Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 41

Chapter Ten

‘What are you planning to do about them then, Mantaigne?’ Peters asked when he found Tom on the old outer walls watching the moon rise over the sea.

‘Schools for some, trades for others. Boys need to be busy and will get into trouble if they’re not occupied, whatever Lady Wakebourne thinks about turning her urchins into little gentlemen. The adults must decide what they want out of life for themselves, since I can’t do everything. There will be posts here if they want them, but not the sort of freedom they have had until I came back.’

‘For some that was only freedom to starve, but what of the ladies?’

‘Ah, yes, the ladies. Now they really are a conundrum.’

‘One beyond your ability to solve?’

‘It will take some thought and a measure of cunning,’ Tom replied with a frown at the calm waters below and the cloudless twilight sky above them. ‘At least there’s no need to worry about smugglers tonight—it’s far too bright a moon for them to risk being out and about,’ he said, as they were a lesser problem than the one Miss Paulina Trethayne and Lady Wakebourne’s presence here had set him.

‘I don’t worry about them much on any night. There’s little point doing so when half the coast is actively involved in the trade and the other half wink at it.’

‘Aye, it would be a bit like trying to keep water in a sieve,’ Tom admitted with a frown at the calm scene that was so at odds with the turmoil inside him.

‘Which is why you don’t ride to certain coves or visit outlying farms at the wrong time of day, I suppose?’

‘I’ve never been one for tilting at windmills,’ Tom said with the uneasy feeling he might be lying.

‘And there’s trouble enough close to home.’

It was more of a statement than a question, and Tom didn’t know if he least wanted to think about who was managing to invade his castle right under his nose, or what to do about a female unlike any other he’d ever encountered.

‘You are a clever lawyer, Peters, but Rich Seaborne tells me you’re an even wilier investigator of knotty problems certain rich and powerful men would rather you did not untangle.’

‘Does he, my lord? I wouldn’t have thought Mr Seaborne so ready to wag his tongue about the shady affairs of such men to anyone who asked him.’

‘Oh, don’t worry yourself on that head; I had the devil’s own job prising even that much information out of him. He only admitted to knowing you as anything other than a lawyer when I told him of my mission from my godmother and the fact she had engaged you to come here with me to guard my back and investigate my enemies. He said she wouldn’t have asked you to do so on a whim, nor would you have agreed to come here if it was as easy a task as it appeared.’

‘These incursions into a near-ruinous castle don’t have the feel of anything truly sinister about them to me,’ Peters said as if he was a connoisseur of the worst sort of criminal mind and this one wasn’t up to his mettle.

‘No, I suspect it’s a mean little affair, much like the rest my one-time guardian had running in his lifetime. His nephew seems even less effectual, if also slightly less mad, than he turned out to be.’

‘Yes, he does seem to have been a bully of the worst sort, but a coward with it, I suspect,’ Peters said as if that was all the world needed to remember of Philip Grably, and Tom wondered if he was right.

‘He was a twisted and devious coward and bully, though. All the tales I hear of my father when I ride about the estate and villages have made me realise he knew this place like the back of his hand. I can’t help remembering how Grably used to rave he loved my mother better than any other man and how dared my father lay his filthy hands on such a perfect and fragile woman when he wasn’t fit to black her boots? I suspect he might have murdered my father, for all the good that could do him when my mother was already dead. Perhaps he thought he was avenging her, or who knows what he thought when he pitched his supposed best friend down a two-hundred-foot drop onto the rocks below five years after she died?’

‘That’s a grim suspicion to live with, Mantaigne,’ Peters said with sympathy Tom would have felt uncomfortable with only weeks ago.

‘Aye, but it could explain how my father stumbled so close to the edge of a cliff-path he walked every morning and knew better than anyone.’

‘It could, but if so it’s a secret Grably took to his grave,’ Peters agreed quietly.

‘True,’ Tom replied with a frown at a certain window in the old part of the castle where the women had their quarters. ‘And the Trethaynes are alive and under my roof. Their welfare trumps old sins.’

‘Indeed,’ Peters agreed so blandly that Tom decided he didn’t care if the man thought he was a besotted fool or not.

‘Don’t you think it strange even a junior branch of such an old and powerful family was left to beg, borrow or steal their daily bread?’

‘Profligacy has brought many a rich man to ruin,’ Peters said with such austerity Tom wondered if that was a reason a clever and devious man might become a lawyer and whatever else the man was when he wasn’t busy.

