by Sophia Nash
“You do,” Roxanne continued. “You raved about some sort of French bonnet with grapes and leaves on one side and three feathers trimming the other. It did not sound very fetching in my opinion.”
“You know,” Isabelle said as she sighed, “you are an expert at changing the subject.”
“I learned from the best,” Roxanne replied.
“Well, I outrank you and I insist that you return tonight after you finish with Mr. Jones. And then I shall pack too and we shall go to my estate together. I decided it all when you kept me awake half the night with the fear you would slip away.”
“Well, at least it wasn’t due to my snoring.” Roxanne’s insides tumbled with happiness. She hadn’t realized how much she dreaded the idea of leaving everyone behind. It was going to be bad enough saying goodbye to Alex.
She smiled and hugged Isabelle. “Nothing could make me happier than traveling with you. And it has nothing to do with your well-padded carriage.”
Isabelle drew back for a moment and studied her. “Oh, I can think of one thing that would make you happier. But I won’t torture you any longer this morning.”
By the time Roxanne and Alexander left, the sun was overhead and the tide was fully retreated. When they approached the Mount’s stable to secure two horses, there was but one minor adjustment to his plan.
Bacchus was missing. And the stable hand knew naught of it for he had been off island to arrange for a feed delivery.
Alexander turned to her, and she hated having to owe him once again.
“I’m sorry. Lawrence must have borrowed him. He hates to walk, and I believe he came here by boat just as the tide was receding.”
He smiled. “Actually, I rather think that horse was made for your husband. I think they shall get on together. Well, at least until Bacchus breaks down one of Paxton’s stall doors to get at the earl’s last inch of lawn.”
Roxanne mounted a pretty gray mare, and released the skirts of Mémé’s riding gown to cover her legs. “How does your great-aunt manage to ride?”
“Someone is always there to lead her,” he replied.
“It’s you, right?”
“Sometimes.” He swung his muscled leg over the saddle and settled himself on the back of a bay gelding as if he had been born to the saddle.
They started down the hill separating them from the shingle path. “Were you ever a cavalry officer?”
Alexander was ahead of her and she saw his shoulders flex. “Why do you ask?”
“You have that look in the saddle,” she replied.
After a long pause he finally replied. “Hussar.”
My God. He had fought for the French? Did the other dukes know? Did His Majesty know?
“Go ahead,” he continued. “Spit it out.”
“What?”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“And what is that?”
He halted his horse and turned his torso to look back toward her. “That I must be a traitor.”
“I never thought that.”
“Really.”
“I don’t care if you are.”
“Well, everyone else will if you say a word.”
“I would never. Not after everything . . .”
“I know. It’s the reason I told you.”
That was it of course. He could tell her because she owed him so much—not because they shared any sort of true intimacy.
He was silent a while before he continued. “I joined to earn enough francs to smuggle my brother and Mémé to England after we escaped Mont-Saint-Michel by the skin of our teeth. The jewels only went so far. Later, I joined them when I had saved enough to leave myself.”
He said naught of supporting his great-aunt or of putting his younger brother through Eton’s lesser collager program. Of course not. He was a hero. Had he ever been anything else since the day she had met him?
“Why did your father’s family not help you?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve told you. You cannot count on anyone in the world except yourself. I’d hoped you’d learned this lesson by now.”
As they arrived at the last bank leading to the now-exposed path, she forced him to continue on topic. “Did you develop a fear of enclosed spaces and the dark while a Hussar?”
“I am not afraid of the dark, thank you very much.”
“So you’ve only a fear of small spaces?”
“Does it matter? It’s not the sort of thing I must worry about from day to day. It’s only when someone decides to climb into a sodding mine,” he muttered darkly.
His annoyance didn’t bother her any longer. She realized it might just be a sign that he could find his ease with her and was capable of dropping his constant façade of cool wit. “You didn’t have to try and save me,” she said softly.
He clucked to his horse and moved to the side of the path. After a long silence, he finally spoke. “The Portuguese captured me while I was holding documents containing English troop movements and numbers. I spent several months in a small pit deep underground.” He stopped abruptly.
She felt ill. Her imagination conjured all sorts of vile images: bugs; muddy, crumbling walls; dank air and little food. God, what he had endured. He was a stronger man than she had ever guessed. Yet, she knew nothing she could say would alter his emotions, so she said the only thing she could muster. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was war and to be expected. It’s in the past, and what’s more important is the future.” He peered sideways at her.
She spoke quickly before she could think. “Will you marry Lady Mary Haverty after I leave?”
He pointed to a huge tangle of seaweed in the middle of the path. “Careful here. I shall have to ask John to arrange for someone to tend the path each day. Have I told you I’ve decided to have John apprentice as my steward? The Mount fell to ruin when my forebear failed to take any interest in finding a new man when the former steward died a decade ago.”
“I see.”
“It will be the blind leading the blind leading a blind French comtesse, but then when I return to London, I will leave the Mount in good hands.”
“Absolutely,” she agreed.
“And Mémé will be content here as long as she doesn’t realize she’s in her dotage.”
“You’re absolutely right,” she replied.
“You can disagree with me, you know,” he said without turning his head toward her.
“It’s your heart, Alex.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your heart is the part of yourself you’re embarrassed by, but it is my greatest hope—”
He was on the verge of an explosion when he interrupted her. “You haven’t the bloodiest idea what you’re—”
She interrupted him right back by raising her voice over his. “But it is my greatest hope that you will give it to someone. Maybe to Mary? She deserves it. And so do you.”
