by Nancy Butler
Niall nodded. “They say at the ‘Thrush that he’s deep in debt. Plans to marry Mortimer’s sister-in-law for her dowry. Got to take some bumpkin into his bed and leave the delectable Vivian Partridge unconsoled.”
A vague memory stirred in Romulus’s brain and then lay still before he could place it.
“I wonder if that’s what’s put him in such a foul temper?”
“He’s always like that, Rom,” Niall observed. “I think he fears you more than he lets on. Lady Hamish favors you, you know. And Beveril doesn’t want anyone getting too close to the honeypot.”
“Then the man’s a jackass,” Romulus said through his teeth. “As though I stand to gain anything from her ladyship, except her good will. Beveril’s a fool to even think it. Maybe he was dropped on his head.”
They separated at the back of the house—Niall went sauntering off to the dairy to coax information from his latest flirt, while Romulus ducked through the low kitchen door. The cook greeted him with a smile.
“Mr. Perrin,” she said. “Go right on in, sir. I believe Lady Hamish is in the drawing room.”
Rom went up the back stairs which led to the central hall. Fine paintings hung along the paneled walls, and a Venetian mirror gleamed above a marquetry console table. He recalled the first time he stood in that hall, ten months earlier, a shivering, emaciated wreck, clad in a borrowed cloak.
Romulus had been convalescing at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, his health broken and his nerves in tatters, when he first met Sir Robert Poole, the noted statesman and reformer. Poole had attempted to befriend him—with indifferent success. Then an acquaintance of Sir Robert’s came to see Rom. The woman was not young, but handsome, stately, and obviously wealthy. She announced blithely that she had a position to offer him—caring for the swans that had bred for centuries on her estate. She had discovered that his father had been a river warden in Wiltshire, and that as a boy Rom had learned to look after water birds.
He tried to refuse, but she was quite steely for all her elegant manners. And so after endless weeks in the bleak confines of the hospital, Romulus found himself in Hamish House, the greatest of the great houses that lay along that stretch of the Thames.
For the past ten months he had reported to her of his work on the river. It was curious, he often thought, that although she never went out on the river, she was much concerned with the welfare of the swans and the other waterfowl. He’d have thought her an eccentric, but she was the least fanciful woman he’d ever met.
Their relationship gradually evolved from one of respectful servant and lady bountiful, to one of near equals. Lady Hamish saw nothing amiss in discussing the books she read or the news from London with her river warden. Or of having tea with him in the garden on a sunny afternoon.
Romulus wasn’t sure how it had happened, this friendship with the reclusive baroness. At first he kept to the island, rebuilding the abandoned lodge. During his weekly reports to her he never strayed over the boundary of servant and mistress. But one day, after he’d been on the island a month, her groundskeeper delivered a sleek skiff for him to use on his patrols. He had gone to her home to thank her and found himself lured into conversation. She had spoken with him for hours that day, inquiring about his childhood in Rome and his life in Wiltshire with his father. Happily, she never mentioned his years in the army.
He left Hamish House that afternoon perplexed beyond words. Loneliness, he reckoned, had driven her to seek the company of her nerve-rattled river warden. And so he accommodated her, visiting more frequently and bringing her gifts from the river—bird’s nests and cocoons, hawk’s feathers and river rocks with tiny fossils embedded in them. Small enough tokens, but she clearly valued them, as though he offered her a window on a world she chose not to visit, but longed for all the same.
In truth, Romulus still had not sorted out Lady Hamish’s curious patronage. But it pleased him to offer a diversion to the gracious lady who treated him with such kindness. And it was, furthermore, most gratifying to be a burr under the saddle to her officious nephew, who had been at odds with Rom from the instant he had come to live on the island. Rom reckoned it just another of his failures with the human race and thanked Providence that he possessed a better rapport with wildlife.
“Romulus,” Lady Hamish said with unfeigned pleasure as he came through the wide, arched entryway of the drawing room. “You’ve only just missed Beveril.”
