Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 40
ОглавлениеThat day set the pattern for the Marquis of Mantaigne’s return to his primary country seat. Whenever it didn’t pour with rain he spent his days exploring the estate and its villages, with or without his secretary at his side. If he stayed home he was polite and surprisingly easy with the interlopers at his once-grand mansion and they did their best not to ask what he intended to do about them as days grew into weeks. Polly felt like the outsider as her friends and family came to look on him as a genial and civilised gentleman. So why was she the only one who felt as if she was constantly waiting for the second shoe to fall?
Her life had narrowed to the park and gardens, and she supposed glumly that it would prepare her for a time when they must leave and patch together some sort of life elsewhere. One day she came home from working in the fields around Dayspring to find a beautiful riding habit draped across her bed. For a moment she enjoyed the sheer pleasure of seeing the richly dyed forest-green fabric lying there in the dappled sunlight slanting through the ancient leaded windows. There were depths and shifts in the folds that told her it was the work of a master weaver and she knew that colour would suit her to perfection, if she had any intention of wearing it.
Knowing she was being stubborn and ungrateful, she still felt her temper rise to dangerous heights at Lord Mantaigne’s presumption. If the man didn’t like her as she was he could tell her so; this was an attempt to force her into the role of a meek and properly dressed female without him having to point out her clothes were unladylike and shocking even to a rake like him.
She refused to fit into a neat little niche where spinster ladies with no prospects must live. She couldn’t cram herself into such narrow confines even if she wanted to, she concluded, with a severe nod at the beautiful garment lying there like a false promise. How did he expect Miss Paulina Trethayne to force herself into the cramping styles of a proper lady when she hadn’t a penny to her name she hadn’t earned through working his land when his back was turned? Surely he didn’t think local society would blink at such an unlikely spectacle and make space for her?
The very idea of the derision that would greet her if she tried to cramp her long limbs and unladylike lope into the mincing gait and quiet littleness of a spinster’s day-to-day life made her cringe. He was setting her up to be a mockery, and she felt the sting of it, even as she slammed the door of her bedchamber and ran back down the stairs to find the wretched man and berate him for taking this latest chip out of her self-confidence.
He didn’t need her to accompany him about the estate while he was visiting folk who only a few weeks ago had turned to her for help and advice. They had little choice but to ask her for what little help she could give them after years of neglect by their lord, but now they’d forgotten how long he’d left them leaderless and bewildered and she might not even exist for all the need they had of her now. She hoped they never came to regret relying on a man who might easily forget them for another decade.
Fighting her hurt at being forgotten in the dazzling presence of the latest Marquis of Mantaigne, Polly felt weariness pinch after her latest day of hard physical labour. She was driving herself and the men who worked the smallholding they’d made in the castle’s vast kitchen garden too hard, but fear of being left with nothing again goaded her on. This was their last chance of a good harvest and it ought to be the best one they’d ever had. If they could make enough money from their crops this year, maybe they could sell the surplus and set up a small farm elsewhere. It wouldn’t be Dayspring, of course—nothing could equal the noble old stronghold by the sea she had come to love so much—but they’d work hard to make it a different home.
As she strode across the inner bailey and looked for my Lord of Mantaigne instead of avoiding him, Polly wondered why nobody else worried about the future. The marquis was with a stranger when she tracked him down to the little parlour he had appropriated as a study-cum-estate office and the surprised-looking visitor, trying so hard not to look at her legs, made her more uncomfortable than if he had leered like an uncouth lout. She hung back impatiently while Lord Mantaigne escorted the man outside and bade him a cheery farewell without ever managing to say who he was and why he was here in the first place.
Anyone would think the lord was the land steward he had still not appointed, despite his fine promises, and not a noble fashion plate, Polly told herself scornfully. Yet even she had to admit he looked like a hero from Ancient Greece in the mellow evening light, the long shadows from the setting sun lending his features such stern definition even she couldn’t accuse him of being a soft dandy. She saw him laugh at something the man said and once more felt the pull of attraction even as a frown pleated her brows and she shook her head impatiently.
