Moonlight on My Mind

by Jennifer McQuiston

  Now, the dress that had borne those hopes was close to destroyed. The hem had ripped during her fall onto the kitchen floor, and a smear of blood stained the front of the bodice from where she had leaned in to wrap her hands around the dog’s muzzle.

  When she had boarded the train in Leeds, she had not considered how Patrick might feel about the news she carried, so desperate and important had her task seemed. But there was nothing to be done for it now. It would be far worse for all of their futures to withhold this information. She’d waited too long as it was. “I’ve come to find you because you need to go home, Patrick.”

  His jaw hardened. “Do not presume to tell me what I need to do, Miss Baxter. And do not call me Patrick. Our fathers might be good friends, but you are no friend of mine.”

  Julianne steeled her nerve against his scathing retort. “Well then, you need to go home.” She hesitated, this last bit of it painful for her to say, and likely devastating for him to hear. “Lord Haversham.”

  He took a sudden, whiplashed step back. She could almost see him wrestle his thoughts back to center. “What game do you play, Miss Baxter?”

  “The earl . . .” She exhaled, and rubbed her sweating palms against her skirts, wishing the terrier’s soft, reassuring fur was still within reach. “Your father died last week. I am so, so sorry.”

  He paled beneath the sandy fringe of his stubble, but appeared possessed by an almost supernatural calm. “I do not believe you.”

  She had expected his grief. Possibly his anger. But she hadn’t expected doubt.

  “I speak the truth,” she told him, praying he believed her.

  The calm with which he engaged this conversation began to show the faintest of cracks. “The truth.” He stumbled over the word, as if it sliced his tongue to even utter the single syllable. “You, of all people, do not hold the truth in good stead. This is a ruse you have concocted to force my premature return, nothing more. Is there a reward out for my head, then?”

  This time it was Julianne’s turn to jerk backward as if struck. She felt ill, her stomach churning to hear the venom in his voice. Not that she didn’t deserve some measure of it.

  “Perhaps you seek the pleasure—the notoriety—of being the one to bring me in,” he went on. “Or perhaps you have a moribund fascination to see the reduced circumstance of a man who might kill his own brother?”

  Good heavens. Did he really believe she was capable of such a thing? “I’m here because I felt you deserved to know,” she protested. “That you would want to know. There would be no reason for me to fabricate such a thing.”

  “What you fail to realize is that I am in regular correspondence with my father, and the letter the coachman mentioned is undoubtedly from him.” He crossed his arms, though she could see his fists clench reflexively. “My father is the only person I trust, and I have no intention of returning until he sends word.”

  Julianne considered the possibilities, given her regrettable knowledge of the past week. “Are you sure the letter is from your father?”

  “My father is the only person who knows where I am.”

  “Not the only person,” she pointed out. “I learned where you were, after all. Perhaps someone else has sent you a letter. Your friend David Cameron. I believe he enjoyed an extended stay in Brighton after his recent marriage.”

  “Cameron and his new bride returned to Moraig a sennight ago.”

  “Well then, perhaps the mail was delayed en route to Moraig.” She thought back to the solemn graveside service. It had been a beautiful ceremony, the leaves of the nearby trees just beginning to turn in color. But she had not spared much time admiring the beauty of a Yorkshire autumn. The countess’s frozen vigil, and the tears of her two small girls, had held Julianne’s attention far too well. “I saw him buried, Patrick. There can be no mistake.”

  He stared at her a long, fractious minute. “There can always be a mistake.” His unspoken accusation hung in the air between them.

  Julianne shook her head, anger beginning to simmer now at his refusal to entertain the truth. Her imaginings of this interaction—and she had entertained a few—had never gone like this. “You are the new Earl of Haversham, Patrick,” she told him. “And because of that, you must return now.”

  His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “Do not call me that,” he all but growled.

  “Which? Patrick? Or Haversham?”

  “Either.”

  “Then what should I call you? Channing no longer fits. You can deny it, you can hate me, but it will not make it any less true.”

