“Admiring the Chancellor heiress, are we?”

“Chancellor heiress?” Jack turned to look at his companion just as the dance ended and the young woman moved off the floor.

“She’s a half sister of the present Chancellor head of the family, who is a financial wizard in the city. The heiress was sent to the States shortly after the war started, when she was quite a young girl. Came back earlier this year. Everyone and his brother’s after her.”

He looked sideways at Jack. “How about it? Why not have a go yourself? God knows you could do with the money, no longer land-rich, and dirt-poor into the bargain. But however carefree she looks on the dance floor, she’s as hard as nails when it comes to suitors.”

“And as hard as nails on the dance floor, too, if the performance I’ve just witnessed is any guide,” said Jack, determined not to reveal how much the mere sight of the Chancellor heiress had roused him.

Jack Compton’s Luck

Harlequin®Historical

Author Note

After I had written two novels telling of the Chancellor twins Ritchie and Russell, and the part played in the first, Major Chancellor’s Mission, by the charmed object called the Luck of the Comptons, it occurred to me that here was another interesting story waiting to be written.

The Luck had passed out of the hands of the Comptons and into those of the Chancellors, with the promise that if ever the Comptons were to be in serious trouble again the Luck would find a way to return to them, and so offer them salvation.

Just over a hundred years later, in the 1920s, the Comptons find themselves once more in financial difficulties. Jack Compton, trying to save his family home from ruin, meets Miss Lacey Chancellor, a descendant of Ritchie, and their love story takes place in events that echo those of her ancestor.

I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I enjoyed creating their adventures.

Paula Marshall
JACK COMPTON’S LUCK

TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

PAULA MARSHALL,

married with three children, has had a varied life. She began her career in a large library and ended it as a senior academic in charge of history in a polytechnic. She has traveled widely, has been a swimming coach and has appeared on television in University Challenge and Mastermind. She has always wanted to write, and likes her novels to be full of adventure and humor.

Available from Harlequin®Historical and PAULA MARSHALL

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Chapter One

Jack Compton was leaning against a wall at the Leominsters’ thrash, watching the dancers in the great ballroom. It was the first time that he had taken part in the London season since the Great War had ended six years ago in 1918 and there was something frenetic about everyone’s behaviour which didn’t resemble in any way the life he had known before the war.

His cousin, Rupert Compton, had brought him along. He was something in the City, which was another new thing since, until quite recently, the Comptons had always been tied to the land and had rarely had much to do with town.

‘I haven’t been invited,’ he had protested when Rupert had said, ‘Why don’t you come along with me to old Mother Leominster’s do?’

‘Oh, fudge to that,’ Rupert had said carelessly. ‘Who cares about invitations these days? You’re my cousin and that’s good enough.’

Once at the Leominsters’ Rupert had disappeared, a giggling girl on his arm, shortly after they had both done the pretty in the reception line at the top of the stairs—at least some things hadn’t changed, Jack thought.

Lady Leominster had stared at him when he had arrived before her and had said in a sweet voice, ‘If you’re Rupert’s cousin I suppose that you must be related to Sir William Compton. Sad about him, wasn’t it? Is there any hope that he might recover?’

Jack had agreed that he was related to Sir William, being his younger brother, and no, there was little chance that Sir William would ever be other than a frail and helpless cripple as the result of his war wounds.

‘Oh, how rotten,’ she had replied, but not passing on to her next guest until she had said, ‘Please remember me to him, we were very close when we were young together, before the War, that was.’ It was plain that this Lady Leominster was quite unlike her predecessors, most of whom had been fiery Amazons, famous for their managing and meddling ways.

Jack had moved on after that and, knowing nobody, had wandered around Leominster House which was still much as it had been before the war had changed almost everything else. Rupert had not yet reappeared, so he decided to return to the ballroom and watch the dancing a little before going back to his lodgings near Regent’s Park—although the temptation to leave immediately had been great. He resisted it, and was afterwards to wonder how different his life might have been if he had left before the dancing began.

There was a jazz band performing on a small stand in a corner of the room. It was said to be the real thing since the musicians had all come from New Orleans to take London by storm. They were playing a tune which he did not know, but was later to learn that it was called, quite simply, ‘Charleston’. The dance being performed to the music was of the utmost live-liness and was like nothing that Jack had ever seen before—except on the stage.

All the decorum of normal ballroom dancing had disappeared. The dancers, who seemed to be in a state of high abandon, were throwing themselves about, waving their arms and side-kicking from the knee. When they were not doing that, they were bowing their legs and knocking their knees together with much crossing of their hands over them.

It was not so much that Jack was shocked—nothing much shocked him these days—but that the scene before him was so different from anything which he had previously seen at a great house in London society that he stared at it in amazement.

One couple particularly caught his eye. The man was young, elegant and athletic, but his female partner was something else altogether. The only word that described her, Jack decided, was stunning. She was dancing with the utmost flair, as though not only was she on the stage, but she was also very much the star of the show. Altogether she was a sight for sore eyes, as Jack’s nurse had been fond of saying.

Her low-waisted frock, emerald green in colour, with stockings and shoes to match, was short and diaphanous. A pair of exotic orchids rode on her left shoulder. Her dark hair was cut fashionably short, except for a long fringe which was held back by a tortoiseshell buckle ornamented with tiny emeralds and diamonds. Her eyes shot green fire to match the emeralds. Her vivacity, as she laughed up into the face of her partner, made every other woman in the dance look stolid.

What was worse, her effect on Jack was extreme. Since he had arrived back in England after serving in Palestine once the war in Europe was over, he had lived a quiet and abstemious life. Before the war he had been part of a lively set of officers and gentlemen and had been nicknamed ‘Fighting Jack’ for his many daring and comic exploits. Four years of war and five years of trying to save the Compton family estates after his service in Palestine had changed all that.

He was so taken up with watching her gyrations, not sure whether he appreciated her expertise or deplored it, that he failed to hear Rupert, now without his girl, sneak up on him.

‘Admiring the Chancellor heiress, are we?’ he asked, grinning a little at the expression on Jack’s face. He had always thought Jack a bit of a stick, full of duty and honour and all that, since he had retired from the Army, but no stick had ever looked at a woman as Jack was doing! Fighting Jack was back with a vengeance!

Jack, startled, turned to look at Rupert just as the dance ended and the young woman and her partner moved off the floor together and towards the supper room.

‘Chancellor heiress?’ he parroted witlessly. ‘I thought I knew all of Bretford’s brood.’

He was referring to the Earl of Bretford, whose family name was Chancellor. ‘But aren’t they all as poor as church mice these days?’

‘Not this one. She’s not one of Bretford’s get, old chap. She’s some half-Yankee fourth or fifth cousin, an heiress, no less, through her mother’s father. She’s a half-sister of the present Chancellor head of the family who is a financial wizard in the City and as rich as Croesus himself—they’re the hard-headed branch. The heiress was sent to the States shortly after the War started when she was quite a young girl. Came back earlier this year. Everyone and his brother’s after her, but she’s not yet shown any interest in marrying any of them.’

He looked sideways at Jack. ‘How about it? Why not have a go yourself? God knows you could do with the money, no longer land rich, and dirt poor into the bargain.’

‘Why not have a go yourself?’ riposted Jack. ‘You are in no better case than we are.’

‘I suppose by “we” you mean poor Will since he’s still in the land of the living. No, I’ve had a go at her but, however carefree she looks on the dance floor, she’s as hard as nails when it comes to suitors. She made it very plain that I was an also-ran.’

‘And as hard as nails on the dance floor, too, if the performance I’ve just witnessed is any guide,’ said Jack, determined not to reveal how much the mere sight of the Chancellor heiress had roused him.

‘Beggars,’ said Rupert, as though he were coming out with something new and profound, ‘can’t be choosers, old fellow. Let’s be off to the supper room so that you can meet the lady.’

‘I don’t even know her name yet,’ returned Jack, ‘I can scarcely address her as the Chancellor heiress.’

‘Oh, it’s one of those odd Yankee ones,’ said Rupert cheerfully. ‘Lacey, no less. How do you like that?’

‘Not much,’ said Jack, ‘but, as you say, beggars can’t be choosers. On, Stanley, on. Not that I’m willing to sell myself for money, but anyone who carries on like that on the dance floor is well worth knowing.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Rupert knowingly. ‘The Charleston, the dance which has become all the range while you’ve been in exile. She’s famous for that. She’s a flapper who rarely flaps, except when she’s on the ballroom floor.’

‘The Charleston, eh?’ mused Jack. ‘So that’s what it’s called. Also from the States, I suppose.’

Rupert was cheerful, ‘You suppose correctly. Come on, let’s be off to the supper room before the grub disappears and find the American Beauty—that’s what the gossip columnists are calling her.’

‘If you must,’ said Jack. ‘I was thinking of going home.’

‘Home, where the devil’s that?’ said Rupert. ‘Up a pair of stairs somewhere cheap, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m surprised that you trouble to come to town at all if this is how you carry on when you do.’

‘Business,’ said Jack, ‘business brings me.’

‘Well, in that case,’ Rupert riposted, ‘we must go to the supper room at once. Your business tonight is to repair the Compton fortunes by snaring the Yankee beauty—a much better way of doing it than working yourself to the bone at Compton Place.’

He slid an arm through Jack’s. ‘Come on, old fellow, stop moping and enjoy yourself for a change. The war was over last July,’ he sang, ‘it said so in “John Bull”.’ He winked at Jack as he finished, just like the comedian who had introduced the song to the London stage.

Jack gave way and let Rupert lead him to the supper room. Why not? He could meet the Beauty and see if her conversation matched the force and vigour of her dancing. He very much doubted it.

They were both unaware that they had been overheard by a lady of mature years who still possessed the remnants of great beauty. She had been seated in an alcove away from the heat of the ballroom and, hearing that it was Lacey Chancellor whom Jack and Rupert had been discussing, she had grown more and more disgusted with the pair of them.

Since she was Lacey’s Aunt Sue, as well as being her companion and protector—not that Lacey needed much protection—she considered it to be her duty to warn her to keep well away from the Compton cousins. Rupert she had met before and had considered him a charming lightweight. The other man had sounded little better. A pair of predatory so-called gentlemen who had nothing better to do than try to marry her innocent niece for her money.

She would go to the supper room herself and spike their guns. Her brother, Jacob Hoyt, the General, often used the phrase and she had always wondered exactly what it meant. No matter, it sounded nicely dramatic and that was enough. Oh, and if she got the opportunity, it might be as well to advise Lacey not to dance the Charleston quite so vigorously—it seemed to be giving young men the wrong idea about her.

Aunt Sue sighed. And much notice Lacey would take of that. The women of her branch of the Chancellor family were always as lively and merry as grigs—and, by the by, what were grigs? And why were they merry?

No matter, she had her duty to do and, like Jack Compton, although from what she had overheard, she might not think it of him, Aunt Sue always did her duty.

Lacey Chancellor in the supper room was not thinking about duty at all. She had come to England to visit her distant relatives in order to get away from doing her duty for a time. It would be waiting for her, she knew, the moment that New York’s towers hove into view at the end of the sea voyage home.

In the meantime she was enjoying herself with her distant cousin, Darcey Chancellor, who was safely promised to a pretty girl back in one of the Shires, and who was having a last, reasonably innocent fling in town before he went back to marry her. ‘No hope for you, old girl,’ he had carolled at her when they had first met. ‘I can squire you round town, tell you who to avoid and who to be pals with. If you meet anyone you prefer, just say the word and I’ll find another obliging female who doesn’t want me to be serious.’

Lacey had laughed at him a little, but she had soon found out that, for all his surface frivolity, he was a man of his word.