At this distance he looked like a gilded lord out of a legend—a modern King Arthur about to unite his ravaged kingdom with daring deeds and the circle of charm such beings cast on their friends as well as their subjects. Except he was real. And here. Every female impulse in her felt the siren call of such a compelling and deeply masculine man, even when he didn’t know he was making it.
She drew a picture for herself of the woman he would happily pull close to kiss and caress in the fading May twilight as their visitor rode away. She would stand no higher than his heart. His true mate would be an intensely feminine beauty with hair of a paler gold than his own, eyes as compellingly blue, but softer and a great deal more demure. There would be a special grace to her slender limbs that not even her detractors could deny and, as one of those detractors, Polly was quite sure she would try very hard to do so.
His ideal woman’s voice would be soft and low, and Polly was horribly certain she would sing like an angel. She added a low-cut, narrow gown of gossamer and fairy-dust and knew the wretched female would have sensual curves and a lovely line to her slender limbs to hold him to her for life. Already she hated the smug creature and waved a hand in front of her eyes as if she could erase the differences between such a paragon and herself just by wishing.
She glanced down at the mud and dust-stained work boots she’d once seen as a necessity of life and now regarded as a mark of how little she had in common with the ladies she should have grown up with. Then came her ridiculously overgrown legs, encased in ancient breeches she had found in an attic, discarded by their original owner decades ago in the belief they were too shabby and threadbare to wear even for rough jobs about the castle and the poor probably weren’t poor enough to want them.
When she was growing up she often felt a freak, her overlong limbs tangling in her skirts and tripping her up at the most awkward moments. Now she knew she was a female others would mark out as extraordinary for all the wrong reasons and why on earth should it matter to her if the marquis watched her every move or kept his distance as sternly as she’d told herself she wanted him to ever since that first day and night at Dayspring?
She remembered the titters of some other girls when she fell on her nose in church one Sunday not long after her sixteenth birthday. She had crushed the brim of the new bonnet she had longed for so passionately. The pretty delicacy of it hadn’t suited her, as one of them unkindly pointed out when humiliated tears streamed down Polly’s sore face and bloody nose. Her stepmother had loyally informed them such cattish remarks were neither pretty nor delicate and said more about them than they did about her daughter. Even so Polly had seen the worry in Claire’s dark eyes when she hugged as much of her strapping stepchild as she could still reach and whispered one day she would grow into herself and be magnificent, but those commonplace little girls would just be little and commonplace for the rest of their lives.
Loss twisted in her gut as painfully as the day Claire had died when Josh was born. Something in Polly’s father seemed to die with her and grief for both of them fought its way past the anger Papa’s ruin and reckless death brought with it and she let herself see how deeply he’d loved Claire and how impossible he had found life without her at last. It didn’t make the things he’d done to forget his terrible grief right, but suddenly they were more understandable.
The possibility of loving so passionately might trip her up as well, but maybe she had inherited too much sense from the first wife Papa had wed with his head for such a headlong risk of everything she was for love. Idiotic woman, she chided herself, haven’t you just congratulated yourself on being a prosaic female and now you’re longing to be the exact opposite?
‘He has me in such a spin that I don’t know what I do want any more,’ she said out loud this time and heard the soft murmur of her own voice sound round the little room with horror.
What if someone was close by when she gave away so much she wanted to keep to herself? Sneaking a look to see if she really had given herself away, she saw nobody and heard only the cool silence of a place with history in every shadow. Fanciful nonsense, of course, Polly decided with a wry smile for her sudden outbreak of lunacy. She touched one of the cool old pieces of glass in the leaded window that overlooked the yard where the marquis and his visitor were still talking earnestly. If she closed her eyes and pretended hard enough, the image she saw through that glass might be him. In another dimension she might reach through and touch the man’s very soul instead of the far-off untouchable reality.
