The Merchant's Daughter

by Rebecca Hardy

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Historical Romance; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Desperate times lead to hasty vows... A gripping regency mystery for fans of Eve Chase, Louise Douglas and Tracy Rees.

'Expertly researched, vividly drawn, and so much fun! Five fabulous stars from me' JENNI KEER on Rebecca Hardy's first novel THE HOUSE OF LOST WIVES
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For better. For worse.
For the sake of her future.

London 1815. Jenny's father is dead. She needs to marry immediately to save her and her mother's livelihood.

A chance meeting presents the perfect candidate in the form of the enigmatic Erasmus Black. Gentleman, merchant, and if the rumours are to be believed, captain...

But where does Erasmus slip away to in the dead of night? What secrets about her father's business has he discovered? And was their meeting really just a convenient coincidence?

Guided by her unique intuition, Jenny must seek the hidden forces in play to unravel a sinister web of corruption...without getting trapped herself.
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(P) 2023 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: October 29, 2023

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 400

Sample

It was a week before my world was turned upside down that the subject of marriage was first mentioned.

I had overheard my parents discussing my future in the drawing room late one evening, when they thought I was in my room curled up with a book. I had, in fact, left said book on the window seat downstairs and was just coming to retrieve it when the fateful M word was overheard, causing me to stop outside the open door and eavesdrop. My mother and father’s heads were just visible over the backs of their armchairs, and although it was too warm for a fire, the candles placed in front of the hearth glowed before them, stretching shadows towards my hiding place as though they might be reaching for my bare toes. Aristotle, our King Charles spaniel, snored quietly in his usual spot before the empty fireplace.

‘She must marry, my dear,’ repeated my father. ‘It is imperative that we find her a suitable husband.’

My mother made a sound that indicated she felt equally humoured and frustrated by the idea.

‘You know our silly girl and her notions,’ she chimed. ‘Jenny is terrified of men after what that young lord did to her.’

‘She is terrified, or you are, my dear? For it seems to me that you have barely let her out of your sight these eighteen months, since that regrettable incident,’ my father replied, not unkindly.

It was true enough, for my mother, Katherine Miller, was indeed as protective of me as any lioness might be of her cub, particularly if that cub had been abused and publicly ruined at the hands of another.

She tsked in reply and ploughed on. ‘Mark my words, I know our girl’s heart better than anyone and she will not form an attachment. Unless she falls in love,’ she added, as though the word were sickly on her tongue.

‘She will not marry if she does not meet someone, and she will not meet someone if she does not venture outside these walls,’ my father pointed out.

‘But she does go outside on occasion.’

‘To visit the bookshop,’ came my father’s resigned reply.

‘Yes,’ my mother agreed thoughtfully, ‘though I don’t believe that she would wish to marry at all. She would no doubt rather run off with a character from one of her books.’

‘You cannot marry a fictional character,’ my father replied gruffly, as though my mother were not already aware of the fact. ‘And although there is nothing wrong with love,’ he added, making the word sound a little sweeter than my mother had, ‘there are practical reasons for marrying. George Talver’s offer still stands.’

I suppressed a shudder at the name. I would not marry my father’s business partner if he were the last man on Earth.

‘How romantic of you, Mr Miller,’ my mother replied drily. ‘I can assure you that as charming as George may be, I do not fancy him for a son-in-law.’

My father paused, and I could see the bob of his head in agreement at that. Thank goodness.

‘I have to agree with you, my dear. I am only thinking of her future. If she marries a nice man soon, she will have time enough to bear us a few grandchildren before we are too old to enjoy them. Our son-in-law could take on my role in the family business, and you and I could visit all those old houses and gardens you so enjoy speaking of.’

As horrifying as the thought of bearing children was to me, I had to smile at my father’s gentle barb in my mother’s direction. She gave an amused harrumph in reply, but he was not finished.

‘If she does not find a suitable partner soon, I worry what might happen to you both if some tragedy were to befall me.’

And so it began again, reminding me why I hated this discussion so. Although both of them had tried on several occasions to convince me that next season would be my season, I truly had no interest in finding a husband for the sake of an heir for the business. If only my parents had had a son, then no one would have to worry about the family fortune falling out of our hands.

