Chapter one ~ 1784

“Then what shall I do?”

The question was plaintive, the voice shrill with anger.

The Earl of Wynchingham turned on his heel.

“You can go to the devil,” he said in a voice that seemed to cut through the air like a whip and on the way you can find some other cork-brained idiot to pay your bills.”

He walked from the room with dignity, crossed the hall, waited for the footman to open the door and stepped across the pavement into his coach that was waiting outside.

He flung himself back against the cushioned seat.

“Where to, my Lord?”

For a moment it seemed as though he had not heard the footman’s question. There was a deep frown between his eyes and his mouth was set in a hard line.

“Where to, my Lord?” the footman repeated the question a trifle nervously.

“Home.”

The word came out like a pistol shot.

The footman sprang up onto the box.

“’Ome,” he whispered to the coachman, “and ’is Nibs be in a rare tantrum.”

The coach had already begun to move and the driver turned his head to wink at the footman.

“I bet you she wouldn’t last long,” he said. “Not but what she’s cost ’im a pretty penny.”

“’E can afford it,” the footman countered laconically.

Inside the coach Lord Wynchingham put his hand up to his forehead and then covered his eyes as though they hurt. In fact he felt exceedingly ill.

The brandy he had drunk last night in large quantities, the rich food he had consumed and above all the tension of the evening had all combined, when he did get to bed, to make sleep impossible and as soon as it had been decently possible he had risen and called for his coach so that he could visit his mistress.

He had no idea why he turned to her in his trouble, except that there seemed no one else and perhaps at the very back of his mind, behind the cynical facade that was so characteristic of him, was some youthful fantasy that believed that her continually voiced expressions of love had some basis in reality.

He was to be speedily disillusioned. He had no sooner begun an explanation of his gaming losses the night before than Cleo de Castile, who incidentally had been christened ‘Maisie Smith’, produced a sheaf of bills, which she declared were his responsibility.

He would not have minded so much had he not been convinced in his own mind that he had paid those self-same bills only a fortnight earlier or at least he had given Cleo the money to do so.

What had started as a half-expressed appeal on his part for a little sympathy and understanding had ended in a furious quarrel with Cleo de Castile making threatening demands and Lord Wynchingham’s final decision to be rid of her once and for all.

Now, sitting back in the coach with his eyes closed, he wondered how he could ever have been so besotted as to have wasted so much of his money on such a particularly common and unpleasant strumpet.

But Cleo was the fashion and the fact that he had beaten two of his greatest friends in a race for her affection and carried her off from under the very nose of one of the richest and most powerful men at Court had added both flavour and piquancy to the affair.

Now he saw her for what she was, a loud-mouthed, hard-headed creature whose only interest in any man was what she could get out of him. He counted up how much he had spent on her during these past six months and clenched his teeth in a sudden fury.

‘God! What I could not do with that money now!’

Through the fumes that still seemed to be in possession of his head and the throbbing of his temples the scene last night came back to him in all its vividness.

He had not been too foxed to know what he was doing. He realised that his luck was out, but like every gambler since the beginning of creation he had believed that his luck would turn and the next card would be in his favour – the next or the next –

But Lampton had gone on winning and winning and, because they were old enemies across the green baize tables, he had not hesitated to taunt Lord Wynchingham, needling him into making more and more extravagant bids until, finally, one hundred thousand pounds had waited on the turn of a card.

Lord Wynchingham could see his own six of diamonds staring up at him and he thought now that he had known, even before Lampton’s long thin fingers very slowly turned his own card over, what it would be in the split second before he actually saw what the card was, he had known that he was beaten.

And, drunk though he was, he knew exactly what it meant.

It was almost as though he saw a procession of his possessions passing away from him into Lampton’s keeping. His house, his estate, the pictures his father had set so much store by, his horses and last of all, because she was the least important, Cleo de Castile.

The card was there blinking up at him from the green baize, the ten of spades, black as his luck, dark as the sudden despondency that gripped his heart until he felt himself almost squeezed of breath.

Yet he managed with a superb effort to give a little laugh.

“My pockets are now definitely to let, Lampton,” he had said lightly and as though it was not of the least consequence. “I must drink to your good fortune as it is too late for any further play.”

He had known by the expression of the faces of those who had been standing round the table that his sportsmanship appealed to them. He gulped down the brandy that the waiter had brought him and then turned towards the door.

He was surprised to find Lampton at his side. For a moment he had thought the older man was going to taunt him, but Lampton had said in a quiet, almost commiserating tone,

“I know that this is going to knock you a trifle, Wynchingham. Shall we say payment in a month?”

Just for a moment rage had surged up in Lord Wynchingham. He had longed to be able to retort that the money should be in Lampton’s hands first thing the following morning and yet, even as he moved his lips, he knew that it was impossible. But because he was embarrassed, furious, hating both himself and his opponent, he merely muttered ungraciously,

 “I shall not default, you may be sure of that.”

He had walked from the Club without looking back. His coach was waiting outside, the horses and the coachman half-asleep.

A drunken fop was protesting to the nightwatchman that he had been robbed by footpads.

“It’s a dish-grace!” he slobbered, “ – that’s what it is – a stinking dishgrace that a gentleman cannot move about the streets without being ash-aulted! What I asks ish – ish this 1784 or ish it not?”

Unsteadily he brushed against Lord Wynchingham who swore at him.

Lord Wynchingham flung himself into his coach and slammed the door without waiting for his footman to do it for him.

It was only a short distance to Berkeley Square, but it seemed to him that he had time to review the whole of his life as the carriage carried him home.

God! What a fool he had been! He cursed himself as he climbed out and glanced for a moment at the fine exterior of the house and at the massive silver door handle and knocker that shone in the light from the linkman’s lantern.

He cursed himself as he moved across the marble hall with its ghost-like busts of his ancestors and he cursed again as he went up the softly carpeted stairs where the pictures of previous Earls stared back at him with what seemed to be accusing eyes.

He had never before appreciated the elegance of his bedchamber, his valet waiting up to undress him, the fire burning brightly in the hearth and the heavy silken curtains blotting out the dawn which was just beginning to creep over the rooftops.

He waited until his valet had left and then he strode up and down his room remembering, too late, an interview only three days ago with his Solicitor.

“You are spending too much, my Lord,” he had been told then.

“Gracious!” he exclaimed. “What is money for but to be spent and why this sudden parsimony? There has always been plenty in the past and to spare.”

“Not to spare, my Lord,” the Solicitor corrected. “We’ve managed, with I think commendable administration, to keep what one might call a steady balance. In fact, to put it clearly, the rents from your Lordship’s estate have been able to offset the majority of your expenditure, but now things are different.”

“How different?”

He had known the answer even before his Solicitor had enumerated his increased expenditures, his racing stables at Newmarket, the improvements he had made to his house in the country before the Prince of Wales’s visit six months earlier, but these were almost paltry beside the sums of money that he had been expending in London on the entertainment of his friends and to satisfy the extravagance of his mistress.

Cleo de Castile had not been the only one. Before her he had been the protector of a more flamboyant and even more expensive ‘lady’, who was not only French by name but French by birth. She had succeeded an opera dancer and further into the past were innumerable little ‘bits of muslin’ whom he had allowed to fleece him, only because money appeared to give them so much pleasure and he had so much of it.

He was not so stupid that he did not realise that one hundred thousand pounds to be found in cash in thirty days from now would mean his selling almost everything that he held of value.

His horses must go, the house in London, a great deal of the land around Wynch and perhaps even the house itself.

What a fool he had been and all because he had been too proud to refuse...