“So Frederick kept the rents and did nothing for his tenants?”
“Less than nothing. When they get sufficiently fed up, they’ll all move on.”
They traveled the rest of the way in silence, but when they trotted up the lane, Val saw an order of crushed shells had been delivered and the back terrace all but finished.
“Day and Phil can put the horses up,” Val told Darius. “I’ll walk Ellen back to her cottage, then I can update you on our exciting day in town.”
“Looks like a tiring day in town,” Darius remarked as Day and Phillip yawned and stretched. He swung Ellen down from her perch on the bench and eyed her critically. “Even the indomitable Mrs. Fitz is looking done in, Val. You’ve taken your slave driving a little too seriously today.”
“Have a piece of the raspberry pie I brought home; then pass judgment on me. Ellen?” Val offered her his arm, which she took without protest, and headed with her toward the woods.
“You really ought to be cleaning this wood up,” Ellen observed as they gained the shade of the bridle path.
“I don’t want to.” Val matched his steps to her leisurely pace. “I’m afraid I’ll offend the piskies.”
“It is beautiful, but if you don’t at least cut up some deadwood, these paths will become useless, and the piskies will be the only ones keeping warm in winter. Then too, there are a couple of old pensioners in here who need to be cut down before they topple, and they’re big enough to land on your outbuildings or mine.”
Val stopped and regarded her in the late afternoon light. “I don’t want to disturb the wood because it’s the first place I kissed you. It’s… magical for me, and I don’t want it to change.”
It was an unplanned disclosure, a truth Val himself hadn’t been aware of until he heard the words coming out of his own mouth.
“Magical.” Ellen’s expression shifted between amusement, sadness, and… wistfulness?
“Silly.” Val glanced around self-consciously. “But there it is.” He could still see in his mind’s eye the way two butterflies had danced around in a sunbeam the day he’d first kissed her, not far from where they stood now. At the time, he’d thought the butterflies absurd.
Ellen shook her head. “Not silly. Sentimental, though.”
“I’m going to kiss you again.” He took her hand in his. “Now, in fact.”
He settled his lips over hers gently, just as he’d done a year ago. And now, as then, he took his time deepening the kiss, tasting her, breathing in her fragrance, letting his hands wander over her arms and shoulders and neck, until she was leaning into him and kissing him back.
“All day today,” Val said as he wrapped his arms around her, “I watched you being so brisk, efficient, and businesslike. You have the knack of the friendly transaction, and you part with your produce willingly enough. But your flowers.” He paused to kiss the side of her neck, a spot she seemed to particularly enjoy. “When you sold your posies,” Val went on, kissing his way out to her shoulder, “each time, you didn’t want to let them go. Your heart broke a little, sending them off that way, for coin.”
“Hush. Flowers aren’t kisses to be given away…” She buried her face against his shoulder.
“What?” He slid a hand to her nape and began massaging gently. “Your moods are hard to read today, love.”
“I’m just tired,” Ellen said, offering him a smile. “And cranky and probably in need of my bed.”
“I can understand fatigue.” He stepped back and took her hand as they started toward her gardens. “It has been a long and challenging day.”
“You made progress, though. You met with Sir Dewey, whom Phil says is standing in for Squire Rutland as magistrate, and you met with your tenants. You were also a considerable help to me, so I expect you to behave with docile submission when I declare it time to treat your hand again.”
“Docile submission?” Val shot her a puzzled look. “You’ll have to explain this term to me, or better still, demonstrate its meaning.”
She gave him an amused smile that put Val in mind of the smiles Her Grace often bestowed on Val’s father, then disappeared into her cottage. When she emerged, she handed him a tall glass of cider and took a seat on her swing. Val lowered himself beside her, setting the thing to swaying gently with his foot. While Ellen worked salve into Val’s hand, they discussed Sir Dewey Fanning and Val’s physician friend, Viscount Fairly, and his good friend Lord Nick—Darius’s brother-in-law—who was also a mutual friend of the Belmonts.
