Easy Conquest Read online

  Emily’s cheeks flamed. “You really should not say such things,” she said.

  “Why not? We are alone, my dear, and a mother should be able to speak bluntly to her daughter. I made a terrible marriage, and I then allowed my true love to walk out of my life ...” Cora’s voice caught as the buried memory suddenly resurfaced.

  “Your ... your true love?” Emily repeated in astonishment, for this was the first she had heard of it.

  Cora collected herself. “Yes, my dear, so I knew a thing or two about it when I advised you not to take Geoffrey Fairfield for your husband. He clearly wasn’t the man for you, because even though I grant he knew a thing or two between the sheets, in every other respect he was selfish. Whether you admit it or not, I was right about your first marriage, and I am right again now. Sir Rafe Warrender could not be less suitable! All he has to commend him is money and a title, and what price either of those in the dark of night when you yearn for love? If he adored you, instead of simply desiring you, if he put your happiness before his own, if he had a single thought of Peter in his plans, I could forgive him much. But I know him for the devil he is.”

  “Mama, my days of yearning for love are over.”

  Cora was horrified to hear such resignation. “Emily Fairfield, you are thirty-three, not one hundred and thirty-three!” Catching her daughter’s hand, she pulled her across the room to the carved stone fireplace, next to which a faded mirror had been set into the ancient dark oak paneling. “Look at yourself, my dear, and tell me what you see.”

  “There is no point in trying to reason me out of this, Mama.”

  “Humor me.”

  Emily sighed. “Very well. I see a hard-pressed widow whose happiness ended early last November when her husband was killed in a riding accident, and who has a young son to bring up alone. Oh, and who must also endure her own mother’s complete lack of prudence.”

  Cora smiled a little. “Well, I see a lovely young woman with a great deal of happiness still to live for. I see a heart-shaped face of quite exquisite daintiness, golden brown hair that should never have been guillotined of its glorious long curls, and I see a pale skin that I would have rejoiced to possess in my youth. I see beautiful hazel eyes that are capable of turning most men’s hearts over, and a sweet figure that is as perfect now as it was at sixteen. It certainly should not be hidden beneath black bombazine for a moment longer than necessary! I also see a gentle character that should never, ever be exposed to the awfulness of Sir Rafe Warrender!”

  “You flatter me, I think, Mama,” Emily murmured.

  “No my dear, I merely speak the truth.”

  “Nevertheless—”

  “I haven’t finished yet,” Cora interrupted. “Lastly, when I look at you, I see a warmth and vibrancy that needs a very special man, a once-in-a-lifetime man such as all women yearn for in their heart of hearts. I found mine, but I let him go. It was the worst decision I ever made, and not a day goes by even now when I do not regret it.”

  Emily turned in astonishment, longing to ask questions, but Cora made her look in the mirror again. “Look at yourself, Emily. Your once-in-a-lifetime man is out there, and I know you will find him. Believe me, his name is not Warrender! Wait and see what the future brings ...”

  “That is the whole point, Mama. How many times must I repeat that I cannot afford to wait? Our debts are accruing by the day, as Mr. Mackay has been reluctantly obliged to remind me.”

  Cora released her. “Your mind is made up, isn’t it?” she said resignedly.

  “I think it has to be, Mama.”

  “You will be throwing away your chance of happiness, just as I did all those years ago.” Cora gazed wistfully at the rain. “Oh, I wish Felix were here.”

  “Well, Felix isn’t here, and I really cannot see what difference it would make if he were,” Emily said.

  Felix Reynolds was her mother’s distant cousin, who was much older than she, and had spent most of his life abroad. It was a mystery why her mother always yearned for his advice in times of crisis, for he had never figured greatly in her life. He was an explorer of distant lands, and had last been heard of five years before, when a letter from him had been brought from Venezuela by a sea captain with whom he had struck up a friendship in Caracas.