There now, at last the marquis had said his farewells and the stranger was riding away. No time like the present, she told herself, and braced her shoulders for the argument she’d been promising herself as she did her best to recall why she was so angry with him in the first place.
‘Miss Trethayne, you must have found the habit your friends have worked on so diligently from the stern expression on your face,’ he said genially, as if he’d been expecting the flare of temper in her eyes and was finding it a little too amusing.
‘If they made it, how come the material is so fine?’ she demanded, telling herself she felt so frustrated and suspicious because arguing with him was like trying to wrestle with a shadow; the moment you thought you had a grip on it, it faded and all you were left with was a mocking smile and frustration.
‘I remembered seeing a trunk full of such lengths of cloth hidden away in a room tucked away under the eaves that you and your friends must have missed,’ he said, a tension in his eyes she might have welcomed a few moments ago to remind her how distant they really were from one another. Now it made her uneasy, tugged at some connection between them she really didn’t want to know about.
‘Then it’s rightfully yours,’ she said and shot him a baleful look.
‘Ah, but it’s not my colour,’ he quipped.
‘Don’t shrug me off and don’t treat me like a charity case.’
‘I would never be so rash or so rude, even if you were anything of the kind and you’re not,’ he said sternly, as if he thought the rest of the world spent too much time tiptoeing about her temper.
‘You have no idea what it’s like to have nothing,’ she replied defensively.
‘Do I not? If you’d seen the ragged boy who used to risk his life climbing out of the highest tower window up there and down the outside of his own castle in search of scraps to fill his hungry belly, you might change your mind about my ignorance.’
‘But you didn’t really have nothing,’ she argued weakly, pity for such a desperate boy causing a lump of sadness in her throat she knew he would hate.
‘And neither do you. You have a family who adore you; friends who would walk barefoot to reach you if you were in trouble and the whole neighbourhood sings your praises at me until I’m almost sick of the sound of your name on their tongues.’
‘None of them need me now you are here.’
‘Just as well, since you’ve been hiding behind a set of harrows or pulling weeds out of turnips or whatever else you’ve been finding to do with yourself all the hours God sends these past few weeks in order to avoid me.’
‘I wasn’t hiding.’
‘Were you not? If nobody else could have done any of those tasks, then I bow to your superior knowledge and must consider you sociable after all.’
‘You know very well there was nothing uniquely skilled about any of the jobs I’ve done lately.’
‘Perhaps you ought to let someone else do them then. I’ve offered anyone who wants work all the employment they could dream of in my sadly neglected pleasure gardens, woods and the acreage the castle once kept under its own management. Kingwood wants to retire and tells me he’s only been farming the land you and your friends couldn’t cope with because he felt he owed it to my father. You have no idea how humble I’m becoming under the goad of such words, Miss Trethayne. Everyone here thinks my father a much better man than I’ll ever be, although I can’t remember much to back that opinion up. In fairness, he could hardly be a worse master than I have been, so the competition is not fierce.’
‘They want to admire you,’ Polly heard herself say softly and wondered how he’d turned her from raging virago into his sympathetic champion in so short a time. ‘Some would even love you, if you let them.’
‘Love is the most unreliable of human emotions, Miss Trethayne. I do my best to avoid feeling it or asking for it from others.’
‘Then I must feel sorry for you, my lord,’ Polly said with a corrosive feeling of disappointment and pity nagging at her as she turned to walk away.
‘Don’t. I’m perfectly content with friendship and mutual respect.’
‘I hope it keeps you warm in winter then,’ she murmured and would have gone back to her eyrie to take a second look at the riding habit that now sounded like a gift of love, except he held her back with the lightest of touches on her arm.
