The Heiress Read online

  “There will be no love. No, I am not naive. Being a prisoner all my life has made me old. There is something wrong with this Gregory Bolingbrooke that his father must pay mine to marry me. I cannot look forward to a life of love with a healthy young man. I wonder if there will be children?”

  When she abruptly lowered her head and glanced at Tode, he turned away so she could not see his eyes. “Do not tell me!” she cried. “I do not want to know.”

  Jumping up from her chair, she flung her arms out. “I would like to live for once in my life. I’d like to look into a man’s eyes and see that he loved me or hated me for myself, not for my father’s gold. I am not Frances who cannot wait one second before she tells that she is the cousin to the greatest heiress in the land. You know that I’d rather talk with the cook than with those old men my father sends to visit me.”

  Tode’s eyes twinkled. “You, dear Axia, would talk to anyone from outside these walls, ask questions of anyone.”

  “Oh, to see the world,” she said, twirling about, her skirt belling out about her. “That is what I’d like, to see the world. Oh, heavens, but I’d like to paint the world.” She stopped spinning. “But to see it properly, I must be someone ordinary, like … like Frances. Yes, to be as ordinary as Frances, that is what I would like.”

  Tode had to bite his tongue to keep from making a comment. He disciplined himself to keep from again saying what he thought of Frances. When Axia was twelve years old, she’d received a letter from her father saying he was sending her a thirteen-year-old female cousin for a companion. Axia had been so excited that Tode was jealous, and for months Axia had turned the estate upside down as she prepared for the arrival of Frances. Axia had moved out of her own room, the best bedroom in the house, and completely refurbished it for her cousin. When Tode had protested this extravagance, Axia had said, “If she does not like it here, she will not stay,” as though that ended the discussion. And even though Axia lived in fear of displeasing her father and made it a policy to ask for nothing for herself, she never hesitated to ask for something for someone under her care. So before Frances arrived, new curtains, new bed hangings, new cushions, were commissioned for her room.And as the day drew near, Axia was beside herself with anticipation.

  But on the day Frances arrived Axia was nowhere to be found. After much searching, Tode found her hiding high up in an apple tree. “What if she doesn’t like me?” Axia had whispered. “If she doesn’t like me, she will tell my father and he will take her away.” It had taken a great deal of talking to persuade her that no one could help but like her before Axia would come down and greet her cousin.

  But Frances had not liked Axia. Tode, more worldly than Axia and hardened in the first horrible twelve years of his life, saw that Frances had learned to take what she could when she could and with anxious, eager-to-please Axia hovering about her, she managed to take a lot. It was no wonder this James Montgomery thought Frances was the heiress because she dressed as she thought someone who was related to the Maidenhall heiress should: dressed, ate, lived. And the more Axia gave, the more Queen Frances seemed to believe was her right. In the seven years since Frances’s arrival, many times Tode had tried to get Axia to stop giving so much to Frances, asking her father for whatever Frances wanted, whether it was oranges in winter or a special shade of silk, but Axia just waved her hand and said, “If it makes her happy, why not give it to her? My father can afford it.” But Tode knew that Axia, so lonely, imprisoned all her life, would always be that little girl, afraid of being left alone with strangers. And all these years, even though Frances had never reciprocated, Axia had never stopped taking care of Frances. Axia’s only retaliation to Frances’s ingratitude was barbed remarks and a pretense that she didn’t care. And, Tode thought with a smile, an occasional practical joke, such as painting an ugly woman on one of Frances’s mirrors or putting daisies under her pillow because daisies made Frances sneeze.

  Tode was suddenly brought back to the present when Axia turned a face full of wonder toward Tode. “I shall be Frances.”

  “Ah yes, of course. We shall cover the walls of your bedchamber with mirrors as hers is and remove all those dreary books you love so much. And of course your paints must go. And—” He broke off. “Pray tell, who will Frances be?” But as he said it, he knew. “No! Your father—”

  “Will not know, will not care. I will tell him I did it to protect his precious commodity. If the Maidenhall heiress is kidnapped, it will be worthless Frances, not I, who is taken captive. And I am sure she would soon enough tell her captors the truth. But this is of no concern as we will be under guard. There will be no danger.”

  “This is because of that Montgomery, isn’t it? He put this idea into your head.”

  “He can go to blazes for all I care. He has no honor, no sense of decency. He has no soul that he would lie and deceive so.”

  Tode well knew how Axia felt about men or women who wanted to be near her because of her father’s money. Once she’d said about Frances, “At least her friendship can’t be bought. I’ve tried.”

  Going to his chair, she put her hands on the armrests, her face near his. She was the only person in the world who did not turn away in revulsion at the sight of him, and when she put herself this close to him, a wave of love ran through him.

  “Do you not see?” she said. “It is my only chance. My one chance. I could travel as my rich cousin’s poor companion.”

  “Poor indeed if you have less than Frances,” he said, his eyes soft as a doe’s.

  Axia was not oblivious to Tode’s love for her, and when needed, she used it to get round him, for ostensibly, he was her father’s chief spy. She gave him a sweet smile. “It all depends on you.”

  “Away from me,” he said, throwing up his arm, for he saw what she was up to. “You think you can persuade me to anything. This is dangerous. Your father’s rage is—”

  “What would be his rage if I were taken by brigands and held for ransom?” Looking at him, she lowered her voice and hoped he would not catch the hole in her logic, as just moments before she had been reassuring him that she would be safe. “What would you feel when my father refused to pay the ransom and they murdered me?”

  When she saw his eyes flicker, she knew that she had won. Clapping her hands, she laughed aloud as she danced about the room. “No one will know who I am! No gawking boys staring at me as the new men my father hires do. No one staring at my clothes and food, asking whether I wear silk in bed or not. No one judging every word I say because England’s richest heiress has said it. No marriage proposals at the rate of three a day.”

  At that Tode smiled. Axia exaggerated, of course, but declarations of love were tossed over the walls regularly. Young men sang love songs from outside the walls. They wrote sonnets to Axia’s beauty and said they’d glimpsed her in a dream or “from afar” or had climbed a tree and watched her and fallen hopelessly in love with her. Whenever Frances heard that, she always said, “They must have seen me.”

  “Will Frances agree?” Tode asked softly, buying time to allow him to think this out. “You know how she loves to thwart you.”

  “Agree?” Axia asked, aghast. “Agree! Are you asking me if she’ll agree to have it all? To have the gold and the beauty? Do you ask me if this is what she wants?”

  She laughed happily. “You leave Frances to me.”

  “And may God have mercy on her soul,” Tode said under his breath so she could not hear him.

  Quietly, Frances listened to what Axia was saying. Her room, half again the size of Axia’s, had walls covered with drawings and paintings of herself, each of them expensively framed.

  “You want me to be you?” Frances asked, her nose in the air. “I am to risk my life as every criminal in the country tries to take your father’s gold?”

  Axia gave a sigh. “You know my father would not send me across the country if it were not safe.”

  Frances gave her a little smile. “Safe for you perhaps, but if I am the