Читать книгу The Regency Season Collection: Part Two - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 43

Chapter Twelve

‘Has it ever struck you that the intruders we thought were prowling round the Stuart wing of the castle could be choosing moonlit nights to avoid the free-traders, Lady W.?’ Polly asked Lady Wakebourne over the luncheon Prue insisted they took in the ‘Drawing Room’ while the rest of the self-appointed staff had theirs in the kitchen.

For a while Polly had tried to insist nothing had changed with the marquis’s homecoming, but the air of restraint and discomfort in the otherwise cosy kitchen had soon defeated her. Now she reluctantly bowed to the divisions that seemed to have grown up between gentry and working folk once more. It was tempting to blame his lordship, but fairness made her admit he’d done nothing to put those barriers up, he had given in to the fact they existed much as she had herself.

‘I do my best not to think about the smugglers who infest this coast, or anyone else who might be wandering about in the night when I’m in bed. And don’t call me Lady W. in that vulgar fashion.’

‘If you really mean to adopt me as well as your mixed quantity of urchins so Lord Mantaigne can get us out of his castle, then you’ll have to let me to call you something other than “your ladyship”.’

‘As if you ever did treat me with much respect,’ Lady Wakebourne scoffed.

‘Yet I still respect you and might even have admitted to loving you now and again, if you recall?’

‘You know it’s mutual,’ Lady Wakebourne said. Polly felt her own smile wobble as it occurred to her it wasn’t only Lord Mantaigne who had held back his feelings these past few years.

‘I also know you stood with me when the rest of the world turned its back and without you I would have been so lonely I can’t even bring myself to think about it. Besides that, who else can understand the things that concern me most? I love my brothers far more than they like me to admit now they’re so grown up and manly, but they aren’t interested in where their next pair of breeches is coming from or how to keep them well and happy on nothing a week.’

‘You’re far too young for that to be the beginning and end of your ambitions now, my dear, so at seventeen you were unforgivably youthful to be left to bring them up without a penny to bless yourself with. I would be a very hard-hearted female if I’d turned my back on you and those three little boys then.’

‘And you’re certainly not one of those, are you? Do you ever intend to tell Lord Mantaigne how your great-aunt somehow contrived to interfere in his young life, my lady? No, don’t try pretending she had nothing to do with his timely rescue from his awful guardian because I know you as well as anyone can by now. Hearing how it was done might help him live here and not see that monster around every corner when the rest of us must leave.’

‘And you take a humane interest in the man’s welfare, I suppose? Do you really take me for such a fool, Paulina?’

‘No, but you know as well as I do it’s all I will ever share with him.’

Lady Wakebourne gave Polly a steady look as if she would like to argue, then sighed and shrugged her agreement that there was no future for a lady of no means at all and a rich and powerful marquis. ‘Nevertheless, I am always here if you need to talk to someone about it. Carrying your burdens alone as you have had to all these years has made you both older than your years and at the same time as inexperienced as a débutante at her first ball. Promise me you’ll come to me if you need a woman’s advice or even a sympathetic ear?’

‘If I ever come up against a problem Lord Mantaigne doesn’t resolve before I have a chance to make my own decisions, I will,’ Polly said bitterly and knew how much she had betrayed when she saw the look in her acute friend’s dark eyes.

‘How very ham-fisted of him,’ the lady said with a glint of unholy satisfaction in her gaze that left Polly torn between agreeing and feeling even more hurt.

‘We are better having as little to do with each other as possible when we must live under the same roof.’

‘If you say so, my dear,’ Lady Wakebourne said so equably Polly gave her a suspicious glare.

‘Anyway we were not talking about me and the lord and master of this poor old place, we were discussing how your relative came to intervene in his childhood.’

‘Well, no, we were not if we intend to be strictly accurate. You made an unsubstantiated observation and I didn’t deny it.’

‘That’s splitting hairs.’

‘No, I once made a promise and I don’t easily go back on one of those.’

