Читать книгу Rake's Reform - Marie-Louise Hall - Страница 6

The courtroom was small, crowded, but utterly silent as the judge, resplendent in his crimson, put on his black cap and began to intone the words of the death sentence. Above in the gallery, a young woman sat as still and as rigid as the ashen-faced boy who stood in the dock, his hands clenched upon the wooden rail.

Miss Jane Hilton stared disbelievingly at the judge, her hazel eyes ablaze with anger beneath the wide brim of her black straw hat. This was nothing short of barbarism. This could not be happening! Not in England! Not in the supposedly civilised, well-mannered England of King William IV in this year of 1830. And she was not going to let it happen.

She was on her feet before she had stopped to think.

“How can you?” Her question rang out in the hushed room. “What crime has this child committed? Any farmer or labourer in this room could tell you that a rick of poorly cured hay may heat to the point where it catches fire without any assistance.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the more poorly dressed onlookers as every head in the lower part of the courtroom turned and looked upwards, including that of her guardian, Mr Filmore, who regarded her first with astonishment and then with tightlipped fury as he gestured to her furiously to sit down and be silent. The judge’s hooded eyelids lifted as he, too, stared at her with bloodshot blue eyes.

“Silence in the court, madam, or I shall have you removed from the building,” he roared.

“I shall not be silent!” Janey retorted. “I know Jem Avery is not guilty of arson. On the morning and at the same time as he is supposed to have set the rick alight, I passed him upon the road some five miles from the Pettridges Home Farm yard.”

“Indeed?” The judge’s bushy white brows lifted. “I trust you acquainted the defence counsel with this—” he paused “—alleged meeting.”

“Of course I did, but—” Janey began.

“M’lud?” The defence counsel stepped forward and said something in an undertone to the judge. American, unstable and prone to female fancies were the only words which Janey caught, but it was enough, combined with the smug smile of her guardian, to tell her why she had not been called as a witness.

“It seems your evidence was deemed unreliable,” the judge said, lifting his head again to look down his long nose at Janey. “So I must ask you a second time to be silent.”

“I will not!” Janey repeated furiously. “I have seen better justice administered by a lynch mob in St Louis than I have here today.”

“Then perhaps you had better go back there,” the judge sneered, earning sycophantic smiles from both defence and prosecution counsels, who were already surreptitiously shuffling their papers together. “Gentlemen,” he said laconically to two of the ushers who stood at the back of the gallery, “remove that woman from the courtroom.”

“I suppose I should not have lost my temper.” Janey sighed heavily a few minutes later as she stood next to her maid upon the steps of the courthouse, attempting to push strands of her flyaway fair hair back into the rather workmanlike chignon in which it was usually confined. “But that judge is a pompous, port-sodden old fool!”

“Yes, miss,” Kate agreed as she handed her the wide-brimmed hat which had become dislodged from Janey’s head during her somewhat undignified exit from the courtroom between the two ushers.

“It makes me so angry, Kate,” Janey went on as she rammed the hat down on her head. “Jem Avery has never hurt a soul in his life. The worse he has ever done is poach a rabbit or two to prevent his family from starving. I know he did not fire that rick, though Mr Filmore gave him reason enough in the way he treated him! It is monstrous to even suggest he should hang.”

“I know, miss,” Kate said sympathetically. “And there was not a Christian person in that room who did not agree with you.”

“Then why didn’t they all get up and say so!” Janey said, her American drawl more pronounced as it always was when she was angry. “Why don’t they demand a retrial?”

“Because that’s just not how it’s done here, miss. People don’t dare make a fuss, for fear they’ll lose their places or trade if they’re in business. You have to know someone, one of them…if Jem were a Duke’s son, then it would be different.”

“I know,” Janey said gratingly as she retied the grey silk ribbons on her hat beneath her pointed chin. She was almost as angry with herself as she was with the judge. After four years in England, she should have known better than to expect an instant public protest. Kate was right. That wasn’t how things were done here in this genteel and ancient English cathedral city, where the law was enforced to the letter and property valued above lives.

She glanced upwards at the serene, awesome spire of the nearby cathedral, which seemed almost to reach the grey November clouds, and sighed. Even the buildings in this corner of England seemed to have that air of superior certainty which she had encountered in so many of her English acquaintances.

