No Man's Mistress by Mary Balogh Page A

stay here and help out as best she can. But she misses you dreadfully, Viola. We all do.”
    Viola felt bereft. She felt not so much her loneliness-she had learned to hold that at bay with her various activities and friendships at Pinewood—as her terrible aloneness. They would never come. Why did she keep on hoping they would?
    It had been her dearest dream when she had come to Pinewood that soon her mother would recover from her anger and forget the dreadful quarrel they had had over Viola's accepting the earl's gift, that she would come to live with her daughter and bring Claire and the twins, Maria and Benjamin—Viola's half siblings—with her. But her mother was not ready to forgive her, at least not to the extent of coming here.
    Mama and the children—though Claire was fifteen already and the twins twelve—did not have a home of their own. Viola's stepfather had died when she was eighteen and left nothing to his family except debts, which Uncle Wesley, Mama's brother, had paid off. He had taken them all to live at the coaching inn he owned, and they had remained there ever since.
    “I am working now,” Claire had continued. “Uncle Wesley has been showing me how to keep the account books, as you once did. He has said that he may let me serve in the coffee room too now that I am fifteen. I am happy to work for him, but what I really want to do is be a governess as you were, Viola, and help support the family with my earnings.”
    They had been proud of her, both Mama and her uncle, Viola recalled. Uncle Wesley had been disappointed when she had first announced that she would be leaving the inn, but he had understood her desire to help support her family. Two years ago her mother had not been able to understand why she was so eager to leave respectable, interesting, well-paid employment in order to accept charity. Charity, she had called the gift of Pinewood….
    “It feels good to help out,” Claire had written. “Uncle Wesley really is most generous. Ben's school fees are considerable. In addition, he has bought new books for Maria, who is learning from Mama and is becoming more of a scholar than I ever was, and new clothes for her too. He bought me new shoes even though the old ones would have done for a while longer.”
    Only Uncle Wesley knew that the money for Ben's education and for many of the extra family expenses came from Pinewood rents. He had not wanted to be part of the deception. He did not want to take credit where it was not due. But Viola had pleaded with him in a letter she hadwritten soon after coming to Somersetshire. Mama would never accept anything that came from Pinewood. But Viola needed to keep on helping her family. Claire and Ben and Maria must have a chance at a decent life.
    “Bless you, dearest Viola,” the letter had concluded. “Since we cannot go to Pinewood, can you not come to London for a visit? Please?”
    But she had never been able to bring herself to go back there. The very thought made her shudder.
    Upset over her encounter with Lord Ferdinand, and upset too over this letter, Viola gave in to a rare moment of self-pity and heard a gurgling in her throat. She swallowed determinedly. She did miss her family dreadfully. She had not seen them for two years, not since that dreadful quarrel she had had with her mother. Her one consolation had been that she was doing them some good while she lived here. But how would she continue to help out if Pinewood was no longer hers?
    How would she be able even to support herself?
    Panic tied her stomach in queasy knots as she turned her steps back toward the house. How she hated Lord Ferdinand. It was not just Pinewood he was trying to take away from her. It was everything. And how she hated herself for not merely turning a cold face away from him on the riverbank just a short while ago.
    She might have gone into the house through the back door, since it was the closest entrance from the avenue. But she walked around to the front.