“No,” he said quietly, taking that errant curl, the strand like silk in his fingers. “I understand that in every way,” he murmured, placing it gently behind the soft shell of her ear. “I have…” He paused, his gaze shifting beyond the top of her head. “I had two brothers. My father had expectations and hopes that we’d be accomplished scholars. They were. And I?” He grinned wryly. “I was not.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said with a confidence he didn’t deserve. But then, just as he didn’t know her beyond the words in her file and his one day here, she knew nothing about him.
“I wasn’t.” He acknowledged his failings, hating that he’d shatter whatever illusions she’d allowed herself of him. “Any lessons I received never made sense. I couldn’t bring them into any real clarity. My mind…” He struggled to find the words to explain how crippling it had been to order his thoughts and found himself prevented from doing so by that very same failing.
“Why can’t you finish a sentence, Sheldon?” his father entreated. “You are a duke’s son. Own your words like you are one.”
Whereas that pressure had been applied to him by his father, brothers, and too many tutors and professors to remember, Martha did not urge him on with his telling. Instead, she waited. In the end, he proved… unwilling? Unable? Mayhap a bit of both, to share the deficiencies of his mind. “Horses always made sense,” he settled for. “In ways that books never did.” Or would.
Martha leaned against the wall and scraped her rake along the floor. “Hmm.”
The vague utterance revealed nothing. Was it a recrimination? Disgust? Was it the same distaste his own father had for Graham over the years? At her scrutiny, he resisted the urge to yank at his collar. Instead, he resumed working alongside her.
“My father was rubbish at keeping the accounts and ledgers,” she said suddenly, unexpectedly. Pausing, she leaned over the head of her rake. “He hated it.” She laughed softly, her heart-shaped features a study in nostalgia. “I hated it more.”
“What makes me believe you oversaw those tasks anyway?” he murmured.
“I did.” That was the kind of daughter she would have been, because that was the manner of woman she was—one unafraid and unashamed to work or take on onerous tasks that would have made most grown men balk. “I despised it all. Adding up the expenses, resolving the columns. It was tedious. I toiled over it. It took me endless hours to force myself to finish the task.” How free she was as she spoke. There was an absolute lack of artifice in both her words and demeanor. Unlike the coquettes he’d seduced and bedded who’d been practiced with their every word and look. “Sometimes,” Martha went on, “I’d sit until the candle burned down and the sun came up, finishing our accounts. Because, if one makes a mistake with ledgers, it matters. An error cannot be transformed into anything other than an error.”
“Unlike your artwork.”
Her eyes lit, and she pointed her rake at him. Graham took an automatic step away from the rusty combs. “Precisely,” she said, planting it back on the stable floor. “Numbers should make sense. They are certain and add up to mean something definitive. But to me, they don’t.” Gripping the handle of her rake with one hand, she more safely gesticulated with the other as she spoke. “Yet, hand me a blank page with nothing upon it, and I can see structures and faces and images that belong there.”
Something went through him. “That is what stables are like for me,” he said softly. “This is a world I understand.” He glanced around. “And in here, surrounded by these loyal creatures, it doesn’t matter what a man’s station is. What rank or title he was born with. Here, there is only a sense of accomplishment that comes in looking after the stalls and seeing the completion of one’s efforts.” At work in his family’s stables, Graham hadn’t been a duke’s son. He hadn’t been a familial disappointment, or the man who’d failed more times than he’d succeeded at anything.
Martha drifted closer, erasing the space between them. “I understand that,” she murmured.
I understand that… Those three words filled his chest with the most inexplicable lightness. He hadn’t sorted through just why he’d preferred this work—until now.
They shared a look, and in that instant, a bond was forged, kindled from a shared appreciation and understanding. And something more.
“My own father thought I was mad because I enjoyed being in the stables.”