God in his Heaven and everything and everyone in their proper place, including Miss Jane Hilton, colonial nobody, she thought, feeling a sudden overwhelming homesickness for the handful of ramshackle timber dwellings strung out along a muddy track, half a world away. That had been the nearest to a town she had known, until her parents’ death had forced her to return to St Louis, where her grandfather had found her.

The log cabins in which she had spent her childhood had had no attractions with which to rival either the medieval splendour of the cathedral or the exuberant prosperity of the timbered Tudor merchant’s houses that clustered about its close. And the people who had lived in them had often been rough and illiterate. But they would not have condemned a boy like Jem for the loss of a hayrick, which had in all probability set alight by itself.

No, she thought, Lilian, her parents, the Schmidts, the Lafayettes and the rest would all have been on their feet with her in that courtroom—and one way or another the judge would have been made to see reason.

She shut her eyes, seeing them all for a moment as if they were stood beside her. Her mother, fair, calm and beautiful, even with her apron besmirched with smuts and her sleeves rolled up. Her father, weathered and strong as the trees he had felled with his own hands to make the clearing that they had farmed. Proper Mrs Schmidt, looking askance at red-haired Lilian, who was as tough as the trappers she allowed to share both her cabin and her body. And Daniel, quiet, brown-eyed, brown-haired Daniel Lafayette, who had moved through the forest as silently as their Indian neighbours.

Daniel, who had been her childhood sweetheart and the first to die of the smallpox that had swept through the small frontier community. And with all the innocence and intensity of a fifteen-year-old, she had thought nothing worse could ever happen to her. And then her parents had become ill, and she knew that it could.

She shivered, remembering the sound of the earth being shovelled on to their rough wooden coffins by Lilian who, since she had had the smallpox as a child and survived it, had taken on the responsibility of nursing the sick and burying the dead.

“Miss?”

She started, wrenched back into the present by Kate’s voice.

“They’ll commute it, surely—give him transportation, won’t they?” Kate said hopefully.

“I don’t know,” Janey said flatly, swallowing the lump which had arisen in her throat. Hankering for the past and feeling sorry for herself was not going to help Jem. This was not Minnesota, this was England. Green, pleasant, and pitiless to its poor. And if she was going to save Jem’s neck, she had to think clearly and fast.

“They wouldn’t hang him, they couldn’t,” Kate added with a distinct lack of conviction. “He’s just a child, really.”

“I know,” Janey replied grimly. “But everyone is in such a panic of late because of the labourers’ riots in Kent and Hampshire that they are seeing the threat of revolution everywhere. If you had heard Mr Filmore and his fellow magistrates at dinner last night, you would have thought them in danger of being carted off to the guillotine at dawn. They see harshness as their protection.”

“But it’s not right!” Kate’s blue eyes brimmed with unshed tears. “If Mr Filmore had not dismissed him, this would never have happened. I don’t know how we’re going to break this to Mrs Avery, miss.”

“Nor do I, but I promised I should call and tell her of the verdict as soon as it was known,” Janey said grimly. “Where’s the gig, Kate?”

“That way, around the corner—I paid Tom Mitchell’s boy to hold the pony out of the master’s sight, like you said,” Kate replied.

“Thank you—I’d better go before Mr Filmore arrives and tries to stop me,” Janey said as others began to trickle down the courthouse steps. “Can you stay here and see if the warders will let you see Jem for a moment, or at least get a message to him that I will do everything I can for him? I saw Jem’s uncle, Will Avery, over there. I am sure he will give you a lift back to Pettridges if you ask him.”

“Yes, miss,” Kate agreed. “Miss—you’d better go. There’s Mr Filmore.”

With an unladylike oath acquired from Lilian, Janey picked up the skirts of her grey gown and pelisse coat and ran.

“Be careful, miss,” Kate admonished from behind, “that leg of yours is only just healed. You don’t want to break the other one.”

“Jane! Jane! Come here at once!” Janey increased her speed a little as Mr Filmore’s rather shrill tones overlaid Kate’s warning. But flicking a glance over her shoulder, she slowed a little. Mr Filmore’s over-inflated idea of his own dignity would not allow him to be seen chasing his ward down the street.

There would undoubtedly be a scene when she returned to Pettridges Hall, she thought resignedly as she scrambled into her gig and took up the reins. Not that she cared. While her grandfather had been alive, she had done her best to turn herself into the English lady he had so wanted her to be, out of affection for him. But she had no such feeling towards the Filmores, and what they thought of her had long since ceased to matter to her in the slightest.

