his arrival in America. He had known she would worry about him if he did not. And he had felt too the need to keep some frail thread of connection to his past.
Despite himself, he had read her letters avidly for the snippets of local news she passed on. He had looked, though he had never asked, for some hint, any hint, that the truth of what had happened before he left had become generally known and had not continued to be falsified. He had sworn Mary to secrecy in his first letter, though it had been unnecessary. She had said nothing about him to anyone, she had assured him in her return letter, and would never do so under any circumstances. He had trusted her word at the time and still did.
Perhaps he ought not to have begun the correspondence. It might be better to have known nothing, to have broken all ties, to have been content to be dead to everyone and everything he had left behind. Even Mary.
The year after Cyrus’s untimely passing, Mary’s spring letter had brought word of three other shocking deaths. Her sister and Julius—her brother-in-law—and nephew had died the previous summer, just after she had written him her last letter of the year. An outbreak of typhus had taken a few other people from the neighborhood as well, though it had not touched Mary herself, living as she did, almost as a hermit in her small cottage on one corner of the family estate.
That had been astounding news in itself, but there had been repercussions that were eventually to complicate Gabriel’s life and force his return to England. For Mary’s brother-in-law and Gabriel’s uncle, Julius Rochford, had also been the Earl of Lyndale. Philip, his only son and his heir, though married, had had no sons of his own—no legitimate ones, at least. And he had predeceased his father by one day. Gabriel, son and only child of the late Arthur Rochford, Julius’s younger brother, was therefore his uncle’s successor.
He was the Earl of Lyndale.
He had not been happy about it or about the death of his aunt, who had been sweet though dithery and a person of no account in her husband’s household. He had regretted the death of his uncle too. He had not grieved the loss of his cousin at all.
He might have ignored his changed status for the rest of his life, and had done so for six years after receiving word of it in Mary’s letter. No one knew where he was—except Mary herself, and she would not tell, having given her promise. If a search had been made for him, and he did not doubt that there had been some halfhearted attempt to discover the whereabouts of the new earl or whether indeed he still lived, then it had failed to turn up any trace of him. When he had taken passage for America, it had seemed a bit of an unnecessary precaution to use his mother’s name instead of his own. As it had turned out, though, it had been a wise thing to do. After a certain number of years—was it seven?—he would be declared officially dead and the next heir in line would succeed him to the title and inherit everything that went with it. That would be his second cousin, Manley Rochford, whom Gabriel remembered with no more fondness than he had felt for Philip. But . . .
May Manley and all his descendants live happily ever after. Or not. Gabriel did not care either way. All that had happened was ancient history. He wanted nothing to do with the title or the property or the pomp and circumstance to which he was now entitled as a British peer of the realm. He was perfectly content with his life as it was and wanted nothing to do with England.
Except that there was Mary. His aunt’s sister. Mary, with her clubfoot and crooked spine and deformed hand and plain looks. Mary, with her little thatched cottage and her flower garden of breathtaking beauty and her vegetable patch and herb garden and her cats and dogs—all of them strays that she insisted had adopted her. Mary, with her books and her embroidery and her incomprehensible contentment with life.
Mary, now facing the threat of eviction.
Manley Rochford, heir to the title after Gabriel, was already acting upon his prospects. He had within the last year moved his family to Brierley Hall, as though by right, and taken