‘So do I,’ he said far more seriously than usual. ‘I also hope you’ll accept Lady Wakebourne’s scheme for your joint futures when she proposes it, Miss Trethayne. The lady has no family and those wild young rascals of hers to bring up on her own somehow. I don’t think you’d want her to struggle on alone, even if the idea of me freezing to death on an Arctic ice-floe would probably cost you no qualms.’
‘You’re so wrong about that,’ she told him, meeting his eyes for a long moment. ‘It would cost me a great many.’
‘But you have a tender heart, Miss Trethayne. I dare say you would make a push to rescue your worst enemy from such a chilly ending,’ he said, and there was something in his gaze she dared not read, something that spoke of more than lust or mere liking for her and that simply couldn’t be a possibility between them.
‘Perhaps I would,’ she agreed with a faint smile.
‘And you will listen?’
‘I would always give such a good friend a fair hearing and try my best to be reasonable about whatever it is she has to say.’
‘If that’s what it takes to render you open to reason, I must wish I was your friend then.’
‘So must I, my lord,’ she said rather sadly.
‘Could we not try it?’ he offered, and for a moment the chance of such an unlikely relationship tempted her to take the admiration in his gaze and warmth of his hand in hers to seal a bond between them.
‘I don’t think a marquis could be friends with a beggar,’ she said and hated herself for being less democratic than he was as she made herself turn away.
‘I don’t think that so-called beggar can be friends with herself until she accepts we are each of us more than a rank or a piece of ignorant name-calling,’ he said quietly as she went to walk away.
She hesitated, wishing so hard she dared accept his olive branch and see him in the same rosy light as the rest of the unofficial residents of Dayspring Castle did.
‘I expect you’re right,’ she said tritely and made herself leave, before she swore undying devotion to him, or even blurted out some disaster of an emotion he would dislike even more.
Thinking back to his idea that she would be happy to hear he’d met such an awful end, she fought down a denial it almost hurt her not to voice. Of course she didn’t want anything to happen to the arrogant lord of Dayspring Castle. The very idea of him enduring such hardship when she wasn’t there to try to make it less hurt her. Tears blurred her vision before she blinked them back as she strode off to her room to find clean clothes to put on after the bath she so badly needed.
* * *
Half an hour later Polly sat back in her tub of hot water in the women’s bath-house with a contented sigh, then reached for the soap Lord Mantaigne had insisted on sending for as a luxury he refused to live without. He wasn’t the man she’d thought him at first sight of all that perfect tailoring and gilded splendour, but he wasn’t the man he thought either. She’d done her best to pretend he was just a London dandy, but he was so much more. If he ever stopped keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length, he would be an extraordinary and unforgettable man. It was the waste of such magnificent potential that made her want to cry, though, not a more personal sort of desolation that she wasn’t the woman to unlock it.
Washing off the sweat and dirt of her labours, she did her best not to think of making love with the wretched man like this, with her limbs all smooth and warm and naked and her feminine curves undisguised by mannish clothes and rough labour. What would he make of her if he could see her naked? The very idea shot a hot quiver of anticipation through her like an arrow of molten gold, but that was a silly idea, wasn’t it?
Gold was far too soft even for Cupid’s arrows and she didn’t care to even consider being pierced by one of those. A knot of pure heat still clutched in her belly, though, and on down to whisper all sorts of impossible echoes of him and her at her deepest and most secret core. She considered what he might look like similarly naked and as curious about her as she was about him and blushed in places she didn’t know she could blush. Would he want her if he saw her like this? Would his manhood betray the fact a vigorous and healthy male would always want a reasonably well-formed female, if the chance arose to be closeted with her hot and naked in a steamy room with a fire lit in the corner to make it cosy and intimate? Probably, but a cynical voice whispered in her head that it didn’t mean she would be in any way special to him and he would be the sun and moon to her if she wasn’t very careful.
