The Silver Lord
Miranda Jarrett
On the surface, Fan Winslow appeared to be the prim and proper housekeeper of Feversham Hall. In actuality, she was secretly heading a notorious smuggling gang based off the rambling estate's stormy coast. The arrival of Feversham's new owner, Captain Lord George Claremont, however, threatened to ruin her thriving business.Having lived down the shame his rakehell father had brought upon their family, George Claremont lived by his honor and the kingdom's laws. Dubbed the Silver Lord for his feats in battle as much as for his sterling reputation, the celebrated navy hero was duty bound to stop any and all illegal activity on his property…even if the villain was a mysterious beauty with eyes no man could resist. Would turbulent passion be enough to forever unite lovers on opposite sides of the law?
George. A saint’s name, the name of kings and now the name of Feversham’s new owner.
But oh, when did Fan begin thinking of him like that, as George instead of his string of titles? She was his housekeeper, his servant, not his friend and certainly not his lover. To address him with such familiarity would be one more slippery step downward to her own ruin, with no way ever to climb back.
That kiss on her hand had been another. Why, why hadn’t she pulled away? Could she only protest when there were others watching? Or was she so weak that she’d cared more for that shiver of heady pleasure that came from his touch?
The Silver Lord
Harlequin Historical #648
Praise for bestselling author
MIRANDA JARRETT
“Miranda Jarrett continues to reign as the
queen of historical romance.”
—Romantic Times
“A marvelous author…each word is a treasure,
each book a lasting memory.”
—The Literary Times
“Miranda Jarrett is a sparkling talent!”
—Romantic Times
#647 TEMPTING A TEXAN
Carolyn Davidson
#649 THE ANGEL OF DEVIL’S CAMP
Lynna Banning
#650 BRIDE OF THE TOWER
Sharon Schulze
The Silver Lord
Miranda Jarrett
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
Available from Harlequin Historicals and
MIRANDA JARRETT
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With Affection & Regards
Contents
Chapter One (#u851ff357-8a8f-5e1a-b65b-970525c83469)
Chapter Two (#u372cde86-c642-5665-819f-cf0a3082ecd8)
Chapter Three (#u5052af1e-6d70-5515-b9ef-eea039e74175)
Chapter Four (#u6ef646e9-3f2f-5956-9408-8da31bcaf6fc)
Chapter Five (#u82dfab60-8db7-5cb7-9ebe-3eb2af5fb058)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Feversham Downs, Kent
March, 1802
The fog clung close to the coast, so gray and heavy and icy-wet that it seemed like an extension of the sea itself, risen up into the night sky solely to increase the misery of any shivering creatures it might touch. This fog had stolen away the moon and stars along with all earthly landmarks, and even the great rush and crash of the waves seemed muffled and muted. It was a night fit for neither Christian man nor beast, and certainly not for a lady.
But for Fan Winslow, it was the most perfect night imaginable.
“Keep the light covered, Bob,” she said briskly to the man on the horse beside her. “Even in this murk, I won’t have the risk of a glimmer to betray us.”
Dutifully the man tugged at the hinged window on the tin lantern swinging from the stake in the sand, the awkward bulges in his coat betraying the pistols in his belt. Though there was seldom any trouble, they were always armed; in this trade, it would be foolish to take the risk of doing otherwise. Now only the tiniest pinpricks of light showed through the punched holes on the back of the lantern, and Fan nodded her approval, drawing her black cloak more closely around her huddled shoulders.
Faith, as if that could keep out more of this wretched cold! The fog would always have its way, icy fingers that could creep through the woolen layers of petticoats and stockings and mittens and shawls under her cloak. The only real warmth came from the sturdy little horse beneath her, for Pie’s shaggy rough coat had been bred for weather like this. Fan wasn’t as fortunate, and she pulled the scarf higher over her face, trying to preserve some semblance of a ladylike complexion, even as the salty wet chill made her cheeks ache and her eyes tear, and plastered the few loose curls of her hair like clammy seaweed against her forehead and neck.
Yet still she and Bob Forbert waited on the beach, steadfastly staring out into the fog to where the little boat must be, squinting so hard to see what Fan prayed would be there that her exhausted eyes teared from the effort. Except for those careful few who knew the truth, no one would guess her place by day at Feversham Hall, or understand the risk she took by coming here on this night, and on scores of others like it.
Furtively she puffed her breath against the rough wool of the scarf pulled over her mouth, hoping to warm herself however she could, and twisted the reins in her cold-numbed fingers. It was a perfect night for their trade, exactly the weather she always prayed for. A fog like this kept secrets as surely as the grave itself.
But how long had she been standing here by the sea, the spray that blew towards them like tumbled flakes of snow? Had it been one hour, two, even three? She could reach for the heavy watch she wore at her waist, but to do so would make her look weak and unsure of herself, as if she hadn’t planned and anticipated every last detail of this night. She couldn’t let Bob sense her uncertainty. She couldn’t let him, or any of the others, ever see her be less than absolutely confident.
But hadn’t Father taught her that, never to show doubt to those who depended upon her? These folk are our people, Father would say, his black brows bristling with seriousness, these are the Winslow Company. They’re our responsibility, and you must be ready to put them first. That’s how it’s always been for us Winslows, daughter. We must be brave, be sure, be true. We must, my girl, else we’ll never hold their respect and their loyalty, nor shall we deserve it.
But then Father would never have imagined her in his place here on the beach, waiting with the lantern and pistols and praying that she’d said the right things to make the men follow….
“Leastways they’ll be no red coats after us tonight, mistress,” said Bob, spitting in the sand as an extra measure of contempt. “Nor blue Navy ones, neither. None of them bastards’d take their fat rumps from the hearth in this cold.”
“They’re all fair-weather rogues, true enough,” said Fan. “Let them stay by their hearths, I say, and leave us honest folk to ourselves.”
It had been a warm, clear night early last summer, the air full of the sweet scent of hay and new clover, when Father had let a bellyful of unwatered French brandy at the Tarry Man in Tunford rob him of his common sense. Off he’d stumbled towards the marshes and the beach with his old friend Tom Hawkins, the pair of them bellowing wicked songs about the king beneath the bright crescent moon, certain that there’d be a boat coming in from Boulougne.
And to her sorrow, it was the last she or anyone else had seen of either her father or Tom. Some said they’d drowned and been washed out to sea. Others were sure they’d been murdered, shot dead and their bodies hidden away by some rival company. There was even one version, still popular at the Tarry Man, that they’d simply hopped aboard some vessel for France on a whim, and were there now, drinking their fill of brandy and chasing the ladies and blithely turning their backs on their old lives.
Yet the stories were no more than guesses, without any proof one way or the other. All that Fan knew for certain was that her father had never come back, and that she missed him dreadfully, and that ever since that night, she’d been standing here in his place, waiting and hoping and praying for his return.
“There, mistress, there be the boat!” exclaimed Bob, pointing out through the fog. “Just like you said it would be, mistress! Just like you said!”
Fan nodded again, hiding her relief. She hadn’t been nearly as certain that Ned Markham would risk bringing the Sally in on such a night, but now she could see the bobbing yellow light on the sloop’s prow for herself. The pattern of the signal was the same they’d always used: one quick flash, two slow.
Fan leaned forward to uncover the face of her own lantern, and answered the signal in reverse with two slow flashes, one quick. Then, at last, Fan uncovered her flame and let the beam shine bright and steady, a kind of makeshift lighthouse here on the beach. The Sally’s pilot would need such a signal, for without the lantern’s light, he’d have the devil of a time guessing exactly where lay the mouth of the narrow channel called the Tunford Stream.
On the far side of the dunes the others were waiting, the trusted Company men with the horses, as well as the porters and carriers hired for the night. They all would work together with the Sally’s crew in well-practiced efficiency, bringing seven hundred pounds of China tea ashore without paying a single penny to the Customs House or the Crown.
She watched the boat drawing close, the sail just visible through the mist and fog. The tedium of waiting here on the beach was nearly done, and the next few hours would fly by, a race against the dawn. If everything went as planned, she would see the last pony, laden with tea, off over the hills before the night began to fade on the eastern horizon, and be back at Feversham with the cock’s crow, and so weary she’d barely be able to climb the back stairs to her bed.
“Who be takin’ our tea this time, mistress?” asked Bob, hopping up and down beside her with excitement, or maybe the cold. “The innkeeper in Lydd, same as last week, or that new bloke clear from London?”
“Hush yourself, Bob,” ordered Fan sharply, appalled he’d speak so freely. “Haven’t I told you before to keep your peace about our affairs here?”
“But mistress, I—”
“No chatter, Bob, not even to me,” she answered, cutting him off. “Or is that the path you’re wishing to take, Bob Forbert? Betraying us all with your idle guesses and follies?”
“Nay, mistress,” said Bob, anxiously wringing his hands in their fingerless gloves. “Nay, mistress, not by half.”
“Not by halves nor wholes nor quarters, either,” said Fan. “If you wish to share the Company’s profits, then you must abide by our rules.”
“’Course I shall, mistress!” cried Bob defensively. “I’ve my family to feed, mistress! I’m not like you with only yourself to look after!”
That hurt; that hurt, but since it was the truth, what could Fan say? “Off with you, Bob,” she said, hiding her bitterness, “and tell the others the Sally’s nigh. I’ll follow on my own, as soon as I’m sure they’ve followed the lantern.”
At once the man turned his pony and trotted away across the sand, while Pie whinnied and shifted restlessly, eager to be off as well. Swiftly Fan drew the pony in, wondering unhappily if Bob’s haste was because he was trying to prove his loyalty, or if he simply wished to be away from her criticism.
She’d heard what some of the men in the Company said behind her back, how since her father had disappeared, she’d become sharp-tongued and hard, the worst kind of shrill spinster. It didn’t matter that the Company had continued to prosper under her leadership, or that the runs were planned with greater efficiency now, or even that their profits had grown while the government’s patrols had increased along the coast with the end of the war. All they had to grumble over was the trial of taking orders from a leader in petticoats, even if she was Joss Winslow’s daughter. She didn’t want to consider how much longer they would listen to her, or what she would do if they stopped altogether.
But because Father would wish it, she’d done her best to hold the Winslow Company together, taking each day and night as it came. Whether with the Company or in her place at Feversham, she’d always taken pride in being a hard worker, in doing things the proper way.
Yet now nothing seemed right or proper in her life. Ever since last summer, she’d exactly the same feeling as she had standing on this beach tonight: empty and cold and joyless, and absolutely, completely alone.
Chapter Two
Always prepare for the worst, and you’ll never be disappointed.
This was hardly the sort of cheerful altruism that guided the lives of most English peers. Blue blood and privilege didn’t generally go hand-in-hand with such sturdy pessimism. But although Captain Lord George Claremont had in fact been born the legitimate second son of the Duke of Strachen, he’d learned from hard experience that the worst could be lurking around the next corner, and all too often was.
