A Scandalous Lady

by Rachelle Morgan

  “As much as I can. Not as much as I’d like.”

  He rose from his crouched position on the deck, the motion sheer poetry, and for a moment she could only stare at him. Waves of awareness bathed her veins.

  “So what do you think?”

  I think I’m going to swoon. I think you are the most magnificent creature on earth. “Are you building it?”

  “Rebuilding it.” He cast a frown at the half-constructed rail around the deck. “Or trying to, at least. I seem to have reached a standstill.”

  “I had no idea you possessed such a talent.”

  It was praise such as he’d not heard in more years than he could remember. Troyce captured it, held it close to his heart. “Shipbuilding and restoration is a passion of mine. My father taught me as much of the craft as he knew. The rest I learned on the shores of Maine.”

  “Is that what you were doing in America?”

  “Aye. For eight years. I’d probably still be there if my father hadn’t died.” He paused to glance around the cavern. “I felt close to him in here. In there”—he pointed to the manor—“we were strangers, but in here . . . we were father and son.”

  She strolled toward the bow and ran her hands lightly on the freshly sanded bulwark. “What’s her name?”

  He looked at Faith in surprise. Not many women realized that a ship was a woman in itself, to be pampered and cherished and guided with a firm but loving hand. She was the shelter on the stormy sea, a carrier to mysterious and exciting new lands. But Faith understood, and the affinity she seemed to share with him stirred a forgotten piece of his soul. “La Tentatrice.”

  “The Temptress.”

  The way she translated the galleon’s name sent a frisson of desire straight to his groin. “I didn’t realize you knew French.”

  “There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”

  He couldn’t disagree with that. Faith was a mystery wrapped in layers. Just when he thought he had her pegged, he’d learn something new to blow his theories out of the water.

  “Why La Tentatrice?” she asked, appraising the vessel.

  “My father named her,” he said, making his way off the deck and down the steps. “He loved ships.” Reaching Faith’s side, he continued, “I was with him the day he raised this one from the sea. You should have seen the look on his face. One would have thought he’d just discovered the lost city of gold. He would spend months sanding, painting, and polishing each one until they glowed, then when he was through with his renovations, he’d sell them to the highest bidder.”

  “If he loved them so much, why did he sell them? Why didn’t he just keep them?”

  “It wasn’t the object he loved as much as the process. He loved taking things no one deemed worthy of saving and restoring them to their natural, raw beauty. Perhaps that’s why he fell in love with my mother. She was a commoner who had come to England as a young woman. My father saw her and fell in love. My grandpère nearly had apoplexy when he announced he planned to marry her—he said he hadn’t kissed the king’s ballocks so his only son and heir could throw it all away on some American out to better herself. But my father was stubborn, and he married her anyway.”

  “And they lived happily ever after.”

  “On the contrary. She was everything my grandfather had predicted. She went through the fortune, flaunted her newly acquired title, and once she bore him his heir, she all but left him to pursue other interests. He turned to his ships, and she, of course, objected to the time he spent on them as well. ‘Gentlemen do not engage in such a common trade,’ she’d tell him. But it wasn’t a trade to him, it was his passion, or perhaps his escape.”

  “My father loved ships, too.”

  The remark took him by surprise. She never talked about her family. “Did he?” he asked nonchalantly.

  “I remember little ships all over his study. On the walls, on the shelves, on the tables. One time my sister and me were playing hide-and-seek and I knocked over one of the models. We tried to fix it but . . . it was beyond repair.”

  Her smile, small and unsure, even a bit wistful, took his breath away. He wanted to ask how a girl with a father who collected ships and a sister who played childhood games wound up in London’s underworld but knew she’d never tell him. Instead, he asked, “Is there a purpose to your visit?”

  She shook herself from whatever past had absorbed her and replied, “Actually, yes. Lady Brayton is looking for you.”

  “Did she say why?”

  “No, milord. She just sent me to find you.”

