by Sandra Byrd
He lightened a little, and then laughed as he let go of my hand and prepared to take his leave. “I shall bank on your confidence, Miss Ravenshaw, I shall bank on it.” Although he still looked mildly disappointed, his smile had returned and the lines on his face smoothed. Perchance he was a little relieved as well, as every man, I suspected, wanted to be the sole and focused object of his wife’s affections.
Every woman, myself included, wanted that, too.
Dunn slipped away into a group of others, the violinists struck up, and I felt a familiar hand clasp my elbow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“The elusive Miss Ravenshaw.” Whitfield’s voice sent a shiver through me though I couldn’t yet see the man. Just be careful, Cook’s recent warning whispered in my mind.
“I am in no way elusive.” I turned to face him. “I thought perhaps you’d been avoiding me.”
He reached his hand up toward the sky. “Could someone avoid the moonlight?”
I grinned. “I suspect you used an equally honeyed line with Miss Dainley some hours ago at croquet.” Then I chided myself for letting him know I’d noticed.
He smiled back but did not answer. “Dunn has left your company looking rather low.”
I nodded and thought back on my mother’s early, difficult years in India. “He is a good man, and he deserves a wife whose dreams match his own.”
“You have a kind heart, Miss Ravenshaw.” His voice was downy with tenderness. “Would you be willing to stroll the grounds with me?” There it was, that boyish note in his voice that caught my heart as firmly as the deeper, rougher notes did. He looked so eager for me to be pleased. I wanted to please him.
“Delighted,” I said. I took his proffered arm and we began to stroll around the vast gardens.
“This is not the typical Hampshire Noah’s Ark picnic.”
I shook my head. “I’m afraid I don’t know that phrase. A fancy picnic? In animal skins?”
He laughed. “No, lovely Miss Ravenshaw, it’s two-by-two. You know. Matchmaking.”
I brought my hand to my mouth and then down again. “Oh, I see.”
“I prefer moonlight.”
“For matchmaking?” I pulled my dress, midnight-blue with crystals, up just a little to step over an exposed root; he held his hand out and helped me over it.
“In all cases,” he said. “There is a proverb, ‘Work by sunlight, love by moonlight.’ ”
“I have not heard that before.” My voice and flesh weakened.
“Maybe it’s not so much a proverb as an invitation.” He spoke quietly. “If it were an invitation, would you answer it?”
“It is good manners to respond to every invitation, Captain Whitfield, although the answer need not always be in the positive.”
He laughed aloud and squeezed my hand for a moment. “You are delightful, you really are. It gives me great comfort, happiness, and peace to know you live so nearby for now.”
Happiness and peace, the two things I believed I must sacrifice to guarantee my security—my house. Hearing him say I brought those things softened me like wax that had long remained unlit, now tipped to gentle flame.
I turned the topic. “Talk of animal skins reminds me of India. And shooting for pay.”
He settled us on some cushions on the ground. “Do explain!”
“There are, of course, all manner of exotic creatures in India, exotic to Englishmen, that is,” I started. “Of course, there are elephants, which can trample a hut as quickly and flatly as a man might step on an insect. My mother, for some reason, never feared them and they knew it. She rode them with ease and command.”
“Your mother rode elephants, no, commanded them!”
“Indeed she did,” I said. “There were also jackals. We did fear them, really we did, as they seemed evil. Their wails sound like a woman in travail, or, if you like, siblings fighting over a sweet.”
He grinned and moved closer to me. I felt his presence deep in my bones; I inhaled deeply of the manly spiced scent that had perfumed the guest room the night I’d slept in it. I had not taken laudanum for some time but that familiar and welcome warmth began to spread from my center outward again, this time a warmth without an edge to it. This comfort was, I decided, much better.
“Most feared were the large cats. One night, when Father was gone making rounds with other missionaries, we heard a noise in our small back garden. Our cow was tied there; she gave us milk but was also like a pet. I heard a dangerous purring and knew it was after our cow.” I grinned. “We’d named her Bessie. See how English we are?” I swallowed hard. “Were, I mean.”
He caught my mistake and my temporary sadness and gently urged me on. “Go on, Miss Ravenshaw. Do not leave me in suspense.”
“Mother was not a good shot, so I took my gun, which was mounted above the door, and killed the leopard before she could get the cow. Our bearer had someone skin it and we let him keep the money for delivering the skin to the dewan.”
“Now that I’ve seen you shoot,” he said, “I know the leopard never had a chance. You are unlike any Englishwoman I have ever met.” The affectionate look in his eyes told me that was a compliment. “Mademoiselle d’Arbonneau came close to losing her life at the other end of your pistol.”
I sat up, alert. “Did she tell you that?” I had no idea they talked personally, or perhaps even frequently.
“Servants talk,” he said soothingly, by way of a nonanswer. “Thornton mentioned it to me. You should be more cautious,” he said. “Mistakes can be made.” He withdrew his hand from mine for a moment and looked into the distance. “Even if you had killed her by accident, Miss Ravenshaw, she would still be dead and there would be consequences, both outwardly and inwardly. It would be on your head. Taking a life . . . that is not something you’d want to live with.”
