A Reluctant Courtship

by Laurie Alice Eakes

  “He works for you. Why don’t you tell him when you want the meals served?”

  Meric held up a finger for silence. The young ladies had gathered around the pianoforte, a violin, and a cello. Two stood in the center.

  “The singers,” Meric said.

  Philo paled. “There’s a candle right above us.”

  “Take heart. They might be good.”

  They weren’t good. Neither were they terrible. They simply sang and played with every note right and yet no heart. And Meric’s heart ached for the music his family had produced. None of them played an instrument. They didn’t have any instruments to play anyway. But all of them sang. They harmonized together. They felt the music of the old ballads Mother and Father remembered from their youth. The Devenish ladies sounded like an automaton playing a flute, which Meric had witnessed at some lord’s house in London—pitch-perfect and soulless.

  “I wonder if Mother and the children are singing tonight,” he whispered to Philo.

  Philo blinked hard, turned his face away, and shrugged. “They won’t have anyone to do the low parts with us gone. And Kate might—”

  “Shh,” an old woman in a purple turban hissed at them from the row ahead.

  Mr. Devenish’s mother.

  Meric cleared a thickness in his throat and stood. “Must go outside to cough.”

  He slipped along the row of chairs to the far wall and a French window that led onto the terrace. Cold, damp wind blew into his face, clearing his head and throat of candle smoke and too much perfume. The sharp tang of the sea greeted his nose, and he inhaled, missing the freshness of the lake at home, the tang of the forest in autumn. His heart ached.

  “This wasn’t what I meant when I prayed for the means to support my family, Lord.” The ache grew into a clenched fist inside his chest. He pounded his own fist on the stone balustrade.

  He wanted to leave, find a smuggler’s vessel to carry him to France, where he could find an American ship to sail him back to New York. The most enjoyment he had experienced since deciding to take up residence in Devonshire was rescuing Miss Bainbridge from the cliff. He’d been useful there. No one else he’d met so far could perform such a feat. But the opportunity to pull maidens off crumbling cliffs didn’t arise every day. The rest of the time he gave a nod to Chilcott’s reports of the lands and other holdings, approved of the cook’s food, and tolerated Huntley dragging him to a tailor or boot maker or some other sort of clothier.

  “No wonder these people gamble away fortunes and drink to excess. They’re bored to distraction.”

  Violin music swelled loudly enough to pierce the heavy glass in the doors.

  “And suffer through bad musicianship.”

  Duty called, however. Duty always called him back. He opened the door at the end of the song. Apparently he did so at the end of the set of songs, for Miss Devenish rushed over to him, her cheeks as rosy as apples, her pale blue eyes shining, her golden curls bobbing. “My lord, thank you for enduring our performance. We know we aren’t very good, but we so enjoy playing.”

  “You have a very pretty voice, Miss Devenish.”

  Which was the truth. She was a very pretty young lady, especially her sweet smile.

  She blushed. “Why, thank you, my lord. Shall we get more refreshments? I know they were sparse earlier. We rather had a disaster in the kitchen this afternoon, but replacements should have arrived by now.”

  “What sort of disaster?” Meric offered her his arm—as he had no choice—and nodded to his brother, cornered by the elder Mrs. Devenish.

  “Cook tripped over the cat and dropped the ham into the fire.” Miss Devenish tittered. “That caused such an uproar, the bread burned and one of the maids dropped the trifle and . . . it was quite a mess. Mama was shrieking and threatening to dismiss them all, and Cook said she would give her notice if that was how thirty years of service was rewarded. It was like a farce at the theater.”

  “It sounds like it.” Meric ran calculations through his mind as to whether or not he should take on more servants. “Did the servants get dismissed?”

  “Of course not. Mama would not dare.” Miss Devenish grasped his elbow like a tiller and steered him through the crush heading toward the dining room.

