A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel

Book 2: The Doomsday Books

by KJ Charles

Genres: LGBT Gay; LGBT Lesbian; Historical Mysteries; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

When Major Rufus d’Aumesty unexpectedly becomes the Earl of Oxney, he finds himself living in a remote Norman manor on the edge of Romney Marsh with his noble, hostile, and decidedly odd family. His position is contested both by his greedy uncle and by unexpected claimant Luke Doomsday, a dashing member of the local smuggling clan. They should be natural enemies, but cocksure, enragingly competent Luke is a secretary by trade and quickly becomes an unexpected ally, the partner Rufus needs...and soon the lover he can't live without. Unfortunately, Luke’s not telling anything like the truth. He came to Stone Manor with an ulterior motive, one he’s hiding even from the lord he can’t resist. And as family secrets unspool on both sides, master and man soon find their positions and their partnership in danger of falling apart…

Release date: September 19, 2023

Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca

Print pages: 333

Sample

One

THE ISLE OF OXNEY, ROMNEY MARSH

APRIL 1823

Rufus d’Aumesty, nineteenth Earl of Oxney, twenty-second Baron Stone, and inheritor of the ancient and unbroken d’Aumesty lineage, glared at his uncle Conrad and said, “Balls.”

“Your vulgarity is regrettable.” Conrad wore a little smirk on his smug face. Rufus regretted the twenty-year age difference that prevented him knocking it off.

“We’ve been through this,” he said in lieu of violence. “The Committee for Privileges took seven months to assess my right. You dredged up every calumny and speculation you could think of against my mother and invented God alone knows what nonsense about me in your effort to claim the title, and you still lost. They said so, it’s done with, and you cannot start it all again!”

Conrad’s smirk stayed in place. “Of course I have accepted the decision of the Committee. I can scarcely be blamed for taking pains to ensure the title continues down the true line in lawful fashion—”

“You speculated my mother bore a girl and switched me at birth with an orphan boy, as though she were a Bourbon queen, not a draper’s daughter,” Rufus said with all the patience he could muster, which was scant. “Then you said I was an impostor who’d stolen a dying man’s identity on the battlefield.”

“I merely raised the question.”

“You called my mother a liar and me a fraud, and I’ve had enough of it. The title has been awarded. The matter is closed.”

“Then it must be reopened. Some very serious information has only recently come to light, as a matter of chance. It requires investigation.”

Rufus’s back teeth were grinding together. “It does not, because the title has been awarded. I’m the legitimate son of Raymond d’Aumesty which makes me the sodding earl, and there is no more to be said!”

“Certainly you are Raymond’s son. The question is your legitimacy.”

Rufus clenched his fist to prevent himself saying something his uncle would regret. He was going to stop trying to hold on to his temper very shortly. “The Committee examined the proof thoroughly. My mother was married to my father. That is incontestable.”

“Oh, the marriage is unquestionable,” said the man who’d spent months questioning it. “I do not argue that Raymond went through a ceremony with your mother. The question is whether he was legally able to do so.”

“Legally able to—what, marry?”

“Indeed.”

“He was twenty-seven years old and of sound mind, insofar as any d’Aumestys are of sound mind, which—”

“He was already married.”

“What?”

Conrad plastered on a sympathy-shaped smile. “Or such is the allegation. Raymond was my brother, but he was a rash, irresponsible, foolish man, easily led, with uncontrollable enthusiasms—”

“What do you mean, already married?” Rufus demanded. “Get to the point!”

“Before Raymond became…entangled with your mother, he had a dalliance with a local girl. A housemaid who abandoned her duties to sport with a son of the house.”

“You mean he pestered one of the staff. And? If my father had married all the girls he

bothered—”

“He married this one!” His uncle spat the words out, then went on in his usual condescending tone, “Or so it is suggested.”

“By whom? And why wasn’t it ‘suggested’ while you were scrabbling round for a way to make yourself earl?”