‘Dodge him,’ he said, when he saw her talking to one seedy Earl. ‘Listen to your Uncle Darcey. He’s no money, no sense and no morals. Now, that one…’ and he indicated a younger man with a charming, if somewhat characterless, face ‘…is painfully honest and safe. A much better bet. He owns a worthwhile stable of racehorses, too. I gather that your branch of the Chancellor family are all great equestrians.’

‘True,’ said Lacey. ‘Although I’m a steady rider, not a great one.’

Now, in the supper room, she was looking around her. She knew most of those present and, despite her youth, was able to judge them at first sight nearly as well as Darcey, who had known them all his life.

There was, though, one man present talking to the ineffable Rupert Compton whom she had never seen before. He was tall, but not too tall, and held himself after a fashion which Lacey recognised, since all her Chancellor relatives possessed the same upright stance. It was that of a soldier, or a man born into a family of soldiers. He was well built, although not in any way heavy. But it was none of these attributes which had her watching him: it was his face.

He was a little past his first youth, she thought, somewhere in his early thirties, but his face was more lived-in than that. When younger he had probably been conventionally handsome, but time had written experience on what had once been youthful charm; it was the kind of experience which had Lacey giving a little shiver at the sight of it. Of course, he had probably been a soldier in the last war, and it was that which had scarred the smooth beauty of a man who had enjoyed nothing but an easy life before it.

He had stopped talking to Rupert Compton, and was now looking across the room at her. Their eyes met. His were quite unlike hers, being as grey as a stormy sea with the faintest hint of a drowned blue in them. They matched the dark blond of his hair, so dark that it was beginning to turn into a colour which was more of a bronze than a brown…

Lacey became aware that Darcey was talking to her. She wrenched her eyes away from the stranger and tried to work out what Darcey had been saying. He was no fool, though, and he was well aware of why Lacey had become a little distrait. He was not surprised when he saw the man at whom she had been staring walking towards them with Rupert Compton at his side.

Now, here was a jolly thing! Well! Well! Well! Fighting Jack Compton and Lacey Chancellor were obviously intrigued by one another. Did Jack still deserve his nickname? Nothing had been seen of him since the War had ended. Only yesterday someone had remarked that he had left the Army several years ago and had gone to manage the estate of his brother, Sir William, whom the War had rendered a hopeless and helpless cripple.

If he were still Fighting Jack then he would probably relish knowing the lively Lacey. It was almost his duty to forestall Rupert Compton, introduce them himself and watch the fur and feathers fly. She deserved an opponent worthy of her steel. Most of the men in society at the moment were either war-weary veterans or soft young fools and it was to be hoped that Jack came somewhere in the middle.

‘Well met, Rupert,’ he said. ‘And Jack, too, although I don’t suppose Jack remembers me. I was only a nipper when we last met, before the War.’

‘Darcey Chancellor, isn’t it?’ said Jack, amused by the way in which young Darcey had sidelined Rupert who liked to think of himself as one of the arbiters of what was left of society.

‘Indeed. Now, I don’t suppose you know my partner for the evening. She’s over here from the States. One of the Chancellors, no less. Lacey Chancellor, meet Fighting Jack Compton, late of the Guards, and now, I believe, running his crippled brother’s estate for him.’

‘Delighted!’ exclaimed Lacey and Jack together. Lacey, as frank as a boy, put out her hand to Jack. Jack did not shake it, as she had half-expected, but instead took it and kissed it.

As he touched her the most extraordinary thing happened—something which he had not experienced since he was a green boy and merely to see a pretty young woman had excited him. Desire roared through him, red hot. He was Fighting Jack Compton again, the man he used to be before time and chance had changed him into the man whom he knew Rupert secretly mocked. Something in the eyes of the woman who was snatching her hand away from his told him that she, too, had felt the electric current which had flashed between them.

Lacey was, if anything, more shocked than Jack. She had been squired by a number of desirable young men both back in the States, where she had almost married one, and here in England, too. Yet she had never before experienced the sensation that had passed through her when first Jack touched her hand and then kissed the back of it. And to have this happen with a man whom she had only just met, to whom she had not even spoken, was the biggest surprise of all!

If she were honest, though, the moment that her eyes had met Jack’s across the crowded room she had felt a shiver of something powerful. That, too, was a new thing.

‘Fighting Jack,’ she almost stammered, so shocked was she. ‘How come you were called that? Your prowess in the ring, perhaps?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Not really, although I boxed a little at Oxford and when I was in the Army before the war, but I was nothing out of the ordinary. I’m afraid I was something of a reckless daredevil, up to any silly jape I could think of.’

Rupert, unused to being ignored, said, ‘Come on, Jack. Silly japes they might have been, but dangerous, too. Why, Lacey, the fellows used to bet whether or not he could bring off the most daring challenges he could find. He was a devil at night-climbing tall buildings at the Varsity, weren’t you, Jack? Why, I remember when—’

Jack closed his eyes. ‘That’s enough, Rupert. I prefer to forget all that. You will give Miss Chancellor a very dated picture of me. I’m a reformed character these days. Quiet and dull, confined to the provinces.’

Lacey, however, could believe that he had deserved his nickname. True, he had spoken to her calmly enough, but there was something about him that told her of a leashed strength, now well under control. Furthermore, she didn’t believe that anyone who was merely quiet and dull could have had such an immediate and profound effect on her.

‘The quiet and dull bit, I don’t believe. And, by the way, I’m not Miss Chancellor to you, Jack. I recently discovered that one of my ancestors married a Compton of Compton Place in Sussex over a hundred years ago—so we’re distant relatives, if you’re one of those Comptons.’

‘Is that true, Jack?’ asked Rupert eagerly. ‘I’m related to the Comptons of Compton Place,’ he told Lacey, ‘so if you’re related to him, then you’re also related to me. You never told me that before, Lacey,’ he added, somewhat reproachfully. ‘Does that mean Darcey is related to us as well?’

Darcey smiled, ‘Afraid not, old fellow. I come from the other branch, but I am Lacey’s distant cousin.’

Jack said drily, ‘You know, Miss Chancellor…I mean, Lacey, most of us present at this ball are related to one another. In Regency times the gentry and nobility called themselves the cousinry because of all the intermarrying that went on among them.’

‘Welcome then, cousins,’ said Lacey giving all three a brilliant smile. ‘And will one of you kindly offer to assist me to some supper? I find dancing the Charleston most exhausting—and thirsty work into the bargain.’

‘So I noticed,’ remarked Jack, dry again. ‘And since that was my first sight of the new dance I shall be happy to feed the dancer.’

He offered Lacey his arm and skilfully steered her away from Rupert and Darcey in the direction of the supper table, leaving them to stare after him.

‘Well cut out,’ said Darcey with a grin to the somewhat offended Rupert, who was not accustomed to be sidelined by the man he thought of as his country cousin. ‘Something tells me that Fighting Jack is not yet quite dead. That was very neatly done.’

Lacey thought so, too.

‘I really came here with Darcey,’ she told him, but her smile took away any sting in her comment.

‘So I noticed,’ repeated Jack drolly. ‘I have to tell you that, while I am happy to escort you to the supper room, I am not able to partner you in the Charleston. I was exposed to it for the first time tonight.’

He was trying to be as calm with her as he could, which was difficult for him. Her nearness, her scent and her ready smile were having a disastrous effect on his body, to say nothing of his mind. He had never been so unsettled by a young woman for years.

‘Were you shocked?’ she asked him. ‘I believe that many in English society are.’

‘Not so much shocked as surprised,’ he told her. Something made him add. ‘After taking part in the war there is little that could shock me. And that’s quite enough of that,’ he added, for he had astonished himself by referring to the war. It was a taboo subject with him as it was with many ex-soldiers.

Lacey nodded. ‘I can understand that. You know, I’m really pleased to have met you. My half-brother has bought an estate near to yours in Sussex. He is transferring most of the treasures from the family home to it and one of my tasks while I am in England is to catalogue and rearrange them for him. Over the years there was a lot of unwanted furniture and bric-a-brac consigned to the attics at Liscombe Manor that he believes might be valuable. The Historical Manuscripts Commission has also written to him, asking if he has any interesting old letters, papers and accounts hidden away. If I tire of the London season I shall take up residence at Ashdown and enjoy myself there.’

Jack looked at her with new respect over his plate of canapés. ‘Do I take it that this sort of thing is a hobby of yours?’ He was also delighted to learn that she might visit Sussex.

‘More than a hobby.’ She was suddenly impelled to tell him the truth which she not yet confided to anyone in England, not even her Chancellor relatives—apart from her half-brother who had been sworn to silence. ‘If you promise not to give me away, I can tell you that I am a trained historian with a PhD.’

Jack looked at her with new respect. He also thought that she must be a little older than she seemed. The careless grace of the flapper which she had displayed on the dance floor certainly concealed from the world that she was a most learned lady.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I was aware that women in the States were freer than ours and were invading all the professions hitherto reserved for men, but I never thought that I should meet one. And if I had, I should have expected her to be something of a gorgon, not a lady who looks like a model or a movie star and can dance like a professional.’

Lacey, who had been about to sip her champagne, began to laugh. ‘That was a compliment…I think. Did you mean it as one?’

Jack decided to be candid. ‘I don’t know what to think or even what I meant. Other than that you have bowled me over. There I was, under the impression that you were as light-minded as Darcey and Rupert, and then you tell me otherwise—that you’re a lady academic, no less. Do they really not know?’

‘Certainly not, and you are not to tell them. They might not wish to dance the Charleston with me again if you do!’

‘Then why don’t you dance the waltz or the foxtrot with me once we have finished supper and you are quite recovered from your previous exertions?’

‘Willingly,’ she said and laughed up at him. ‘To dance either of them with Fighting Jack would make my evening.’

Darcey and Rupert watched them with amazement. Or rather they watched Jack with amazement. Lacey’s frank and cheerful way with Jack was no surprise, but Jack’s behaviour was quite another matter. For years they had accepted him as the dour man he had become since he had returned to England—and now he was behaving as though he were twenty again.

Rupert wanted to go over and twit him, but Darcey put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want to see what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object.’

‘The latter being Jack, I suppose. OK, then—it might be fun,’ Rupert said.

They were even more amazed when a little later Jack and Lacey strolled off to the dance floor to take part in the slow foxtrot which the musicians had begun to play in a slightly faster tempo than usual.

As she had expected, Lacey found that the slow fox was a perfect dance for Jack since he was able to perform it gracefully, if decorously, guiding her round the floor, and holding her at a little distance from him. There were no sudden swoops and bends from him when they turned and glided in perfect time with the music.

He did say once, shortly after they had made the first circuit of the floor, ‘I was always intrigued by this dance’s name. Slow fox, indeed! The only foxes I have ever seen were fast ones.’

‘From horseback, I presume. Do you still hunt?’

‘No time,’ he said briefly, which was not the whole truth, but half of it. He was not about to tell her that the Compton fortunes had declined to such an extent that they could not afford to keep hunters any more. Their once-huge estate had shrunk to being a small working farm.

Since his very touch, as well as his nearness, was disturbing her, Lacey tried to dismiss these unwonted feelings by looking up at him and asking, if only to keep her mind off them, ‘I never did get to hear any of the details of the jolly japes which earned you your nickname. What exactly were they?’

Jack looked down at her sparkling eyes, which were beginning to trouble him more and more, and replied in what he hoped was an offhand manner, although he had never felt less offhand for years, since having her almost in his arms was doing terrible things to him.

‘Now that would be telling, and I don’t intend to play the sneak on my young self. Broadly they came under the heading of what a Yankee I met in the war said was called hell-raising in the States.’

On the last word he looked down at her intently and, whether he knew it or not, his expression was such that for a moment she could seen in him the lively, reckless boy he had once been…And then it was gone as quickly as it had come.