  The captain had come to the Hall and stayed for several weeks while Cora plied him with questions about Felix. All the talk of foreign climes and mysterious civilizations had so caught Peter’s interest that from then on the boy had regarded Felix as the example he wished to follow. Emily could only hope it was a phase that would run its course, for the last thing she wanted was for her only son to set off across the world into the dangerous unknown.

  Cora managed a smile. “You’re right, of course. Even if Felix is still alive, he will be well on in his seventies now, and anyway I do not know if he changed his mind about...” She stopped speaking.

  “About what?”

  “He promised, you see. He said he would do something, but it seems he did not. Unless, of course ...”

  “Yes?” Emily prompted, heartily wishing her mother would divulge whatever it was.

  “Sir Quentin Brockhampton, may have ... Oh, there is no point in saying anything, for there is no proof at all, one way or the other.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Mama, explain what you’re talking about!”

  Cora remained silent, and there was such a strange look in her eyes, a yearning for things lost, that Emily suddenly realized the truth. “Is Felix your once-in-a-lifetime man, Mama?” she asked gently.

  “Yes,” Cora whispered, tears welling from her eyes. “Oh, Emily, you will never know how much I wish I had gone with him when he begged me to.”

  Emily was startled. “Gone with him? Exploring, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Emily recovered a little. “Well, I hardly think an exploring life would suit you, Mama. There are not many assembly rooms along the Amazon.”

  “That’s all you think I am good for, isn’t it? Indulging in a social diary that is as packed as possible? Well, let me tell you that my year in Paris as a young girl gave me what the Germans call wanderlust. As it happens, I have never been abroad since, because I married and then had you to consider, but I have never stopped wanting to go. If I could turn the clock back, I would not hesitate to fling caution to the winds. I’d have sailed the world’s oceans with Felix. We belonged together, but I shrank from that final step because I was a wife and mother. I could hardly take a child exploring in South America.”

  Emily stared at her.

  Cora gazed at the falling rain, seeing the forsaken happiness she could never regain. “If I’d thrown in my lot with Felix, it would have been the making of me. Oh, my love for him is no longer the great passion it once was, but it will never die completely. He will always occupy a very special place in my heart.”

  “I can’t imagine you as an intrepid explorer, Mama. Could you really have clambered up the Andes, or carved your way through a tropical jungle? It just doesn’t seem, well, you.”

  “It isn’t the me I have become. It is certainly the me I might have been.”

  Emily felt guilty for criticizing her mother earlier. “I know I have sniped most horridly at you today, Mama, but I love you very much. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, my dear.” Cora patted her arm.

  “Are you going to explain the mystery about Sir Quentin Brockhampton?”

  “No.”

  Emily sighed, but nodded. “Well, I cannot force you.”

  “Nor I you, it seems. If your mind is made up about Sir Rafe, there is little more to say, except to beg you not to do anything precipitate. Wait as long as you can before finally accepting him.”

  “I will wait until the twelve months are up.”

  “And do not be hasty even then,” Cora pressed.

  “Mama, our debts will not permit it.”

  “But something might turn up!”

  “And it might not. Sir Rafe has throw
n a lifeline, and I will drown—we all will—if I do not seize it.”

  Cora struggled to maintain her composure. “Something must turn up, Emily. I will pray with all my heart that between now and November you will be saved from all threat of Sir Rafe Warrender!” Catching up her skirts, she hurried from the room.

  Chapter 3

  That same day, on the other side of the world in Peru, John Lincoln—Jack to his friends—stood within the handsome enclosed balcony of the hillside hacienda overlooking Lima.

  “Do not ask me again, Felix, for you know I cannot possibly leave you now,” he said quietly, deliberately not turning to look back into the shadowy but well-ventilated room, where Felix Reynolds lay propped up on the pillows of a huge rococo bed.

  “But there is nothing more you or Cristoval can do for me, m’boy. Not even Cristoval’s Indian servant Manco can speed my recovery with his Inca medicines and magic. I will be a long time recuperating from this illness, and while I languish here doing that, you and Cristoval should get on with your lives.”