“Indeed, he met me in the drive, ma’am.” His tone gave nothing away.
“I’m so pleased he took the time to speak with you. He could learn a great deal from you, Romulus, about many things.” She shook her head slowly. “But he shows little enthusiasm, I’m afraid.”
“Your nephew has too much consequence to care for the doings of servant, ma’am.”
“Nonsense,” she said briskly. “You are no servant, as I’ve told Beveril a dozen times. You are here only until you are well enough to return to the army or some other career. So tell me, how are you faring?”
“Fitter every day,” he said as he seated himself in a wing chair. “The swans, however, are not faring so well. There’s a poacher on the river.” She leaned forward intently, as he continued, “Three adults were snared last week and their nests were abandoned. I’m looking after the cygnets, but I doubt all of them will survive.”
“They might not have anyway,” she pointed out. “Nature does take a toll, after all. I am sure you are doing all you can. Anyone will tell you, Romulus, the swans have never had a better caretaker.”
He raised his eyes to her. “You know I begrudge the loss of even one bird to poachers. If the foxes take them, or the snapping turtles and the otters feed on the hatchlings, that I can tolerate. But not the poaching of one bird to serve at a rich man’s table.”
“My father served swan once,” Lady Hamish mused in a distant voice. “Our bailiff at the time vowed he would leave our service if such a thing ever recurred. Papa was most distressed—he was, we all were, very attached to the man. The swan had been killed by accident, you see, caught in a fishing weir. But I think Papa regretted that meal for the rest of his life. We Hamishes take our swans very seriously.”
Romulus grinned slightly. He had apparently caught the Hamish affliction. “I recall that Queen Elizabeth was also a great lover of swans,” he said. “Had her flock branded by the Royal Swankeeper. At least that’s one thing I needn’t worry about. As much time as I spend around them, the adults are still quite testy—especially during nesting season. I wouldn’t fancy wrestling one.”
“No,” Lady Hamish said, chuckling softly. “We haven’t carried our obsession to that extreme. But tell me, how does your new houseguest go on?”
Romulus gaped at her in confusion. Allegra had been in his keeping for less than three days, and he was positive no one, save Niall, knew of her presence on the island.
She noted his bewildered expression and added, “The heron you rescued? Is he still refusing to eat?”
“Oh, the heron.” Romulus breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, he’s eating and his leg is finally mending.”
“Excellent,” she said. “Now, I see it’s nearly noon. Would you care to join me for lunch?”
Romulus refused her offer with as much graciousness as he could muster. His other houseguest, the troublesome Miss Swan, had been left alone for far too long. He feared she would be growing bored with nothing to occupy her, save the feeding of the cygnets.
“Thank you,” he said, rising. “But I need to see to my chicks.”
All my chicks, he amended silently.
* * *
Romulus berthed his skiff at the narrow stone slip that lay on the eastern side of the island, and then walked along the path to his lodge, brushing back the encroaching foliage with one hand.
The lodge sat in a grassy clearing, raised up four feet from the ground on an open stonework base. Romulus had put his soul into refurbishing the tumbledown house, re-bricking the damaged exterior, and reglazing the bro
ken windows. He had painted the woodwork a deep, rich ochre and had planted an herb garden in the front yard, using leftover bricks to make a curving path to the front porch. The house now looked welcoming and snug. It also looked particularly unoccupied. The back door yawned open and he could see no one moving about inside. It was a warmish day, but he doubted his houseguest had had to resort to opening the doors, when the windows would have sufficed nicely.
“Allegra!” he called as he ran up the front steps to the small covered porch. He went into the hallway, and ducked briefly into the sitting room and the storeroom. The two stacked crates were empty.
“Drat the girl,” he muttered as he made his way to the kitchen. He marched out through the open door and down the steps to the yard. “Allegra!” he shouted in a voice that would have done a sergeant-major proud. When there was no response, he continued across the graveled yard, past the woodshed and the privy.