“You did not do this hand any favors today.” Ellen frowned at the offending appendage. “But you did let me drive out from town.”
“I rested my hand as well as I could.”
“But you tormented the poor thing yesterday and the day before,” Ellen chided as she spread salve over his knuckles. “You are not going to heal quickly at this rate.”
“I’m not getting worse,” Val replied, closing his eyes. “And if you’ll attend me like this, I have an incentive for making only the slowest of recoveries. With respect to the estate, though, I feel daunted. It feels like a quagmire, one that will consume every resource I throw at it and still demand more.”
“Like a jealous mistress,” Ellen murmured, kissing his knuckles.
“Yes, though I can’t say I’ve experienced one of those in person—at least not recently. The farms are nearing disgrace, the house is a ruin, somebody is bent on criminal mischief, and my own health isn’t one hundred percent.”
“Your hand will get better if you rest it.”
“You’re going to send me off now,” Val predicted. “We visit and we hold hands and we even cuddle, Ellen, but you’re still shy of me, and I can’t tell whether I should be flattered or frustrated.”
“Valentine.” She set his hand on his thigh. “I am not… I am indisposed.”
“Ah, well.” Val brushed his hand down her braid. “That explains it, then. As I myself am never indisposed, except perhaps when my seed is all over my belly and chest, I’m sweating with spent lust on a blanket beneath the willow, and my wits are abegging too.”
“You are shameless.” A blush rose up her neck and suffused her cheeks.
Val looped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her against his side. “And you are very dear. Shall we go swimming tonight?”
“You are being outrageous. Trying to shock me.”
“Trying to seduce you,” Val corrected her, pulling her in so he could kiss her temple. “Without apparent success, but I’m the patient sort and you won’t be indisposed much longer, will you?”
She shook her head.
He stayed with her for a long while after that, rocking the swing gently, holding her, and watching darkness fall over the garden. When she began to doze against him, he carried her through the darkened cottage to her bed and tucked her in.
Leaving Ellen to wonder as she drifted off to sleep how it was her furniture-merchant neighbor rubbed elbows with not one title but several, and, were she a different kind of widow in a different life, if he’d be courting her—and if she’d be allowing him to.
* * *
Val retrieved his horse from the Great Weldon livery, feeling as if his interview with Cheatham had been just the kick in the arse he needed to be completely out of charity with life. He was still disgruntled and puzzled when he returned to the estate at midday.
Darius greeted him on the driveway. “Just in time for lunch.”
Val quirked an eyebrow at his friend, who had foregone cravat and waistcoat in deference to the building heat. “You’re in dishabille.”
“And soon I’ll be romping the day away at the pond in all my naked glory, like our pet savages. What did you learn in that beehive of commercial activity known as Great Weldon?”
“Nothing positive,” Val said, leading Ezekiel to the stables. “The lane looks good.”
“The Ostrogoths about bloodied their paws getting the shells raked out for you. Make it a point to compliment them.”
&n
bsp; “I take it they’ve had their meal?” Val put his horse in the cross ties and heaved the saddle off its back. He ignored the familiar pain shooting up his left arm and put the saddle down on its customary rack.
Darius took a seat on the only bench in the barn aisle. “Hand bothering you?”
“Hurts like blazes,” Val said easily, but what he’d learned in town hurt worse. “It was pointed out to me today by the estimable William Cheatham, Esquire, that Ellen FitzEngle has a life estate on that property known as, et cetera, until such time as she dies, remarries, or loses privileges of citizenship, whichever shall first occur, et cetera.”
Darius frowned. “A life estate?”
“Life estate, as in the right to dwell unmolested and undisturbed, free of any interference and so forth, right here, for the rest of her life, with all the blessings attendant thereto.”
“All the blessings?” Darius asked as Val groomed his horse briskly, the brush held firmly in his right hand. “As in the rents?”