‘But I was right, wasn’t I?’

‘If you make your own connections, I suppose it wouldn’t break the letter of any agreement we might have made to keep quiet about Lord Mantaigne’s early life for his own sake.’

‘Cunning of you.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’

‘And you didn’t recall this place was empty by an inspired chance either, I suppose?’

‘No, and I made Virginia no promises on that front. She made sure the right backs were turned when I appealed to her for a chance for us to make some sort of a life for ourselves here since we had nothing. It wasn’t as if his lordship wanted anything to do with the place and she agreed we were better than some villainous gang of rascals taking the place over.’

‘Rather than the rascals who live here now?’

‘Aye, we are something of a mixed bag, are we not?’

‘At times I can’t help feeling sorry for Lord Mantaigne for having to endure our ramshackle company,’ Polly admitted ruefully.

‘Don’t waste your pity; he’s enjoyed it, for the most part, and it distracted him from brooding on things he’d rather forget.’

‘I suppose he does like the boys and seems to get on remarkably well with Barker and Partridge and one or two of the others. You could be right.’

‘Of course I am; it’s one of the privileges of middle age. Another is noticing it isn’t only the boys and those two rogues he likes.’

‘He does get on well with Jane and Prue and I’m sure if Dotty was twenty years younger he’d like her far too much.’

‘If you say so, my dear.’

‘She must have been lovely in her prime, don’t you think?’

‘Not if I can help it, for goodness knows what she got up to back then.’

‘I hate to think.’

‘Best if you don’t, but you have so little grasp of your own attractions it might be dangerous if your marquis wasn’t nearly as bad. I never came across two people more genuinely ignorant of their own qualities that sometimes I feel as if I’m in the midst of one of Shakespeare’s comedies.’

‘Except it’s not very funny.’

‘If I had charge of the ending, it would be,’ Lady Wakebourne said with the happy ending she would write onto their sad little tale in the almost-smile she gave Polly as their eyes met in an admission it was nigh impossible.

Polly looked away to try to tell them both it wasn’t even worth speaking of and tried to recall what had got them on to this dangerous ground in the first place. ‘You still haven’t answered my original question,’ she said as she retraced their steps and remembered her theory about those moonlight nights.

‘Which was?’

‘If those intruders you have always done your best to pretend you didn’t believe in come here at the best times to avoid being spotted by the smugglers? I suppose that says either they are afraid of them or think they’d be recognised.’

‘Either I suppose, if they exist at all outside your fancy, my dear.’

‘Oh, they do, Lord Mantaigne and I heard them inside the closed-up wing the first night he was here, so at least now I know my ears do not deceive me.’

‘And I know you two are reckless and headstrong as a pair of runaway horses.’

‘Don’t change the subject, although while we’re on the subject of who knows what and when, did you really contrive to get word to Lady Virginia there was something wrong here before she died?’

‘I’m sure she had her sources in the area. The late Lady Farenze had a wide circle of friends.’

‘If she was half as all-knowing and infuriating as you, she could have run a spy ring for all anyone else would have known about it.’

‘Lady Virginia was far more of everything than I am, Paulina. Such a shame you never knew her, for you have much in common.’

‘I think not,’ Polly said stiffly, horrified at the image of a formidable lady looking down her aristocratic nose at her.

‘If nothing else, you could have compared notes on Lord Mantaigne, since you both dote on him.’

‘I certainly do not dote on that stiff-necked idiot of a man,’ Polly ground out gruffly and wished her ladyship a brusque farewell until later so she could go and watch out for him to return from his afternoon of avoiding her in peace.

* * *

Later that afternoon Mr Peters rode back up the drive in time to meet his employer coming the other way. Polly wasn’t watching for either of them by then, of course, but she happened to glance out of the a window overlooking the coast road and wondered how two gentlemen could be so wet and muddied and yet so vital she longed to be out there with them just to find out what they were talking about. Whatever it was that kept them out there longer than any sensible creature should be on such an inclement evening, it must be of absorbing interest, or so confidential they didn’t wish to be overheard.