‘Do not speak like that,’ my mother retorted. ‘I could not imagine a life without you, Mr Miller.’ I stifled a chuckle, knowing she only referred to him thus when she was particularly vexed. ‘After all, what would I do with the house, the business? Never mind that to lose you would be most impractical.’

‘Oh dear me. Impractical, would it be?’ There was the hint of humour in my father’s tone at that.

‘Quite a nuisance indeed.’

‘Be that as it may, my dear, the truth of the matter is that we cannot have our sweet little girl grow up to become a spinster, no matter what her poor experiences have led her to believe.’

There was a moment’s pause while my mother chose her best response, and I willed her to come to my aid even though she had no notion that I stood only feet behind her.

She settled on a sigh, before resting her hand on my father’s arm. ‘She’s no longer the bright and impulsive girl she used to be, Jacob. Yes, at first it was at my insistence that she stayed home and waited for the world to forget the unfortunate incident, but now it is she who digs her heels in at the mention of social engagements. When that blasted man ruined her, he crushed her spirit too, and I cannot bring myself to put her through the pain again.’

This conversation would replay itself in my mind in the days and weeks following while I searched for its meaning in the events that came after. How poignant and somehow full of foreboding it had been, though seeming so innocent at the time.

What more was said between them I do not know, for I felt the presence of someone behind me and turned to find Marcus, my father’s manservant, looming over me like a spectre, his face as unreadable as ever. I promptly scurried back to bed empty-handed, without either of us saying a word.

She’s no longer the bright and impulsive girl she used to be. My mother’s words still stung a little, though it had been a year and a half since my fall from grace, and I clenched my fists in protest, standing before the sack of flour that hung in my closet. It was barely disguised with an old blanket that I had now yanked off, pushing my clothes to one side so that I could stare at the garish face I had painted on the front. My maid had accidentally unveiled my punching bag once while cleaning, and her scream had sent the other staff running to her aid. Only Marcus, who had followed the commotion, and myself had laughed at her discovery. Lord Buckface, we called him, and although my artistry left much to be desired, I thought it was an apt likeness of the man who had wronged me.

The bag had been Marcus’s idea, and in recent months I’d found myself more and more grateful for having something to hit, to release a little of the anger that I held inside, relishing the sting of canvas against my knuckles. I was always careful to wear gloves in the day, as any lady should, and if my mother noticed the wear on my hands, she refrained from comment. I had begun to believe that she was afraid to have the conversation with me, knowing what demons it might unleash.

After a few well-aimed hits to the target, I found myself already drenched in sweat and gave it up for the night, concealing the source of my nightmares behind his shroud and closing the door to the closet. I lay on top of the blankets, the room too hot and stifling to burrow underneath them, and stared at the ceiling, fingers twined over my chest as my parents’ conversation and thoughts of marriage filled my mind. It had been a long time since I’d even entertained the notion, so outcast had I become from society. It worried me that Father thought it suddenly urgent that I find a husband.

My mother knew the truth of it. Unless I could spend the rest of my days with one of the heroes from my stories, I would rather remain alone. Fictional men were far better company and were not so vulgar as real ones. But to be a heroine of one of my novels, I would have to be either devastatingly beautiful or unwaveringly brave. I was pretty enough, I thought, yet perhaps I did not have the breathtaking looks of a princess in need of rescuing. And although I was not brave, I did not consider myself a coward, despite my mother’s sentiments. After all, there were not many opportunities to be brave while cooped up in a London town house.

I propped myself up on one elbow and reached over to the bedside cabinet, opening a small drawer that contained a bundle of pictures and postcards. Retrieving my keepsakes, I sat up and undid the frayed string, worn thin from all the occasions I had done just this for years. To anyone else, these bits of card and paper held little value: sketches of ships that my father had given me as a child, tokens he had sent me on his various travels, letters describing far-off places that I could only imagine. I had once begged him to take me with him on his journeys, but he had always refused, stating that a ship really was no place for a lady. I traced the lines of one of his rough sketches, a group of men in some tavern, each one suspended in laughter. The drawing itself was not particularly detailed, but I often looked at it and transported myself to that mysterious place where strangers became family over the course of a journey, and where you knew the man you worked with better than perhaps you did your own wife. With heavy eyelids and a sigh, I stacked the pictures and stowed them away, lying flat on my back in my bed.