“Rents, crops, and benefits not including the right to sell fixtures. This was to be her dower property, Dare. I don’t understand it.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“Ellen has been collecting the rents here through Cheatham for the past five years, but she has Cheatham put the money into one of the Markham accounts in a London bank. Not a penny of it has gone into the estate.”
“That doesn’t seem in character with a woman who dotes on her own land. Your horse is about to pass out with the pleasure of your efforts.”
Val glanced at Ezekiel, who was indeed giving a heavy-lidded, horsey impression of bliss.
“Hopeless.” Val scratched the horse behind the ears with his right hand. “At least Zeke doesn’t prevaricate on estate matters.”
“Did you ever ask the lady where the money is going?”
“I did not,” Val said, tucking Zeke into a stall. “But you put your finger on the contradiction I couldn’t quite name: Ellen treasures her ground and takes better care of it than some women do their newborn children. It doesn’t make sense she’d let the rest of the estate go to ruin.”
“No sense at all. Maybe she doesn’t have a choice.”
Val fetched a rag to wipe off his bridle and boots. “The deed is clear. I now own the place in fee simple, but she has a life estate. Freddy didn’t lie exactly, he just implied title was held in fee simple absolute when it wasn’t—quite.”
“Ellen’s tenancy, or life estate, is probably a detail to him in the vast whirlwind of empty pleasures constituting his life.” Darius got off his bench and extended a hand to Skunk in the stall next to Ezekiel. “One has to wonder if this is what the previous baron intended.”
Val hung his bridle on a peg and laced the throatlatch around the headstall and reins. “No, one doesn’t. Ellen is to have those rents, the use of the hall, and so forth, but she’s to make improvements, alterations during her life as she sees fit. She wasn’t intended to toil away in a simple cottage, getting her hands literally dirty to earn her daily bread.”
“This bothers you, not just because the place is a wreck but because she isn’t getting her due.”
“It bothers me.” Val took the bench Darius had vacated. “For those reasons but also because she hasn’t told me any of this. I am the new owner and I’ve been here several weeks. If Freddy has Ellen on some sort of reduced stipend, I can certainly set that to rights.”
“And if he has her on no stipend at all?” Darius wondered aloud.
Val sighed, closed his eyes, and leaned his head back while Darius came down beside him. “She’s lied to me, Dare.”
“Not outright. Family situations are complicated, as we both know. She might have her reasons, and things might not be as they seem. Maybe she’s hoarding her rents because she doesn’t trust Freddy, and you can’t blame her for that. Have a talk with her, discuss how matters will go on from here, and clear the air.”
“You’re like her.” Val rose as he spoke. “You have this direct, brisk way of thinking things through that yields simple answers to complicated problems.”
“Maybe the problem isn’t so complicated. Maybe you just need to eat some decent food, talk to the widow, and come to an understanding.”
And Darius, damn the man’s skinny, handsome, genteelly impoverished ass, had been right. With a full belly, Val’s sense of upset had faded to something more manageable, until it occurred to him sabotaging his efforts at the manor might not have been aimed at victimizing him.
In some convoluted way, scaring off the new owner, with his deep pockets, London connections, and titled family, could be a way to further erode what little financial security the widowed baroness had attained at Little Weldon.
In other words, Ellen FitzEngle Markham might have enemies willing to go through Val to bring her harm.
He kept that alarming thought silent and lectured himself sternly about jumping to conclusions, overreacting, and leaping to the worst case. Though his mental lecture lasted the entire time it took him to assist with glazing the new windows on the north side of the house, he was still pondering the possibility when the crews left, dinner with Dare and the boys was a noisy memory, and evening shadows stretched over the terrace.
“Don’t stay out too late,” Darius warned as they stowed the hamper in the springhouse. “The boys have remarked on your late-night wanderings. And your wretched ugly self and your wretched ugly hand are in need of beauty sleep.”
“Yes, Mother.” Val sauntered off toward the woods. “Don’t wait up.”
