by Lauren Royal
She smiled down at them. “What would you care to play?”
They settled on blindman’s buff, and the game went on for a while, other children joining in. When an impish lad named Thomas stole the blindfold and ran away laughing, the others raced after him. Kendra tried to follow but got halfway around the house and stopped. Thanks to her high Louis heels, the merry chase had far outstripped her ability to keep up.
Trick had been right to suggest a plain gown—next time she’d wear flat shoes, too. Wondering what was taking him so long, she made her way over to where Mrs. Jackson was hanging laundry.
“Have you an idea where my h-husband”—her tongue tripped over the word—“might have got himself off to?”
“Of course,” the older woman said, tossing a nightshirt back into the basket. “I’ll show you the way to the sickroom.”
She led her around the corner of the house and up the front steps. “I bless your husband nightly for saving these children.”
“Bless you for caring for them,” Kendra returned, glancing around the entry. Though the house and its furnishings were well-worn and far out of date, it was clean and cheerful. “Are the children receiving an education?”
“Mercy, yes. His grace has seen to it that tutors attend to that. All but the youngest can figure and read and write—”
“Girls, too?”
“Yes, indeed. Your husband has some odd ideas.”
They skirted a few wooden toys on the floor as Mrs. Jackson led her down a corridor. “Are they instructed in the classics? Latin and—”
“Nay, not as yet. I cannot imagine what children like this would be needing with Latin. But with the duke directing things, you never know what will happen next at Caldwell Manor.” The woman’s ample bosom quivered with a good-natured if slightly befuddled chuckle. “Here we are.”
In the room Mrs. Jackson indicated, a young girl, perhaps five or so, sat propped among pillows in a four-poster bed that looked as though it had rested on the same spot for a century or more. Kendra paused in the doorway.
“They’re busy,” Mrs. Jackson whispered.
Trick sat in a straight-backed chair by the bed, an open book in his lap. The girl leaned forward, apparently engrossed in whatever he was reading. Feeling like an eavesdropper, Kendra listened as well.
“‘Then have I gained a right good man this day,’ quoth jolly Robin,” came Trick’s throaty voice. “‘What name goest thou by, good fellow?’”
“And what did he say?” the child asked.
“The stranger answered, ‘Men call me John Little whence I came.’”
The girl’s blond curls bounced as she shook her head. “No, it’s Little John!” she corrected, her brown eyes wide with delight.
Trick glanced up from the leather-bound book. “Aye, but that was Will Stutely’s doing. He loved a good jest and said”—he looked back down at the book—“‘Nay, fair little stranger. I like not thy name and fain would I have it otherwise. Little art thou, indeed, and small of bone and sinew; therefore shalt thou be christened Little John, and I will be thy godfather.’ Then Robin Hood and all his band laughed aloud until the stranger began to grow angry…”
Kendra could only gape. She felt like one of the Graiae, three sisters who had but one eye between them. What was she seeing? A highwayman, telling a story to an ill orphan? Or a duke? Right now, he looked like neither.
She backed away from the doorway. She didn’t know this man, not in the least.
SIXTEEN
“ROBIN HOOD,” Kendra said on their way home, in that forthright way of hers that never failed to make Trick smile. “It’s fitting, I’ll credit you that.”
“Oh?” The caleche’s wheels crunched on the dusty road as he wound the horses through the gentle hills toward Amberley House. “Whatever makes you think so?”
“Don’t jest with me. It’s obvious!”
“Aye?” He looked over at her, but she was gazing straight ahead, her bright hair glistening in the slanting late-afternoon sunshine.
“I do believe I’m beginning to understand you.”
“Pray, enlighten me,” he said dryly. “I’ve been struggling to understand myself since childhood.”
She snorted. “You are playing Robin Hood,” she said with that same cocksure confidence that had drawn him to her the first time they’d spoken.
Heart’s wounds, was that but three days ago?