Martha frowned. “There is no explaining where a person finds their pleasures. Nor should there be. It should be enough that you found joy in that task. You shouldn’t have had to explain that love or been sneered at. I want my own ch—” She stared back with stricken eyes and shook her head.
Graham furrowed his brow.
“My child,” she finished, her voice threadbare. “I want my child to find and celebrate happiness wherever and whenever he might find it.”
He’d been a rogue and a scoundrel so long that he’d developed an appreciation for the texture of a woman’s skin, for the feel of a woman in his arms. Only, now he was captivated, in ways that made a mockery of all that past rakish admiration, by a young mother’s devotion to her child. “My mother has always been of a like opinion,” he finally admitted, absently raking the clean hay against the wall. “In the end, my father, however, always had his desires obeyed.”
Martha drew in a shuddery breath. “That is something I understand at every level and in every way.” As she quietly resumed raking the corner of the stall, Graham gripped his own rake hard.
The details surrounding her marriage are irrelevant, Whitworth.
“Mr. Donaldson?” he asked, even with his superior’s order blaring loudly in his mind.
“Mr. Donaldson was my father.” She slowed her back-and-forth strokes of the rake and then stopped altogether. “Mr. Barrett was my husband.”
It was a name she loathed so much she’d ceased to go by it.
“I’m finished,” Frederick called out from another stall, and Graham silently cursed the interruption.
“Splendid.” Martha beamed. “Run ahead and brush down Guda.” She stared on as the little boy sprinted off, until the door had closed and she and Graham were again left alone. Her smile dipped, and silent as the grave, she returned to her work.
I don’t want to feel anything for this family. I don’t want to feel pity or pain or regret or anything. All those emotions went against every lesson and code of not only the Brethren, but also what he had learned about self-preservation. To allow oneself to feel only brought a person pain. He’d had enough of that sentiment that he’d never subject himself to all that went with it.
“And Mr. Barrett was a disapproving father?”
“Mr. Barrett was a self-absorbed father,” she clarified tightly. “He didn’t see Frederick, and when he did, he was only interested in him as Frederick’s presence could benefit his needs or wants. ‘Get me this, Frederick. Get me that. Get him gone…’”
What would it have been like for a woman to be married to a man such as that? “He did not help, then, around the stables?” he asked, even as he already knew.
A laugh gurgled up from Martha’s throat. “He couldn’t have identified a mucking rake if someone had held it to his nose.”
So… how did a woman who enjoyed the simple pleasures to be found in the stables come to be married to a man such as… that?
“My father trusted it was the best match for me,” she explained. “And I trusted my father. And it was the last time I freely trusted anybody.” Martha looked to him, and for the span of a heartbeat, her piercing gaze on him, he thought she knew. He thought she knew that his being here was no chance meeting and that even now she was calling him out for the impostor he was. Then some of the tension went out of her. She smiled. “You have been the first I’ve allowed myself to trust.” She laughed quietly. “I didn’t believe you were a stable master, but rather, a man with dishonorable intentions towards me.”
Guilt stabbed at him.
“I’ve finished,” F
rederick announced as he drew the door open and let Guda into one of the empty stalls.
This time, with the boy tying up the mount, Graham gave thanks for the intrusion.
“Here,” Martha called out, and her son trotted over. She handed off her rake. “I have to finish the laundry. Help Mr. Malin.” She went to drop a kiss on his cheek, but the boy angled his head away, and her lips merely grazed the air.
Yes, her leaving at that moment was safer. With her revelations here, and the evidence of how she’d lived, she’d left him at sea.
“What should I do?” Frederick asked when they were alone.
“Guda requires fresh hay.”
The boy scrunched his mouth up tightly. “She already has straw. I filled it yesterday.”
“There’s a difference between straw and hay.”
