The Earl’s Hoyden

  The Earl’s Hoyden

  Madeline Martin

  Copyright 2022 © Madeline Martin

  THE EARL’S HOYDEN © 2022 Madeline Martin. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part or the whole of this book may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted or utilized (other than for reading by the intended reader) in ANY form (now known or hereafter invented) without prior written permission by the author. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal, and punishable by law.

  * * *

  THE EARL’S HOYDEN is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and or are used fictitiously and solely the product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, places, businesses, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Dar Albert @ Wicked Smart Designs.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Madeline Martin

  Prologue

  January 1, 1810

  Devon, England

  Lady Finch’s Finishing School

  * * *

  The old longcase clock on the landing of Lady Finch’s Finishing School chimed the start of 1810 with a tinkle of magic.

  Miss Hannah Bexley, the only child of the doting Baron and Baroness Westwich, tucked her chilled toes beneath her as she eagerly sat upright and glanced around at her roommates. In the year they’d been together at Lady Finch’s, they’d become inseparable. So it only made sense that they would each announce their resolutions for the coming year together.

  The beginning of a new year was the opportunity to reinvent oneself—a chance in which Hannah was always in sore need. If only she could make her hair less red or her freckles disappear. Sadly, she lacked any control over those aspects of her life. Of what she could alter, however, there were still many things to fix.

  She considered the leather-bound journal in her hands, stamped with leaves and flowers that were dyed in shades of green and blue as they crawled elegantly around the border. It had been a gift from her parents several months back for her fifteenth birthday. Lacking anything else to do with it, she and her friends had filled the cream-colored pages with their dreams and secrets. Now they would add their 1810 resolutions.

  Perhaps this year, Hannah could talk less. Or laugh a little more softly. She could be dainty and elegant in a way she never had been before. Or maybe follow the rules more precisely.

  But even as the silence of the room fell upon them, it didn’t lie with gentle comfort over Hannah as it did the others. No, the quiet pressed on her with an urgency to fill the gap of nothing with…well, something.

  “Clearly, Lucy’s resolution will not be punctuality,” Hannah teased.

  There went the chance to talk less.

  The other three young women looked toward Lucy’s empty bed in the large room the five of them shared and giggled.

  “Maybe she’s with Lady Alison, selecting ribbons for class.” Jillian pinned her dark waves with a pinch of her fingers as if it were a bow, then gave a wry twist to her lips.

  A cackle erupted from Hannah at such a thought as their dear Lucy in the clutches of the dreadfully spoiled Lady Alison. Hannah clapped her hand over her mouth to stifle the unladylike guffaw.

  Laughing more quietly was now off the list as well.

  Drat.

  “Hopefully, she didn’t take a tumble.” Elizabeth cast a glance toward the door, worry in her pale blue eyes. While she moved with the grace of a dancer, she somehow managed to trip over every loose stone and bump into every low-hanging eave.

  “I’ll wager she’s up to no good.” Amy frowned. Her blonde hair was knotted up in rag rolls that bounced about on her head as she spoke.

  This, of course, only made Hannah giggle more.

  And Amy most likely was not wrong. Lucy was always into some kind of trouble.

  At that exact moment, the door swung open, and Lucy sauntered in, her nightgown whispering about her ankles. She tossed her head back to clear a length of dark hair from her hazel eyes and grinned at them all. “I thought this would make our resolutions a little more interesting.” From behind her back, she withdrew a corked bottle.

  Hannah leapt to her feet, leaving the journal, and ran toward Lucy with a squeal of delight.

  So much for being dainty and elegant…

  “I don’t think we should have that in our room.” Even as Amy spoke with her usual caution, she slid from her bed to examine Lucy’s prize, her curiosity piqued. “Where did you get it?”

  Brandy.

  “From ole Gibbons’s private stash that he keeps behind the sofa.” Lucy wiggled the bottle, and liquid sloshed inside.

  No one ever used the ruffled pink sofa with the over-fluffed cushions. No one, that was, except the butler who needed a nip from time to time to deal with “the infernal racket of so many girls” as he groused in an audible mutter at least once a day.

  “And don’t fret.” Lucy pointed a finger at Elizabeth. “I left him a few coins to cover a new bottle of an even finer vintage than this.”

  Elizabeth gave a bright smile of appreciation.

  “What does it take to get drunk?” Jillian asked, peering around Hannah.

  Amy narrowed her eyes at the bottle. “I wager it’s about seventeen jacks. Divided between the five of us, that’s exactly—”

  “Now is not the time for such equations.” Lucy pulled the cork free, and the hollow thunk filled the room. “We’ll find out.” She sniffed the contents and recoiled. “I imagine not much.” With that, she put the bottle to her lips and tilted her head back. She grimaced and lowered the brandy as she wheezed out a pained exhale.