“Only instead of stealing from the rich,” she continued, “you’re robbing the Roundheads, who are no doubt responsible for making most of those children orphans anyway.” She sighed. “I do believe I could love you for this.”
It was his turn to snort. “The fellow you think you see isn’t me at all. I wish I could be that fellow,” he added under his breath.
“Balderdash. It’s well done of you, Trick.”
He shook his head. “My father wanted to build himself a monument, so he spent every shilling he’d ever made on the mansion and abandoned that perfectly good manor house. I wanted to see it put to use, that’s all. Filled with children, as it might have been had he ever cared a whit for his family.”
She turned to him, her heart in her eyes. “That’s why you play the highwayman, then, isn’t it? To pay for the children, since your father spent all his money on the mansion and left you without adequate funds.”
“Not precisely.” He was about to add that he’d turned his father’s illicit enterprise into a prosperous legitimate shipping company, but thought better of it. He didn’t like hiding things from her—especially after how she’d reacted to learning he was a duke—but blast it, his hands were tied.
It was no fault of his he was stuck in this situation. He’d been wracking his brain for a believable excuse to continue playing the highwayman, and she’d just dropped one in his lap. Never mind that he could support Caldwell Manor ten times over. She didn’t have to know that. Not right now, anyway.
“When I tell my brothers—”
“Don’t. Don’t tell them anything. I promised them I’d stop the highway robbery.”
“No, you didn’t. You ducked that issue cleverly.” How very perceptive she was—and how very inconvenient that could prove. “If you stop, the children will suffer, and I couldn’t bear to be responsible for such a thing. I was an orphan, myself.”
“Aye, well, any feeling human being would be sympathetic to their plight.” Trick’s mind raced, scrambling for an alternative, a way to avoid these secrets and lies. But he saw no choice. He’d promised King Charles he wouldn’t breathe a word of the real purpose behind the highwayman ruse.
He sneaked Kendra a guilty glance. She twisted her hands in her lap, and the imported lace fell back from her wrist, leaving it bare. “Why aren’t you wearing the amber bracelet?”
“It doesn’t go with this plain gown.”
He wondered why he found her flip answer so disturbing. “Are you still angry with me for being a duke?”
“I’m not sure what I feel. I don’t like being lied to.” Though she directed those words to the sky, she soon looked back to him. “Did you ever feel abandoned as a child?”
“In a sense,” he said slowly, wishing he and Kendra could go back in time and start over. He didn’t want their relationship ending up like his parents’. “My father took me from my mother when I was five—well, very nearly six, actually. I’d seen him but a few times over the years, and I’d never been more than a dozen miles from our home in Scotland.” The caleche bumped over a particularly rocky stretch of the path, and he reached to steady Kendra. “He took me to France. It was…unpleasant. He wanted me only to further his business dealings.”
“His business dealings?” She subtly shifted away from his touch. “He was a duke, was he not?”
“An impoverished one. He lost everything, including Amberley, helping finance the war. He regained his title and land after the restoration, but there was little money after the war. Not enough for him, anyway. The greedy old boar. Ruthless, too, he was
. Not a man one would be proud to claim as a relation.” Trick knew he sounded resentful, but he couldn’t seem to check the bitterness in his tone. This was why he usually avoided the topic. It was wrong to speak ill of the dead.
And he certainly had nothing good to say about Father.
Gingerly, Kendra prompted: “So he rebuilt his fortune?”
Trick nodded. “Trading in spirits, among other things. Madeira was his ticket to riches. Every bottle that graced the tables at the courts—French and English alike—passed through his hands.” He hesitated, then decided to come clean with it. Enough secrets stood between the two of them already. “He was a smuggler.”
She gasped. “A smuggler?”
“Aye. One doesn’t amass a fortune paying import taxes—at least not on the scale that he managed. You can imagine why I chose not to continue his enterprise, though it was highly lucrative.” Since that half-truth caused him no small discomfort, he added, “And as he made me an accomplice in his crimes, you can imagine as well why I felt lost—abandoned—as a child.”