How might it feel if she happened to be the true lady of this ancient castle? Perhaps one of the previous ladies of Mantaigne had stood at this very window, watching for her lord to return from court or some foreign war and seen him at last on the horizon. She could have waited with breathless longing for it to be really him, this time, at last. Imagine how that lady would feel knowing he was safe and back with her again, joy surging through her at the sight of him, breathless with longing to lie in his arms all night again, desperate to be held close and told how deeply he had missed her every moment they were apart and she had held his fortress for him in his absence.

It seemed that dreaming of another time and different ways of being lords and ladies had let her think of herself as his lady as she never had in the here and now. The how she might have been as Lady Paulina of Mantaigne was queenly and proud instead of beggarly and defiant, her carriage fluid and assured as she swept down the stone stairway from the Great Parlour to greet her lord. She knew he adored her just as she was; that he knew she would defend his lands and his people and their children like a she-wolf protecting her cubs. A mighty lord needed an independent lady then, for how else could he know his lands and people were safe when he was not at home?

She shook her head and told herself not to be a fool. Not only was that then and this now, but here and now was real and there and then was not. Something about Peters’s and his lordship’s earnest conversation told her they believed some important problem had been solved by that mysterious trip to London, and it made her shiver to think that would be that. Now his lordship would leave and perhaps never come back. Even that phantom lady of his queening it over the neighbourhood seemed better than never setting eyes on the wretched man again, or only once in a long and weary decade when he might come back to see if his castle had fallen into the sea quite yet. Lady Wakebourne was right to accuse her of doting on the man and knowing it at least gave her the sense to distance herself from him.

If it was in any way mutual, he wouldn’t have been able to turn his back on her and ride away from her this morning. She had offered herself to him so blatantly and he had all but blushed and said a polite ‘no, thank you’. Shame rushed into her cheeks in a hot flood of colour, and she leant one on the cold window pane to cool it and saw with horror his lordship’s rain-dark head raise as he caught sight of her. Gasping a denial she had been watching for his return like some faithful hound, she jumped away and refused to look back, but it was too late—the image of him soaked to the skin and his fine clothes plastered to his body as if they couldn’t love him enough was stamped on her mind’s eye.

Even from so far away she’d seen the intensity in his blue gaze as if not even that much rain would douse the heat in it. Drat the man, but he called to the wild instincts and hot blood in her. Her heart was pounding, her body roused and eager and her breath coming short through parted lips. She caught sight of herself in a watery old Venetian glass mirror almost too old to do its work any more and put suddenly cold hands to her hot cheeks. She looked wanton and, worse, enchanted; like a silly maiden in a fairy story put under a spell by the very sight of the handsome prince who had come to rescue someone else. Well, she wouldn’t be the bereft spectator on his life. She was her own person and that was that. Easy enough to think it, but telling her body to let go of all those seductive images of her curled about him all loved and sated against that mighty, muscular body proved much more difficult.

* * *

‘I wish a lady like that one would look at me as Miss Trethayne just did at you,’ Peters joked down below in the stable yard as he and his latest employer led their tired horses through the stable doors Dacre had flung open as if he’d been waiting for his lordship to come home too.

‘If I ever catch you watching her with that glint in your eyes again, I’ll black at least one of them for you,’ Tom told him brusquely and for once couldn’t have cared less what his supposed secretary thought his feelings for Miss Polly Trethayne might be.

‘No need, I have the sense to see when a woman has hardly noticed I live on the same planet, even if you are wilfully blind about your feelings for her.’

‘A little less of both than I was when you left for London,’ Tom said softly as the image of her, warm and dry and wistful as she gazed out of that window like a princess in her tower wishing she had a prince on the way, replayed through his mind.

‘Less wilful, or less blind?’