His distressed tone and the sharp turn in the conversation alarmed me. Was he speaking about me and Michelene? Someone else he knew? Perhaps he spoke of himself and, as the rumors had darkly suggested, the fate of my imposter.
“Do you speak from firsthand knowledge?” I asked quietly.
At the sound of my voice he turned to face me again, his composure mostly returned. “I’ve been on battlefields” was his response. Sound, but unsatisfying.
I caught the man Whitfield had seemed to quarrel with earlier looking at us, Whitfield in particular, with disdain. “Who is that man?”
He looked up. “Sir Alan Halford.”
“He looked curt, earlier,” I said.
A sad look crossed his face and he just as quickly replaced it. “Perhaps. I’d offered to help with a training and charity initiative which Lady Frome had just told me needed further assistance. By the time I made it to Halford minutes later, he coldly claimed they no longer needed help.”
“But why?” I reached a hand out to his arm.
“It’s been that way since last December,” he said. December, when my imposter had died. “My father, even with his humble beginnings, would not have had to brook an insult like that. Shall I tell you something of my father?”
That boyish tenor underpinned his voice and I believed, once again, in his innocence and honor.
“Please do.” I impulsively tucked my arm further into his and he drew me near him, possessively, and I did not mind. I was glad for my many layers, which formed a barrier between us. It enforced a physical discipline from temptation.
“I was but a lad when my father died. Indeed, I have no memory of the sound of his voice. Landreth was a young footman in our household and he says my voice sounds very much like that of my father. When I learned that I had inherited Headbourne”—he wouldn’t meet my gaze—“I found Landreth again, unhappily in service to someone else, and asked him if he’d like to come to Headbourne.”
I nodded agreeably. I’d come to feel very affectionate toward Landreth, who was
the perfect combination of encyclopedic knowledge and grandfather. I’d miss him.
“My father died of wounds inflicted on the battlefield, and he left me naught but his uniform, his steady shot, and a diary.”
“Oh, a diary, what a pleasure,” I said.
“There was little written in it but military direction, insight into his strategic thoughts, but also hope that, once they’d been married a while, my mother’s kinder nature would overcome her crueler one. I regret that I have not seen that kind nature. I take it that he did not, either. I do not know what drew them together. Married in haste, one suspects.”
“Someday you will have a son to pass the diary and the uniform along to,” I said. “And he will surely treasure them as well.”
He looked pensive, perhaps hopeful, but did not answer directly. “A son or a daughter,” he said. “I’d be pleased with either or both. But I’ve come to believe, of late, that the kind of woman to mother a child is not the kind of woman to marry a man like me.”
I protested. “I have found you to be principled and kind.” Attractive. Complicated. Desirable.
“You are overgenerous in your assessment,” he said, holding up his hand against my forthcoming objection. “And I do mean that.”
“Your father would be proud of you. For your pistol patents and other weapons work you’ve done. For the kind of man you are. How you’ve turned Headbourne House around.” Whitfield had surely hoped even for a day or a week that it, too, might be passed to his son.
He took both of my gloved hands in his own, holding them and not letting go. “I’ve heard Miss Dainley call you by your first name.”
“We’ve become close friends.”
“So have you and I,” he said with a grin.
“Hardly!” I laughed with real glee.
“We’re cousins.” He held my gaze and I caught my breath.
“We’re ‘cousins’ so far back in the family as to be watered down to the place where the title scarcely counts. I may be cousin to the Queen that many generations ago.”
He laughed, and it, too, was filled with joy. His comments flowed with the sort of teasing only found between a woman and a man with intentions. I thrilled to that. “Cousins are allowed to call one another by first names.” He leaned near and whispered, his lips touching my ear, “Rebecca.”
I half closed my eyes when he said it. I wanted him to say it over and again. I had heard my name spoken thousands of times over the course of my lifetime, in loud voices and quiet, conversational tones and private ones. It had never had an intimate feel until now.
“Go on,” he said, backing away. “Try it.”
“Rebecca.” I teased. “It sounds lovely!” He laughed again.
“I’ll bargain with you. You use my Christian name in private, and I won’t ever use yours in public. Fair enough?”
I nodded. “Fair enough.” He had no way of knowing that, since the day I first knew his name, I had turned it over and again in my mind, my heart, and on my lips. His face softened and he squeezed my hand, gently, and then quietly quoted, “ ‘Speaking, or mute, all comeliness and grace attends thee; that what seemed fair in all the world, seemed now mean, or in her summed up, in her contained and in her looks; which from that time infused sweetness into my heart, unfelt before.’ ”
“Paradise Lost,” I whispered in awe. “You’ve memorized that!” I flushed with delight and near exultation.
“It’s a gift,” he said, and took my hand in his own then kissed the back of it with tenderness. “From me to you.”
“It’s a gift I shall cherish.” No man had ever declared such feelings toward me—nor had I ever wanted a man to. Until now.