Some small measure of honesty, at least.
“But your mother—”
“She let me go,” he said, the words studiously detached. He would never admit it still hurt inside after all this time. “In eighteen years, she never once tried to reclaim me, or even make contact. In all that time, I haven’t seen so much as one letter.” Crickets chirped as they drove beneath a canopy of trees silhouetted against the cerulean sky. “And besides which, she’s just as bad as he was. I had fond memories of her once, when I was too young to see her for what she is—a wicked woman. A Covenanter, plotting against king and country. And a loose woman as well.”
“How would you know all that? You weren’t even six when you left.”
“My father told me. Blackguard though he was, I don’t believe he lied about my mother; he must have had good reasons for leaving her. He never did anything without a good reason.”
In Trick’s estimation, his parents had frankly deserved one another, each as selfish and uncaring as the other. Perhaps that was human nature, but Trick wanted to do better. Was determined to do better.
He would make this marriage work if it killed him.
“Tomorrow I need to go to London,” he said.
Kendra’s eyes danced. “I love London. Have you a house in town?”
“Aye. And I’m sure you’ll find it every bit as disgustingly opulent as Amberley House.” He smiled on the outside while cringing internally. “I’ll be going alone this time, though.”
“Oh.” The light in her eyes died, and his insides twisted. “Why?”
He had to leave—he’d actually, before this whirlwind of a wedding had come up, been planning to leave today. His shipping company needed his attention. The shipping company that he’d decided to keep secret from her for the time being, lest she figure out he could well afford to support the orphanage without resorting to robbery.
“I had arranged it,” he said quickly, “before we met.”
As he guided the caleche onto Amberley’s long approach, he ran a hand through his hair and cast her an appraising glance. Her expression had turned contemplative. He could almost see the wheels turning in her pretty red head.
“Perhaps we can put aside some money and invest,” she said. “In the future, with careful planning, playing the highwayman might become unnecessary. With any luck, before you ever get caught and”—her voice dropped—“strung up at Tyburn.” She turned on the bench seat to face him. “I’ll help you.”
“You will not. I won’t have you endangering yourself—”
Her laughter rang through the deepening shadows. “I didn’t mean with the robberies, but with the investing. I’ve a knack with finances—you can ask Jason.”
“He lets you invest his money?”
She stiffened beside him. “Not independently, but I’ve helped him make decisions, yes.”
“Whoa, there.” He put a hand on her arm, pleased when she didn’t pull away. “I wasn’t disapproving, just asking.”
“All right, then.” Her expression softened. “It’s only that I don’t know you, and—”
“I don’t know you, either.”
“True enough.” After a considered pause, an unmistakable glimmer lit her green eyes. “As for the highway robbery, I have a good aim—”
“Ye won’t.” Hearing his accent broadening, he winced. What was it about her that got under his skin? Pulling up before Amberley House, he tugged on the reins with more force than was necessary before taking her by the shoulders. “I mean it, Kendra.”
“I was jesting,” she whispered, her smile sweet. Something inside him seemed to shift. It was such a small space to bring his lips to hers; he did it without thinking. Her mouth was soft and yielding, and he felt her pulse race beneath his fingertips on her neck. Their lips clung for a long, heady moment before he pulled away.
“Oh,” she whispered. “I cannot keep my head when you do that.”
“Aye?” He couldn’t help but grin as he handed the reins to a groom and hopped down from the caleche.
Perhaps this marriage wouldn’t kill him after all.
SEVENTEEN
SEATED AT Trick’s desk, Kendra frowned at the ledger in front of her. “So you’ve been living here at Amberley for six months?”
“Aye. And I fired Rankill after two.” Trick took a sip of bracing whisky, then set the glass on the table beside his favorite leather armchair.
He’d returned from seeing to his London interests to hear his wife had spent the past week examining his books and inspecting his property. After recovering from the shock, he’d decided he was pleased. With that part of their relationship, at least.