‘How plain do I have to be? I know she is like no other woman I ever met, that any man who could call her his would need to thank his maker on his knees for her every morning and work hard to deserve her for the rest of the day and into the night.’

‘A delightful pastime, no doubt, but why does there seem to be a “but” running under all that promising infatuation?’

‘You have the devil of a sharp tongue, man; are you related to the Winterleys by any chance?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Peters said as soberly as any judge, but Tom was beginning to know him well enough to be certain he was laughing at both of them for some reason best known to himself. ‘And the “but”?’

‘But I’m hardly the sort of man who deserves the love of a good woman.’

‘If we all had to wait to be worthy of that, the human race would have died out long ago.’

‘Yet if what you say is true, Miss Trethayne will soon have the chance to meet a man who can offer her so much that I cannot.’

‘A castle, perhaps? A comfortable lifestyle at the heart of the ton? Or do you think she might prefer a fortune not even laying out funds to support half the countryside can make a dent in?’

‘Please don’t think accusing her of being a gold-digger will make me furious enough to give away some phantom truth about my feelings for Miss Trethayne, Peters. I’m not some naive young fool up from the country.’

‘It might be better if you were.’

‘Better for whom?’

‘For you of course, my lord,’ the man said abruptly and made way for one of the grooms to take over caring for his tired horse as if he couldn’t endure the company of such an idiot for very much longer.

‘He’s right, lad,’ Dacre informed him.

‘Not you as well,’ Tom mumbled with a tight frown he hoped would put the man off one of his homilies.

‘Me more than anyone, m’lord. Her ladyship trusted me to keep you from riding straight to the devil when you was younger than Master Josh and I ain’t done yet.’

‘Thank you,’ Tom said as the fury died out of him at the sight of genuine concern in the old groom’s eyes. ‘You always were more patient with me than I deserved.’

‘High time someone was,’ Dacre said gruffly, as uneasy with speaking of his feelings as Tom had ever been, but doing it all the same.

How humbling to know his old friend had more courage than he did, but perhaps this was his day for being humble.

‘Any woman worth her salt wants to make her own choice, boy, and that one’s worth a lot more,’ Dacre told him with a severe nod and went to fetch the warm mash he had ready for the unlucky gelding who had gone so hard for him all afternoon.

‘Anything to say?’ he challenged the weary animal as he finished grooming it and stopped to pet him. ‘No? You must be the only one who hasn’t today,’ he murmured in the gelding’s responsive ears and even his own weariness wasn’t enough to blot out the feeling he’d done the most stupid day’s work he’d ever done by walking away from all he could be as Miss Paulina Trethayne’s grateful lover.

* * *

Polly refused to go across the courtyard to dinner that night and sat in her lofty room, staring into the fire that would never have been lit on a soaking May evening before the marquis came home. She sighed at the thought of how much had changed here since she saw him that first time, like some gilded god come down from Olympus to play stable hand for a day.

Feeling sad and forsaken and thoroughly out of sorts with herself and the rest of the world, she tried hard not to turn into a watering pot when Toby came up the stairs with a plate carefully covered to keep it warm and insisted on watching over her while she ate. How could she refuse to do so like some fine lady in a fit of pique when he had taken so much trouble to look after her? Luckily he was also old and wise enough to know she didn’t want to talk about what was upsetting her, but a little later Hal and Josh tapped on her door and sidled in, looking as if they thought it was their fault she was blue-devilled.

It was no good, she decided with despair eating even deeper into her than it had before. She couldn’t do it. Not even for the sake of loving Lord Mantaigne as she so badly wanted him to let her love him could she cut herself off from her brothers. Since her stepmother had died when Josh was a baby, Polly had tried to fill the gaping holes in his little life as best she could. Then there was her usually serious and studious middle brother, who sometimes lost himself in a book as determinedly as Lord Mantaigne did in his life of hedonistic pleasure.