‘Now, that,’ she told him severely, ‘is more intriguing than ever, since hell-raising back home covers such a multitude of sins.’

‘Then I suggest that you use your lively imagination—I’m sure that you have one—to work out exactly what mine must have been.’

‘Wine, women and song?’ she merrily proposed. ‘The rake’s classic path to hell?’

‘Something of the sort—but I visited hell later on in quite a different place from Oxford or London.’

Lacey refused to ask him to elaborate on where he had found hell, for she thought that she knew the answer. To restore the conversation to its previous, lighter, level, she said provokingly, ‘I don’t want to use my lively imagination about your past, whose sinfulness has undoubtedly been exaggerated by the time that has passed since then. Instead, to punish you for your lack of frankness, I shall insist that on the next occasion when the Charleston is played you will join me on to the floor again so that I may teach you how to dance it!’

Jack stopped dead—nearly causing a collision behind him by doing so and gathering a lot of amused, angry and surprised stares into the bargain.

‘You wouldn’t! Oh, yes, I do believe that you would. What a spectacle I shall present if I allowed you to do any such thing,’ he exclaimed, resuming the dance again.

‘Exactly—a splendid one, I’m sure. I shan’t take no for an answer. You are not to refuse me when I come to collect you for it. If you do, I must tell you that I have a nice line in throwing comic conniption fits—scenes to you—which I stage to punish boy friends who let me down.’

Jack said, ‘But I am not your boy friend.’

Lacey raised her fine black brows at him in derision. ‘If you’re not, then tell me why you have been flirting with me ever since we were introduced, and why, before we met, you looked at me as though you could eat me.’

‘None of it was intentional.’ Jack tried to make his voice as stiff as possible.

‘That makes it worse, not better. Come on, Fighting Jack, live up to your nickname and dance the Charleston with me.’

Her face, nay, her whole body, was so alight with mischief that suddenly Jack could refuse her nothing. ‘Very well, on your own head be it. Take the consequences, Miss Lacey Chancellor, and live with them.’

‘Great!’ she sparked back at him. ‘That’s the ticket.’

‘Happy to hear it,’ he murmured, wondering what on earth he had let himself in for—and what this was doing to his reputation.

Each of them was so engrossed in the other that neither of them noticed that the music had stopped and the dance had ended until they saw that people were leaving the floor and staring at them as they still revolved.

Lacey murmured wickedly, ‘No need to wonder about making a spectacle of yourself, you are already one.’

‘Too true—and I put it down to my unfamiliarity with this life. I do hope that we shan’t be blackballed and not allowed into a society hop again. I don’t worry for my sake, I’m only in London for a short time, but I shouldn’t like to put an end to your fun.’

Where was all this coming from? Jack asked himself. It was years since he had engaged in social badinage and now it was as though time had rolled back again, or as if he had never been away from town, the season and its functions.

Lacey seemed to be enjoying herself, too. ‘Oh, I don’t think that you need to worry about that. I am that curiosity of nature, a rich American who is not quite a barbarian and is not quite one for whom anything goes. Now, you may take me back to my aunt who, for some reason, is looking most disapproving, but you’re not to forget the Charleston lesson which I am determined to give you even if I have to drag you on to the floor.’

Jack could not stop himself. ‘Are all American women as downright as you are, Lacey? Or is it the Chancellor in you? I seem to remember, years ago, someone saying that all the women of the junior branch of the family were strong-minded beauties.’

There, he had said it, his first compliment to a woman in years.

‘Both,’ she told him. ‘American women are not like yours. On top of that, I believe that a distant ancestress of mine was noted for her looks and her strong mind at a time when women were supposed to boast of the former and not of the latter.’

By this time they had reached Aunt Sue, who greeted them with a frozen face even after Jack had been introduced to her. This was so unlike her that Lacey wondered what was wrong. Had she and Jack perhaps overdone things on the dance floor? Surely not.

She was, of course, perfectly polite, even if cold. Jack did not appear to notice that anything was amiss when Miss Susan Hoyt, Lacey’s mother’s cousin, was introduced to him as Lacey’s companion.

‘Not my duenna,’ Lacey said laughing. ‘Rather a friend to see that I am not lonely and, since Aunt Sue has spent a lot of time in England, to show me the ropes, as it were, and to make sure I don’t say, or do, the wrong thing.’

‘Oh, I’m sure that you’d never do that,’ smiled Jack in a comic tone that suggested that she probably might, ‘so Miss Hoyt’s task must be an easy one.’

Not even that provoked a smile from Aunt Sue and once he’d wandered off, after promising again to be taught the Charleston, she asked her aunt, ‘What’s wrong? Is it something I’ve done?’

Her aunt shook her head. ‘No, not at all. There is something which I have to tell you, but here is not the place for it. When we get home will do. Are you really promising to teach Mr Compton the Charleston on the dance floor? Is it wise?’

Lacey laughed, ‘Perhaps not, but I managed to pierce his icy English reserve several times and I thought that making him dance the Charleston might unfreeze it altogether. Come on, Aunt Sue, you’re not usually a spoilsport.’

‘There are reasons,’ said her aunt ambiguously, shaking her head. ‘But have your own way, dear, you usually do.’

Lacey thought that she was past the age when she could be reprimanded by a companion, even one as kind as Aunt Sue usually was. Bees did not usually buzz in her bonnet but tonight there was a distinct noise of a hive having been disturbed by something. Not to worry, she would concentrate instead on trying to unsettle Fighting Jack even further—perhaps to the point where she made him behave as though the nickname still suited him!

Chapter Two

‘Old Mother Leominster’s dance was even more eventful than hers usually are,’ was Rupert Compton’s somewhat inelegant remark to Darcey Chancellor later. They had spent the evening and the hour after midnight in enjoying themselves with a variety of flappers. Neither of them had any real expectations of inheriting anything and, since Darcey was already pledged to his long-time, if also penniless, love, they were not regarded as either threats or possible husbands.

‘Something between a gigolo and a cavaliere servente,’ was Darcey’s rueful comment to Rupert, who wasn’t sure what he meant by the second half of the sentence but didn’t say so. He assumed, rightly, that it was something more respectable than a gigolo, but both words were damned un English so far as he was concerned.

They had lost sight of Jack, who had come across an old friend from his Army days who had stayed behind in Europe when Jack went to Palestine and had got involved with Allenby’s lot and ‘that bounder, T. E. Lawrence’: the friend’s description, not Jack’s. Jack’s attempt to explain the intricacies of Middle East politics was lost on him and he was thankful when he heard the strains of the Charleston begin to filter into the supper room.

‘Forgive me, lady waiting,’ he offered, and set off at the double. Wouldn’t do to offer Miss Lacey Chancellor the opportunity to stage a conniption fit in Lady Leominster’s august halls.

She was where he had left her, with the dragon aunt. She was looking about the ballroom, a trifle anxiously, he thought, but her face brightened up amazingly when she saw him.

‘I thought that you’d taken the coward’s way out,’ she told him, offering him her hand—which he took with the usual electric effect on both of them.

‘Never,’ said Jack, after taking it and leading her on to the floor, ‘and I promise not to throw a conniption fit if I make a cake of myself in the dance.’

Rupert, together with Darcey and a group of other spectators, watched Jack join the romping Charlestonites, with a look of total disbelief on his face.

Darcey exclaimed, ‘Told you the fur and feathers would fly if those two got together. Who else would tease old Jack into making an exhibition of himself!’

‘Only he isn’t,’ said Rupert gloomily. ‘Just watch him go. Do you believe he’s never danced the damn thing before? And how did she get him to do it with her?’

‘Clever girl that she is,’ said Darcey slowly, ‘she used what we told her about Jack accepting challenges. She challenged him, that’s what. All I have to say is that it’s a damned sight safer than some of the other things he got up to. No breaking his neck in this.’

‘Break his leg more likely,’ grumbled Rupert. ‘You know I suggested that he had a go for her and her fortune before he even saw her. Do you think that’s what it’s about?’

Darcey shook his head. ‘Not Jack, from all I’ve heard of him, he’s not a fortune hunter. Just a chap who can’t refuse a challenge.’

Lacey panted at Jack when she saw him rivalling her in agility, ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you had danced this before?’

‘Because I haven’t,’ Jack panted in reply once he had recovered enough breath to answer her. ‘But I watched you and Cousin Darcey enjoying yourselves and it didn’t strike me as particularly difficult. I can only wonder, though, what Queen Victoria would have made of it if it had arrived in England in her reign.’

‘Or most of the other things we do these days,’ gasped out Lacey, after several more hectic minutes, ‘such as women smoking and driving motor cars, to say nothing of short skirts and Eton crops.’

By now they had arrived at the musicians’ corner; when he saw Lacey and Jack’s spirited rendition of the dance, their leader stood up and played his saxophone pointedly in their direction.

She waved back at him, so Jack did too. Who was it who had once said, ‘It’s my night to howl?’ He couldn’t remember, which didn’t matter, because he was too busy enjoying himself after a fashion which he couldn’t have anticipated when he had reluctantly agreed to accompany Rupert to ‘old Mother Leominster’s’, to worry about such irrelevancies.

Inevitably the dance came to an uproarious climax during which those who could not keep up with the musicians’ increasingly rapid tempo stood back to admire Lacey and Jack’s performance which had become more and more inventive. Both of them were separately whirling and twirling before coming back to face one another again, slapping their knees and bending their legs in a rhythm which was almost professional.

The moment that the music ended the spectators gave them an ovation. They had been so involved with each other and the dance, that, as in the slow foxtrot, they had forgotten that the rest of the world existed. When the clapping broke out, they stopped, stared at one another, and Jack asked Lacey, ‘Good God! Never say that was for us?’

‘Afraid it was,’ she said, her campaign to unfreeze Jack having succeeded even beyond her wildest dreams. She was not sure how he was going to take it, and was tremendously relieved when he began to laugh.

‘Minx,’ he choked at her, taking her hand and piloting her off the floor.

He was amused to hear someone whose face he vaguely remembered call out to him as they made for the supper room and a much needed drink, ‘So Fighting Jack rides again, good for you, old chap.’

‘I told you that I should make a spectacle of myself and never live it down.’

‘Aren’t you pleased you did?’ Lacey responded pertly. ‘Now, be a good fellow and bring me a drink, a long cool one, no alcohol, I’m tight enough already without having the excuse of drinking very much to account for it.’

‘Excitement,’ said Jack soothingly. ‘Sure you don’t want a gin and it—or some champagne?’

‘Quite sure. Lemonade and lots of it.’

He reached the bar to find Rupert there on his own, Darcey having discovered another flapper to squire.

‘My word, you were going the pace, old fellow, weren’t you? Took what I suggested to you earlier seriously, did you?’

Jack, who had forgotten Rupert’s advice about Lacey’s fortune, ordered her lemonade and a glass of champagne for himself, before saying, ‘What was that, then?’

‘Don’t say you’ve forgotten that she’s an heiress? The one I recommended you to go for.’

‘Oh, damn that,’ said Jack cheerfully. In his present mood the cloud which had hung over him for so long seemed to have disappeared and it had been Lacey Chancellor who had dispersed it. ‘She’s a jolly good sort—and would be with, or without, a fortune. Haven’t enjoyed myself so much for years.’

‘So I saw,’ returned Rupert glumly, his own evening not having been much of a success. ‘And while you’re feeling so happy, could I touch you for a couple of hundred? I’m a bit short at the minute and you can probably stand it.’

‘Not really,’ replied Jack, frowning. ‘Besides that, I don’t lend money to either friends or relatives, it’s the best way to lose them in my experience.’

‘But I really am most awfully strapped, old chap.’