Five months, she thought, as she cracked the whip over the skewbald pony’s head and sent it forward at a spanking trot. Five months, and she would be twenty-one, and she would have control of her fortune, her estate—and would be able to tell the Filmores to leave Pettridges.

Heads out, extended necks flecked with foam, the blood bays pulled the high-wheeled phaeton along the narrow lane at full lick. Bouncing from side to side on the rutted surface, the wheel hubs scraped first the high stone wall on one side then the other.

“You win, Jonathan! I still consider this contraption outmoded and damned uncomfortable, but I will grant you it is faster than anything in my carriage house. So, slow down!” the fair-haired man, sitting beside the driver, gasped as he held on to his tall silk hat with one hand and the safety rail with the other. “We’ll never make that bend at this speed and if there’s anything coming the other way—”

“You’re starting to sound like my maiden aunt, Perry.” The Honourable Jonathan Lindsay laughed, but he pulled upon the reins and began to slow the team of matched bays, who were snorting and sweating profusely. “For someone who was cool as a cucumber when Boney’s old Guard came on at Waterloo, you’ve made an almighty fuss for the last twenty minutes about a little speed.”

“At nineteen, one has not developed the instinct for self-preservation one has at thirty-two,” Perry said, sighing with relief as his dark-haired companion brought the bays down to a trot. “And I can assure you, I was far from cool…” A faraway look came on to his fresh ruddy face. “Is it really fifteen years ago? I still have nightmares about the sound of the damned French drums as if it were yesterday. And at the time, I didn’t think either of us would see our twentieth birthdays.”

“No.” Jonathan Lindsay sighed. “Neither did I, and sometimes I begin to wish that I hadn’t—”

“Begad! You have been bitten by the black dog!” Lord Derwent said, giving him a sharp look from his brown eyes. “What the devil is up with Jono? First, you announce you are giving up the tables, next, that you are going to bury yourself in the country—” He stopped and gave a theatrical groan. “You have not been spurned by Charlotte?”

Jonathan shook his fashionably tousled dark head.

“Or Amelia, or Emily Witherston?” Perry frowned as Jonathan’s craggily handsome face remained impassive. “Tell me it is not that ghastly Roberts girl—”

“Margaret? Allow me some taste!” His friend sighed again. “I have not fallen in love, Perry, and I have not the slightest intention of doing so!”

“Then what is chewing at you?” Lord Derwent persisted in asking. “Go on like this and you will be in danger of becoming positively dull.”

“Exactly!” Lindsay sighed again, checking the bays as he looked ahead and saw a small ragged-looking child swinging precariously upon one of the gates that interrupted the run of stone walling here and there. “Don’t you feel it, Perry, creeping in from all directions since the old king died? And it’ll get worse if Wellesley steps down for these reforming fellows—”

“Feel what?” Lord Derwent looked at him blankly.

“Dullness, respectability, worthiness and rampant hypocrisy! You can’t enjoy an evening in a hell without these new Peelers turning it over. And as for society—the most innocent flirtation sends young women into a simpering panic, and let slip the mildest oath and the mamas look at you as if you have crawled out of the midden! Conversation is all of profit and industry, new inventions and good works—everyone fancies themselves an archaeologist or scientist or writer—no one confesses to idleness or sheer self-indulgence any more. I begin to think old Bonaparte was right—we’re becoming a nation of shopkeepers with a tradesman’s morality—damnation, I am even beginning to feel that I should be doing ‘something useful’ with my life!”

“But you do…you do lots of things. You hunt and fish, and you’re damned good company at the club—”

“Amusements, Perry, that’s all,” Jonathan said gloomily. “Amusements of which I am beginning to tire.”

Lord Derwent’s brow furrowed. “Well, you’re a Member of Parliament. That’s useful, ain’t it?”

“Parliament! I rarely visit the place and I’ve made one speech in five years—and that was for a wager to see if I could make old Beaufort’s face go as purple as that young Jewish fellow’s waistcoat.”

“Caused more of a stir than most, though.” Derwent laughed. “When I read it in The Times, I thought you’d become a raving revolutionary. If every landowner gave land to his labourers for their use, we’d all be penniless and I doubt they’d bother to work for us at all!”