The germ of an idea formed in my mind as I lay in the drowsy heat – thoughts of bravery, of travelling and sightseeing, of discovering places other than the same streets and parks that I had known all my life. For if I were to marry as soon as my parents wished, there would be no opportunity for that. No, instead I would be running a house and having children, attending parties as a married woman. If it was perhaps an impossible dream, in my half-asleep state it seemed like rather a good one.

I’d not always recoiled from the thought of marriage. Growing up, I had been the absolute model of a daughter, pursuing every possible avenue for a proper courtship, and at one point had even had three proposals, all of which I had rejected based on my feelings, or lack thereof, for the men in question. My parents had not pressed me on the matter, for there had been time enough, they thought, to find a suitor. But then had come two moments of my life in which the topic of love was truly ruined for me.

The first was only a few months after I had first come out at the age of seventeen.

My mother had ensured that I attend every cotillion ball and party from Belgravia to Knightsbridge, in the hopes of finding me a suitor among the high aristocracy, and that I might come away with a taste for balls and dancing as well as a husband. The former certainly came about. My appetite for pretty gowns and dances, social discussions and meeting others of my age knew no limits. I swiftly fell for a young man by the name of Nigel, although even now when I look back on it, I believe I fell in love with what he represented and not the boy himself. I had felt that everything about him was soft and caring, his compliments always sincere. He was a poet, and like so many others of his talent, he loved and hated with passion and honesty. He seemed genuinely enchanted with me also, and we always danced once or twice at any social gathering at which we met over the first weeks of the summer. I waited in vain for him to ask me for a third dance, where our attachment might be confirmed, or to call on me the day after and at the very least leave his card. Instead I found him a month later dancing with another girl of slightly wealthier stature, a lock of her hair twined around his finger, any unspoken arrangement between us ending as abruptly as it had started.

The second ruination had been far worse, even the reminder of it sending goosebumps across my hot skin. Somewhat disillusioned by Nigel, I had attended a party where the host had been only a few years older than I. A Lord Darleston, who had inherited his wealth at the young age of twenty-two.

I am still uncertain how we came to be alone that night, or where my friends and parents had disappeared to, leaving me with the young lord in his rose garden, the fresh blooms filling my nose with heady perfume. I had sensed the danger when it was already upon me, moments too late. My stomach turned at the reminder of it, Lord Darleston’s words echoing through my mind.

‘I am grateful we find ourselves alone, Miss Miller, for I can show you my favourite garden statue. I think you’ll quite enjoy it, having a fondness for the Greek tales as you do.’

The words had been inconsequential in themselves, but the lie had rung through me as loud as any alarm bell. Yes, there was a small likeness of Athena in the garden amongst the roses, her shield and spear in her hands, her robes draping evocatively from her marble form, but that was not what Lord Darleston had wanted to come here for.

Even as I lay in bed now, I could feel the phantom press of his fingers on my arms and his stale breath upon my neck. The imprint of his hand on my bodice, the look of rage in his bloodshot eyes when I slapped him, the low growl in his throat as he forced me into the grass and pushed my skirts up. The rip of fabric, the scramble as my silk gloves failed to find purchase on anything that might stop him from having his way with me. I think I screamed, but it was muffled by a hot palm pressed over my face. Then the champagne flute that had fallen to the ground was in my hand. Only a swift swipe of it into his head, the glass erupting like violent crystals in my fingers, had stopped him from doing his worst. I could still recall the blood dripping down his temple, black as ink in the moonlight. The nightmares had almost abated a year ago, when I found out that the lord in question had been imprisoned for gambling debts, but still he haunted me, the memories an indelible scar upon my mind and heart.