‘I know, but Lord Trethayne’s fortune seems intact. I don’t know how the man could leave those children to starve when he should feel a moral duty to look after his nephew’s family, even if the idiot didn’t leave them to his care until they were grown. That seems the logical step for the nephew of a lord to take when he began to breed so many boys with his second wife, don’t you think?’

‘The late Mr Trethayne doesn’t sound like a sensible man.’

‘No, but his second wife fled to this country after the revolution in France. She must have known first-hand how it felt to lose everything and would have pushed the idiot to make some provisions for her children, however feckless he was otherwise,’ Tom confided the unease he’d felt about that destitution ever since he found the family here scraping a living on his land.

‘I believe his ruin began after the lady died, but it happened nearly a decade ago and I can’t recall any details. Nobody mentioned he had children when the tale of his rash dealings and sad end went the rounds, so I didn’t think it remarkable Lord Trethayne disclaimed all responsibility at the time. Now I can see that you’re right; it’s odd and needs looking into, if only to find out why he didn’t help them. I expect I will find out more in London at this time of year than I could at Trethayne’s country seat, so I’d best arrange to be summoned there urgently before the week is out if you truly wish me to take this any further.’

‘Aye, I do, and I’m sure the place is teeming with crimes and misdemeanours awaiting your attention by now,’ Tom said with a mocking grin to offset Peters’s knowing smile that he cared enough about the Trethaynes to go to so much trouble on their behalf.

‘At least I’ll be spared the tension in any room when you and Miss Trethayne are in it for the next few days. I half expect crockery or candlesticks to start flying round the room whenever you meet without one of Miss Trethayne’s brothers or Lady Wakebourne there to make you guard your tongues and tempers,’ Peters replied with a look that told Tom he also wondered if he was about to be punched in the nose.

‘Well, don’t, Miss Trethayne is too much of a lady to vent her temper on innocent bystanders. If I can remind Lord Trethayne of his duty to his family and the fact she and her brothers are his responsibility, at least they might be able to go home and excuse the rest of you such a state of civil war at the breakfast table.’

‘She will never agree to go anywhere near the old vulture after he left her to tramp the roads with three little boys when her father died,’ Peters cautioned as if warning him not to get his hopes up.

‘The trick will be to present things to her in the right terms,’ Tom said with a feeling finding those words wasn’t going to be as easy as he made out, especially as his best words seemed to desert him in Miss Trethayne’s company and all sorts of wrong-headed ideas took their place.

‘I doubt a poet could come up with those,’ Peters cautioned.

‘I can’t let her leave Dayspring with nothing in her pockets and an easy mark for any rogue who might threaten or exploit her and her band of fellow vagrants.’

‘If I were you, Mantaigne, I’d look a little deeper into that particular charitable impulse before you lose something precious without ever realising you had it.’

Tom felt his way along that sentence and found knots in it. There was a deep sadness in Peters’s expression he’d never thought he’d be allowed to see, and Tom fumbled to pretend he hadn’t seen that glimpse of the man’s private self Peters wouldn’t relish sharing with the likes of him.

‘Just as well you’re not me then,’ he said facetiously and saw Peters’s frown at his refusal to be counselled.

He might have learned to love his childhood home again, had even let the sad old house and grounds and the folk on the estate into his life as far as he could, but he wasn’t ready to give up everything he’d learnt about surviving in a hostile world. If he let himself care about everyone within his orbit he’d collapse. Too many people depended on him for him to risk burdening himself with a wife and a ready-made family and hadn’t he decided on his way here he had true friends in Luke and his family? So he should be able to look forward to the end of Virginia’s three months with the lightest of hearts.

Yet, despite her poverty and unconventional life, Polly Trethayne wasn’t a female he could stow in a neat little corner of his life labelled ‘mistress’ and forget the rest of the time. She wouldn’t fit, for one thing; for another he didn’t want to leave her less than she was now and embittered by his betrayal into the bargain. He wanted her with a passion he couldn’t recall being this fierce even as a spotty youth desperate to find out about sex and any female who’d let him have some with her. What he felt was a freakishly heated physical attraction that would burn out as soon as he got her out of his castle and as far away as he could put her. Even a few miles away would be good enough for now, though.

He felt the gap in his heart and mind at the idea of being a stranger to her and hers again. He licked his suddenly dry lips and tasted her on them, as if her lush mouth had only just parted from his instead of the gap of impossible that stretched between them. He was the one who walked away; he’d made that gap and would always have to make it.