Setting aside thoughts of Martha and instead focusing on the safe, familiar topic he’d learned at the hands of his family’s stable master, Graham explained, “Hay is for feed, straw is for bedding.” Setting his rake down alongside the trough, Graham dropped to his haunches. “Here,” he said, and Frederick joined him. “Straw and hay both begin as a field crop.” He held up a stalk, and Martha’s son took the piece, studying it. “Hay is the entire harvested plant and used as animal feed. Timothy, rye, alfalfa, wheat oats, are all intended for consumption.” Graham turned over another stalk for the boy’s inspection. “Straw is the stalk after the grain or seeds have been harvested. There’s little nutritive value for a horse there. See how dried out it is?” he asked, gathering straw from the floor. He crushed it in his hand. “We want to change Guda’s bedding daily. It gives her a warm, clean bed to rest on. It protects her joints and legs.”
“How do you know all this?” Frederick whispered, awe underlying the question.
“I had… a good instructor.”
Mr. McNair, the groom who’d served Graham’s mother’s family and then shifted over to the Duke of Sutton’s stables when the couple had married. In some ways, he’d been more of a father than Graham’s own. Old Mr. McNair, who’d died too young and been replaced by another who’d been of a like opinion to Graham’s father about a duke’s son being underfoot. Graham hadn’t allowed himself to think of McNair in more years than he could remember. Uncomfortable with the emotion that memory brought, he came to his feet. He fetched his rake and resumed his earlier work. “You should—”
Then his ears caught it.
The faintest of sniffles.
Oh, bloody hell. His palms went moist, and coward that he was, Graham continued raking, hoping he’d been wrong. Hoping that hint of sound belonged to the hay scraping the floor. Or Guda’s whinny. Or—
Sniff-sniff.
Bloody hell. There it was again.
He forced himself to turn. Frederick stood precisely where he’d left him. Silent. Somber.
Even when life had been the most miserable for him, Graham had never been either of those. He’d been unruly. Wild. Garrulous. But he’d never been quieted by his tutors or his stern duke of a father. His brothers, though they’d exercised some restraint, had also not been the subdued, colorless heirs and spares that one would expect from most ducal sons.
This boy, Frederick, and his demeanor, and everything about him, were alien to him. “What is it?” he asked, setting his fork down.
Martha’s son clenched and unclenched a little fist around the handle of his shovel.
All the while, Graham remained silent, allowing the boy the time he needed.
Frederick slashed his spare hand through the air. “I don’t know how to care for any of this. That’s why it’s a mess. It’s why I don’t know the order to do things or how to properly care for a horse. Or any of it. Not like you.” As if deflated, the boy’s shoulders slumped.
Oh, bloody hell. I’m supposed to say something here…
Had Graham been presented with a woman in a diaphanous gown, or actress just finished with a performance, he would have known precisely what to say.
But the person before him… was a child, and the extent of Graham’s experience with children was… nonexistent, reserved for the time when he had been one years ago.
“Frederick?” The boy picked his head up slowly, meeting Graham’s gaze. “You’ve done a wonderful job here. The upkeep of a household is great for anybody.” Let alone a boy and his young mother.
“I didn’t help before,” he said, his voice threadbare. “My mother did it all. We had servants. My father never…” Frederick’s thin lips flattened, and a hatred better suited to a man twenty years his senior radiated from the depths of his brown eyes.
His father.
That mystery figure that Graham’s own superior hadn’t named. For what reason? Who had the Brethren sought to protect? Given the deliberate omission, Graham wasn’t intended to know, and the boy’s lingering statement should go without exploring. “Your father never…?” he prodded, the gentle urging coming not because of his assignment, but rather, because of a selfish, inexplicable need to know about Martha Donaldson and the husband whose name she refused to claim.
“He never came round. And when he did, he never helped,” Frederick spat, his tone pitching more and more to the stable rafters as he spoke, the words pouring out of him. “He expected the servants to wait on him. He expected my mother to wait on him like she was a servant…” And then the fight seemed to go out of him. “And she did. And I let her. We all let her. We didn’t help her. She did… everything.” Frederick’s voice dissolved into a barely there whisper. “Everything.”