  Too many persons greeted them, waylaid them along the way for further conversation. Not until he and Miss Devenish sat at a table set against the windows, plates of simple but abundant fare before them, did Meric gain the opportunity to ask, “So why does your mother dare not dismiss the servants?” He smiled to disarm any rude intent that might be read into his question. “I am learning the ways of the country gentry, you understand.”

  “Of course you are.” Miss Devenish bestowed an understanding look upon him. “And we are a close company, you understand. Our servants talk to one another. And some of them talk to their employers. If one is unfair or unkind, it gets around and then hiring good workers becomes difficult.”

  Ah, so the servants were not entirely helpless.

  “Did you not have this problem in America?” she asked.

  “I have no idea. I didn’t have servants.”

  She stared at him. “But who cooked your meals and did the shopping and the cleaning and—” She broke off this litany of chores as Philo and the violinist, a tall, slender girl with big, dark eyes, joined them at the table. “Penelope, Mr. Poole, how kind of you to seek our company.” The chill of her voice and the tightening of her lips suggested feelings in opposition to her words.

  “I heard about the kitchen disaster,” Penelope Babbage said. “How did you get replacements so quickly?”

  “Our cook is the sister of the cook at Bainbridge.” Miss Devenish smiled at Meric. “As I was saying, everyone knows everyone else.”

  Meric set down his fork with careful deliberation and curled his hand around the edge of the table. “You took food from the Bainbridge household but didn’t invite Miss Bainbridge to your party?”

  He spoke a trifle too loudly. He spoke during a momentary lull in the hubbub around the food. He spoke at a moment when everyone in the room heard him.

  “Um, Meric,” Philo began, “maybe—”

  Meric raised his hand. “I’ll say no more on it. It is your concern.”

  Miss Devenish had paled right down to the apples in her cheeks, opened her mouth, but said nothing.

  “Do, please, forgive me,” Meric said.

  Conversations resumed with a vengeance. Philo and Meric continued eating. Miss Babbage smiled as she nibbled at a hothouse strawberry.

  Poor Miss Devenish stared down at her plate and didn’t touch her food.

  Meric touched her arm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s really none of my concern.”

  “Oh no, my lord.” Miss Devenish gazed up at him with shining eyes. “It shows what a good and kind person you are that you could care about the feelings even of a female like her.”

  Across the table, Philo covered his mouth with his serviette and spluttered. His eyes danced.

  Meric pushed back his chair. “I need some more air. Is it too cold or improper for you to join me, Miss Devenish?”

  “No, my lord, not on the terrace.”

  Where the well-lighted rooms spilled their glow onto the flagstones and on anyone promenading back and forth. Besides, several others preceded them into the crisp night, but not so many that every word would be overheard.

  “It was Mama’s decision, you know,” Miss Devenish said, “not to invite Miss Bainbridge. I wanted her here.”

  “Because of her reputation?” Meric asked.

  Miss Devenish hesitated then answered, “Mama says so, but I think it is because she is so very pretty that girls like me have no chance of attracting the right sort of husband.”

  Meric’s heart softened, warmed. He paused at the end of the terrace and smiled down at her, covering her little hand where it rested on his forearm. “I don’t think that’s true at all, Miss Devenish. You have an excellent chance of makin
g a good match.”

  Her fingers trembled, and her smile was radiant even in the near darkness. “I do hope so. I wish to avoid going to London.”

  “Why? I thought all females wished a Season in London.”

  “I don’t like the city. I don’t even like going into Exeter or Plymouth.”

  “But what about the theater, the opera, the bookshops?” He named the activities he had found most enjoyable in the biggest city he had ever visited, then added one he thought all females would prefer. “And the shopping, of course?”

  “I would like those things, I suppose, but for the crush of people.” She shook her head. “I am too used to the open moors and sea here.”

  “They are fine.” He resumed their stroll. “Do you like walks in the country, Miss Devenish?”

  “I prefer to ride.”