“I have yet one more surprise for you,” he said. “From India.”
“Not someone who knew my brother? Come to test me further?” I jested.
He smiled. “Indeed not. This comes courtesy of one of my friends. It’s a way of thanking you for allowing me to remain in the guesthouse while I complete the purchase of my own.”
I noted that he did not say “home.” And, having declared his affections for me, even in a veiled manner in verse, he had not, apparently, diverged from the path he’d set upon. To leave Hampshire. It bewildered me. It might be he meant only to have a harmless gentleman’s flirtation, fine country manners. Perhaps that was the modus operandi for Hussars. Maybe, as he’d intimated, he did not feel he would do well by me for some reason.
He had brought me to highest high, like a kite flying into the air, and then wound the string that brought me quickly back to earth, but I did not detect any spite or cruelty in his actions or his words. I had thought I could live life, happily, with my house, not requiring the love of a man. Hadn’t I? Now I was not sure. Perhaps he was equally conflicted.
One moment with him, the sun shone and I allowed myself to imagine a life together. The next, dark talk of killing, and distance placed, and leaving.
I grew cold, and perhaps a little frightened. If I allowed myself to fall in love with him, what of my house, my property, my only security, my safety! Whitfield himself had intimated that he was untrustworthy. I had seen no evidence of that myself. If it was there, it was well hidden.
Like a snake sleeping in a mazy fold?
I refused to believe it. Perhaps I, like Captain Whitfield, was a skeptic. I needed to see evidence of his bad character with my own eyes before I’d believe it.
“The gift will be here shortly, but I wanted you to have something to anticipate,” he finished, bringing me back to the present. “I hope you’ll like it.”
We approached the others, so I kept my voice low and ignored my head and let my heart speak. “I’m certain that I will, Luke.” I whispered the beloved name into his ear with the caress I’d intended it to deliver.
Within a few days I made my way to the coach house. I wanted to speak with Daniel in private.
“Cook says that you may know where I can find an Indian maid,” I began. “I’d be grateful for your help.”
His face lost its color and for the first time his swagger wilted. “I have no idea, Miss Ravenshaw, where you might find an Indian maid, nor why Cook would say that, either.”
“She said that you drove away with the Indian maid of the woman who had been claiming to be me.”
“Her eyes have gone old and her brain soft. I know nothing of it.”
“How did the maid leave, then?”
“Someone must have picked her up.”
I didn’t believe it and raised my eyebrows. Finally, he spoke.
“It was Christopher. He was the head driver then, not I. When he left, then I became head driver.”
“What happened to Christopher?”
“Captain Whitfield fired him for mistreating the horses. He left with his pay and we’ve not heard from him since.”
His mouth was firmly set, and I knew there would be no more information from him, if indeed there was any to be had. I nodded and he walked away. If my imposter had been murdered, I’d deduced, it had to be someone with one of three motives.
First, perhaps the young woman was local, had enemies, and changed her identity to hide. However, she would certainly draw a lot of attention to herself, claiming a grand manor and inheritance, so it wasn’t a good place to disappear. Also, if she were truly local, she risked someone coming forward to say they’d known her. And how would they have made their way into the house to kill her?
Second, perhaps the murderer was the woman’s Indian maid. Or someone had used the Indian maid to kill her. But Michelene had said they’d seemed close, almost intimates. So it was unlikely she had been put to the task, though intimates, of course, could be fooled if one was too trusting . . . or bought. If only that maid could be found!
Last, I admitted reluctantly, there was one person with a motive, the means at hand, and a number of people perhaps w
illing to help conceal the crime, or at least turn a blind eye. Luke. I just did not want it to be him. I truly did not.
Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Ross joined me and we left for the dance. “A wonder Captain Whitfield did not want to ride over with us,” I said, as the footman helped us out of the new carriage.
After we’d alighted from the carriage, Mrs. Ross leaned toward me and said, “I doona believe Lord Ashby invited Captain Whitfield. Competition, ye know.”
We made our way up the steps, which were carefully tended, but even I could see that the great house struggled with ill repair and was in need of attention. Once inside, we were warmly welcomed and I accepted a dance card.
“May I be the first to ink my name?” Lord Ashby came up next to us and I held my card out to him, now that my foot had healed enough to dance.
“I would be delighted.”
“I’ll claim three dances,” he said. “More than that would draw attention, though I should not mind.” He left me to attend to other hosting duties, but ensured that his household made certain my glass was never more than half empty. His mother took me by the elbow and introduced me to some local notables I had not spoken with before. At supper, Lady Ashby sat me near her.
“I remember your mother,” she said.
“You do?” I set down my fork. “It was so very long ago that she was here and I’ve been quite surprised that so few, if any, recalled her.”
“We are a small community, Miss Ravenshaw, and a very few of us do remember our own, though it’s been decades and we’ve had many incomers dilute the pool. I know she danced beautifully—as do you. And I remember her stunning lacework. She would have been a credit to our circle had she been able to remain, as she wished.”
Ah. A clue that others knew India had not been my mother’s first choice.