No wonder, then, that as George leaned back against the musty leather squabs of the hired carriage, he concentrated on how best to attack the rest of this gray Kent morning.
No, not attack. He was in the civilian world now, and civilians did not take kindly to attacking of any sort. He must remember that, even if it broke a habit of eighteen years’ standing. Impatiently he brushed away a speck of lint from the gold-laced sleeve of his good dress coat, refusing to believe it had been quite so long that he’d worn a uniform of the same dark blue.
Sweet damnation, it had been eighteen years, hadn’t it? He hadn’t paused to do the figuring for a while, but the facts were still the same. He’d been only eleven when he’d been unceremoniously sent to sea, as wretched and homesick an excuse for a midshipman in His Majesty’s Navy as was ever created. But the Navy had given him a structure and values that his own family had never had, and against all his wishes he’d survived, even prospered. Now, at twenty-nine, he had risen to be a full captain of one of the fastest frigates in the service with a crack crew of seamen to match, and as thoroughly content with his lot as any man had a right to be in this life.
Or rather he had been content, before the politicians had signed that infernal peace and he’d been deposited on the beach like every other good sailor. At least he was better off than most of his fellow-officers, and with a grumbled oath he remembered the fantastic good fortune that had, finally, brought him here to Kent.
He glanced once more at the printed sheet that the property agent had given him in London.
FEVERSHAM HALL
A Most Handsome & Agreeable Seat of the
First Order in the County of Kent
Discreetly Situated & Elegantly Appointed
Highly Suitable for a Gentleman’s Family
Available for Immediate
Consideration & Possession
The crude drawing beneath this proclamation showed an old-fashioned, rambling house from the stately days of Queen Bess, with dark timbers criss-crossing white plaster walls and diamond-patterned windows. Roses bloomed on either side of the front door and handsome old trees shaded the curving drive, and in the distance was a picturesque glimpse of shining water and an improbable winged goddess with a trumpet hovering over the waves.
Ever skeptical, George frowned at the illustration. “Elegantly Appointed”, hah: most likely there were bats in the chimneys and mice in the walls, and the slates on a roof that old were sure to let in the rain in torrents. He’d no more real use for a grand house in the country like this one than he did for a three-legged cockerel.
He didn’t hunt and he didn’t give grand entertainments that lasted for weeks, the two usual reasons for country living. He didn’t feel the imperative to have a home tagged onto his name, of always being referred to as “Lord George Claremont of Pretentious Hall.” Besides, he’d no intention of lingering on land any longer than he had to, and as for the family that required the suitable arranging that the advertisement had promised—he certainly didn’t have so much as a wife, nor, given his career, was he ever likely to acquire one.
Yet for the first time in his life he had the means to support the title he’d been born to. He hadn’t inherited the dukedom or their father’s debts with it, thank God, the way his older brother Brant had, but he was still a Claremont, and there were certain obligations to the family that should—and now could—be maintained. He was an officer of the king, too. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life ashore living in the same ragtag lodgings over a tavern in Portsmouth.
The carriage slowed to turn off the main road, and with new interest George studied the landscape. There was a wildness to this part of Kent that he’d always liked, so different from the plump, sunny contentedness of his native Sussex. It had the additional advantages of being far enough from Portsmouth to excuse him from calling on admirals’ wives, yet almost exactly equidistant between Claremont Hall, where Brant lived, and Chowringhee, the oddly named house that his younger brother Revell had built for his new wife Sara.
On this overcast day, the flat gray of the sky seemed to merge with the silvery sweep of the Romney Marshes, a place that fell somewhere between land and the restless waters of the Channel. This coast was known to have an unhappy history, replete with shipwrecks and smuggling, and it looked it. The few scattered trees had been bent and gnarled by the wind, and as far as the horizon stretched George could see no friendly curls of smoke to mark a cottage chimney. He’d not be troubled by inquisitive neighbors, that was certain. A desultory handful of gulls riding the wind and a herd of shaggy brown sheep, huddled along a stone wall for shelter as they grazed at the stubbled grass, were the only living things in the entire bleak picture.
The driver turned again and swore as he struggled to control the weary horses. The new road was narrower and even more rutted, and George braced himself to keep from being bounced from his seat to the floor. One more way to hold unwanted visitors at bay, he thought wryly, and craned his neck for his first glimpse of the house that surely must be near.
And once again, he’d been wise to expect the worst.
Clearly the London artist who’d been called upon to draw the house had never seen it for himself, but had made his illustration based on another’s description. Like the blind men and the elephant in the old fable, the stark results were based far more on imagination than reality. The ancient timbers and the white plaster and the diamond-paned windows were there, true, but there was no sign of the gracious old oaks or the rosebushes, and the drive was neither curving nor welcoming, but scarcely more than another rutted path to the door.
“Here we be, M’Lord Cap’n,” said the driver as he opened the carriage door for George. His face was ruddy from the cold, his breath coming in white puffs, as he kept a suspicious eye on the scruffy boy who’d appeared to hold the horses. “Feversham Hall, M’Lord Cap’n.”
George nodded, too intent on studying the house itself to venture more. The old timbers were splitting and silvered, the plaster needed patching, last summer’s weeds still dangled from the eaves, and nothing seemed to be parallel to anything else. Even that wretched boy with the horses would have to be taught to comb his hair and stand properly. If he took the house, he’d have plenty of work ahead to make it shipshape and Bristol-fashion. He’d have to bring in his own people up from the Nimble to see that things were done right, beginning with filling in the ditches in that hideous excuse for a road.
He nodded again, allowing himself a wry smile of determined anticipation with it. A right challenge this would be, wouldn’t it? If Addington and his blasted treaty had put the French out of his reach, at least for now, why not direct his energies and those of his idle crewmen towards replacing rotting timbers and split shingles? Perhaps “attack” had been the right word after all.
Purposefully he climbed the stone steps to thump his knuckles on the front door. The agent in London was supposed to have sent word about George’s arrival to the caretaker who lived in the house—a caretaker who was not only negligent in his duties, but dawdled at answering the door, decided George impatiently as he counted off the seconds he waited. If he took the house, one of his first tasks would be to send this worthless fellow packing.
George knocked again, harder. Where in blazes was the rascal, anyway?
He heard a scurry of footsteps inside, the clank and scrape of the lock being unbolted, and at last the heavy old door swung open on groaning iron hinges that needed as much attention as everything else. That much George had expected.
But he’d never anticipated the woman now standing before him.
She was tall, nearly as tall as George was himself, and even the simply cut dark gown that she wore with the white kerchief around her throat couldn’t hide that she was a handsomely made woman, one that would draw his eye anywhere. Just enough thick, dark hair showed beneath her cap to emphasise the whiteness of her skin, and her mouth had the kind of rich fullness that lonely sailors dream of. She seemed as if she’d been fashioned with the same contradictions as the landscape around her, dramatic and unyielding, beautiful yet severe, with thick-lashed eyes the mysterious smokey-gray of the mist that rose from Romney Marsh.
Yet though she wasn’t some giddy maidservant ripe for dalliance—she was too self-possessed for that—she wasn’t a lady, either, not answering her own door. The housekeeper, then, to stand with such authority. She was most definitely a different kind of beauty from the dithering, highborn London ladies he’d spend the last fortnight with, women so overbred and insubstantial in their white muslin gowns that a good west wind would have blown them away. But not this one, not at all, and George caught himself studying her with considerably more interest than he should.
“Good day, sir,” she said. The clipped words sounded more like a warning than a greeting, nor did she step to one side to invite him to enter. “We have been expecting you, Captain Claremont.”
“Captain Lord Claremont,” he corrected, his smile intended not to soften his words, but to show he meant them. “If you have been expecting my arrival, then you should know how to address me properly. ‘Good day, Captain My Lord’, not ‘sir.”’
Her eyes might have narrowed—he couldn’t be certain from the way the shadows fell across her face—but she most definitely did not smile.
“As you wish,” she said, pointedly omitting any title at all as she finally stepped aside and held back the door.
He walked past her, tucking his hat beneath his arm. As his eyes adjusted from the gray light outside, he could see that the interior of the house was in much the same state as the outside. Everything was well-ordered, scrubbed and swept, clean and in its place, but the cushions on the chairs were threadbare and the walls needed paint, the sorts of shabbiness that came from a lack of money, not inclination.
“Mr. Winslow is to show me the house,” he said as he ran his hand lightly along the carved oak leaves on the newel post. “Please summon him directly.”
“Mr. Winslow isn’t here,” she answered, so quickly that he was sure she’d been anticipating the question. “He is—he is away at present.”
“Is he indeed?” George was surprised; he knew the agent had been quite specific about his visit since there’d been so few inquiries about the house.
“Indeed, he is.” She flushed as she noticed his gaze shift to her clasped hands, looking for a wedding ring. “Mr. Winslow is my father, not my husband. I can show you the house every bit as well as he.”
He held his hat before him and bowed, just from the waist, and smiled. She deserved that from him. It wasn’t any of his business whether she had a husband or not. Still, for some reason he was glad she wasn’t married to the ne’er-do-well caretaker, but instead merely burdened with the rascal as her father. “Then show away, Miss Winslow. Show away!”
She didn’t smile in return the way he’d hoped, though the flush remained in her cheeks. “You will not like the house.”
He frowned. “Why are you so certain?”
“Because none of you fine London-folk do.”
“Then it is a good thing I am neither from London, nor what you would deem ‘fine’, being a sailor,” he said, wondering why the devil she seemed so determined to warn him away. “You are not quite as knowledgeable as you believe yourself to be, Miss Winslow.”
“Nor am I quite so ignorant as it pleases you to think,” she said. “Even here in Kent, we have heard of the ‘Silver Lord’. Rich as the king himself, they say you are now, and all from plundering that Spanish treasure ship.”
“‘They’ do not always tell the truth, Miss Winslow.” He should have realized his new fame would have preceded him, even to this remote place, and he doubted he’d ever grow accustomed to that hideous soubriquet that his own brother Brant had concocted. But unlike the greedy admiration and interest his good fortune had brought him in London, this woman seemed disdainful, her gaze patently unimpressed as it swept over his uniform.
“Now shall you show me this house, Miss Winslow,” he asked, “or will you leave me to find my own way?”
He couldn’t tell if she sighed with resignation, or irritation, or simply took a deep breath as she turned towards the first room to the left of the hall.
“The oldest part of Feversham Hall was built in 1445 by Sir William Everhart,” she began, lecturing like a governess with her hands folded before her at her waist. “It was supposed to be called Rose Hall, but the Feversham stuck instead because of the fevers and miasmas that rose each summer from the marshes. They say from fear of fevers, Sir William wouldn’t come down from London until he’d been assured of a killing frost.”
“I can understand the old gentleman’s reluctance,” said George as he followed. “I saw what yellow-jack could do to an entire fleet in Jamaica. I wonder that you don’t worry for your own health, Miss Winslow, living so near to the marshes.”
