The Heiress of Epsom
The Heiress of Epsom: Secrets and Lies
Hedley J Huntt
Published by Hedley J Huntt, 2019.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
THE HEIRESS OF EPSOM: SECRETS AND LIES
First edition. November 21, 2019.
Copyright © 2019 Hedley J Huntt.
Written by Hedley J Huntt.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
A THANK YOU GIFT
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
EPILOGUE
THANK YOU
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A THANK YOU GIFT
Thank you very much for purchasing my debut book.
Your perchase really means a lot to me, because this is the best way to support my beggining!
As a Thank You Gift, I have written a full length novel for you, called
“The Heiress of Epsom: Her Lady’s Heart”.
It’s only available to the ones who have downloaded my book and you can get your own free copy by tapping this link here
Once more, I am really thankfull for your love and support.
Hedley J. Huntt
PROLOGUE
Caroline Catoghan, the Heiress of Epsom, spends her days in the Epsom mansion leading a happy and content life. She has offered her heart to Oliver Rusell, her loving, caring husband.
However, their love story dates back to the time when they both were children, growing up belonging to the noble class. But, Oliver’s life takes an unexpected turn, and he finds himself excluded by the class in which he was brought up; he suddenly is obliged to live as a commoner. He is a whole new man now, and it is Caroline’s father, the Marquis of Epsom, who is responsible for that.
Years later, he works as a post office clerk charming the young ladies of the village with his verses. Caroline is one of these young ladies, but her discipline of character commands that she resists his sensational call. Yet, she fails to follow the demands of her class and allows herself to fall deeply in love with Oliver. His shady past makes Caroline’s family suspicious of his motives, and a potential marriage is out of the question.
Despite the Marquis’s arrangements for Caroline’s future, the young lovers’ romance blooms, and they don’t lose their faith. Hard as the family may be trying to make her forget about Oliver and discipline to her father’s commands, Oliver and Caroline are still deeply in love, and when Caroline finds herself close to death, Oliver is the one to save her.
After all the hardships Caroline and Oliver had to bear before they could be together, they are finally living the happily-ever-after. The balance of the family has been restored, and the young couple is now about to set off on a new adventure as an enigmatic figure brings turbulence to the Epsom mansion.
Oliver’s past is now knocking on the mansion’s door...
CHAPTER 1
THE QUAINT HUMP of The Rockets stood square and dark, except for the dull light that filtered through two of its frosted glass windows. The sky above it was dark, and the breeze that blew had all the elements of London’s confused weather. The clang of the giant clock on the flat insensate face of the Westminster building rent the demure evening in halves. Partridge Street stretched both ways, to the east and left, it twisted off and broke into an L shape where the South Central Bank stood dark and suspicious, and to the right a narrowing array of hedgerow houses where lamps illuminated the windows.
Oliver Russell leaned against the growing wind. It’s impugning reach rattled his topcoat, and it flapped about his feet. He managed the flutter around his legs with one hand and grabbed his collar. The wind would take his coat off his back if he let it. He climbed the steps that led into The Rockets hurriedly and with just three bounds, shutting the heavy mahogany doors before the gale could snatch it off his hand.
He faced a mute pub. The lighting was poor. The beer here was even poorer he’d heard, and he reckoned it wasn’t an opinion to be belittled. And quite frankly, it was not his intention tonight to taste what alcohol was there to be had. He scanned the place, and by the appearance of things, it looked like business had been a drag. Two heads turned to record his presence, the only ones in the place other than the jowly faced man behind the bar, white apron over his wide chest and a protuberance that Oliver thought did not bode well for its carrier. One of the men at the table raised a perfunctory hand, flicked his wrist and waved.
Oliver nodded, managed a slight adjustment in his temperament, and walked to the bar. He deposited his bottom on a stool and placed his elbows on the damp counter.
The tender gazed at him under the beaming light of the lamp on the hook on the wall; beady soft eyes, thick brows, and a nose that looked like it had been broken one too many times. His lips parted in the corner.
“How may I be of help to you, Sir?”
“Here to meet Mr Sigourney,” said Oliver.
The chiming clock of Westminster was a murmured suggestion. Oliver counted the seventh bang.
“How about some beer while you wait?”
“Suppose you get Mr Sigourney to come down here from his room upstairs?”
The barman’s chubby hands paused, his knuckles around the mug’s handle looked like pale medium-sized sausages. His eyes danced in their sockets towards a flight of steps set into the far wall on the right of the bar itself. The banisters were also wrought in the same polished mahogany as the doors at the entrance. The steps were dark, lighted only halfway up. Oliver Russell followed the man’s gaze. Behind him, one of the drunks brought his glass of beer down hard. It made a restrained thud on the thick wood of the table. Oliver was tempted to turn around.
“Mr Sigourney sure does well for himself, won’t you say?”
“He sure does, Mr ....?”
