Winning the War Hero's Heart Read online

  Women, in his experience, were timid creatures who fainted at any sign of violence, who obeyed when told to keep out of it. They sat at their sewing, drank tea and gossiped about fashion and the latest on dit, and left the men to govern and keep order among the people for whom they were responsible. Helen Wayland was not a bit like that.

  She plunged in where others feared to go and spoke her mind when she would have done better to remain silent. How could you tame a woman like that? Why, in heaven’s name, did he want to tame her? She was not his wife. She was not even eligible to be his wife.

  Why, then, did he enjoy their meetings so much? Why did he savour the cut and thrust of her debate, even welcome her fiery temper? He remembered his mother looking sideways at him and asking him if he had developed a tendre for her and his sharp denial. Now, if she asked him again, he would not know how to answer. Miss Helen Wayland had him in thrall—so much so that he had been fool enough to ask her to dance with him. He had not danced since he had been wounded and did not know if he could. And what would she make of it if he found he could not? Why, in heaven’s name, had he said he would go?

  About the Author

  Born in Singapore, MARY NICHOLS came to England when she was three, and has spent most of her life in different parts of East Anglia. She has been a radiographer, school secretary, information officer and industrial editor, as well as a writer. She has three grown-up children, and four grandchildren.

  Previous novels by the same author:

  RAGS-TO-RICHES

  BRIDE THE EARL AND THE HOYDEN

  CLAIMING THE ASHBROOKE HEIR

  (part of The Secret Baby Bargain)

  HONOURABLE DOCTOR, IMPROPER

  ARRANGEMENT

  THE CAPTAIN’S MYSTERIOUS LADY*

  THE VISCOUNT’S UNCONVENTIONAL BRIDE*

  LORD PORTMAN’S TROUBLESOME WIFE*

  SIR ASHLEY’S METTLESOME MATCH*

  * The Piccadilly Gentlemen’s Club mini-series

  And available through

  Harlequin® Historical eBooks

  WITH VICTORIA’S BLESSING

  (part of Royal Weddings Through the Ages)

  Author’s Note

  Seditious Libel

  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the libel laws were used to repress rebellion against the government, but their implementation was inconsistent. Writers and producers of newspapers and radical literature were under constant threat of prosecution and, when taken to court, were often faced with a hostile judge and jury. A defendant’s counsel could raise points of law, but could not summarise the case on behalf of the defendant until 1836. On the other hand, the Home Office lacked the means to prosecute everyone who published seditious matter and the writers often took their chances and got away with it. The prosecutions dwindled because defendants frequently managed to obtain an acquittal by exploiting the language in which the arraignment was made, and the legal authorities gave up trying for all but the most serious cases.

  The year of 1816 was known as ‘the year without a summer’, not only in England, but all over the world, particularly in Northern Europe and North America. The year before there had been a huge explosion in the Mount Tamboura volcano on the Dutch East Indies, which had been rumbling since 1812. Thirty-eight cubic miles of dust and ash was sent up into the atmosphere, the ash column rising thousands of feet. The debris, including vast quantities of sulphur, took a year to circulate, its sheer volume obliterating the sun. The result was a cold, wet and miserable 1816. It rained off and on from May to September and, without sunlight, temperatures dropped dramatically. In the English countryside crops rotted in the fields before they could be harvested and those that were gathered rotted in storage because of the damp. Farm labourers were put out of work and added to the unemployed soldiers returning from the war with Napoleon.

  Winning

  The War Hero’s

  Heart

  Mary Nichols

  Chapter One

  1816

  Helen heard the hunt some time before it came into view. The dogs were yelping and the horn sounding a wild halloo, and there was the thunder of hooves which seemed to shake the ground at her feet. Surely they would not come galloping through the village? The road was narrow, flanked on either side by workers’ cottages and their small gardens. And there were people on the street: woman gossiping at their gates, children playing, a cat sunning itself on one of the few days in the year in which the sun shone. Hearing the commotion, the women snatched up their children and disappeared indoors. The cat, its tail a wire brush, fled. Helen drew in her serviceable grey skirt and pushed herself against the fence of one of the cottages as the fox streaked past her. It scrambled over the gate and into a garden where a little boy was playing. It nearly knocked him over as it flew across the garden and through the hedge on the far side.

  The dogs were in the street now, desperate to get at their quarry and the riders were not far behind. Afraid for the child, Helen moved swiftly into the garden, scooped him up and ran towards the house, but all she had time to do was press herself and the little one hard against the wall before the whole hunt was upon them. Dogs and horses milled about, trampling down rows of beans and cabbages and the currant bushes, wrecking the patch of grass and the few bedraggled flowers which had been growing each side of the path that ran between the rows and knocking over the hen coop and sending the chickens flapping and squawking to die under the horses’ hooves.

  And then just as quickly they were gone, flattening the neatly clipped hedge at the end of the garden—all except one rider, who pulled up beside her. ‘Are you hurt, madam? Is your little one injured?’

