Moonlight Mist Read online

  Copyright © 1979 Thomas Dale Curtis and Sharon Curtis

  Excerpt from The Windflower copyright © 1984 by

  Thomas Dale Curtis and Sharon Curtis

  Cover images © Malgorzata Maj/Arcangel Images

  The right of Laura London to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in this Ebook edition in 2014

  by HEADLINE ETERNAL

  An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by arrangement with Forever,

  an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN 978 1 4722 2118 6

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headlineeternal.com

  www.headline.co.uk

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Laura London

  By Laura London

  About the Book

  Dedication

  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

  Excerpt from THE WINDFLOWER

  Find out more about Headline Eternal

  About the Author

  Author: Laura London

  Credit: Angela Hill

  Laura London is the pen name for the husband and wife writing team Tom and Sharon Curtis. Married more than forty years, Tom and Sharon published ten historical and contemporary romance novels from 1976 to 1986, many of which have come to be regarded as classics in the genre. The Windflower is in numerous top 100 lists of best romances of the twentieth century, including on Goodreads, The Romance Reader, All About Romance, and Dear Author.

  Find out the latest at www.facebook.com/lauralondonauthor.

  Praise for Laura London:

  ‘This sophisticated romp takes readers into the Regency period with charming, colorful imagery that describes all the sights, sounds and smells of the period. Sharp, witty dialogue, sweet romance and unforgettable characters are all hallmarks of the classic novels by this incomparable writing team. Don't miss this oldie, but goodie’ Romantic Times

  ‘From its very first sentence, The Windflower seduces the senses with lush, lyrical, evocative prose. It is a brilliantly-plotted work full of wonderful details, subtle eroticism, clever humor, and heart-wrenching emotion, yet it is the characters that really capture the reader. Not only are the hero and heroine unforgettable, but a wealth of secondary characters are drawn with a richness and depth rarely equalled’ All About Romance

  By Laura London

  The Windflower

  A Heart Too Proud

  The Bad Baron’s Daughter

  Gypsy Heiress

  Moonlight Mist

  Love’s A Stage

  Sunshine and Shadow

  The Testimony

  The Golden Touch

  Known as the ‘naughtier twin’ of Downpatrick Hall, Miss Lynden is far more brash and adventurous than her sister Lorraine. After flying a kite into a tree and climbing out onto a branch, she is saved from a terrible fall by Lord Justin Melbrooke, who pulls her through his open window . . . and into his bedroom.

  It’s all quite innocent, of course. But when an unannounced visitor walks in – and sees Lord Justin untangling Lynden’s skirt – there is only one way to salvage her reputation: marriage. In a whirlwind ceremony, Lynden finds herself exchanging vows with one of England’s most sought-after bachelors. Neither one is truly ready to settle down, but their heated words soon turn to heated kisses, and their marriage of convenience may just turn out to be the match of a lifetime.

  To George and Kathleen Blakslee

  With Love and Thanks

  Chapter One

  The high-chimneyed, brickwork manor house had been built much earlier in the reign of poor mad King George III, but never before in its prosperous, if not particularly distinguished career had it been honored with so notable a guest as now stood before its threshold. The house looked smug today, as smug as a house could in late February after a winter’s battering. It condescended more than usual to the small neighboring cottages; its pseudo-Gothic swirls and furbelows glared with pomposity, accented by a spiky frieze of blue crystal icicles that lined the eaves like over-abundant jewelry on the bosom of a pretentious matron.

  It is a common reflection that a dog will absorb its owner’s personality. The same might be said for a house. And all the self-satisfied respectability of this house was reflected in the demeanor of its master, Mr. Monroe Downpatrick, who stood by his handsome wife, Eleanor, at the top of the front steps, beaming in obsequious welcome as a tall impeccably dressed gentleman descended gracefully from an elegant bay stallion. The stallion’s satiny coat shimmered as the animal turned and pranced away, led by a waiting groom. An attractive blaze on its forehead shone like white marble in the late sun.

  The expression of the tall gentleman himself was bland, even distant, as he turned to face his hosts, but as he responded politely to their greetings it was impossible to tell whether he found the effusive warmth of his reception distasteful or whether it was merely his habit to appear noncommittal.

  It was the opinion of at least one of the three young women watching the scene from behind a well-trimmed yew hedge that the tall gentleman’s sentiments fell into the former category.

  “Depend upon it,” this young lady remarked in a censorious tone, “he despises them! Ugh! Did you ever see Uncle Monroe toady so? Only consider how Aunt Eleanor will lord it over her acquaintances about Lord Melbrooke there having been a guest, when in fact he is only spending one night here to break his journey to his home in the Lake District.” These words were accompanied by a sweeping movement of the hand to indicate the tall visitor being subjected to her uncle’s handshake. “And I daresay he wouldn’t have stopped here at all, despite Aunt Eleanor’s flagrantly fawning letters, if Downpatrick Hall had been as much as one mile out of the way! As for Lord Melbrooke himself—why, he’s not at all what I was led to expect! I must say, Lorraine, I was never before so taken in!” The speaker, Miss Lynden Downpatrick, had been kneeling on the frozen grass, peeking beneath a low-hanging evergreen branch, but as she spoke, she rose to her feet, brushing bits of twig from the front of her French blue velvet winter cloak.

