“No, she is even better.” His sister replied to his joke with perfect seriousness.
Bertie narrowed his eyes at her over the rim of his teacup. Since taking up residence in the Friar’s House, Georgie had developed a fascination with matchmaking. The last time she had started flinging about unidentified feminine pronouns, Bertie’s visiting friend Peregrine Lochley had tumbled into a tumultuous affair with a local woman.
Not that this was a bad thing, since Lochley and Caro Martin were now happily married. And Lochley had turned farmer, for God’s sake. How love changed a man.
Or so Bertie had observed. He had once thought to fling himself into the same experience, a heedless headlong delighted dive. But in that—as in so much else a decade before—he had been disappointed.
“Be more specific,” he was just beginning to say, when the door of the breakfast parlor was flung open.
“Monsieur Gage, à la porte! C’est une femme...” The butler continued in his native French, the tails of his coat flapping along with his agitated hand gestures.
“Florian, en anglais,” Bertie reminded him gently.
The older man grimaced, drawing himself up straight. The subtle ways of an English butler were no more native to him than the language, yet no one could have been more loyal. During Bertie’s long months of recovery in France, the stern, stocky Florian had tended his gunshot wound—after informing him that it had surely been inflicted by a Frenchman horrified by monsieur’s execrable accent.
Their lands destroyed by war, the aging farmer—and his wife, now the cook, along with their grown daughters, sons, cousins, and other sundry relatives—had returned to England with Bertie once peacetime made such travel possible. They had accompanied him from London to the village of Hemshawe, and now there was hardly an English accent to be heard in the servants’ hall of the Friar’s House.
The butler tried again. “You have a…lady at the door,” said Florian in an accent as thick as chocolat chaud.
“Is the pause because you are not sure she is a lady?”
“Of course she’s a lady,” scoffed Georgie. “He couldn’t remember the word ‘caller,’ that’s all. Isn’t that right, Florian?”
The butler pursed his lips in the French expression that meant no, but this isn’t the time to argue. “C’est Mademoiselle Greenleaf,” he explained.
The name was a blow to Bertie’s chest, halting his heart before setting it to a furious gallop. With nerveless fingers, he set down his cup. “That’s impossible. Eliza Greenleaf is in London, making fashionable young men fall madly in love with her.”
“Clearly not, because she’s on the stoop,” Georgie pointed out. “She is visiting her friend Lady Sturridge in Hemshawe.”
“In the entry, not on the stoop,” corrected Florian. “It makes the rain. She waits in the entry hall.”
“But…” Bertie fumbled for sense. “Why did she come from Lady Sturridge’s to our entry hall?”
Georgie became occupied with the arrangement of the crusts and crumbs on her plate. “I…might have sent word that you needed help on quarter day.”
Bertie closed his eyes. “Oh God. Quarter day.” His tone was the same he had once used in war to say things like horse carcass or French marksman.
Quarter day, on which rents were collected and accounts settled, had proved a particular sort of hell in March and June. Tenants on the Greenleaf lands flocked to the Friar’s House, as per custom, and there had followed a nightmare of tangled communication between them, Bertie, and Andrew Greenleaf’s sons. The landlord’s offspring had returned to Hemshawe to oversee the events of the day, but were as ignorant and careless of the family’s rent rolls as a complete stranger would have been.
More so. For Bertie was little more than a complete stranger, wasn’t he? And there was something about the stream of tenants wanting a little more time to pay…just a bit more…
It wrung his heart. The country was still recovering from an uncommonly bad harvest the previous frigid year. The crofters’ cottages were in no better shape than the tumbledown bits of the Friar’s House. Andrew Greenleaf should be here to keep an eye on them.
Bertie’s usual flash of triumph at the thought of possessing the Greenleaf house, even for a year, was absent this time. There was nothing quite so grating to the nerves of a former officer as encountering people who needed help and being powerless to provide it.
The ceiling grizzled into the teapot, a slow mournful drip.
