Lord Haven's Deception

by Donna Lea Simpson

  She entered the old grand dame’s lair and threw herself into a settee, petulantly reliving all of Colin’s casual cruelty. He saw her as nothing more than a brat, an unformed child, a hoydenish little terror. And all the while he idolized Rachel. Rachel! Rachel who didn’t give one fat fig for him. Rachel who ridiculed him behind his back for his plain face and hooked nose and country clothes. It was beyond humiliating. She hate, hate, hated him!

  But no, she didn’t. Not really. She loved him. Loved his country ways and his plain speaking and his talent with horses. She adored his estate and his funny old sister, Andromeda, who was kind at heart, even if she was a bit strange. And she craved the absolute peace of Corleigh, his beautiful little house. She could imagine it; no mother condemning her every hoydenish move and no lovely sister to forever compare herself to, only to be found lacking. Just easy, friendly Colin and sweet, addled Andromeda.

  Grand tapped over to the tea table. Her elderly maid moved stiffly in the background, ignoring as she always did Grand’s company. She was the only servant in the entire house who did not indulge in below-stairs gossip. One never needed to care what one said in front of her.

  Dropping a lump of sugar into a cup and filling it with steaming dark brew the color of brackish peat water, Grand handed the cup to her youngest grandchild and stood looking down at her. With one crabbed hand she gently stroked Pamela’s curly, close-cropped locks. “My little darling,” she murmured to her favorite, her voice a crooning, comforting lullaby. “My sweet child. Why you like that long-nosed supercilious baby-baronet I do not know.” She paused and continued gazing down at her youngest grandchild. “But if you really want him you can have him, you know.”

  Pamela had just taken a swallow of burning tea and she yelped, put the cup down and stared up at her grandmother. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean just what I say, as always; you can have him. You have the wherewithal,” the woman said, holding out one hand, “in your little hands to attract him, elicit a proposal, and decide whether or not you wish to marry him.”

  “But he’s mad for Rach! He would never look at me like he looks at her. He absolutely adores her.”

  “You’re worth two of her,” Grand said fiercely. “And that country turnip would know it if you would follow my plan. But you must decide if you really want him.”

  Pamela, thoughts racing pell-mell through her mind, stared blindly at the figured carpet, tapping her fingers against her breeches-clad leg. Grand knew everything there was to know in the world, she had always thought. Once upon a time she had been a great London beauty, with scores of men at her feet. But times had changed. Life was different. She looked up at her grandmother.

  With that uncanny mind-reading she often seemed to engage in, the old woman said, “Do not think just because I am old I do not know how to capture a man’s attention. Life has not changed so very much, and men not at all. Men are still the same, my darling. Men are hunters by nature, but with a strange sentimental streak running through them. They seek to idolize a lady, put her on a pedestal and worship her. Sir Colin adores your sister because she treats him as if he is not fit to lick her dainty shoes and he believes it, the idiotic country toad. So every time she deigns to speak to him or look at him it is a great boon. A favor, bestowed in kindness by the lovely lady of the manor.”

  Her voice hardened. “But you! You chase him, throw yourself at him, act like a little boy worshipping a great gentleman. Of course he cannot see you as a lady, as a woman. No more than he would see a stable lad that way!”

  Pamela thought for only a moment. Then she nodded and looked up at her grandmother. “All right. Say for one minute you are right and that I can get Colin to look at me. Tell me what I need to know.”

  She shook her head. “Slowly, my dear. First let us talk of other things.”

  She flounced in her chair, straightening. “But I—”

  “No,” Grand said, steel in her voice. She sat down opposite Pamela and stared into her green-gray eyes. “We will get to you and your problems, my little miss, but first we will talk about my concerns. Did you happen, in your ride, to stop at Mary Cooper’s cottage?” When Pamela nodded, she continued, “And did you happen to meet the widow Cooper’s cousin, a Miss Jenny?”

  Pamela’s expression lit up. “I did! She is the jolliest girl you could imagine! I liked her very much.”

  “What does she look like?”