“I could not say.” Conrad looked sour. “But I have now received this information, and it must be investigated. Whatever the Committee for Privileges has ruled, this would change everything. If your father was already married at the time he wed your mother, that second marriage is invalid and you are not legitimate.”

“If,” Rufus said. “Where’s the proof? Who is this woman, and if she was married to my father, why hasn’t anyone heard of it till now?”

“Her name is Louisa Brightling. She is or was a local woman, from Fairfield. She no longer lives in the area and her whereabouts are not known.”

“Then who’s making this claim?”

Conrad gave him an exceedingly unpleasant smile. “Her son.”

---

They sent the claimant orders to present himself at Stone Manor the next day. Rufus would have preferred to ride down and confront the fellow at once, but he lived in Dymchurch, halfway across Romney Marsh. It would probably be bad tactics anyway: he didn’t want to treat this latest freak of Conrad’s as having any more substance than all his other accusations.

He needed to get out of Stone Manor. It was raining, as it always did in this blasted place and this blasted country, but he ordered his horse anyway, and rode out for Buds Farm. He’d been meaning to go, given the numbers of complaints that had come from that source, and hopefully an unheralded visit on such a dismal day would make him look like a good landlord who took his duty seriously.

Little chance of that, he reflected as he rode along the wooded, dripping lane to Wittersham, what with the pile of unread or half-read letters accumulating on his desk, and the nightmarish labyrinth of accounts to which he had no clue, and the state of his lands, which showed itself to be worse and worse the closer he looked.

This was, or should be, a prosperous area, since the Weald supported an amazing number of sheep per acre. The d’Aumestys ought to be a prosperous family with prosperous tenants. He might easily have inherited the earldom as a well-run concern, with a smooth transition of authority from his grandfather to himself. No such luck.

Rufus had spent seven miserable months in the legal mire as the Committee for Privileges examined his claim to the title. It had been scarifying, but he’d won. He was the Earl of Oxney, immovably in place unless he committed treason, which he didn’t intend, or was proven illegitimate,

which he was determined not to worry about. This was a last desperate throw of Conrad’s, and Rufus was tired of putting up with nonsense because his uncle couldn’t let go of his disappointment.

In fairness, Conrad had good reason to be disappointed, and angry too.

The previous Lord Oxney, Waleran by name, had had three sons, of whom Conrad was the youngest. The eldest, Baldwin, Lord Stone, had never married; Raymond, the second son, had eloped with a draper’s daughter, Mary Hammond. The old earl had promptly disowned him, and disavowed any responsibility to Rufus, his grandson. He didn’t respond to pleas for help when Raymond abandoned his young wife and child, or send for the body when Raymond died, and when Rufus was reported killed in action, and his grieving mother wrote to let the Earl know, he had replied that he was glad to hear it. Mary never forgave that cruelty, and Rufus didn’t blame her. But it meant that she didn’t trouble to write to Stone Manor when Rufus turned up thin, ill, scarred, but alive after five months as a prisoner of war. She hadn’t wanted the Earl’s poison tainting her joy.

And then the eldest son, Baldwin, died. Mary saw the notice in a newspaper, and took vengeful pleasure in advising the Earl that his despised commoner grandson was alive and now his heir. The Earl replied with a single line of crabbed acknowledgment. He did not suggest meeting, which was a pity because Rufus would have enjoyed refusing: he had nothing civil to say to the man.

Rufus had gone on with his life as a soldier, since it seemed ghoulish to think of himself as an earl in waiting. Still, he’d known the position would be his one day, and when the old man shuffled off at last, he’d expected to assume it without too much trouble.

He’d expected wrongly. Because, over the three and a half years since Baldwin’s death, the old earl Waleran had not broken the news to his family that Rufus was alive.

For all that time, his third son Conrad had been under the impression that Baldwin, Raymond, and Rufus’s deaths made him heir. For all that time, Conrad had awaited his decrepit, bedbound father’s death in the belief that the coronet was a breath away from his own brows, and the old earl hadn’t troubled to disabuse him.

