The Westerby Inheritance Read online

  M. C. Beaton is the author of the hugely successful Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series, as well as a quartet of Edwardian murder mysteries featuring heroine Lady Rose Summer, several Regency romance series and a stand-alone murder mystery, The Skeleton in the Closet – all published by Constable & Robinson. She left a full-time career in journalism to turn to writing, and now divides her time between the Cotswolds and Paris. Visit www.mcbeatonbooks.co.uk for more, or follow M. C. Beaton on Twitter: @mc_beaton.

  Titles by M. C. Beaton

  The Poor Relation

  Lady Fortescue Steps Out • Miss Tonks Turns to Crime • Mrs Budley Falls from Grace Sir Philip’s Folly • Colonel Sandhurst to the Rescue • Back in Society

  A House for the Season

  The Miser of Mayfair • Plain Jane • The Wicked Godmother Rake’s Progress • The Adventuress • Rainbird’s Revenge

  The Six Sisters

  Minerva • The Taming of Annabelle • Deirdre and Desire Daphne • Diana the Huntress • Frederica in Fashion

  Edwardian Murder Mysteries

  Snobbery with Violence • Hasty Death • Sick of Shadows Our Lady of Pain

  The Travelling Matchmaker

  Emily Goes to Exeter • Belinda Goes to Bath • Penelope Goes to Portsmouth Beatrice Goes to Brighton • Deborah Goes to Dover • Yvonne Goes to York

  Edwardian Candlelight

  Polly • Molly • Ginny • Tilly • Susie • Kitty • Daisy • Sally • Maggie • Poppy • Pretty Polly • Lucy • My Lords, Ladies and Marjorie

  Regency Candlelight

  Annabelle • Henrietta • Penelope

  Regency Royal

  The Westerby Inheritance • The Marquis Takes a Bride • Lady Anne’s Deception • Lady Margery’s Intrigue • The Savage Marquess • My Dear Duchess • The Highland Countess • Lady Lucy’s Lover • The Ghost and Lady Alice • Love and Lady Lovelace • Duke’s Diamonds • The Viscount’s Revenge • The Paper Princess • The Desirable Duchess • The Sins of Lady Dacey • The Dreadful Debutante • The Chocolate Debutante • The Loves of Lord Granton • Milady in Love • The Scandalous Marriage

  Regency Scandal

  His Lordship’s Pleasure • Her Grace’s Passion • The Scandalous Lady Wright

  Regency Flame

  Those Endearing Young Charms ? The Flirt • Lessons in Love • Regency Gold • Miss Fiona’s Fancy • The French Affair • To Dream of Love • A Marriage of Inconvenience • A Governess of Distinction • The Glitter of Gold

  Regency Season

  The Original Miss Honeyford • The Education of Miss Paterson • At the Sign of the Golden Pineapple • Sweet Masquerade ?The Constant Companion • Quadrille • The Perfect Gentleman • Dancing on the Wind • Ms. Davenport’s Christmas

  The Waverly Women

  The First Rebellion • Silken Bonds • The Love Match

  Agatha Raisin

  Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet

  Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener • Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley

  Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage • Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist

  Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death • Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham

  Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden

  Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam • Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell

  Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came

  Agatha Raisin and the Curious Curate • Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House

  Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance • Agatha Raisin and the Perfect Paragon

  Agatha Raisin and Love, Lies and Liquor

  Agatha Raisin and Kissing Christmas Goodbye

  Agatha Raisin and a Spoonful of Poison • Agatha Raisin: There Goes the Bride

  Agatha Raisin and the Busy Body • Agatha Raisin: As the Pig Turns

  Agatha Raisin: Hiss and Hers • Agatha Raisin and the Christmas Crumble

  Hamish Macbeth

  Death of a Gossip • Death of a Cad • Death of an Outsider

  Death of a Perfect Wife • Death of a Hussy • Death of a Snob

  Death of a Prankster • Death of a Glutton • Death of a Travelling Man

  Death of a Charming Man • Death of a Nag • Death of a Macho Man

  Death of a Dentist • Death of a Scriptwriter • Death of an Addict

  A Highland Christmas • Death of a Dustman • Death of a Celebrity

  Death of a Village • Death of a Poison Pen • Death of a Bore

  Death of a Dreamer • Death of a Maid • Death of a Gentle Lady

  Death of a Witch • Death of a Valentine • Death of a Sweep

  Death of a Kingfisher • Death of Yesterday

  The Skeleton in the Closet

  Also available

  The Agatha Raisin Companion

  The Westerby Inheritance

  M. C. Beaton

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First electronic edition published 2011

  by RosettaBooks LLC, New York

  This edition published in the UK by Canvas,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © M. C. Beaton, 1982

  The right of M. C. Beaton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-131-0 (ebook)

  Cover copyright © Constable & Robinson

  For my sister, Tilda Grenier

  and her husband , Laurent.

  All my love.

  Contents

  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 One

  It was not, reflected Lady Jane Lovelace moodily, that her stepmother was a particularly cruel or unjust woman. It was her very character, her coarseness, that grated like a knife across the bottom of a pot.