Jack sighed. ‘Let me be honest with you. I’m just about keeping the whole boiling back home from falling into instant bankruptcy. Apart from my reservations about lending money at all, I simply don’t have that much ready cash to spare. I’m surprised to learn that you are having trouble given that you have a well-paid position at Coutts Bank.’

Rupert made a face. ‘It’s the gee-gees, I’m afraid. I made a few horrid bets lately. Lost a packet on the Grand National to make matters worse, and I’m no longer at Coutts.’

Jack refrained from advising Rupert not to gamble and particularly not to bet on the horses. He thought it would be a waste of time. Instead he said, as gently as he could, ‘I’m sorry, but I have Will to think of and young Robbie, Max’s boy, as well as the estate. We’re even more strapped for cash than you are, I’m afraid. I try to put a brave face on things and you ought to have asked yourself why I’m staying in a cheap lodging house. The flat in town went long ago.’

‘Oh, God, Jack!’ Rupert’s face crumpled as though he were about to cry. ‘Everything’s gone since the war, hasn’t it? Nothing is ever going to be the same.’

‘That’s true enough,’ Jack said, ‘but we have to keep a stiff upper lip and do what we can. Now, I must take Lacey her lemonade. I’m sorry to have to let you down, but there it is.’

If Lacey wondered why Jack had taken so long to fetch her drink, she didn’t say so. Instead she told him more about her half-brother’s decision to move to Sussex.

‘I’ve just found out that Richard’s new country home, Ashdown, is not far from yours,’ she said.

‘Why did he sell Liscombe?’ Jack asked. ‘It’s a handsome house, and its Arabian stud was famous.’

‘Richard isn’t interested in horses so he sold the house and the business to a trainer. He wanted somewhere nearer to London, and the London-to-Brighton train is so fast and frequent now that it makes it easier for him to leave town for the country. Liscombe was somewhat out of the way.’

‘Well, when you are finally ensconced at Ashdown you must be sure to visit us. Will, my brother, will want to meet you. You must both come to tea, lunch or dinner, whichever you fancy. I have to repay your niece for teaching me the Charleston, don’t I, Miss Hoyt? And you for allowing her to do so.’

‘I suppose,’ almost sniffed Aunt Sue, which had Lacey wondering all over again whatever could be the matter with her. It was not like her to be discourteous or short, particularly with someone like Fighting Jack, whose understated charm was beginning to overwhelm her. Something which she would not previously have thought possible.

After that, Jack had to follow the conventions which said that he must not monopolise one of the early season’s successes. He bowed his way away, to allow other young men to fill her dance programme, and hoped that Miss Lacey’s eager acceptance of his offer of entertainment at Compton Place was truly meant. Not only that, he had promised to look out for her at his cousin Lady Lynch’s reception and ball, which was taking place in the following week, and dance the Charleston with her again.

It would mean that he would have to stay in London longer than he had intended, but never mind that. He had had few opportunities to enjoy himself since he had left the army, and the pull of Miss Lacey Chancellor was so strong and profound that he could not ignore it.

No woman had ever attracted him so powerfully before.

‘Now, Aunt,’ said Lacey once they had reached home again, ‘why was it that you were so cool to Jack Compton? He seemed to me exactly the sort of young man of whom you would most approve.’

Her aunt shook her head and said grimly, ‘But you hadn’t overheard him talking with that flighty cousin of his, Rupert Compton. If you had you wouldn’t be defending him. They were, in the most cold-blooded fashion, talking about having a go at you because you are an heiress worth winning. Particularly since it seems that Jack Compton, as well as Rupert, is on his uppers. Jack actually described you as being “as hard as nails”. They were his exact words, I fear.’

The colour drained from Lacey’s face. ‘Are you sure, Aunt? Couldn’t you have been mistaken?’

‘Indeed I wasn’t. I was in the best possible position to hear every word they said. I can’t remember everything, of course, but it wasn’t very pleasant, mostly about you and your money. I warned you about this before you left the States.’

As hard as nails! So that was what he thought of her! All that charm had been poured over her simply so that he could get at her money. It just went to show that you couldn’t judge a book by its cover—one of Grandfather Hoyt’s favourite sayings.

Fighting Jack, that jolly good fellow as everyone called him, was no better than a fortune hunter. Well, he wouldn’t hunt her fortune any more, that was for sure. What hurt her the most was that she had begun to believe that she might have met that rare thing—an honest man—only to find that he was no better than the rest who hung around her. For once she had been unwary, but never again.

She would go to Lady Lynch’s do and there he would soon find out that she was no easy mark—another saying learned from her Grandfather—and that Lacey Chancellor, could, when it pleased her, be exactly as hard as he had described her.

Numbly she sat beside her aunt, for once fighting back tears—she who never cried, she whom Grandfather had nicknamed the infant stoic because even when she had fallen out of the tree which she had insisted on climbing, she had never shed a tear and had never complained.

Her biggest regret was that she had been so attracted to him that she had forgotten to put on the invisible armour which she always wore in public. One thing was certain, she wouldn’t make that mistake again in a hurry.

Jack was whistling cheerfully while dressing himself in the poky bedroom of his lodgings. Never mind that his evening dress was shabby, he had long ago become resigned to such small drawbacks. Besides, he needed to wear evening dress so rarely that buying a new, more up-to-date version of what was now considered fashionable seemed a waste of money.

What was more important was that he was going to see Lacey Chancellor again. He had spent the morning at Coutts where the Comptons’ bank balance was running along just above the fateful line which, if it were crossed, would land it in the red. One had to be grateful for small mercies. A junior banker had interviewed him, for someone so low down in the scale of things as Jack Compton was never interviewed by the top brass. A fact of life which the suave man behind the desk had taken as read.

Tomorrow he would go home. However often he left it, or for how long, Compton Place would always be his home now. If Will had not been so gravely wounded he would have remained in the Army. Time, the death of so many young officers, and his own talents, meant that he had retired with the rank of Colonel and the lost promise of a bright future. That opportunity, like the Comptons’ wealth, was long gone.

Tonight, however, he would forget all that. He would persuade Lacey that it would be to her advantage to visit Compton Place and examine its attics. He was sure that the Sir Jack, who had inherited in 1820, and who had restored the family fortunes, had almost certainly left behind records and documents which might throw light on the Pandora Compton who had married her ancestor, Ritchie Chancellor, and on other matters, too.

Jack laughed at himself a little for inventing opportunities for seeing Lacey again. After all, Ashdown was only a short distance away from Compton Place by motor, and there was every reason why they should meet often. Examining himself in the shadowy mirror in the elderly wardrobe he thought that he almost looked like Fighting Jack again. It was funny how that nickname followed him around, even though it was not now applicable.

Finally he was ready to leave. The taxi which would take him to the Lynchs’ home on Piccadilly would be arriving any minute and he could not afford to keep it waiting. He would return to his lodgings by the Underground since no one was likely to see him depart, whilst his arrival would almost certainly be noticed by the flunkies who guarded the entrance.

He was right about that. A canopy had been erected before the door and a solid phalanx of guests was walking into the house beneath it. There were the usual watchers gaping at the quality while they amused themselves. It was something of a relief that they would not be able to see how threadbare a gent he actually was. The footman’s knowing stare, however, when he handed him his top hat, cane and gloves told him that he knew only too well that Mr Jack Compton was hanging on to his place in society by his teeth.

Several people acknowledged him on the way to the stairs at the top of which his cousin was waiting to receive him. She seemed genuinely pleased, as did her husband.

‘Oh, Jack, I’m delighted that you decided to come. I rather feared that you might abandon town as quickly as you usually do. I know things are a little dire in Sussex, but surely you could manage rather more of the season than a few days in early May.’

How to explain that with Will unfit to run things and so much to run, he really ought not to have stayed on to visit them at all? Jack didn’t even try. ‘Oh, I’m a country boy at heart, you know, and the land is a harsh mistress,’ he replied. Well, at least the second part of the last sentence wasn’t a lie, was his inward gloss on that!

‘You weren’t a country boy when I first knew you,’ remarked Louis Lynch with a wink.

‘Perhaps not, but time changes us all.’

‘True,’ said his cousin, but fortunately, by then the next visitor was waiting to be received so Jack moved on. Well, he thought, looking around him, the War hadn’t destroyed Sir Louis’s wealth. The Sargent portraits of his parents still hung on the walls. It was perfectly furnished to the last degree of sophistication with new fashion mingling well with antique opulence.

Yes, the house was in splendid nick and the signs of great prosperity were everywhere. Jack wondered exactly where all the money came from to pay for such splendour. He only knew that Sir Louis was something in the City. He wondered how one got there and why it had always been supposed that the younger Compton sons always went into the Army, or the Church or became land agents on someone else’s land.

Not that everyone in the City was wealthy—just look at poor Rupert. On second thoughts, Jack decided that he had rather not. He had come here to find Lacey, to dance the Charleston with her again and to tease her as though the past ten years had never happened.

Dancing had already started. Lady Leominster had not yet arrived, but the Marchioness of Londonderry and her two pretty daughters were already seated in one corner of the ballroom, surrounded by a large crowd of hangers-on. Not that he could aspire to the hands of either girl since the Londonderrys were at the very top of the tree in society.

Lacey had arrived, however, and was sitting beside a potted palm with the old dragon on her right and a bevy of eager young men before her. Neither Rupert nor Darcey were among them and the rest were as anonymous to Jack as the nameless courtiers on stage there to make up the numbers in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

He decided to wait a moment before approaching Lacey. The crowd gradually thinned, which gave him a chance to speak to her. By the sound of it they had been proposing themselves for the dances neatly laid out in Lacey’s programme.

Jack bowed to Lacey and Aunt Sue. He could not help noticing that her aunt stared balefully at him, but, armoured in the knowledge of his previously made arrangement to dance the Charleston with her niece, he took little notice of that.

‘Here I am, ready for another lesson in modern dance,’ he said with a smile. ‘I hope that you’ve left room for me on your programme.’

Lacey’s smile, as well as her answer, was so cool that Jack was a little shocked. She displayed little of the happy rapport which they had shared at the Leominsters’ do. Instead, her answer was a regretful, hardly apologetic one.

‘Oh, yes. The Charleston. I did promise to dance it with you, didn’t I? Oh, dear, it’s very remiss of me, but I quite forgot and my programme is already filled. I’m sorry to have been so stupid. Another time, perhaps?’

This last sentence came out after such a fashion that it gave the impression that another time would be long in coming.

Jack’s smile froze on his face. He scarcely knew what to say. He had delayed leaving London only in order to attend the Lynchs’ dance. He had spent all his spare time dreaming about seeing Lacey again, but she was making it very obvious that the moment he had left her on that happy night at the Leominsters’ she had immediately forgotten about him. For her he was simply a chance-met nobody who had entertained her for a little time before she passed on to the next anonymous man who took her brief fancy.

He mentally shook himself, but not before the disappointment which he felt so keenly was plainly written on his face. He could not stop himself from saying quietly, ‘I thought that we had had an understanding…’

Lacey was surprised to find not only how much it had hurt her to let Jack down so brusquely, but also that she felt ashamed that she had done so—and had told a lie in the doing, albeit only a white one. Bad behaviour was bad behaviour, however many excuses one made to one’s self for indulging in it.

Perhaps, after all, her aunt had not been telling her the whole truth about the conversation she had overheard. Young men often talked extravagantly when on their own and one ought not to hang them for it. Besides, she also knew that Aunt Sue was very keen for her to marry a Duke which would mean that she would go one better than that other great heiress, Cornelia Vanderbilt, who was engaged to the heir to a Barony, that of the Amhersts.