  Somewhere in the house, the lamb found its voice again. He turned from her with a muffled curse and snatched a half-full bottle of milk from a nearby shelf.

  “There’s more,” she offered to the hard slant of his shoulders.

  He tied a slip of cloth over the bottle with a length of twine before turning back around to capture her in the steel band of his gaze. “You’ve told me my father is dead.” His voice rang hoarse, a sure sign that the crack in his prickly, competent armor had widened to a chasm of canyonlike proportions. “How much more could there be?”

  Julianne wished she had more than her voice to convince him, given that he seemed to distrust her so much. “An inquest has been called into Eric’s death. I’ve been told I will be expected to testify.”

  His face betrayed no expression. “There has always been talk of an inquest, and nothing came of it. My father has assured me—”

  “Your father cannot help you in this. Not anymore.” Julianne drew a deep breath, praying the maddening man saw reason. “You need to return, Patrick, and fight these accusations through the proper channels. That is why I am here.”

  The little lamb called out again, fainter now, as if it had given up all hope of its dinner and was now considering crying itself to sleep. He snatched up the lantern and strode toward the door, his wide shoulders filling the frame. But something halted him, just on the threshold of the hallway. He turned his head over his shoulder, and she felt pinned like a scientific specimen by his gaze. “You told the authorities I murdered my brother. Were, in fact, the sole witness to the purported crime.” His eyes burned like twin tapers in the lamplight. “It was an accident, Miss Baxter, as I have repeatedly attested. A terrible mistake, a shot gone wrong. Do you truly believe I am capable of such a thing?”

  Julianne wrapped her head around the question. Discovered the ends of her thoughts would not meet flush at center. “You seemed . . . uncertain in your explanation to the magistrate. If your brother was shot by accident, why didn’t you offer a stronger defense?”

  “I was scarcely standing. For God’s sake, my brother had just died in my arms. You’ll forgive me if I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  Julianne stilled at his confirmation that he had been there when his brother had drawn his last breath. A scald of remorse washed over her, as hot as the water in the kettle upon the stove. Because if she believed him innocent—as she was increasingly prone to do—it meant she had done something so terrible as to be damned thrice over.

  Not that his innocence mattered, in the total, awful scheme of things.

  She raised her chin. “It scarcely matters what I believe. Because guilty or innocent, if you hang, your title reverts to the Crown. And that means your family loses everything.”

  Chapter 4

  If Miss Baxter was to be believed—and he wasn’t sure the girl’s claims held more than a cursory brush with anything approximating truth—his father was dead. His sisters’ futures were poised on the brink of ruin.

  And Patrick was facing the fight of his life.

  Another tentative bleat echoed down the hallway. His fingers fisted around the bottle. Bloody lamb. Bloody timing.

  Bloody Julianne Baxter.

  He stalked into the hallway and kicked the kitchen door shut on Miss Baxter’s pinched face with an angry boot. Unlike the front door, this one stayed latched. He took an almost feral pleasure in leaving Julianne shut up in his darkenin
g kitchen, with only the ghosts of her past wrongs and the recovering dog to torment her.

  The little ewe lamb greeted the bottle with an enthusiasm that bordered on violence. Patrick leaned over the makeshift pen, still seething with resentment, and stared at the outline of the lamb’s busy nose and tongue working hard against the fabric teat. His thoughts, usually so ordered, worked themselves into a similar frenzy.

  Christ, but he didn’t need this distraction. Until today, he had moved through the ordered nuances of his life in Moraig keeping the events of that day well buried. Now it seemed clear he had merely thrown a cursory bit of dirt over the details.

  With Miss Baxter padding about his kitchen, it was far too easy to sink back into the past. His father had been the only one who believed him innocent in Eric’s death, at least of the act of premeditated murder. The girl’s statement to the magistrate, full of damning details that even he had trouble refuting, had much to do with the opinions that quickly turned against him.

  Not that he blamed them. It had been his rifle, after all. His bullet that had struck his brother in the chest. His guilt to live with, even as his father had battled to save the remnants of what was now—but should never have been—his birthright.

  “Hullo! Anyone home?” A baritone voice pushed at him from the parlor door.