That absurd, cruel silence had given Conrad years of hope and anticipation and expectation, and then snatched everything from his grasp. Rufus could not imagine

what had been in the old fool’s mind unless he’d had a particular dislike of Conrad, which was understandable.

Rufus shared that dislike, but despite that, or perhaps because of it, he intended to be scrupulously fair. So he’d meet this individual who claimed Rufus’s father had married his mother first, and he’d hear him out and examine the evidence fairly. And if it proved to be a pack of lies, he’d kick the swine all the way down the Isle, and into the Marsh he came from.

On that invigorating thought, he arrived at Buds Farm.

Rufus wasn’t a countryman. He’d been brought up in the household of his stepfather, a successful draper; he’d followed the drum from the age of sixteen. He didn’t know anything about farms, or farming. But he knew what makeshift repairs looked like, when you had to keep shoring-up and patching-up because there was no time or money to do a proper job, and he saw it here.

The tenant farmer, Hughes, didn’t seem overjoyed by a visit from his new landlord. He spoke respectfully, but there was a lot of resentment under the polite words.

“Been asking for repairs a long time now, my lord. I wrote to Mr. Smallbone time and again. Didn’t happen when the old master was alive, and as for after he died, with you and Lord Oxney—Mr. Conrad, I should say—fighting over the title for seven months…” He let that hang meaningfully.

“Surely the work of the estate was carried on in that period,” Rufus said.

“No. It weren’t. And I’ve an agreement says what costs I bear, and what the Earl, and that ain’t been done. I’ve got rights—”

“Now, Hughes,” his wife said, warning in her voice, and something more than that. Alarm, perhaps.

Rufus had a temper. He was well aware his face showed his feelings, and he was undeniably angry at this moment, so he made an extra effort to look and sound calm. “Have you given Mr. Smallbone the full list of repairs due?”

“Three time.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Rufus promised, trying not to make it sound like I’ll wring his neck.

Hughes snorted. His wife dug a finger into his side with an urgent expression, and he shot her a glower. “Stop that, woman. I’ve talked to Mr. Smallbone, and written too, and he’s made plenty of promises of this and that. Well, it ain’t happened yet and I don’t see it happening now, and I’m weary of asking for the same thing over and over. I got my rights!”

The battle cry of an Englishman digging in to be an awkward son of a bitch. Rufus knew it well. “Yes, you have rights, Mr. Hughes, and the estate has duties to you. I’m going to get this under control. Can you tell me, this situation, with repairs due—”

“All over,” Hughes said, with a sort of gloomy glee. “There’s nothing been done to speak of anywhere on the estates, not since Lord Stone died, and that’s the truth. Everyone’ll tell you the same. The loss took the heart out of old master, your lordship, and nobody could blame him for that, but it’s been more’n four year now—No, I will not mind my tongue!” he snapped

 at his wife. “His lordship asked, and we’ve had nothing done in all this time, and if he wants to turn me off my land for saying so—”

“I shall do no such thing,” Rufus said. “I asked you a question because I wanted you to answer it. I’m grateful for your frankness.”

Hughes gave him a short nod. Mrs. Hughes didn’t look convinced.

---

Rufus was still turning over that unsatisfactory encounter in his mind the next morning as he sat in the study, swamped by paper.

He was supposed to have the assistance of his cousin Odo, Conrad’s younger son, who had acted as his grandfather’s clerk. Unfortunately, Odo was a vague sort of man, nervous to the point of imbecility, who only seemed happy talking about ancient history and the family heritage, subjects in which Rufus had no interest at all. He reacted as though he might be struck whenever Rufus expressed the slightest sign of annoyance, and since Rufus did that a lot, matters were not going well. Rufus didn’t want to upset the fellow, since Odo was the only one of his family to show any sort of civility, and he was clearly trying. But he was also useless, and Rufus had been obliged to send him away earlier, in case he swore at him.