She paused, staring at him as if he’d asked the most foolish question in the world. “I have always lived near the marshes, and I cannot imagine living anywhere else. Besides, it’s only the outsiders that are stricken with the fevers. We folk that live here always are never touched.”
“So if I were to make this my home,” he asked, “then I should never be touched either?”
“Shifting your home to here would make no difference at all,” she answered firmly. “Not even you can have whatever you wish to buy. At Feversham, you would always—always—be an outsider. Now here, this is the front parlor.”
He frowned, tapping his thumbs along the brim of the hat in his hands. He was accustomed to being obeyed by his crewmen and most everyone else he encountered in his life, and he certainly hadn’t been corrected with such directness by a woman since he’d left the nursery.
The same woman who’d just turned her back to him—to him!—and was now walking briskly away as if he were nothing more than that lowly stable-boy.
“Miss Winslow,” he said, his voice automatically marshalling the authority of the Nimble’s quarterdeck. “Miss Winslow. Have you forgotten that I have come here solely to inspect this house for the purpose of making it my own?”
Slowly she turned, her hands still clasped before her, and gazed at him over her shoulder with unsettling evenness, almost as if they were equals.
“I have forgotten neither your purpose nor mine, no,” she said, her head tipped to one side so the pale light slipped across the curve of her cheek. “You are here to see Feversham, just as I am here to show it.”
He let out his breath slowly, unaware until that moment that he’d been holding it. “I am glad you have recalled your duty, Miss Winslow.”
“Yes, Captain My Lord.” She turned her head another fraction to the left as she dipped a quick curtsey of unconvincing contrition. “I recall everything. My duty, and my miserable low station before my betters. I shall not forget either again, Captain My Lord.”
Before he could reply she’d swept into the next room, tugging aside the heavy curtains at the windows. Weak sunlight, swirling with motes, filtered through the tiny, diamond-shaped panes and drifted over furniture shrouded in white cloths like so many ghosts. Miss Winslow didn’t glide through the parlor like London ladies, but went striding across the patterned floor so purposefully that her black skirts flurried and fluttered around her ankles in white-thread stockings.
But the skirts and the ankles were the least of it. Why in blazes did he have the distinct impression that by agreeing with him as she had, she’d still somehow bested him?
“There are sixteen chairs made of the same Weald oak to match the panelling,” she announced, twitching aside a dropcloth to display the tall-backed armchair beneath it. “It is considered most rare to have the complete set like this.”
Most rare the chairs might be, but George was in no humor to appreciate it. “That chair is a right ugly piece of work, Miss Winslow,” he said testily, “whether it has fifteen brothers or a hundred, and I’d wager it’s barbarously uncomfortable in the bargain.”
“That is your judgment, My Lord.” A fresh spark of challenge lit Miss Winslow’s gray eyes as she flipped the cover back over the offending chair. “The last master, Mr. Trelawney, appreciated the old ways in his home.”
“Or perhaps,” said George, “Mr. Trelawney was simply too tightfisted to make the necessary renovations to bring the old ways up to snuff with the new.”
“And what if he was, Captain My Lord, or what if he wasn’t?” she demanded tartly. “It’s been four years since Mr. Trelawney died, and nothing has been changed in that time. I told you the house wouldn’t suit you.”
George raised a single brow. “I haven’t said that it didn’t, have I?”
“You’ve as much as said it, saying everything’s gone fusty and shabby,” she said, her voice warming. “The other Trelawneys up north aren’t about to keep up with London fashions and improvements when what’s here will serve well enough. Times are hard, what with the wars and all, and the Trelawneys aren’t the sort to go tossing good coins after bad for no reason.”
“But what a wonderfully fine thing their carelessness is for me, Miss Winslow,” countered George, “especially if the shabbiness of the ‘old ways’ lowers Feversham’s asking price.”
She dipped her chin, letting the words simmer and stew between them. Too late she’d realized he’d been teasing her, and clearly the knowledge hadn’t made her happy with him, or herself, either.
“Through these doors lies the dining room,” she said curtly, turning with an abrupt squeak of her heel to lead the way.
George followed, keeping his little smile to himself. He’d won this particular skirmish handily, and he suspected there’d be more to come before they were done. Clearly Miss Winslow hated losing just as much as he did—which was making this tour a great deal more interesting than the old-fashioned furniture and creaking steps.
Their truce lasted through the tour of the dining room, the drawing room, and another dark little parlor pretending to be a library, though the shelves appeared to hold not books, but a mouldering collection of badly preserved stuffed gamebirds. The same uneasy peace held between them as they went downstairs and through the empty servants’ hall, past the laundry and the dairy and the echoing catacombs of the pantry, scullery, and kitchen, where George decided there was nothing more desultory than a kitchen bereft of the bullying chatter of a cook and the savory fragrances of roasting and baking, or sadder to see than a cold, clean-swept hearth with a row of empty spits above it.
How in blazes did Miss Winslow live in the middle of this? Surely she couldn’t be spending night and day alone among these shrouded chairs and mouldering walls, not and keep that straight defiance in her back and the sharp spark in her eyes. Surely there must be some other small, snug cottage on the land where she and her old father lived, some other place that was home.
But if that were so, then why did she still have so much pride in the old hall, shabby as it was? And why, when he had the power to restore it, did she seem so resentful of such a possibility? Why was she so intent on chasing him away?
And why, really, did he care?
“This is the mistress’s bedchamber,” she was saying as she threw open the shutters of the next-to-last room upstairs. “It has not been used in a long time, Mr. Trelawney being a bachelor-gentleman.”
“But doubtless at least one visiting queen or another has slept here,” said George, gazing at the enormous canopy bed, the heavily carved posts and the faded white and gold brocade hangings still maintaining a rare, regal grandeur. “Isn’t that always the case with the grand beds in these old houses?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Not here, not at Feversham. No lady’s ever slept in that bed that hadn’t a wedded right to it.”
Unable to resist such an opening, he patted the bed’s faded coverlet. “You’ve not been tempted to try it yourself, Miss Winslow? Not once, for a lark, to see how the mistress slumbered?”
Fiercely she shook her head, even as she blushed. Ah, he thought, so she had tried the bed, no matter how severe and proper she aspired to be. What woman wouldn’t, really, when tempted with a bedstead fit for a queen?
Or fit for a smoke-eyed woman with a queen’s own bearing….
“You have not asked of the roof, My Lord,” she said hurriedly, wishing so clearly to move from the topic of the bed that he almost—almost—regretted twitting her about it. “Most of you Londoners ask after that.”
He glanced up towards the ceiling, where the white plaster was stained yellow from obvious water damage. “I assume that there is one?”
“Of course,” she said. “It is made of tiles, to replace the old thatch.”
“And does it leak, Miss Winslow, this tiled roof?”
She looked upward, too, following his gaze. “Rain is a part of our life here, Captain My Lord. Raindrops and sea-spray—why, we scarce notice them, nor the marks that they leave.”
He smiled, knowing inevitably what would come next. “But the Londoners notice?”
“Oh, yes,” she said with undeniable triumph in her voice, and for the first time she smiled in return, quick and determined, in a way that seemed to link them together for that instant. “They do. Here is the last room for you to see, My Lord, the master’s chamber. You shall understand for yourself why it is the most perfect room in the entire house.”
His own smile lingered as he followed her, thinking of how that grin of hers was already as close to perfection as anything he’d see today. He’d tolerate a good winter’s worth of water-marked plaster to be able to see her look at him like that again.
But as soon as she pulled back the heavy velvet curtains, he forgot everything else but the view that rolled away before him. Here the old-fashioned diamond panes had been replaced with newer casements, freeing the landscape. The overgrown remnants of a garden huddled close to the house, then a band of wind-stunted oaks and evergreens that ran to a ragged edge of sandy land, and then—then lay the restless, shimmering silver of the sea, the horizon softened on a gray day like this so the waves and sky blended into one. What he would see from these windows would never be the same twice, just like the sea itself, and just like the sea, he’d always be drawn irresistibly back to it.
“Mark what I say, Captain My Lord,” said Miss Winslow swiftly, realizing too late the cost of sharing perfection. “There is so much wrong with Feversham that you cannot see for yourself, not in so short a time! Every chimney needs repointing, and every fireplace smokes. I cannot count the panes missing from the windows, the lead in the mullions having gone so brittle. The last cook left over how the bake-ovens are crumbling to dust from the inside, and there’s so many bats living in the attic that they’d come down into the servants’ quarters, too, making the maidservants all give notice from fright.”
He was only half listening, because none of it mattered. He would make whatever was wrong into right, wouldn’t he? There’d be no better way to spend his Spanish silver than this. He would have the curtains taken down from these windows, and he would never replace them. He would want to wake to this, his own private square of sea, and he would want to fall asleep to it each night as well.
“Shall I call your carriage, Captain My Lord?” the gray-eyed woman beside him was asking. “You should begin your journey now, before it grows later. Your driver will not wish to take his horses on our roads after dark.”
“Thank you, Miss Winslow,” he said gently. He could hardly fault her if she wished to keep such a magical place as this to herself, could he? But if he hadn’t come, then someone else would, and at least he would be sure to give her and her worthless old father a handsome parting settlement when he let them go. “Tell the driver I shall be ready in half an hour’s time.”
“You will leave, then, Captain My Lord?” she asked, the relief in her eyes strangely sad. “You will be gone from Feversham?”
He nodded, wishing for her sake that the truth didn’t feel like deceit. He would leave, but he meant to return, and then he wouldn’t leave again until he’d new orders from his admiral. He would always come back to Feversham because, like every wandering sailor, at last he’d found his home. He’d prepared for the worst, and been granted better than he’d ever dreamed.
He’d found perfection.
Chapter Three
Fan stood on the bench and gazed out over the score of expectant faces turned up towards her, her hands clasped before her to hide any trembling. The candlelight from the lanterns flickered with the drafts that found their way in through the barn’s timbers, and the men of the Company were waiting so quietly that she could hear the horses at their hay, rustling and nickering in their stalls behind her.
“I know there’s talk at the tavern in town,” she began, “and I’m not the kind to pretend otherwise. The hard truth is this—that a Londoner came to look at Feversham with an eye towards buying it.”
She let the muttered oaths and exclamations settle before she continued. “But this fine gentleman found the house old and inconvenient, with much lacking,” she said, adding a bit of purposeful scorn to her voice for extra emphasis, “and I do not expect him to bother with us again.”
“You didn’t show him this barn, did you, mistress?” called one man to the raucous delight of his friends. “He wouldn’t’ve found much lacking there if’n you had.”
“Nay, Tom, not the barn, nor the privies, either,” she answered dryly. “I kept our secrets to ourselves, where they belong. But I did take care not to show him the house in the best of lights, just to be sure. The sight of old Master Trelawney’s moldy stuffed pigeons seemed enough to send him racing back to London, his driver whipping those hired horses for all he was worth.”