  In a rare moment of generosity, Jack had once told her that her curiosity was one of her finer qualities. But as Faith huddled with her ear against the door of the baron’s library, she decided that it was an attribute she could do without.

  “My red dress is missing,” the duchess said.

  “Bloody hell, Devon, you summoned me away from my work to complain about some piece of feminine frippery?”

  “It’s not frippery, West! It’s an expensive silk gown, and I think your little maid took it.”

  Silence fell, and Faith stiffened.

  “You cannot make such a serious accusation without proof,” the baron said, his voice low and flat.

  “She was snooping through my trunks at Radcliff.”

  “That proves nothing.”

  “Perhaps not, but I’ve not had a problem with thievery until she arrived.” A pause . . . “What do you really know of that girl? You told me yourself that you found her on the docks . . .”

  Her voice faded as if they were moving farther into the room and the rest of the conversation became indistinct, but Faith was beyond listening anyway. She rested her head against the wall beside the library door and stared unseeingly at the intricate carvings of a column near the split staircase. She’d heard enough to know one thing. Lady Brayton thought her a thief. A sense of foreboding crept through her veins as she realized she’d made herself a formidable enemy in the baron’s sister.

  And there didn’t seem to be a bloody thing she could do about it.

  Chapter 10

  The days blurred one into another, and Faith found that she’d developed a routine of sorts. Rise before dawn, stock the coal bins, put the bread on to bake. The duchess had forbidden her to serve meals, much to her relief, and the task had fallen to Lucy. The girl didn’t bother hiding her displeasure, either. Still, Faith managed to ignore her, even though it went against her nature. Back on the streets such behavior would have made her appear weak; here at Westborough, it was simply an act of survival.

  And so, she consigned herself to helping Millie, who continued to instruct her on the ways of being a proper servant. Faith was tempted to tell her that she didn’t plan on being a servant any longer than she had to but kept her silence. With the exception of Lord Westborough, Millie was the only person within the house who deigned to treat her civilly, and she had no wish to make an enemy of her.

  She had enough of those already.

  When Millie no longer needed her help in the kitchen, Faith would tidy up the main rooms, then tackle one of the unused rooms with broom and rags until it glowed. It was mundane and backbreaking work, but it kept her busy.

  She rarely saw the baron, which was probably for the best, and did her utmost to avoid the duchess. It should have been an easy feat considering the size of Westborough and yet, every corner she rounded, Her Grace seemed to be waiting on the other side, no doubt hoping to catch her in some act that would send her away.

  As hard as she tried to forget the woman’s accusation, it pounded in Faith’s head. She’d had plenty of opportunities to clear not only Radcliff, but Westborough of every valuable object within and without its walls. Her promise to the baron and the threat of prison would not allow her to steal, though, no matter how tempted she was at times. And it bothered her more than she wanted to admit that the duchess thought so little of her. And so, she began to think of Lady Brayton as a Bow Street Runner, to be avoided at all costs. It helped
to lessen the tedium and lighten the stress brought by her unfounded charge.

  But by the time she entered her third week at the castle, as she’d come to think of Westborough, she was beginning to climb the walls. She longed for the challenge of skirting danger. The daring in outwitting the outwittable. The unpredictability of what each day would bring. Even the pretense of evading Robins, the discovery of new rooms or the occasional thrill of finding a hidden panel where she imagined coming across a treasure chest of coin to buy off her debt did nothing to alleviate the hollow, restless feeling inside her.

  The walls slowly began to close in on her more and more until Faith thought she’d suffocate. She wanted out, if only for a few moments, to regain her bearings, to catch her breath, to escape this wooden identity that seemed to wrap itself around her.

  And so, she was grateful when she entered the kitchen late one morning and found Millie fit to be tied. “Where is Lucy with that mutton?” She sat at the table, peeling potatoes. Both had agreed that as long as she did not tax herself, she could remain downstairs and no one would guess her health was still fragile. “I sent her to the village hours ago, and she still hasn’t returned.”

