At least now she was falling in love with her own country and it wasn’t because she saw it through Magnus’s eyes when he pointed out this landmark or that hidden beauty spot to Toby or Aline.
* * *
Their journey rumbled on into August and the heat built a little higher, but she and Toby were used to far hotter summers than this one and now even the servants seemed to be in a holiday mood. Peg grudgingly agreed it was quite nice to be rambling along like this when it was warm and fine and if she didn’t have to harry laundry maids about the right way to remove stains from the fine muslins that were all Hetta and Aline could endure on the hottest days. Insisting on mending Toby’s linen and making him new shirts as he wore them out or carried on growing like a weed gave Hetta an excuse to sit sewing by Peg and listen to her tales of the Hailes as children and pretend it didn’t matter Magnus was avoiding her. Just as well he was, she decided. He was an impecunious gentleman with very little inclination to be a fortune hunter, despite his late father’s blackmailing efforts in that direction. He might have felt a few moments of hot desire for a willing woman, but it had obviously been no more than that. Those kisses at Develin House stole her breath even now when she let herself dream about them, so she pushed them to the back of her mind and tried to concentrate on her needlework. She whipped stitches into a parade-ground neat line as even the shade grew sticky and a little bit trying, and Peg dozed. No, if he wanted her he would have to prove it, then catch her as if he meant to. She would not make it easy for him.
‘The landlady has sent out some small beer straight from the cellar for Peg, but Ally insisted you would prefer tea, Mrs Champion,’ the man she had been trying so hard not to think about said from behind her, so no wonder Hetta jumped as if she had been stung.
‘Oh, thank you—and your sister is quite right, of course,’ she made herself say as coolly and distantly as he seemed to want her to be, once they had set out on this frustrating but at the same time rather wonderful tour.
‘You always seem busy,’ he said with a nod at her neglected sewing.
Hetta hastily picked it up again and set a stitch or two before she realised he wasn’t going to put down the tray and lope off as if he was far too busy to spare any time for her today. ‘I sometimes think Toby grows between one day and the next,’ she said nonchalantly. He could hardly expect her to be openly delighted to see him after weeks of pretending she only existed as Toby’s mother and Aline’s new friend, not as a still fairly interesting and desirable female.
‘Boys his age are full of so much hope and hunger for the future it seems as if they are trying to get to maturity by willpower alone,’ he told her as if he had thought long and hard about Toby’s rush to grow up and thought she might like his opinion. She might, but she liked a great deal about him that he didn’t altogether want her to as well.
‘Girls are quieter about it, but much the same underneath, except we are taught to be more diffident and self-contained.’
‘Is that what you learned at your mother’s knee, then? I admit to being surprised if it was. Katherine, Lady Porter’s Letters form a fascinating little book Wulf drew my attention to before we left Hampstead and he even managed to track down a copy. He sent it on to enliven my nights in various different hiding places and I have to say she doesn’t sound like a conventional lady to me.’
‘No, she wasn’t,’ Hetta said with a fond smile as she refused to wonder why he had taken so much trouble to read an obscure book not many people had noticed when Papa had the less personal passages from her mother’s letters collected and bound as a public memorial to such an extraordinary woman. ‘You will already know she corresponded with some of the most radical thinkers of her day, but took her own path. Luckily for me she did not share the Godwins’ ideas about rearing daughters or Rousseau’s theories about children raising themselves on wild instinct and navy beans.’
‘You were lucky indeed, then,’ he said with a grimace.
‘Yes, but she was extraordinary enough to keep me with her even when Papa thought I should be packed off to school in England.’
‘Perhaps your hurt and grief when she died would have been less acute if you had already been parted,’ he said as if he recalled quite a bit about that sense of loss of at least one caring parent from his own schooldays.