  Pamela frowned and stared off toward the window. She picked up her cooling tea and took a long draught, then put her cup down. “She’s pretty, I suppose.”

  The elderly woman sighed deeply and snapped her fingers. Pamela looked over at her, a quizzical expression on her pixie face. “I mean, what does she look like! Describe her to me! Color of hair, face shape, eyes.” She paused and stared at her granddaughter. “Her hands. Tell me of them.”

  Pamela paused and collected her thoughts. “She has dark hair, lovely and long, and curling.” She rubbed her hand over her own hair and sighed. It was a frizzy mop when it was long. Keeping it close-cropped was the only thing that had ever tamed it. “Her face is kind of round, with a small chin—kind of like Rachel’s only with a bit of a dimple in the middle—and her eyes are . . . well, gray; you know the gray the sky gets just before a storm? That is the very color. She is plump, I suppose. Certainly deeper bosomed than I,” Pamela said, with a rueful look down at the flat stretch of cambric shirt under her disreputable jacket.

  “Her hands?”

  Pamela frowned and shrugged. “Just . . . hands.”

  “Are they soft or coarse?”

  “Soft, I think. Not callused like mine.”

  “And her manners?”

  “What d’you mean, Grand?” Pamela searched her grandmother’s blue eyes, looking deep into the bloodshot depths.

  The old woman put both hands on the head of her cane. “Are her manners what you would expect from a maid? I understand that is what this girl was before visiting Mary.”

  “I would not have thought her a maid. She talks . . . oh, scads better than me. Lovely voice; soothing. I’d wager my best hunter that she can sing, likely better than Rachel’s dreadful caterwauling.”

  The dowager stood and tapped over to the window, staring off into the distance. She had chosen her suite with care. She had a corner room that overlooked both the front drive and walkway and the side lawn, which rolled off behind the house to the stables and beyond that to the green and tawny moor. Jenny. A lady’s maid?

  If only she had thought to tell Haven to leave that ransom note with her. She would give much to be able to look at the handwriting again. But why—?

  The dowager considered the current state of affairs. Lady Mortimer and Haven’s mother had arranged this match between them, their dead husbands being some kind of cronies in London in years gone by. But girls now did not want matches made for them. They wanted to pick their own husbands and the old customs were dwindling. What pressure had been brought to bear on Miss Jane Dresden to force her to travel up to this northern wasteland? The dowager had never yielded to any kind of liking for Yorkshire and still remembered the trepidation she had experienced as a very young girl on learning her own fate was to marry Lord Haven of that fearsome, dark, wild county. Granted, in those long-ago days travel north this far was not at all the usual thing. The roads were so dreadful. In this modern day with the mail carriages whizzing by at unheard-of speeds, every soul with two pennies to rub together could visit the great northern wasteland of Yorkshire.

  But still, Miss Dresden could very well have been suffering the same feelings of dread she had experienced so long ago. And then while at the Lesleydale inn, the girl learned her mother had married. Had she suffered some sort of breakdown on hearing the news? Was the child mentally unstable?

  What, among all of these reasons, could be the cause of her running away, if in fact she had?

  She stared off to the distant moor, the long rolling hill beyond which the Haven home farm cottage nestled. I
t had occurred to her that it could be . . . it just might be, that this ladylike Miss Jenny, supposed cousin of Mary Cooper—that coincidence seemed just too great for the woman to swallow, that the girl had turned up so soon after Miss Dresden disappeared—was, in truth, Miss Jane Dresden. Had she suffered a mental breakdown? Had she forgotten who she really was? Was she the supposed barmaid who had been attacked outside of the Swan? She would have to ask Haven, when he came in, what he had found out.

  But then why would Mary Cooper claim her as her cousin? Mrs. Cooper had reason to be loyal to and grateful toward the Haven family. Surely she would not mislead them if she knew that this girl was the one Haven was so frantically searching for, and Haven must have asked her if she had seen anyone fitting Miss Dresden’s description. Another thing to ask him; had he checked with his childhood friend?