They laughed again, as much from relief as from amusement, and pushed and shoved at each other, as if to prove that way that they hadn’t been worried, not at all. But Fan knew she wasn’t entirely free of the questions, not as long as Bob Forbert stood in the front of the crowd, chewing on the inside of his mouth and shifting nervously from one scrawny leg to the other.
“The boy that watered the coachman’s horses, mistress,” he said, his voice squeaking as he strived to make himself heard. “The boy said the man weren’t no regular Londoner, but a fancy lord and a king’s officer, a Navy man in a coat all glittering with gold lace. Do that be true, mistress? That some bleeding gold-lace officer was here poking his long nose around our affairs?”
Instantly the laughter and raillery stopped, and all the faces swung back towards Fan for an answer.
“Yes,” she said slowly, carefully. “He was Captain Lord George Claremont of His Majesty’s Navy, but all that interested him was the house.”
Smuggling took money from the king’s pockets, and in turn the king took catching smugglers most seriously. Officers like Captain Lord Claremont were sworn to capture smugglers as enemies of the crown, especially now with the country at peace with France. Such an officer could destroy her life as well, if he learned of her role in the Company, and there wasn’t a man in the barn who wasn’t thinking the same.
How simple it sounded that way, how clean and uncomplicated, when in fact the captain’s visit was still twisting away at her, as sharp as a new-honed knife. When she’d received the letter from the Trelawneys’ agent in London, she’d imagined the captain to be the model of Navy cruelty, with a twisted, squinting face as weather-beaten as a cliff to reflect the wickedness of his personality.
But an aristocratic captain: what could possibly make for a worse combination? To be sure, she’d next to no experience with arrogant noblemen, though she’d heard enough tales of how they were all riddled with the pox and fat from too much drink and wickedness. And considering this one’s reputation as a famously daredevil frigate captain—the agent had made quite a point of that—he’d likely also have lost an arm or leg in battle, or be hideously seamed with scars. She had pictured the visitor like this in alarming detail, steeling herself for the unpleasant task of showing him the house.
But what she had never imagined was the reality of Captain Lord Claremont who had presented himself on Feversham’s doorstep.
She had, quite simply, never in her life met such a gentleman, let alone found one standing on the doorstep before her. He was appallingly handsome, tall and broad-shouldered and lean, and the dark blue coat and white breeches of his uniform were so closely fitted that she’d no more need at all for her imagination.
It wasn’t just that he had all his limbs, unlike the Captain Claremont she’d been picturing in her mind. This Captain Claremont stood before her with an assurance that was new to Fan, a kind of unquestionable confidence that came from inside the man, not from any tailor’s needle. She could see it in his eyes, his smile, even the way his dark hair waved back from his forehead. She’d known her share of brave men, but their bravery had come from muscle and force, while this one—this one would have the same muscle and force, true enough, but it would be his intelligence and his conviction that he would win that would always give him the advantage.
And God help her, he already had it over her. He had begun by treating her like the lowliest parlor maid, and she had responded as was fitting for the housekeeper of Feversham: dignified and aloof, and justly proud of her position and the old house. He’d respected that, or so she’d thought at first.
But somehow things had shifted between them while she’d shown him the house. He’d challenged her, dared her, badgered her, until she’d done it all back to him, and not only in defense, either. She’d enjoyed testing herself against such a clever man: that was the horrible truth of it. She’d enjoyed the banter, and she’d enjoyed being with him. By the time they’d reached the bedchambers, he’d been out-and-out flirting with her, and, wretched creature that she was, she could only smile and blush like some simpleminded maid.
Her only solace came from knowing Captain Claremont had left Feversham the same day he’d come, and wouldn’t return. He’d made that clear enough, hadn’t he? She’d made a shameful fool of herself once, but at least she’d be spared doing it again. And if she let his handsome, smiling face haunt her dreams, then that would be her penance.
That, and the questions and doubts of the men before her.
“But why Feversham, mistress?” called Will Hood from the back, and others rumbled along with him in a chorus of uncertainty. “There’s scores o’ other grand houses for the likes o’ him. Why’d he come here if he’d no reason?”
“He wished a house by the sea,” answered Fan, raising her voice, praying she sounded more sure of herself than she felt. “That is what the Trelawneys’ agent in London wrote to me. He saw a drawing of Feversham, and was much taken with it. But he found the real house much lacking and inconvenient, and left disappointed, determined to find another.”
She was unwisely repeating herself, and she saw the uneasy glances passing back and forth.
“Captain Lord Claremont saw nothing to make him wish to return,” she continued, “nor anything of our affairs here. None of this barn, or your ponies, or the boats near the stream.”
“This Captain Lord Claremont, was he the same captain what made all the fuss last year?” asked Hood. “The one what stole all that silver from that dago treasure-ship? Was he your gentleman here?”
“He’s not my gentleman,” said Fan quickly, but no one else noticed the distinction, or cared.
“Likely this Claremont’s friends with the old bloody Duke o’ Richmond, too, may his bones rot in the blackest corner of Hell,” said Forbert darkly. “All them nobles are kin, aren’t they? I say this one’s come to see us broke and strung up for the gulls to pick apart, like they did to those poor blokes on Rook’s Hill near Chichester.”
“And I say you’re daft, Forbert, making no more sense than a braying jackass,” said Hood, wiping his nose with a red-spotted handkerchief. He was a sensible man, an old friend of her father’s, one she trusted and one the others listened to as well. It was also whispered in awe that Hood was strong enough to row single-handedly across the Channel to France, which doubtless added extra weight to his opinions. “Those black days o’ Richmond were your grandfather’s time, not ours.”
“But who’s to say they won’t come back?” demanded Forbert peevishly. “Who’s to say they’re not here now?”
“Because they’re not.” Impatiently Fan shoved a loose strand of her hair back under her cap. “Do you think I’d purposefully lead you astray, Bob Forbert, just for the sport of it? Do you think I’d put my own neck into the noose first? You know I’ve ways to tell Ned Markham to keep back his tea for another week if the customs men are here. Why would that be changing now?”
Hood nodded. “And mind, we’re a small company, and always have been. No high-and-mighty lord-captain’s going to bother with us, not when he can go fill his pockets as deep as he pleases catching dagos and frogs. Mistress here will tell you the same. We’re not worth the bother.”
Forbert gulped, his Adam’s apple moving frantically up and down. “But there’s a peace now,” he persisted, “and if this captain is idle, then—”
“The peace won’t last, not with the French,” said Fan quickly. “The London agent said so in his letter. He said Captain Claremont wanted to find a house at once, since he expected to be sent back to sea soon. Ned Markham’s said that, too, that the word of a Frenchman’s not worth a fig.”
“Well, then, there you are,” said Hood. “And if mistress says this lordly bloke’s not coming back, then he’s not, and that’s an end to it.”
“Yes,” said Fan, her old confidence beginning to return. Captain Claremont was no more than a single day’s inconvenience in her ordered life. Why, in another week, she’d scarce remember the color of his hair, let alone the way he’d grinned to soften his teasing about the mistress’s bed. “That is an end to it, Bob Forbert, and to Captain Lord Folderol, too. Let him take his Spanish dollars and settle in China for what I care, and a pox on anyone who says different.”
Hood nodded, the lines around his mouth creasing through the graying stubble of his beard as he smiled.
“True words, mistress, true words,” he said, clapping his hands. “How could it be otherwise with you, considering what the Navy would do to the likes of us if they could? Ha, that old bastard of a captain-mi’lordy’s lucky you didn’t shoot him dead there in his fancy carriage, just because you could!”
The others laughed, pleased by the vengeance Hood was imagining. But while Fan laughed, too, her conscience was far from merry.
Shoot the bastard dead, that’s what they wanted, dead on the step of his fancy carriage.
And forget forever the way he’d smiled, just for her, just for her….
George sat in the small office, ignoring the dish of tepid tea that the bustling clerk had brought, and considering instead the murky fog in the street outside. Though landsmen failed to mark the difference, London fog was nothing like the clean, salty fog at sea. The stuff that clogged the London air was gray and heavy as a shroud, so weighted with coal smoke and grime that he wondered the people who lived in the city could breathe it without perishing.
Not that any of them seemed to notice it, let alone complain. That in itself would set him apart from the true fashionable Londoners like his older brother Brant, His Grace the Duke of Strachen, as much at elegant ease in the chair across from him as George himself was not. If it weren’t for his uniform, George wouldn’t have the slightest notion how to dress himself, while Brant not only knew the fashions, he set them, from the precise width of this season’s waistcoat lapel to the cunning new way to wear a peridot stickpin in the center of one’s cravat.
Once again George smiled to recall how blithely Miss Winslow had lumped him in with the other Londoners, and smiled, too, to remember how she’d lifted her chin with such charming defiance when she’d done so. Yet he’d felt more instantly at home in that windswept corner of Kent than he’d ever felt in his family’s vast formal house on Hanover Square—a contradiction he intended to correct as soon as possible.
“Ah, ah, Your Grace, Captain My Lord!” exclaimed Mr. Potipher as he scurried into the office, bowing in nervous little jerks like some anxious little waterfowl in old-fashioned knee-breeches and steel spectacles. “I am so honored to have you here, so very honored!”
George didn’t even give him time to circle around to his desk. “I have come about Feversham,” he declared. “I have decided to take it.”
“You have?” exclaimed Potipher, so shocked that he briefly forgot his manners. “That is, Captain My Lord, you have found the property pleases you?”
“I have,” George answered without hesitation. “And I wish to buy it outright, not merely let it. The house requires so many improvements—which, of course, I intend to make at my expense—that it would be imprudent not to.”
“You would buy Feversham outright, Captain My Lord?” asked Potipher, shocked again. “You would make an offer this day?”
“Indeed, I will make it,” said George, “just as I expect it to be accepted. I understand the family that owns the property has had little interest in it for years, and should not be overly particular.”
“No, no, no, they shall not,” agreed the flustered agent, taking down a wooden box from the shelf behind him and rustling through the sheaf of papers it contained. “Yes, here we are. You are quite right about the Trelawneys, you know. Times being what they are, I am sure they shall be delighted to accept whatever you offer.”
George nodded, and smiled with satisfaction across the room at his brother. Brant had always been the one among the three brothers with a head for business and investments, and Society had long ago dubbed Brant the “Golden Lord”, after his ability to draw guineas seemingly from the air, while their brother Revell had been called the “Sapphire Lord” for his success in India.
It had, of course, followed that George would be labeled the “Silver Lord” on account of that single stupendous capture, a title that George himself found wretchedly embarrassing. But after today, he’d have more than that ridiculous nickname. When he left his office, he’d no longer be just a rootless, roaming sailor, but a Gentleman of Property.
But Potipher was scowling through his spectacles at a paper from the box. “You should know that there is one small consideration attached to this property, Captain My Lord.”