Oliver turned back to the sagging face of the bartender.
“Oliver Russell,” he said and smiled. “Will you get him, please? He’s expecting me.”
A very white face appeared in the gloom above the steps where the light ended and darkness began. It hovered there for a moment, ghostly. A white hand rested on the railing. Attached to the wrist was the white lace of an inner shirt.
Oliver stared at the hovering apparition for a moment. He waited for the small mouth attached to the face to speak. When it did, it squeaked like a girl’s own.
“Mr Oliver. Oh, you’re earlier than I thought.”
The figure of Mr Mathew Sigourney drifted into the light. He was a short man about in his fifties. He was perhaps the whitest looking Englishman Oliver had ever laid his eyes on, and he had seen quite a few. Oliver himself admired his own tan when he could. Sigourney sauntered to him, short hands outstretched, his black coat impeccably cut and sewn. His hair shone, parted on the le
ft and combed both to the right and back, severely. The light caught grey strands in it. Besides those, the only other indications that Sigourney was a widower with three grown daughters and a business that required little sleep and littler absence, was the crack of blood capillaries in his eyeballs. Oliver got a whiff of perfume, expensive, a blend of lavender and some other essence thrown in the mix. Something the rich and powerful used these days.
Oliver took his arm and shook it. The shorter man smiled at him, his eyes two delighted slits, his skin almost translucent.
“Let’s sit here, please,” he said motioning them towards a vacant table.
The Westminster clock had finished counting eight moments before; one of the men at the tables was snoring, having fallen asleep, his jaw rested on his chest, his flat cap bent to the side on his head.
“What’d they say; punctuality is the soul of business, eh.”
Sigourney sat back, and his clear eyes settled on Oliver’s face. He was smiling. The bartender served them beer in large mugs that were different from the regular ones the other two men were drinking from.
“Indeed, Mr Sigourney, every successful business thrives on punctuality. And speaking of this ...” Oliver looked at the steps by the wall where Sigourney had drifted down, “... you would spend the night here?”
“And why not, Mr Oliver? I can do with the place anything I so wish.”
Sigourney’s face had clouded just a fraction. Oliver thought if the small man’s skin hadn’t been so pale, he’d have missed the reaction. A little sigh escaped the small mouth, but his smile never faltered.
“Until such a time when it is no longer in my possession, that is.” He spread his lips over his small row of teeth.
Oliver almost pitied the man.
Sigourney started; he slipped a hand in his coat pocket and pulled sheaves of paper out of it like a magician doing a dove out of pocket trick. He placed them on the table between them and placed his hands palms face down on both sides.
“Shall we?”
Oliver nodded. “By all means.”
Ten minutes after, the rights and ownership of The Rockets left the smallish frame of pale-skinned Mr Sigourney and slid across the lifeless virtual spaces of the air and latched itself to the investments of Zachary Catoghan.
“Sign here please, will you?” Oliver instructed.
Sigourney signed.
They shook hands after Oliver shoved the papers in his pocket.
“Lord Zachary Catoghan thanks you,” Oliver said.
◊
Vivian came to the room with a letter in her hands and a light in her eyes. Caroline caught the radiance in the oval face, her slightly pinched nose coloured a little, and the pretty maid approached commendable beauty in that instance. Caroline often loved to witness this little transformation in the maid.
The windows were open, and a crimson sunset sent some of its brilliance across the polished floorboards. Caroline sat straight, corset-sprung and stiff. Her hair was piled up in a coil, dark and lustrous. Vivian had just placed a trinket of emeralds around her neck when they both heard the knock at the door downstairs.
Vivian had gone sprinting down the hall and the steps thinking it was Oliver. It was late, and recently the nobleman had been knocking at that door after dark, frazzled and sleepy.
“Who was it, Vivian?”
“The mailman, m'lady.”
Her freshly trimmed brows climbed her forehead and stayed there a moment. Quick thoughts resolved themselves in her mind. She flapped her hands, and the trinkets around her wrist jingled. Vivian rushed over.
“Am I expecting anyone?” she asked.
Vivian furtively eyed the letter. She shrugged her ample shoulders, one of her slips had fallen halfway down her arm in her recent dash.
“None, my Lady,” she said, “there is Madame Mallory’s ball, though, and you were supposed
to ...”
“Then this correspondence is from her.”
Caroline’s brow relaxed, and her lips twisted in musing contemplation. She was unwrapping the envelope, the mountain of her hair unravelled, but she barely noticed. Vivian hovered. She picked a pin off the dresser and deftly inserted its tapered end into a spot where it held the long dark strands from toppling over Caroline’s face and letter.
“Oh ...”
