Chapter 1

Merstham, England

July 1818

A n unexpected inheritance is supposed to be a happy event.

But nothing ever happened as it was supposed to for Gwendolyn Brocklesby.

It was the second funeral Gwendolyn had attended that year. The first had been for her parents, who had died of a fever the previous autumn. Gwen had been spared not so much by the grace of God but rather due to the fact that her parents had not cared to have their odd, embarrassing bluestocking of a daughter accompany them to such a fashionable place as Brighton. Thus had Gwen been at a safe distance when the disease struck.

This time, her Aunt Agatha was the one being laid to rest. Strictly speaking, she was Gwendolyn’s great-aunt, but Gwen had always called her Aunt Agatha, ever since she was a small child. Growing up, Gwendolyn had spent summers at Aunt Agatha’s home, Frogcroft Cottage. And Christmases. And any time her parents wanted to hie off to Brighton, or Paris, or the Lake District, and… gracious, now that she thought about it, over the years she had probably spent more time here, in Merstham, than at her parents’ house in London.

She felt a pang of guilt because the overwhelming grief she felt at Aunt Agatha’s death brought into sharp relief the fact that she had not been devastated by her parents’ passing. Surely, it should have been the opposite. They were her parents, after all.

It was just that Aunt Agatha had actually loved her.

Aunt Agatha had been married once but had never been blessed with children, and her husband, John, had died long before Gwen was born. Gwen fancied that Aunt Agatha thought of her as the daughter she’d never had. She certainly thought of Aunt Agatha with a maternal warmth that it pained her to admit she did not feel for her own mother.

Perhaps it was the fact that Aunt Agatha had always had time for her. Unlike most women of her class, she made everything herself. Delicious jams made from the blackberries she grew in her own garden. Three different kinds of cheese. And she had a tincture for whatever ailed you, from headaches to nettle stings to dyspepsia. When Gwendolyn came to visit, they made them all together. Gwen knew that, especially in her early years, she was not a help but a hindrance, but Aunt Agatha had never shouted at her when she cracked an egg onto the countertop rather than into the bowl, or when she somehow rendered every surface in the kitchen sticky with honey. Those were some of the happiest memories she had from her childhood—being elbow-deep in cheese curds with Aunt Agatha, who laughed rather than scolded when Gwen got some in her hair.

Her favorite chore was tending the bee boles in the back garden. Aunt Agatha never tired of explaining how bees formed their own society, with rules as intricate as the court of any king in Europe.

“Except with the bees, Gwen my dearie, it’s the queen who is in charge!” Gwendolyn could picture the gleam in Aunt Agatha’s eye when she said it. Aunt Agatha was always excited rather than annoyed when Gwendolyn asked questions. She was the only person who didn’t bemoan the fact that she was a bespectacled bluestocking rather than a great beauty and the only one who liked her precisely as she was.

That was why Aunt Agatha was her favorite person on the face of this earth.

And now, she was gone.

Dabbing her raw eyes with her handkerchief, Gwen peered at her great-aunt’s longtime solicitor, Mr. Reynolds, from across the churchyard. She knew he had been charged with distributing her aunt’s effects, and there was a particular item she was hoping she might have. But she hadn’t figured out how to broach the topic without sounding grasping.

She was therefore relieved when Mr. Reynolds approached her. “Miss Brocklesby,” he said, bowing his head, “I am so very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you,” Gwen whispered.

When Mr. Reynolds looked up, his eyes were kind. “I know you will not wish to think about legal concerns on a day such as this. But your great-aunt left you a bequest, and I thought it might be more convenient to dispose of it before you head back to London.”

Hope flared in Gwen’s heart. “A bequest, truly? Is it her household book?”

Many women kept household books, full of recipes, remedies, and tidbits of advice. Gwen had so many memories of the two of them standing in the kitchen, heads bent together as they recreated a recipe out of that book.

It was even written in Aunt Agatha’s own hand.

