Page 36 of Lady Daring
“Ah.” Pelton shook his salt-and-pepper head. “I’m sorry, lad, indeed I am.” Sympathy shone in his eyes. “But that’s not the Antipodes. A man would have made it back to civilization by now, were he able.”
“So the coroner can declare him dead? With no evidence?”
“If there’s a peerage involved, the suit must be brought before the King’s Bench. Might go before the House of Lords, depending on the judge.”
“What’s to stop such a suit?” Darien asked desperately.
The other man shrugged. “Besides producing the missing son?”
“But if the heir presumptive were thought unfit?”
Pelton narrowed his eyes. “He’d have to be a felon or non compos mentis to be removed from succession. Too many in Lords would favor having the line of inheritance clear. And the King’s men would have the same interest, unless, of course, there were some chance of it going to the Crown.”
Properties of peers reverted to the Crown only if the line was extinguished or forfeited for treason. Darien’s hopes puddled into his boots. His cravat, tied so expertly, pinched his windpipe. He didn’t want to destroy his father’s legacy; he wanted it whole and intact and waiting for Lucien when he finally came home.
He cast his mind about. What caused a man to be thrown out of Polite Society? His scandal with Celeste had made his father determined to tie him down as his heir, rather than disown him.
“Too much debt?” he wondered aloud. “Threat of imprisonment, or transportation?” But he didn’t care to commit the kind of crime that would merit that penalty. Nor did he wish to get himself killed on the field of honor, as enlivening as the challenge from Havering had been.
But Nell, Horace’s widow, running off to Italy with a portrait painter and leaving her last child behind, had stunned them all and also forfeited any claims to her husband’s estate. “An unsuitable marriage?” he suggested.
Pelton’s face froze, and his eyes went beyond Darien’s shoulder to where his daughter sat on the settee. “Wouldn’t advise that, lad,” he said in a low voice. “A man can come back from ruin. A woman can’t.”
“I didn’t mean—” Darien stopped himself, appalled. And now Sir Pelton, along with Charley and Henrietta, would be watching with drawn swords every move he made around Miss Pomeroy.
Henrietta paused in her conversation and looked up. Her eyes were mossy gray in the candlelight and her lips red-stained and glistening from the strawberry comfits she had eaten for dessert. When she rose and walked toward him, Darien couldn’t stop staring at the way the silk caressed her legs as she walked. His mouth went dry where before his throat had been burning. Just what kind of spice had their cook put in the food?
Henrietta regarded him with a complete lack of flirtatiousness, as if he were a puzzle she was bent on solving. Darien straightened his spine.
“Lord Darien. Mr. Bales has been describing your designs for a water wheel to me.”
Now this was taking her meddling too far. Did she pretend to be an engineer too, the way she pretended to have a stake in her father’s mills? He resolved to be polite, at least until he could leave Hines House and this parlor and this maddening company and howl out his frustrations elsewhere.
“I’m afraid they are only conjectures at the moment,” Darien said. “I haven’t found a landowner who will let me build a model on his property.”
“Try it on Hetty’s,” said Sir Jasper, strolling up to them with a dish of tea he had teased out of his lady. “She’s got a swamp at Birch Vale she don’t know what to do with. The men keep digging it out, and it keeps filling. I say she should cover the whole thing over, but she wants to create a stream.”
“If I fill it in as you say, Papa, it won’t create more arable land,” Henrietta said. “The best a bog could provide is furze and firewood, and we’ve plenty of that already. What I need is to improve the irrigation of the Lower Hundred, and if I put in a water wheel, I’d have power into the bargain.”
“Birch Vale is where?” Darien asked, diverted for the moment by the land-owning talk. He never got enough of it. Most of his friends didn’t own lands, the men he knew who did were interested only in their income, not the administration, and good landowners, like his father, never took Darien seriously.
“Hetty’s got a little estate near Bamford, in Derbyshire,” Jasper said. “Three thousand acres. Surprised she didn’t mention it. She’s always going on about how her butter is the best in the county.”
Darien did some quick math. A well-run estate could yield an annual profit of a pound an acre. Miss Henrietta Wardley-Hines had a comfortable income of around three thousand a year.
“But if I can find a pump that works at the Vale, we might adapt the design for a cotton mill,” Henrietta said. “The drop in the river at Bamford isn’t steep, and the corn mill used horses for power.” Her face brightened. “Do you suppose it would be possible to build a water conveyance system throughout the building? Think of how useful that would be in the case of fire.”
“I am sure such a thing could be designed.” Darien caught his mind before it darted away into thinking how to pull off such an invention. “I am surprised to find you a landowner, Miss Wardley-Hines. In addition to your charitable interests.”
Jasper gave his daughter an indulgent smile. “Hetty’s a businesswoman, didn’t you know? She’s tried her experiments on my estates, then Charley’s, and then she inherited Birch Vale from her mother’s dowry and started saving up to invest in mills of her own. I believe she plans to compete with me and steal my business.”
“You own an estateanda mill,” Darien clarified.
“Only if Hodge sells to me.” She shrugged. “And only if I do not marry. If I do, by law, every property I possess becomes my husband’s.”
Darien looked at her with new attention. “Why haven’t you found any engineers before this to help you with your ideas about your land?”
She made a quick, sweeping motion that drew a line in the air from her head to her hips. “Woman,” she said.
