His fingers fumbled a bowl from which a strong odor of dried flowers rose. “What the devil do you know about it? You’ve never had to care for anyone but yourself.”
Eliza’s mouth opened.
“I’m sorry,” Bertie muttered. “That was ungracious.”
She shook it off, drawing herself up straight. The fillet in her hair glinted gold. “No, you’re quite right. I’ve never had to care for anyone else. But I have done so all the same.”
He had been expecting her to lash out, and the low melancholy of her tone gave him pause. If she fought back, would that mean she cared? Did he care if she cared?
Honest to God, he ought to put himself to bed with a headache powder and a hot-water bottle. His mind was becoming as garrulous as Mrs. Clotworthy.
“For whom have you cared, Eliza?” Despite himself, he had to ask. “Tell me something you’ve done in the past ten years to serve someone beside yourself.”
Her lips curved. “As I said, that’s why I am here.”
* * *
It was a lie. But she wished it were true. How simple everything would be if she were here only to serve as the face of the Greenleafs on quarter day. A caller for Georgie, and maybe a friend.
How good it would be to sink into the newfound yet familiar delight of Bertie’s company, to let a romance unfold in its own time, if it would at all.
How marvelous that would be if it did.
But being a Greenleaf of Hemshawe didn’t mean what it had ten years before, when she had a large dowry and a pretty face and nothing more ragged in her smooth life than a torn hem. The face had hardened. The dowry, protected by her parents’ marriage settlements, was all the money left to the Greenleaf family. Over the years, her brothers and father had gambled away a fortune vast enough to vanish slowly, so slowly that they had thought it would always be there.
When Eliza was twenty years old, they were already beginning to scrape at the edges of society. Now the family had little left but pride and an ancient house they were forced to lease.
Ten years before, she had jilted Bertie out of family loyalty. Since then, she had allowed only the most worthless, profligate of suitors, a way to protect herself. She had agreed not to marry against her family’s wishes, but she wouldn’t wed against her own either.
Her thirtieth birthday loomed, though, and with it the loss of everything left to her family.
Unless she could persuade Bertie into love with her again. Unless she could convince him to wed her at once.
Her throat caught. Cold, her fingers toyed with the gold cord that trimmed her gown. She was not false by nature, and that was the trouble. She’d never been able to deny her own heart.
“No, you are right,” she said. “I haven’t done anything noble with the past ten years. And I shouldn’t have criticized, because your sister has grown into a lovely young woman. Although you send her to bed at a horrid hour, your mutual affection is clear.”
“Although?” Bertie returned to the chair beside hers. Instead of seating himself, he gripped the back of it.
“Despite the fact? Even though?”
“Because,” he growled, though the corner of his stern mouth gave a treacherous twitch. Almost a smile? No, there was something other than humor in his eyes. Something hot and dark—or was that the firelight, reflected?
Her chest rose in a quick inhale. Her very thoughts seemed breathless.
He bent lower, lower, until his face was only a whisper away from her own. She could breathe him in, the wine he’d swallowed at dinner, the subtle scent of his soap, and the starch of his cravat. Even though she ought not. Despite…or maybe because…she swayed closer to him.
She could almost pretend the past decade had fallen away, that he was courting her in her home during her debutante season. Or that they were long wed and were enjoying a coze together before trailing upstairs to their shared bedchamber.
She closed her eyes.
His lips brushed hers, lightly, sweetly, his breath the ahh of a man who had waited long for something he wanted.
Heat curled through her—and then the chill of regret.
Shoving hard with her feet, she scooted the chair back. The thin wooden legs caught in the carpet, and she wobbled and tipped before righting herself again.
“I can’t—mustn’t.” Her voice was as off-balance as the rest of her.
“Can’t what?” His dark lashes swept low, hooding his eyes.
“Can’t—this.” She shook her head. “All it takes is a kiss, Bertie. That’s all it ever takes.”