At the northern end of the island there was a shallow pond of perhaps thirty feet in length. It was overhung with willows and oaks, and was boggy at one end, where irises grew in profusion. As Rom came out into the open field where the pond lay, he saw Allegra kneeling beside the water on a large, flat rock.
“What the devil are you doing with my cygnets!” he thundered.
Diana nearly tumbled off the rock. She had been watching in amazement as the sixteen fluffballs paddled merrily back and forth across the water, and so had not seen Romulus bearing down on her.
“I wasn’t the one who forgot to latch the kitchen,” she called back heatedly, as she scrambled to her feet. Wasn’t it just like the man to place the blame on her. “I only let them out of their cages. And I suppose I did leave the storeroom door open. But I didn’t bring them out here. I swear it.”
Romulus used the time it took him to reach her to settle his temper. He’d had every intention of taking the cygnets to the pond himself, but at least he had a crumb of an idea of what he was about.
“Then how did they get out here?” he asked meaningfully, once he reached her.
She bit her lip as she gazed up at him. Lord, she wished he wasn’t so tall. “You mustn’t have shut the back door when you left this morning. A few of them had gotten into the kitchen, and before I could stop them, four of them went out the door. When I ran after them, all the others came trailing along behind me.”
The stormy expression on his face hadn’t softened one whit, but Diana thought she could see the beginnings of a smile in the depths of his eyes.
“I didn’t know whether to rescue some of them,” she continued, “and risk the others finding their way to the river. Or to just keep following after them, until they ran out of energy.”
“I gather they led you here?”
“It was the most amazing thing.” Her eyes widened. “They marched right up to the water and jumped in, one after the other, as though they’d been doing it their whole lives.”
She stopped to draw a breath. Rom no longer looked as though he meant to throttle her. Not that the thought of being under those lean hands didn’t have a sort of charm. “I assumed one had to teach them to swim.” She nodded to where the baby swans were cavorting effortlessly in the water. “But they don’t appear to need lessons at all.”
Romulus chuckled. “Haven’t you ever heard the expression, ‘like a duck to water’? It’s no different with swans.”
He lowered himself onto the flat rock and stretched his legs out before him, crossing them at the ankles. Tipping his face up to her, he said more gently, “I’m sorry I railed at you, Allegra. It took the wind out of me when I saw they were gone from the house. I wanted to be here when they had their first swim. This is my first crop of cygnets in a very long time. Seeing them go into the water is…well, it’s a treat.”
“You are a very strange man, Romulus Perrin,” she muttered, settling down beside him.
“I expect the people of Treypenny would wholeheartedly agree with you.”
“Why? Do they know how you wax rhapsodic over swans?”
“I daresay it wouldn’t surprise them,” he replied with a frown. “Nothing I do surprises them. You see, they think I am mad.”
Diana drew back. “Mad? As in addled?”
He nodded. “I was rather…um, battle scarred, when I first came here. And I wanted nothing to do with the people in the village. You may have gathered, I have little patience for fools.”
“I suppose you think me a fool,” she said softly, plucking at the fringed belt of the dressing gown. “I don’t blame you. It was wrong to take the cygnets out of their cages without asking you first.”
He mumbled his agreement, but then settled back on his elbows to watch his brood paddling about in the calm water. Several of them had climbed onto the grassy bank of the pond to preen their downy feathers, but they were keeping well away from the humans on the rock.
Diana had a sudden thought. “But how will you catch them now? I doubt they will let either of us get near them. Or is it time to return them to the river?”
Romulus shook his head. “No, they’ll be with us a while longer.”
Diana smiled to herself. She liked very much that he had said “us.”
“And as for catching them,” he continued, “you’ve just got to know how a swan thinks.”
At that moment, Diana would have rather known what a swan-keeper thought, especially about her.
