Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress

by Louise Allen

  ‘Will you not you sit down, Meg?’ He was going to have to speak of Giles, to explain. Lay bare the raw guilt that haunted him, haunted this house.

  ‘No. Thank you.’ She paced away from him, then back. There was anxiety in her eyes; he could almost feel her efforts not to judge, to hear his side of the story. Most people, looking at him, would not have hesitated to believe the worst. ‘What did she mean?’

  ‘That I am responsible for my brother’s death. I shot him.’

  He waited, braced for the revulsion to show in her voice, on her face, but she just stared at him, distressed and questioning.

  ‘But he died six or so years after you joined the army, you said. Surely you were in the Peninsula then?’

  ‘I shot him when we were boys. The bullet entered Giles’s chest and could not be removed. It left him weak, prone to every disease and infection that were around. Eventually it killed him.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, no.’ Meg did sit down then, looking at him with painful earnestness. Her hands were shaking and she clasped them tightly together. ‘Did you mean to shoot him?’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Did I intend to shoot my brother? No,’ Ross said. ‘It was my own damn carelessness, my lack of responsibility for him, but it was an accident. It was hushed up—two boys hunting, one of those things.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘All I wanted to do was to join the army, to shoot. I was good at one thing only, but in my father’s eye the ability to shoot well was simply one of the attributes of a gentleman, not a way of earning your living. I told you I had two fine tutors: the head keeper and a wicked old poacher. By the age of fourteen I could hit anything, still or moving. Giles was the model son, the obedient, intelligent, hardworking, sweet-tempered son. Unfortunately I was the elder, the heir. Obedience could not be beaten into me, although God knows, my father and tutors tried, but my father could, and did, refuse to let me join the army when I was seventeen as I wanted.

  ‘All he wanted, of course, was Giles to be the heir.’

  ‘But you loved your brother,’ Meg said. ‘I can hear it when you say his name. You weren’t jealous or resentful of him, were you?’

  ‘No. You could only love Giles.’ He made himself look then, look up to where he knew it would be, hanging opposite his father’s desk. He had loved his brother and he hadn’t even been able to take care of him when he was doing the one thing he was good at. ‘See for yourself.’

  Meg went to stand in front of the portrait, hands behind her back, like a child in a picture gallery. Ross found himself looking at her, not at his brother’s face, watching the graceful line of neck and shoulder, the weight of hair at her nape, the inquisitive tilt of her head.

  ‘What an extraordinarily good-looking young man,’ she said at last. ‘He has kind eyes. And, of course, people are inclined to equate beauty with goodness.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ross agreed without resentment, looking up at last. His mother’s pointed chin and high cheek-bones, her green eyes and sensitive mouth allied to his father’s height and jet black hair had resulted in a youth who looked, so the impressionable ladies of the district used to say, like a prince from a fairy tale. And the delicacy of his health left him pale, slender, even more beautiful. ‘He had our mother’s looks. I, as you can see, have my father’s. Just for once, the looks did not lie. He was everything he seems to be.’ And I killed him because I was headstrong and heedless and always had to score a point against authority. Because I would not do my duty. Because I did not love him enough to deny him.

  Meg turned and studied Lord Brandon’s image. ‘Black eyes, slanted brows, a stubborn jaw and a mouth that does not know how to say “I Yield”,’ she observed. ‘You must have made a handsome pair, you and your brother.’

  ‘Raven and dove.’ The comparison had been made often enough. Devil and angel.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was almost seventeen, Giles was two years younger. One day when I cut lessons with our tutor to go rook shooting he followed me, wanted to come too, hung on my sleeve, teased me to let him come. For an adventure. I said yes, just that once. I was the elder, I should have been responsible. I should have said no, looked after him.’ But of course, the opportunity to kick over the traces, to be defiant, was far more alluring than any thought of what his duty to his young brother might be.

  ‘I was used to stalking, used to the woods. He was not. I had my gun raised, my finger on the trigger and he tripped on some brambles, crashed into me. The gun got jammed between us and went off.’