Rumours had circulated quickly afterwards, undoubtedly straight from his very lips. They varied from me throwing myself upon him to some ridiculous idea that I had been plotting to be seen compromised by him so he would be forced to propose, but despite my protests that none of it could be true, society had rejected me, and I, in turn, had lost my faith in it. I spent many months in a dark place after that night, unwilling to leave my room for more than meals, my books the only thing keeping me sane. My large bedroom, with its attached bathroom and closet, was my safe haven, the four walls my sanctuary. I saw little more than the pretty blue wallpaper, the elegant furniture, and the view of the square from my balcony. I became a quiet echo of myself for what felt like a very long time.

Finally, fatefully, my mother insisted I attend the birthday party of a young girl who had suffered equal misfortune at the hands of the very same lord. The family was poorer than ours, and she had lost her sister almost immediately after the assault, and yet there she was, communing with people as though she were fearless, daring anyone to say anything against her. I could still see her descending the staircase of their bare home on her father’s arm, defiance in her eyes. I had told myself I would not mention the torment we had both experienced, but as she spoke to me with kindness, I could not help but ask how she retained the will to carry on, to be seen in public.

One conversation with Lizzie Dawson had changed my resolve and given me the strength to put Lord Darleston behind me. She had decided that nothing would stand in her way or break her, and the proof of it was that she was now happily married to a captain and running a manor in Sussex.

‘He’s already taken a part of us we’ll never get back,’ she had said. ‘Don’t let him take the rest.’

They were words I now lived by.

I had implored Marcus to teach me to fight. He had refused in his own silent way at first, knowing that my parents would disapprove of their daughter indulging in fisticuffs like a common brawler, but soon enough I persuaded him to at least teach me to defend myself against an assailant so that I might never be caught out again. So it was that Lord Buckface was created – any resemblance to persons living or dead purely a coincidence – and though I had never had to put my skills to any real test, I felt confident that I could land a punch or two given the opportunity.

As my tired eyes traced the faint cracks in the paint on the ceiling, my candle flickering despite the night being stiflingly still, I wondered how Lizzie was and what she was doing now. I should write to her and perhaps invite her here, or ask her if I could impose and stay in Sussex for a week or two. Maybe the change would do me good. Wanderlust had sometimes tugged at me when I disappeared into the pages of a story, wishing to see the places I had read about for myself; to taste exotic foods and smell the rich scents of an alien land. Slowly a plan began to form in my mind, even as weariness tugged at me.

I fell asleep that night on top of the mattress with Lizzie’s words rattling around my head, the prospect of an arranged engagement looming over me, and what I might do to change that fate.

No, despite my parents’ insistence, I was not about to marry the next eligible bachelor who came along.

The following morning, after penning a letter to the woman who had inspired me so, I announced to my parents that I wished to leave London for a short while.

‘What is she saying, Jacob?’ my mother asked my father, as though I had spouted some foreign tongue and she had not in fact heard me perfectly.

‘I believe she is requesting leave of us, my dear,’ he said with a sigh as he sipped his tea. ‘It seems she has grown tired of her parents after all these years.’

‘I have not grown tired of you, Papa,’ I huffed, aware that he was teasing me and succeeding in his fun. ‘I merely wish to know what the world is like outside London.’

‘I hear Bath is very pleasant at this time of year,’ he said, passing a crust of his breakfast roll to Aristotle when he thought my mother wasn’t looking.

‘I do not wish to go to Bath. My intention is to begin in Sussex, to visit Mrs Blountford – you remember her, Mama?’

‘Ah yes, although she’s a lady now that her husband’s uncle is dead. Remarkable young woman,’ my mother commented, narrowing her eyes at the dog, who, having swallowed the crust whole, was now making a dramatic coughing noise beneath the table.

‘I have written to her just this morning in the hopes that she will have me for a few weeks. I realise I should have asked permission, Papa,’ I interjected when I saw my father open his mouth to protest, ‘but I know that Lizzie – Lady Blountford – won’t think the request improper coming directly from me.’

I didn’t mention the fact that I also intended to speak to Lizzie’s husband, Captain Blountford – or perhaps Lord Blountford now, if he had taken his late uncle’s title. He had travelled the world with the navy and might be able to advise me on how to proceed with my plan. Although I hadn’t particularly thought it through, there was the notion that from Sussex I could take a coach to Plymouth, and thence a ship to France if I had the courage to pursue my idea of adventure. The captain, who had fought all the way across the far reaches of Egypt and Africa, might be able to guide me better. And if bravery eluded me and I decided not to embark on the trip, at the very least I would have escaped from under my parents’ feet for a while.