Before Jack could walk away, she said in her best impulsive manner, ‘Please allow me to try to make up to you for being so careless about what was, after all, a promise. It won’t be like dancing the Charleston with you tonight, but Richard is making up a party to visit the Wembley Exhibition tomorrow afternoon. Why not squire me there? I’m told that it’s one of the sights of the century.’

Jack’s face brightened immediately. ‘If that is what you want, then I shall be happy to oblige you. By the by, I’m told that the Ashanti warriors do a war dance there, but I can’t promise to partner you in that.’

‘No, indeed, it might be too much. You may call for me tomorrow at Richard’s place in Park Lane at one thirty and join the party. My cousin George will also be going. Now let me introduce you to George’s sister, Pamela—she’s another splendid performer on the ballroom floor. I can’t have you left without a partner because of my carelessness.’

Jack was so delighted by the prospect of a whole afternoon with Lacey that he promptly agreed, although his first impulse on being let down had been to flee the Lynchs’ ball altogether. He allowed her to lead him through the crowd to where the other Chancellors were sitting and make the promised introduction.

Aunt Sue was very reproving when Lacey returned after seeing Jack settled with them and talking cheerfully to George and his family.

‘I thought that, having virtually cut Mr Jack Compton, you would have had more sense than to revive his hopes by asking him to be your escort to the Wembley Exhibition. I am sure that Lord Wellsbourne would have been happy to accompany you there. He is rich enough not to be marrying you for your money and he has been showing a great deal of interest in you lately.’

‘Dear Aunt,’ said Lacey gently. ‘You would not have me behave shamefully to Jack Compton. I promised to dance with him tonight and it was wrong of me to fill my programme before he came, even though you had told me of what you had overheard. Besides, squiring me to Wembley means that we shall be together, with many others, in a public place. I gather that he is returning to Sussex almost immediately so that our paths won’t be crossing much in future.’

Oh, dear, and now she was telling another whopper! Her aunt was not aware, but she was, that when they went to Ashdown they would be mingling with the county society of which Jack was a part. Not only that, but she was determined to discover more about the connection between the Comptons and the Chancellors.

Aunt Sue heaved a great sigh. ‘If you are not going to take any heed of my advice, then I wonder why you felt the need for my companionship, my dear. Reflect that I know more about the world in which we are now moving than you do. These people have a veneer of polish which we in the States do not possess. One has only to read Henry James and Edith Wharton to know how true this is—and always has been. Sophisticated charm may have its theoretical limits when set against the straightforwardness which is so much a part of American life, but it does flatter to deceive and cheat us when we come to Europe as many young men and women have found to their cost.’

Lacey was sorely tempted to point out that these two novelists had actually shown how often supposedly straightforward American heroes and heroines had taken on the sophisticates of Europe and had beaten them at their own game, but she thought that it would not be tactful to inform her of that!

Fortunately, the band began to play and her first partner arrived to whirl her into the quickstep. From then on Lacey was too busy enjoying herself with a sequence of young men whose names featured prominently in Burke’s Peerage, that large volume beloved of Aunt Sue, to worry about her strictures over Jack Compton.

She saw Jack at intervals. He seemed to be enjoying himself with the Chancellors’ set, and danced the Charleston with young Pamela without showing the same athletic vigour which he had done when dancing it with her at the Leominsters’.

No time for regrets, though, until young Henry Laxton, the Duke of Beddington’s heir, came to claim her for the Charleston when the evening was three parts over. He had been sober when he had booked the dance with her, but was far from being so when he reeled up to her chair.

‘Tally ho!’ he announced unoriginally. ‘Ready for the off, are we?’

Lacey rather thought not, and tried to cool him down by saying, ‘Do you feel up to it, Henry?’

‘Hank,’ he said blearily, winking at her. ‘That’s the nickname for Henry in Yankee-land, I’ve been told. Never felt better. Come on, babe,’ and he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her on to the floor just as the music began.

The whole thing was a disaster. He was constantly falling over her feet and proclaiming that it was all her fault. ‘You know,’ he hissed at her, after they had both nearly landed flat on the floor after one of his more unfortunate manoeuvres, ‘you’re the clumsiest bitch I’ve ever had the misfortune to dance with. Are you any better in bed? Do you—’ and he began to reel off an obscene list of suggestions to her.

What to do? Lacey was aware that people were beginning to look at them. She took the whirling giddiness of the Charleston as an opportunity to wheel him slowly away from the dance floor towards an anteroom. This, young Henry took to be an invitation for seduction.

‘What ho! And tally ho,’ he exclaimed again, or Lacey thought he did, since his speech was now so slurred that it was difficult to tell exactly what he was saying. He lunged at her in a clumsy attempt to begin the apparently promised seduction, but fortunately for Lacey drink, and the gyrations of the dance, had affected him so badly that it was easy for her to trip him up. He landed on the floor, winked at her, closed his eyes and immediately began to snore.

Now, what in the world was she to do? Leave him?

She was saved by, of all people, Jack.

He had been watching the erratic progress of an obviously tipsy Henry Laxton around the floor and had seen them dancing into the anteroom. The sixth sense which had served him well had him following them in to find Henry snoring on the floor and Lacey staring down at him.

‘Dead drunk, is he?’

Lacey let out a startled laugh. ‘I fear so. My first instinct is to ask you to help me—but after the way in which I have treated you, I hardly dare to.’

It was Jack’s turn to laugh.

‘You may ask me anything you like: anything.’

‘That is a kindness which I hardly deserve.’

Jack ignored this.

‘No time to waste,’ he told her severely. ‘Help me to get him on to the sofa.’

‘And after that?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

Together they lugged the snoring Henry up from the floor and arranged him artistically on the sofa. He muttered a couple of words which sounded like ‘Tally ho!’ and promptly went to sleep yet again.

‘What now?’ asked Lacey anxiously.

Jack considered the unconscious Henry with a judicial eye. ‘He looks safe enough there to me,’ he pronounced. ‘Let’s leave him and finish the dance together. You can regard it as a thank you to me for rescuing you from that half-wit. I sometimes think that he was the original of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.’

It was Lacey’s turn to laugh. ‘What a splendid notion. But whatever will people think if I Charleston into an anteroom with one partner and come out with another?’

‘That you are the most original American girl who ever set sail from the tall towers of Manhattan.’

He held out his arms to her and she sank into them as though she were coming home. Both of them, while they whirled and twirled away from the unconscious Henry, could not stop laughing. They were still laughing when they reached the ballroom and began to decorate the Charleston with some original steps of their own.

Jack had not enjoyed himself so much for years. Irresponsibility held him in its thrall as it had done when he had been young and silly before the world went mad. Then, he might have been like Henry, sleeping it off on the sofa. Now, he was the recipient of Henry’s folly, being given the chance to dance with a girl with whom, quite without meaning to, he was beginning to fall in love.

What she was feeling for him, he thought ruefully, might be quite a different matter. For the present, though, he would take what fortune, that fickle goddess, was sending him and What ho! and Tally ho! he would be taking her to Wembley.

Aunt Sue’s thoughts when she saw Lacey emerge from the anteroom with Jack, after entering it with Henry, are perhaps best not recorded.

Jack and Lacey were in a world of their own. The strong attraction between them, which had been sparked off at their very first meeting, was growing more powerful by the minute. The dance ended all too soon for them.

Breathless, they stepped back. Lacey gasped out, ‘What a pity that my programme is full. We go so well together, and at the very least you are still sober—which I am sure will not be the case with all my future partners.’

‘I promise to rescue you again if any of them are as far gone as young Laxton was,’ promised Jack gallantly. ‘You have only to run up the Stars and Stripes and I shall come at the double.’

‘And ruin my reputation completely.’ Lacey laughed. ‘Now you must escort me back to Aunt Sue. I think that it would be better if you didn’t take me into supper. I daren’t imagine what all the old gossips are saying about us.’

‘They say, let them say,’ quoth Jack. ‘From what I have seen of you so far, Miss Lacey Chancellor, what other people say about you doesn’t concern you overmuch.’

Before she could answer they had reached Aunt Sue, who now had another lady of uncertain years for a companion. Jack had seen her before. She was yet one more of his distant relatives, Mrs Anna Harley, who was noted for her plain speaking.

‘Tell me, do,’ she cried, snapping her over-large fan at the pair of them, ‘what you have done with Henry Laxton. I trust that he’s still in the land of the living. He was being very forward with you, Lacey, before you disappeared, I hope that young Jack hasn’t been too severe with him.’

‘On the contrary, Cousin Anna,’ replied Jack quickly before Lacey’s aunt could add a rider to her friend’s comment since he feared that it might be over-critical of the pair of them, ‘I helped him to have a nice lie-down on one of our cousin Lynch’s more comfortable sofas. If you will all excuse me, I shall make it my business to find a footman who will be sure to see that he’s looked after before he ventures home.’

His cousin snapped her fan at him again. ‘Off you go then, young Jack. You were always a resourceful villain, as I well remember. You must tell me where you have been hiding since that wretched war was over. I want to hear all the latest news about poor William, as well.’

Jack, amused, exited bowing, as the old playwrights had it.

Lacey was equally amused. Aunt Sue would not now begin to reproach her while Jack’s cousin remained with them. Surprised to learn that she was his cousin, and that their hostess was another, she said, ‘You are related to Mr Compton, then?’

‘Who? Oh, Jack! Why, yes, I’ve known him since he was a boy. Sterling fellow, Jack. A bit wild when he was young, but aren’t they all? Miss Lacey could do worse than set her sights at Jack,’ she continued, much to Lacey’s secret, and further, amusement. ‘He may be as poor as a church mouse but he’s worth a hundred Henry Laxtons for all that Henry’s a Duke’s heir.’

Aunt Sue, who had privately decided that Henry would be just the thing for Lacey, even if he were a few years younger than she, was somewhat put out by this curt dismissal of him and even more by Anna’s unwanted praise of Jack, but she could not say so.

‘Mind you,’ continued Anna, ‘it’s some time since a Duke, or his heir, married an American heiress. Are you acquainted with Miss Cornelia Vanderbilt? I understand that she is going to marry the heir to the Amherst barony shortly. I hear that a fortune is to be spent on the day of the wedding. Pity they’ve not got better things to do with their dollars—if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’

Aunt Sue didn’t want to forgive her but, knowing that Mrs Harley was a powerful member of high society despite having no title before her name except a mere Honourable, which was a nothing of a thing since it was never used in public, had to grin and bear her freely offered opinions in silence.

Fortunately for her peace of mind and her hopes of her niece making a grand marriage, Lacey’s next partner arrived early in order to claim her for the waltz. He had the good fortune to be none other than Peregrine, Viscount Harcourt, the heir to a Marquess who had managed to hold on to his money and estates despite the depredations of the recent war.

That Lacey, as she later told her aunt, found him a dull stick after Jack, was not to the point. Aunt Sue was determined to press her case and prove that in the marriage stakes Miss Lacey Chancellor, whose mother had been one of New York’s Hoyts, was an even better bet than Cornelia Vanderbilt!

That being so, it was a pity that Mrs Harley continued to support Jack’s claim to be Lacey’s suitor all the time that Peregrine and Lacey were dancing a sedate waltz. The only thing which gave her any relief from her worries was that Jack did not return to trouble them. He had, according to Peregrine—who was also distantly related to him—left early, saying that he had to make a final visit to the solicitors early the next morning and had asked Perry to present his regards to his aunt, Miss Hoyt and to Lacey, and his pleasure that he would be seeing them again so soon.

‘Off to Wembley tomorrow afternoon, I gather, with Richard Chancellor’s party,’ he finished. ‘I shall be taking the motor along, too, and will have the pleasure of meeting you all there.’

