Scandal's Virgin. Louise Allen

Keep still! The circular image shook, swooped over immaculately scythed grass, across flower beds fresh with young growth, over a flash of bright blue cotton... There.

The watcher’s hand jammed so hard against the branch that the rough bark scored the skin from the knuckles. Yes. Glossy ringlets the colour of autumn leaves, determined little chin, flyaway brows over eyes that must surely be clear green. Beautiful. She is so beautiful.

And then the girl smiled and turned, laughing as she ran. The telescope jerked up and a man’s face filled the circle. Hair the colour of autumn leaves, stubborn chin, angled brows, sensual mouth turned up into a smile of delight.

‘Papa! Papa!’ The child’s voice floated back through the still, warm air. The man stooped to scoop her up and turned towards the house as she buried her face in the angle between neck and broad shoulder and clung like a happy monkey. Her laughter drifted on the breeze towards the woodland edge.

The telescope fell with a dull thud onto the golden drift of fallen beech leaves and the woman who had held it slid down the tree trunk until she huddled at its base, racked with the sobs that she had stifled for six long years.

* * *

‘You saw her then.’

‘How did you guess?’ Laura Campion let the door slam shut behind her.

‘Look at the state of you. All blubbered up. You never could get away with tears, my la—ma’am.’

Trust Mab to exhibit the delicate sensibility of a brick. The scratch of wicker on wood as the maid pushed aside the mending basket, the sharp tap of her heels on the brick floor, the creak of the chain as she swung the kettle over the fire, all scraped like nails on a slate. But the words steadied her as gushing sympathy never would have done. Mab knew her all too well.

‘Yes, I saw her. She is perfect.’ Laura pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. Her boots were tracking leaf mould across the floor and she tugged them off and tossed them onto the kitchen doormat without a glance. ‘She looks like Piers. She looks like him.’

‘You just said.’ Mab slopped hot water into the teapot and swirled it round.

‘No, I mean she looks like the Earl of Wykeham. Piers’s cousin Avery.’ Laura tightened her lips, stared round the kitchen of the little house that had been home for just two days and fought for enough control to continue. ‘She calls him Papa.’

‘Aye, well, that’s what he says he is.’ Mab Douglas dug a spoon into the tea canister. ‘I only had to ask at the shop who lives in the big house and they were all of a clack about it. How his lordship came here just a month ago from foreign parts with a love child and no wife and doesn’t even have the grace to be shamefaced about it.’

‘Foreign parts!’ Laura tugged at her bonnet strings. They’d do nicely to strangle his lordship with. ‘He stole her from Derbyshire, though I expect that’s foreign enough for them around here.’

‘They won’t know nothing about that, it was six years ago and he must have taken her abroad with him right away. He’s been at that Congress in Vienna, and then he stayed on to help sort out some political nonsense in the Low Countries, so they say.

‘Besides, Mr Piers is dead and Lord Wykeham is head of the family, after all. In the village they say he’s spending money on the estate.’ The boiling water splashed onto the tea leaves. ‘Perhaps he thinks he should be responsible for Mr Piers’s child as well as his old home.’ Mab, at her most infuriatingly reasonable, being devil’s advocate.

‘That might be the case, if the child did not have a mother.’ The bonnet ribbon tore between Laura’s twisting fingers. ‘But she does.’ Me.

‘Aye, and there’s the rub.’ Mab poured two cups of tea and brought them to the table. ‘You drink that up, now.’ She sat down, five foot nothing of plump, middle-aged, bossy femininity, and shook her head at Laura with the licence of a woman who had looked after her since she was ten years old. ‘He knows you’re the child’s mother, but he thinks you don’t want her. He doesn’t know you thought she was dead. The question is, where do you go from here now you’ve found her?’

‘He has never met me.’ It was time for calm thinking now the first shock of emotion was past. Laura smoothed her palms over the dull fabric of her skirts. She was so tired of the black she had worn since her parents died of influenza fifteen months ago. She had been about to put her mourning aside and return to society, but that had been before the bombshell that had rocked her world. Now the solemn garments made the perfect disguise.

‘There is no reason he would suspect I am not who I say I am—the widowed Mrs Caroline Jordan, retired to the country to regain my strength and spirits before I re-enter society.’

‘And how are you going to meet an aristocratic bachelor who lives in the big house in the middle of a park?’ Mab was still being logical. Laura didn’t want logic. She wanted a miracle or, failing that, to sob and rant and... ‘And what are you going to do if you do get in there? Snatch the child?’

‘I do not know!’ Laura closed her eyes and dragged in a steadying breath. ‘I am sorry, Mab, I didn’t mean to bite your head off. All I knew, right from when I discovered those letters, was that I had to find my daughter. I did not dare plan beyond that. Now I have found her and I have no idea what happens next.’

‘He called her Alice,’ Mab said and laid her hand over Laura’s. ‘They told me in the village. Miss Alice Falconer. That would have been her

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