Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand by Carla Kelly Page B

Etheringhams, who were without question the most impecunious family in the peerage. Lord E. must think he can get enough money out of me to stay afloat, and offer his daughter as a sacrifice to a divorced man, in exchange for my respectability again.
    Thank you, no, Amabel, he thought, and then began to wonder where he could spend Christmas this year. His best friends were dead on Spanish and Belgian battlefields. Perhaps Clarice could tolerate him, and resist the urge to dangle a woman his way. Clarice could probably be depended on to keep his whereabouts a secret from Amabel. He would write her in the morning.
    Lord Winn reconsidered. The ink was probably frozen in the bottle in this cursed estate. He would finished up his business as fast as possible, direct his horse to Moreland, and write his letter there. It would be a simple matter to clear up this mess with Lord Whitcomb, assure Winslow of his undying affection, visit a few more estates, then beat an incognito retreat to Clarice's manor for the holidays.
    Good plan, he thought, rubbing his hands together and blowing on his fingers for warmth. He cursed Northumberland roundly and stalked to the window. There was snow flying in the air, and despite his ill humor, the sight made him smile. And so another season turns, he thought, and I am older. Still alone, too, he considered, and leaned against the cold window frame.
    But I was alone when I was married, he told himself. In all fairness to Cynthia, he could not blame her for that quirk in his character that isolated him from others. He had always enjoyed solitude. The war only made it worse, he knew. There was something about watching friends blow up on battlefields that led to a certain melancholy, he told himself wryly as he stared out at the snow, which was beginning to stick to the ground now. Others drank their way through the war, or wenched, or took fearful chances. He had withdrawn inside himself until he was quiet to the point that Amabel called him a hermit.
    "And so I would be," he said out loud as he went to the bed. He thought about taking off his clothes, but it was too cold. He removed his boots and crawled under the covers, overcoat and all. He shivered until he fell asleep, thinking about Spain, and heat and oranges, and getting the hell out of Northumberland.
    He left early in the morning, after scrawling out a note for his bailiff, vowing that he would return in the spring and try to figure out the legal tangle over High Point that had been festering since the days of the first Bishop of Durham, at least. "If it has waited five centuries, it can wait until spring," he wrote in big letters, and signed his name with a flourish. "After all, I am the marquess," he said out loud to the letter as he propped it against an ugly vase on the sitting room mantelpiece. "I can do what I want." He was still chuckling over that piece of folly as he mounted on Young Nameless and pointed him toward Yorkshire.
    Lord Winn rode through snow all day until his head ached from the glare of white against the bluest blue of any sky he had seen. And there in the distance, and coming closer, were the Pennines, the spine of England, tall and brooding, and then a delicious pink against the setting sun. There wasn't an inn to be found on the lonely road, but he was welcomed into a crofter's cottage for the night, where the ale made his eyes roll back in his head, and the bread and cheese was far finer than the haute cuisine of his French cook. He slept three in a bed with two of the crofter's children, and was warm for the first time in a week.
    The snow began again in the morning, but he rode steadily through the day and into the evening hours, telling himself that Moreland was only over the next rise. He wondered if Tibbie Winslow would have a welcome for him, considering that he was two weeks ahead of schedule, but shrugged it off. He rode doggedly on, thinking of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
    It was nearly midnight when he