The revelations ripped a hole in a heart Graham belatedly discovered he was in possession of. Martha Donaldson was a woman just twenty-eight years of age. An age when the ladies of the peerage were enjoying the luxuries permitted them as young women recently married: greater freedoms, idle time to partake in frivolous pursuits, and, given his own parents’ marriage, whatever pursuits the wife wished. Only, Martha’s life had been one of strife and suffering, and it ate at him. And because of that, Graham couldn’t find any suitable words for the child before him. For none of them would take away the misery he and his mother had known.
Frederick cleared his throat. “Yes, well, anyway. Mother would say I shouldn’t speak of those things with you because you’re a stranger, but I trust you.”
The lash of guilt landed another blow. It shouldn’t. Graham would remain on, carry out his responsibilities for the Brethren, and then part ways as Martha and Frederick both expected, with neither the wiser about just what had brought him into their lives. Telling himself that, reminding himself of that, didn’t ease the pangs of his conscience. “Your secrets are safe,” he vowed.
“I know,” Frederick said automatically, and the blade of guilt found another mark.
For with that, he’d succeeded beyond his wildest expectations in his assignment: After just a day, he’d wheedled his way into a mother and son’s life and earned their trust.
Consciences are a dangerous thing, Whitworth. Never forget that right or wrong doesn’t matter in the work you’ll do. All that matters is your assignment.
“But the reason I told you”—Frederick scrunched his mouth up—“what I did about my mother was because I want to help her now. She’s an artist. She’s very good, you know. And she should be doing that like she used to, and I should be caring for the stables. But I don’t know how.” Graham opened his mouth to speak, but the little boy spoke on in a rush. “I know you won’t be here long. We don’t have the funds to employ you. But as long as you are, I thought since you know so much about horses and stables, you can teach me everything you know.” There was such admiration and awe in Frederick’s tones that Graham again found himself at sea.
Nothing he’d done had earned the awe or appreciation of… anyone. His mother loved him, but none had seen Graham Whitworth as being in possession of any skills of worth. Hell, even the Home Office had passed him over at first. “I’d be honored to,” he said, his voice slightly hoarse.
Frederick�
�s lower lip quivered so faintly that had he not been studying the boy so closely, Graham would have missed it. And in that instant, as regret tugged at him, he wished he hadn’t been looking. Because the last thing he needed, the last thing he could afford, was to care about or worry after a little boy with anger simmering under the surface.
“Frederick, look at me,” he said. When Martha’s son met his gaze, he spoke. “Everything you do here on the farm is valuable and a help to your mother. One task isn’t more important than the other. You’ve done wonderfully in the role you have.” When it should have been the rotted Mr. Barrett who’d not only seen to the upkeep of the farm, but who should have seen it settled in his death. “And I promise, anything you want to learn, anything I can teach you”—while I’m here—“I will.”
The boy brightened. “Thank you, Mr. Malin.”
As Graham and Frederick Donaldson went back to ordering the stables, Graham, who’d lamented his assignment, now found himself dreading the day he left Martha and her son.
Chapter 11
Since she’d been forced to send away her family’s handful of servants, all to preserve funds, Martha had mourned the time she no longer had to sketch. It had been one more aspect of her life that had changed. Instead of creating her artwork during the day as she’d done as a viscountess, she’d instead had to wait for the late night, when all the day’s chores were completed and Frederick was abed. Except, by the time the house was still, exhaustion set it, so that even the pleasure of creating lost out to her body’s need for sleep.
Now, with the addition of Graham, an all-purpose servant, she at last had that coveted gift—and could not bring herself to focus on her artwork.
The bread recently removed from the ovens and now cooling on the counter, Martha stared out the window. Graham and Frederick were escorting Guda from the stables, drawing her to the middle of the stable yard. As the unlikely pair talked, Graham tied the mount with a quick-release knot.
The Rogue Who Rescued Her Page 12