She ran a speculative hand down the long sweep of her wet thigh and shuddered with feminine curiosity, longing for his hands to shadow hers there and admitting for once how very much she wanted him as her lover. Even the thought made her breasts grow heavier and tighter, and she cupped them to push them up and wonder. How would it feel to have my Lord of Mantaigne seize one hot, tight nipple in his knowing mouth and suckle, even as his long fingers played with the other so it didn’t feel left out in the cold?
Polly gasped at where her wicked imagination was taking her, hastily snatched her hands away and reached for the rosemary-and-soapwort infusion Lady Wakebourne made up especially to clean the mud from her hair. She cleansed every lock until it squeaked, then poured the jugs of water over her head, adding the one of icy cold, drawn from the well lest any of the others proved too hot, for the last rinse of both her hair and her unruly body. There, that ought to chill the ardour out of her; shock her into seeing how impossible such a coupling was for both of them.
He would probably leave her with child and she would leave him with regrets and a duty to care for her and her by-blow for the rest of their lives. No, no and no. She would never do that to a man like him, one who would have to find a suitable marchioness one day. Pretend how he liked to be a care-for-nobody, he would suffer the guilt of the damned about any lady whose life he’d ruined in the eyes of the world, once the heady passion was spent and he woke up to find himself the other half of such an unlikely pairing with her.
Her tender smile wobbled at the thought of him arguing he hadn’t a soul for her to concern herself with, as he surely would if he was here and knew what sinful wonders she was thinking about. He knew so little about himself it shocked her. It was as if the neglected and abused boy he’d once been had taken the hard things his obnoxious guardian threw at him and secretly owned up to them, as if every word was true. She was sure that was too simple a way to explain it, but she ached for the boy he had been and the man he really was.
Was the ton really so wilfully blind they only saw the gilded nobleman he offered up for them to wonder at? She supposed it was a brilliant act; his pose of shallow and vain aristocrat, more concerned about the knot in his cravat than the state of the world or the well-being of his fellow man. Perhaps he showed up less as the man he really was there than he did here, set as he would normally be amongst the brilliant but shallow pleasures of the haut ton and pretending to be as indifferent as the next care-for-nobody to the affairs of ordinary humanity.
He’d offered work to those who wanted it here though. That smile played about her mouth again and it was as well there was no mirror in the women’s bath-house to show her how gentle it went at the thought of him pretending to be indifferent, even as he gave the local men a chance to wean themselves away from the smuggling trade or the sea, if they chose to take it.
If he really thought they would lose the chance of a night’s work as tub-men and gain luxuries a working man couldn’t dream of otherwise, he was probably doomed to disappointment. At least he was giving them a chance to earn an honest living, though, and it would be good to see the Banburgh estates worked as they should be once more, or at least it would be for everyone but the gangs who had used the neglected woods and byways as the ideal conduit from coast to warehouse.
There, she had got through roughly towelling the water from her heavy hanks of hair and drying her over-receptive body without longing for the impossible again, here with her, loving her as she secretly longed to be loved exclusively by him. Was that it? Was she afraid of falling in love with the marquis? Worse even than that disaster—was she already halfway there?
Well, if she was it was about as much use to her as a lunatic longing for the moon, so she had chosen a man who would do her no harm—since it would never even occur to him to love her back. She was nearly six feet tall with four and twenty years of life in her dish; had three beloved obligations who would need her until she was old and grey and she habitually wore breeches in preference to petticoats, for goodness’ sake. How could he consider her as a potential lover when she was about as ineligible even as his bedmate as a woman could be?
Seizing the delicately carved comb she had felt guilty about taking from one of the bedchambers in the closed-up and neglected part of the house, she began tugging at the tangles in her hair as if it was their fault she was undesirable. Not only was that ridiculous, but it hurt, so, taking a deep breath, she made herself begin at the ends and work towards her crown until every tangle was banished. As it began to dry the firelight picked out red and gold and russet lights in the curls it sprang into wherever Jane had cut the full weight of her heavy locks away.