‘And perhaps I had the best possible time with her as I could, while I could,’ she said fiercely, because grief for her mother was always waiting to trip her up even now and she wouldn’t cry in front of him. ‘Boys are different,’ she said with a gesture of her hand to admit it was a lazy argument. ‘Toby has lived in the world as it is, rather than the way I would prefer it to be, so he must learn to be self-sufficient as well. I know I cannot tie him to my apron strings.’
‘He’s such a bright and happy lad I don’t think you have even tried to,’ he said gently and she looked directly at him for the first time and saw everything she had longed for all these lonely nights in his dark brown eyes.
Warmth and understanding and something a lot more exciting seemed to look watchfully back at her and she sighed for the scruples and protectiveness that had made him sleep in a stable while she enjoyed a restless, if virtuous, night’s sleep in the innkeepers’ best bedchambers. It was what she told him she wanted. No, what she knew she must not have however much she wanted it. So, he was right. They had to avoid any more long nights in the same place, like the one at Develin House that seemed like long months instead of a couple of weeks ago now. She felt the heaviness of longing in her supple spine and shoulders as she unconsciously bent towards him as if he was magnetic and she couldn’t help herself. Straightening hastily in her chair, she shot him a sidelong look to see if he had noticed the wanton creature she wanted to be.
Either he was pretending he hadn’t or he truly had no idea what was going on in her wicked thoughts and all-too-willing body. ‘You set him up as best you can for life, Hetta,’ he reassured her. ‘Toby knows he is the centre of your world and you would go to the ends of the earth for him if he needed you to. It will do him very well in life, I promise you.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because it is what our mother did for us—well, all of us except Gresley,’ he added as if he had to be strictly honest with her now they had let some feelings through the pretence they were little more than chance travelling companions. ‘Our father doted on his heir, but my mother was less loving with him than the rest of us for some reason. Gres is the most like the old man out of the seven of us and I suppose that did him no favours with her as soon as he was old enough to follow the Earl about as if he was a demigod.’
‘Poor little boy,’ she said and Magnus seemed to think harder about that statement and he nodded slowly as if realising his eldest brother hadn’t been so lucky to be the firstborn son after all.
‘Indeed, and he has grown up a disappointed man somehow,’ he said and didn’t meet her eyes this time.
Was Magnus Haile going to follow in his elder brother’s footsteps in that much at least? They had loved and lost the same woman. Well, Gresley had cast her aside, turning his back on his lover for money, but would both brothers end up less than life intended them to be because of Lady Drace? She hoped not. The new Earl must have repented his wild ways when he wed his lady, or she would have heard whispers of scandal about him by now. Maybe he would even be remembered one day as the man who had saved his family estates from ruin after sacrificing his real love for them. And as for Magnus Haile, what would his salvation prove to be? Not loving Mrs Hetta Champion, obviously, but if ever a man needed a purpose it was this one. He had so much promise of goodness and happiness in him he deserved better than drinking his life away and idling about town because he refused to leave his mother and sisters to his father’s mercy. That was it, wasn’t it? The great fool had put aside his own need to make something of his life as a second son to stay at Carrowe House and soften the blows for the m
embers of his family he loved so deeply. Now the old Earl was dead he could be free to find his own way and she wondered when it would occur to him he was able to do what he wanted now, without them suffering for it behind his back.
‘Oh, there you are, Master Magnus,’ Peg said as she broke out of sleep with a little snort and a startled look so they all pretended she had been awake all along.
‘Yes, here I am, my lovely. So, when are you going to make me a happy man and marry me at long last?’ he teased her with a wicked smile.
‘Never, my handsome lad, and you should be fixing those dark eyes of yours on a fine young woman like this one here instead of plaguing the life out of old Peg.’
‘Poor old Peg, my foot,’ he said as if he would like to challenge her for being devious and saying things he preferred unspoken, but that was not in the rules of the game, whatever this game they were all playing was.