“One can hardly blame them,” Lindsay answered drily. “The price of bread is up, wages are down, and the common land has been fenced in for sheep. Their work is being taken by machines in the name of profit and the poor relief has been cut to subsistence.”

“Well, at least they’re spared all that nasty dusty work—and the farmers do well out of it,” Lord Derwent said lightly. “All the clever chaps tell me that the health of the nation is dependent upon the creation of wealth—”

“And also, it would seem, upon the creation of paupers,” Jonathan said glancing towards the pinched face of the child as they passed him.

“The lower orders have always gone without when times are hard, they’re used to it. A bit of hunger toughens ’em up and keeps ’em grateful for what they do get. They’re not like us, Jono, they don’t have the finer feelings—look out!”

But Lindsay had already reined back the bays almost to their haunches as they rounded another bend, made blind by the gable end of a cottage built into the wall, and almost collided with a pony trap slewed across its width.

There was no sign of its driver. The reins were looped loosely about the post of a small gate to one side of the cottage, and the skewbald pony was nibbling at a weed growing in a crack in the wall.

“Damned silly place to leave it!” Derwent announced loudly. “All Curzon Street to ninepence that it’s driven by a woman.”

“The Rector’s wife or daughter, I’d wager,” Jonathan agreed wryly, glancing at the weathered straw hat with a plain ribbon trim that lay discarded upon the seat of the trap. “Calling upon the downtrodden and irreligious with some tract, no doubt. Jump down and move it, would you, Perry? Or we’ll be here all day. There’s a field gate a bit further on—put it in there while I pass—”

“Must I?” Lord Derwent looked down doubtfully at the chalky mud of the lane. “It took my man hours to get this finish on my boots.” His face brightened as he noticed that the tiny downstairs window of the cottage was open and leant across to pick up the whip. “No need, watch!”

He stretched out the whip and rapped upon the window sill. “I say, you there, would you like to earn a shilling—?”

“Go away! Go away!” A woman’s voice, choked with sobs, replied. “You’re murderers! All of you!”

“Murderers! I assure you, we are no such thing!” Perry shouted back cheerfully. “All we want is for someone to move this trap—surely you have a good strong lad—”

The woman’s sobs became a low keening wail.

There was a bang as a door was thrown open. A moment later, Janey was at the gate. Tall and slender in her grey gown and white apron, she glowered up at them, as she settled a grubby-looking infant more firmly upon her hip.

“Can you not just go away?” The voice was low, educated and furiously angry with the faintest of accents, which puzzled Lindsay for a moment. He had heard that accent before, but where? His brows furrowed for a moment. And then he remembered. Jack de Lancey, the young American officer who had served on Wellington’s staff at Waterloo before being mortally wounded.

“Whatever is the clergy coming to? She sounds like a colonial,” Perry hissed in an all-too-audible whisper at the same moment.

“Perhaps that is because I was born in America and spent the first sixteen years of my life there,” Janey snapped. She was in no mood for condescension from a pair of aristocratic dandies who were probably incapable of tying their own cravats. “Now, if your curiosity is satisfied, will you please go away!”

“With pleasure,” Lord Derwent moaned, “but this—” he wrinkled his nose distastefully as he gestured to the trap “—this vehicle is in our way.”

“You have my permission to move it!” she retorted, brushing back a strand of dishevelled fair hair from her face with her free hand. “Unless you would prefer to hold the child? I thought not!” she said scathingly as her hazel eyes blazed across Derwent’s horrified face. “It might spoil your gloves!”

“But surely there is a lad—” Derwent said.

“Not any longer! You hear that woman weeping—she has just heard that ‘her fine lad’ is to be hanged for the firing of a rick, which he was not even near—”

“Hanged! Bigod!” Lord Derwent’s fair brows lifted. “Damned inconvenient timing, but I suppose he deserves it.”

“Deserves—” Her voice came out of her throat as a hiss of contempt. “Do you think anyone deserves to die for the price of a hayrick, when his employer is a mean-minded cheat who will let men, women and children starve to death? Is hanging a just punishment for such a crime?”

“Should have thought of that before he set fire to the rick. Common knowledge that arson’s a capital offence,” Lord Derwent drawled.