  Miss Lynden was a diminutive lady of seventeen summers with heavily lashed brown eyes that had the oddly enticing ability to change shape with her passing moods, becoming wide and almost round with wonder one minute and then narrowing with amusement into slanting, sparkling gems. Her hair was inky black and curled in wild, lustrous exuberance beneath the rabbit lining of her cloak’s hood, as though the hair had absorbed the liveliness that was so much a
part of the lady’s character. Add to this a pair of shallow mischievous dimples and it was easy to see why Miss Lynden’s fond Papa, unhappily now deceased, had called her his “elf.” Papa’s elder brother and Miss Lynden’s current guardian, Monroe Downpatrick, had continued his brother’s habit of describing Lynden in supernatural terms though, unfortunately, in his less fond eyes she was “the imp” and sometimes, when he was more than usually enraged with her, “that little witch.”

  “Well, Lynnie,” said the young lady who had been addressed as Lorraine, “Lord Melbrooke has received as many blessings as one human being can. He’s wealthy, titled, connected by birth with the first families in England, and he’s…”

  “He’s handsome as sin!” chirruped the third member of the trio, a heavyset, round-faced girl whose mobcap and the white apron showing beneath her woolen overcoat proclaimed her status as a chambermaid.

  This remark drew a smile from Lorraine. “Yes, Peg, and handsome, too,” she said. Lorraine was near to Lynden in coloring. It was easy to place them as sisters; they were, in fact, twins, having arrived into the world within minutes of each other, Lorraine in the lead. It was the last time in Lorraine’s life that she would lead, however, for Lynden was clearly the captain of the pair, the chief instigator of mischief, the more willful.

  Lorraine was five inches taller than her twin, with a straight, willowy figure and black hair that lay in wide, well-ordered waves; her eyes were the same warm brown tones of her sister’s, but their message was more consistent and sweetly serene, though without insipidity. She continued: “But what I had planned to say was that Lord Melbrooke is one of the nation’s most renowned young poets. Imagine, the gentleman that His Highness himself labeled the Bard of the Lakeland, knocking on our front door!”

  Lynden sniffed and rubbed the cold tip of her nose with one mittened hand. “As for knocking on our front door, why, he never got the chance, what with Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Monroe practically falling over each other to meet him! Besides, it is his being a poet that makes his… well, his gentlemanly appearance so disappointing. They call them the romantic poets, don’t they? Lord Melbrooke doesn’t look in the least romantic! Where’s his brooding expression? The disordered shock of tumbling curls? Why isn’t he wearing a cape that he whips from side to side as he walks and carrying a silver-tipped cane? Romantic poets, indeed! If you want my opinion, I think the public is being gulled by a lot of cagey publishing firms! And no one, Peg,” she ended, emphatically, “who ties his cravat with such painstaking neatness could have such a wicked reputation with women as you’ve led us to believe.”

  Peg had known the twins since childhood; the three girls were much the same age and had shared many childish adventures, but her loyalty to the twins did not prevent Peg from bridling slightly at this aspersion of her credibility.

  “A lot you know about wicked reputations,” said Peg, with spirit. “I’ve heard tales of Lord Melbrooke from Mademoiselle Ambrose, Lady Eleanor’s lady’s maid herself, who’s been with Lady Eleanor these seven years and more, long before she came to marry your Uncle Monroe two years ago. And Mademoiselle Ambrose has lived in London for years, which is more than you’ve ever done!”

  “Much I care,” retorted Lynden, bending over to pick an apple-green kite from the ground where she had laid it some few minutes earlier. “From what I hear of London, it’s a smelly place full of disagreeable, snobbish people. And as for Mademoiselle Ambrose’s tales, if the one you’re talking about is how Aunt Eleanor tried to set up a flirtation with Lord Melbrooke before she married Uncle Monroe, why, I’ve heard that already, and let me tell you, it does nothing to romanticize Lord Melbrooke’s reputation. Quite the opposite! Because the way I recall the story, Lord Melbrooke barely even noticed her existence and Aunt was mad as fire. That’s hardly the meat of which scandal stew is made!”

  “There are other stories,” said Peg darkly, trying to look mysterious and world-weary. “Stories repeated around the wide kitchen fireplace in the servant’s hall late in the night, when the young ladies of the house are tucked snug in their feather beds.”

  “Of all the bouncers!” exclaimed Lynden. “As though you ever stay up late at night when you know very well that you get up at the crack of dawn every morning so you can flirt with Farmer Judd’s son when he brings the milk! And the only people who have feather beds in this house are Mama and Aunt Eleanor. Besides, I’d like to know how anyone could tell a tale around the fire with Cook there, because she never lets anyone steal in a word edgewise.”

  “Cook wasn’t there at the time,” said Peg, undeterred. “And Mademoiselle Ambrose gave us lots of tales about Lord Melbrooke and his seducing ways.”

