A Lady Like No Other Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Dedication

  .

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Proposing to a Duke

  The Duke's Brother

  A Lady Like No Other

  Claudia Stone

  Copyright © 2017 Claudia Stone

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be copied or shared without the author’s written permission.

  About the Author

  About the Author

  Claudia Stone was born in South Africa but moved to Plymouth as a young girl. Having trained as an actress at RADA, she moved to New York to pursue her dream of acting on Broadway in 1988. She never did see her name in lights, but she did meet a wonderful Irishman called Conal who whisked her away to the wilds of Kerry, where she has lived ever since.

  Claudia and Conal have three children, a dairy farm and a St. Bernard called Bob. When she has any time left over, Claudia enjoys reading Regency as well as writing it.

  Fans can write to Claudia at [email protected]

  If you would like to hear from Claudia about her new releases, you can sign up for her newsletter by clicking the link below:

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  To Orla, for all your support and encouragement. And for all the lovely hats you’re going to make!

  .

  Love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey.

  - Lord Byron

  Prologue

  If there was one thing that James Trevelyan Reese Beaufort, Fifth Earl of Pemberton, adored - it was women. The only male heir to the centuries old Pemberton title, had arrived into the world after several failed attempts at producing a son by his mother. His father - the person who referred to his seven daughters as the “failed attempts” - died quite suddenly after James’ birth, though few people mourned his passing. For reasons, most obvious.

  Thus James - or Jammy, as his sisters christened him, for his face was always smeared with jam - grew up in a house that was full to bursting with the female of the species. The seven girls and one boy ran riot, with no male presence to cast a disapproving glare on all the fun they had.

  Rather than feeling suffocated, mollycoddled or in any way fussed over by all the ladies in his life, James revelled in their company - for they were equally as boisterous and adventurous as he -and mourned being parted from them for the entirety of his years at Eton. He was older and more philosophical when the time came for him to go down to Oxford, to cad around for a few years more, but when he came back after Hilary or Michaelmas, he always announced his arrival at Pemberton Hall by shouting; “Blessed art thou amongst women!”, as he strolled through the door.

  “Don’t be such a Papist, James,” the Dowager Countess would admonish, for Catholicism had completely fallen from fashion, but secretly she adored his enthusiasm for his female charges.

  “I fear it will have to be a very strong woman indeed, who marries into your family Lady Beaufort,” the patronesses of the ton said each season, when Lady Beaufort arrived in town with her many daughters in tow. The Beaufort girls didn’t mean to, but they overshadowed every ball that they attended with their beauty and vivacious energy. So much so, that their mother began to fear they would get the cut absolute if they drew the attention away from another young Miss at her coming out ball. So, Lady Beaufort set about marrying off her seven daughters, employing the same energy and tactics that any general would employ when going to war. The first had to make a spectacular match, as, she reasoned - if the castle falls the rest will follow. And so, with half a mind not to, Lady Beaufort arranged a marriage between her most beautiful daughter Tabitha - and the Duke of Blackmore, who at nearly eighty, had sixty years on the girl.

  “I forbid it Mother,” Lord Beaufort said, with the air of a man who truly believed he could forbid his mother to do anything.

  “I knew you would,” Lady Beaufort replied serenely, “That’s why I only wrote to you after the fact. Your sister is married now, and as a Duchess she outranks even you. So, put a lid on it dear and help me find husbands for the other six.”

  James would have liked to have been shocked by his mother’s actions, but he knew that when she wanted something she got it through any means, even deception.

  And so, the Beaufort girls were married off to Marquesses, Viscounts, Barons and even a Knight. The only disappointing marriage - in the Countess’ eyes at least - was the union between her youngest daughter and the local Vicar.

  “He’s a man of God mother!” James had chortled, amused by her dismay. “It’s not like she boarded the Jolly Molly and ran off with Blackbeard.”

  “Oh, I know,” the Countess sighed, “It’s just that love matches are so very last season, and poverty is only romantic in novels, dear.”

  As disastrous as the Countess believed the love match to be, James thought that out of everyone his youngest sister, Tess, had made the happiest of unions with her Vicar. He often spent an evening in the Vicarage with his sister, on the occasions that he was in residence in Pemberton, and the mix of gentry and intellects who passed through the warm and cosy home, meant that the company was never dull.

  It was on one of these evenings, when a fine mist of rain was lashing against the sleepy hamlet of Pemberton, that James met his own love match: Miss Kathryn Stockett. Pale as an alabaster carving, with a halo of hair as dark as the night, she was the most beautiful creature that James had ever seen.

  He came up behind her in the small drawing room, listening as she spoke to the Vicar, Gordon Mann, and was so carried away by her soft, lilting voice that he momentarily didn’t understand what she was saying.

  “Oh, we have so enjoyed our trip Vicar,” Kathryn said, sipping on pale tea. “I am rather sad that we have to leave so soon.”