There was a lot to swear about. Odo’s hand was appalling, a chaotic close-written chicken-scratch that slanted erratically up the page, with endless crossings-out and insertions, so a wooden rule under the lines was no help. It danced in front of Rufus’s eyes, the words tangling themselves into incomprehensible knots, and the most ferocious concentration wasn’t giving him anything more than a headache. There were entire books of this that he needed to make sense of, but he could barely get through a page in an hour, leaving him in a state of shame, rage, and frustration.

And there were sheaves of unanswered letters from the seven-month interregnum, when it seemed nobody had taken any responsibility at all, and new ones coming in every day, and Rufus was beginning to panic. The steward Smallbone seemed entirely useless, affairs were all too visibly deteriorating, and everyone he spoke to was hostile. The family hated him, and the staff were stiff and unwelcoming, siding firmly against the interloper who had stolen Mr. Conrad’s birthright. They eyed Rufus with distrust, and took his orders to Mrs. Conrad for confirmation.

It was enraging, miserable, and exceedingly lonely. Rufus would not have compared his situation as earl of Oxney with his time as a prisoner of war, or at least not out loud, but in the last weeks he had sat through too many meals where the company was even colder than the food, and spent too much time mired in the study, struggling with books he didn’t understand and an inheritance he didn’t know how to manage, and he was beginning to feel something

rather like despair.

He didn’t intend to give in to that. Still, he sat in the study alone, achieving nothing, cursing Conrad and the books and this damned pretender fellow, until he was informed that the visitor had arrived.

Odo was in the hall, looking even more like a surprised owl than usual. He gave Rufus one of his twitchy smiles. “Oh—ah—Oxney.”

“Busy,” Rufus said, to head off whatever gibbering he was likely to be subjected to.

“Is it the, uh, the—”

“Fellow who claims he’s the earl. Some ridiculous name.”

“Perkin Warbeck.”

“What? No, nothing like that.”

“No—I mean the claimant—Perkin Warbeck was a pretender to the throne,” Odo explained earnestly, falling into step by him. “He declared himself to be one of the Princes in the Tower, you know, and attempted to take the throne from Henry the Seventh.”

“Good for him. Did it work?”

“Well—er—no? He was captured, and Henry hanged him.”

“Even better,” Rufus said, and kept walking.

Conrad was waiting for him in Stone Manor’s drawing room, along with the pretender, who Rufus was now inevitably going to call Perkin at some point. Conrad was in a flow of oratory; the other man was listening in silence.

He stood when Rufus arrived. “Lord Oxney. Good day. I’m Luke Doomsday.”

It was a ridiculous name. Perkin Warbeck would be better, and come to that would suit him better. Someone named Doomsday should be villainous-looking: shabby and sinister and scarred.

This fellow was not shabby. He was respectably dressed, even rather smartly, with a well-fitted coat that showed off a pair of decent shoulders for his height. He had a bright head of guinea-gold hair that gleamed in the little sunlight allowed by Stone Manor’s miserable windows, and a clean, clear look to him, with nothing sinister or piratical about it.

But by God, he was scarred.

It was a hell of a scar, a raised welt easily four inches long that slashed down his temple, made a jagged curve around his left eye, and ended over his cheekbone. It was clearly old, which invited questions because he looked to be in his mid-twenties, and it must have made a bloody mess of his face at the time. It was the kind of scar someone called Doomsday ought to have. People of a sensitive nature would recoil from a scar like that. 

Rufus wasn’t sensitive, and had seen a lot worse, and the face it bracketed was otherwise rather pleasing. Dark brown eyes that made a nice contrast to the shining hair, finger-thick near-black brows over them—as though a couple of caterpillars had found a resting place, Rufus thought unkindly—and a generous mouth.

Doomsday, Rufus reminded himself. Pretender.

“Sit down,” he said. “So. You think you should have my earldom.”

Those thick brows went up like hands on a clock. “No, Lord Oxney.”