  Meric tensed. Gorge rose in his throat at the mere thought of bouncing up and down on a horse. But Chilcott’s voice rang more loudly in his ears than had the music, reminding him how he needed a proper wife to boost his own reputation, and what a fine choice Miss Devenish would make.

  After taking a long breath as though planning to dive into cold, deep water, he said, “Then ride we shall. Tomorrow? No, Wednesday.”

  He mustn’t seem too eager when all he wanted to do was learn more about her, to see if, indeed, he could spend the rest of his life in her company.

  “I think . . .” She hesitated by one of the French windows. “I think perhaps Friday would do better. Father has some sort of business with the bishop, so we are traveling down to Exeter, and then Mama wishes to look at carpets in Axminster. So we may not return until Thursday or even Friday. I will send a note around when we return.”

  “You do that, Miss Devenish.” Meric bowed, truly admiring whatever personage in the Devenish household who had made such traveling plans right after the soirée. Don’t make the daughter too available to his attentions.

  Laughing to himself, he followed Miss Devenish into the drawing room but kept going rather than stay and listen to the next set of music, this time performed by two middle-aged spinsters he had met at church the previous week. They glared at him as he exited the room. He smiled and bowed and continued on his way. Unable to locate Philo, he left a message with a footman and headed home. Two could play at the not-too-eager-to-court game.

  The night was dark save for the brightness of stars, and the walk back to Clovelly was outside of five miles, but he needed the exercise. He got too little in England. Coal and wood came cut and delivered to his door. Servants carried buckets of water from the well. His suggestions that he go fishing had been met with expressions of horror and shock. If he wanted to row into a lake or river and fish, Chilcott could arrange a journey to Scotland. The earl of Ashmoor could never go out in a smack like a common fisherman.

  “And don’t we need to worry about the French?” Philo had asked.

  “They leave the fishermen alone, especially since they dare not come this close to our coast,” Chilcott explained.

  “Then I will be perfectly safe.”

  Chilcott seemed to have set out to dampen any opportunity for him to go out with the fishermen, for none would agree to take the earl aboard, Meric discovered when he tried to make arrangements for himself. He could easily purchase his own boat and go, but he didn’t know how to sail. He had rowed on a lake. No one in England outside of the universities and Lake District seemed to row anywhere.

  So he eschewed his carriage as often as possible and walked. Daytime, nighttime, rain, or shine, he took to the cliff path or the road.

  The road passed by a stone wall and massive iron gates. Meric paused, realizing they belonged to Bainbridge. Somewhere up the lime tree–lined drive visible through the wrought iron, Miss Bainbridge spent the evening alone save for her paid companion and her Gothic novel. Next time they met, he would have to ask her if she had indeed endangered her heroine’s life by having her nearly fall off a cliff.

  And be rescued by the villain.

  He resumed his walk. Not until he reached his cottage perched high above the village of Clovelly did he realize his trot had turned into a canter and then a near run, as though he were being chased, with each footfall accompanied by the same refrain. A villain like your father. A villain like your father.

  If these people had known his father, they never would think him capable of murder. Yet they had known him twenty-eight years earlier—the older people—and amongst those, only the late Lord Bainbridge had believed him innocent of the crime. Apparently Lord Bainbridge hadn’t passed his belief down to his daughters or his son, considering the latter hadn’t contacted Meric in any way. Yet one more reason to court Miss Devenish. She and her family seemed unconcerned about his parentage. But then, a title and quantity of money covered up a number of family skeletons, especially when those barely removed from the shop wanted to elevate their social standing.

  “Lord, I don’t just want to cover them up, I want to erase them.”

  Restless despite the vigorous walk, Meric entered the library, shed his coat, and tossed it onto a sofa in a way sure to give Huntley apoplexy. He pulled the box of correspondences he had unearthed at Ashmoor off a shelf and set it on the desk. They were from his father. If any had been written to his father, Meric had never seen them. Father, however, had written to his brother faithfully for the twenty years he had been gone before he died.