Haunted by the idea he might look back on this time with the bitter regret Peters seemed to feel about some lost chance at love he regretted, he made himself remember where and what he was. With Peters probably noting the reminiscent smile Tom found himself giving at the thought of creeping through a dark and dusty mausoleum with Polly Trethayne’s hand in his, it was high time he remembered the Marquis of Mantaigne cared for nobody again, especially not for a female he’d never be able to ignore as so many of his peers did their wives once they’d got their obligatory heir and spare. And when had he jumped from mistress into marriage, even in his head? Heavens, but he’d been right after all; the woman was a danger to herself and everyone else and the sooner she left the better.

‘Anyway, we must make sure the felons plaguing my castle are run to earth,’ he said. ‘Neither of us can leave until we find out what the devil they’re up to.’

‘Until we catch them in the act again as you so nearly managed to that first night, or find out why they want to explore this dusty barrack of yours at any time of day, you would seem to be stuck here then, my lord,’ Peters said with a lack of respect Tom was beginning to admire. If the man ever did treat him with some, at least he’d know he’d earned it.

‘Hell’s teeth,’ he exploded with frustrated rage.

‘You have nigh on a month left on your slate, my lord,’ Peters pointed out less than helpfully.

‘And you know just what you can do with that happy reminder, don’t you?’ Tom asked sarcastically and decided he’d been tried enough for one day. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he told the man with a glare that dared him to say it was nearly midnight and he needed to have a care until their night visitors were unmasked.

‘I hope your groom can put up with your moods better than I can whilst I’m in London, my lord, since it seems to me you need a bodyguard more than you do a lawyer at the moment.’

‘At least I’ll be able to cheer myself up with the thought of you ploughing through piles of dry and dusty documents and listening to tedious old gossip while I’m here and you’re in London though, Peters.’

‘I could ask Miss Trethayne for the details, I suppose and persuade her to confide her sad tale to me. It would save us both a great deal of time and trouble.’

‘Only if you don’t like the way your head currently sits on your shoulders, Peters,’ Tom told him grimly, an image of Peters and Polly Trethayne discussing her life so far as rain beat intimately on the mullioned windows and the outside world seemed far away punching into his gut like a fist.

‘I do. Lovely, spirited and unique though I think she is, Miss Trethayne is not for me and nor am I for her.’

‘Just as well,’ Tom said, ‘I’ll see if I can find out if anyone on the estate knows where Grably went when they removed him from Daybreak while you’re gone. Someone else might have heard him raving about his treasure and the most precious things at Daybreak he’d make sure I never got to lay my filthy little hands on.’

‘You’re sure that’s what he said all those years ago?’

‘He bellowed it loudly enough for half the village to hear him when Virgil demanded he returned everything he’d taken from me, but I’m in no humour to think of him right now. Get on with delving into the Trethayne family fortunes and tomorrow I’ll go through that mountain of rolls and boxes in the Muniment Room myself.’

‘It’s a full moon tonight and your villains won’t even need a lantern,’ Peters warned him as if he knew there were a pack of wild ideas skittering about in Tom’s head, but somehow the Trethaynes’ well-being seemed far more important than a few dusty objets d’art and mementos of a mother he had no memory of.

‘I’ll watch my step,’ Tom said as patiently as he could manage as he set off to reacquaint himself with Dayspring by moonlight.

At least the exercise might improve his temper and allow him a few hours of sleep uninterrupted by fantasies of a softly warm and satiated Polly Trethayne asleep at his side and tangled round him with sleepy-eyed ardour when they awoke together. Sometimes he couldn’t get her out of his head long enough to relax into oblivion for a few hours, but even when he could, waking up alone felt stark and lonely. Thinking about his light-hearted affairs of the past, he shook his head and wondered why this woman threatened to be essential as breathing to him.

He strode on through the silvered landscape and vividly remembered how magical this place was to the small boy he’d been when night and the moonlight offered him escape from his guardian’s thugs and mood swings and invited him to explore a new world. At night the place was alive in a very different way and Tom hoped the poachers and landers were staying home tonight in deference to the power of the nearly full moon.

Which thought brought him right back to where he started and the heady fantasy of returning to his own bed to find a sleepy-eyed goddess in it all warm and welcoming and murmuring unlikely promises. Drat the wretched woman, would she never give him a moment’s respite? Thinking of such impossible and significant souls as Polly Trethayne, he realised now why Virgil had never seemed quite content when Virginia was out of sight and sighed at the idea both of them would be highly amused by the sight of him acting the fool over a woman like this.

