Perfect Sins by Jo Bannister

doesn’t really.”
    â€œAnd I do.” It was half a question, half a statement.
    â€œYou’ve more reason. Anyway,” she added briskly, “Pete’s got his mum for moral support. She can hold his hand.”
    Ash remembered the encounter on the landing. “Only if he scrubs it first,” he muttered, and Hazel laughed. Ash grinned, a little shame-faced. “I’m fine. Really. I think we should stay, at least for a day or two. We shouldn’t leave Pete to deal with this on his own while he’s still in shock. I don’t think either his mother or Sperrin is likely to be much help to him.”
    Hazel agreed. “What did you make of our countess, then?” Ash thought from the sly tone of her voice she was hoping for an indiscretion.
    â€œIsn’t she a dowager countess? Since her husband’s dead?”
    â€œNo, she’s the countess until Pete marries. Then she becomes the dowager, to avoid confusion.”
    Ash didn’t want to give offense. He knew Hazel had connections with these people that could not be explained in practical modern terms. And, so far as he could see, she counted the earl a genuine friend. But she had asked. “She doesn’t seem an easy woman to like.”
    Hazel wasn’t offended. “That’s because she isn’t. She and the old earl were like chalk and cheese. He loved Byrfield, loved everything and everyone about it. She’s always thought of it as a rather big piece of jewelry, something to flash and make the other countesses jealous.”
    â€œIt makes you wonder what they saw in each other.”
    Hazel stared at him, wondering—not for the first time—how an intelligent man could be so dense. “She saw a title and a historic house. He saw enough money to help him keep them together.”
    Ash couldn’t help feeling a little shocked. And yet, that was the reality—that something like Byrfield was always going to need more income than it was capable of generating. An heiress every few generations was probably as vital to its survival as the phone number of a good woodworm operative. He shrugged helplessly. “I suppose, if they were both satisfied with the arrangement…”
    â€œThey both did what was required of them, anyway. They preserved Byrfield, and they produced an heir. Eventually.”
    â€œWhat was he like?” asked Ash. “Pete’s dad. The … somethingth earl?”
    â€œTwenty-seventh,” said Hazel with a smile. “Pete’s the twenty-eighth. He was very like Pete. Not to look at—he was short and tubby—but in personality. He was a very kind man. He put a value on people, and if he could help them, he did. Like David Sperrin. The old earl helped him get to university. He was a good man, and a good earl. No one around here has a bad word to say about him.”
    Ash glanced back, but they’d walked far enough from the house not to be overheard. “But people aren’t as fond of the countess?”
    â€œLet’s just say she never courted popularity,” said Hazel. “People whose families had farmed the estate for generations objected to the way she behaved as if she owned the place.” She caught his expression and laughed. “Yes, I know—technically speaking, she did. But her father was a supermarket magnate, and there’s nothing that the ancient poor like less than the new rich. So the tenant farmers and their laborers gathered in the saloon bar of the Spotted Pig in Burford to scowl into their beer and ask one another, ‘Whom do her think she is? Her’s nobbut a grocer’s daughter.’”
    Ash laughed out loud. “Funnily enough, Patience”—Hazel’s curious eyebrow warned him just in time that he’d strayed onto shaky ground, and he edited as he went along—“looked as if she was thinking much the same.”
    *   *   *
    The