  She could remember her own mother, a tall and elegant lady not much given to demonstrations of affection, but a mother to be proud of for all that. That Lady Jane’s father had loved his first wife deeply had never been in question. Else why did he venture into a dissolute course of ruin after her death, drinking and gambling until both pastimes grew to obsessions and he had gambled away his estates and home to his cunning cousin, James Bentley?

  At the thought of Mr. James Bentley, Lady Jane’s face darkened like the March sky above. She was allowed to visit her former home once a year so that Mr. Bentley, his wife, and his two daughters should ha
ve the pleasure of patronizing Jane’s father, the Marquess of Westerby, and Jane herself. Their haughty airs and manners did not faze the new Marchioness, who usually became very drunk and rowdy and had to be assisted home.

  This was the third year of the Marquess of Westerby’s new marriage. He had married the daughter of a local innkeeper, a wild gypsy-looking girl called Hetty, and had moved his new wife and Jane, and Hetty’s two little daughters by her previous marriage to a blacksmith, into a crumbling house some few miles from the marches of his former estates.

  Lady Jane was sitting in the low branches of an oak tree some distance from her home. She stared across at it. It seemed to crouch in a little fold in the rolling, grassy hills. It was very old, believed to have been built around the time of Henry the Eighth. It was of yellow brick with a mossy slate roof and a multitude of weird and fantastic chimneys.

  Inside, it was cold and dark. All the floors sloped abominably, and the chimneys smoked terribly, and one would have been asphyxiated had it not been for a whole army of scuttling and bustling drafts which kept the place well ventilated.

  They had no servants, a strange state for a Marquess. The cooking was done by the Marchioness, and all the rest of the housework by Lady Jane. Jane tried not to feel sorry for herself, because the vicar said that self-pity was a mortal sin, but it was indeed hard to become resigned to one’s lot when there was that perpetual once-a-year comparison with what life could have been had not Papa indulged both his fatal tendencies to the hilt. That very evening was to see the annual visit to the Bentleys—one evening in which she, Lady Jane, could see again the pleasant, spacious rooms of her old home.

  Her stepsisters were considered old enough to attend this year, Sally being thirteen and Betty, eleven.

  An icy wind from the northwest blew across the fields and sighed in the branches of the tree above her, but Jane was reluctant to return home. She hated James Bentley with every fiber of her small being. Hated him for having won her old home in a card game, knowing that her father was too fuddled with wine even to see his cards. Bentley had not, however, been able to get the title. That did not go with the estate, although it was small comfort. What was the point in being a titled lady, thought Jane, when one’s hands were cracked with chilblains and most of one’s dresses in rags?

  She had no hope of meeting any young man who might marry her and take her away—any young man of her station. Mr. Josiah Plumb, the widowed farmer who was their nearest neighbor, had come courting and, to Jane’s horror, her stepmother showed all signs of encouraging the match, although Mr. Plumb was nearly fifty.

  “Jane!” A faint scream was borne on the wind. A flock of pigeons wheeled up to the darkening sky. Jane sighed and stretched. Her stepmother was looking for her. She decided to ignore the call and stay a little longer, and shifted her body slightly so that she was screened from the house by a thick branch of the tree. The only comfort she had was in these rare moments of solitude when she could dream that somehow she, Jane, would be instrumental in winning back those lost estates.

  “Jane!” The voice was louder now. Jane turned her eyes away from the house, as if looking in that direction would bring her to her stepmother’s notice, and looked instead to the Surrey woods, bare and skeletal against the sullen sky.

  It would have never happened had Mother lived, thought Jane. Her father owed his marquessate to his wife’s adroit politicking in the Court of St. James’s. He had been a mere earl when he married her, and she had been the most beautiful woman in London.

  Sometimes, when he was in his cups, the Marquess would stare at Jane and say she grew more like her mother each day. And each time Jane would slip away and study her face in the old greenish looking-glass but fail to see any likeness. Her mother had been a brunette of magnificent and Junoesque proportions with creamy skin, large, liquid eyes, and a long, straight nose. Jane was very small, little over five feet in height. She had inherited her mother’s masses of thick brown hair, but her eyes were long and tilted and gray. Her face was white and thin, with a pointed chin and strange thin eyebrows which flew up to her hairline. Some gallant in the days of their wealth had said she looked exactly like a fairy, with her strange eyes like seawater on a winter’s day, and her strange brows. Jane often dreamed of a rich husband with all the fervor and passion of a ton-nish mama launching her daughter on the London Season.

  “JANE!” The voice sent the pigeons flying again, up round the fantastic chimneys of the house. Jane sighed and climbed down from her perch. There was no rich husband, and in any case, she, Jane, was not possessed of enough beauty to attract such a suitor. Perhaps she would marry Mr. Plumb with his fat red face and fat red hands, and beget fat red children.

