The nursery maid sitting by the fire jumped to her feet when they entered, dropping her mending. She appeared to be alone. “Where is Geoffrey?” asked Benjamin.
The makeshift tent shuddered. Tom crawled through a flap and stood. Geoffrey emerged behind him. At least he was dressed this time and clean, Benjamin thought. “Ah, there you are.”
“Have you made a blanket castle to play in?” asked Miss Saunders. Her tone was all sweetness, nothing like the way she habitually spoke to Benjamin.
“It’s a tepee,” replied Geoffrey, his tone and expression contemptuous.
“A…” She looked bewildered.
Benjamin hadn’t spent sixteen years around his father for nothing. “A type of dwelling used by the native tribes on the prairies of North America,” he supplied. “And you shouldn’t answer so rudely, Geoffrey.”
His small son simply looked at him. Those blue eyes might be shaped and colored like Alice’s, but she’d never given him such a stony look, Benjamin thought.
“We’ve come to ask you what sort of things you might like to do,” his uncle said. Benjamin felt a spurt of annoyance at the interference.
Geoffrey’s response was immediate. “I want to go to the gorge at Cheddar.”
“Nonsense,” declared Benjamin, just as quickly. “That’s no place for a child.”
“Geoffrey should be allowed to choose,” said Miss Saunders.
She seemed to delight in contradicting him, Benjamin thought. If he said the sky was blue, she’d probably argue the point.
“Is it something to do with cheese?” she asked. “I like cheddar very much.” She smiled at Geoffrey, who ignored her as effectively as a haughty grande dame might any toadeater.
Benjamin didn’t entirely blame him. Miss Saunders had no idea what she was talking about.
“I’ve heard there’s a warm spell coming up,” said his uncle. “Your head gardener, who’s said to be a weather oracle, reckons a taste of spring is on the way. Perhaps we could put together a picnic.”
“At the gorge,” said Geoffrey.
Tom, who had stood silently by till now, said, “I could chase after him, my lord. Make certain he don’t get into trouble. He’s been wanting to see that place for ages.” From his expression, it appeared that young Tom was curious about the gorge as well. “I told him nothing doing, of course. Not without permission.”
Everyone looked at Benjamin, even the nursery maid whose name he’d forgotten—all of them primed to cast him as the villain of the piece. Well, he wouldn’t be. And on their heads be it. “Fine. A picnic. In March. What could go wrong?”
Geoffrey leaped into the air, waving his arms and shouting in triumph. Miss Saunders started visibly at the noise.
“Let’s go and consult the housekeeper about arrangements,” said Benjamin’s uncle. “What is her name?”
“Mrs. McGinnis,” said Geoffrey. His small face turned sly. “She’ll make Cook give us muffins, if you ask her.”
“Splendid.”
Benjamin wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but the earl swept Geoffrey, Tom, and the maid along in his wake, leaving him alone with Miss Saunders. He was making a habit of this, Benjamin thought. It was beginning to seem suspicious.
“So generous of you to grant a little boy a small treat,” his remaining companion said.
“Small? The gorge at Cheddar is a steep, dangerous place, full of caves to lure in curious children and lose them. We’ll have to watch Geoffrey every minute to make certain he stays safe.”
Miss Saunders looked daunted; Benjamin enjoyed her expression. “I didn’t know. You might have said so.”
“Yes, and be the sole voice forbidding, as you say, his treat. I didn’t care for the role. But please don’t encourage my son to think he can always get his own way.”
“As opposed to never getting it?”
Could this admittedly very pretty female have any idea how annoying she was? “Are you trying to turn Geoffrey against me? Is that your game? I won’t allow it.”
“I would never do such a vile thing!” exclaimed Miss Saunders.
“So you draw the line at kidnapping?”
“I do not… I wouldn’t—”
“You came here meaning to take him from me. If you’d managed to bundle him into your carriage, would you have waited for my permission?”
He watched her face, a pleasure in itself. And even more so as her irritation faded into doubt. “This inflammatory language is not helping our situation,” she said.
“Inflamm—” Benjamin surprised himself by laughing. “Our? In what sense is anything ours? There is no our. We’re speaking of my son, in my house. You really have no business here, Miss Saunders.”
It was unfair that his smile should be so distracting, Jean thought. He turned it on her like a secret weapon. And it very nearly worked. “I meant that such provocation is not a way to reach agreement.”
“Agreement on what?”
Why did the word fluster her when he said it? She’d had a point, hadn’t she? “Surely there are things we can agree on?” she managed.
“You think so?” He smiled again, as if he found her amusing.
Jean’s temper flared; she refused to be laughed at. “Geoffrey needs a sensible routine. No one could argue with that.”
“Do you always speak in absolutes?” He met her eyes as if trying to see what lay behind them. “But I won’t dispute this one. He does.”
“And you must pay more attention to him.”
“Again a must. I might quibble over the phrasing, but I will allow it.”
Weary of his superior tone, Jean said, “Now you.”
“I? What?”
“You suggest something we can agree on.”
“Why should I? This is your game. You’re the cause of this whole uproar.”
