Page 13 of Lady Beast's Bridegroom
Arial asked for a fresh tea tray, and for Peter to be shown to her study when he was ready. It seemed wrong to treat a guest in her house as she had the other applicants and interview him in the little parlor downstairs.
He came at the same time as the tea, took the seat she indicated, and talked easily about his sisters’ reaction to Hyde Park, the Houses of Parliament, the royal palaces, and other sights they had driven by. “We stopped at the Tower of London, which they found thrilling.”
He fell silent after the maid brought him his tea and left the room, closing the door behind her at Arial’s request.
“Lord Ransome,” she began, “you know my reasons for seeking a marriage, and I believe I know yours. You want to repair the fortunes of your house, is that not so?”
He pressed his lips together as if catching back words, then must have decided to meet frankness with frankness. “I would not have put it like that. I want to secure the futures of those who depend on me—my sisters, servants, and tenants.”
He hesitated again, then leaned forward, fixing her with his gaze. “Richards will have told you that my father left a mountain of debt when he died, mortgages on the estates just part of the whole mess. I can bring the estates back to profit, given time, but time is what I do not have.” He rubbed a hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration that left him looking tousled and more attractive than ever.
“Your sisters?” Arial prompted.
He nodded. “My sisters. They cannot return to Three Oaks while my stepmother resides there. Either they or she must live elsewhere, and I do not have an elsewhere to offer.”
He heaved a sigh. “I hope you will believe me when I say that I also want to be of service to you. Even without our past history, I would not want to abandon a lady in your circumstances. Given that I feel in some way responsible for your injuries—” He put up a hand at her shocked gasp. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds. It is just…”
He stood to pace, not meeting her eye. “I should have been there. I crept out after dark. You may not remember, but I had a dog who was a ferocious rabbiter.”
Arial nodded. “Sally. I remember.” She remembered the argument he had had with his father and hers, over whether he should be allowed to go night-rabbiting. It was too dangerous, they had insisted.
“I was meeting some of the boys from the village. When the alarm went up…” He sighed again. “I’ve always wondered. If Sally and I were in my room, as we should have been, would she have given the alarm? Even if we’d not been in time to put out the fire, could I have got you and your brother out in time? Would Mother have lived, and your mother as well?”
He grimaced as he sat back down in his chair. “I know I can’t change the past, but if I help you, perhaps I can redeem myself.”
Arial was shaking her head. “You and Sally would probably have been the first on our floor to be overcome by the smoke, Peter. Your room was directly above it, and it was well aflame before it reached our floor. Indeed, my father used to wonder how you got out alive, since the floor to your room went up all at once.”
Should she tell him how it started, or would that add even more guilt? Certainly, her father had never recovered from his own part in the disaster.
When she was Arial’s governess, Clara used to say, “Tell the truth and shame the devil.”
He insisted, “I may have been able to do something,” and made up her mind.
“Have you not heard how the fire started? The report on the investigation was in my father’s papers. He must have sent a copy to your father, for there was a letter…” A letter that rambled incoherently. Lord Ransome must have been drunk when he wrote it.
“Tell me.”
“It began in the billiards room.”
“But the billiards room was being redecorated. The door was locked.”
How to put this?“According to the report, the outside doors had been left open to the terrace after we were sent to bed. A matter of allowing paint fumes to escape, I believe. The investigators believe that the fire started in the materials heaped in the corner. Wood scraps, turpentine, paint, offcuts from the wallpaper.”
“I can guess the rest. Were our fathers drinking? I remember my mother had quarreled with my father over coming drunk to bed each night. They decided to take a look at the room, I suppose. Did one of them drop a candle?”
“Perhaps. Neither of them remembered doing so, but perhaps they left one alight in the room and it blew over, or perhaps sparks caught and smoldered and neither of them noticed.” No need to say that her father had gone for a walk, leaving his friend smoking on the terrace. The report did not say, but Arial remembered angry words between the two friends that summer. “Neither of them was in the room when it went up in flames, and the conflagration in that room was complete. Before anyone noticed to give the alarm, the fire had taken too strong a hold. That room and the ones above on the next two floors were part of a single inferno.”
“My mother’s room. And the boys’ side of the children’s floor.”
Arial could not stop the tears spilling over onto her cheek, but she would continue on now that she had begun. “They think my mother must have tried to get John, my brother. They were found—” she swallowed hard—“what was left of them—huddled in the corner of the playroom, just yards from the door to the back stairs. But the stairs, too, were gone.”
She felt Peter more than saw him through the veil of tears. He had crouched before her, holding her hands in his strong ones, gently stroking them with his thumbs. “Lord Stancroft saved you. I remember my father mentioning that.”
She nodded and took a shuddering breath so that she could speak more calmly. “I was glad of it in time.”
*
Peter wanted topull her into his arms and comfort her as he would Viv or Rose. How she must have suffered. To lose a mother and a brother in such a way. Then months of pain from the burns. Or longer, most probably. She had lost an eye, too, she said.