Gwen’s throat seized, and she dabbed her eyes for what must be the thousandth time. Aunt Agatha’s household book would be precious to her beyond any treasure.

A soft smile came across Mr. Reynolds’s face. “It includes the household book.” He inclined his head toward the town center. “Come with me to my office, and we’ll read her will aloud.”

It was just a short walk from St. Katherine’s Church to his office on High Street. Her brother, Joseph, who had become Gwendolyn’s guardian upon their parents’ deaths, said he would come along with the stated goal of “hurrying things along.” There was a faro game he wanted to attend back in London, and he was determined that they would be on the road home within a quarter of an hour.

Once they were seated and Joseph had declined Mr. Reynolds’s offer of tea on both of their behalves, the solicitor opened a file folder. Withdrawing a few sheets of paper, he cleared his throat. “In the Name of God, Amen. I, Agatha Grace Brocklesby, a widow residing in the town of Merstham, in the county of Surrey, being weak in body but of sound and disposing memory?—”

“Can we get on with it?” Joseph asked. “What did my sister get? Summarize.”

Mr. Reynolds laid down the papers. His expression was carefully blank, but Gwendolyn formed the impression that he was suppressing a scowl. “Indeed, Mr. Brocklesby, it is a simple matter to summarize. Your sister has received everything.”

“Very good.” Joseph stood. “Do you have it here, then?”

Mr. Reynolds’s eyebrows shot up. “Indeed, no. I do not have any of Mrs. Brocklesby’s effects here in my office.”

“Well, come on, man,” Joseph said. “Fetch us a box, and let’s be done with it.”

A keen gleam came into Mr. Reynolds’s eyes. “That would be a very large box, indeed. Mrs. Brocklesby’s principal effects include…” He paused to shuffle through the pages of the will, then began to read. “Frogcroft Cottage?—”

“Frogcroft Cottage!” Joseph interrupted. “I thought the old bat rented the cottage.”

Gwen had thought so, too. She had been under the impression that Aunt Agatha scraped by on a minuscule army pension inherited from her late husband. Considering the fact that John Brocklesby had never risen above the rank of captain, the amount could not have been too generous.

Mr. Reynolds looked up. “She did. But she was able to purchase it around ten years ago.”

Joseph grunted. “And it’s been left to Gwendolyn, you say?” He shifted around in his seat, looking more interested in the proceedings but also annoyed. “Anything else?”

“Yes, as it happens.” Mr. Reynolds returned to perusing his list. “In addition to the cottage grounds, Mrs. Brocklesby owned about forty acres of land to the southeast?—”

“Forty acres!” Joseph exclaimed.

Mr. Reynolds looked up, holding his gaze in silence. “May I?”

“By all means,” Joseph said, looking more pleased than ever.

Gwendolyn didn’t care for the look of anticipation on her brother’s face. She had a fair idea how this was going to play out. Growing up, Joseph had been the apple of their parents’ eye, the oldest son, the heir. They had not felt the same way about Gwendolyn, an awkward, bespectacled bluestocking who couldn’t seem to fit in amongst the ton circles in which her parents aspired to move. She was interested in all the wrong things. Instead of reading La Belle Assemblée , she read the Journal of Science and the Arts . She was a clumsy dancer and an awkward conversationalist, her thoughts full of birds and bees—and she meant the literal kind, not the latest on dit about whose husband was carrying on with whose wife.

Nor did Gwendolyn possess the sort of lithe, delicate figure most men seemed to prefer. To be sure, she had caught more than one man staring at her full hips and her ample bosom. But in addition to being short and plump, she was a sturdy sort of girl from hours spent hiking through the woods in search of natural wonders and summers with Aunt Agatha spent digging up carrots and carrying crocks of honey.