‘The wilds of Sussex, eh?’ said my father. ‘Are we certain that the countryside will cope with the likes of our daughter?’

‘I am not sure she is ready for it,’ my mother argued. ‘Going to a strange place to stay with people we’ve barely met.’ I might have been inclined to agree with her had I not been so eager for the opportunity to travel. For it was not men and parties I wished to seek out, but rather new sights and experiences that might give me the resolve I needed to return to society. I imagined that my father, joint owner of a large merchant company and seasoned traveller himself, would sympathise with me.

He smiled warmly at his wife, sharing one of their silent, private conversations that I was so accustomed to, which mostly involved my mother scowling and my father waggling his eyebrows plaintively until she said, ‘Oh, very well. If Lady Blountford will have you, then I suppose a few weeks away will do you no harm. But you’ll be taking a chaperone.’

I felt a thrill through my very bones at the thought of escape.

Adventure. It called to me even as I sat at the breakfast table, absently sliding some of my egg onto the carpet so that Aristotle would cease whining for food. I was but an invitation away from new sights, countryside and the possibility of salty open air.

But then my father died, and everything changed.



The death of my father, Jacob Miller, was as sudden as it was painful to our family. He had been sitting with us at breakfast one Friday morning, and was gone by the afternoon. We were told later of the unhappy circumstance of his demise, and even then it felt as though it had happened to someone else, and not the man I admired and respected. While attending a luncheon with his business partners, he had simply dropped dead, face first into the main course. The doctor suggested he might have had a sensitivity to something in the food, which had our cook blanching at the thought that I might have inherited any similar reaction.

It is a peculiar thing to lose someone you love, for it is always more than just the person that dies. Their voice, their mannerisms, even the stories they had yet to tell all disappear, leaving a person-shaped hole in the world. Our house, previously a vibrant and happy place for our small family, turned into a hollow shell where the air was thick with nothing but grief.

My first wish was that we had had more time together, as though the past twenty years of my life had been an inadequate amount of time to truly know my father and appreciate everything he had accomplished. The sketches in my bedside drawer and his handwriting in his ledgers, our family portrait in his study, his clothes hanging in his wardrobe – all of these things made up the man he had been and yet none of them replaced the deep loss of him from our lives.

My second wish was that it had not affected my mother as greatly as it had, for when he died, it felt like a part of her had gone as well.

Heat settled over the city, summer’s stifling blanket, enveloping the streets in sunshine and humidity. My father had been swiftly buried because of it, the funeral attended by very few. Only Mother and I, our staff, Mr Osborne and Mr Talver, my father’s business partners.

Those first days after his wake my mother sat in her armchair and barely moved, as though if she waited long enough her husband might stroll through the door and take up his place beside her. We all felt the loss keenly in the household, but it was worst for her. She forbade anyone to sit with her, or to move his chair or adjust the cushions. More than once, I climbed out of the window onto the balcony of my room and read there until the heat became unbearable, but more often than not I stayed with her, perching in my usual window seat with a book. Even the sound of turning pages that she had complained about so profusely before seemed to no longer bother her, or perhaps it was that she was too numb to care.

Marcus, now the household steward without my father to attend to directly, had taken it upon himself to stand vigil and bring her food even when she left most of it untouched. He had met my father as an adolescent, and was deaf by some accident of birth. When I was only five or six – my curiosity outweighing my manners, as was so often the case with children – I had asked my father if he had ever heard Marcus speak. He could have called me impertinent and ignored the question, but that was not the way of Jacob Miller. Instead, he sat me down and told me of the young, ambitious man whose only desire was to see the world from the deck of a ship. Having been left a sizeable inheritance by his deceased parents, he had bought a vessel, swaggered into the first tavern he saw, and promised riches to any man who wished to join his crew. Marcus, discarded by his own parents and considered good for nothing except carrying barrels and wiping tables, had seized the opportunity to work for this brash but determined young sailor.