It was stupid to be vain of a mane of hair she often thought couldn’t make up its mind how to be, but the weight of it on her naked shoulders felt silky and rich and sensual. Telling herself it was as well to be realistic about her own attractions, she unwrapped the bath towel, another of Lord Mantaigne’s luxuries she couldn’t bring herself to argue against using, and felt as if even her skin was more sensitive than it had been before he came here. She felt as if only his sigh against the softness of her shoulders, or the whisper of a fingertip on her arm, might set a blaze of something sensual and irresistible running over her like wildfire.
You are a deluded idiot, she chided herself as a hot shudder of wanting probably made it a good idea to plunge back into the rapidly cooling water and wash away the very idea. She’d been in here far too long already, though, and what if anyone suspected she had been preening and dreaming and longing for impossible things, instead of simply scrubbing herself clean and getting ready to face his lordship’s indifference once more with a mental shrug and roll of exasperated eyes?
For once Polly took some trouble about dressing for the evening ahead because she did have a certain amount of pride after all. She grimaced at the latest ill-fitting gown with its wide skirts and unfashionably long bodice. She’d snatched it from the usual attic as the only other one left that would be long enough for her without the wide hoops designed to make it the first stare of fashion decades ago when a fine Banburgh lady ordered it from her mantua-maker.
She looked a quiz, she decided as she fumbled her bare feet into the old-fashioned high-heeled shoes that added another few inches to her already impressive height. At this rate she would be given a torch and told to stand instead of a light on the headland to keep ships away in a storm. Well, this was the truth: Miss Paulina Trethayne in all her unadorned plainness. She felt a twinge of regret for the jewellery she’d been forced to sell to pay some of her father’s debts and feed the boys until she could beg, borrow or steal enough to keep them all from starving. Her mother’s gold locket or single row of pearls would have diverted one glance from the stark lack of style in anything she was wearing.
The magnificent diamond ring Claire had managed to keep hidden somehow throughout her frantic flight from the Terror in France was hidden safely away behind a neatly re-mortared stone in Polly’s bedchamber to be sold to help her boys one day. So far Polly had managed to tell herself not yet, but soon it would have to be now.
* * *
‘Ah, there you are, my dear,’ Lady Wakebourne said absently when she slipped into the dining parlour at the last moment before Prue would tell her she was too late and must make do with whatever she could forage in the kitchen.
‘I was too dirty to sit down to dinner without a bath,’ she told whoever might be interested.
‘You shouldn’t be slaving in the fields like a peasant girl,’ Prue said sternly, and her sister nodded a solemn agreement.
Toby frowned at the last of his rabbit stew as if it suddenly tasted less savoury and shot her a worried look. ‘We should help you instead of idling at the Vicarage all day,’ he told her as if he’d suddenly grown up and become the man of the household.
‘I’m not idle,’ Henry objected, ‘I work hard.’
‘No, but you’re a natural scholar, Hal, and love your dusty old books. I don’t see much point aping the little gentleman much longer and pretending I have the least bent for learning, though, because I haven’t.’
‘I doubt any of us struggled to provide you with an education in order for you to throw it in our faces, my lad,’ Lady Wakebourne chided with a glare at her own protégés that Jago returned with a shrug that said he wasn’t going to complain about a lack of hard work after his years spent cleaning chimneys from dawn until dusk.
‘I don’t think any of us could describe you as little gentlemen without being accused of stretching the truth mightily,’ Lord Mantaigne intervened before Toby could dash out and sign on as cabin boy on the nearest merchant ship and his littlest brother as powder-monkey to a man o’war.
‘I promised your mother I would raise you as gentlemen, so you’re not getting out of your lessons that easily, young man. And you promised her you would do as I said until you were one and twenty. By my reckoning, I have another six years of blissful obedience to my every whim to look forward to,’ Polly said with a steady look for her eldest brother, then a wistful glance at her dinner.
She had worked up a mighty appetite at her labours and was very sharp set, but her brothers took precedence over everything else until she’d convinced them there was no point setting out to see the world before it had an idea they were coming.