After that, Lacey’s evening was a dull one. She wondered a little why Jack had not come to say farewell to them in person, but decided that he probably had his reasons. She was not wrong. Jack could see quite plainly that he was something of a red rag to a bull where Aunt Sue was concerned and that it would be better not to inflict himself on her overmuch—particularly since, against all the odds, he was going to spend the whole of the next afternoon with her and Lacey.

Early the following morning Jack was speculating about what, from his limited wardrobe, he ought to wear for the expedition to Wembley when the lodging housemaid came to tell him that he was wanted on the telephone.

It was Will. After a few short enquiries as to what Jack was up to, Will said, ‘I was under the impression that you would be coming home yesterday. Have your plans altered?’

‘Well, that was my original intention, but something came up.’

The something, of course, was Lacey, but Jack felt that he could scarcely ramble on about that on the telephone and, besides, Will might not think it a sufficiently good explanation for his having postponed his return. ‘Is there any particular reason why you want me back?’ he added, because he thought Will sounded harassed.

‘Actually, yes. I could do with you here as soon as possible. I don’t wish to discuss the matter over the phone, but if you could manage to return tomorrow I should be exceedingly grateful.’

‘Oh, I can easily arrange that. I have a final visit to the lawyers this morning. This afternoon I am making up one of Richard Chancellor’s party on a visit to the Wembley Exhibition.’

‘Now, I do envy you that, and Robbie will, too. I feel a cur for asking you to cut your London visit short since you seem to be seeing life a little, but needs must. Give my best regards to Richard. I haven’t seen him since before the war. I hear that he’s done well for himself.’

There was something wistful in Will’s voice. Unlike George, all his hopes for the future had been dashed by the War.

‘I’ll try to find Robbie a souvenir. Give him my love.’

He put the phone back on the wall, wondering what it was that had made Will, who rarely used the telephone, ring him. Well, he would find out soon enough tomorrow. Today, though, was to be devoted to the law and to Wembley.

Fortunately for Jack, and the others, the weather was good that afternoon and the company was better—even Aunt Sue was being civil to him. She had, rather sensibly, decided that to oppose Jack’s interest in Lacey so decisively was merely encouraging her headstrong niece to go on seeing him. If she said nothing, this squib of an affair might burn itself out.

Richard, whose party it nominally was, apologised for not accompanying them—something important had come up, he said, and his cousin George would take over as host.

The British Empire Exhibition was the official name for the jamboree they were attending—George Chancellor’s description of it. ‘It’s the twentieth century’s version of the Great Exhibition of 1851,’ he explained cheerfully to his hearers.

There were, among other exciting things, an Ashanti village, a collection of animals from South Africa, native dancing and something else, not perhaps strictly part of the Empire, but allied to its glory: a replica of Tutankhamen’s tomb, which included a superb gold life-size figure of the boy Pharaoh himself.

Jack and Lacey stood before it in wonderment. Lacey said, ‘It makes me feel humble to think that all those years ago human beings could create something so beautiful. What have we to show which is equally fine?’

‘A motor car,’ suggested Jack, not quite seriously, ‘or an aeroplane? The Pharaohs weren’t up to them.’ But he knew what she meant, and they both appreciated the awe which Howard Carter must have felt when he rolled back the linen shroud which had covered the effigy and, after three thousand years, revealed to himself, and ultimately to the world, one of the glories of the long-dead past.

George Chancellor, and the others of the party, also stood, awed, before the golden and blue marvel. Finally, when they moved away, he murmured, ‘I know the emphasis of this exhibition is really on trade, and as a civil service flunkey I ought to appreciate that, but, to me, this beats everything.’

His hearers nodded. If, for Jack, the emphasis of their expedition was on Lacey, as well as the wonders of the Exhibition itself—for who knew when he might meet her again?—to see Tutankhamen’s effigy was an experience also never to be forgotten. After that the Palace of Industry and even the Burmese pagodas, beautiful though they were, took second place.

Somehow, in the crowds, Lacey and Jack managed to escape from the others, avoiding Aunt Sue’s vigilant eye, and seat themselves not far from where the Battle of Zeebrugge was being re-enacted.

‘I now know what the sentimental novelists mean when they have their hero and heroine say, “Alone at last”,’ remarked Lacey.

‘I second that with some enthusiasm,’ Jack replied, ‘if being lost among such a crowd could be called being alone.’

‘You know what I mean,’ Lacey told him a little severely. ‘I like George and the others, but I feel so confined when I am always one of a large party.’

‘Of course, and I feel the same.’

Jack was busily admiring Lacey’s perfect profile and wishing that he dare kiss her on the cheek. Supposing, however, Aunt Sue popped up from nowhere—whatever would she say? For the first time he envied the anonymous young people who fervently embraced one another while lying on the grass in London’s many parks. Here he was, imprisoned by convention, unable to offer his newly found beloved a chaste kiss while sitting upright!

He could, however, take her hand and stroke it gently. This had the strongest effect on both of them—of which, of course, they could take no advantage.

‘I have to go home tomorrow,’ Jack told her. ‘I can’t imagine when we shall next have a chance to meet.’

Lacey, who had just decided to stroke Jack’s hand for a change, murmured, ‘So soon. Do you realise how short a time we have known one another?’

‘Yes. Odd, isn’t it? I have known some pretty girls for years and have never had the slightest inclination to feel for them what I have begun to feel for you.’

There, it was out. He had said it—and damn the consequences. She, and certainly Aunt Sue, might dub him fortune hunter, but he—and he hoped Lacey—knew that was not true. Had he been a real hunter, roving the plains in the distant long ago, even before Tutankhamen, he would have thrown her over his shoulder and run off with her to some convenient cave!

Which was an impossible dream. They were trapped in the twentieth century in a society which, outwardly at least, imposed the strictest standards on the behaviour of young unmarried people.

‘We could write to one another,’ suggested Lacey, who was feeling a little desperate herself. During their walk around the Exhibition she had discovered that Jack had a fund of knowledge—not academic, unlike her own, but that of a man of intelligence who had read widely. He had spoken of his time in Palestine, and of the problems of the Jews and Arabs there, with sympathy and understanding.

Now she was to lose him to a succession of young men, many of whom were little more intelligent than Bertie Wooster!

‘Would you?’ exclaimed Jack. ‘Would you really?’ He was beginning to believe that Lacey was as entranced by him as he was by her. Of course, nothing could come of it. After all, it was highly unlikely that one of America’s richest heiresses would be allowed to marry poverty-stricken Jack Compton. Aunt Sue’s would not be the only voice raised against it. He was scarcely in the same league as the Amherst heir.

On the other hand, he might as well follow the old Roman motto, Carpe diem, or ‘seize the day’ in plain English, and make hay while the sun shines, as another old saying had it! Such an odd mishmash of ancient advice as he was giving himself made him laugh internally since it was proof positive of the excited state he had been in since he had first seen Lacey dancing the Charleston only one short week ago.

‘Of course. You must give me your address immediately. I can’t be asking you for it in Aunt Sue’s hearing.’ Lacey rummaged in her large handbag and produced a gold propelling pencil and a small notebook, which she opened at the first blank page she found.

‘It’s an easy one to remember,’ Jack told her, writing it down. ‘Compton Place, Sussex, would probably find us, but to be quite safe, I’ll put the long one down.’

He handed the little book back to her. ‘And now we’ve enjoyed the cultural and economic delights of Wembley, how about visiting the Amusement Park and having a go on the Scenic Ride on the roller coaster, or switch-back railway, before we try to find the others?’

‘What could be better?’ exclaimed Lacey enthusiastically. ‘I went on one at Coney Island when I was a little girl. I was frightened to death and screamed all the way down—and up! Promise to hold my hand if I’m frightened again.’

‘Oh, I promise to hold your hand even if you’re not frightened,’ Jack told her gravely.

So they wandered off to the Amusement Park to engage in an activity of which Aunt Sue would undoubtedly deplore! Lacey did scream, but with pleasure, not fear, this time and hung on to Jack after a fashion which made him feel both manly and protective—as well as hopelessly roused.

He took the opportunity to stroke her head gently when she buried it in his chest—which had the effect of rousing him further. He could not stop himself from kissing her neck when she let go of him on one of the less exciting parts of the run—and that did nothing for his composure either.

By the flush on Lacey’s face when she finally sat up and straightened herself, Jack could tell that she had been enjoying his petting of her nearly as much as he had. On the final run in, she murmured to him, ‘Oh, I did like that,’ though whether she was referring to the ride itself or his attentions to her during it he was still not quite sure.

Lacey, however, was quite sure. Oh, she had been stroked and kissed by a man before, but it had never had the powerful affect on her which Jack’s gentle loving had caused. She was experienced enough to know what the shivers of delight which had overcome her during the ride truly meant. They meant that she was ready, nay, needed, more than he had just offered her.

And what did that tell her of her true feelings for him?

She didn’t go quite so far as to say that she wanted to go round again, although had Jack invited her to she would immediately have agreed.

Instead, regretfully, she looked at her watch and exclaimed, ‘We really ought to try to find our party, we’ve almost reached the time when we agreed to return home.’

‘True,’ said Jack, ‘but not before I do this.’ He had already decided that there was safety in numbers and that since he and Lacey were suitably anonymous, lost in a crowd which neither knew nor cared what they did, it would be quite safe to give her a real kiss, not the soft ones he had offered her on their ride. So he saluted her not chastely on the cheek, but nearly chastely on the lips, almost in passing as it were, needing no passionate embrace.

Lacey made no attempt to stop him and it was he who broke away first. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘but I have spent the whole afternoon wanting to do that. If you didn’t like it, I promise not to do it again.’

‘Oh, don’t say that,’ she riposted briskly. ‘I liked it very much. In fact, I wouldn’t object if you did it again—more slowly this time.’

‘In that case,’ said Jack, ‘I will try to oblige you.’

What was preventing him from being a little more urgent with her was that he was hanging on to his self-control by a thread. If Lacey had been surprised by the strength of her reactions to him, Jack was equally surprised by the depths of passion which he was plumbing while he was simply squiring Lacey round an Amusement Park!

This time the kiss was both long and slow. Lacey had her back to the wall of one of the booths, her arms around his neck, and was standing on tiptoe so that she could enjoy as much of him as possible.

The kiss went on and on and became more and more passionate. His wicked tongue parted her lips and danced with hers and when Jack, for very self-preservation, pulled away from her, her swollen face and lips told him that she was as roused as he was.

For a moment, they stared at one another, lost not only to the crowd, but to themselves, almost unable to speak since time and place had disappeared too. When speech returned to them, it was Lacey who spoke first.

‘Much though I am enjoying myself,’ she murmured breathlessly, ‘and would love to prolong it, we really ought to behave ourselves and join the others. Aunt Sue will be thinking that I’ve been kidnapped by White Slavers and that you have been left for dead somewhere.’

‘True,’ said Jack again, slowly returning to the realities of the everyday world, if being in an Amusement Park at the Exhibition could be called the real world! ‘George told us all that if we became lost we should return to the main entrance by five o’clock and I calculate that we have just about time to do that.’

They found most of the party there, waiting for them and several others who had been playing hookey, as Lacey called it when they were on the way back.

Aunt Sue hissed at her, ‘Wherever have you been? Peregrine wanted to escort you, but you were nowhere to be found. He was particularly interested in the Trade Pavilion.’

‘Well, I was particularly interested in the Amusement Park,’ returned Lacey naughtily, ‘so Jack took me there.’

‘He would,’ her aunt hissed again, meaningfully this time.

‘Well, he could scarcely make improper advances to me on the roller coaster when we were clinging on to our seats for dear life, so you needn’t have worried, Aunt. I was quite safe. I’m sorry to have disappointed Peregrine, but he should have made his wants known to me, not you.’