  Patrick looked up, startled from the torment of his memories. “In here.” He chased the greeting with a foul, whispered curse. Covert expletives were necessary, given the man attached to the voice intruding on his thoughts. What in the name of all that was holy was the town vicar doing in his house?

  Reverend Ramsey’s girth offered a commanding presence from the pulpit, but squeezing through the narrow doorway, it made him resemble a turtle emerging from its shell. When he saw what occupied Patrick’s hands, he pulled up short. The lamb chose that very moment to dispense of its last meal, wagging its tail vigorously as pellets of dung fell onto the parquet floor. The reverend snatched a kerchief from the depths of his black coat to cover his nose. “I say,” he gasped. “If you’d come to church on a more regular basis, Mr. Channing, you’d know that cleanliness is next to godliness. ’Tis customary for a gentleman like yourself to keep beasts in a stable, is it not?”

  Patrick eased back from where he leaned over the pen, disengaging the bottle from the lamb’s mouth with a gentle twist. The lamb bleated its objection, but there was no helping it: the bottle had been sucked dry. He tossed the creature an armful of hay from the nearby sideboard as he considered his answer. No doubt the vicar and Miss Baxter would disagree, but he had always considered the warm, earthy smell of manure from a healthy animal one of the most natural things in the world. “It is also customary to knock first to announce one’s presence,” he finally said. “It seems we are both gentlemen who eschew convention.”

  Reverend Ramsey lowered his handkerchief in indignation. “The door was open, sir.”

  Patrick regarded his visitor steadily. They both knew the door wasn’t open. It simply wasn’t latched. “Can I help you, Reverend?”

  “I heard from Stephens you might have my dog.”

  “Stephens? I don’t recall the blacksmith being on the scene this afternoon.”

  “He said he heard it from the butcher, who had it straight from Mrs. Pue.”

  Patrick hesitated. Even after eleven months, the voracious machinations of Moraig’s rumor mill remained somewhat of a mystery to him. “And Mrs. Pue is . . . ?”

  “Mr. Jeffers’s sister.”

  “Ah.”

  “He’s a black and white collie. Spots on his nose. His name is Skip.”

  Patrick expelled a frustrated breath at the accurate description. All hope of extracting some form of payment to cover the costs of the afternoon’s surgery scattered like goose down on the wind. There was really no point in asking. The vicar was notoriously tightfisted with his own money, even as he expected the townsfolk to be generous with theirs. The knowledge that the hapless creature he had just snatched from death’s jaws belonged to Ramsey was enough to make him want to take up bricklaying instead of vetting.

  It was hard enough not to get attached to the beasts he helped. Turning them over to unworthy—and nonpaying—owners was harder still.

  “Well, I’ve a black and white dog recovering in my kitchen. You’ll have to take a look and see if he’s yours. He’s lost a leg and will need to be watched carefully for infection, but he’s a good chance of pulling through.” Patrick didn’t add that there would be a good deal of fecal matter to deal with in the near future, at least until the animal was steady on its remaining three feet.

  Sometimes the Lord worked in mysterious ways.

  Ramsey’s heavy shoes shuffled on the straw-strewn floor. “He’s lost a leg, then? I’m not sure . . . that is, I don’t think . . . He’s a working dog, Mr. Channing. Perhaps it would be better to put him down.”

  Patrick’s thoughts flew to Gemmy, and how the scruffy, damaged terrier twisted his heart up in knots. “So Skip’s a working dog, eh? Gathers your flock and all?” He almost snorted. The vicar’s idea of “work” was about as far from his own as the distance from Moraig to the moon.

  And Reverend Ramsey’s flock was more of the pious, human variety.

  “Aye.” The man lifted a finger to tug at his white clerical collar. “And he’s no good at all to me with only three legs. Perhaps it was God’s will that he die.”

  Patrick unfurled his fingers, testing his patience. “He’ll still make someone a fair companion. If not for you, perhaps someone else.” He wiped his palms on his trousers, dislodging the worst of the filth and blood that had accumulated over the course of the evening before stooping to pick up his lantern. “And I’ll not put him down after I went to the trouble of saving him. Besides, you haven’t confirmed he’s yours yet. Plenty of black and white dogs running loose in Moraig. Come on to the kitchen and take a look.”