“He did not fire the rick!” Janey found herself almost choked with rage. If they did not go soon, arson would not be the only capital offence to be committed of late. She could easily murder the pair of them. “I do not know how you can be so complacent! So arrogant!” she said fiercely.

“Quite easily, really. Someone has to support the rule of law, you know.”

“The trap, Perry?” Jonathan interposed quietly, speaking for the first time when he saw Janey’s free hand clench upon the crossbar of the gate as if she were intending to rip it off and hurl it at Derwent like a spear. “Now, if you would not mind?”

“Must I?” His companion’s answer was one sharp glance that sent Lord Derwent down from the box in a moment.

The hazel eyes followed Derwent, and the soft rose lips silently framed an epithet that the Honourable Jonathan Lindsay had never heard from a lady, and certainly not from a Rector’s wife. His cool blue gaze flicked to the hand she had put up to push away another stray strand of hair from her eyes, leaving a smudge of soot upon her slanting cheekbone. No ring upon the slender fingers—the daughter, then?

A pity, he thought. With her great angry dark eyes, slanted dark brows and wide, soft mouth, she was all passion and fire, a veritable Amazon. Quite unlike the insipid blue-eyed misses who were English society’s current ideal, but put her in Paris and she’d have ’em falling at her feet. If she had been married, country life might have proved more entertaining than he had expected, but he had a rule of never seducing unmarried girls. There were some depths to which one could not sink, even to relieve boredom.

And then, with a start, he realised that those extraordinary hazel eyes were fixed upon his face, regarding him with a coolness that he found distinctly disconcerting. He was not accustomed to women looking at him as if he had just crawled from beneath a stone. Possessed of a large fortune, and good looks since the age of sixteen or so, he had always been the recipient of frank admiration, dewy-eyed adoration or thinly veiled invitations from females of all ages.

“Lord Derwent is not as unkind as he sounds, I assure you,” he said, wondering why that cool dark gaze should make him feel as if he should apologise to her. After all, why should he care what she thought of him?

“No?” The fine dark arch of her brows lifted as she glanced to where Lord Derwent was somewhat ineffectively coaxing the unwilling pony away from the weed in the wall. “Perhaps I misjudged him…perhaps he is merely stupid.”

“Derwent is far from stupid. He is overly flippant at times,” he said tersely, knowing that it was equally true of himself. “It has been a habit of his for so long he no longer notices himself doing it.”

“Flippant!” Her voice was as contemptuous as her stare as she looked at him a second time, taking in the studied carelessness of his Caesar haircut, the immaculately tailored grey topcoat that emphasised the broad width of his shoulders, leanness of his waist and hips, the glossy perfection of riding boots that did not often have contact with the ground. “If you think that an excuse, then you are as despicable as he is.”

Her gaze came back up to his, defiant and decidedly judgmental, he thought. She might as well call him a dandy and a plunger and have done with it as look at him in that fashion. Well, if that was how she wished it—

“Oh, no, I really cannot allow you to insult Derwent in such a fashion,” he drawled and returned her scrutiny with a blatancy which sent the colour flaring in her cheeks. “I’m worse, much worse, I assure you.”

“That I can well believe,” she replied, involuntarily lifting her free hand to the little white ruff collar at the neck of her grey gown to be sure it was fastened. And then, aware that his mocking blue gaze had followed the gesture, she let her hand drop swiftly back to her side and lifted her chin to glare at him again.

“But I do have my saving graces,” he said, drily feeling a flicker of satisfaction that he had succeeded in disconcerting her. “A sense of humour, for instance.”

“Really?” Her faintly husky voice was pure ice as her gaze blazed into his eyes. “I cannot say I find hanging a source of amusement.” Hitching the infant more firmly upon her hip, she made to turn away.

“Wait! My apologies. You are right, of course—hanging is no laughing matter.” He found himself speaking before he had even thought what he was going to say. “This lad who is to be hanged—if you tell me his name and circumstances, I might be able to do something. I cannot promise, of course, but I have some influence as a Member of Parliament.”

“You are a Member of Parliament?” There was astonishment in her voice and in the wide hazel eyes as she turned to face him again, and, he noted wryly, deep suspicion.

“Difficult to believe, I know, but it is the truth,” he drawled.

“For a rotten borough, no doubt,” she said, half to herself.

“Positively rank, I’m afraid. My father buys every vote in the place,” he taunted her lightly. “But the offer of help is a genuine one.”