He was sitting only a hand’s span away from her, and his right elbow, in its green buckskin sleeve, was angled near her hip. She was tempted to rest her head on his broad shoulder as they reclined there in the bright sun, but feared he would toss her into the pond for such a familiarity. So she contented herself with watching him, shifting back a little so he would not know he was being observed.
The sun played over his russet hair, picking out the gleaming bronze strands that lay among the darker auburn waves. She saw the fine texture of the tanned skin on his face and his hands. And at the V of his throat, where his shirt gaped open slightly. She admired the firm muscles in his outstretched legs and the sheer breadth of his shoulders.
The ton had never seen his like, she mused. Dressed in an elegant suit of clothes, and in topboots and a caped greatcoat, he would be nothing less than breathtaking. Ladies would throw themselves under his carriage wheels to gain his notice. Gentlemen in droves would go into fatal declines, envious of his impressive stature and admirable physique.
But he was not a gentleman, in spite of his cultured voice and refined manners. Gentlemen did not toil for their bread, at least not overtly. No, Romulus Perrin was an aberration—a common man who possessed a rich spirit and a masculine beauty that were anything but common.
“Were you a soldier before you came here?” Diana asked, needing to distract herself from the powerful lure of the lean body stretched out beside hers. “You mentioned the war last night, and you just now said that you were battle scarred.”
As he turned to answer her, his elbow brushed against the side of her breast. At that moment, Diana thought she might just slither off the rock and into the pond. Anything to douse the fire that had leapt through her at his fleeting touch.
Oblivious to her distress, he replied gruffly, “It was some time ago. I don’t like to speak of it.”
“Then you are not like other military men,” she pronounced. “I’ve met dozens of them in London, and all they ever do is rattle on endlessly about this skirmish or that battle.”
“I see your selective memory is returning,” he observed with a wry glance.
“I…that is….” Diana knew she was in for it now. Unless she used her mistake to her advantage. “Yes!” she said gleefully, “my memory is returning…a little. I can clearly recall conversing with a member of the King’s Rifles in Hyde Park. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“I rejoice,” Romulus drawled, as he furled his long legs and climbed to his feet. “Now, I believe our charges have had enough swimming for one afternoon.”
He went striding off, and Diana didn
’t know whether she was to bide or follow. She decided to stay beside the pond and keep an eye on the cygnets. A minute later Romulus reappeared, carrying what appeared to be a butterfly net set on a long handle. He deftly scooped two of the baby birds from the surface of the water, placed one in each pocket of his coat, and then turned back toward the house.
“Now watch,” he called to her over his shoulder, just before he disappeared from sight.
The remaining cygnets paddled around for several seconds, and then, as if by an unspoken command, one by one they flipped out of the pond and went scuttling off along the path toward the house, marching in a straight line like camels in a caravan. Diana had never been more astonished in her life.
“How did you know they would do that?” she asked Romulus breathlessly, as she came into the storeroom in the wake of the last cygnet.
After he had lifted the bird into the lower cage to join its brethren, he drew Diana over to the stacked crates. “That one”—he pointed to one of the cygnets in the upper crate—“and that one”—he indicated one in the lower—” They are the largest, the leaders. Baby swans instinctively follow that leader. Whether it’s the female or the cob or just an oversized sibling.”
Diana peered into the shadowed cages. For the life of her, she couldn’t detect the slightest bit of difference in any of them. “Those were the two you captured first?”
He nodded solemnly, and then gave her a crooked grin.
“Well, you needn’t be so smug about it,” she complained. “But I will admit, there’s a deal more to swankeeping than I would have thought.” An idea began to formulate in her head. “Romulus…?”
“Hmm?” He had turned away to latch the two cages.
“Would you consider taking me out on the river with you tonight? To see the swans.”
“Absolutely not!” He spun to face her, and she saw the humor had disappeared from his eyes, as though a shade had been drawn down. “It’s totally out of the question.”
“Then you’re still angry with me for letting the cygnets out?”