  It didn’t surprise Faith.

  “Would you mind going to the village to see if you can find her?”

  “I don’t mind at all.” Seizing on an excuse to leave the house, Faith quickly fetched her shawl from the back of a chair and all but ran out the door.

  The day was balmy and the sky as clear as she’d seen it in a month of Sundays. Thick, fluffy clouds meandered across the expanse of powder blue. Fields of clover and black-and-yellow wildflowers stretched into woods of beech and ash. Faith knew that the village lay just beyond the woodlands but decided against taking the shorter, more pollinated route across the fields. Though she knew supper could not be started without the meat Lucy was to bring, ’twas too grand a day to cut short the first stroll she’d been permitted since leaving London.

  Instead, she walked along the edge of the cliffs, her gray skirts swishing around her ankles, a gentle breeze playing with the ribbons of her mobcap. She dragged the hat off her head, lifted her face to the sky, and simply enjoyed feeling the sun on her face. Turning, she could see the manor house looming high above, the shimmering waters of the Channel to her left, and beyond, the distant shores of France. Before her stretched a grassy, flowerless vale of green.

  She laughed for the sheer pleasure of laughing, and the sound at once startled and thrilled her. She could not remember the last time she’d felt so free. No duchess to accuse her of wrongdoing or lying in wait for her to err, no Lucy glowering at her from behind her mistress’s skirts, no baron to confuse her emotions and send her senses into a turmoil.

  Aye, she was still under his command, but oh, for a few minutes to herself, with nothing but the fresh sea air and sunshine to keep her company, she could endure anything.

  The land began to slope and turn inward. The sight of the first cottage took her by surprise, as she wasn’t expecting to find homes so far away from the village, and she fell in love with it the instant she set eyes upon it. It mattered none that the thatches bowed into the crumbling walls, or that it was badly in need of chinking. Nor did it matter that weeds had overtaken the herb garden to the side and the circumference of the foundation. She did not even care that the door hung at a cockeyed angle courtesy of a broken leather hinge.

  Before she realized what she was doing, she had pushed open the front door. Dust motes swirled as if angry at the disturbance. There were two woven chairs sitting before a river stone hearth, a dust-thick rug between them littered with toys. Several tables and cupboards had been set against the walls, and benches and a round table displaying a vase of dried and brittle flowers marked the dining area. A curtained doorway at the far end of the cottage suggested a sleeping room.

  But what beckoned to her most was the boundless amount of love she felt within the crumbling walls. The kind that endured generations. Familiarity. Security and a kinship beyond explanation.

  She imagined a beautiful lady baking pies at the table. A handsome man seated in one of the chairs, smoking a pipe while two little girls played with their dolls on the rug in front of the fire. . . .

  Who had it belonged to? Why would anyone abandon such a charming home?

  Reluctantly, Faith drew the door shut, then left the tiny cottage by the sea. Strolling farther down the hill, she spotted several more cottages, all in similar states of disrepair, chimneys broken, thatches gaping, walls bowing inward. Surrounding them were fields that had one time borne wheat or corn but now lay fallow. She called upon any stories she’d heard in the tunnels, and decided that, since the homes had been constructed so close to the manor house, they’d probably once belonged to farmers or fishermen, gamekeepers or laundresses, and every trade in between. No doubt they, like she, longed for the fresh air and sunshine not found in the confining walls of the castle.

  Laughter trickled from one of the lowermost cottages, first feminine, then masculine. Then a pair tumbled out the door and Faith came to an abrupt standstill. “Well, I’ll be a bloomin’ . . . !” Lucy? So this was where the wayward wench spent all her time!

  She seemed unaware of an audience as she danced about the bearlike man with dirty blond hair braided at the temples, taunting him with swishes of her hips and bouts of laughter.