“My brother’s credit is sufficient for a score of country houses in Kent,” drawled Brant. “That should be no ‘consideration’ at all.”
“Oh, no, no, there was never a question of that!” Potipher smiled anxiously, the plump pads of his cheeks lifting his spectacles. “It is the housekeeper, Miss Winslow. I believe you must have met her at your, ah, inspection of the house, Captain My Lord?”
George nodded, striving to remain noncommittal. The last thing he wished was to confess to this man, and worse, to his brother, that he’d been thinking of that self-same housekeeper day and night since he’d returned, with no end to his misery in sight.
“Then I am certain you shall be willing to oblige this request from the current owners, Captain My Lord,” said the agent, his lips pursed as he scanned the letter in his hands. “Miss Winslow’s father was the house’s former caretaker, and most kind and useful to old Mr. Trelawney before his death. But it appears that recently Mr. Winslow himself has met with some manner of fatal misfortune.”
At once George thought of the young woman’s somber dress, how she’d said her father was only away, and how long it took for her to smile.
“I am sorry, on Miss Winslow’s account,” he said softly. “She is young to bear such a loss.”
“Then you will honor the Trelawneys’ request that she be assured her position as long as she wishes to retain it?” asked Potipher hopefully. “They have made it a condition, you see, Captain My Lord, having great respect for the father’s services as well as regard for Miss Winslow’s own abilities. She would certainly ease your entry into the neighborhood, recommending the best butchers and bakers and such.”
George sat, suddenly silent. To keep a lone young woman in the house once he’d settled it with his own men from the Nimble, his steward and other sailors who knew his ways and would readily adapt them to land—it would not do, it would not do in the least. He was certainly fond enough of pretty women, but he hadn’t lived in the same quarters with a female presence since he’d been a child, and to do so now could bring nothing but absolute, appalling trouble.
And then he remembered the wistfulness in Miss Winslow’s face when they’d stood together in the last bedchamber, when the view from the windows had convinced him to make the house his own. He’d realized then that she’d saved the best for last, at once hoping and dreading that he’d love it the same way that she did. Clearly she did love the weary old place as if it were her own, and he understood the depth of her sorrow at seeing it go to another. She’d already lost her father, and now she was faced with losing her home as well. He understood, and he sympathized, a good deal more of both than was likely proper.
And now there was this damned clause imposed by those damned Trelawneys, tying his hands and hers too….
“I shall leave you to consider it, Captain My Lord,” said Potipher as he rose behind his desk and began bowing his way towards the office’s door. Feversham had sat empty for years, and clearly the agent meant to be as obliging as possible if it resulted in a sale. “Pray take as long as you need to reach your decision. But I fear I must remind you that there is not another property with Feversham’s special charms in all my lists, and keeping the housekeeper is such an insignificant, small condition for such a fine estate!”
“‘Special charms’, hell,” grumbled George as the door clicked shut. “The place is such a rambling, ramshackle old pile that they should be paying me to relieve them of it.”
Not that Brant cared one way or the other. “The housekeeper, George?” he asked, pouncing with un-abashed curiosity. “You’ve been keeping secrets from me again, brother.”
George sighed mightily. “No secrets, Brant, for there’s nothing to tell.”
“Nothing?” repeated Brant archly. “I’d wager ten guineas that this Miss Winslow isn’t the sort of black-clad old gorgon who ruled our youth with terror, else you would have already described her to me in the most shuddering terms. Instead you haven’t even mentioned her existence, which tells me infinitely more than any words.”
“You will make a wager of anything,” grumbled George. This was precisely the kind of inquisition that he had wished to avoid. If there was one area where Brant delighted in displaying his superiority over his younger brother, it was his far greater experience with women—a markedly unfair advantage, really, considering that George had spent most of his adult life at sea and far from any females at all, while Brant, with his fallen-angel’s face and a peer’s title, had absolutely wallowed in them in London.
“Well?” asked Brant, undaunted. “Is she?”
George glared. “Miss Winslow is neither old, nor is she a gorgon, though she was dressed in black.”
Brant waved his hand in airy dismissal. “Black can be an elegant affectation on the right woman.”
“Not if it’s mourning,” said George sharply. “You heard Potipher, Brant. The poor woman’s just lost her father.”
But Brant would not be discouraged. “Is she sweetly melancholy, then? A delicate beauty, shown off by that black like a diamond against midnight velvet?”
“You would not find her so,” said George, his discomfort growing by the second. He’d never cared for Brant’s manner with women. True, his brother’s attitude was shared by fashionable gentlemen from the Prince of Wales downward, but the way Brant combined a connoisseur’s fastidious consideration with a predator’s single-mindedness seemed to George to include almost no regard or respect for the lady herself.
Which, of course, was not how he’d felt about Miss Winslow. “She is tall,” he said, choosing his words with care, “and handsome rather than beautiful. Dark hair, fair skin, and eyes the color of smoke.”
“Ah,” said Brant with great satisfaction as he settled back in his chair, making a little tent over his chest by pressing his fingertips together. “You sound smitten, George.”
“She is not that kind of woman, Brant,” said George defensively. “Put a broadsword in her hand, and she’d become St. Joan and smite her villains left and right, but as for leaving a trail of swooning beaux in her wake, the way you’re saying—no, not at all. She’s prickly as a dish of nettles.”
“But you are intrigued,” insisted Brant. “I know you well enough to see the signs. You’ve had the sweetest cream of fair London wafting before you this last month, and not one of them has inspired this sort of paeans from you as does this housekeeper.”
“Paeans?” repeated George incredulously. “To say she is prickly as a dish of nettles is a paean?”
Brant smiled. “From you it is, my unpoetic Neptune of a brother. I say you should take both the house and the housekeeper. Regardless of her housewifery skills, she shall, I think, offer you other amusements.”
“Amusements, hell,” said George crossly. “That’s not why I’m taking the blasted house.”
“Oh, why not?” said Brant with his usual breezy nonchalance. “Our dear brother Rev has gone and married a governess, and now you fancy a housekeeper. I’ll have to look about me for a pretty little cook to become my duchess, and make our whole wedded staff complete.”
“Just stow it, Brant,” growled George. “Just stow it at once. Potipher!”
The agent reappeared so quickly that George suspected he’d been poised on the other side door, listening.
“You have reached a decision, Captain My Lord?” he asked, hovering with cheerful expectation.
“I have not,” growled George. “What if Miss Winslow wishes to leave my employment, eh? Is she a slave to the wishes of these blasted Trelawneys as well?”
Potipher blinked warily behind his spectacles. “Oh, no, Captain My Lord, not at all. Miss Winslow will be under no obligation to remain whatsoever.”
George sighed with a grim fatalism, drumming his fingers impatiently on the arm of his chair. At least that was some small solace. He would not wish any lady, especially not one as fine as Miss Winslow, to be obligated to stay with him. Yet if he wanted Feversham—which, of course, he did, now more than ever—then he was trapped into keeping Miss Winslow with it. George did not like feeling trapped, but least Potipher was also offering him a way out: what respectable woman, young or old, would wish to remain long beneath the same roof with the crew of the Nimble?
But then George thought again of the way Miss Winslow had smiled at him, bright and determined, as if she’d enjoyed their skirmishing as much as he had himself. Although he’d nobly scorned Brant’s suggestion that he “amuse” himself with the housekeeper, he couldn’t keep from considering all the wicked possibilities and justifications the circumstances would offer, and he nearly groaned aloud at the willfulness of his wayward thoughts and willing body.
Blast, he didn’t even know her given name….
Abruptly he rose to his feet. “Then it is decided, Mr. Potipher,” he said. “I shall take Feversham, and Miss Winslow with it.”
And trust the rest to fate.
“Ooh, miss, those look most wonderful fine on you!” exclaimed the girl behind the counter of the little shop as she held the looking-glass for Fan. “They say all the noble ladies be wearin’ such in London and Bath.”
Fan turned her head before the glass, making the gold earrings with the garnet drops swing gently back and forth against her cheeks. While her Company specialized in bringing in tea, there were others along the coast that carried more jewels and lace from France than in most of the shops in the Palais Royale, and even here in the tiny harbor village of Tunford, not three miles from Feversham itself, Fan could let herself be tempted by earrings that likely were the same as the noble ladies in London were wearing.
“You’ll fetch yourself a handsome sweetheart with those a-glittering in your ears, miss,” promised the girl, nodding with mercantile wisdom. “Less’n you already have a good man, and you want me to set these aside for him to come buy for you.”
Wistfully Fan touched one earring, catching the sunlight in the faceted stone like a tiny ruby prism in the golden filigree. She’d never had a sweetheart, old or new, let alone one to give her anything like these earrings. Father hadn’t permitted it, claiming that all the Tunford boys were beneath her. Fleetingly, foolishly, she now let herself imagine what kind of roses and jewels Captain Claremont would lavish on his lady, just like the heroes in ballads.
For that matter, Fan couldn’t recall the last time she’d bought something so frivolous for herself. Instead she’d always dutifully put her share of the company’s profits into the double-locked strongbox inside the wall of her bedchamber against hard times, the way Father had instructed. She was always conscious of that, of how she wasn’t like other women with a husband to look after her. She’d no one now but herself to rely upon for the future. She’d no one to blame, either, if she died in the poorhouse, or if some cowardly fool like Bob Forbert finally decided to turn evidence against her to the magistrates.
Yet the earrings were lovely things, and Fan let herself smile at her reflection as the red-tinged sparkles danced over her cheeks.
“Them garnets are as right as can be for you, miss,” coaxed the girl. “You won’t find any finer on this coast, not in Lydd nor Hythe, neither, and I vow—la, what be that ruckus?”
The girl hurried to the shop’s doorway, the looking-glass still in her hands, and curiously Fan followed. Tunford was a small village with only a handful of narrow lanes, sleepy and quiet the way country villages always were.
But it wasn’t quiet now. Two large wagons piled high with barrels, trunks, and boxes were coming to a noisy stop before the Tarry Man, Tunford’s favorite public house, their four-horse dray teams snorting and pawing the rutted soil while their drivers bawled for the hostler. Dogs raced forward, barking and yelping with excitement, and children soon came running along, too.
Even before the wagons had stopped, the eight passengers who’d been riding precariously on top began to clamber down, laughing and jumping to the ground as nimbly as acrobats. They were strong, sinewy, exotic men, all burned dark as mahogany from the sun, with gold hoops in their ears and long braided queues down their backs: deep-water sailors, man-o’-war crewmen that were seldom seen in a group like this outside of the fleet’s ports.
“What d’you make of all that, miss?” marveled the shopgirl. “Looks like half the Brighton circus, come here to Tunford!”
But it wasn’t the Brighton circus, half or otherwise, thought Fan with sickening certainty as she watched over the other woman’s shoulder. Over and over she had told herself this wouldn’t happen, until she’d let herself believe it. What was arriving in Tunford, and soon after at Feversham, was going to outdo any mere circus, and cause a great many more problems.