  “We’ll do as we choose, not as you see fit to command.” Jack gazed steadfastly through the unglazed wooden lattice window, watching his and Felix’s good friend Cristoval, the owner of the hacienda, issuing orders to the two Indians who had charge of the gardens.

  Don Cristoval de Soto was a Creole nobleman who could trace his ancestry to one of the original Spanish conquistadors. He had been a widower for twenty of his fifty-five years, and over the past twelve months had become a close companion of the two Englishmen. Over the past few weeks he had gladly placed his hacienda at their disposal because of Felix’s poor health.

  The hacienda was luxuriously decorated in the Spanish colonial style, with silk wall hangings, gilded furniture, and paved gardens of quite exquisite beauty. The month of May marked the onset of winter in this hemisphere, and Lima was obscured by the thick drizzling mist known as the garúa, or Peruvian dew.

  If it were not for this, Jack would have been able to see not only the capital but also as far west as the port of Callao, some seven or eight miles away on the shores of the Pacific. Small earthquakes rocked this part of the world once or twice a week, and truly destructive earthquakes happened once or twice a century, so that nothing seemed permanent, except perhaps the snow-capped peaks and ancient Inca mysteries of the great Andes cordilleras.

  Peru was an amazing country, but Jack now longed for England again. He was tired of being an exile. If there must be a mist, he wished it to be English mist, the sort that prevailed in a wood on a crisp autumn morning, with the luminous glow of imminent sunshine, not this soaking haze that never quite became rain.

  Felix, on the other hand, would never tire of Peru, and even now that his health had let him down, he did not yearn for the land of his birth. The old man had for some time been finding it increasingly difficult to climb mountain paths in search of remote Inca ruins, and eventually had been obliged to concede that he needed to rest. So the three friends had come to the hacienda, where Felix had promptly succumbed to the ague that was so very prevalent in the coastal regions.

  Felix spoke again, his voice thin and weak where only a few weeks ago it had still been firm and strong. He was slightly built, and his hair, once dark, was now a mere tonsure of gray. His green eyes had become watery, but their gaze was still steady.

  “Admit you are homesick, Jack. The Swedish merchant vessel Stralsund sails from Callao next week, bound for Stockholm by way of Bristol with a cargo of silver, and you could be aboard her. Damn it all, man, can’t you see that I want you to go?”

  “Cristoval and I would now be at the bottom of Lake Titicaca if you hadn’t hauled us out, so don’t expect me to desert you.”

  Jack smiled. What a strange trio they were he thought: an elderly English gentleman who chose to spend his life wandering, a young English gentleman who was an unwilling exile, and a lonely Creole nobleman who longed to wander but never had. A shipwreck on Lake Titicaca had brought them together the previous year.

  Until then Jack had been going his own aimless way, following a life that was filled with adventure but lacked purpose. Felix and Cristoval had given him a new outlook, and at last he wanted to return to England to pick up the pieces of an existence that had become little more than a dream vaguely recalled.

  Felix turned his head to survey his young friend’s silhouette against the latticework. “You’re a stubborn fellow, Jack Lincoln.”

  “That makes two of us, I fancy,” Jack replied as he came back into the room. He was thirty-five years old, tall and lean, but muscular too, with broad shoulders and slender hips. His eyes were the vivid blue of the southern ocean, and his skin was tanned from months in the Peruvian sun, which had also bleached his brown hair to blond.

  There was a ruggedness about him, a rough and ready air that marked him as one of life’s adventurers, yet five years ago he had been an elegant man of fashion, a leading light of London’s high society, and the darling of many a belle. And he had worn with measureless pride the great signet ring called the Agincourt ring, which had come into his family in 1415, when Henry V, who had worn it into battle, had presented it to Jack’s ancestor in appreciation of conspicuous bravery.

  That privileged society life—and the Agincourt ring—were now denied to Jack Lincoln because the courts had wrongly declared he was not after all the heir to his family’s fortune. Instead, the law in all its majesty had found in favor of his deceitful cousin. Denied the right to appeal, Jack Lincoln was now penniless and cast adrift, robbed of the precious heirloom he had worn every day from the moment of his majority.