  He strode down the hallway with Ramsey lumbering along behind him. He had no doubt the dog belonged to the vicar, but it would be interesting to see if the man tried to claim it was a stray. If he searched his memory, he could even remember seeing the animal now, lurking about the churchyard the few times he’d taken himself to Sunday service. The dog had been a bone-thin, furtive thing the last time he saw him, scarcely more than a puppy, but the confluence of spots around the dog’s muzzle matched the ones in his memory.

  He opened the kitchen door, girding himself for the difficult business of discharging the dog to a recalcitrant owner, but froze as a far different dilemma inserted itself front and center. Miss Baxter stood with her back to the door, leaning over the cookstove in a state that went somewhat beyond simple dishabille. She was still missing her shoes.

  But now she was also missing her bodice.

  No, not missing it, exactly. She was holding it. In her hands.

  No matter the room’s meager light, the sight of her blinding white chemise and beribboned corset felt like a stick in his eye. Even as he watched, she poured hot water from the kettle onto the bunched fabric and began to rub the two sides together. He was struck by the absurdity of her efforts. Any usual variety of fool knew pouring hot water on a bloodstain only made it set up faster.

  Not that Miss Baxter appeared a usual variety of anything, standing in his kitchen in only her skirts and unutterables.

  Too late, Patrick thought to warn her. “Julianne,” he said curtly, only to wince as he realized her given name had escaped his lips instead of the far more appropriate formal address.

  She whirled around, giving them a firsthand view of what under other circumstances could objectively be called a delightful, cotton-clad bosom. He risked a glance down at Ramsey’s balding pate. The florid color staining the man’s scalp told Patrick that no matter his own sparse attendance at church, the not-quite-naked Miss Baxter was the one now being judged here.

  And despite the certain danger to her reputation, despite the fact he had cautioned her of just such a possibility, Patrick found himself
enjoying the turnabout.

  Julianne’s heart flung itself against the confines of her chest.

  The same chest she was all but displaying like an exotic curiosity to the new Earl of Haversham and . . . merciful heavens . . .

  Was that a vicar?

  Her eyesight wasn’t the best—not that she would admit that to a single, solitary soul—but she could still make out the dark coat and white collar that marked the new arrival as a man who relied on his Maker to decide his wardrobe instead of a valet. She had been very foolish to think she could quickly deal with the stain and be properly clothed again before anyone was the wiser. She had thought . . . well, she had thought a lamb might take a bit of time to go through a bottle. An hour at least. Apparently she didn’t know the first thing about farm animals.

  Or vicars, for that matter.

  She had thought them kindly gentlemen, more interested in the state of one’s soul than the size of one’s breasts. Clearly she had been wrong, given the man’s unswerving focus in that very area.

  “We’ve a visitor.” Patrick stepped closer, bringing his too-thin face into focus. He motioned about his chest in a parody of what she needed to do. “You might want to . . . er . . . cover yourself.”

  “I . . .” She stumbled over what to say. She had never stood in this state of undress in such close proximity to a man in her life. For her first experience to be undressed in the vicinity of two men took the scenario from damning to hysterical. “My dress is . . . that is, my bodice is—”

  “Missing?” For the first time this entire dreadful day, a devilish gleam flashed in Patrick’s usually stern eyes.

  “Stained,” she finished weakly. Her hand fluttered over the neckline of her chemise. Too late, she realized the motion merely drew the visitor’s unwelcome attention more fiercely. If she hadn’t felt like snarling an oath, she would have laughed. She had endured three London Seasons cringing over the attention her hair sometimes caused, when all along she had unknowingly possessed a more formidable distraction. “I’ve misplaced my bag with my clothing, and as we need to head straight to Summersby on the morning coach, I cannot afford to let the stain set up.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I had thought you would be delayed a bit longer with the lamb and its bottle,” she added crossly.