  She could not be sure. And until she was sure, she would say nothing about this to anyone. Two words to Haven would settle the whole affair, but he was taken with this girl, this Jenny. If she was Miss Dresden, perhaps this was the kind of time they needed to get to know each other. He had always shrunk from contact with aristocratic ladies, and of course the very girls who would confirm his worst opinions of ladies of his class—that they were all snobbish, selfish, prim and humorless shrews—were the very ones his mother inevitably found most suitable to introduce him to.

  Her grandson was, in her mind, the most handsome Haven to ever hold the title. His father had been good enough, in his way, but this generation held all the sturdy, healthy looks that the father had not had. To those good looks he added a fine mind and a tender heart, which he hid behind a brusque manner. But when his guard was down he could be charming. If the girl had eyes in her head and a heart to be captured, she would fall in love with Haven.

  And so she would hold her tongue and wait. And ask questions. If this girl was just a maid, she did not believe Haven would ever disgrace his family by marrying so far beneath him. And if she was Miss Jane Dresden, then he was on his way to falling in love with and wooing his future wife. How interesting a turn of events. She chuckled. Oh, what she would give if she could convince her daughter-in-law for just one moment even that Haven was going to elope with a maid!

  She turned to her granddaughter, who was drowsily yawning. “We shall talk more, Pamela. But it is high time you dressed for dinner, I think. We will talk about Sir Colin later—” Pamela was about to protest, but the dowager held up her hand. “Later. I promise. Go and change into that yellow dress, the sarcenet.”

  Pamela reluctantly obeyed. There was no real choice. When Grand said something, she meant it, not like mother. Their mother was all bluster, but with very little real power. She could make life miserable, but if one held out she eventually crumbled. Her older brother had yet to learn that, Pamela knew. He valued peace in his household above all else, and so their mother got her way far more often than she should.

  When Pamela came down two hours later, feeling a little stiff and ridiculous—she had told her mother’s abigail to “do something” to her, and now she was primped and prodded and fluffed into a creature hardly resembling herself, even more so than in London—it was to find her brother on his way into Grand’s suite.

  “Haven,” she called out and flew down the rest of the stairs, forgetting her fresh determination to act like a lady.

  “Hey, Pammy—” He stopped and stared. “My, you look like a princess, pixie! What a difference from last time I saw you.”

  She had stumbled to a stop in front of him. She made a face. “If only Millicent could do something about my manners while she primps my hair!”

  He put his arm over his sister’s shoulder, dropped a kiss on the top of her head, and said, squeezing, “There is nothing wrong with your insides, pixie. Any man would be lucky to call you his wife, and never forget it,” he finished, referring obliquely to Sir Colin’s behavior earlier. “You are gallant and pluck to the backbone and perfectly adorable.” He chucked her under the chin and she gazed up into his eyes adoringly.

  “Are you going in to see Grand?” she said, laying her head on his shoulder.

  “I am.” He sighed deeply.

  She looked up again and searched his eyes. “Are you that worried about that little nodcock, Miss Dresden?”

  “I feel that she is my responsibility, chuck. If she has been abducted, it is in my jurisdiction, as she was coming here to stay with us. It is my duty to find her. I cannot imagine what the poor girl is going through. Just think about being seized by some basta . . . uh, wretches and held against your will.” They started together toward the door of Grand’s suite.

  Pamela, subdued, said, “I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. Will you marry her?”

  “I do not see myself marrying her.”

  “Who will you marry?”

  “You ask entirely too many questions, pixie.” He tapped on the door to Grand’s suite, and at her “Enter,” pushed it open and swept his sister a deep bow. “I bring you the honorable Miss Pamela Neville, famous beauty of the ton, Lady Haven.”

  “Idiot,” Pamela said, kicking him in the shins.

  Grand took in a deep breath. “Pamela, all of the window-dressing in the world will not make you look like a lady if you persist in that kind of hoydenish behavior.”

  “But it is just Haven. And I am at home!”

  “If you are to be a lady who attracts the gentlemen’s attention, you must be one at all times!”

  “Grand, don’t make her over into one of your prim and proper fine ladies,” Haven barked. “I like her the way she is!”