‘Let your sister eat in peace, Tobias,’ his lordship said quietly, and Polly waited for a protest, but none came.
Toby held his new friend’s eyes with a steady challenge for a long moment, then seemed to accept some unspoken reassurance Lord Mantaigne was giving him and grinned like the schoolboy he still was.
‘Can I have some more, then?’ he asked Prue, who pretended to be shocked by his huge appetite, as usual, then helped him to another plateful and muttered about growing boys who grew cheekier by the moment.
‘You know very well I’m your favourite,’ he replied with a grin, and Polly had to fight a smile, because he was quite right. Prue loved the way Toby enjoyed her food so openly and he also had the easy charm of generations of piratical Trethayne males to call on when he chose to use it.
‘You take no notice of him, young Henry,’ Prue said and piled another helping on Hal’s plate unasked.
He grinned and ploughed his way through it with nearly as fine an appetite as his elder brother, but he was more comfortable in his own shoes and accepted he was loved as easily as one of the mixed pack of dogs lying fast asleep in front of the fire seemed to do. Little Josh had worn himself out chasing about the countryside on some mischief and had already been packed off to bed before he went to sleep in his dinner. Polly took time to wonder at how different her brothers were. Each had a special place in her heart and she would lay down her life for them if she had to, but did she love them enough to lay pride aside and let Lord Mantaigne offer them some golden future she could not?
The hint of it was in the air, the promise of a different life for them all in his vague reference to a plan he and Lady Wakebourne had been hatching between them. She wondered at herself for not wanting to snatch hold of it with both hands. How would the boys feel in ten years’ time if they lived on a rich man’s charity? And how did Mr Peters feel about his lot in life now? She shot him a wary glance as she did her best to recall Claire’s teaching that real ladies took small bites and chewed their food to stop herself gulping Prue’s stew down as fast as she could before running out of the room to escape all these uncomfortable problems.
The answer was that Mr Peters seemed content enough to play second fiddle to his employer, most of the time. She frowned at the notion he also seemed braced for some long-expected burden to fall on his shoulders and that odd idea didn’t answer any of her questions. All Toby and Henry and Josh needed to do was make a path for themselves through life, though, and she hoped it would lead them to happiness and middling prosperity. They had an honourable name, but nobody would expect them to shoulder the heavy weight the head of a noble family had to bear.
She ate her fill and drank a little of the wine so long left to age or even spoil in my lord’s cellars and thought about that weight. The Marquis of Mantaigne carried such expectation, so many demands on those broad shoulders of his, so how could she let her brothers become one more? The long put-off notion of trying to get the head of her family to help her again surfaced. The mellow claret turned bitter on her tongue at the thought of asking the arrogant old man who’d looked down on her father for anything, after he’d thrown her and the boys out of his house as if they’d polluted it and ordered her never to come back. She gulped her wine so carelessly it went the wrong way and she demonstrated all too clearly why she’d never be any man’s conformable wife by spluttering and going red as a beetroot at the dining table.
‘Try to breathe slowly and evenly and you’ll soon be right as ninepence again,’ Lady Wakebourne urged comfortably as Polly did her best not to cough at the same time as she mentally pushed the imaginary Marchioness of Mantaigne out of the room and slammed the door in her smug face.
‘Tea, Miss Polly, that’s what you need,’ Prue said sagely and went off to make some before she could argue.
It would take a lot more than a cup of smuggled Pekoe to right the trouble that ailed her, Polly decided. She let Lady Wakebourne lead her from the room and sit her down in the slip of a room she’d christened her drawing room, as if she was still the prosperous squire’s daughter of her youth, though, and enjoyed being soothed and mothered for once. Tomorrow was soon enough to face the very adult problem she had been fighting not to admit she had since the moment her eyes first met Lord Mantaigne’s across one of the Dayspring stables.
