The Rebel Bride by Catherine Coulter

Julien nodded his agreement to Mannering and made his way through the great front doors, past several footmen and two giggling maids who had peeped around a corner to peer at him.

“I always feel that I should be removing my armor rather than a meager cloak and hat,” Julien remarked, as Mannering gently removed the many-caped greatcoat and the beaver hat.

“Indeed, my lord, isn’t it just grand?” Pride rang in his voice, perhaps as much as in the earl’s.

Like many great houses of its age, St. Clair opened its oaken doors directly into a magnificent hall, whose walls were covered with ancient tapestries and brightly lit flambeaux. Suits of highly polished armor stood upright around the great room. Julien had always the impression that at a moment’s notice they would spring forward into action to defend St. Clair, and as a boy he had joined them in many an imaginary battle. A wistful smile played over his lips, and it was with a conscious effort that he turned his attention to Mrs. Cradshaw.

“I find myself quite famished. Could I have my dinner, with, of course, the blueberry muffins, in about an hour?”

“Certainly, my lord.” She gave him a sideways glance as if to remind him that he was no longer among that rackety pack of good-for-nothing servants in London, who could not be trusted to take proper care of his lordship.

Julien strode to the main staircase, a dark oak affair that dominated a goodly portion of the hall. He touched the ornately carved railing, aware that it glowed shiny and bright under the careful ministrations of Mrs. Cradshaw. He slowed his step halfway up the stairs, turning his gaze for a moment to the portraits of past earls and their wives on the wall beside him. They had been a prolific line, he thought, mentally adding to this number of portraits the scores of others that hung in the gallery. The portraits reminded him that the St. Clairs had inherited father to son in an unbroken stream of earls from the mid-sixteenth century until the present, an unusual occurrence in itself. Julien could readily imagine his father hurling abuse at his head for all eternity should he not marry and produce the necessary male child. It had seemed rather absurd to trouble himself with such thoughts, for he was young and quite healthy, certainly more so than his nominal heir at present, a distant sickly cousin who would become the eighth earl should Julien depart this world without a son.

On his next birthday Julien would be twenty-eight, a reasonable enough age to take a wife and beget a future earl of March.

He was certain that this decision would please his Aunt Mary Tolford, sister to his mother, who had been voluble on the subject of his marriage from the moment he had passed his twenty-fifth birthday. He could always count on her, after all formal amenities were done, to look at him with narrowed eyes and inquire after his plans to modernize the nursery wing at St. Clair. Over the past three years whenever he had crossed the portal of her rather dark and airless house in London he knew that in the drawing room he would face a nervous young miss, elegantly clad, pale with anxiety, awaiting his inspection.

Julien looked up, surprised that he had reached his room. A footman appeared and quickly flung open the massive door. Like the hall below, the master bedchamber was amazing in size and filled with heavy furniture that dated from Tudor times, when that particular St. Clair had been the second Viscount Barresford and the fifth Baron Hedford. It had crossed his mind to wonder how the diligent Mrs. Cradshaw managed to move the ponderous pieces in order to sweep beneath them. But it was the huge canopy bed that Julien most appreciated. The Tudor St. Clair responsible for its construction must have been a giant of a man, for the bed was nearly seven feet long and almost as wide. Julien could not be displeased at this, for he himself was six feet tall and suffered unending discomfort at inns and at his friends’ houses.