That first voyage had been tough on all of them, particularly a young man who had more money than sea legs and no idea how to run a ship, but through their joint naïvety and lack of knowledge of the sea, they formed a friendship. When my father, by some miracle, gained more and more contracts, he spent less time at sea himself, preferring to leave the voyages to those with more experience, and hired Marcus as his personal steward. In their time spent together, Marcus had only vocalised once, warning my father when a boom almost took his head off during a strong wind on that first voyage. He was either unable or unwilling to speak, but was perfectly capable of reading lips and signalling his responses.

Where others mistook his lack of speech as stupidity, my father, only a few years Marcus’s senior, saw someone observant and intelligent, with the strength and value of ten men. They developed their own sort of language, using their hands, and my father taught it to me and my mother so that the steward never felt as though he could not communicate if he so wished. In a time when society looked down upon those who were not oralists, my father resolutely disagreed with this form of thinking, and Marcus became more than simply part of the household staff and more like the uncle I’d never had. Now nearing his middle age, he was a tall and imposing figure who could communicate more with a simple expression than most humans could with a dozen words. But without my father’s constant company, even he seemed unmoored somehow.

Jacob Miller had been the axis upon which our house had spun. Now Marcus, my mother and I were all planets around a sun that had winked out. My mother’s grief seemed to eclipse my own, for although I too needed time to come to terms with my loss, in her inability to carry out daily tasks and run the house I found myself more and more taking her place. Loss became a blade lodged in my chest, the pain ever present even as my body tried to heal around it, made doubly hurtful by the lack of my only surviving parent.

Despite knowing that he would never come back, I heard my father’s footsteps in every creak of the floorboards, in the faint scent of tobacco that still clung to the furniture. I sensed him in every room he’d ever frequented, and it felt as though, if I just willed it hard enough, he might walk in the door with his briefcase in hand, telling us what a day he’d had at his offices. But of course that never came to pass, and the days bled into weeks and still my mother didn’t move, and still my father was gone.

A letter had arrived from Ambletye Manor, Lady Blountford’s place of residence, but her cheerful words and invitation went unanswered. I was unwilling and unable to put into words the change of events that had occurred since my original writing. Stacks of condolences, some addressed to my mother, others addressed to me personally, arrived and sat in a dresser drawer, unread. Silence fell over the house like a fog, punctured only by the sound of the doorbell occasionally ringing with well-wishers and friends bringing flowers and their sympathy. We turned them all away.

That was, until the executor of my father’s will arrived.

I had the vague notion that it must be nearing the end of July. Mother was in her chair, her body angled away from me, her constant silence more unnerving than if she were screaming. I sat fanning myself at the window, too hot even to read, watching the ladies outside in their many layers of skirts sweating beneath their parasols. Men mopped their brows with limp handkerchiefs. The scent of rotting sewage wafted in through the small opening, but any breeze was better than none at all, even if it gave the house a stench of dustbins and full chamber pots. Edith, my mother’s maid, was busy arranging vases of lilies around the room to counteract it, but it only reminded me of the funeral, making everything smell of death in all its forms.

I watched as a fat bluebottle flew at the window in heat-drunk stupidity, its repetitive tap tap buzz the only significant sound. Even Aristotle, who was sleeping in the solitary patch of shade in the corner, refrained from barking when the doorbell rang.

I spied the stranger on the stoop from where I sat, unfolding myself from the seat and wandering over to the doorway to listen in as Marcus answered the door. Aristotle rose to his feet and languidly followed me across the room, his nosiness getting the better of him.

‘Good day! I am Mr Gallows of Gallows & Enwright Solicitors. I am the appointed executor of the late Mr Jacob Miller’s will and I am here to meet with Mrs Miller, if she would be available to see me. I sent letters and left my card several times.’ His voice was far too bright and cheery for such weather, and I peered through a crack in the hinges to see that Mr Gallows was a man with an unfortunate name and an even more unfortunate moustache. It crawled across his top lip like an emaciated caterpillar, twitching peculiarly when he spoke.

Marcus gestured something that I inferred to be a dismissal.

‘But she must see me