“Damnation, Georgie. You had no right to send such a message.” He shook his head. “To Eliza. Eliza Greenleaf.” He had to say the full name again, wondering if it would seem less odd that she, split by years from him, now stood only a room or two away.
Georgie lifted her head and smiled. “You really do need a Greenleaf about on quarter day. She can help you with some of your questions.”
“I don’t have questions,” Bertie said.
This was untrue. He did have questions where Eliza Greenleaf was concerned, and he had for ten years.
Florian was still hesitating in the doorway. “Shall I show the…lady…in for petit déjeuner?”
“No,” said Bertie.
Plop. Another sodden fleck of the ceiling fell, this time into a bowl of marmalade.
“Exactly,” said Georgie. “It’s not as though she’d want to come in here and eat toast with plaster all over it.”
This, Bertie ignored. “Show mademoiselle to the study,” he told Florian. “I’ll see her in the study. My study.”
Not that Florian was the one who needed convincing. Not when everything around them, from the crumbling ceiling to the ancient mahogany table, truly belonged to Andrew Greenleaf.
Even, Bertie knew from dreadful experience, the will of his daughter.
* * *
But he did not meet her in the study. He encountered Eliza Greenleaf in the corridor just outside the breakfast parlor, wandering the house as though it still belonged to her.
Catching a brief impression of slim height and a rich sweep of a purple-red gown, he ducked into an ironic bow. Cutting words. He needed cutting and brilliant words of greeting. Right now.
As he straightened, though, he saw that Miss Greenleaf’s leaf-green eyes were not clapped on him at all. They were directed over his shoulder at the interior of the breakfast parlor, and her dark brows had lifted in surprise.
“Good God,” were the first words he heard in ten years from the woman he’d once hoped to marry. “What has happened to the ceiling in there? It looks ready to collapse onto your sister.”
Chapter 2
Horror dawned on Bertie’s features: features long unseen, but instantly familiar to Eliza despite the passage of years. “Could the ceiling truly fall? Or are you joking?”
“Not at all. Once the plaster gets wet, the keys that hold it to the lath—oh, it doesn’t matter. But if your sister has finished breakfast, she ought to come out of there.”
“Of course.” With the speed and snap of a longtime soldier, he pivoted and called to Georgette.
Oddly, the young woman took the time to replace the lid of the teapot and slid it aside before following her brother from the room.
Eliza had known Georgie as a girl of ten, coltish and eager and full of mischief. Now, looking at the thin young woman of elegance, it was clear from the wicked sparkle in Miss Gage’s dark eyes that she hadn’t lost her mischievous edge.
A hand at his sister’s back, Bertie shut the door behind her. Without light from the tall window in the breakfast parlor, the golden stone of the corridor went amber-dark, lit only by an ancient wavy-paned window at its far end.
“Don’t go in there for any reason, Georgie. If the ceiling fell, you could be…” He cleared his throat. “We’ll take all of our meals in the dining room from this point forward. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”
“And let the ceiling in the breakfast parlor rot and fall?” The girl sounded puzzled.
He shot a glance at Eliza—a wary glance—then replied, “You know we’re not to change the structure of the house at all.”
“If so, you ought to repair the ceiling,” said Eliza. “For when you leased this house, the ceiling was intact. By doing nothing to keep it up, you’ve let it fall into decay.”
He folded his arms and glared at her. “You would know about such things, would you not? Obedience even in the face of ruin?”
A hot retort sprung to her lips—but as she looked him over, she checked the sharp words. Despite his steely mien, his cravat was creased and slightly askew. The imperfection washed her with wistfulness.
She had said more than she meant to, and he had realized it at once. Like the soundness of this ancient house, their love had worn away. Instead of raindrops, Eliza’s particular nemesis had been a lack of courage.