Once he’d sworn never to dance at another being’s bidding and here he was back at Dayspring on Virginia’s orders and pining for a woman he couldn’t have. At least he was trying to make peace with the past as Virginia must have intended when she sent him and Peters here to find out what had gone amiss at Dayspring. That ought to be enough even for his ever-interfering godmother, and at last Tom saw the joke was on him as he paused by the lake to moodily skim stones across its otherwise mirror-like stillness.

A moorhen shrieked a protest, then hastily fell silent as a hunting barn owl scoped the edge of the trees on silent wings and a vixen barked to her cubs to behave themselves and come away from somewhere close by. They were noises of the night he’d been so familiar with once upon a time he marvelled that he’d forgotten how good it felt to enjoy the freedom of his own land in the dark, when nobody else but smugglers and poachers and creatures of the night wanted it and a forlorn boy could feel free of all that made his days hideous. Even though he’d hated the castle back then because his guardian lived in it, he’d loved the land and still did. Another lesson learnt, he decided with a resigned sigh as he wondered if that was another reason for his godmother’s demand he spend a season here and never mind all those childish oaths never to set foot in the place again.

‘Damn it, Virginia, I’m here, aren’t I? Shouldn’t that be enough for you when I swore I’d never set foot in the place again until you went and died on me and left that confounded list of things to do behind you,’ he murmured into the night air. He could have deceived himself into thinking he heard her argue less than the best was never good enough for her godson, thank you very much. ‘God, I miss you so much,’ he whispered to the now-still lake and the moonlit shadows and decided restlessly wandering the cliff-paths all night wouldn’t do anyone much good and he couldn’t avoid his bed for ever because there was no Polly Trethayne in it, waiting for him to come home and make love to her in the heady shadows of my lord’s currently humble bedchamber.

* * *

Polly had been out of sorts for the rest of the evening. When the fire was burning low and conversation lulled to a sleepy murmur she looked up from a reverie about what lords and their secretaries talked about when nobody else was listening and caught Lady Wakebourne’s eyes resting on her. For a while she tried to join in the relaxed chatter after the day’s work until her thoughts took over and she lapsed into silence again.

If Mantaigne was here, no doubt he’d manage to annoy her in all sorts of subtle ways. And yet... And yet nothing; he was just a man and much like any other. Under his fine clothes and fastidious grooming he was still only another son of Adam. For a supposedly idle man he had a set of very powerful muscles on that lean body of his, though, and she had a feeling he was as impressive without a stitch on as he was with all that fine tailoring and spotless linen not doing a very good job of concealing his manly perfections from the eyes of the world.

He swam in the sea every morning whatever the weather, just for the sheer pleasure of pitting himself against the elements so far as she could tell. Then there were all those long hours spent in the saddle and it really wasn’t quite right for her to long for an excuse to ride at his side and simply watch the play of his well-honed muscles over that long body of his as he moved as one with his horse. He might have helped her out in her quest to find fault with him, she decided crossly, but, just when she was ready to find him as idle and frivolous as he wanted her to, he would do something that showed how unlike the image he worked so hard to portray he was underneath those fine clothes.

She recalled him on that first day, dust and ancient cobwebs clinging to his sweat-sheened skin until she’d challenge his fashionable friends to even recognise him under the grime. Heat rushed through her at the memory of him so utterly male and yet so endearingly boyish in all his dirt. That hot bolt of what must be carnal desire unnerved her.

She’d spent years thinking herself a freak for not feeling the wanton urges some women seemed to be brought so low by. Now she was yearning like a schoolgirl for a man who very likely wished she didn’t exist. Horrified to catch herself sitting among her friends, a dreamy smile on her face, she tried to make sense of the various strands of conversation and join in, but it was like trying to weave cloth out of cobwebs and the chatter faded into the background again as sorting out her feelings towards the lord of Dayspring Castle took centre stage once more.

The man was a walking conundrum, she concluded, frowning at the empty fireplace. If she understood him a little better, maybe she could put him out of her head and get on with her life. At first sight he’d looked almost too perfect, like a hero out of a myth rather than a real man. She supposed she’d been as taken in by his surface polish and glamour as everyone else after that first bolt of heady shock that here was the man she’d never let herself dream of, standing there watching her with whole worlds of promise in his blue eyes. Something told her that shield was part of a game he played with his fellow man even then and perhaps that accounted for her irritation with him as soon as she realised he wasn’t put on this earth to make her feel unique and feminine and found.

