Family Scandals by Denise Patrick Read Free Book Online Page B

reading his father’s last missives, then put it behind him as best he could.

Chapter Four
    “It is our pleasure to bestow upon Lord Marcus Edward Waring the title of Earl St. Ayers, along with all hereditary rights and responsibilities appertaining thereto.”
    Queen Victoria to Parliament, 1869
     
     
    Marcus stood near the edge of the cliff and stared out at the distant horizon before him, lost in thought. The sun shone in a startlingly blue, cloudless, sky, but he saw none of it. A light breeze ruffled his hair and cooled his face, but he barely felt it. High above him birds screeched, swooped, and dived, carried aloft on the breeze one minute, the next plunging toward the sea and rocks below. He took in the vista before him for a short time, then turned his sights inward. His thoughts drowned out the world around him as he pondered the new direction of his life.
    An Earl.
    Earl St. Ayers.
    He’d tried out the title on his tongue last night as he lay in the quiet splendor of the master suite. It still sounded foreign to him.
    He felt like a usurper.
    He would get used to it, he supposed. In time.
    Earlier he’d visited his mother’s grave and stood before it, wondering at what she had been through. He supposed it must have been terrifying for a young girl of fourteen to suddenly be torn from her home, her father disgraced, and banished from the country of her birth. Only to be taken in by relatives who misused her in turn.
    The vision of another fourteen-year-old briefly danced before his eyes, and he wondered how Amy might have fared had she lived.
    He did not blame his mother for breaking under the strain, but was thankful her plans had not made it to fruition. He would have been a terrible duke.
    But he just might make a decent earl.
    It was too bad he had no one to share it with. He would have to remedy that, eventually. But for now, he needed the time, the space, to heal. And St. Ayers would provide that for him. Not only could he come to grips with his own past, but he could put India behind him as well.
    His dreams last night had been depressing, his fertile imagination conjuring up the hopelessness and helplessness his mother and grandmother must have felt. Amy, too, figured prominently, her large gray eyes imploring him to save her. Rising this morning had been difficult on so little sleep. At least he hadn’t awakened from a two-day opium-induced stupor with no knowledge of the previous forty-eight hours.
    The person looking back at him in the mirror had not been the same person who had awakened to find Colonel Bromley and Lieutenant Teatherton standing over him. He no longer looked gaunt, nor did his eyes have the shadowed, haunted look about them they had in India. Perhaps, he admitted to himself, Colonel Bromley had been right. He needed to come home to face his ghosts and to put his life in order.
    His grandfather’s grave beside his mother’s informed one and all that Edward Terrence Geoffrey St. Ayers had been the sixth earl. Despite that the title had been granted to him anew, he would style himself the seventh.
    Glancing over the various graves, he mentally traced the St. Ayers’ line back a number of generations. Although not the norm, the family name had also been St. Ayers. No longer, he thought. He would not give up his name. He was proud to be a Waring and someday, so would his children.
    That decided, he now knew he should eventually marry. But the notion held no appeal for him. Amy’s loss was still new to him, even if it had been five years. Arriving in England knowing she would not be waiting for him had brought back feelings of guilt. Despite knowing he could not have prevented it, her death was still an open sore on his conscience.
    The day before he left London he’d ridden northwest to Houghton Hall. Sitting atop his stallion, he had stared for some time at the edifice in the distance, wondering if he dared ride up to the front door and ask to visit Amy’s grave. He wondered if