  The man lunged for her and scooped her off the ground by the waist.

  Anger such as Faith had never known surged within her. While she’d been working her fingers to the bone inside the manor house, scrubbing and polishing and lugging and toting, Lucy had been squandering her time dallying with one of the local serfs.

  “Lucy!”

  The girl spun around, shocked. The man, just as shocked, dropped her to her feet.

  “What are you doing here?” Faith demanded.

  “Visiting an old friend,” Lucy replied, recovering her surprise. “And you? What brings you so far from his lordship’s clutches? Has he tired of you already?”

  She would not let this cheap bit of rumpled skirt rile her, Faith told herself. “Millie sent me to fetch you. You were supposed to bring mutton for supper.”

  “I guess I had other things on my mind.” The lascivious glance she slanted toward her companion left no mistaking what sort of things. “Perhaps you should stick around. Learn a few tricks. Goodness knows, a scrawny spinster like yourself needs all the help she can get if she’s to capture the baron’s notice.”

  Fanny of Bethnal Green would have ripped out the girl’s tongue and fed it to the rats.

  Faith of Westborough Manor would not stoop to that level. With a dignity she’d not known she had, she tipped her chin and calmly stated, “Your grandmother has been feeling under the weather lately. If you can tear yourself away from your gentleman friend here, I’m certain she would appreciate your help.”

  “Who are you to order me about, you impertinent little wench?”

  “You know what, Lucy? I’ve tried to be decent to you, and I’ve tried to work with you, I’ve even tried to ignore you, but I’ve about had my fill of ye.” She felt the speech she tried so hard to perfect start to slip away but was too angry to care. “Now, unless ye want yer activities here made public, ye’d best hie yer plump li’l arse back to the manor house and give yer grandmum a hand.”

  “How dare you threaten me!”

  “There are two things ye should know about me, Miss Lucy. I don’t waste words on threats. And I never make a promise I can’t keep.”

  Knowing that there was still the mutton to fetch, Faith turned her back on the pair and started down the hill toward the village. If the task were left up to Lucy, the baron and Lady Brayton would not get any supper tonight, and somehow the duchess would make it seem Faith’s fault.

  What’s more, the gel had managed to ruin the first good morning Faith had had in weeks.

  Her mood soured even further when she finally arrived in the village. Faith’s steps slowed and she t
ook in her surroundings with a mix of horror and disbelief. The village, if it could be called that, consisted of cottages in worse shape than those on the outskirts. A marketplace lined out in two rows of perhaps a dozen two-story buildings made of stone with broken windows and sagging roofs, housing everything from pubs to a livery to a butcher shop. Refuse littered the gutters, rubbish had been piled against the walls and left to rot. Worse, people lived amid this. Not many, but she spotted a few peeking out window sockets and staring at her from front stoops.

  A group of scraggy children played in a mudhole nearby, oblivious to whatever filth had been dumped there. Two women wearing dresses that hug on their frames were picking through a pile of rotting apples in a cart. A man emerged from the pub in the center of town, stepped into the street, and in full view of everyone, relieved himself.

  Faith spun around, shut her eyes, and covered her mouth to keep from spewing. She thought she’d left such crude behavior behind in London. Obviously, poverty existed all over England.

  She’d just never expected to find it here.

  How could Lord Westborough permit such filth? How could he allow his own people to live in such squalor?

  How could she stand by and let it continue?

  “I would like a word with you, milord.”

  Troyce glanced up from the estate books to the summer squall blowing into his study. Her stiff tone and the scathingly formal manner in which she addressed him did not bode well. He tucked the quill into the holder beside the ledgers, and lifted one brow. “Only one?”

  “I have just returned from the village. The place is slovenly, the buildings are ready to fall over, and the people are little more than unkempt drunkards with nothing better to do than lie around like a heap of rocks. I’ve seen corpses with more energy!”

  Troyce bent over the books again. “That’s enough, Faith.”