  We?

  Leave?

  As these two words sank into James’ consciousness, every etiquette rule that had been instilled in him since birth left his head.

  “And who is we?” he asked, sidling to a stand beside his brother in law, and looking at Kathryn expectantly.

  “Why, my Aunt and I, my Lord,” she said, rather startled by the ferocity of his question.

  James tried to refrain from looking too smug: so, she wasn’t married.

  “And where are you leaving to?” he continued, ignoring Gordon, who was stepping heavily on his toe, presumably to indicate that Lord Beaufort was behaving in a most unseemly manner.

  “To Dublin, my Lord,” Kathryn replied, dipping her eyes shyly from his gaze. “We sail tomorrow evening.”

  “What a coincidence,” James said, in a way that implied to all who knew him that there was no coincidence at all, and that the Earl was lying through his teeth. “So am I.”

  “You are?” Kathryn looked pleased to hear it.

  “You are?” Gordon looked
baffled at the news.

  “You are not.”

  The Countess stood in the doorway to her son’s bed-chambers as he instructed his rather flustered Valet on what needed packing.

  “Oh, but I am Mother,” the Earl replied happily, clapping his hands together brusquely. “You have been nagging me for months to wed, and now that I have decided to, you cannot stand in my way.”

  “I wouldn’t try to stand in your way if you were getting married James,” his mother replied crossly. “But that’s not what you’re doing. You’re moving to some God-forsaken rock, full of heathens and reprobates - all in pursuit of a girl you don’t know. You don’t even know if she is already promised to anyone else.”

  “If she is, then I shall call him out,” James said brightly, as though that solved everything.

  “Oh James,” his mother sighed, realizing that she wasn’t going to win this time. “I hope this girl doesn’t end up breaking your heart…”

  As it was, it would take Kathryn Stockett a few more years to break the Earl’s heart, and even then, her actions were far from intentional.

  Dublin before the turn of the century was a city on the rise. Its population had passed the eight million mark by the time that the Earl of Pemberton arrived, on a rainy afternoon in the year 1788. The Earl took up residence on the south-side of the river Liffey, in a newly built, three story mansion on Leeson Street Corner, which faced out onto St. Stephen’s Green Park. The Beaux Walk, the park’s equivalent to The Mile in Hyde Park, was daily filled with elegant ladies strolling in Paris fashions and gossiping about nothing, just like at home. The Earl of Kildare had only recently built a grand palace on nearby Kildare Street, and James kept nearly the same elitist company as he had in London. While his mother had declared Ireland to be full of heathens, James actually felt more than at home on the wide, Georgian Streets of the capital - except that he still had not managed to make Kathryn Stockett his bride.

  It wasn’t from a lack of trying, it was just that the girl thought him a bit mad.

  “It’s not usual,” she stammered, as James once more professed his love by buying a large estate in the West of the country, commissioned a grand home to be built and named it Stockett House, in honour of his love. As a daughter of the cloistered and insular Ascendancy - as the Anglo-Irish ruling classes were known - she had not been exposed to characters as eccentric as the Earl of Pemberton in all her life. But soon he won her over, despite his oddities and because of them, and after their marriage she gave birth to three daughters in quick succession.

  “Do you mind, my love?” she had asked nervously when Lydia, their youngest, was born after a difficult labour in the year 1792. Sheltered though Kathryn’s life had been, she knew something of men, and feared that her husband would force her to keep trying until she produced for him a son.

  “Do I mind what?” the Earl - now Earl of Galway, thanks to a large donation to the Crown, as well as Earl of Pemberton, and a speaker in the Irish House of Lords - asked with confusion.

  “Do you mind that we still haven’t managed to secure the line?” Kathryn repeated quietly. To her utter shock her husband threw his head back and laughed so loudly that he woke the sleeping babe in her arms.

  “Lud, my dear,” he exclaimed happily, taking the little Lydia in his arms, and rocking her soothingly. “When have I ever professed to give a fig about the line? I have a male cousin in deepest, darkest Norfolk who has six sons, let them worry about the silly estate in Pemberton and the Beaufort name. My kingdom is here, you are my Queen and my three little girls are all princesses.”

  Never had a family been so happy, nor a couple so in love, and if things had not turned out the way they had, Kathryn and James would have enjoyed a long and joyous marriage.

  But alas it was not to be.

  In the summer of 1796 the Beauforts took leave of Dublin to live in their West country home, Stockett House, for the capital stank to high-heavens in the hot weather. The three young Beaufort ladies; Lucy, Lila, and Lydia, spent the long summer days in the rambling gardens of the estate. Lush, green land gave way to ancient oak woods and deep, black lakes, and the three girls had the freedom of it all. Their governess was not a cultured yet tragically unmarried daughter of the upper classes, but rather a wizened old country woman named Moira, who gave no lessons on dancing or needle point but did tell them endless stories.