  “I think you’re supposed to sip it,” Jillian mused.

  “I’ve never been a rule follower,” Lucy ground out and passed the bottle to Hannah. “And neither have you.”

  The glass was cool against Hannah’s palms. “I ought to take offense to that.”

  “But you won’t,” Lucy replied, her husky voice restored.

  While Lucy wasn’t wrong, she wasn’t entirely right either. Unlike her wayward friend, Hannah didn’t intentionally break the rules. Just as she didn’t intentionally talk too much or try to be overly loud.

  It all sort of happened.

  She didn’t bother to sniff the bottle as Lucy had, or her courage might falter. No, she set aside her reservations and tossed back a mouthful.

  In for a penny, in for a pound…

  And like that, her last option for a New Year’s resolution—following the rules better—slipped away. Or, was swallowed away, as it were.

  The liquid hit her throat like punishment, all fire and hell and awfulness. She swallowed it down so as not to spit it out and felt as though she were breathing out flames as she wheezed an exhale similar to Lucy’s.

  Amy immediately set to patting Hannah’s back.

  “Is it really that bad?” Elizabeth asked, wide-eyed, stepping away from the offending spirits.

  Jillian took the bottle in a show of her own special defiance and drank. Of the three, only she did not sputter but instead offered a shrug. “Not bad.”

  She regarded their faces, then burst into a laugh, succumbing to a hacking cough, her green eyes watering. “But not good either,” she rasped.

  Amy ran to her and gently thwacked her back until Jillian waved her off, still laughing.

  “Let’s get to our resolutions before any one of us has to drink more of that.” Jillian pointed an accusatory finger at the brandy.

  Lucy tucked the bottle against her arm, and they gathered closer to the hearth. Hannah swiftly retrieved the journal, flipping to one of the back pages as she did so. She sank in the semi-circle near the fire, and heat blossomed against her icy toes and warmed the front of her nightdress.

  As they settled on the plush salmon-pink carpet, Hannah already could predict each of their resolutions, even as she handed the journal to Elizabeth. Amy dipped the quill in ink for her and held it at the ready, poised over the small metal well.

  “I vow to be less clumsy this year,” Elizabeth said. “Or at least not be so intolerably awkward about it.”

  Amy cast her a sympathetic look and gave her the prepared quill.

  Elizabeth scratched her vow onto a fresh page with “1810” written atop it. Hannah had written the year earlier in anticipation of the evening, her penmanship so careful and perfect, even the stern-faced Miss Cuthbert wouldn’t have cause for complaint.

  “And you, Amy?” Hannah asked, already guessing the answer as Amy accepted the book.

  Amy gently blew at the page to dry the ink. “I would like to be kind always.”

  “You are always kind,” Lucy groaned in exasperation.

  Even Amy rolled her eyes at this, albeit playfully and wrote the resolution in her neat, looping script.

  “And I resolve…” Lucy indulged in another gulp of brandy with only a wince this time.

  “To be as wi
cked as possible,” they all finished for her in chorus.

  She blinked in surprise as they all laughed. “Apparently, I ought to resolve to be less predictable.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Elizabeth said with a giggle. “We’d be at a loss as to what to do with you.”

  Lucy grinned and drank from the bottle again.

  All eyes turned on Hannah.

  Well, the year wasn’t exactly starting on fine footing, considering how many potential resolutions she’d already blundered within the short side of an hour. She sighed. “To be more patient.”

  “Isn’t that what you tried last year?” Amy asked gently.

  Lucy scoffed. “And only made it a week if I recall.”

  Immediately Hannah regretted having shared this information with her friends. Perhaps she truly did talk too much. “To be fair, patience does take a while,” she protested.

  Lucy tilted her head at the point well made.

  And patience did take a long while to master. An eternity.

  Time stretched before Hannah, dreadfully dull and hopelessly bleak. But still, she held onto the thought that patience might eventually be the key to everything she needed.

  Her answer officially written beneath Lucy’s scratched script, the book found its way into Jillian’s hands.

  Of the five of them, Jillian’s answer would be the most difficult to predict. Much like the young woman herself.

  One never knew what thoughts danced about behind her crystal-green eyes. She saw the world in a different hue of light, her thoughts like winding tendrils that concocted insights no one might otherwise consider.

  “I resolve…” She brushed the page with a tapered finger. “To never wed.”

  The girls all sucked in a breath. Well, except Lucy, who snorted an unladylike laugh.

  “What?” Elizabeth gasped.

  Jillian’s chin lifted slightly, and she got that dreamy look on her face as when a notion struck her. “What if none of us ever wed? We wouldn’t have to cede ourselves or our property to a man. We wouldn’t be forced into a poorly matched union with a disagreeable man.”

  “I don’t want to wed either,” Lucy said with a derisive scoff.