Did Hal hide the same sort of sensitivity behind a front of self-sufficiency as his lordship did then? Unlikely, Polly decided as Hal’s own character trumped the fear he was deeply damaged by the loss of parents he barely remembered. Her Hal was a natural scholar, a thinker who would find a comfortable corner of life somehow and settle into it with a genuine pleasure few outside his own world would ever understand. Worry as she might about Toby and his adventurous spirit and Josh’s sometimes wild imagination, she knew Hal would be happy as long as he was able to keep following clues and trails only he could read in some dusty old tome.

So now she could worry about Toby instead. He knew how it felt to have two loving parents and a comfortable life because he’d been eight years old when his whole world fell apart. Those first years were nothing like the past seven had been and now she thought she could rob him of the small security he had with Lady Wakebourne and all their other friends and fellow travellers? No, not even for Lord Mantaigne. There wasn’t a man on earth she could love enough to risk throwing away her brothers’ happiness for.

So, that was that. She would do whatever it took to keep these boys as happy and secure as they could be without a penny to their names but what she could earn or accept from a man who felt guilty about them for some reason. Once upon a time she had been too proud to accept charity, but could any woman who stared destitution in the face afford pride? It might be charity, but it would do. They would go to the Dower House of Spring Magna Manor House when it was ready if Lord Mantaigne offered it to them. The man had houses enough to quarter an army in and was hardly likely to miss one he admitted he’d forgotten about until he stumbled on it on one of his lone rides and asked who owned it.

If he intended to salve his conscience by allowing her and her friends to live in the Dower House, then so be it. She would watch that fine and suitable marchioness of his playing lady bountiful in the villages and smile. Polly might hate the pity and puzzlement in such a fine lady’s eyes whenever she encountered the oddest of her husband’s dependents, but she would be polite and deferential to the devil himself if it kept her brothers safe and happy.

‘I know you don’t want to hear it, but I do love you all, you know?’ she said and watched them roll their eyes at each other and pretend to be sick with a feeling her real world had just slotted back into place.

Anything else was only a dream, yet wasn’t the pain supposed to stop if you told it not to be real? How could something as insubstantial as a dream still hurt as if part of her had fallen off a cliff and been bruised and battered half to death?

‘We know, and we do you too,’ Toby said as if to get it out of the way in as few words as he could on behalf of all of them.

‘We decided to show you our secret to make you feel better about whatever it is you feel miserable about, Poll,’ Hal informed her solemnly, and the parent she had tried to be for the past seven years pricked up her ears and worried about what that might be. ‘It’s all right, it’s nothing bad. We didn’t want to tell anyone about it, but since a man’s going to come and set the castle right very soon, or at least so Lord Mantaigne says, you might as well know about it before everyone else does.’

‘I agree,’ Josh said solemnly, and Polly wondered if letting them sleep in the men’s quarters in the ancient castle keep had been such a good idea after all. It might have made them more independent, but apparently it had also left them free to wander about the rest of the empty and maybe dangerous old house whenever they felt like it.

‘Where is it then?’ she asked warily.

‘We’ll have to show you or you won’t understand properly,’ Hal said with a look that said it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if they told her where it was and Polly concluded her middle brother could sometimes be a bit too clever for his own good.

‘Come on, Poll, the doors will be locked and everyone supposed to be in bed if we don’t hurry and we need to know what to do about it anyway,’ Josh said with a defiant look for his bigger brother as if that was an argument they had long been having with each other.

‘Very well,’ she said, for they might as well get it out of the way so she could tell Mr Peters who would inform his employer about whatever small niche the two of them had found in this once-great fortress.

‘It’s as well you aren’t wearing skirts tonight,’ Hal said with an approving glance at the breeches and jacket she’d put back on for some obscure reason even she couldn’t understand when she came up here to brood alone over what was and what ought to be and wasn’t.

‘Most brothers would be glad to see their sister ape the lady.’

‘We’re not most brothers and you’re not most sisters,’ Hal said, and Josh just looked puzzled by the whole idea she could be anything else but what she was—their big sister.