She regarded him warily for a moment. There was no longer mockery in either the blue eyes or that velvety voice.

“You mean it?” she said incredulously. “You will try—?”

“My word on it,” he said, wondering how he had thought her hair was mouse at first glance. It was gold, he realised, as a shaft of weak sunlight filtered through the clouds. A warm tawny gold, like ripe corn under an August sun. And it looked soft. Released from that tight knot, he would wager it would run through a man’s hands like pure silk.

“His name is Jem, Jem Avery, he’s fourteen years old and he was sentenced at Salisbury Assizes, by Judge Richardson.”

Jonathan jerked his attention back from imagining the circumstances in which he might test his own wager and gave her his full attention. “Fourteen? That does seem harsh,” he said slowly.

“Yes. Fourteen. They seem to think that to make such an example will quell the discontent amongst the labourers and prevent it spreading to Wiltshire,” she said flatly, as his blue gaze met and held hers for a moment. “You really will see what you can do? You will not forget?”

“No. No.” He shook his head, quite certain that even if the unfortunate Jem slipped his mind, his advocate was not likely to do so for a week or two at least. “You have my word I will do what I can.”

“Why?” she asked suddenly. “You are a stranger here and can have no interest in what becomes of Jem.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Must be my altruistic nature. I can never resist a distressed damsel, so long as she is passably pretty, of course,” he added self-mockingly.

“I am not distressed, sir! I am angry!” she snapped with a lift of her chin. “And neither am I passably pretty!”

“No,” he said, after a pause in which his gaze travelled over her face, taking in the breadth of her brow, the fine straight nose that had absolutely no propensity towards turning up, the clean, strong upward slant of her jawbone from the point of her lifted chin, and that wide, generous mouth, “you are not passably pretty.”

“I am glad you realise your error—” she began to say, wondering why she felt such a sense of pique.

“Any man who considered you merely passable would be lacking in judgement and taste,” he interrupted her lazily, his eyes warm and teasing as they met her gaze. And that was true, he thought, with a touch of surprise as his gaze dropped fractionally to the decidedly kissable curve of her mouth and then lower still to the perfect sweeping lines of her body beneath the plain grey gown.

Janey stared back at him. He was flirting with her. This laconic, drawling, society dandy was flirting with her! He was looking at her as if he wanted to kiss her, touch her…The image that arose in her mind was so shocking, so devastating, that she could do nothing for a second or so but stare back at him helplessly. And then, as the corners of his wide, clever mouth lifted imperceptibly, and the clear blue eyes dared her to respond, the breath left her throat in a small exasperated sigh.

“Have you no sense of propriety?” she found herself blurting out and then frowned as it occurred to her she had sounded all too much like Mrs Filmore.

“Afraid not,” he answered with a complete lack of apology. “I blame it upon a youth spent in hells and houses of ill-repute, not to mention the houses of the aristocracy and Parliament, of course.”

“Oh, you are quite impossible!” In spite of herself, in spite of everything, she found her mouth tugging up at the corners.

“You can smile, then?” he said lightly. “I was beginning to wonder if you considered it a sin.”

“No.” She sobered, feeling guilty that for a second or two she had almost forgotten Jem. “But I cannot say that I much in the mood for merriment at present.”

“No.” The hint of mockery, of invitation, left his face and voice as he glanced at the cottage. “That is understandable enough in the circumstances. You have not told me where I might send word. The Rectory?”

“No, Pettridges Hall,” she said with inexplicable satisfaction, having overheard his comments about the likely owner of the trap through the open cottage window. “I have no connection with the Rectory and no fondness for reforming tracts.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” he said without the slightest trace of embarrassment. “Especially since it seems we are to be neighbours. I have just become the new owner of Southbrook, which I understand borders the Pettridges estate.”

“You have bought Southbrook?” Janey’s face lit as she looked at him with unhidden delight. “That is wonderful!”

The dark brows lifted, mocking her faintly. “I am flattered by your enthusiasm to have me for a neighbour.”

“It is not for you in particular, sir, I meant merely that it is wonderful that Southbrook has been bought at last,” Janey said, and knew as she caught the flicker of amusement in the pale blue eyes that she had spoken just a little too quickly to be completely convincing either to him or herself. “The land has lain idle so long and there are so many men in the village who desperately need work.”

