Read The Rake for Free Online

life. Well, maybe Johnson was right; Reggie was tired of London and life both.
    Perhaps there would be something at Strickland that would make life worth living. But he doubted it.
    Â 
    Â 
    The rolling pastures and woodlands of Dorset were hauntingly familiar, though Reggie had not seen them since he was eight years old. He remembered the bleak heath of the high downs, too. In contrast to that starkness, Strickland included some of the richest agricultural land in Britain.
    After deciding to leave London, he had packed and left while Julian Markham was still asking puzzled questions from the sofa. Mac would follow later with the curricle and enough clothing for an indefinite stay. Reggie preferred to ride, and to ride alone. He slept at Winchester. By early the next afternoon, he was approaching Strickland, his once and future home.
    Though he had ridden hard most of the distance, he slowed his horse to a walk on the long drive that led to the house. The road was lined with three hundred sixty-six beech trees, one for every day of the year, including the extra needed for leap year. At one point there was a gap in the row. Next to the blackened fragments of a lightning-struck stump, a brave young sapling grew.
    He studied the sapling, wondering who had cared enough for tradition to plant that tree. The exemplary Mr. Weston, perhaps? More likely one of the local people. The Davenports had come and gone, but the tenants who had worked this land for generations remained.
    The drive curved at the end, and the house came into view all at once, without warning. He pulled up involuntarily, his eyes hungrily scanning the facade. Strickland was a manor house, midway in size between the humble cottage and the great lordly mansions. Built of the mellow Ham Hill stone that was quarried locally, it was similar to a thousand other seats of the English squirearchy.
    When he was a child, the summit of his ambition had been to become master of Strickland. He’d always known that as the eldest son he would someday inherit, and his goal had been to make himself worthy of wearing his father’s mantle. He, too, would care for the land, would know every tenant’s name, and have a sweet for every child he met. He, too, would be a man greeted everywhere with respect, not fear. And, like his father, he would have a wife who glowed when her husband entered the room.
    Then, in a few short, horrifying days, everything had changed. When his uncle’s secretary had come to take the orphan to Wargrave Park, Reggie had gone without question, dazed but obedient to adult authority. He’d yearned for the day when he could finally return to Strickland, until his uncle had told him in harsh, unfeeling words that the estate was not his, nor ever would be.
    After that he had no longer thought of Strickland as his home. He tried not to think of Strickland at all. During the years when he’d believed he would become the next Earl of Wargrave, he had known that his boyhood home would be a minor part of his inheritance, but he never intended to live there again.
    Now, in the end as in the beginning, there was only Strickland. His great expectations had vanished, and he was merely a man of good family and bad reputation, no longer young.
    But for the first time in his life, he was a landowner, and in England land was the source of power and consequence. If he ever hoped to find a meaning for his existence, it must be found here. If only he weren’t so weary... .
    His mouth tightened into a hard line when he realized that his thoughts were dangerously close to self-pity. Urging his horse forward again, he tried to recall what he knew about his mother’s family. Her maiden name had been Stanton, but apart from that and his personal memories of her, he could recall nothing.
    Strange how children accept their surroundings without question. He had never guessed that the estate belonged to his mother. Her family must have been solid,