Page 1 of Joy to the Earl

Chapter 1

North Yorkshire, December 1813

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

Well, perhaps it was more hair raising on the back of his neck than thumb pricking. But Jack Reynolds knew trouble when he saw it, and the Macbeth line shrieked again in his head as a finely dressed older man stepped out of a richly appointed and crested travelling carriage, and made his way toward the manor’s front door.

No one ever stopped by Northridge Farm. It was too small, too cold, too isolated, and too far from the gracious peak of Roseberry Topping, which offered unparalleled views of the county for hardy visitors who climbed to her summit. And yet the man didn’t have the look of someone lost. His gaze was contemptuous, his stride certain.

Wiping his hands on a rag, Jack left his carpentry shed and crossed the tiny but immaculate paved courtyard. “Can I help you, sir?”

The stranger turned at his greeting, pale blue eyes missing nothing. Then he whipped out a notebook and pencil, muttering to himself as he wrote. “Subject is much worse than supposed. Frightful lowborn accent. Clothing so bad not even the poor would want them. Rough, callused hands, like a common laborer. Grotesque height, surely six and a half feet if I’m a judge, and that pronounced limp…ugh. Subject must sit at all times in company and converse as little as possible…do you lounge?”

Jack blinked. “Are you talking to me?”

“Of course I’m speaking to you. There is no one else in this godforsaken place. Are you mentally incapable? None of the reports mentioned that. Oh dear, with all your other faults, that will be a bridge too far.”

“My name,” said Jack as calmly as he was able, “is Jack Reynolds. May I have the courtesy of yours before I throw you off my land?”

The man sneered and made another notation. “Subject is ill-mannered. Uncouth. But the facial resemblance to his grandsire is uncanny, same blond hair and abnormal combination of one green eye and one blue. The height and build is the fault of some ghastly Norse ancestor on the maternal side, his father and brothers were both men of perfect proportions and features.”

“What on earth—”

“My name is Crawley. Bernard Crawley, Esquire,” said the man, finally deigning to look up. “I am the London legal representative for her ladyship, the Countess of Lynthorpe.”

Jack froze in confusion, his gut churning. Grandsire? Brothers? What the hell was the man talking about? He was an only child, raised by his mother at Northridge and kept mostly apart from others for his own good due to his cursed eyes and the hip disfigurement that gave him such a damned awful limp. He’d lived in this lonely but peaceful place for as long as he could remember, the last year by himself as his mother had passed the previous November.

“I’m afraid you have me mistaken for someone else, Mr. Crawley. I don’t have any family. I’m an orphan. Certainly not acquainted with this Lady Lynthorpe person.”

Crawley sighed audibly. “I am never mistaken. And for the rest of this story, a gentleman would invite me indoors at once. Fiendishly cold out here.”

Silently, Jack pushed open the front door and gestured the man inside, even though every sense he possessed was screaming at him to toss the frigid city bastard out on his ass and bolt the door.

The fire in the small front parlor was barely a smolder, but a few swift turns of the poker and an extra piece of scrap wood, and a healthy blaze began to warm the room. It was his favorite in the manor and contained his most prized possessions, his books. History, poetry, plays, languages, science, and mathematics, an entire world surrounding him, which helped immeasurably on the days when it felt like his solitary, repetitive existence would suffocate him.

He could hardly take a wife. Ladies weren’t interested in men with meagre incomes who lived in the middle of nowhere. Even less so at the thought of lying with someone not only damaged, but bizarrely large. Damn it, even the tavern girls in Middlesbrough had refused to bed him for payment, the result being he was, rather humiliatingly, probably the only twenty-eight-year-old virgin in England.

“Well then,” said Jack eventually, as they both settled onto overstuffed chairs. “Tell me the rest of this…story.”

Crawley frowned. “This is not some fanciful tale, young man. Everything I’m about to tell you is undisputed fact.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. Firstly, and most importantly, your name is not Jack Reynolds. You were born The Honorable John Henry Francis Wakefield, third son of the eighth Earl of Lynthorpe and his wife, the Countess. Yours was a difficult birth both due to size and a breech position, and once the physical deformities of your hip became obvious after you learned to walk…well, that on top of your eyes was far, far too great a burden to expect of any well-bred woman, let alone her ladyship. You were given to Mrs. Reynolds, a distant cousin, at age two to be raised so you did not infect the rest of the family or other ton children.”

Head pounding, Jack hunched his shoulders and folded his arms so Crawley didn’t see his trembling hands. The tale seemed ridiculous, fantastical…entirely too far-fetched to be true. He wouldn’t have believed it either. Except for the single page contract he’d found hidden in the bottom of his mother’s chest of drawers after her passing. One that banned her, on pain of penury and imprisonment, from ever bringing JHFW to London or its near surrounds.

He’d always wondered who or what JHFW was. Now he knew.

“And why…why are you here telling me this after so long? Do…does my family wish to see m-me?”

“Good God, no,” said Crawley, curling his lips in distaste. “In normal circumstances, life would have continued with you receiving the allowance Mrs. Reynolds was paid to care for you, nothing more. But these aren’t normal circumstances. Your father passed ten years ago, and was succeeded by his eldest son, as proper, and second son, as spare. However, I am grieved to report those two fine, upstanding men succumbed to a fever that swept through the countryside in mid-November. We strived to keep it quiet until I could travel here, but you, my lord, are now the eleventh Earl of Lynthorpe.”

Shock lashed him like a whip, harsh and unrelenting. Beth Reynolds not his mother, but a distant relation paid to feed and clothe him. A father and brothers who never wanted to know him, and were now dead. The woman who birthed and discarded him only reaching out because she had no choice, not because of any remorse or caring.

Launching himself out of his chair and limping across the room to brace his hands on the window ledge so Crawley didn’t see his damp eyes, Jack shook his head. “No. I can’t. Surely there must be someone else, a cousin or somebody who would do a far better job. You said yourself I am entirely unsuitable.”

“You are,” said Crawley in an irritable voice. “On every level. But English law is quite specific when it comes to patent. The Lynthorpe title can only pass down through the direct male line. Your brothers had no offspring, so unfortunately you are the last.”