She did not add that off the roller coaster had been the place for advances from Jack, but since they could not be called improper, they were hardly relevant.

‘On the carpet, were you?’ whispered Jack to her when he had manoeuvred them both into the back seat of the Chancellors’ Rolls. He knew an angry Aunt Sue when he saw her.

It was Lacey’s turn to hiss. ‘Ssh, Jack. I didn’t believe all those stories of your wild youth when we first met, but now—’ and she rolled her eyes theatrically, ‘I am beginning to find out why you were nicknamed Fighting Jack.’

‘Oh, you don’t know the half of it, my girl.’ Jack was determined to enjoy himself in the short time he had left with her since she was equally determined to join him in having fun. Tomorrow it would be home and duty and the grinding task of trying to keep the Comptons solvent. To say nothing of finding out what was so obviously worrying his brother.

The day was not yet quite over, though. Richard, who had proved to be Lacey’s much older half-brother, met Cousin George’s party in the entrance hall of his Park Lane home where he had arranged for a late tea to be served to them. He was leaving to keep yet another appointment, he said, and apologised for not being able to entertain them in person.

‘Sorry I couldn’t go with you this afternoon,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘Duty and all that. George, here, being a civil servant, can call his pleasure, duty, but a simple business chap like myself hasn’t that option—as you can now see.’

Simple, he called himself—simple, he certainly wasn’t, Jack thought. Lacey introduced him to Jack, although Jack thought that he had almost certainly met Richard years ago, before the war.

‘Fighting Jack, isn’t it?’ he remarked cordially. ‘We met at Ascot in ‘13, I think. Squiring young Miss, were you? Come to dinner tonight as a thank-you, you deserve it.’ This was all said with the greatest good humour.

Jack accepted the invitation to dinner, even though he had packed his evening wear before he had left for the lawyers that morning and would now have to unpack it. It would give him yet another chance to meet Lacey and take a last memory of her home to Sussex.

‘Though I don’t think that I really deserve a thank you,’ he ended, ‘it was a most enjoyable afternoon.’

Lacey murmured, her eyes twinkling mischief, ‘I think that Jack enjoyed himself on the roller coaster as much as I did.’

‘I’m sure he did,’ smiled Richard, looking knowing.

Later that evening, before the guests arrived for dinner, he remarked to Lacey, to Aunt Sue’s annoyance, ‘Young Compton’s better than your average escort. He had a good war and gave up a promising career in the Army in order to try to improve the family fortunes. His brother Will is a helpless cripple—war wounds, of course. The other brother was killed at Passchendaele.’

‘I know,’ Lacey said simply. ‘He’s not at all like his cousin Rupert or any of the other young men I have met over here. He takes life seriously.’

One thing she had already privately decided: that London season or no London season, she would be off to Sussex as soon as decently possible!

Chapter Three

‘I hope that you didn’t rush home for my sake,’ said Will anxiously.

Jack’s answer was robust. He always did his elder brother the honour of speaking to him as though he were still the hearty athlete he had once been and not a man paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. ‘I came home for mine. I’ve too damned much to do here without wasting my time in London.’

‘Did you meet anyone interesting?’

‘Cousin Rupert—who is apparently in hock to the money-lenders. He always was a bit of an ass. Richard Chancellor—he asked to be remembered to you. The Chancellors are now even more enormously rich than ever, I gather, with interests in oil in the States. Oh, and Darcey, his cousin. A more sensible chap than our cousin Rupert from the sound of it. Rupert was behaving very badly, up one minute, down the next.’

He deliberately didn’t mention Lacey. If nothing came of their sudden romance then, so far as Will was concerned, what the heart doesn’t know, the heart can’t grieve. Good God, that was yet another ghastly saying of his old nurse’s which had popped into his head after many years’ absence! He was so busy lamenting its reappearance that he only just heard Will’s next question.

‘No interesting young women, then?’

‘Come, come, Will, by interesting do you mean, beautiful, glamorous or rich?’

‘All three rolled into one gorgeous package would be useful,’ sighed Will, ‘but rare, one supposes. You must admit that if you found one and married her all our money troubles would be over.’

Lacey Chancellor certainly fitted that bill, was Jack’s inward and clichéd response, but fortune hunting was not his game, and so he told Will.

This brought on another attack of sighing from his brother. Jack thought that Will looked frailer than ever. He was leaning back in his chair, a blanket over his knees and a scarf round his neck even though the day was a warm one.

They were seated on the terrace which looked out over the neglected park where a few sheep were grazing. The folly at the end looked more broken down than he had remembered it, while the state of the ha-ha was even more disastrous. On the whole, though, it was probably better to be sitting in the open rather than in the house whose every room reminded the brothers of the splendour which had vanished and which was beginning to look increasingly unlikely to be restored.

‘I’m not in the market for fortune hunting.’ Jack was short.

‘Pity,’ sighed Will. ‘I had the local bank manager round the other day about our account there. He was surprised to find you in London.’

‘Was he, indeed? I suppose that we ought to be grateful that rather than summon us brusquely to his parlour he still cares to visit us. What did he have to say?’

‘That we ought to sell some more land to help our finances and improve our living conditions.’

Jack frowned. ‘I don’t like the thought of selling any more land. We have little enough left to farm profitably as it is. Besides, our main account is at Coutts, as he knows.’

‘I don’t exactly like the thought of selling it myself,’ admitted Will, ‘but do I have the right to tie you to this sinking ship? Things might yet take a turn for the worse. You’ve sacrificed enough already—and to what end?’

Jack tried to reassure him. ‘That we are not quite in such a desperate state as we were when the war was over. A little more than a hundred years ago we were in a similar predicament when young Sir Jack inherited and pulled us round again.’

Will was sighing again and looking worried. Jack wondered why. ‘It was easier for him,’ he said ruefully. ‘Now we live in an age which sees something wrong with inherited land and titles. Consequently the kind of deference which young Jack almost certainly received, and which helped us to survive and prosper until the damned War came along, has almost disappeared.’

‘You mean that bank managers didn’t descend on us with ultimatums—or should it be ultimata?—we sent for them at our leisure.’

‘Something like that,’ said Will.

‘Is this why you wished me to come home as soon as possible?’

‘Not quite. There is something else, just as worrying. In fact, to be honest, much more so. It’s my fault as well.’

He looked away from Jack, his fingers plucking at his blanket. When he spoke his voice was low and ashamed.

‘I did a damned foolish thing before you came back from Palestine. I had a lot of debts of honour incurred in my Army days. I contacted a London money-lender and took out a loan to enable me to pay them—and some other, larger ones, which I had run up by unsuccessfully gambling on the Stock Exchange in an effort to mend matters.’

He paused. Jack stared at him. ‘Come on, Will, that’s not the end. Finish what you have begun. What did you use for security?’

‘Compton Place—and the remaining lands. What else was there?’ He stopped again.

Aghast, Jack exclaimed, ‘Why did you never tell me of this? Did our solicitors know? Did our former land agent, old Baines?’

Will shook his head. ‘Not the solicitors. At first I conducted most of the business through Baines. As you know, he died just after you took over here.’

‘And without saying a word to me about this.’ Jack was grim. ‘I take it that you paid interest to this shark—how did you do that?’

Will looked away. ‘He wasn’t really a shark. To begin with I paid him out the money cousin Alfred left me. The interest wasn’t exorbitant. He didn’t want to ruin me. He said that in the long run he would make more money that way. I used some of young Robbie’s inheritance from his maternal grandfather after I had adopted him. His mother, as you know, couldn’t wait to hand him over to us once she remarried. Said her husband didn’t want another man’s brat.’

‘And now Robbie’s money has gone as well?’

There was a quiet desperation in Jack’s voice since Will, despite his brave words earlier, had behaved as badly as Sir Jack’s predecessor, another William. Worse. Not only had he gambled a fortune away, he had also pillaged Robbie’s inheritance, and then he had said nothing of this to the brother who was trying to rescue him until he had been compelled to.

Will hung his head. ‘That’s not the end of the problem. The money-lender died recently and his son had no interest in running the business. He sold my loan to Bernard Montague, who is a different cup of tea altogether. He has recently been combing Sussex for a suitable mansion—he wants to become a country squire, of all things. He’s one of those financiers who did well out of the War and have filled Parliament, I’m told.

‘I had a letter from him while you were away. He has immediately upped the interest to an impossible sum—the debt had been running for far too long, he said and he wants to end it. He thought a visit to me might prove profitable to us both. He came to see me without warning while you were in London and…’

He faltered and stopped.

Jack’s expression was grimmer than ever. ‘Go on, I can give a guess as to what is coming.’

‘Can you? I couldn’t. I told him that his demand was impossible. He just grinned at me and said that that was the point. If I couldn’t pay the next instalment he would foreclose and ruin me by keeping the deeds and claim Compton Place in lieu of payment. On the other hand I could sell it to him for a moderate sum and he wouldn’t trouble me about the debt any more. He said that he preferred the latter option since he didn’t want to make enemies of the people among whom he intended to live. Either way we lose everything.’

‘So that’s why you’ve been encouraging me to marry an heiress,’ Jack said, beginning to stride restlessly about the terrace. ‘How long has he given you to make up your mind?’

‘He suggested a month for me to think it over. I asked for three. He said that he didn’t want to be unreasonable and therefore he agreed to three months. Of course, if we could clear the debt before then—’ Will stopped, sighed, and handed his brother all the documents which were the witness of his folly.

‘And pigs might fly!’ The words flew out of Jack’s mouth when he had finished reading them. He looked across at his brother. Will was slumped in his chair, a picture of dejection as ruin stared him in the face—stared them both in the face, for that matter.

‘Why didn’t you tell me of this before I left the Army?’ Jack could not stop himself from asking. ‘Were you afraid that I might refuse to retire and run the estate if saving that and the house was never a true option?’

‘I didn’t think that the original money-lender would die, so that consideration never came up. After Baines died, Judson ran all errands for me. I fobbed him off with some apparently reasonable explanation.’

He should have remembered that Will had always been an incurable optimist. More than that, since he had suffered the injuries that had incapacitated him so severely his grasp on reality, which had never been strong, had become even less so.

Jack turned away from his brother and looked out across the ruined parkland. If Montague acquired the Compton estates, by whatever means, it would not remain ruined, nor would the house—but at what a price for the Compton family which had built it and had lived there for so long?

Will, worried that Jack remained silent, said, ‘I know that I’ve been an absolute rotter, but at the time I couldn’t think of anything better to do. You were with Allenby in Palestine so I couldn’t ask you for your advice.’

He added, somewhat pathetically to Jack’s back, ‘You know that I was never a strong character like you, Jack, even before this wretched business laid me low.’

Well, that was true enough, and now he could see where Will’s obsession with wealthy heiresses came from. By all accounts Lacey Chancellor was so rich that the money required to save Compton Place would be a mere fleabite, not capable of harming the Golconda she possessed.

Temptation roared through Jack. Why not? Why should he not sink his principles and ask Lacey to marry him, just for the money—and save them all? He knew that the pull between them was strong, but he was repelled by the thought of changing the something precious which was beginning to flower between them into a mere commercial transaction. She might not know that the urgency of his pursuit of her was because of the time limit Montague had set, but he would.

The devil of it was that now he was beginning to feel unable to pursue her at all since it would mean that he would be branded fortune hunter even if there were no truth in the accusation. In the face of this, he glumly felt that it would be wrong to write to her as he had promised.

He turned round to face his brother. ‘I won’t fortune hunt. If I ask a girl to marry me it will be because I love her and for no other reason. In the meantime, I will try to think of some way out of this impasse.’

Will lifted his head. ‘I cannot ask you to forgive me, but I hope that you will feel able to do so.’