Because there, riding on a prancing chestnut gelding as he joined the wagons carrying his belongings, was Captain Lord Claremont.
Chapter Four
It took considerable determination for Fan to make herself walk slowly across the lane towards Captain Claremont, as if she’d been planning all morning to do exactly that. What she really wished to do, of course, was to race back to Feversham, lock every door, and bury her head beneath her bed pillow upstairs like a terrified cony in her burrow. But Father had taught her that danger was best confronted face-to-face, and so she did, even managing a polite smile to mask the thumping of her heart.
“Good day, Captain My Lord,” she called as he swung down from his horse. “I did not expect to see you again so soon.”
Clearly surprised, he turned at her voice, ducking around the chestnut’s neck to find her. He smiled warmly as she came closer, and swept his black cocked hat from his head to salute her, there in the middle of Tunford.
“Miss Winslow,” he boomed, his voice so cheerfully loud that she was certain they must be hearing it clear in Portsmouth. “Good day to you. I did not expect to see you here, either.”
She’d forgotten how very blue his eyes were, as if they’d stolen the brightest color from the sky above, so blue that she had to look away, towards the wagons and the grinning sailors watching them with undisguised curiosity.
“You are making a journey, Captain My Lord?” she asked, foolishly saying the obvious as she hoped and prayed he was going somewhere on the far side of the world.
“I am,” he declared, the sunlight glinting off the gold buttons on his coat. “And likely you have guessed my destination as well. Feversham, Miss Winslow. Feversham, my new home port. You have received the letter from Potipher, I trust?”
“No,” said Fan faintly, the awful certainty knotting tightly in her stomach. “I have had no letter from anyone.”
“No?” The captain frowned, his blue eyes clouding. “Potipher was to have written to you. So you’d know, you see. So you’d be prepared.”
“No letter,” she said again, and swallowed hard as she tugged her shawl higher over her shoulders. She didn’t want to know, and she didn’t want to be prepared. “I’ve had nothing from—”
“Miss Winslow!” The shopgirl came puffing up beside them, her expression as stern as her round face could muster. “Miss Winslow, if you don’t be wanting them garnet ear-bobs, then I must be taking them back to the shop.”
“Oh, I am so sorry!” Fan flushed, her fingers flying guiltily to the earrings. “I forgot I even had them on. Here, take them back, if you please. I do not think they suit me after all.”
“I think they suit you vastly well,” said the captain gallantly. “A spot of color is just the thing for you.”
The flush in her cheeks deepened, more scarlet than any miserable garnets, and hastily she pulled the earrings from her ears.
“Thank you,” she said, pressing them into the girl’s waiting palm. “Besides, they’re too dear for me.”
“How dear can they be?” asked the captain. “What’s the price, missy?”
“Twenty-five shillings, M’Lord,” answered the shopgirl, simpering up at him as she brazenly tripled the price that she’d asked of Fan earlier. “They be French garnets and filigree-work.”
“And now they shall belong to Miss Winslow,” he said, reaching into his waistcoat pocket for the coins, “for I cannot imagine them hanging from any other ears than hers.”
“No!” gasped Fan. True, she’d been fancying them, but fancies didn’t account for gossip, or whispers, or how accepting such a gift from him would rob her of all respect from the men in the Company. “You cannot! I will not take the earrings! That is—that is, it’s not proper for me to accept such a gift from you!”
His face fell, and he rubbed the back of his neck, a rare, restless little gesture of indecision for a man like him.
“It is not intended as a gift such as that,” he explained. “Not as a gentleman to a lady, that is. I meant it to make up for Potipher not sending that dam—that letter to you, as he ought to have.”
“Why?” she demanded, though she was already guessing—no, she already knew—the truth. He would be the new master, for as long a lease as the Trelawneys would grant him.
“Because I haven’t just let Feversham, as I’d first intended,” he said, unable to keep the satisfied pride from his voice. “I’ve bought it outright.”
She stared at him, dumbstruck. He’d bought Feversham? Had his captain’s share of that Spanish treasure ship truly been so vast, or were even younger sons of dukes wealthy enough to make such a purchase with ease?
“That is where I’m bound now,” he continued, “to take possession. There’s nothing to be gained by wasting time, is there?”
Aware of her shock, his smile turned lopsided as he answered quickly to fill her silence. “No, no, there isn’t, not at all. But this will be easier for us both if we—”
“No.” Abruptly she turned away from him. Everything in her life would be changed by this impulsive purchase of his, from warning the men, to changing the place along the stream where their tea was landed, to making sure no further messages were delivered to her at Feversham.
Oh, yes, and more change as well: she must leave the house where she’d been born and find a new place for herself to live. No wonder she was walking so fast now she was nearly running.
“Hold now, Miss Winslow, don’t flight off like this,” he said, his long stride easily keeping pace with hers. “We’ve matters to discuss.”
She kept her gaze straight ahead, quickening her step. “We do not.”
“And I say we do.” He wheeled around, blocking her way. “Isn’t there some place more private than the middle of the street where we can talk?”
“I told you,” she said, trying to step around him, “there is nothing to be said!”
“But there is.” He caught her arm to stop her, his grasp through the rough linsey-woolsey of her sleeve hard enough to make her gasp indignantly. “I don’t give a tinker’s dam if we talk here where the whole world can listen. But knowing these are your people, I’d think you’d want it otherwise.”
Fan glared at him and jerked her arm free, rubbing furiously at the spot where he’d held her as if to wipe away his touch. What he said was true; there was never much privacy to be found in a village like this, where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Even now she and the captain were drawing a sizeable audience, curious faces peering from open windows and over walls, and she didn’t want to think what sort of tales the company men would be hearing.
“This way, then,” she said curtly, heading across the lane and leaving him to follow her into the yard of the little church, stopping when they were surrounded only by overgrown headstones of long-dead villagers and the empty graves of sailors who’d perished at sea. “There’s no one here who’ll spread gossip.”
“Very well,” he said, glancing dubiously around at the old slanting headstones, the carved names and dates softened by the wind and patched with moss and lichen. The breeze from the marshes and the sea blew more insistently here in the open, tossing the heavy tassels on her shawl against her hip and ruffling his hair across his forehead. “Dead men tell no tales, eh?”
“Why should the dead trouble you?” she demanded bitterly. “Considering your trade’s as much killing as sailing, I’d vow that you’d be more familiar with the dead than the living.”
“You cannot have life without death,” he said quietly. “One goes with the other, doesn’t it?”
A chill shivered down her spine. No matter how often she’d pleaded with him to stop, her father had often spoken that way of death as well, as if he almost wished to court his own end. How was she any better, speaking like this while standing among so many graves?
“Life goes with death, yes,” she countered, striving to put her darker thoughts aside, “but few can find as much profit in it as you have.”
“Luck is as unpredictable as death, you know. I could as easily have been shot to pieces by French guns as be standing here with you now.” He tried to smile, but his expression seemed clouded now, without the earlier happiness, and she wondered if he, too, felt the grim pull of the burying ground. “You are angry because I have bought the house you regard as your home.”
“It is not my place to be angry,” she said sadly, for of course he was right, “even if you are taking away the only home I have ever known.”
He shook his head, frowning. “Hold now, I’ve not said that.”
“You didn’t need to say a word, not when your actions are so clear!” she cried forlornly. “You’ve no use for our old ways here, and you’ve even brought your own people as servants. What place can there be left for me at Feversham?”
“Have I asked you to leave?”
“Have you needed to?” She lifted her chin, determined to not let him see her cry. “I’ll not trouble you overmuch, Captain My Lord. That’s not my way. I shall gather my things and be gone by nightfall, and you’ll need not give me another thought.”
“The hell I won’t,” he said sharply, his frown deepening. “You’re not to leave, not unless you wish it. I’ll have need of your special knowledge of the house, the tradespeople in this county, the neighbors—a thousand things, I’m sure, if you’ll but share them. I’ve no intention of sending you out of your home, especially not with your father gone.”
“My father’s not dead,” she said quickly, shoving aside a piece of hair that had blown free of her cap and across her forehead. “I know it. He will come back.”
“I’m sure he will,” he said with gruff kindness. “And he should find you at Feversham when he does.”
Her resolution wobbled, and tears stung behind her eyes. How long had it been since anyone had shown her any manner of kindness at all, gruff or not? To take her father’s place leading the Company, she’d had to appear twice as competent, twice as emotionless as Father had ever been. Such leaders didn’t expect sympathy or kindness, nor did they get it. To feel it now, standing in the windswept burying ground and from this man, was almost more than she could bear, and far more than she could wish.
“Father would never look for me anywhere else,” she said softly. “I was born at Feversham, you see. My mother was the cook, when the old master still had guests to look after. Not that I can remember those times, or my mother, either.”
The captain nodded, more understanding than she’d expected. “I can scarce recall my mother, either, she died so young.”
“It fell to my father and my aunt to look after me,” she said. She didn’t know why she was telling him this, for surely these ordinary details of her life would be of no interest to anyone else. “My aunt was the housekeeper before me, and trained me well in the skills and arts of running Feversham. ‘The mysteries’, she called them, as if she were a very witch, and not the most pious woman in the parish.”
He smiled, the lines crinkling around the corners of his eyes the way she’d remembered. The last time he’d smiled at her like this had been when she’d shown him the mistress’s bedchamber, and he’d teased her about trying the bed. He’d made her heart thump and her thoughts race off in all kinds of wrongful ways.
“I expect you were the most attentive and adept of students,” he was saying now, “whatever the day’s mystery.”
“Oh, hardly,” she said, recalling how often her aunt had rapped her knuckles with the long handle of a wooden spoon. “Aunt called me Miss Fan Fidgets, on account of my never paying proper attention. I always longed to be out-of-doors when I was little, you see, and didn’t always heed her explaining how to take the tea-stains from the Irish linen and mildew from the plaster, or how always to speak as much like the gentry as I could.”
“That’s what your aunt called you? Miss Fan Fidgets?” His smile widened with obvious relish. “I can’t repeat any of the names my brothers called me, they were so foul. It’s quite astounding how many mangled versions of a simple ‘George’ boys can concoct when they set their minds to it.”
She smiled then, too, more amazed that he’d confide in her that his brothers had teased him with foul names when they’d been boys. She couldn’t picture having such a conversation with any of the other men she knew, even the ones she’d known since they’d been children together. Perhaps this was another way titled gentlemen were different than ordinary men, or perhaps, more dangerous for her, this was simply the way this particular titled gentleman behaved with her.
“I was the only child of the household,” she confessed wistfully, “which made me more at my ease around my elders than the lads and lasses my own age.”
He glanced at her sideways, beneath the brim of his hat, as if to show how thoroughly he doubted her. “Though surely that is no longer the case.”