  Not one missive indicated where Broderick Poole had taken his family. The letters had been mailed from various ports—Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, even as far away as Charleston and Savannah. Father didn’t write about the lakes or the woods, the hard winters or the brilliant autumn colors. In the early letters, he explained in clear, considered prose what had happened that fateful night. He gave an address in Trenton, New Jersey, where he could be contacted if the truth finally came out. Later, when that precious correspondence never arrived, he wrote about his growing family, his peace of mind and heart, his forgiveness of those who had lied about him.

  “So where is everyone else’s forgiveness?” Meric rested his chin in his hand and stared at the windows open to the cold wind off the sea. “And how do I start clearing his name?”

  No answer came to him. None had come to him the other ten times he had read the letters. He didn’t know the county, the coastline, or the people well enough to have a clue where to begin. The late Lord Bainbridge would have aided him. They had discussed it. But that option had been taken from him in a heartbeat. He needed an ally . . . an ally . . .

  He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep, his head on his folded arms atop the desk, until Philo wandered into the house mere moments before dawn.

  Cold and stiff, Meric rose to greet—or confront—his younger brother and heir. “Where have you been all night?” He sniffed to detect the odor of spirits. He smelled salt spray and fish instead.

  “I haven’t been drinking, big brother.” Philo grinned. “I’ve been fishing.”

  “You?” Meric frowned. “Why will they take you and not me?”

  “I’m not the earl.” Philo wandered to the steps, yawning. “By the look of things tonight, I won’t even be the heir in a year or so.” Chuckling, he stumbled up the steps.

  Meric started to follow. “Maybe I should buy a boat and learn to sai—”

  The front door knocker sounded with a thunderous boom, boom, boom.

  “Wait for me to get that, my lord,” Wooland called from the back of the house.

  Something harder than a human fist and louder than a door knocker pounded on the door.

  Guts twisted into a knot strong enough to hold up a ship’s spar, Meric ignored Wooland and opened the door himself. Two red-coated soldiers poised on the stoop, one with the butt of his musket poised to slam against the door again.

  “How may I help you . . .” He scanned the two men, one a sergeant, the other a lieutenant, judging from their insignia. “Gentlemen?” He allowed the question in the last word to convey his opinion of thei
r early morning visit, and them for making it.

  “We are here for Lord Ashmoor,” the lieutenant said, hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Indeed?” With Wooland hovering behind him, Meric tried to imitate the lugubrious and stiff butler. “Do you intend to arrest him?”

  “That is between us and his lordship.” The lieutenant stood on tiptoe to peer past Meric’s shoulder. “He must be home at this hour.”

  “That, fellow, is none of your business.”

  “It’s the king’s business, it is,” the sergeant declared. “You’d best let us in if you knows what’s good for you.”

  “And you,” Meric drawled, “better know to whom you are speaking before you talk in such a manner. Now, if you will excuse me, his lordship does not receive callers of any sort before eight of the clock.” He stepped back and slammed the door, shooting home the bolt.

  The pounding resumed.

  “That was well done, my lord.” Wooland cast Meric the first approving glance since their acquaintance. “But you had best take yourself off so I can honestly say you are not at home.”

  “I shall.” Meric exited through the library, snatched up his coat, and climbed over the windowsill into the strip of lawn the English apparently called a garden. From there, losing himself amidst the shops and early marketing servants was no trouble. He found himself a chophouse and purchased a meat pie for breakfast. In about an hour, he returned home the way he had come.

  “They may as well open the gates of the prison and let all the Frenchies walk out,” Chilcott informed him. “Another half dozen escaped last night. I assured the men you were at a party late enough you couldn’t have been anywhere near the prison.”

  “But I wasn’t,” Meric said. “I left early and walked home, then was here by myself all night.”

  “Never you mind about that. It will not matter.” Chilcott didn’t sound quite sincere, and his lips turned down at the corners. “They are grasping at straws to find whoever is helping these men, and you are easy because you are new. But in the end, they cannot do much to a peer without awfully good proof.”