  She enraptured the girls with tales of the fearless ancient Fianna and the wolves that had once roamed the Connemara mountains.

  “There are no more wolves left Moira,” Lucy - the eldest - said scornfully, as the woman finished another story one long evening in July. “Papa said they were all killed by the planters.”

  They were seated at the edge of the lough; whose surface was eerily still. The sun had been beating down mercilessly for the past week, and Lydia, who had half dozed off as Moira spoke, had a splitting headache. The stories of wolves had made her feel strange, but she drew comfort from her older sister’s confidence: Lucy was six and therefore was always right. Moira spat on the soft, boggy ground at her feet at the mention of the planters - the Scots and English who had been brought over to farm stolen Irish land by Cromwell.

  “Ach,” Moira replied softly, her blue eyes rheumy as she stared at the cloudless sky, “The English think that they are dead, but you can never kill the Mac Tire completely. They’re waiting for their revenge, and there will be no happiness upon this land until they have it.”

  “Mac Tire?” Lila, the middle of the three, and the most easily scared, asked nervously as the elderly woman trailed of ominously.

  “The sons of the land,” Moire replied brusquely, tired it seemed of entertaining them. She stood and straightened the black widow’s weeds, that the maids said she had been wearing for nearly fifty years, and began to walk back to the house, gesturing for her charges to follow. “That’s the Irish word for wolf, but don’t go repeating all this back to your Pa, or he’ll have me burned at the stake. Now inside with you, you have me driven mad with all your chatter.”

  Lydia rather thought that Moira had her driven mad, with all her talk of wolves and unhappiness. Her knees felt weak as she stood, and the sun was blinding her, so that she could hardly see as she stumbled toward the house after her sisters.

  “I should like to see a wolf,” she thought absently, for Lydia adored frightening things - or the thought of them at least. Her headache persisted through supper, and she felt so hot and sick that even the nursery-maid, who was not known for her quickness, noted the change in her.

  “It’s a bad fever,” the physician, brought down from the nearby port town of Galway, said to James and Kathryn later that night. Lydia lay writhing in her bed and her sheets were soaked with sweat; her neck and chest covered with a scarlet rash.

  “Don’t let the other girls near her,” the physician continued blandly, preparing several complex tinctures for administration. “And in your condition Lady Beaufort, it would be wise to keep your distance.”

  Lady Beaufort’s hand crept protectively around her expanding belly; she feared the birth of another child, but feared its passing even more.

  “I’ll look after Lydia,” James reassured his wife, “You take care of the others.”

  And so, the Earl took up residence in a corner of his youngest daughter’s room for the night. He forced sups of water into her mouth and bathed her burning forehead with a damp flannel. But by the time that a grey dawn began to break, the Earl was convinced that his youngest would not last till noon, so he set out to fetch Kathryn, who had stayed with the others in the West Wing of the house.

  But when he arrived at the second-floor nursery, he found Moira seated in the hallway outside the door, like a ghoulish sentry dressed in black. She held a string of beads in her hands, and was whispering a forbidden Catholic prayer beneath her breath, her eyes large and frightened.

  “My wife?” James asked.

  “The whole house my Lord,” the old woman croaked in reply, “The
cook, the maids, the grooms; the whole house has gone down with this illness.”

  “Please. Go and take care of Lydia,” James instructed as he pushed into the nursery, and found his wife, Lucy and Lila in much the same state that he had left his youngest daughter. Moira had tended to them as best she could, and there was little that the Earl could do to make them any more comfortable. Over the course of the longest day of his life, he administered water, and herbal brews that the old widow had brought, but the death rattle soon began to shake their bodies.

  “Please, don’t go.”

  The plaintive cry was ripped involuntarily from his lips as he watched Kathryn breathe her last, her eyes closed against the pain she was suffering. He hummed nursery rhymes, and held the hands of Lucy and Lila, as they each slipped away into a different world, so quietly that in truth he did not realise that they were gone for quite some time.

  Perhaps he had sat there for hours, the Earl really could not say, but outside the window night had fallen again and when the clouds broke, the moon illuminated all within the nursery, giving them the appearance of angels.

  “But one is missing,” the Earl thought madly in his grief, and suddenly he remembered - horrified - that he had forgotten about his youngest daughter, and he stumbled blindly from the room. He arrived at the bedroom that he had left Lydia in, to find that it was empty and that the bed had been stripped of all its linen. The starkness of the unmade bed ripped through his very soul.

  “She’s gone,” he cried as he took in the emptiness, then fell to his knees, his body wracked by sobs of grief for all that he had lost. “She’s gone and I was not there to say goodbye.”

  “Who is gone Papa?”

  One could forgive the Earl of Pemberton for thinking he had gone mad; for thinking that the confused voice was a hallucination, and not actually his youngest daughter speaking.