  Helen found herself looking up at the Earl of Warburton’s son, Viscount Cavenham. She knew who he was because a great fuss had been made of him in the district when he came back from Waterloo, a wounded hero. He did not look wounded to her, sitting arrogantly on a huge black stallion, looking down at her with what she took to be contempt. True, she was wearing her grey workaday dress, a wool spencer and a plain chip bonnet and the child she held so close to her bosom was filthy and bawling his head off, but that was no excuse. Still, he was the only one of the hunters to stop and enquire, so she ought to answer him.

  ‘No, we are not hurt, but the child is terrified. Have you no more sense than to come galloping all over other people’s property, ruining a year of hard work? This was once a productive garden. Now look at it.’ She waved an arm to encompass the mess.

  ‘The dogs follow the fox, madam,’ he said. ‘And the riders follow the dogs. And unless I am mistaken, the property is not yours, but part of the Cavenham estate. The Earl may go where he chooses.’

  ‘How arrogant and unfeeling can you be?’ she demanded. ‘How would you like it if someone trampled all over Ravens Park and terrified your children?’

  ‘I have no children.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she countered.

  His smile transformed his face from darkly brooding to almost human, but she was too angry to notice, too furious to take in his good looks, his thick dark hair curling below his riding hat and into his neck, his broad shoulders and the long elegant fingers holding the reins, not to mention a shapely thigh, clad in white riding breeches, with which he was controlling his restive mount. ‘Perhaps. But I do not think anyone would dare invade the Park.’

  ‘No, but why is there one law for the rich and another for the poor? And for your information, I am not the child’s mother and I do not live here. I am simply an observer.’

  ‘Oh.’ He looked slightly taken aback, but recovered quickly. ‘Then I suggest you reunite the child with his mother and mind your own business.’

  ‘I intend to make it my bus
iness,’ she said, as a woman came from the house, diverting him from a reply.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she said, taking the child from Helen. ‘I was upstairs when I heard the hullabaloo and in my haste to come down and fetch Edward indoors to safety, I tripped and fell. It winded me for a moment. If you hadn’t acted so quickly…’ She stopped, suddenly seeing the Viscount. ‘My lord.’ She curtsied and dipped her head.

  The gesture infuriated Helen. ‘He and his like have just frightened your little boy nearly to death and ruined your garden and you bend your knee to him. You should be angry and demanding compensation.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ she murmured, looking fearfully up at the man on the horse. ‘This is a tied cottage and I work at the big house.’

  Helen realised she would probably make matters worse if she went on, so she held her tongue. Looking from the woman to the Viscount, she caught him gazing at her with an expression of puzzlement. So, he did not know who she was. He would soon find out.

  He turned his attention from her to the mother. ‘Are you hurt, madam?’

  ‘A bruise or two, my lord. It is nothing, I thank you.’

  Helen could have kicked her for her meekness. No wonder men like the Earl and his son felt they had a God-given right to trample over poor folk, just as they had trampled over the garden.

  ‘I am sorry about the garden,’ his lordship said softly, taking Helen by surprise. ‘The dogs became too excited to control and there was nothing I could do.’ He smiled again, though this time it was aimed at the other woman, not Helen. He reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew a coin, which he passed to her. She accepted it, thanked him and curtsied. Without looking at Helen again, he wheeled his horse about and rode off.

  ‘Of all the arrogance!’ Helen exclaimed, watching him go.

  ‘He has given me a whole guinea,’ the woman said in mitigation. ‘And, to be fair, he didn’t ride over the garden, did he? He was the only one who stopped.’

  Helen was in no mood to see any good in the Earl of Warburton’s son and did not respond, but accepted an invitation to enter the cottage for a cup of tea. ‘It is only camomile,’ the woman said. ‘I do not have Indian tea.’

  It was while she was waiting for the kettle to boil that she learned a little more about Mrs Watson. ‘My husband died at Waterloo,’ she told Helen, putting the baby on the floor while she set out a teapot and cups. ‘Eddie was only a baby when he went off. He’d been all through the Peninsula without a scratch and he didn’t have to re-enlist, but he would go because Viscount Cavenham went and he couldn’t have the Earl’s son going off and making him look a coward. Why are men so proud?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Helen murmured, thinking of her father. He was proud, too, and look where that had got him.

  ‘I’m lucky the housekeeper at the big house gave me a job in the laundry,’ Mrs Watson went on. ‘While I have this cottage, I can manage. Having the garden helps with fruit and vegetables and eggs, though nothing was growing well this year. Do you think we will ever get a summer?’

  ‘Let us hope so,’ Helen said. ‘I fear for the workers if the harvest is ruined.’ The year so far had been uncommonly wet and cold. It had rained every day and there had been snow in London the week before. According to the London newspapers, which sometimes published news from the regions, there was snow in hilly districts only a little further north. Some crops were already rotting in the fields. Farm labourers were out of work and added to the numbers of soldiers returning from the end of the war with Napoleon. And yet the Earl must have his sport. Unlike some, he hunted all the year round.

  ‘I’ll have to see what I can salvage. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it looks.’ Mrs Watson broke in on Helen’s reverie. ‘I have you to thank that Eddie was not trampled along with it. He could have been killed. That would have been far, far worse.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose the Earl would care any more about that than he cared about your dead chickens.’