What did you say to a man who had lost everything by his own folly? Even the possibility of ever being a man again in the true sense had gone from Will. Judgement was impossible. He might both regret and deplore what his brother had done, but it was done and would have to be lived with.

He opened his mouth to say something but, perhaps fortunately, he was interrupted. The glass door to the terrace opened and young Robbie came through it. He had been spending the afternoon being tutored by the Vicar of Old Compton before he went to University.

‘There you both are,’ he exclaimed. ‘Judson said that you were out on the terrace. He asked if you would like a cup of tea carried through. I said that I preferred lemonade. Tea is for old ladies.’

‘Well, that puts us in our places,’ said Jack, a remark which helped to break the tension which the afternoon’s revelations had created.

‘Not that I think that you are old ladies,’ said Robbie magnanimously.

‘Old gentlemen, then,’ said Jack, ‘or old something, anyway.’

‘I’d prefer a stronger drink than tea,’ said Will. ‘A pint of ale, if Judson would be so good.’

Since Judson was Will’s former batman who looked after him and acted as a man of all work as well, this somewhat deferential request might have sounded unnecessary, but Judson played the tyrant with his master to some effect.

So it proved. Shortly after Robbie had delivered Will’s message, Judson arrived with a glass of lemonade for Robbie, tea for Jack, no ale for Will, and a disapproving look.

‘Ale is bad for you in this weather,’ he announced, shortly, slapping two cups of tea down on the round iron table he had pushed in front of Will. ‘I see that Mr Jack’s got more sense than you. As usual.’

Will’s head hung even lower on hearing this blunt judgement. Judson, unaware of his recent conversation with Jack, could not know how tactless, or how truthful, he was being.

‘Cook’s gone to bed sick,’ Judson announced, grimly cheerful. ‘Makes dinner a little problematic seeing as how Lottie has the megrims, too.’

Jack looked up. ‘Not to worry. We can eat the cold stuff left over from lunch with a salad and the remains of the treacle tart for dessert. I suppose we have enough in the pantry for breakfast. If Cook is still ill tomorrow, we can ask Mrs Jarvis to come and help us out until she recovers.’

Mrs Jarvis was their previous cook who had retired some years before after marrying the village cobbler.

‘I don’t like salad,’ said Robbie dismally.

‘You’ll like what you’re given,’ Judson told him. ‘Can’t have you pampered.’

Jack choked over his tea. A less pampered life than Robbie was having he couldn’t imagine.

‘It’s a good thing Mrs Vicar gave me some sandwiches and jam tarts for tea, else I should starve on the short commons we have here.’ Robbie was determined not to be placated.

His uncle winced at the knowledge that the Vicar’s wife was feeding Robbie because she knew of the hardships of life at Compton Place. It was a far cry from the days when the Vicar’s family were delighted to dine there in order to enjoy the fleshpots of the Compton family’s table.

At least thinking about that, and the other problems he faced, didn’t leave Jack much time to muse about Lacey. He wondered wistfully what she was doing in London and whether she had found another man to charm and enjoy life with. Her one letter to him so far had not suggested that might have happened, but then she wouldn’t write about that to him, would she?

Lacey was feeling bored. Nearly a month had gone by since Jack had left London. She had written to him, only to receive no reply, which was strange after all his apparent eagerness to correspond with her frequently. Perhaps there was a young woman in Sussex to whom he was attracted and his attentions to her during his London visit had been nothing more than a careless way of passing the time.

Besides that, the attraction of a London season had begun to pall. At first everything being so different from home had interested and intrigued her, but the novelty of it all had soon worn off. She had become used to a busy intellectual life back in the States and found the conversation of most of those whom she met—particularly the young men—increasingly empty. One of the reasons why Jack had attracted her was his lively mind and his open interest in everything.

Everyone seemed to have such perfect manners, which somehow made it worse. Aunt Sue was plainly disappointed by what she called Lacey’s lacklustreness. She had been annoyed when Lacey had asked her politely if there was such a word, and had snapped back, brusquely for her, ‘If there isn’t, then there should be.’

Lacey was mooning after Jack Compton, Aunt Sue supposed, which, when every young man of wealth and title in society was interested in her, seemed an awful waste.

Richard said to Lacey one evening when they were waiting to go into dinner at yet another great London house, ‘This bores you, doesn’t it?’

‘If I’m honest, yes.’

‘Hankering after him?’

Lacey knew who him was. She tried to deflect her half-brother’s shrewdness by saying, apparently idly, ‘A little, I suppose.’

‘More than a little, I think. I’ve a suggestion for you. Why don’t you go down to Sussex and begin the task at Ashdown that we discussed when you first came over? You might enjoy that more than you seem to be enjoying the season. If you don’t, you can always come back again and have another go here.’

‘Aunt Sue would throw a conniption fit if I proposed any such thing!’

‘It’s your life, not Aunt Sue’s. I’ll try to soap her down for you. I’ll write letters of introduction for you to some of the families there who are my good friends. Come on, lass, I don’t intend my London home to become your prison. Give me a few days to write to Mason, my agent at Ashdown, asking him to make the place ready for you, and then you can be off. How about it?’

Why not? She would almost certainly meet Jack again and discover whether he had simply been trifling with her. She would be able to enjoy herself, not only in examining and cataloguing the house’s contents, but also in arranging the furniture, pictures and other treasures there to their best advantage.

So she simply said, ‘Yes, I’ll do what you propose—and soon, please.’

‘Good girl. Now, leave Aunt Sue to me.’

Consequently here she was in seely Sussex—whatever that meant—sitting in the drawing room of one of Richard’s friends, waiting for dinner at the home of Sir Burton and Lady Barrington. Aunt Sue, not completely mollified, was sitting opposite to her, neither of them sure whether Lacey had done the right thing by adopting Richard’s suggestion.

Interestingly enough, the idle conversation around her was about the Comptons and their dire situation. No financial details were given—it would not have been proper—simply that the brothers and their nephew were living a Spartan life in the house with very few servants to look after them or it.

‘Apparently,’ said one middle-aged man, ‘Jack has decided that so far as staff is concerned, the needs of the farm comes first.’

‘A bit hard on Will,’ said another.

The first man shrugged. ‘Oh, he’s well cared for, I believe, and the boy. The hard part is Jack’s.’

After that the next topic of conversation was about a financier called Bernard Montague, one of the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war, as the yellow press had it.

‘He’s on the look-out for a country house,’ said speaker number one who obviously knew all the County’s gossip. ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he made a bid for Compton Place.’

Their hostess put in a word. ‘Oh, I’m sure that neither Will nor Jack would ever sell it. The Comptons have been there almost since the Conquest.’

‘Wouldn’t be the first,’ said one old fellow gravely, and all the wiser heads nodded agreement.

What to Lacey was surprising was that, a few minutes after the Comptons had disappeared from the conversation, the door opened, the butler entered, and announced, ‘Mr Jack Compton, m’lady.’

At first Jack had wished to refuse the invitation from the Barringtons, which had arrived one morning when he had been busy birthing a calf without the help of a vet.

Will, however, would not allow any such thing.

‘Good God, Jack, you live the life of a monk. Go and enjoy yourself for a change.’

Jack didn’t wish to say that he was so busy that all he wanted to do at the day’s end was to retire to bed and go to sleep. It sounded such odd behaviour for a healthy man in his early thirties to indulge in. It was true, though.

‘My dinner jacket is barely fit to stand another outing.’

‘Oh, damn that for a tale. Judson!’ he bellowed. Judson, who was engaged in the entrance hall in mending a doorknob which had gone wrong—his description—put his head round the drawing-room door.

‘You rang, sir?’ he asked in an exquisite parody of a butler.

‘I called for you, yes. Tell Jack that he must accept this invitation to the Barringtons’ dinner.’

‘Only too happy. Accept the invitation to the Barringtons, Jack, and on the double. Will that do?’ Judson bawled, now imitating a Regimental Sergeant-Major.

‘It had better,’ snarled Will. ‘You heard that, Jack?’

‘I should think that half the county heard it,’ retorted Jack, ‘but since you have both asked me so nicely, I’ll go.’

So go he did, and the first person he saw when he walked into the Barringtons’ drawing room was Lacey Chancellor, staring at him and his antique dinner jacket as though she had never seen it, or him, before.

Thank God for bullying brothers and batmen, was his first instinctive reaction, without them I shouldn’t have met her quite so soon. Even so, he thought it his salvation that he immediately had to do his duty to his host and hostess before he was able to speak to her.

They, and he, said all the proper things. They asked after Will and Robbie, and assured him how pleased they were that he had accepted their invitation to dinner. He congratulated them on Sir Burton having been appointed one of the Deputy Lord Lieutenants of the county. All the time he was keenly aware of Lacey’s presence even though he now had his back to her.

Lady Barrington took him over to her, saying on the way, ‘Did you meet Miss Chancellor while you were in London, Jack? If not, I will introduce you to her.’

‘Fortunately, yes,’ he replied, hoping that he did not sound as stiff as he felt, ‘I had that honour.’

‘Excellent,’ said his hostess. ‘You will be taking her into dinner. The bell will ring as soon as the Wickhams arrive. They are famous for being late.’

Lacey and Aunt Sue rose, to be effusively greeted by Lady Barrington.

‘I understand that you and Jack have already met, which, since I had decided that he would make you an excellent dinner partner, was very providential. Miss Hoyt, I have arranged for you to be taken in by Charles Jackman—he’s recently been travelling in the States.’

Both Lacey and Jack had been stricken dumb by their unexpected meeting. Jack was the worst afflicted since he had had no notion that Lacey was other than miles away in London, enjoying the season to the full, whereas Lacey did at least know that Jack lived somewhere nearby.

What Lacey wanted to say, but could not in this company was, ‘Why did you not answer any of my letters?’ What she did say was, ‘I had no idea that Sussex was such a lovely county,’ and all that Jack could find to answer her with was,

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it.’

The good thing was that after this exchange of banalities, so different from their previous lively conversations, they both began to laugh at themselves at the same time. Surprised heads turned a little at their amusement. They were saved from further embarrassment by the ringing of the dinner bell.

‘You know,’ Lacey whispered to him, after they had sat down, ‘if all our meetings had been productive of such horrendous social clichés I don’t think that I would have been so cross with you for not answering my letters. Rather, I should have been relieved!’

‘There was a reason for my not replying,’ Jack whispered back to her.

‘It had better be a good one. The only happy thing about it was that Aunt Sue was very pleased that you didn’t write because she hoped that it would mean the end of the affair.’

‘Hardly an affair,’ was Jack’s murmuring answer.

‘In action, not, but in spirit I rather think that it was.’

She could have said nothing more calculated to make Jack wish that he could kiss her on the spot. He was not used to such charming frankness and its effect on him was to make him forget his determination to have nothing more to do with her.

He could not give her up, he could not. She was offering earth, fire and water to his soul, which had been starved for so long of such essentials of the spiritual, as well as the physical, life. They had early passed the boundary where lust turned to love and he could no more deny the bond that had been forged between them in their few short meetings than he could have denied the basic tenets of honour and duty by which he ruled his life.

Dinner passed like a dream. All they ate tasted the same: it was either manna or nothing. They compelled themselves, out of sheer good manners, to talk to their other dinner companions, but the pretty girl on Jack’s left remained as anonymous to him as the sturdily handsome young sportsman on Lacey’s right was to her.

Both of them were deeply grateful for the discipline of formal etiquette and correct social behaviour which had been ingrained in them from birth since it made them function almost mechanically, their hidden being remaining focused on each other and on no one else.

Jack thought later that only the cynically pragmatic Judson would have twigged the double mental life they were leading and that as a consequence of his instinct rather than his intellect. It was that instinct which caused both Will and himself to offer him their respect.

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