Chapter Thirteen
Exeter was a fine and handsome city with a magnificent old cathedral and a generous scatter of ancient inns and posting houses Mr Haile could pretend to retire to for the night, once he was certain his charges were safely tucked up somewhere else. Did he and Jem take it in turns to slip back and watch the inns where she and Toby and Aline stayed all night? Hetta wondered. Perhaps Magnus spent the rest of his evenings when Jem was on duty drinking and dancing and enjoying the company of less respectable women. Maybe he whirled a different laughing, dizzy, obliging female about every other night of the week. He sometimes looked as if he hadn’t had much sleep, but if he was haunted by images of him and her wanton self undone in the intimate darkness together as well, there was no sign of it in his relentlessly polite greeting for her every morning and very frustrating it was, too. Soon her father would solve his father’s murder and she and Toby would either return to their wandering existence again without even a hint of Mr Magnus Haile in their lives to make the sunlight seem brighter and the road ahead less dusty and tedious, or she would find a place she could tolerate living in for him to avoid as if he didn’t want to encourage her fantasies about him sharing it with her.
The day they’d landed in England she would happily have turned about and faced the sea again to get away from it, but now she hated the idea of leaving the white cliffs at Dover behind once again because of him. It felt almost as if this country could really be her home in the right company and he was wilfully denying it to her. Then she stood on her first Cornish cliff and stared down at a clear turquoise sea with the sun dancing on its waves and fell in love with it for its own sake. Even with the memory of all the clear and perfect seas and sunny and cloudless days in the sun of an African or French or Italian sky in her mind she could not fetch out a brighter, clearer image than this. She could live here, winter or summer, and never tire of the moods of sea and sky, but the idea still didn’t bring the pleasure it should because if ever a place called out for the right company it was this and he would be far away, chasing rainbows for a very different woman than Mrs Hetta Champion.
* * *
Magnus thought he was doing well at staying close to his charges, but also keeping his distance from them until they got to Cornwall. Hetta and his sister seemed to throw off another layer of caution and propriety in this clear and sunny weather on the most beautiful of coasts he had ever come across. He only had himself to blame for suggesting they come here to this place he had always loved, winter or summer. The sun was hot on another cloudless day and the air seemed as if it had been washed and ironed on its long journey across the Atlantic Ocean. He gazed at the incredible clarity of a sea where waves were barely a light silver glint over clear turquoise and an even deeper blue further out. On such a day he wished he could paint himself a reminder of a perfect day to keep with him for the rest of his time on this earth. He desperately wished for a picture of Hetta Champion so he could linger over might-have-beens even more reverently as he got older and heard tales of her dashing remarriage to some exotic foreign nobleman who was going to appreciate her as extravagantly as she deserved. He was far too flawed and shop-soiled to deserve to even try to cut the damned caper merchant out, he reminded himself, even if he had been rich enough to make an attempt at blinding her to the sterling character of her imaginary suitor. She would give him a thundering scold and bid him a hasty goodbye if he let himself say out loud even one or two of the impulses and needs in his heart and head he knew he should not have. Until they knew who this elusive rogue on her and Toby’s tail was, he couldn’t say a word out of place to her for fear she would banish him and be left with only Jem and his brave and rather reckless sister Aline for protection. He could creep around the neighbourhood and perhaps beat the dratted hedge creeper at his own game if Hetta ever realised how base his thoughts were and banished him from her presence, but this was far better. He was close enough to her to be able to scare the villain away, but far enough away to live with his own conscience and not ruin another woman’s life with his hot and hasty passions and this headlong need of her that sometimes felt too mighty to ignore.
Virtually penniless as he was, he could not marry her even if she would let him. And he wouldn’t wed a woman who only wanted to let him wed her after Delphi anyway. Only her raw need and deep and abiding love in return would get him to propose marriage to any female ever again and this one would reject him even if he did. At Develin House she might have said yes, but now she would dismiss him as a woolly-minded idiot who didn’t know his own mind. Because he had held himself on such a tight rein with all the miles they had put in he must seem like a tin soldier rather than a real man to her by now.