  ‘You must have been terrified.’ Meg watched him with those wide, candid blue-grey eyes that seemed to see so deep inside him. ‘But you got him back, of course. And he would tell everyone it was an accident.’

  ‘Of course.’ A good officer gets his men back. But he doesn’t shoot them himself in the first place. All that blood. And Giles, white and terrified and hurting, saying over and over, accident, accident. Blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, the panic. What should I do? Move him? Leave him?

  ‘Never, since that day, have I felt so helpless, so useless. I got Giles back somehow, carried him for half a mile in my arms, knowing I was hurting him, seeing the bleeding I could not stop, hearing the breath sobbing in his lungs. But Giles never protested, never cried out, because he trusted me.’ And that was perhaps the worst pain of all.

  ‘So you ran away to join the army.’ He could not tell whether there was condemnation or understanding in Meg’s voice, only that she was struggling to keep it steady.

  ‘I left as soon as I knew he was not going to die. It was only later, from my godfather’s letters, that I realised how sick it had left him. And then it did kill him. I killed him.’

  ‘No!’ she protested. ‘No, it was an accident. How could you blame yourself?’ He just looked at her and saw the understanding dawn. ‘You felt the responsibility, that you had failed him. Yes, I can see if I had hurt Lina so badly accidentally I would feel that too, however irrational it was.’ She hesitated. ‘The accident did not put you off shooting?’

  ‘No.’ Meg’s lack of condemnation, her understanding, shook him. She seemed to think he was not to blame. That was comforting—if he allowed himself to believe it. ‘I think now, looking back, that I wanted to do something useful with the skill. I had shot my brother—I could kill my country’s enemies.’ As many as possible, as coldly and as efficiently as possible. Even if it made him a machine for killing he had to make that mistake right somehow. ‘And I had failed in my duty to him—that made me want to be a better officer.’

  ‘And now it is time to stop killing and to begin growing things,’ Meg said so softly he was not sure he had heard her correctly. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

  Ross found himself surprised, almost shocked. He had expected revulsion, horror, condemnation and instead he had received understanding and thoughtful sympathy. Something hot burned shamefully at the back of his eyes and he made an abrupt gesture, rejecting her kindness. Meg did not really understand, that was all. It was impossible that she could see into his motives and his conscience and absolve him.

  She looked, for a moment, as though she would speak, then her lips tightened, perhaps in response to his rejection. ‘And now, kindly explain why you let me think this place was no larger than a country squire’s house?’

  ‘Because you would never have come otherwise.’

  ‘And just how many servants are there? How many rooms?’ The questions were obviously rhetorical, for she swept on, ‘And how on earth do you expect me to manage it all, even for a few weeks?’

  He was saved from answering as the door opened without warning. Mrs Fogarty stalked in, tossed the bunch of keys on to the desk and smiled pure acid at Meg. Ross admired the way Meg’s chin came up. Yes, she was a lady to her fingertips.

  ‘You be careful, young woman. This one’s his father’s son, whatever else he is. The temper of the devil and his pride too. And no woman’s safe either, not with the B
randon men. A good thing this one ran away before any babes got laid at his door, which doesn’t mean there weren’t any to lay. You think you’re the one and only? They all think that.’

  Ross got to his feet. ‘Get out.’ He found he was so angry he could hardly speak. She thought that after his father’s whoring he would treat women the same way?

  The door shut behind the housekeeper. He stormed out from behind the desk, too angry to sit still, and was brought up short by Meg’s expression as he passed. He stopped, bent over her chair, one hand on each of the arms pinning her in place, and stared into her face, searching for the disgust and the condemnation that she must surely be hiding.

  ‘Don’t go looking askance at every twelve-year-old brat around here,’ he said. ‘They won’t be mine and my father did his whoring in Truro.’

  ‘How awful for your mother,’ Meg said. She looked back at him steadily, nothing but compassion in her eyes. ‘And not pleasant for you and your brother, either. I cannot imagine what it must be like…That is one good thing about having a father who is a vicar, and a puritanical one at that.’