“I’m not sorry!” She might be beset by doubts over methods, but the central fact remained. “Geoffrey deserves better than what he has received up to now.”
Briefly, the earl was silent, his handsome face unreadable. He didn’t appear angry, but certainly not contrite either. “I believe we can agree that the weather in March is a chancy thing,” he said.
“That isn’t fair.”
“How so?”
“It’s too true.”
“Can a thing be too true?”
“Stop repeating words back to me like some sort of…parrot. You know what I mean.”
“Very well.” He hesitated, then reached over with one finger and flipped a curl that had, typically, sprung free of her hairpins. “Perhaps we can agree that your hair is marvelously…active.”
Startled, Jean didn’t move. His gesture had felt like a caress, though he hadn’t touched her. She’d never heard his voice gently playful till now, or seen his eyes dance. “It is excessively curly,” she replied, breathless at this glimpse of a different person.
“Would you say excessive? That seems harsh. Of course, I haven’t seen your tresses set free in all their glory.”
He smiled at her, warmly this time. Jean’s pulse accelerated. Was he imagining her hair wild and loose? Would he bury his hands in it? And what then?
The nursery door banged open, hitting the wall so hard it bounced back. Geoffrey burst into the room like a miniature whirlwind. “Bradford says I can’t ride a horse.” The boy skidded to a halt in front of Benjamin and stared resentfully up at him. “You’ll say I can’t go now.”
Tom hurried in, looking like a foxhound whose quarry had slipped by him through trickery.
Benjamin set aside his resentment at the interruption. “Can you ride, Tom?”
“Yes, my lord. Pretty well. I learned when I worked for the blacksmith and had to get accustomed to the horses.”
Benjamin turned back to his scowling son. “You’ll ride with Tom. The two of yo
u won’t be a great burden.”
“I want to ride myself,” Geoffrey declared, his little fists clenched.
“Well, you can’t. You’re too small to control a mount. You’d fall and hurt yourself.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“You will ride with Tom, or we won’t go.”
Geoffrey’s face reddened. His little jaw set; his eyes narrowed. Startled, Benjamin recognized a resemblance to his own father in the cast of his son’s features. He almost expected an explosion of irritation—the kind of scolding he’d received when he interrupted his father’s studies. But Geoffrey was silent, blue eyes burning. He was braced for a lecture, Benjamin realized. The shoe was on the other foot.
“You should learn to ride, however,” Benjamin said. “I’ll make inquiries about a pony.”
Geoffrey froze for a long, incredulous moment. Then delight swept his face, and immediately died away. “You’ll forget,” he said.
“No, I won’t. Why do you say so?” He’d expected a bit of gratitude at least, Benjamin thought. Did Geoffrey know the word thanks?
“You always forget. You forgot the cricket bat and the top.”
Benjamin, in fact, had no recollection of these things. Had they been discussed at some point? Surely he would know. And he would have said that Geoffrey was small to handle a cricket bat. He did not believe promises had been made. Still, Benjamin was assailed by an uncomfortable mixture of shame and resentment and impatience. He couldn’t entirely dismiss the reproach in his son’s gaze. “I give you my word that I will look for a pony,” he said. “I can’t guarantee I’ll find a suitable animal at once, mind.”
Geoffrey put his hands on his diminutive hips and stared up at him. After a moment, he pursed his lips and nodded like a much older child. And thus he was judged, Benjamin thought, amusement taking over. A strange gurgle at his back made him turn to Miss Saunders. “Is something wrong?”
“I…I have no riding habit with me,” she replied.
“Ask Mrs. McGinnis. I’m sure she can find you something.”
“I’ll take you,” said Geoffrey, clearly eager to remove any impediments to the promised expedition. He grabbed Miss Saunders’s hand and tugged. She allowed him to pull her along, but Benjamin thought she looked apprehensive as they went out. He smiled. One of the few pleasures of the intrusion that had turned his peaceful life upside down was watching his pretty houseguest cope with his unruly son. Miss Saunders had obviously expected quite a different sort of child. And didn’t it serve her right!
Only then did Benjamin realize that it had been hours since he’d thought of Alice.
Four
“I’ve found you a habit that’ll fit well enough, I think,” said Mrs. McGinnis the following morning. She spread a swath of crimson cloth on Jean’s bed and set a tricorn hat atop it.
“Was it Alice’s?” Jean asked. She didn’t want to wear her dead cousin’s clothing, for a variety of reasons.
“No, miss. Her ladyship’s clothes were given away. This belonged to Lord Furness’s mother when she was young. We got it from a trunk in the attic. It’s been brushed and aired, and it was stored away clean, of course.”
Jean fingered the skirt; the cloth was very fine. “Did you work for her as well?”
Mrs. McGinnis nodded. “I came along with Lady Evelina when she married. Several of us did. There wasn’t much staff here at the time. Rather like now. My lord’s father didn’t pay much heed to his household, so long as he had candles to read by and a fire in the library.” The housekeeper paused, then added, “She was the daughter of an earl, you know.”
“Lord Macklin’s sister.”
“Yes, miss.” She sounded proud and fond.
“I don’t know much about her. I’m related to Alice’s side of the family, you know.”