“No? Am I misinformed?”

“Really, Oxney,” Conrad began.

“Let’s hear it from the horse’s mouth,” Rufus said. “You’ve had plenty of opportunity to coach him already.”

“Excuse me!” Conrad said furiously.

“I beg your pardon, Lord Oxney,” Doomsday said. “I have not been coached, and I have no claim on your title.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“You ordered me to come.” His voice had just a slight edge. “I’d be very happy to state my position and answer your questions, but I have travelled a long way at your summons, my lord, and I don’t feel I should be insulted for it.”

That was plain speaking. Confident, too, excessively so in the circumstances. Rufus eyed him. “Stop me if I’m wrong, Doomsday, but I understand you bear a name of some notoriety on Romney Marsh. I hear your family are a pack of smugglers.”

“Were,” Doomsday said calmly. He was well spoken, without the thick accent of this part of Kent. “There is some history to the family, but they operate as respectable traders these days.”

“Moral reformation?” Rufus suggested sarcastically.

“Lower taxes,” Doomsday retorted. “It makes all the difference. I’m not a smuggler, Lord Oxney, I’m a secretary. I have letters of reference from Mr. Acheson Wood, Viscount Corvin, and Sir Gareth Inglis.”

Rufus had met Sir Gareth, a tall, thin, pale-haired fellow with a peculiar hobby. Beetles, that was it: he’d written a book about the beetles of Romney Marsh or some such thing. Rufus had an untouched copy somewhere. It was a respectable reference, and could be checked easily enough. “Well,” he said, trying to sound a bit less hostile. “But you’re here with a story, aren’t you?”

“I’m here because I was asked to bring my information.” Doomsday sounded a little tight. “As follows: My mother was Louisa Brightling, from Fairfield. She worked at Stone Manor as a girl. I understand that Mr. Raymond d’Aumesty expressed his intention to marry her, that she was dismissed by Lord Oxney on that account, and that Mr. Raymond was sent to relatives in Oxfordshire to get him away from her influence. She was fifteen,” he added without inflection. “That was in 1789, years before my birth, so please correct me if I’m wrong.”

Rufus frowned. “He married

my mother in 1789.”

Conrad shook his head with pantomime regret. “From the frying pan into the fire.”

“My mother was also fifteen,” Rufus said. “And my father, at their marriage, was twenty-seven, so if you’re saying he was stupid enough to be manipulated by girls half his age—”

“I should not use that term about my brother, but if the cap fits.” Conrad smirked. Rufus bit back his annoyance at laying himself open to that hit.

Doomsday’s jaw tensed a fraction. “Louisa did not marry, despite many offers and many suitors. She did, however, have a child some years later. She named the father as Elijah Doomsday, deposited it—me—with the Doomsdays, and left the Marsh.”

“That’s a sorry tale,” Rufus said.

“And a revealing one,” Conrad put in. “Why would a woman not marry the father of her child? Surely the only reason would be that she was legally unable to marry. Or, should I say, to marry again.”

Doomsday gave a very slow blink. Rufus rolled his eyes. “I’m yet to hear the meat of this.”

“Louisa left the Marsh, and has never been heard from again. I don’t know where she is or what became of her. But I did speak to her father, Mr. John Brightling, a few years ago. He was ailing; he died not long after. And when we talked, he spoke—rather wildly—about a secret kept for thirty years. A secret marriage.” Doomsday paused, apparently bracing himself. “He told me, ‘She married the lord’s son. She married Mr. Raymond.’”

“And there we have it,” Conrad said triumphantly.

“If by ‘it’, you mean this fellow’s unsupported word,” Rufus pointed out. He did not like the sound of this. “Who did you tell about this at the time you heard it?”

“Nobody,” Doomsday said. “Mr. Brightling spoke to me in confidence.”

“You didn’t mention this to anyone else? Lord Oxney, say—you didn’t think he should know?”