Val took his time ambling along the bridle path, not sure what he wanted to accomplish on this visit with his neighbor. He wasn’t ready to broach the subject of the rents and her life estate, but he wanted to see her.
Blazing hell, he wanted to bury himself in her body and forget all about rents and life estates—and sore left hands and glaziers and roofing slates and all of it.
But she wasn’t on her porch when he emerged from the trees, and so Val was left with a quandary: Did he knock on her door or take her absence for an indication he wasn’t to impose? Did he come back in half an hour? Lie down on her bed and close his eyes among the pillows and linens that bore the scent of her?
And where was she, anyway?
“Valentine?”
Ellen’s voice came from the yard behind him, and as his eyes scanned the darkening tree line, he saw a pale patch that hadn’t been there previously. He crossed the gardens, the flowery fragrances teasing at his nose, until he could make out a hammock slung between two sturdy hemlocks.
“Good evening.” He gazed down at her lying in her hammock and realized she had already changed into her bedclothes.
Well, well, well…
“Is there room for two in that hammock?” he asked, still not quite sure of his welcome.
“I don’t know, but let’s try it, and if we end up on the ground, we’ll know there isn’t.”
Not exactly a rousing cheer, but the boys had said she was in a mood today. Val hopped around, pulling off his boots and stockings, and surveyed the challenge before him. “You roll up that way and hold to the edge, and I’ll climb aboard.”
The hammock dipped significantly, and it took some nimbleness on Val’s part, but he was soon ensconced wonderfully close to Ellen, the hammock pitching them together by design.
“We need a rope,” Val murmured into Ellen’s ear, “attached to one of the trees, so I can set this thing to swinging for you.”
“There’s a breeze tonight.” She turned so her cheek rested on Val’s arm. “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Val nuzzled her hair, loving the scent and softness of it. “Because the boys are still making a racket at the pond?”
“I hoped it was our boys and not those other rotten little brats. You shoo them away, and they’re like flies. They just come buzzing back.”
“Are they truly rotten?” He worked an arm under her neck, drawing her closer. “I was
a boy once. I hesitate to think all regarded me as an insect merely on the strength of my puerile status.”
“You were a good boy.” Ellen’s voice held the first hint of a smile. “They are not good boys. They are little thugs and worse. I’ve been trying to think up a name for your estate, and I keep thinking it should have to do with the lilies of the field.”
“The lilies of the field?” Val cast back over his dim command of scripture.
“It’s about what seems useless to us being worth the Almighty’s most tender regard.”
“I thought it was about flowers being pretty,” Val said, nuzzling at Ellen’s ear. “Roll over on your side. I would like to cuddle up with someone who is exceedingly pretty and worth some tender regard.”
“So I might be inspired to whisper confidences to you?” Ellen asked, shifting carefully in the hammock. Val waited for her to get situated then rolled to his side and began stroking his hand over her shoulders, neck, and back.
“The boys said you were not your most sanguine today.” Val felt the tension particularly across her shoulders, exactly where his own usually ached when he’d finished a good round of Beethoven. “Have you confidences to share?”
“I do not. You will put me to sleep if you keep that up.”
“Then you can dream of me, and I will dream of you—and vegetables.”
“Vegetables?” Ellen quirked a glance at him over her shoulder.
“Green beans, tomatoes, peppers, you know the kind.” Val kissed her nape. “Fruit helps, but I am beside myself with longing for vegetables. I could write a little rhapsody to the buttered green bean, so great is my torment.”
“I understand this torment.” Ellen rolled her shoulders. “By the end of June, I am practically sleeping in my vegetable patch, so desperately do I want that first bowl of crisp, ripe beans. Mine are almost ready.”
“And what about you?” Val kissed her nape again. “Are you ready?”
His cock had risen in his breeches to subtly nudge at her derriere, and she didn’t pretend to misunderstand the question. Rather than answer him, she reached behind her and tugged his hand around her middle.
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