As time slipped by, she had gone days, sometimes, not thinking of him at all. It seemed her mind had used those periods of forgetfulness to keep his image fresh and precious to her. He was tall, but so was she, and she knew from long-ago experience that he was just the right height to kiss when she rose to her tiptoes. His dark hair was showing a bit of gray now, and his young features had been sunburned and carved by weather and time. Now he was as sculptural as he was handsome, all strength and angles and will.
She shouldn’t have come here.
She hadn’t been able to stay away.
Trying for a calm tone, she said, “My father is trusting you to do what is right for his house while you inhabit it. You were never a man without common sense, Bertie.”
Bertie. She had been the first to coin the nickname for him when they were young and in love, and the exchange of Christian names had not been intimacy enough.
He seemed not to like it now, for his brows lowered. “I am obeying your father, Miss Greenleaf. You ought to appreciate that.” Turning to his sister, his features relaxed at once. “Georgie, go join Mrs. Clotworthy in the upstairs sitting room. She will want your company as she knits.”
“Mrs. Clotworthy?”
At Eliza’s exclamation, Bertie pokered up. “My sister’s companion and chaperone. She is a widowed cousin of Georgie’s late mother.”
“Clotworthy,” Eliza mused. “She must have loved her husband a great deal to accept that name.”
“It can take courage to accept the name of a spouse, yes.”
Unmistakable reproof, and one she deserved. She could have been Eliza Gage ten years ago. Ten years at his side, she’d have followed his regiment through muddy fields and insect-ridden swamps. Fearing each day that he might die.
And maybe he would have, with her to slow him down.
At twenty years old, she hadn’t been brave enough to trust her heart. To be defiant to the parent who had coddled her. To be physically uncomfortable for the sake of giving comfort to someone else. Such small things had seemed very large at the time.
In the end, he had still almost died. He had been shot, she knew. When she’d heard it—idle gossip from a suitor grown just as idle as his words—she had almost felt the wound herself.
“I was thinking,” Georgie spoke up, “that if you’re to assist on quarter day, Miss Greenleaf, you ought to stay in the house. You still have a bedchamber here, after all. And I’m the lady of the house, so I can issue an invitation.”
There was no word for the noise Bertie made. “Mrs. Clotworthy is the hostess,” he managed.
“Yes. Thank you. I accept.” Eliza curtseyed to Georgie. “As soon as the rain slows, I shall send for my things from Lord and Lady Sturridge’s home.”
Another unnameable sound from Bertie, as Georgie bobbed a curtsey of her own and darted off to the main staircase.
With a sigh, Bertie turned back to face Eliza. “She’s been ill. My sister, I mean. Not in the head—though you wouldn’t know it from her behavior today—but in the lungs. If you’re to stay here, I should not wish you to plague her beyond her strength.”
Georgie Gage had looked a bit thin, but she hadn’t lacked for spirit. Eliza let this evidence of brotherly worry pass, though, adding only, “And what about you? How much may I plague you?”
This won from him a slight smile. “There was never a limit to that amount, was there? Come, Eliza, and speak with me in the study. You can tell me why you’re really here.”
No, she couldn’t. Not yet.
But if he would only call her Eliza again, instead of Miss Greenleaf, she’d follow him anywhere.
* * *
The study was one of Bertie’s favorite rooms in the Friar’s House. Usually.
The home took its name from its thirteenth-century origin as a monastery. Over the centuries, when stone crumbled or walls were added on, newer brick and neatly trimmed stone repaired the fallen portions.
The study was bounded by some of the oldest portions of the hodgepodge of a house. Dark, but warmly so, it was flanked by a fireplace and a great desk and was lined with shelves full of ledgers. Apart from these, there was just enough room for a small sideboard and a pair of wing chairs that faced each other before the fire.
It ought to have been entirely comfortable. But—damnation. Eliza Greenleaf. He had not stopped reeling since Florian had spoken her name, a name long forbidden to his own thoughts.
“Take a seat,” Bertie said, and Eliza did so. Outside, thunder grumbled its displeasure.