  “You, sir, are not an eligible parti,” the dowager retorted. “No man will marry a chit who outrides him, uses stable cant, and strides around the house like a boy. Especially not the man she is interested in.”

  Pamela gave her grandmother a quelling look, but the dowager was not one to be cowed by a child. She gave her granddaughter a stern look and then turned to her grandson. “What did you learn, Haven?”

  He moved over to the window and stared out at the hills beyond the stables. “I don’t know, Grand. The girl who was attacked by the fellows at the inn, they all say she looked like a barmaid. Varens’s stable manager says the girl was not harmed and that the fellows who accosted her just went back into the inn and continued drinking. That was verified, when I went back to the Swan, by the innkeeper. I even spoke to old Billy, one of the men who manhandled the girl, and he swears he just saw a likely lass, followed her out to the back of the inn and tried to get a kiss.”

  “Repulsive,” Pamela shuddered. “How do they think they have the right to kiss a girl just because she is wandering past?”

  The dowager gave her grandson a warning look. Pamela was not a sheltered little miss—any girl who spent the hours she did in the stable knew at least some of the facts of life—but there was still much she had either ignored about life among the human tribe or did not know. She would not understand about the casual use of barmaids and serving girls as relief for a man’s bodily needs, nor had she likely ever heard of the exchange of money that often took place after such a casual coupling.

  “He was drunk, love,” Haven said. He did not need his grandmother’s warning to protect his little sister. “Men act brutally on occasion when they have been drinking.”

  “I would have kicked him.”

  Haven stifled a chuckle and said, “I doubt any man would have used you thus, pixie. But if he had, kicking him would be the appropriate way to handle it. I commend you for your sense.”

  Pamela gave him a look to see if she was being roasted, but nodded, satisfied that he was serious about that, at least. “What is this all about? What girl was this, and why is she important?”

  Haven explained that it had to do with Miss Dresden.

  “You don’t suspect this barmaid was Miss Dresden!” Pamela said, aghast.

  “No,” Haven said. “I cannot imagine that it is. But the odd thing is, no one can seem to find out which girl who works there
is the one who was accosted. I have asked them, but not one of them will admit to being she. And too, the girl’s dress was torn. I would think that would have been noticed.”

  “I asked Mary and Jenny if they had seen anyone and they said no,” Pamela said.

  Haven felt the color drain from his face. He had forgotten about his sister’s trip to Mary’s cottage. “They said that?”

  Pamela nodded.

  Haven swallowed and said a silent prayer of hope that Pamela had not said anything to Jenny that revealed him as Viscount Haven. She may have inadvertently unmasked him, and he would not know until his next visit. But at least he did not now have to ask Mary if she had seen the girl. He had been trying to figure out how he would do that and yet stay in the character of the farmer he was supposed to be.

  His grandmother, during the conversation, had held her tongue, only nodding occasionally. She had a sly smile on her face but all she said was, “I am sure everything will be just fine, Haven. Do not worry unduly. Everything will come out right in the end, I feel sure.”

  He shook his head. It was all well and good for her to be so sanguine, he only wished he could be so sure.

  Chapter Ten

  “No, no, Jenny, not that way! If’n you mix the dough for the dumplings too long or too hard they’ll be like lead!” Mary took the wooden spoon out of Jenny’s hand and gave one skilled swipe around the bowl, collecting every morsel of dry flour and mixing it into the batter. “There, now. Drop it by spoonsful into th’stew.”

  Jane bent over the fire and spooned the mixture into the bubbling gravy of the stew.

  “It’ll work better if you dip the spoon into the gravy between—that way the dumplings’ll scoop up better from the bowl,” Mary said, glancing up from rolling pie dough.

  Doing as she was advised, Jane found that the mixture did, indeed, scoop onto the spoon easier when the spoon was hot and slicked with the stew gravy. There was so much to learn! Jane realized that to Mary all of this was second nature, just as entertaining the vicar, tatting lace and making small talk was to her. But at her age, to learn all of this? She would make a miserable farmer’s wife, she thought with a tug of regret. Not that she would be called upon to fill that role in the near future. The only thing so far that had come naturally to her was caring for Molly.