Now that he was back home, he’d work on the other part. He’d made progress before he left—he was sure of it. Though he’d as soon strangle her brothers for being right, he had to admit he and Kendra were a good match. They simply needed to get past these initial difficulties.
“Were my suspicions about Rankill’s dishonesty on target, then?” he asked her, feeling more than awkward requesting his wife’s opinion of his estate business. But between the king’s mission and the demands of his shipping company, he had precious little time to see to Amberley. “Was I right to let him go?”
“You should have done it earlier.” She glanced up. “Your father died three years ago. What brought you back now?”
He couldn’t tell her he’d moved home at King Charles’s request to track down a problem in the region. Or that he’d agreed to do so in exchange for a pardon from old smuggling charges. The threat of losing Amberley and the title had been veiled and, truth be told, unnecessary. Trick cared not a whit for his father’s legacy and would have agreed to the mission out of patriotism and friendship alone.
But, nay, he couldn’t tell Kendra any of that.
“I decided Amberley was in need of my attention,” he said instead.
“Well, you haven’t paid it much,” she retorted.
Noticing she still wasn’t wearing his bracelet, he sighed and sipped again, feigning unconcern. “What evidence is there that Rankill embezzled?”
“Look here.” She waved him over. “Amberley’s northwest quarter is capable of producing many more bushels than are recorded. And in the east”—she startled when he leaned over her—“this land will support more sheep than are shown in the records.” Slowly she shifted, turning to meet his eyes.
He’d missed her lavender scent. Bracing himself with one hand on the desk, he held her gaze steadily. “Is that so?”
“Y-yes.” She drew a breath and looked back down. “As a matter of fact, I counted fifty more head than are noted in the ledger. And you should purchase yet more. You’re not maximizing your profits in this area.”
“Our profits.” They were in this together. He didn’t think he’d quite realized that till now, or how much of a relief it was to find himself “saddled” with a wife who had turned out to be so competent.
&nbs
p; If only they could get past her fear of the marriage bed, life would be nearly perfect.
“Thank you.” He leaned closer and pressed his lips to the top of her head.
She stilled, and he heard her swallow hard. “You’re welcome. You can sit back down now.”
Seeing her flustered was heartening. He didn’t sit back down. A long silence stretched between them before she continued.
“The point is, Amberley is quite a bit more profitable than Rankill led you to believe. Run properly, with no one siphoning income, it should be self-supporting and then some. I realize you have a standard of living to maintain—”
“We have a standard of living.” With his free hand, he skimmed his knuckles along her cheek.
A pink flush rose where he’d touched. “Well, yes. But, thankfully, it shouldn’t be long at all until this mess is resolved and Amberley can support both you—us—and the orphanage.” She paused for a breath. “So you can stop the robberies now, except…”
“Aye?”
“There are some matters that need attending. Depending on whether you think they or the children should come first.”
“What sort of matters?”
“Repairs and the like. Rankill took money regardless of whether you could afford it. Your people are working with broken equipment, one of the barns needs roofing—”
“You have a list?” He ran a finger down her nose and stopped with it on her lips.
“Y-yes,” she whispered against his fingertip. She pulled back, her elbow knocking a quill to the carpet.
“I’ll take care of it all.” He leaned down to retrieve the feather and flicked it under her chin, grinning at her tiny yelp. “I think I can survive another few highwayman masquerades.”
With any luck, that would be all it would take. He’d amassed much of the king’s evidence already.
“Weighing your safety against the children’s welfare—”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I hope so,” she said.
She really hoped so.
In less than two weeks of being married to the Duke of Amberley, she’d been surprised to discover she liked her life here. Although she adored Jason’s wife, she hadn’t realized the tension she’d felt at Cainewood—how difficult it had been for her to cede responsibility when Caithren had arrived. Here, the responsibility was her own. The house, the land, the people. And like the extra layer of marzipan on her bride cake, she had her orphanage, too.