Could such a self-contained man let anyone see him as he really was? She doubted it, but if he did she hoped she wasn’t here to see it. There, she had admitted it, even if only in her thoughts. She wanted to be his special female, the one to unlock his guarded heart and make herself uniquely at home in his arms. Well, she could want as much as she liked, it would never happen. How could it when she was herself and he was Marquis of Mantaigne?

‘Woolgathering again, my dear?’ Lady Wakebourne asked softly.

Polly realised the others had said goodnight and gone to their own quarters without her even noticing. ‘Apparently,’ she admitted, finding her gaze hard to meet.

‘High time you got some sleep if you’re planning more relentless toil in the morning, my dear,’ her ladyship told her, and Polly meekly got to her feet and took a last look round the now shadowy parlour.

How much longer would they be able to sit together so sociably at the end of a day’s work like this? The question added another layer to her discomfort as she followed her ladyship down the grand stone stairway and outside into the twilight. So much was changing here and Polly knew her driven urge to work hard stemmed from a need to fight those changes and pretend all would be well again. That was obviously impossible; they lived in a different place and time now and she should accept it and plan her next move.

‘Did Lord Mantaigne really find that lovely cloth for my new habit in an attic we managed not to discover somehow?’ she asked as they made their way across the courtyard and she did her best to curb her long stride to her ladyship’s shorter pace.

‘Yes, he thinks the box must have been thrown in a dark corner when his grandmother died and the fabrics she planned to have her London dressmaker make up for her were forgotten. Lucky for us, since if they had been turned into clothes we’d have had to look at you dressed like a scarecrow for evermore.’

‘I shall ignore that comment as best I can, but it must have taken a deal of work to make it up so beautifully.’

‘We love you, my dear,’ the lady said simply, and Polly battled tears.

‘It’s so long since anyone said so,’ she admitted huskily, ‘and I love you too.’

‘Thank you. After Greville shot himself I thought I was too bitter and twisted up with fury and grief to love anyone again, but you and your brothers and the unlikely friends we’ve gathered along the way taught me otherwise. You have made a lot of difference to a good many lives, Polly. I hope you’ll see how special you are one day and how very lucky those boys of yours are to have such a sister.’

‘I only did what any sister would,’ Polly protested uncomfortably.

‘Most would have sent their brothers to a charitable institution and done whatever they had to in order to make their own way in the world. Not many would put their half-brothers before their reputations and any prospect of a decent marriage. I would not have done what you did at seventeen; I was far too selfish and pleased with myself for such a sacrifice back then.’

‘You would have done exactly as I did. The boys had done nothing to deserve what happened to us and I couldn’t let Papa’s folly cost them a future.’

‘At the price of your own,’ her friend pointed out gently.

Polly paused before she spoke, wondering why they’d never talked this freely in all the years they had known each other. ‘I was too young to see that then and now my brothers’ needs outweigh mine.’

‘You are still human, child—you can’t rule passions and emotions out of your life because your father seems to have indulged in far too many of them. If you ever need a listener, I’m an older and wiser woman than I was once,’ Lady Wakebourne offered as if she thought Polly might stand in need of a confidante before too long.

‘Finding a new home and some sort of future for Toby and Henry and Josh is more important than my little worries,’ she said as if that was all that mattered in her life, as indeed it had to be.

‘You’re still too young to shoulder such responsibility. I really hope your father was properly ashamed of himself for leaving you in such dire straits.’

‘He always thought we would come about.’

‘When that last ill-considered venture took every penny he had?’

‘It could have worked,’ Polly defended her feckless father.

‘And you should have had a life of your own, instead of being provider and protector to those heedless boys before you were out of the schoolroom.’

‘They’re not heedless, and I’m happy here—or I was until we were found out,’ Polly argued. ‘Anyway, I would never have taken in polite society.’

‘Nonsense, you may be taller than the average, but the polite world would be well pleased by the sight of you if you’d ever had a Season in town.’

‘There we must differ, so shall we forget building castles in Spain and go to bed, my lady?’

‘Aye, although whether you’ll sleep when you get there is a very different matter,’ Lady Wakebourne said as if she knew a little bit too much about Polly’s restless nights and disturbing dreams for comfort.