  Now the Agincourt ring graced his cousin’s thieving finger instead, and Jack was no longer clad in the latest modes. Instead, he wore leather breeches and a half-buttoned shirt, with an Inca necklace of solid gold around his throat. With his fair hair loose about his shoulders, he could not have looked less like an English gentleman if he had tried, yet a gentleman he was, and an honorable one at that; too honorable by far to countenance leaving a sick friend.

  Felix continued to study him. “If I were well now, would you return to England?”

  “That isn’t a fair question, and you know it.”

  “Fair or not, I now know the answer. So Jack, if you won’t go willingly, maybe you will go if I beg you to do a favor for me?”

  “A favor?”

  Felix nodded. “I want you to help my daughter.”

  Jack looked at him in astonishment. “I didn’t know you had a daughter!”

  “She doesn’t know it either. Her name is Emily, and she lives at Fairfield Hall, near Temford in Shropshire,” Felix replied with a faint smile as he took something from beneath the pillows. It was a miniature of Emily that Cora had sent about ten years before. Geoffrey had painted it.

  Jack gazed at the lovely face and the long golden brown curls that had been caught with a ribbon so that they tumbled in cascades to her shoulders. “She’s very beautiful.”

  “She is indeed, and she has my eyes, I fancy.” Felix looked at him. “Jack, I’m afraid I was guilty of bedding another man’s wife, and enjoying every delightful damned second of it. Emily’s mother, Cora, is a cousin of sorts, too distant for there to be any problem at all regarding consanguinity, which is just as well, because she is the most bewitching creature I have ever known. She married an oaf who did not deserve her, and in her unhappiness she turned to me for comfort. Even though I was a good generation older, I was more than willing to offer her that comfort, and Emily was the result. I begged Cora to leave England with me, so that we could begin a new life together, but she felt she could not because of Emily.”

  “Well, a life clambering over the Andes is hardly to be recommended for a woman and child,” Jack pointed out, returning the miniature, then going to pour two glasses of the maize liquor known as aguardiente.

  “Maybe not.” A lump rose in Felix’s throat as he thought of the family that should have been his. He gladly accepted the glass Jack pressed upon him.
“I have seen Emily only once since I left, when I returned very briefly to England and managed to get myself to Fairfield Hall. She has a child of her own now, a boy, Peter.”

  Felix paused to collect himself. “For obvious reasons I have never acknowledged my daughter or grandson, but I have followed their progress through Cora’s letters. Emily believes she is legitimate, and for the sake of her reputation that is how her mother and I wished it to stay.”

  “I can understand that,” Jack said.

  “Cora wrote last autumn,” Felix continued, “but the letter has taken until now to reach me, having gone first to Venezuela because that was where I was when last she heard from me. It seems Emily’s husband died quite suddenly in a riding accident at the beginning of November, leaving her very poorly provided for, and Cora acted upon an arrangement she and I agreed upon many years ago. You see, I left a sum of money—not a fortune, but all I had in the world—in the safekeeping of my then lawyer, to be used should either Cora or Emily ever find themselves in need. Well, they are both in need now, but when Cora went to the lawyer for the money, the scurvy knave told her he knew nothing about it.”

  “Presumably he pocketed it himself?” Jack leaned back against a table.

  “Probably; indeed, I almost wish it were so, but the identity of Emily’s neighbor leads me to suspect there is more to it. This neighbor is rather too interested in Emily for Cora’s peace of mind, to the point that when she wrote the letter she expressed a strong fear that when the twelve months of mourning are at an end, Emily will be driven into his arms by financial need. The neighbor’s name is Sir Rafe Warrender.”

  “Warrender?” Jack straightened sharply.

  “Yes. The name is no coincidence, Jack, for it is the same man you have every reason to despise.”

  A nerve caught at Jack’s temple, for Rafe Warrender was the cousin who had managed, with the aid of false evidence, to convince the courts that he, not Jack Lincoln, was the rightful heir to the family fortune.