  “Well, I, for one, don’t believe he’s ever seduced anyone,” said Lynden, pulling a soft pastel scarf from the capacious pocket of her cloak. “If the way Aunt and Uncle slaver over My Lord is any indication of the way other people behave toward him, I don’t imagine he would ever learn to be seductive because it must be easy enough to get all the women he wants as it is.” She pulled another silk scarf from her pocket and began to knot it to the first.

  Lorraine had been watching Lynden’s actions with a puzzled frown, then suddenly she gasped and said, “Lynnie, aren’t those Aunt Eleanor’s zephyr scarves? What in the world are you doing with them?”

  “Knotting them together to make a kite tail.” Lynden gave one scarf a yank, to see if it would hold, before drawing a third scarf from her pocket and connecting it to its hapless fellows. “I had the idea when I saw Aunt Eleanor riding yesterday with her pink scarf caught up by the wind behind her. It looked elegant and put me right in the mood to fly kites today!”

  “Kite tails, indeed!” cried Peg. “Lady Eleanor will have your tail if she finds out you’ve made off wi’ her scarves. She’s straightway forbid you to touch her clothes again. And don’t say she won’t find out neither, because that’s what you said when you took her cashmere shawl to make bedding when the barn cat had kits. Well, she found out, didn’t she? And pret’ near screamed the roof down, too! Not to mention that she boxed your ears red, and locked you in the school room for a day wi’ only bread ’n water to sustain ya.”

  “Lynnie, Peg’s right,” said Lorraine, worry filling her soft brown eyes. “There’ll be the most awful row if it’s discovered and you know how Aunt Eleanor can be.”

  Lynden had finished knotting a fourth scarf to the train and held her finished product aloft to test it in the breeze. “There!” she said. “It looks grand! Don’t worry, you two. The shawl was a much different matter because it absorbed the dirt so and no matter how we tried we couldn’t get the stains out. The scarves will fly high in the air; how could they get dirty? And I’ll have them off this evening and back into Aunt Eleanor’s drawer before she’s any the wiser.”

  From around the corner of the brick house came the dull clank of a heavy brass bell.

  Peg groaned. “That’ll be the housekeeper signaling me in to help ready the guest rooms.” Looking over her shoulder at Lynden, she cast a final pleading glance, entreating her to see sense, and then fetched up the folds of her skirt in one hand and hurried around the corner of the building toward the kitchens.

  Lynden secured the end of the scarf tail to the kite and grinned at her sister. “So. You’ve lost your ally, Rainey. Will you come kite flying with me like a sport or will you keep on scolding?” She felt in her pocket for a moment before bringing her hand out empty and saying, in an exasperated tone, “Botheration! I’ve forgotten the string.”

  Lorraine sighed, drew a bobbin of thin cord from her pocket, and handed it to her sister, whose face brightened with delight.

  “You remembered it, Rainey! Don’t I always say you’re the best of sisters? Come on, you know it won’t do the least good to argue with me and it will waste time when we could be aloft in the meadow. Race you!” she said, and went running down the lane without waiting for an answer.

  Downpatrick Hall sat on the edge of a small Yorks
hire village, cradled at the foot of a steeply wooded limestone hill. A row of picturesque cottages clustered near the Hall and a short tree-lined lane led to a red sandstone church. Lorraine chased her twin down the lane, following the brightly colored scarves of the kite tail as they whipped in the frigid wind. Her ears and nose grew numb from the stiff February breeze, and she tried to shout, calling on Lynden to slow down, but her words were blown back at her and left behind. She could only run harder, her mittened hands reaching up beneath her hood to cover her ears lest they freeze solid and crack off in the cold.

  Lorraine saw her sister’s hood blow back from her head, leaving her tangled brown curls dancing and streaming in the wind as she passed the tidy, half-timbered cottage of Mr. Helm, the apothecary-dentist-barber. The varnished oak door opened and Mrs. Helm, grimacing from the chill wind, waved a cloth and hailed Lynden.

  “Ho there, Miss Ruckus! Where are you going like the Fiend From Someplace Else is after you? And no covering on your head! Come in the parlor this minute and get yourself warmed up.”

  Lynden halted midpace with a curtsy and a dance step, and then went over to Mrs. Helm, a plump lady in an old-fashioned lace cap. Lynden laughingly held up the apple-green kite for her inspection.

  “Thank you, ma’am, but we’re off to sail our kite,” announced Lynden, as Lorraine ran up behind her, out of breath. “Would you like to come?” asked Lynden with a mischievous sparkle.

  “Ho! Kiting at my age? And in February, too! I’m not such a dandy young hoyden as you, Miss, nor never was, neither! And look at your poor sister! You run that gal ragged! If you’re in a rush, let me give you a bit of warm plum cake I’ve just had out from the oven. You can eat it on the run.” She disappeared into the cottage and returned, bearing two warm pieces of cake which sent out streamlets of steam that rushed away in the breeze. She shook her head sadly as the girls ate the cake, Lynden munching with one hand, and holding on to the kite with the other. “Look at the appetites they’ve got. Don’t they feed you girls at the Hall?”