“I stand corrected,” he said drily. “Though I feel honour bound to confess that I did not buy the estate from any sense of philanthropic duty. I accepted it in lieu of a card debt after the owner assured me it was no longer his family home. We are on our way to inspect the property now.”

“Oh, I see,” she said, her voice flat again suddenly. “You are not familiar with the estate, then?” she asked, thinking that he and his companion would undoubtedly take one look and return to town forthwith, as had all the other potential purchasers.

“Not yet. Why?” he asked sharply. For a moment she considered warning him about the leaking roof, the broken windows, the last five years of complete neglect that had followed upon twenty of inadequate maintenance, but then she decided against it. There was always a chance that he might see beyond Southbrook’s failings to its original beauty and decide to restore the estate.

“Oh—no reason,” she replied, carefully giving her attention to the child in her arms who was beginning to grizzle and wriggle. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I asked whom I should ask for?”

“Janey.” Stupidly, for no reason she could think of, she answered with the name with which she had been known to family and friends for the first sixteen years of her life. “Miss Hilton, Miss Jane Hilton, I mean,” she stammered slightly as the straight black brows lifted again.

“Jane,” he repeated it with a half-laugh. “Plain Jane.”

“Yes,” she said defensively. It was a jest she had endured more times than she could count from her guardian’s son and daughter. “What of it?”

“Nothing.” Again his narrow lips curved. “Somehow I did not think you would be an Araminta or Arabella, Miss Hilton.”

“Jono! Are you coming through or not?” Lord Derwent called impatiently.

“I must go. I think your trap would be better there by the gate, but if you wish—”

“No, your friend was right, it was a stupid place to leave it,” she admitted ruefully. “I was thinking only of how to break the news to Jem’s mother. I am sorry for the inconvenience.”

“It is of no consequence.” He smiled at her as he gathered up the reins. “Good day, Miss Hilton, I shall send word as soon as I can.”

“Thank you, Mr—” she began to say and then realised she did not even know his name.

“Lindsay,” he called over his shoulder as he sent the bays forward, “Jonathan Lindsay.”

She stood staring after him in disbelief. That was the Honourable Jonathan Lindsay? That laconic mocking dandy had made the passionate speech, demanding better conditions for the labouring poor that she had read in the paper? Surely not! And yet he had offered to help Jem, a boy he had never met.

For a moment, as she watched the phaeton disappear down the long winding lane, she felt like chasing after it and begging him to take on Southbrook. If she were honest, it was not only because a humane landlord would make such a difference to so many in the village, but because he had made her feel truly alive for the first time since she had arrived in England.

“Miss, miss…” The child who had been swinging on the gate came and tugged at her skirt. “Have you brought us something, miss? I’m hungry—”

“Yes, Sam. Some broth, some bread and some preserves,” she answered, still staring after the phaeton, “and some gingerbread, if you promise to be a good boy for your mother.”

She broke off, frowning as she watched the little boy who was already running for the door, his too thin arms and legs flying in all directions. Even with what she could persuade cook to let her have from the kitchen, they were not getting enough to eat, nor were at least half a dozen other families in the village.

As farm after farm took to the new threshing machines, there would be more men out of work this autumn—and she could do nothing, since she had no control of her estate, nor access to the fortune left her by her grandfather until she was twenty-one. And five months was far too long for Sam and the other families, who would starve and freeze this winter. There was nothing she could do, nothing—heiress she might be, but she was almost as powerless as poor Jem in his prison cell.

Biting her lip, she adjusted the child on her hip again as she limped slowly up the little herringbone brick path to the cottage door. As ever when she was tired, the leg she had broken a year ago had begun to ache. But there was no time to think of that now, not when Mrs Avery stood in the doorway, her face grey and desperate.

“He’ll be so scared, miss, so frightened,” the older woman blurted out. “I’d rather it was me than him.”

“I know,” she said helplessly.

“I’ve got to go to him, miss.” Mrs Avery caught her arm. “I’ve got to!”

“I will take you tomorrow, I am sure they will let you visit,” Janey said huskily as she guided the other woman back into the little dark room, where the other four Avery children were huddled upon the box bed, pale and silent. As she looked from one thin, pinched miserable face to another, the rage in her bubbled up afresh. If Jonathan Lindsay failed them, she would not let them hang Jem! She would not! Not even if she had to break him out of gaol herself.