Mrs. McGinnis nodded.
“Did she meet Lord Furness, the previous Lord Furness, in London?”
“No, miss. He wasn’t one for society. They met in Oxford. He was working in a college library, and my lady was visiting her brother. He was a student there.”
“Lord Macklin was a friend of Lord Furness?” Hadn’t he said he didn’t know him well?
“I don’t think so, miss.” Mrs. McGinnis looked uncertain.
“So they met in a library?” Jean prompted, getting back to her chief interest.
This brought a smile. “My lady used to laugh about it. She was looking over the shelves and saw a book she wanted right up at the top. She turned to a gentleman at one of the desks and asked him to reach it down for her. He growled at her—that was the word she always used—and told her to take herself off. That she had no business in such a place.” The housekeeper’s smile broadened. “That was not a thing to say to Lady Evelina.”
“What did she do?” Jean asked.
“She marched over and picked up the papers he’d been working on, read out a few bits, and showed him a mistake he’d made. I can’t remember what it was, though she told me. Something complicated. She said he gaped at her as if he’d been poleaxed.”
Jean laughed.
The housekeeper nodded. “My lady wasn’t beautiful. Called herself right homely, she did. But she had the quickest wits.”
“And Lord Furness appreciated that.”
“He did.” Mrs. McGinnis smiled sadly. “The old lord wasn’t an easy man. He didn’t care much for people, in general. New maids went in terror of him until they became accustomed to his ways. He loved my lady though. Eleven years older, he was, and irascible, but he never raised his voice to her.” Her expression suggested that she would have had something to say about it if he had.
“I’m sorry I never met her. It sounds as if I’d have liked her very much.”
The older woman looked gratified. “Everyone did, miss. If she was still here, the house wouldn’t have got so—” She pressed her lips together as if to keep the rest of this sentence inside.
“When did she die?” Jean asked.
“Six years ago, of the influenza. Only forty-eight, she was. Never saw her son married or her grandson born.” Mrs. McGinnis shook her head sadly. “I hope the habit’ll do,” she added in the tone of a woman with a list of tasks on her mind.
“Very well, thank you,” Jean replied.
The housekeeper went out with a cordial nod. Jean sat on the bed and fingered the military-looking frogging on the jacket of the riding habit. Her host had suffered a series of losses, she thought. His father when he was young, his mother a few years ago, and then Alice a little after that. Did it seem as if the house had emptied around him? She remembered the feeling of a pervasive presence suddenly removed—like taking a step in the dark and finding the floor missing. Even when one’s chief emotion was relief.
Jean shook her head. There was one great difference between her case and her host’s. He had a child. When the man and boy had faced off this morning over the hope of a pony, the sight might have wrung her heart if she had allowed such a distraction from her mission—to see to it that Geoffrey had a childhood nothing like her own.
• • •
At eight o’clock the following morning, Jean stood before the mirror in her bedchamber and assessed her appearance. The borrowed riding habit was a bit loose on her, but not enough to matter. Its full red skirts fell to her ankles; the matching jacket had a small skirt of its own, which flared over her hips, and long, tight sleeves. A white stock and bow tie, white gauntlets, and the tricorn hat compiled the ensemble, old-fashioned but quite serviceable above her own sturdy traveling boots. The latter weren’t ideal for riding, but she could manage.
Jean settled the hat more firmly on her wayward hair, which was already threatening to escape its pins. She missed Sarah, her maid and sartorial magician. Wild curls didn’t plague her when Sarah had dressed them. Jean sighed and went downstairs to join the others.
Her en
try into the breakfast room caused a minor sensation. Lord Macklin and Lord Furness both stopped eating and stared at her. “I remember that habit,” said the older man. “It was a favorite of Evelina’s. She insisted on the red, even though our mother thought it garish.”
“She told me that,” his nephew replied with one of his beguiling smiles. “Mama said her face gave her the right to any color she wanted. I never understood what she meant by that.”
“Evelina had this conviction that she was plain,” Lord Macklin said. “I once watched her stand at a mirror and inventory her supposedly too small eyes and lumpy nose and undernourished lips. In a dismissive tone she wouldn’t have used about anyone else in the world. She never grasped that charm is in the life of a face more than its shape.”
Lord Furness gave him an approving look. “Precisely.”
They turned back to Jean, who had been absorbed in this interesting exchange. She felt self-conscious under their combined gazes, like a display model at a modiste’s shop. “Mrs. McGinnis got it out for me,” she said.
“I like seeing it again,” said Lord Macklin. “Evelina loved to ride.”
“She taught me horsemanship in that habit,” said his nephew. “Mama was so patient. She led my pony ’round and ’round a paddock while I learned how to manage him.”
“So you had a pony,” said Jean.
He frowned at her, a spark of anger in his blue-gray eyes, and Jean was almost glad. When he smiled at her, it was too easy to forget all else.
A shout resounded from the front hall, followed by the patter of footsteps and then Geoffrey, dressed for the outdoors. “When are we going to go?” He danced from foot to foot with impatience.
“Miss Saunders has not had her breakfast,” said his father. “We cannot leave until she has eaten. She is our guest.”
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