The Lady Knows Best by Susanna Craig

Author:Susanna Craig [Craig, Susanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zebra Books
Published: 2023-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

Though Miles never let many weeks pass between visits to Lyneham Park, every time it came in view, he found himself wondering why he had stayed away so long.

The house itself, constructed of red brick, had been some four hundred years in the making, though the oldest portions of it had been relegated to offices and storerooms in Miles’s great-grandfather’s day, in favor of what had then been newly built in the Palladian style. Its position on rising ground, backed by lush woodland, made it appear even larger than it was, impressive, but not imposing.

It looked . . . well, it looked like home.

Which was a rather silly way of phrasing things. Lyneham Park was his home, after all—one of them, anyway.

He’d been born here, twenty-eight years ago, to parents who had doted on him—or so he’d been told. They had been killed in a carriage accident when he was two. As far as he could remember, he had been Viscount Deveraux all his life. Had they lived, he surely would have shared this home with siblings, as many or more than Daphne’s, he supposed. Instead, he knew his mother and father’s faces only in portraits.

Lyneham Park was full of portraits.

“Do you think they’ll come?” he asked Alistair, turning away from the carriage window.

Alistair looked up from his book. “Hm?”

How the man could read in a jostling coach had always been a mystery to Miles. Then again, Miles didn’t particularly enjoy reading even when he was still—or didn’t enjoy being still long enough to resort to cracking a book.

“The Burkes,” he explained. “Do you think they’ll come?” He wanted, suddenly, to show off his home, not as some ostentatious display of wealth, but because . . . well, he hardly knew why.

Alistair closed his book around his finger to mark his place. “All of them?”

“Any of them.” His mouth felt suddenly dry, the words difficult to speak.

With a laugh, Alistair whacked his book against Miles’s knee. “I suspect at least one will. Whether it’s the one you’re hoping for remains to be seen, old chap.”

The coach rattled along the gravel drive as it curved between the house and a terraced garden that sloped down to a close-cropped green lawn. The garden was full of roses, a profusion of varieties that would have done the Duchess of Raynham proud. Or perhaps the dowager duchess, he corrected himself, thinking of what Daphne had said about her sister Erica, who was probably not interested in such mundane matters as a flower’s color or scent. Even just passing by with the carriage windows closed, he could catch the roses’ perfume on the air.

Miles leaned forward and reached behind Alistair to slide open the panel that permitted communication with the driver. “Straight to the carriage house, John. We’ll sneak in,” he added with a wink to Alistair.

“Very good, my lord.”

Alistair mouthed the words thank you. Entering the house through the front, where more roses had been trained to grow up the columns supporting the pediment, would have left him in stuffy-nosed, red-eyed agony.

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