Joseph, on the other hand, had been the very picture of a young Corinthian with his curling dark brown hair. His build was similar to Gwendolyn’s, but whereas she was derided as stocky, he was praised for his muscular physique. He was precisely the sort of son her parents had wanted, and they had demonstrated this by giving him the world. If Joseph liked the look of Gwendolyn’s dessert, he got it. If he spontaneously decided to leave town on the morning of the lecture Gwendolyn had been anticipating for weeks, he was granted use of the carriage, every single time. His wardrobe cost five times as much as Gwendolyn’s, not that she cared about such things. But it would have been nice to have more than a pittance of pin money to spend on books and the like.

And here was Gwendolyn, receiving a cottage, a farm, and, as Mr. Reynolds was in the process of describing, investments worth more than thirty thousand pounds.

She knew her brother well enough to know that as far as Joseph was concerned, that was his cottage, his farm, and his thirty thousand pounds.

Once Mr. Reynolds concluded his summary, Joseph leaned back in his chair. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He slapped his thigh. “How on earth did the old bat accumulate all of that?”

There was disapproval in Mr. Reynolds’s eyes, but he kept his voice even as he said, “Mrs. Brocklesby had a keen eye for an investment. And in this case, the thing she invested in was the people of Merstham. Over the many decades she lived here, Mrs. Brocklesby would make small loans to various citizens hoping to start a business. Take the butcher, Mr. Cutler. Fifty years ago, she loaned five pounds to his grandfather so he could make his start. Or Mrs. Danforth, whose straw chip bonnets are much in demand at the shops of London. It was Mrs. Brocklesby who loaned her the money to buy raw materials for that first batch of bonnets.” He smiled, giving an elegant bow from his seat behind his desk. “Once upon a time, she even helped a hopeful young solicitor with his school fees. And here I am today.”

Joseph snorted. “You expect me to believe that the interest some butcher paid her on a five-pound loan added up to thirty thousand pounds? You must think I’m daft.”

Mr. Reynolds’s eyes fell on Joseph’s watch fob, a flashy piece with a carved amethyst seal as big around as a farthing coin set in a frame of gold roses. “You would be surprised how far frugal living, practiced over many years, can get you,” Mr. Reynolds observed dryly. “But as far as interest goes, Mrs. Brocklesby didn’t charge any. Not formally, at least,” Mr. Reynolds added at Joseph’s incredulous look. “Although many recipients of her loans would pay her whatever they thought was fair. But it happens that she invested heavily in the initiative to extend the Surrey Iron Railway so it could be connected to the local quarries.”

Joseph frowned. “The Surrey Iron Railway has not been a great success.”

Her brother was correct. The Surrey Iron Railway was an unusual project in which metal rails were installed on the ground in a route from Merstham to the River Thames at Wandsworth. Because the rails were so smooth, it was easier for horses to pull heavy loads of stone, coal, and the like without being hampered by every rock and divot in the road.

“Not today,” Mr. Reynolds agreed. “Although it still breaks even. But it did quite well in its early years before the canal opened. And that is how our Mrs. Brocklesby went from being a moderately prosperous widow to being in possession of a proper fortune.” He smiled at Gwendolyn. “And she wanted you, Miss Brocklesby, to have it. The cottage. The farmland. And the investments, which produce a return of”—he paused, leafing through his papers—“two thousand pounds a year.” He smiled, and the corners of his eyes crinkled behind his spectacles. “Congratulations.”

Gwendolyn managed to stammer out an awkward thank you. Two thousand pounds a year! She had never imagined being in possession of such a fortune. Aunt Agatha’s bequest would be life changing. She could leave the life she hated in London behind. There was no longer a need for her to marry, no longer a need for her to attend balls and routs, ostensibly for the purpose of meeting a suitor, but knowing full well that no man wished to court her.

Yes, such an amount would be life changing, and Aunt Agatha had wanted her to have it. But, as she peered at her brother out of the corner of her eye, she saw that a familiar, weaselly expression had come over his face. Joseph had never let her have anything in her life.

If she wanted Aunt Agatha’s fortune, she would have to fight for it.