  “Perhaps we could all live on a country estate together when we become spinsters, and our parents have given up on us,” Jillian said slowly as the idea came to her. “And we can make the ballroom into an extra library stacked to the ceiling with books.”

  “Oh, yes,” Elizabeth breathed.

  Hannah’s heartbeat quickened at the idea of living in the country forever. To think of never having to fret over the disinterested stares of the opposite sex again or bear the suffocating rules of society.

  She was to have her debut in several years, she knew. And she did not wish to. It would be far better to enter her first season with no expectations of a match, secure in the knowledge that she would never wed.

  “I shouldn’t like to wed either,” she said, grabbing Lucy’s bottle for another searing drink. Her head was already spinning, not only from the blazing alcohol but also the freedom of never having to worry about marriage.

  Or, rather, the rejection that would lead to her inability to wed. For that was her biggest fear, more than a disagreeable man to marry; it was the very real possibility of there being no man at all willing to have her as his wife.

  A smile brightened Jillian’s face as she wrote on a fresh page—The Vow of the Wallflowers with the s blooming into a perfectly drawn rose. Beneath that, she wrote, “The wallflowers who will take their freedom and never wed.” She signed, then passed the journal to Lucy, who signed, and then on to Hannah.

  “No man wants a wife who trips over air.” Elizabeth blew at a lock of brown hair that had fallen over one eye. “And I should love that library filled with every novel ever written.” She nodded firmly. “I’m in too.”

  “I want a curricle of my own,” Hannah said. “Perhaps a phaeton.”

  “You’ll have it,” Jillian said emphatically. “And there will be a music room for Lucy with every instrument imaginable. And an art room for me, glowing with sunlight and overlooking the garden.”

  They all looked to Amy, whose cheeks were scarlet beneath her rag curlers. She opened her mouth, closed it and opened it again.

  Though only fifteen, Amy was a woman destined for motherhood. She was exactly the sort who could tolerate shrieks and cries of infants with a pleasant disposition and was filled with sweet patience that even a saint would covet.

  “You don’t have to sign,” Hannah said.

  “And abandon you lot of spinsters in that manor without someone to properly look after you?” Amy reached for the book and added her signature, one she had practiced to loopy perfection. “Besides, I should like to bake confections in a kitchen without judgement.”

  “Then it is done.” Jillian folded the book closed, sat back on her heels and beamed at them all. “None of us will ever marry.”

  “Wallflowers to the end.” With that, Hannah helped herself to one last sip of brandy, secure in a future she could finally face.

  1

  January 1816

  York, England

  * * *

  Hannah opened the old leather journal from her days at Lady Finch’s Finishing school and touched the paper where the signatures from The Vow of the Wallflowers were written in five different scripts. The opposite page was dotted with ink as well, imprinted there all those years ago when the book was closed too quickly before the ink had fully dried.

  And sealed all their fates with it. Thank heavens!

  “Hannah,” her mother’s voice came from the other side of her bedroom door, pitching higher on the last syllable.

  Hannah shrank deeper into the plushness of her bed, wishing it would swallow her up. Her maid, Mary, had delivered the message her parents desired to speak to her half an hour ago. It was not difficult to know what they wished to discuss with the start of the season looming ever closer.

  Preparations to depart their country estate would begin sooner than later. Gone would be the days of ambling about in hardy boots and breathing in the crisp morning air during walks. There would be no driving her own carriage or reading up in trees with her legs dangling over the rough branches.

  She would be back in shoes that pinched her toes, her hair pinned and curled, enduring insufferable niceties with people her parents wanted her to meet and gowns that made breathing difficult. Desperation welled up inside her, threatening to overwhelm her.

  “Did Mary not tell you we want an audience with you?” her mother persisted from the other side of the door.

  That startled Hannah upright. “She did. I…fell asleep. Forgive me.”

  She could hardly allow her dearest Mary to suffer because of her own disinclination to be subjected to this awful discussion. Again.

  With a huff, she pushed up from the bed, nudging the old journal under her pillow as she did so. A weight settled on her shoulders like a cloak as she went to her door.

  Lady Westwich’s smiling face met her. “Ah, my beautiful daughter. I’m well aware of how much you dread this, but it must be done.”

  “Perhaps it would be advantageous to forego it this year?” Hannah suggested hopefully. “After all, I’ve been well informed from our previous discussions, and I—”

  The tuck of her mother’s lips downward stifled her futile argument.

  Hannah’s shoulders drooped in defeat. It would be better simply to have the arduous chat and be done. Resigned, she followed her mother down the curving staircase into the library, where the family spent most of their time. A roaring fire crackled in the hearth, beating back the worst of the winter’s chill. It had been an extraordinarily cold winter and had even snowed several times.

  But now was not the time for thinking of the crunching of snow beneath her boots or how it dusted the world like finely sifted powder. Now was for enduring the worst lecture of the year.