“Lord Oxney was an old man then, bedridden. Mr. Raymond was long dead; so was his son. Or so I understood. Everyone said his son was dead.”

“I was wounded in battle, spent five months as prisoner of war. The gazettes had me dead. I wasn’t,” Rufus said testily. It hadn’t been an entertaining period of his life and he was tired of talking about it. “So you didn’t think you needed to tell anyone.”

“No, Lord Oxney. I thought it would cause distress to no purpose. I should certainly not

spread such a story as gossip. It was not my affair.”

“Not your affair who your mother was married to?”

Doomsday slow-blinked again. “Lord Oxney, it makes no difference if my mother was married to Mr. Raymond, Mr. Conrad, or Mr. William Pitt the Younger. My father was Elijah Doomsday. Louisa made that very clear, he acknowledged me, and it is impossible to doubt for anyone who knew him. I have his eyebrows.”

“They’re hard to miss,” Rufus said, though he was already getting used to those thick black brows, and their pleasing contrast to his bright hair. “And what about when the Earl died, and I was known to be alive?”

“I didn’t hear about it. I was offmarsh—away, working. I haven’t spent much time here in recent years.”

“Oh, come off it. You weren’t aware of seven months of legal wrangling over the earldom?”

“I’m from Dymchurch, Lord Oxney. The doings of the Isle aren’t our concern.”

Rufus had heard that the Marsh was parochial but this was absurd. “You can’t be serious. It’s, what, twenty miles away?”

“Fourteen,” Doomsday said without embarrassment. “I’d have heard if I’d been here, of course, but my family don’t write letters. As it is, I came back last month for a visit. That’s when I learned of the dispute about the succession, and I realised Mr. Brightling’s story had become relevant.”

Rufus frowned. “So what did you do?”

“My cousin Emily works here, as a housemaid. I asked her what was going on, to understand the situation before mixing myself up in it. I didn’t want to betray a confidence if I didn’t have to. She spoke to Mr. Pauncefoot, who went to Mr. Conrad.”

“Why the devil did he not bring it directly to me?” Rufus demanded. It was rhetorical: he knew damned well that the butler took Conrad’s side. “And why this pussyfooting? You must have realised it was important. Crucial, damn it!”

“If true, my lord. But all I have is a story told me by a man who’s been dead five years. I don’t know if it’s true; I can’t prove it if it is. And I didn’t greatly want to invite anger or resentment for raising the issue.”

That put Rufus’s hackles up. “Are you suggesting I’d punish you for speaking the truth?”

“I don’t know,” Doomsday said. “Will you?”

Rufus opened his mouth, and stopped himself. Nobody here knew him; it wasn’t an insult. “I will not. I suppose your concern is not unreasonable, in principle.”

“I’m more concerned by the practice. I really don’t want to be involved in this. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“On the contrary,” Conrad said. “You had a moral obligation to disclose what you knew, and you should have done so at once. However, I do not consider it blameworthy that you did not go directly to—my nephew.” He

glanced at Rufus. “After all, that might have been misinterpreted. Some persons might have questioned whether your silence might be for sale.”

Rufus had to take a second on that. Conrad was all but accusing him of wanting to bribe this fellow, and he would have exploded with outrage if Doomsday hadn’t got in first. “I am a confidential secretary, sir. My silence is for sale on a purely professional level. There is a name for amateur sellers of silence, and I have done nothing to deserve its application to me.”

Rufus gave him a nod. “That was a blasted insulting implication, Conrad. And talking of implications, can we move to facts? Because if all you have is a claim of what a dead man told you—”

“And the fact that the Brightling woman never married when it would have been to her advantage,” Conrad said. “And the letter from my father talking about Raymond’s secret marriage—”

“He said secretive, not secret, and it referred to my parents’ marriage!”

“We don’t know that,” Conrad retorted. “It is dated September 1789. It could have been written before Raymond’s ceremony with your mother. Not to mention that my father also referred to you as a bastard when he wrote to your mother at your birth. ...