He stretched tall above her, his face in shadow as he looked down. “For?”
“For something to start. Falling in love. Being ruined.” She made herself laugh, a fractured sound. “A bit of both at once.”
“Have you done either?”
“I have,” she said softly. “But only one person knows about them both.”
His jaw worked. “Me?” And after a moment, as quietly as a sigh, “Me… But you were never ruined, Eliza.”
I was ruined for others. A woman couldn’t cast from her heart a man who risked his life for his country, who danced like an angel, who was as unfailing in courtesy as he was in roguery. Who understood her quirks, who made her laugh and feel brave.
As long as no one else was looking. Or questioned her. She had been brave only next to him, and when he was gone, she was unable to hold fast against her family’s disapproval. She had known Bertie for only weeks. For years, she had been Eliza, the proper obedient daughter.
Now she could not remember what that had been like.
“You are afraid.” His voice was quiet. It was not a question.
“I have always been afraid. But I cannot send you away this time.”
“Because?”
“Well—I’m in your house.”
“Then I hold the power to send you away.” A flicker of a smile. “I won’t.”
She ought to feel triumphant—but instead, guilt was low, in the pit of her stomach. Her every word was true, yet just being here was a deception. “Then I won’t go.”
He extended a hand, strong fingers folding around hers. Before she realized, he had drawn her lightly to her feet.
“I wasn’t worth standing up for before,” he said. “What is different this time?”
She met his gaze. “I am.”
Chapter 4
The following morning, it was as though the tumult of the day before had never been. The household snapped into a new order that was, in its way, as clockwork-perfect as the cooperation of Bertie’s former cavalry regiment.
In the study, Eliza took charge of the ledgers. Tutting and scratching at numbers, she also jotted innumerable notes for delivery to certain tenants. Florian offered the services of footmen to carry them, keeping the young Frenchmen trotting from the great house to the tenants’ cottages and back in a steady loop.
Late morning found Eliza with a pile of notes and none of Florian’s minions at hand.
“I’ll take those,” offered Bertie. He had been feeling at loose ends as everyone clicked into industry save himself.
The smile that Eliza cast his way made him wish he’d offered to help far sooner. Thus he found himself with a fistful of notes, striding through the Greenleaf lands in the direction of the tenants’ homes.
The autumn air was pleasantly cool, the sun high and pale in a rain-washed sky. Fruit trees grew abundantly, their leaves withering to reveal little green apples. Then fields on which something was being farmed, though he’d no notion what. He’d never lived in the country before, and thanks to Florian, he knew more about rural France than he did England.
A tidy footpath led him to the crofters’ dwellings, where he distributed Eliza’s replies and instructions. At each home, he was invited to take tea while he waited for a reply. More than once he found himself with a hammer and nails in hand, completing a quick repair to a gate or roof.
By the t
ime he returned to the Friar’s House, he was the sort of tired that came from having worked hard in an unaccustomed way. His right side felt oddly stitched together, and he pressed a hand to it as he ordered a late, cold luncheon.
As he ate a sandwich one-handed, balled fist against the spot where he imagined the bullet lodged, Eliza strode into the dining room. She held up a hand to keep him from struggling to his feet.
“No, no, please don’t get up. You are hurting. Florian tattled to me.”
“Florian is a fussy old woman.”
“Um…no, Florian is an old Frenchman who holds you in great regard and was annoyed with me for sending you off on an errand that would pain le foie.”
“He told you that?” Bertie wasn’t sure whether he wanted to throttle or thank the butler.
“He did, with ghoulish sternness. Ah—is he being facetious, or were you truly shot in the liver?”
Bertie set down his sandwich. “I’m not going to talk about being shot while I eat a sandwich.”
“Would another sort of food be more appropriate?”
“Yes, actually. A game bird would be more appropriate.” Not that he hunted anymore. He’d seen too many shots fired to take sport in it. “Or a liver, considering my own particular experience.”