  Mrs Watson handed her a cup of tea. ‘Is it just the Earl you dislike or is it all landed gentry?’

  The question surprised Helen and for a moment she did not know how to answer. ‘The Earl of Warburton is typical of his kind,’ she said slowly. ‘Arrogant, selfish, unfeeling. They seem to think money will buy them anything. It would do them all good to be without it for a while to see how everyone else has to manage.’

  Mrs Watson laughed. ‘My, you do have a chip on your shoulder, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ Helen admitted. ‘but I try not to let it show. Today I was so angry I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘You don’t live in the village, do you?’

  ‘No, in Warburton. My name is Helen Wayland.’

  This evidently meant nothing to Mrs Watson so Helen did not enlighten her. In her experience, telling someone she owned and published the Warburton Record was a sure way to have them holding their tongues. They would not believe she did not intend to publish some calumny about them when all she wanted to do was publicise their plight.

  ‘You are a town dweller, Miss Wayland, and cannot know what it is like to live in a small village, dependent on the local landowner for everything…’

  ‘Perhaps you should tell me,’ Helen said, picking the baby up off the floor and cuddling him on her lap. He began playing with her father’s watch, which she wore as a fob. ‘Then I might understand.’

  Mrs Watson looked doubtful, but her visitor was so obviously fond of children and genuinely interested that she poured them both a second cup of tea and sat down to answer her questions.

  * * *

  Miles considered whether to catch up with the hunt or call it a day and decided he might as well go home. He did not want to be party to any more ruined gardens and he certainly did not want to have to justify himself to irate young ladies with fierce hazel eyes. Who the devil was she? Not gentry, that was evident from the simple way she dressed and the way she did not mind that grubby child dirtying her clothes, but none of that detracted from her proud demeanour. She had defied him and that was something he was not used to and his first reaction had been anger. But what she had said had troubled his conscience, not that he could do anything to prevent his father running the hunt over his own land. He was a law unto himself and as far as he was concerned owning the land and the cottages meant he also owned those who dwelt in them.

  Did the defiant Miss Grey Gown come under that heading? She had undoubtedly saved the child’s life and, in his opinion, its mother should not be the only one who was grateful because his father, as Master of the Hunt, should also give thanks that his dogs and horses had not trampled the little one to death. Had he even been aware of her or the child as he hurtled through the garden after the dogs?

  And what on earth had the woman meant by saying ‘I intend to make it my business’? It sounded like a threat, but how could a mere nobody, who could not be more than five and twenty, threaten someone like the Earl of Warburton? Miles was suddenly and inexplicably afraid for her.

  He was walking his horse, deep in thought, and did not at first notice the man sitting on the milestone on the edge of the village. His attention was drawn to him when he stood up and took a step towards him, his hand outstretched. ‘My lord…’

  Miles pulled up. The man was in rags and painfully thin. ‘Byers, isn’t it?’ he queried, not sure the vision who confronted him could be the big strong man who had once been employed as a gardener at Ravens Park.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘What happened to you, man?’

  ‘I came back from the war and there was no work to be had and my wife and children had gone to live with her sister. Will you give a coin or two to tide me over and help feed my little ones, my lord?’

  Miles could tell how difficult it was for him to beg.

  ‘Why did you not go back to Ravens Park when you were discharged?’ he asked.

  ‘The Earl had given my place to someone else, the cottage, too. He would not take me on again.’
/>
  ‘I am sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I was a good worker,’ Byers went on. ‘No one ever found fault with what I did; I served my time for king and country and that’s all the thanks I get for it.’

  ‘I can understand your bitterness,’ Miles said. ‘But the garden at Ravens Park could not wait on your return, you know. And gardeners expect to be housed.’ He paused. ‘Did you see the hunt come through just now?’

  ‘Yes, nigh on bowled me over, it did. Why do you ask?’

  ‘It ran over Mrs Watson’s garden and wrecked it. If you go and put it right for her, I’ll pay you. Better than begging, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘Off you go, then. When it’s done, come to the house and ask for me. I’ll have your wages for you.’

  The man touched his forelock and Miles trotted on towards Ravens Park. Jack Byers wasn’t the only one unemployed in the area. There were other ex-soldiers begging on the streets and they were adding to the agricultural labourers who were out of work on account of the dreadful weather ruining the crops. Times were bad for everyone, especially in a countryside that depended on farming for a living. He ought to try to do something to help, but what? Handing out money was not the answer.

  He shook the problem from him as he cantered up the drive towards the house. His father, who had been Viscount Cavenham at the time, had had it built just before he was born, to replace an older building that had fallen into disrepair. It was meant to celebrate his marriage and his earldom. Miles’s mother, Dorothea, only daughter of Earl Graine, was a catch for any man because of her ancient lineage, far superior to that of the Cavenhams. She was beautiful but frail and completely dominated by her husband. He was not physically violent towards her, but his tongue lashings often left her in tears. Miles loved his mother dearly and wished she would learn to stand up for herself. But he understood why she did not. She had been brought up in a culture in which the husband was head of the household and should be deferred to in all things and it distressed her when Miles argued with his father.