  Ross straightened up and limped over to stare out of the window. The rose garden had been neglected, he noticed with the part of his mind that was not fighting bad memories. His mother would have been upset about that. What the devil were the gardeners about?

  ‘He had enough sense of decency not to foul his own doorstep, except once with the daughter of Billy Gillan, the poacher who taught me how to shoot. How does a girl like that say no, when the family is in a tied cottage? He could pretend it wasn’t rape, of course. When he left her with child Billy marched up to the front door to tell my father what he thought of him, so the family got thrown out of their cottage with its scrap of land anyway. Billy’s poaching was all that fed them. I tried to pay him for shooting lessons, but he wouldn’t take it, so I gave the money to Lily direct; at least it helped her bring up my baby half-brother.’

  ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘I stole it from my father, of course. I never took so much at any one time that he’d notice. He’d come home, his pockets full of winnings from the card tables and stuff it into this big lacquer box without counting it. It is the only useful skill I seem to have inherited, the ability to play to win. The money was a bagatelle to him, life and death to Lily and her family.’ Ross felt all over again the hot pleasure that had coursed through him when he succeeded in picking the lock on his father’s strong-box for the first time, the pleasure of sliding out the shiny coins. It was as good as sex.

  ‘And Billy taught me about girls too. Told me never to take anyone who wasn’t willing and how to make sure I didn’t leave any mongrel pups behind. A bit agricultural in his metaphors, is old Billy, but a good teacher for all that.’

  ‘He is still alive then?’

  The thought had never occurred to him that Billy could be dead. ‘Must be. He’s the indestructible sort,’ Ross said with a confidence he did not feel. A cold trickle of fear ran down his spine. How old had Billy been when he left? He’d go down tonight once he had introduced Meg to the staff and done all the things the returning fourth Baron Brandon was supposed to do on the day he came home.

  The clock struck. ‘Time to review the troops,’ Meg said, as she got to her feet, a little pale around the mouth. Nerves, or the realisation of just whom she was working for?

  ‘Here.’ Ross handed her the housekeeper’s keys on their chain and she took them gingerly. ‘Your badge of office,’ he said and something changed in her expression. Her lips firmed, the lashes came down over those clear eyes, but she only nodded.

  Mr Heneage had arrayed the staff in the Great Hall as he had on the steps, women to one side, men to the other, in ascending order of priority. Meg saw Perrott standing beside the butler: valets, like ladies’ maids, took the status of their employer in the servants’ hall. He looked as pale as she felt. Ross walked to the foot of the stairs, drawing her with him by a touch on the arm.

  ‘Good afternoon.’ He stood on the first step, towering over her. ‘Some of you will remember me, others will be new since I left. You will find that I do things differently from my father, but I am sure you will adapt.’ From their faces they had no trouble interpreting that: accept my ways, or you may leave.

  ‘There are some immediate changes,’ Ross continued. ‘Usborne, as you know, is unwell and is retiring. Perrott is my valet. And Mrs Fogarty has also retired. Mrs Halgate is our housekeeper from today and I expect her to receive your unwavering support in managing the Court. Mrs Halgate is used to managing Portuguese households,’ he added smoothly. ‘There will doubtless be some differences. Heneage, will you introduce the staff?’

  Meg fixed a tight smile on her lips and fell into place one careful step behind Ross.

  Portuguese households, indeed! Army tents, rather. Wretched man. He has got a sense of humour, I do not care how well he tries to hide it, and a wicked one it is too.

  Here, for one hideous moment in the study she had thought Ross was confessing to murder. She had been prepared to believe that of him. Guilt lashed through her; she should have known better. He was brave and stoical and kind, under his scowl, and he did not deserve her mistrust. Meg could only hope and pray she had kept her feelings from showing; he needed to heal, to forgive himself, not deal with even more condemnation.

  All she could do for the moment was to carry out her new duties as best she could and make his home comfortable for him. The keys swung heavy from her belt as she walked up the line of maids, trying to fix names in her head, but all she could manage was to hope the face and the position were clear. Three scullery maids, two kitchen maids, two laundry maids, the laundress, the four downstairs maids, the four upstairs maids and Mrs Harris, the cook. Then over to the men. Boot boy, page, three underfootmen, three footmen, Perrott and Heneage. And all the outdoor staff still to come.