She shrugged, twisting her hands into the ends of her shawl. She’d already told him more than enough; he didn’t need to know how few her friends of any age were, or how lonely she often was, or, most revealing of all, how much pleasure she was finding in this conversation with him.
“How fortunate for you to have had brothers!” she said with the wistfulness of an only child. “To have them to count on, to know you are always bound together by blood and birth no matter how you stray apart—what a rare, wonderful thing that must be!”
“Oh, aye, the Duke of Strachen’s three sons, as wild a little pack of ruffians as you can imagine,” he said fondly. “We fair raised ourselves in the country, you know, without much guidance or interference, and turned out deuced fine in the end, too.”
“Surely your father could claim his share of the credit,” she said, only half in jest. His father had been a duke, after all, a peer, and only a step or so below the king himself.
But clearly he didn’t agree. “My father had other occupations that kept him in London,” he said, his expression abruptly losing all its merriment and closing against her. “His sons were not among his favorite interests.”
“I am sorry,” she said softly, realizing too late that she’d inadvertently misstepped. “The love of your parents—that’s a precious fine thing for a child.”
“I would not know,” he said curtly, his face once again the stern officer’s mask, impersonal and un-emotional. “Shall you accompany me to Feversham now, Miss Winslow?”
“Have I a choice, Captain My Lord?” she asked, made wary by his sudden shift of moods.
“You are a servant, not a slave,” he insisted impatiently, though that insistence was enough to make her believe otherwise. “This is England, not the Indies. But you will oblige me greatly by remaining as Feversham’s housekeeper.”
A servant, not a slave, and the formality of obligation: how quickly things had changed between them, and how wrong for her to dare dream they’d ever be anything else. She sighed, looking away from him and out towards the sea.
She wanted to stay at Feversham, not only because it would make her work with the Company easier to continue, but also because, in her heart, she could not imagine herself anywhere else. Besides, where would she go with her little chest of gold and silver coins, squirreled away against the future? The captain had been right when he’d said her father would expect to find her there when he returned, and she wouldn’t dare disappoint him.
Yet what would it be like to live in the same house with this man—a man this handsome, with moods and a temper as unpredictable as the weather, a man whose authority would pose a constant risk to her and the others in the Company, a man whose charm had already made her drop her careful guard with unsettling ease?
A man who would hold all the keys to her life in his palm, and not even realize it?
“You will, of course, continue with the same wages, as well as the same quarters and entitlements,” he was saying, in the brusque voice that she was sure he used for giving orders on board ship. “There is much to be done at Feversham, and at last there will be sufficient hands to do it. That much at least you should find pleasing. You may also find changes in how the house is governed and arranged that may be less agreeable, and I trust you shall adjust. But as you have noted yourself, Miss Winslow, Feversham has always been your home, and I won’t have it said that I drove you away.”
Her smile was tight and sad, regretting what she could never have. It didn’t matter how many brothers he had, or what they’d called him as a boy. He was still Lord Captain Claremont, and she was still a servant, and so it would always be.
“You are kind to think of me, Captain My Lord,” she murmured. The kindness and understanding he’d shown her was still there, if not the fleeting, misinterpreted friendship. “I am grateful for the concern you show to me.”
“Kindness, hah.” He shook his head, as if to shake away the very notion of such a maudlin weakness. “What has kindness to do with any of this? It is the Trelawneys who have tied our hands together, Miss Winslow, those blasted Trelawneys and their confoundedly meddlesome interference. Surely you are sensible enough to see that.”
“The Trelawneys?” she asked, surprised once again, something that seemed to happen far too often with him. “The Trelawneys have never interfered in anything to do with Feversham.”
Another puff of wind tugged at his hat, and irritably he shoved it down more firmly onto his head.
“They have in this,” he answered, “as you would have known if Potipher had bothered to write that infernal letter. The Trelawneys had such regard for your loyalty that they refused to sell Feversham to me or anyone else unless I agreed to keep you on as long as you pleased. There, that’s the cold truth of it, and God take me for a simpleton this instant for having signed my name to such a scrap of foolery.”
“Then that is the only reason I am to stay at Feversham?” she asked, not wanting to believe what she couldn’t deny. “Because you could not have the house unless you took me with it, like any other old kettles and dunnage?”
“I told you earlier, Miss Winslow. I won’t have it said that I turned you out from your home.” He held his hand out to her. “Now will you come with me back to Feversham?”
She looked at his offered hand, more imperious than gallant, the way she supposed he’d always been if she’d but bothered to see it.
“Thank you, no, Captain My Lord,” she said, already turning to leave him, the way she should have done an hour before. “I have my own pony waiting for me. For you see, I won’t have it said that I’ve ridden with you.”
With a glass of the fine French brandy he’d found in the kitchen cradled in his fingers, George sprawled in a leather armchair before the grand sweep of windows in his bedchamber, the same windows that had convinced him to buy Feversham. The view of the Channel and everything else he could see now belonged to him, as much as the sea ever belonged to anyone. But this room, and the chair in which he sat, and the rest of the timbers and stone and plaster around him were indisputably now his. This was what he’d wanted, what he’d dreamed of, what he’d had to suffer and survive a great many years of war and hardship and receive a huge dollop of luck to achieve.
So why, then, did it all feel so damned hollow?
“Do that be all for the night, Cap’n My Lord?” asked Leggett, waiting by the door with the tray from supper in his hands. A stout, ginger-haired seaman of indeterminate age from Northumberland, Leggett had been George’s manservant since he’d made captain and become entitled to such a personal luxury. Like most seaman turned servants, Leggett was more independent than his landlocked counterparts, and considerably more outspoken, believing it to be his entitlement as a free Englishman to tell his captain what he needed to hear.
And from the way Leggett was now scowling and puffing out his ruddy cheeks, George was sure he was going to exercise that right once again.
“That will be all for the evening, Leggett,” said George wearily, hoping that might be enough to stall the man’s comments until morning, for he was in no humor for either company or conversation. “You and the others turn in. We’ll begin in earnest in the morning.”
“Beg pardon, Cap’n My Lord,” said Leggett, purposefully ignoring George’s broad hint. “There be one thing the lads wanted me to say.”
George sighed, twisting in his chair to face the other man. “Is it your quarters? The food?”
“Nay, nay, Cap’n M’Lord, they all be more than fine,” said Leggett hastily. “Fancy beds like them for the likes o’ us, eh?”
“Then what the devil ails you, man?”
Leggett gave another contemplative puff to his cheeks. “It be the lady, the one what we saw in the village. She be the same one what lives here, don’t she?”
“Miss Winslow has been the housekeeper here at Feversham for some years, yes,” said George, weariness sliding into testiness. “Not that she’s any concern of yours.”
“But she do be our concern, Cap’n M’Lord,” said Leggett doggedly. “Everywhere’s we look about this house, her mark be there. Womenfolk don’t like having their ways changed, and if she be staying here with us, why—”
“I will address that question when and if that happens,” said George curtly. “Until then Miss Winslow’s likes and dislikes will have no bearing on my orders, or your duty. Do I make myself clear, Leggett?”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n M’Lord.” Leggett snapped to attention, the tray still awkwardly balanced in his hands before him as he backed through the doorway, yanking the door shut behind him.
Which was, for once, exactly the response that George had desired, and with a muttered oath he sank back into his armchair, swirling the barely-touched brandy in his glass.
How in blazes could he tell his men what Miss Winslow would do next when he hadn’t the faintest idea himself? For what must have been the thousandth—no, the millionth!—time he thought back to that strange, wonderful, dreadful conversation in the burying ground.
Matters had begun badly enough, with no letter from blasted Potipher to ease his way, and making the two of them spit and start at one another like cats there in the middle of the lane, for all the village world to gawk at. He’d tried to make it right with the earrings, and had had that humble piece of gallantry twisted around and tossed back at him. Without thinking, he’d next taken her arm: another mistake, touching her that way, and one she’d soon corrected by vehemently pulling free.
Then, finally, to punish him all the more, she’d dragged him off to stand in the sorrowful center of the burying ground. Wasn’t his news likely to be disagreeable enough to her without him having to deliver it surrounded by a sea of ancient graves?
And yet he could not forget how she’d looked when he’d first seen her again, calling to him there in the lane as he’d climbed down from his horse. Her hair had been uncharacteristically disheveled and her cheeks were flushed from the wind, her lips were parted from her haste, and those red gimcrack ear-bobs were swinging merrily from her ears. Perhaps it had been only a trick of the pale-gray sunlight washing over her face, but once freed of the house, she’d seemed younger, more at ease. She’d also, almost, seemed pleased to see him again.
Until, that is, he’d explained his reason for being there.
Even then the conversation hadn’t gone as he’d expected. She’d thought she had to leave, and he’d told her she could stay: fair enough, true enough. But somehow they’d begun speaking of their childhoods, the sort of funny, flirtatious, touching little conversation that he’d never had with any other woman, or man, for that matter.
In that short time, only a handful of sentences, really, he’d learned her name was Fan, not just the formal Miss Winslow. He’d learned she had spent far too much time among adults, just as he himself had been sent to sea and a man’s world when he’d still been a boy. He’d learned that she could snap that defensive wall back in place around herself in an instant, and he’d learned—once again—that he still could not speak of his father.
And he’d learned that no matter what clauses the Trelawneys had put into their contracts, he was the one who now wanted her to stay on at Feversham, just as she was the one who most decidedly didn’t. Not even Brant, with all his much-vaunted experience with women, would be able to make sense of this mess.
Glumly he stared into the glass in his hand. It was all the fault of this wretched, so-called peace with France. If he’d stayed at sea, where he belonged, where he knew what to do and what to say, then none of this would have happened. He would have remained a happy man, plagued only by storms and high seas and enemy gunfire instead of a ramshackle house and a beautiful gray-eyed housekeeper.
So thoroughly was he regretting his carefree past that he didn’t hear the first knock on the door to his bedchamber, or even the second. But the third—the third he heard.
“Come,” he barked without turning, certain it was Leggett. “It better damned well be important this time, you impudent old rascal.”
“It is important, Captain My Lord,” said Fan Winslow, “and I promise not to take more of your time than is necessary.”
Instantly George lurched to his feet, sprinkling brandy over his waistcoat and the floor.
“Fan,” he began without thinking. “That is, Miss Winslow. Yes. That is to say, ah, at this hour, ah, I believed you to be someone else.”
“I am only myself,” she said. “I’ve never pretended otherwise.”
“Where have you been?” Even George knew enough of women to see she’d been crying, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed. “No one has seen you for hours. I’ve been concerned, damned concerned.”
“Thank you, Captain My Lord,” she said, pointedly not answering his question about how she’d passed her afternoon. She held out a large ring of keys towards him. “I’ve come to return these to you as the new master.”
“Hold now, there’s no need for that,” he said, wincing inwardly at the heartiness in his voice. “You keep those for now.”