But with what? There was no fault to be found in her appearance. If his memory of her were to be trusted, she had not changed much. Her laughing green eyes still held a sultry look, as though they’d seen everything amusing under the sun and had enjoyed it all. Her hair was pinned in tousled curls of a shade between blond and brown. And when she saw him looking at her—really looking—she held his gaze.
And then she smiled. “It’s good to see you again, Bertie.”
“Is it?” He sat heavily in the chair facing hers, as though his knees had been unpinned.
What did I ever see in her? He had asked himself often over angry years. With the blur of time, he was not sure. He could recall only the certainty he had felt when they met at a long-ago ball. This one. She is the one.
Then twenty-five, he’d already lost a mother and a stepmother, and he’d been a rootless cornet in a cavalry regiment for four years. Long stationed on the Continent, he had been in England only for a brief leave.
Always ambitious, his father had wanted Bertie to mix in high society. Patrick Gage had been certain that a uniform would turn heads. Such smartness had, after all, won the elder Gage a lovely Spanish bride during his own military career a generation earlier.
That was before England sank into a war that felt ceaseless. Before a cavalryman’s coat reminded the ton that their peace was fragile. There was no place for a man such as Bertie in the ballrooms of London.
Until, one day, there was. And it was at the side of Eliza Greenleaf.
When he met her, even before they spoke a word to each other, she’d felt like home. The first home he had known in a very long time. And when she jilted him, he’d felt he would never have a home again.
But he did now. Didn’t he? He had the Friar’s House. At least until the end of the year.
A loud slap of rain against the study window drew him back to his surroundings. Before the fire, Eliza settled into the depths of the wing chair, her face pale against the dark tapestry covering. “You don’t look as I expected you would.”
“Aging ten years will do that to a man. Getting shot in the side doesn’t help either.”
A flash of something painful crossed her features, then smoothed away. “The gray at your temples suits you well, actually. I rather meant you looked like a man of fashion now. Such elegance of dress! I cannot recall whether I ever saw you out of your Hussar’s jacket and shako.”
“You did. Once.”
His tone was dry. He waited, silent—and there, a blush bloomed over her cheeks. Evidently remembering, as he did, that long-ago autum
n night at the burnt end of the season when they stripped one another bare and made promises to last a lifetime.
Mademoiselle Greenleaf, the butler had called her, and the realization was a quick lash of heat. She had never wed, and a corner of his heart wondered whether it was because she had held those promises dear after all.
“Why are you here?” he asked. His voice sounded gruff and wary, and he cleared his throat and tried again. “You cannot truly be here out of the goodness of your heart. To help me.”
She waved a hand, still gloved in kid. “Pure self-interest. Would you believe that instead?”
“Yes.”
She raised her eyes to the ceiling—which was, in this room, untroubled by water and damp. “I thought so. Though family interest might be a better way of putting the matter. My three brothers were here to assist tenants on the past two quarter days, and they likely made matters more difficult than if they’d not come at all. Is that not so?”
“I am not eager to repeat the experience, no.” Foppish dandies all, the three brothers insisted on taking charge despite their ignorance, and somehow everyone wound up in the Friar’s House with no one to help them while the brothers drank their way through the best vintages in the cellars.
“They will stay away. And I will be here instead, and everything will be fine.”
Everything would be fine. With Eliza around. Ha.
His expression must have communicated his doubt, for she added, “It will be, Bertie. I’ve a fair gift for numbers. You won’t be inconvenienced in the slightest—ah, you’re making that noise again. Sort of a choke or a splutter. Very well, you’ll not be inconvenienced beyond being put to the trouble of housing me.”
“Really.” Bertie’s tone was thick with disbelief. “So I won’t have to look at you? I won’t be required to speak to you?”
“Is it an inconvenience only to lay eyes on me?” She sounded curious rather than petulant. Frankness, that had always been her way.
“You know it’s not,” he granted. “You’re still pleasant enough to the eye.”
A Novella Collection Page 27