. She is to wed one of the Bolingbrookes.”

  “Imagine such wealth,” Berengaria said dreamily. “Do you think they burn great logs each day so all the house is warm?”

  Jamie laughed. “Joby dreams of jewels and silk, and you dream of warmth.”

  “I dream of more than that,” she said softly. “I dream of you marrying your heiress.”

  Annoyed, Jamie pushed her hand away and got up to go to the window. Without realizing what he was doing, he pulled the worn dagger from its sheath by his side and began to toy with it. “Why do women put romance into everything?”

  “Romance, ha!” she said with passion. “I want to put food onto the table. Do you know what it is like to eat nothing but moldy lentils for a month? Do you know what they do to your stomach, not to mention your bowels? Do you—”

  Putting his hands on her shoulders, Jamie forced her back into the chair. “I am sorry. I—” What could he say? While his family had been starving, he had been dining at the queen’s table.

  “It is not your fault,” she said calmly. “But weevils in the bread do take the romance out of one’s life. We must look at the facts, look at what we have. First of all we could go to our rich Montgomery relatives and throw ourselves on their mercy. We could move into their houses and begin to eat three good meals a day.”

  Jamie looked at her for a moment, one eyebrow raised. “If that is an alternative, why did not you and our foul-mouthed little sister go to them years ago? Edward would not have cared, and Father would not have noticed. Why did you choose to remain here and eat rotten food?”

  Slowly, Berengaria smiled, then as they often did, together they said, “Pride.”

  “Too bad we cannot sell our pride,” Jamie said. “If we could, we would be richer than the Maidenhall heiress.”

  At that they burst into laughter, for “richer than the Maidenhall heiress” was a saying throughout England. Jamie had even heard it in France.

  “We cannot sell pride,” Berengaria said slowly, “but we do have something else that is very valuable.”

  “And, pray tell me, what is that? Is there a market for crumbling stone? Perhaps we should say the well water has healed us so we could bring wealthy patrons here. Or we could—”

  “Your beauty.”

  “Sell the dung from the stables,” he continued. “Or we could—My what?”

  “Your beauty. It was Joby who said as much. Jamie, think of it! What cannot money buy?”

  “Very little, if anything.”

  “It cannot buy beauty.”

  “Oh, I am beginning to see. I am to sell my … beauty as you call it. If I am for sale, then money can buy beauty—if that is what I have.” His eyes twinkled as they always did when he teased her. “How do you know that I am not as ugly as … as a pile of your mouldy lentils?”

  “Jamie, I cannot see, but I am not blind,” Berengaria said as though talking to a simpleton.

  Jamie had to suppress a laugh.

  “Do you think I do not hear and feel the sighs of the women when you walk past? Do you think I have not heard filthy things said by women when they say what they would like to do to you?”

  “This interests me,” he said. “You must tell me more.”

  “Jamie! I am serious.”

  Taking her shoulders in his hand, he put his nose close to hers. “Sweet little sister,” he said even though he was only minutes older than she, “you are not listening to what I said. I’m to escort this rich heiress to the man she is to marry. She does not need a husband; she has one.”

  “And who is this Bolingbrooke?”

  “As you well know, rich is what he is. His father is almost as rich as hers is.”

  “So what does she need of more money?”

  Jamie smiled indulgently at his beautiful sister. She had lived all her life in the country, and to her, wealth was warm clothes and plentiful food. But Jamie had traveled, and he knew that there was no such thing as “enough” money, “enough” power. For many people, the word enough did not exist.

  “Do not patronize me,” she snapped.

  “I said not a word.” He held up his hands in protest, the dagger in one of them.

  “Yes, but I could hear your thoughts. You know that the queen has hinted that titles could be given to Perkin Maidenhall if he paid enough.”

  “And he has refused. The man’s miserliness is known throughout England. And for once I am glad of it or else he would not have hired a man as poor as I to escort his precious daughter.”

  “Poor, yes, but you have now inherited all Father’s titles.”

  For a moment Jamie was startled. “So I have,” he said musingly. “So I have. So I am an earl, am I?”

  “And a viscount, and you have at least three baronetcies.”

  “Hmm, do you think I can make Joby kneel before me and kiss my ring?”

  “Jamie, think of the marriage market. You are titled; you are gorgeous.”

  At that he nearly choked. “You make me sound like a prize bird to be auctioned for the Christmas table. Lord Gander. Come, ladies, look at his fine plumage. Will he not look splendid on your table? Take this bird home, and your husband and children will love you forever.”

  Berengaria tightened her lips into a fine line. “What else do we have if not you? Me? Is a rich man going to marry me? Blind with no dowry? What about Joby? She has no dowry, she will never be a beauty, and her temper leaves a great deal to be desired.”

  “You are being kind,” he teased.

  “And you are being stupid.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, anger in his voice. “When I look in a mirror, I see only myself, not this Apollo my two sisters seem to see.” He took a breath and calmed himself. “Sweet sister, do you not think I too have thought of all this? Not quite in the way you have stated it, but I know that if I made a good marriage, it would solve many problems. And do you not think that my first thought of this heiress was that she would
be a way to solve all our problems?”

  Berengaria smiled in a way that Jamie knew too well.

  He did not return her smile. “What are you and that hellion sister of ours up to? What are you planning?” For all that two people could not be more different, Joby and Berengaria were thick as clotted cream.

  “Berengaria!” he said sternly. “I’ll not participate in anything you two have devised. This is a job. Honest employment. If I deliver this girl safely into her fiancé’s hands, I will be paid handsomely. There is nothing more to it than that, and I refuse to allow you or that brat sister to—”

  He stopped and gave a groan. He could fight wars, lead men into battle, negotiate contracts between countries, but heaven help him when his two sisters got hold of him!

  “I will not participate,” he said. “I will not! Do you understand me? Berengaria, stop smiling in that way.”

  Chapter 2

  If she falls in love with you, Jamie, of course her father will allow her to marry you. She’s his only child, she’s to get everything, so of course he’d give her anything she wanted.”

  Even to Jamie’s ears, Joby sounded convincing. He had a few comments to make, but he couldn’t say anything because his mouth was full of pins. He had been standing in his undershirt, his legs bare, all morning and half the afternoon as Joby directed the village tailor and six seamstresses in the fashioning of a wardrobe meant to win an heiress’s heart.

  Last night he’d drunk half a hog’s head of horrible wine while he listened to an outrageous plan that Joby and Berengaria had concocted. Distasteful as the plan was, that they had done so much work in so few days impressed him.

  As he listened, he heard more than he ever cared to know about the perfidy of his brother (or, as he liked to think, his half brother). Edward had not only sold the Montgomery land but had sold it to men whose characters matched his own.