“Why?” she demanded, somehow still managing to put an edge in the single word even with her face and eyes soft from tears—tears that, he was quite sure, she’d never let slip and shed before him.
“For all the reasons I said before,” he said. “Because Feversham’s your home. Because you belong here. Because I’ll need your knowledge of the house while making improvements.”
“Because the Trelawneys’ solicitors told you you must.”
“Because I wish it this way.” He reached out and placed his hand over hers with the keys, gently pushing both back towards her. “Because it is right.”
She stared down at his hand over his. This time she didn’t pull away, and though she was silent, he could sense her warring with herself, fighting her own judgment.
“Because,” he said. “Damnation, Fan, because you belong here.”
She raised her gaze to meet his, letting him glimpse that same vulnerable, lonely girl he’d discovered earlier in the graveyard, the one that was so carefully hidden behind the guise of the stern, competent housekeeper. He felt her turn her fingers against his, not to grasp the ring of keys more firmly, but to find the comfort of his touch.
“Because you want me to stay?” she whispered, the depth of her daring bright in her eyes.
“Because I want you to stay,” he repeated, and to his confused surprise he realized he’d never wanted anything more in his life. No, that wasn’t exactly true. What he wanted more was to take her into his arms, to feel the roughness of her woolen gown and the softness of her skin and learn how her hair would come undone and spill over his arm as he turned her face up towards his to kiss her. That was what he wanted even more.
But though he was known as a brave man, with medals and gold braid on his coat to prove it, he wasn’t brave enough to kiss her that boldly, not now, not yet. Instead he raised her hand, the keys jingling together, and pressed his lips to the back of it, closing his eyes to savor the scent of her wrist there at the edge of her sleeve, to feel the strength and the gentleness of her neatly curled fingers.
That was all, and for this evening that would be enough.
He wanted her to stay, and now she would.
Chapter Five
Sleep did not come easily to Fan that night, and by the time she heard the old case clock in the front hall chime four, she doubted she’d closed her eyes for more than a quarter of an hour altogether. It was not that the newcomers to Feversham had made noise to keep her awake—they were all in bed and asleep long before she’d doused her own candlestick—but simply the knowledge that she was no longer alone in the house was enough to make her toss and turn and worry herself into exhaustion.
Add to that the scene of George kissing her hand in his bedchamber—his fingers cradling hers as gently as if they’d been made of spun glass, his lips warm against her skin, the way he’d murmured her given name—playing over and over in her memory, and she doubted she’d ever be able to find peace in sleep again.
George. A saint’s name, the name of kings, and now the name of Feversham’s new owner. But oh, when did she begin thinking of him like that, as George instead of the string of his titles? She was his housekeeper, his servant, not his friend and certainly not his lover. To address him with such familiarity would be the one more slippery step downward to her own ruin, with no way ever to climb back.
That kiss on her hand had been another. Why, why hadn’t she pulled away with the same decisiveness that she’d mustered when he’d taken her arm in the village? Could she only protest when there were others watching? Or was she so weak that she’d cared more for that shiver of heady pleasure that came from his touch? So weak that she’d welcome his attention even after he’d confessed that he’d kept her here only because the Trelawneys had ordered it?
So weak, or was she simply that lonely?
With a groan of frustration she pushed back the coverlets and rolled from the bed, reaching for the flint to light her candlestick. There seemed little point in trying any longer to sleep, and besides, no matter how early it was, she could always find much to do. She’d squandered yesterday afternoon aimlessly riding Pie along the flat stretch of the beach at low tide, looking for a possible new rendezvous spot of the Company that was off Feversham land and trying to sort her muddled thoughts. But all she’d succeeded in doing was wasting time that she could ill afford to waste, and making herself even more miserable in the process.
She blew the coals in her fireplace back to life, and hooked the kettle over them to heat water for tea while she dressed. With only herself in the house, she’d fallen into the habit of cooking and eating here, in her bedchamber, rather than lighting fires in the enormous kitchen hearth. Her aunt would have been horrified, accusing her of living in one room like some wretched poor cottager, but Fan had found cooking for one below stairs too bleak and solitary, her father’s tall-backed chair at the oak table too painfully empty.
That would change now. She wasn’t certain exactly how many men George had brought with him, but she could guess that, being men, they would be expecting their breakfast when they woke. It would be a new challenge, no doubt, but she was ready to take it, especially with this early a start on the day.
But she did wish she knew what George liked for his first meal so she’d be able to please him. Was he the sort of gentleman who eased himself into the day with a dish of milky tea and a plate of raisin buns, or did he prefer to make a hearty conquest of his breakfast, with the sideboard laden with meats and pies, pots of butter and marmalade and rafts of toast? She would have to learn his preferences, in this as in everything else.
Swiftly she washed, dressed, and braided her hair while she sipped at her tea, then took the candlestick to light her way and hurried down the back stairs to begin the kitchen fire. A single, mournful bong from the tall clock echoed her footsteps: half past four.
Early, yes, but not as early as Fan had believed. Even on the stairs she could hear the sounds of pans crashing together and a man’s off-key singing and swearing, one blending seamlessly into the other. She could also smell the scent of roasting meat, and see the bright, flickering light from the fire, a large and wasteful fire, too, from the brightness of it. She frowned, determined to stop such blatant disregard for the cost of wood, and marched sternly into the kitchen.
And stopped abruptly at the sight before her. What her poor, dear aunt would have made of this in her kitchen!
Looming over the hearth was a stout older man with one leg missing below the knee, the stump supported by an elaborately carved wooden peg turned like a newel post at the base of a staircase. The man had no hair left on the top of his head, but from the nape he still could grow the gray queue that hung down the middle of his back, nearly to the strings of the leather apron tied around his barrel-shaped waist. In his hand he brandished a long-handled meat-fork like a kitchen-king’s scepter, and beneath his bristling white brows was no welcome for Fan at all.
“What d’ye be gawkin’ at, missy?” he demanded.
“And what are you doing in my kitchen?” she demanded back, settling her hands on her hips. Not only was the man making free with the hearth and larder, but he’d also changed things that hadn’t been changed in Fan’s lifetime: the woodbin had been shifted from one side of the room to the other, the ancient black iron kettle with the mended handle had been replaced by one of new copper, and twin rows of new blue-and-white chalkware plates now filled the shelves of the Welsh dresser in place of the familiar battered pewter chargers. “What is your name?”
“I be John Small, His Lord Cap’n’s cook and warrant officer of His Majesty’s frigate Nimble, and twice the man as any you’ll ever know,” said the man, jabbing his fork at a chicken roasting on a spit over the fire. “Who the devil be you?”
“I am Mistress Winslow, the keeper of this house,” she said warmly, giving an irritable little shove at a packing-barrel filled with wood shavings and more new dishes, “and I have no love for ill-mannered old men, whomever they pretend to be. Why are you here at this hour, meddling where you don’t belong and waking the house with your blasphemy and caterwauling?”
“I be makin’ His Lordship’s breakfast, as even a fool in black petticoats could see if she used her eyes for seein’.” With the long-handled fork, he turned the strips of bacon sizzling in the iron spider, one deft twist of his wrist that kept the fat from splattering into the coals.
“As for this hour or that hour,” he continued, without deigning to look her way, “why, it be smack in the middle o’ morning watch, and if His Lordship’s not to go begging for his eggs and bacon, but to have them proper, when he wakes, then this be the hour when they gets made.”
Fan flushed, for this was not how the morning was to have begun. Here she’d contrived a pleasing dream of surprising George with a fine-made breakfast, while this dreadful old man had already done so and better, and in her own kitchen, too, making her feel like a lazy, worthless slug-a-bed in the bargain.
“Now if you wish to make yourself useful, missy,” continued Small, cracking four eggs in quick succession into the glossy sheen of melted butter waiting in another pan over the coals, “then there’s His Lordship’s chocolate still waiting.”
“I am not here to take orders from you,” said Fan tartly, but still she looked to where he was pointing with his fork. On the table sat a tall, cone-shaped contraption like a pewter coffeepot without a spout or handle, but with a long wooden paddle that protruded through a hole in the lid. Beside it on a trivet sat a pan of steaming milk, and a dish of grated chocolate.
“Get along with it, missy,” he said impatiently. “Put the chocolate into the mill, then the milk, slow and easy, to keep out the lumps. His Lordship don’t care for lumps in his chocolate, not at all.”
Fan studied the chocolate mill warily. No one she knew drank chocolate, not with tea so readily available, and she’d never seen a chocolate mill before this one. Not that she wished to admit that to John Small.
“I don’t take orders from the kitchen staff,” she said defensively. “As Feversham’s housekeeper, I give them.”
The man’s eyes gleamed. “That don’t be it at all,” he said, his contempt palpable. “Do it now? Nay, it be that you don’t know how to make chocolate, do you?”
“Of course I do,” she said swiftly, though of course she didn’t. She lifted the lid on the mill and poured the milk inside, around the wooden paddle, and then the chocolate, before she snapped the lid down tight. She reasoned that somehow the chocolate must be blended with the milk, and taking the mill in both hands, she gave it a tentative shake.
“Do you be daft, missy, or only pretending to make a righteous idiot of yourself?” Small yanked the mill from her hands and set it on the table. He centered the handle of the paddle between his palms and rolled it briskly back and forth until the milk and chocolate became a frothy, fragrant mixture. “There now, that be how fine London gentlemen drink their chocolate.”
“But this isn’t London,” she protested. “This is Kent.”
“Oh, aye, and I be needing you to explain the differences?” He snorted as he deftly flipped the sizzling bacon in the skillet. “I’ve seen cockle-shell galleys with better kitchens than this. Where’s your proper stove, I ask you? Cookin’ over a fire like this be well and fine for grannies and cottagers and such, but if His Lordship expects grand dinners for his mates, then a proper Robinson range we must have.”
“Perhaps you should be making do with what you have rather than pining after what you don’t,” said Fan defensively, striving to keep her voice from turning shrill with frustration. She’d no more knowledge of what “a proper Robinson range” might be than of how to operate a chocolate mill, and the more John Small ranted and railed, the more ignorant she felt.
She couldn’t deny that Feversham had grown shabby under the Trelawneys, but the kitchen had always been sufficient for her aunt and her mother and a score of other cooks before them, and to hear it attacked now by this one-legged old sailor—why, it seemed disrespectful and wrong.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking to change everything just for the sake of changing,” she said, “not when—here now, where are you going with that?”
A beardless young sailor with a calico kerchief tied around his head and his arms full of firewood stared blankly at her.
“There’s plenty of wood in the woodbin already without you traipsing in here with more,” she said. “Besides, dry wood like that costs good money, and we’ll not be wasting it keeping a great roaring fire all the day long in the kitchen. Take it back to—”
“Stow it here in the woodbin, Danny,” said Small as easily as he’d arranged the breakfast tray. “No use runnin’ short o’ twigs, is there?”
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