“That suggestion is somehow both perfect and dreadful at once.”
He’d eaten enough, and he leaned back in his chair. “Do you truly want to know what happened?”
“Of course. It pains you, I can see, and so it is important.”
It pained him, yes, and not only when he rested a hand against his side. “Walk out with me, then,” he said. “The foliage is turning colors, and it’s pleasant to look upon.”
“I’ll fetch a bonnet.”
Within a very few minutes, they were walking out of the house, leaving the patchwork stone and brick of the Friar’s House behind.
Late-blooming flowers marched in regiment between trimmed hedges. The lawn before the ancient home was tidy, its color fading from green to a dusty brown. At his side was the finest sight of all.
He shouldn’t compare. He knew it wasn’t fair to the other women of the world. But he had seen nothing he liked so well in many years as Eliza in a green sort of cloak that matched the brightness of her eyes. With her tan-gloved hand resting on his arm and her copper-colored gown peeking through the cloak as she strode along, she was all the colors of summer freshening into autumn.
“How did your morning’s work go on?” he asked.
She kicked at a fallen leaf. “Fair enough. I don’t understand the accounts my brothers kept, nor my father before them. The past two years, there have been ridiculous charges. Five hundred pounds for beef?”
“Good Lord. Were they hosting all of court?”
“No, I suspect they were using the household expenses to cover…other expenses. We shall have to build upon the last year I know to be honest. With the notes you and Florian’s footmen sent to the tenants, we have gathered news that will allow us to make the adjustments needed.”
“ ‘We,’ you say. Are we both to work on this?”
“I hope so. There is much to do before quarter day. Michaelmas isn’t so involved as Lady Day, when you had farmers moving and all the leases to renew—”
Bertie groaned at the memory of the chaos on that March day.
“—but there are still rents to collect, and new servants to hire, and then the Harvest Festival in Hemshawe only a week later.”
Oh, yes. That. Georgie had been involved in festival plans for months.
“I thought the country was supposed to be peaceful,” Bertie murmured.
“As though a hardened soldier would know what to do with a peaceful life,” Eliza scoffed. “I think we might make something rather special of the Harvest Festival. My father suffered from an ague last year, which stripped his senses of smell and taste. He cannot judge the local wines anymore, but I’m told your friend Mr. Lochley filled the role admirably at the summer fair.”
“Yes, I remember quite well how he spent the fair,” Bertie said drily. Peregrine Lochley, formerly of the 13th Light Dragoons along with Bertie, had acquitted himself well as the judge of the wine-tasting—then found himself a bride to boot.
Lochley the Last, they called him, yet he had a gift for coming in ahead of Bertie.
The wound in his side ached. He put a hand to it, pressing until the pain went silent again.
Eliza took this in with a quick flicker of her eyes, but she said only, “Why did you choose the Friar’s House for your sister’s convalescence?”
He hesitated, wet leaves slippery under his feet as they strode along the footpath. “Because my old school friend Lord Sturridge lives nearby—ah, well, you know him.”
“Right. Yes. You are in each other’s pockets all the time. I cannot find the one of you without the other.”
Her irony was clear, and Bertie hastened to explain, “Sturridge is a landowner with a wife and baby. He doesn’t have time to be running over for visits at every moment.”
“Right,” she said again. “Are you certain you didn’t choose the Friar’s House because it was my father’s?”
“I’m not certain of that at all. In fact, that was a decided point in its favor.”
He wondered if she would be angry, but she replied at once, “I’m glad you did. It was time for things to change.” Her tone held the same fierce satisfaction he had felt when taking possession of the house. “I hope you came down very hard on him.”
“I did. He made such grave and pitiful faces at me as he spoke of the honor of the Greenleafs, but I was as unmovable as stone.” Except for the clause about not altering the house, but Bertie had turned even that to his advantage.