Ironic, wasn’t it? Here he was, learning to want and need her more and more the deeper they got into his favourite county, and his careful avoidance of even a touch or a whisper of desire between them was driving her ever further away from him. Now he had seen her defended and undefended, generous and free as well as tightly buttoned up and wary, and every day seemed to gift him more revelations about her true self. She had a deep character and hers was a slow beauty a man had to look at twice to truly appreciate. He could wind himself up in finding out more and more about her with every day they spent together for the rest of his life, if only he was worthy of sharing it with her in the first place.
‘You could swim, too, Mr Haile,’ Toby danced up the beach on the hot sand to tell Magnus, so he had to give him a proper hearing since the eager boy had distracted him from dreaming of impossible things.
‘Now I am officially grown up, I cannot strip off every stitch I have on as freely as you do, Master Champion,’ he replied with a gloomy glance down at the lightest trousers he had left in a once extensive wardrobe.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I am a man and grown men cannot disport themselves thus in the presence of a lady. It is simply not done, Master Tobias.’
‘We should make them go away, then. You must be devilish hot in all those clothes.’
Magnus was startled into laughter at this sudden transformation from small excited boy to miniature young man. ‘Devilishly so, old chap, but it would not be very gentlemanly to banish your mother and my sister to the inn so I can take to the sea as well as you, Master Neptune.’
‘I can swim like a fish, can’t I? Mama taught me as soon as I could stand upright without toppling over. She says I took to it like a little eel.’
‘She is quite right, as usual,’ Magnus replied more soberly as he forced his brooding gaze away from the women on the shoreline and out to sea.
It did him little good. His imagination had already removed every single one of Mrs Hetta Champion’s light draperies and watched her dive into the deliciously cool waves naked as Aphrodite. For her son to swim as surely and strongly as he did, Magnus doubted she could have stayed primly on the shore and kept all her stays and drawers and petticoats on while she taught him to swim as little more than a baby. He just hoped Sir Hadrian had the sense to make sure no man was close enough to watch his
daughter naked as the day she was born while she did so. Magnus Haile should be the only man who ever saw Hetta so sensually and gloriously nude and he added the fantasy to the ones already haunting him.
‘She usually is, but don’t tell her I said so,’ his companion said with such a solemn and confidential look Magnus had to bite back another bark of laughter. Bless the boy for giving his thoughts a less carnal turn again and making him laugh. ‘She learned to swim when she was a baby herself,’ Toby went on with no idea any mention of his mother and swimming so fluidly put Magnus in a fine pother again. ‘Her mama taught her because they lived such a wandering life she needed to know Mama would stay alive until she could be rescued if she ever fell in. I’m glad I didn’t fall into the Channel on the way over here, though. The sea was far too cold and wild even for a man to swim against it that day. It doesn’t look anything like it was then today, does it?’
‘No, but I am ashamed to say I don’t know where the Channel stops and the great Atlantic begins,’ Magnus replied absently, the pain of bidding goodbye to his own child gnawing at him with that reminder. This time he felt another pang at the idea of this one leaving for other countries as well. Caring was the very devil, wasn’t it? He had never wanted to be cold and unloving like his father, so he was fated to do it even so. Somehow, he would bid goodbye to the boy and his mother with better grace, so they wouldn’t know it hurt.
‘This could be a proper ocean, then?’ Toby interrupted his gloomy thoughts.
‘It could.’
‘I never swam in one before. Do you think it’s colder or harder to swim against than the Channel? I was too little when we were in Spain and Portugal to find out. Mama won’t talk about it and I don’t remember being there at all.’
‘How disappointing for you,’ Magnus said and stored up the knowledge the boy’s mother must have tracked down his grandfather in those far-off lands for it to have been so long ago. He recalled tales of guerrilla bands and unrest lingering in both countries after the Great War. Magnus shivered even in this heat to think of Hetta going so far with a babe in arms and more or less alone. No wonder Sir Hadrian tried to keep her out of his adventures. He must have been horrified by all she risked to find him once her husband died and Toby was safely born.
A Rake to the Rescue Page 13