  She and Mrs Harris, Heneage and Perrott comprised the upper servants and she could not hope to manage this large house without their willing co-operation. Meg smiled at the cook and received a guarded smile in return.

  ‘Where is my estate manager?’ she heard Ross ask the butler who murmured a response. ‘At the Home Farm? Then send someone out for him; I want to speak with him as soon as possible. That will be all. Carry on Heneage, Mrs Halgate.’

  Carry on, Sergeant-Major, Meg thought with a twitch of her lips. Time to exert some authority. ‘I shall need a maid.’ She studied the array of eight young women.

  ‘I was Mrs Fogarty’s maid, Mrs Halgate.’ The girl was thin, anxious, with a sharp nose and pale, darting eyes. ‘I did my best, ma’am.’

  ‘I am sure you did.’ Meg dredged into her memory and came up with a name. ‘And I am sure you deserve a change from those duties, Annie.’ The girl smiled, obviously relieved. Mrs Fogarty could not have been an easy mistress.

  ‘Now, Damaris. I am sure you would do admirably.’ The quiet redhead who had been trying to fade into invisibility behind a plump neighbour jumped. ‘Will you show me to my rooms, Damaris? And the rest of you, carry on as usual. Come to me if you are uncertain about anything.’ Please don’t!

  Her one shabby bag was standing outside the door when the maid led her downstairs. ‘All the rest got lost in France,’ Meg explained, glossing over battles and baggage trains. ‘I must go shopping as soon as possible.’

  It felt strange stepping into another woman’s rooms, especially one that she so disliked. The housekeeper had a good-sized parlour, easily capable of entertaining the other upper servants in, and a smaller bedroom, both with windows overlooking a paved yard with a herb garden at its centre. It was all very comfortable, somewhat dark and almost entirely lacking in personality. Meg supposed Mrs Fogarty had removed every item that gave the space any individuality.

  ‘We can unpack later,’ she decided. ‘First, I want you to show me round before dinner. I need to learn my way about this house.’

  In the event they got no further than a tour of belowstair
s, ending up in the kitchen where Mrs Harris produced tea and a running stream of one-sided conversation while presiding over preparations for dinner.

  ‘The spitting image of his father, God rest his soul,’ Cook pronounced.

  ‘That isn’t likely to be God’s concern, the old so-and-so will have headed in the other direction.’ The gardener grinned at his own parting shot as he left a trug full of vegetables on the kitchen table.

  ‘And how did he come to employ you, Mrs Halgate?’ Cook asked. ‘He’s not been back in England any time to advertise, that’s for certain sure.’

  ‘Mr Empson’s agency. He came in to find a housekeeper and heard me explaining my Portuguese experience. After his long service in the Peninsula I suppose he thought I might suit.’ Best not to explain that it was temporary as well, she decided.

  ‘Portugal! Now there’s a thing,’ Cook marvelled. ‘Was it very different to here?’

  ‘You could not possibly imagine,’ Meg said with some feeling.

  One of the underfootmen appeared: George, Peter or John—she had still not fixed all their names in her mind. ‘His lordship’s compliments, Mrs Halgate, and he says that he understands from the agency that you read aloud very well.’

  ‘Er…yes?’

  ‘And would you join him in the library after dinner and read to him.’

  ‘Please tell his lordship that I would be glad to.’

  Meg waited until the footman had removed himself. She felt instinctively that it was important to get the female staff on her side, and to prevent the slightest suspicion of any impropriety. ‘My goodness! I told Mr Empson about reading aloud in case he could find me a place with an invalid, I never dreamed his lordship would require me to read to him. I do not like to refuse, although it seems a trifle unconventional.’

  ‘You keep the library door open, Mrs Halgate,’ said Cook with a knowing look. ‘You won’t come to any harm with the door open.’

  ‘That is very sound advice, Mrs Harris,’ Meg agreed fervently. It would protect her as much from herself as from Ross, she rather feared.