“Those faces. I know exactly the ones you mean.” She tipped her head back, letting the sun creep beneath the brim of her bonnet. “He must have known we planned to elope all those years ago. The night before you and I were to leave for Gretna Green, he gave me the most heart-tugging talk imaginable about family honor.”
“It must have been wonderful indeed, to convince you to lay aside your future.”
“That, and he locked me in my room.”
Bertie stopped walking. “What? He—what?”
She had taken a step beyond him, breaking her hold on his arm, and she had to turn on the path to face him. “He locked me in my room.”
She said it so mildly that he still thought he misunderstood. “Then you never meant to jilt me?”
A breeze snapped at them, and with the excuse of its chill, he folded his arms. Eliza looked away into the surrounding trees. “I wish I could say I had not, but I wrote that note of my own volition. I doubted my own judgment, because I had never relied on it before. When the alternative was a sort of captivity—I suppose I took the coward’s way out. I was twenty, and I was a fool.”
It was difficult to catch his breath at the moment. The breeze seemed to carry away all the air in the world. “You think so?”
“Well. Not entirely. I was—oh, Bertie, this is embarrassing.”
“Good. You owe me a little embarrassment.”
She caught his eye. “I was a fool in some things, but not in my choice of you. There. I said it. Now, let it drop. It was all long ago.”
Her cheeks were as pink as spring flowers, and suddenly there was air enough for him to float above the ground. “You think so?” he said again. “I am not sure whether time has altered as much as we believe.”
“I am not sure of anything,” she muttered. “Shall we return to the house?”
Gladly, he closed the distance between them with a stride. He didn’t hold out a proper arm on which she might rest her fingertips, though. Instead, he caught up her hand and held it in his own.
Even through gloves, the touch was sweet and intimate. The pressure shot through him from head to toe, nestling into a coil of anticipation.
The footpath took a curve over a gentle rise in t
he land, and autumn again surrounded them in rich life. Evergreens grew solid and strong, their greens and rust browns blending with the brightness of poison-pink yew berries and the silvery limbs of low-growing hazel. Beech trees spread their branches, carpeting the ground below with fallen bronze leaves. Barely visible through the growth was a small stream banked by willows that trailed gold into the water.
There was a fortune to be had here, to behold.
And Eliza was on his arm, and last night he had kissed her.
It seemed impossible that this was the same world in which wars happened, in which cavalry horses were killed beneath their riders and the earth turned to mud and blood. Impossible that one’s life should be spared, or taken, by a fraction of a second’s chance—or by the kindness of an enemy stranger who turned out to be a stubble-faced, bowlegged angel in rough farmer’s garb.
“You asked me to tell you about being shot,” he said. “You know the events. But what you don’t know, and what I often forget, is that the physician called to treat me told me how lucky I was.”
Lucky that Florian had given him lodging. Lucky that the ball had punched through his ribs but missed his lungs, his other organs. It went straight for the liver as though drawn, lodging there. Le foie est fort, the physician had told him. The liver would recover, if Bertie himself could regain his strength. His fragile health should not be risked further through attempts to extract the bullet.
He had been lucky, too, that the medical man wished to heal rather than take revenge on a wounded enemy. Such consideration had turned Bertie’s heart.
“You wondered how I could forgive the French for shooting me,” he said to Eliza. “In truth, I wonder if one could live among people who saved one’s life and not love them.”
“Now I am ashamed,” Eliza said. “For I have done nothing worthwhile to make someone love me.”
“Have you not?” He rubbed lightly at her fingers with his. “I thought that was why you were here.”
Silence lay about them like a warm cloak, the only sound the subtle shift of their footfalls over the path. The Friar’s House turned back into view before them, worn old stone mingling with smooth-cut new brick and stucco. All turreted and rounded, with part of the roof tiled and part shingled in slate. Chimney pots poking up wherever they liked, and some windows tall and arched and some tiny and round, and ivy growing sturdy over it all.
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