Caroline turned the letter around again in her hands. It was about the size of a postcard. The type that came across seas. Her father had sent some of those in the past; from places she had only dreamed about, with names some of which her tongue could not pronounce without the risk of biting it. They were stacked and bound with both a yellow tape and a yearning heart. One of those places had sounded like both an exclamation and a question —Hawee, or Hawaii — she couldn’t quite coarse her tongue to master the syllables. That postcard had a hand-drawn picture of a woman sitting under a palm tree, scrawls of waves in front and a large rimmed hat on her head. The woman’s face had been shaded in dark paint, but Caroline could not help seeing a contented smile in that shadow.
She sighed slowly and opened the fold of paper. It had been pressed together in four places; the words tucked away in the cockle.
Her surroundings forgotten in her reverie, she read, only remembering the presence of her maid once and glancing at her briefly.
“Oh well, it’s done. I’m in this shindig whether I want to or not,” she said when she had finished reading the four paragraphs of request. She turned back to the mirror before her. There were grease stains on the surface where she had swiped a sojourning ant trekking across from it.
“Lady Mallory’s ball, Vivian. That was what the letter was about. I reckon you’d want to know.”
“Does it cancel, m’lady?”
“Dreadful no, how in the world would she do that to herself, the whole country knows about it already.”
Vivian’s hands relaxed a little around her hair, very subtly, yet discernible.
“Some Lord from Yorkshire who’s just been coroneted will be in attendance, Lady Mallory would like some affixing in the arrangements, and by that she means, invitations. Looks like God and the angels are now supposed to be in attendance.”
In the mirror, Vivian smiled at the bon mot. Vivian finished with the hair and moved to the windows, shutting off the grey sky and dying sun. A coolness had settled outside, and the blinds billowed under the push of a gentle wind as the window shutters clasped into place.
Presently they heard distant clops of approaching horses. It drew ever closer and stopped right where it should. Oliver Russell was home. Caroline was done in front of the mirror. She wore a jacket the colour of teal over a grey gown that flared around her calves; she slipped her feet into white shoes and smiled at herself once more. Vivian said she looked beautiful, as always. Caroline jutted her chin, stretched forward, and agreed with the assessment. Would Oliver agree and come along? She’d have to wait and see.
He flopped into the settee, stretched his long legs and let his head fall back.
Caroline hung his jacket up and shut the door to their room. She stood smiling at Oliver. His mouth was open and his eyes shut, Caroline could make out even in the poor light that the dark blotches on his chin were stubble just a few hours old. He was pretending she could see as well.
“So?”
He began to snore. It was a croak, an almost convincing one. She went over to him and sat on his thighs.
“You fool me not, Oliver. Tell me how it went at The Rockets.” She nudged him in the chest.
Oliver let out a mock outcry, “Oh, woman, you will be the death of me!”
“How did it go? Tell me now.”
He exhaled, keeping up his act, a wily look enforcing it.
“Well, the Rocket is in the sky, my love.”
Then he grinned. Her eyes popped. “You closed the deal!?”
“Yes, indeed.”
She wrapped herself around his shoulders.
“Wait, let’s not celebrate yet. I’m filthy. I should
get scrubbed down.”
He pulled himself up and kicked his shoes off his feet. He was pulling out his bow tie and wriggling out of his shirt.
“And properly so, just in time for the ball.”
Oliver turned around. “What ball?”
“At the Kilbournes, certainly you remember?”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, Oliver, it will be the third time in three months we’ve let them down if it happens tonight.”
Caroline perched on the edge of the settee, her eyes pleading at the back of her husband. Her hands clasped her thighs.
Baron Kilbourne was a cousin of hers, five times removed. The thought of the Baron on her family tree made her laugh inwardly. Oliver had never succeeded in liking the brusque, squat ex-soldier and his loud wife. The couple had two daughters, Judie and Shirley, both 10 and 14, quiet but uncouth when they had an audience. Oliver found them a handful still.
He stepped into the bathroom and shut himself up. Caroline’s shoulders sagged, and she made a face at the door. She sat down heavily on the settee. Somewhere in the house Vivian scavenged for chores. There was movement in the kitchen; her flip flops made pattering sounds, muffled but reassuring.
Another sound, less reassuring came from the bathroom. Oliver had a peculiar way of washing himself. Caroline imagined the ceramic walls dripping with the white foamy lather of soap, and also forming pools around his feet. But mostly it was the walls. Then she would have to scrub them when the week ended.
She looked around their stately room; at the king-sized bed she shared with her husband, the heavy drapes, red and yellow embroidery masterfully woven into intricate designs that her mother had gifted them the day before their wedding. There was a painting of King George IV on the wall to her left. She could not now recall by whose brushes that soft almost feminine face came alive. The eyes that followed you everywhere you went in the room now stared down at her amiably.
She dug her toes into the thick carpet in deep thought and looked down at them. Looking at those digits, a fleeting memory occurred to her —it was one of those moments she often had these days, especially since her time after the accident and much thereafter. Oliver did not care so much about the incessant parties. He would hedge, she would persuade, and soon his arms would be around her, and they would be off to honour their hosts for the evening.