  Hetty, Marchioness of Westerby, spied Jane’s slight figure hurrying back across the fields and turned and went into the house. She was looking forward to her evening at the Bentleys’ with her usual insoucionce. She was in her thirty-second year, a brown-faced woman with flashing dark eyes and a mane of coarse black hair. She was content with her lot. A drunken husband was one of the realities of life, and Hetty, Marchioness of Westerby, certainly knew all about realities. She was happy that this charming and dissolute lord had taken her away from her brutal father and bullying brothers. She had never had any social life to speak of and so did not miss the almost total absence of it now.

  The gentry had come to call in the first weeks of their marriage, and also a few members of the aristocracy. But in an age when moderation was all and when enthusiasm was considered a dirty word, Hetty was found lacking. Her blowsy looks and her wild swings of mood from elation to drunken bad temper had shocked them in the extreme, and to her relief they ceased to call. When her husband occasionally won a card game, she cheerfully spent the money on hiring help from the village of Westerby to clean the house, and ordered a bale of silk so that Jane could fashion gowns for the female members of the household. But the money never lasted long.

  She walked into the kitchen and stood with her hands on her hips and stared at her husband. He was glaring at a cup of coffee, having been in the process of sobering himself up for the evening ahead.

  He was still a handsome man, despite the marks of dissipation on his face. He had piercing blue eyes and an acquiline nose. His full-bottomed wig hung crazily from the knob of one of the kitchen chairs, and his blond hair was cropped close to his head. He was dressed in an old-fashioned silk coat with tarnished buttons and cuffs so large they stretched up to his elbows. The buckles of his knee breeches were unfastened, and his shoes were cracked and scuffed.

  “’Fore George,” he groaned as he saw his wife. “A pint of ale would set me to rights.”

  “No,” said Hetty firmly. “You ain’t getting naught but coffee. You made me promise on the childer’s heads not to let you touch nothing strong.”

  Hetty beamed fondly at her two “childer,” who were sitting among the ashes of the uncleaned hearth, making dolls out of pieces of straw. Sally, the eldest, had inherited her mother’s gypsy good looks, but Betty, her sister, was blond and blue-eyed, causing the locals to hint that perhaps his lordship had savored Hetty’s favors while she was still wed to the blacksmith.

  Both girls started whining for food, and Hetty looked at them impatiently. “Why can’t you be like Jane?” she complained. “She hardly eats nothing, she don’t.”

  “But look how small and skinny she is, Ma,” pointed out Sally. “I h’an’t had nothing since berkerfest.”

  “Stow that noise!” said the Marquess, clutching his head. “Damned whining, pesky brats.”

  “There, there, love,” said his wife with a tolerant smile. “I’ll find something to make it better.”

  She sidled along the table toward him and leaned her hip on the side of his arm. He looked up at her. Her eyes were glowing, and her heavy breasts were bursting from the bodice of her purple gown. She was not wearing a neckerchief, and her breasts were exposed almost to the nipples.

  His wandering hand fumbled at
the back of her skirt.

  Jane entered and looked at the happy pair coldly. With all the chilly intolerance of her seventeen years, she considered their marital lust disgusting. It was something, she felt, that they should have grown out of. There was no sign of food on the table and, from the look on her stepmama’s face, cooking was the farthest thing from her thoughts. Jane seized a broom from the corner and made her escape, and shortly afterward she could be heard upstairs, noisily sweeping the bedrooms.

  Hetty looked down at her two children and jerked her head. “Out!” she said.

  “Oh, Ma!” wailed Betty. “We h’an’t had nothing to eat, and I’m ravishing.”

  “Ravenous,” corrected her stepfather mechanically.

  Hetty swung her hips into the larder and returned with a gingerbread cake and a pot of strawberry jam. “Take yourselves off,” she said with a grin, “and you can have all of that.”

  Betty’s eyes glistened, but she hesitated. Unlike Sally, she was rather in awe of her stepsister. “Jane says as how I won’t have no teeth an I eat sweetmeats,” she said.

  “Then say a prayer after you’ve eaten it, and the good Lord’ll see the devil don’t get your teeth,” said Hetty cheerfully, hustling them toward the door. Betty beamed her relief. Ma always had a reply to the most difficult and worrying of questions.

  Hetty slammed the door and leaned against it. “Now, my lord,” she began, smiling slyly. But the Marquess was already unbuttoning his breeches. Hetty thought longingly of that feather bed in their room. But prim Jane would be busy with the broom, and prim Jane would not approve.

  Jane shook the broom out of the upstairs window. A few flakes of snow were beginning to fall. Good! Perhaps they might not have to go. She longed all the same to see her old home, although she dreaded the Bentleys’ patronizing scorn.

  Across the darkening fields, bordered on one side by the black line of the woods, lay the village of Westerby, a handful of thatched cottages and a square church. Lights were already beginning to twinkle in the windows.

  Jane turned from the window and walked from her father’s bedroom to the sparsely furnished room she shared with her stepsisters. That had been one of the hardest things to endure—not having a room of her own. Betty had nightmares, and Sally was dirty and messy and refused to do anything to correct either fault. It was simply furnished with a large fourposter bed, which she shared with the two girls, an oval mirror above the chipped marble washstand, and two hard chairs. A large closet in the corner served as a wardrobe, and three old brassbound trunks as drawers for underclothes.