He halted his horse and she did the same. They stared at each other. Her own heart was in her throat. And it was breaking. She had no choice but to set free her dreams. She wanted him to be happy, and to open himself to the possibility of love. It was the only way she could stomach the future without him.
She knew then that her last real shred of hope had died. Lawrence would win in the end, even if Alex actually tried to force the issue in London. It would always be her word against Lawrence’s no matter what Alex, Isabelle, and Mémé said. No one would take the word of a tin miner’s daughter over that of an earl, not even the Prince Regent. And Alexander had no choice but to heed the future king’s demands for a scandal-free existence.
And so she finally moved ahead of the man she loved and turned her face into the wind to gallop toward the opposite shore so he would not see her face. It was the wind rushing against her eyes that caused them to water.
Dickie Jones had been the best friend of Roxanne’s father, Cormick Newton, since their childhood. They had roamed the cliffs near Falmouth together, and had withstood the rigors of
various tutors when their parents had forced them on them. Their friendship was no surprise given that their fathers had been the best of friends as well.
The only difference in their lives was their respective wealth. Fate had dealt a good hand to Cormick’s paterfamilias by way of a Scottish lass of good fortune who had fallen in love with the Cornishman. Jones’s father had been blessed with a wonderful wife of little means. It was for this reason that the latter went to work for the former as his accountant, and Dickie had followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming Cormick’s accountant when the two outlived their fathers.
This also explained why there were few people, save his own wife and children, who Dickie Jones had loved more than Cormick Newton and his daughter Roxanne.
While Roxanne knew that Dickie Jones would never understand why she had rarely visited her old friends and father, she also knew Mr. Jones would always protect a Newton.
And she was the last Newton in Cornwall.
She was also the last person Dickie Jones would ever dream of seeing again. Yet when she appeared outside the window to his study in his small, but comfortable house on the edge of the largest of all of her father’s former mining enterprises, Dickie Jones did not turn a hair.
He had always had the ability to conceal surprise. Dickie Jones carefully placed his quill beside a document and wiped away the ink on his two fingers before he pushed back his chair with a long squeal and slowly rose to cross to the window.
“Hello, Countess.”
“Roxanne, please,” she said quietly. “Hello, Mr. Jones.”
Alexander stepped into view.
“Allow me to present Mr. Richard Jones to you. Mr. Jones, His Grace, the Duke of Kress.”
Dickie Jones bowed to Alexander and then nodded to her. “Are you coming in then or what?”
“Is anyone in the house, Mr. Jones?”
“No.”
“Could we enter through the back?”
With a single nod of the head he disappeared as did she and Alexander. Assembled in his study, with the shades now drawn, Roxanne found her voice, and then lost it before she could even start. “I’m so, so sorry,” she rasped.
“About what?” the man of few words replied, seating himself behind his plain desk and indicating with his bony hands that they should sit across from him if they chose.
“To bother you, Mr. Jones.”
He tugged on the ends of his waxed salt-and-pepper moustache in the same manner she remembered. He cleared his throat. “You have never bothered me before,” he said gruffly. “Actually, you only ever bothered me when you became a high and mighty lady and never bothered to bother me anymore.”
“You are very familiar to me,” Alexander cut in, narrowing his eyes. “Have we met before?”
“Not formally, Your Grace.”
“At the funeral,” he said. “I saw you standing at the edge of the grave. You were the only one who appeared in mourning for the countess’s hat.”
He stared into the space above their heads. “I knew it was a good sign that the sun was shining.”
Roxanne finally allowed herself to smile.
“Everyone knows that the soul of the departed cannot arrive in heaven unless it is raining,” Mr. Jones continued.
Alexander looked at Roxanne with curiosity.
“It’s an old Cornish superstition,” she explained.
“A Cornish truth, if ever there was one. You’re sitting in front of me now as cool as you please, aren’t you?” Mr. Jones puffed out his thin chest.
“I am.”
“And why has it taken you so long to inform me you are not at the bottom of the sea?”
“Because . . . Well, because, I didn’t want to—”
“If you say you didn’t want to bother me, I might say something we will both regret,” Mr. Jones interrupted.
She couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to go to the man whom she hadn’t seen in almost seven years.
Roxanne stood abruptly and walked around his desk at the same time Mr. Jones came to her. She folded herself in her father’s best friend’s arms. “Oh, how I’ve missed you, Mr. Jones.” He smelled so familiar. Like pipe tobacco, and moustache wax, and stone dust.
“I’ve missed you, too, Countess.”
“Don’t,” she insisted. “Don’t ever call me that again. I hate that title.” For long moments she drank in the warmth of his thin arms.
“And why is that?” Mr. Jones finally pulled back and looked down from his great height.
“Because it took me away from you and everyone else, forced me to cut my ties, and made me see how foolish I had been to wish to marry above myself.”
He studied her. “And?”
“And the gentleman whose sole gift to me was his name and title left me to die when I fell a portion of the way down Kynance Cliff,” she choked out.
Mr. Jones’s hands gripped her shoulders.
She explained the rest of her predicament in a stream of words. Roxanne came to a stop when he sagged and finally sat, his head in his hands.
“The bastard. The blue-blood bastard.” Mr. Jones shook his head. “I shall challenge him since your father is not here to do it,” Mr. Jones said, angrier than she’d ever seen him.
“You cannot,” Alexander finally spoke. “Only a gentleman can challenge another gentleman.”
“Well, then, why haven’t you challenged him, Your Grace?” Mr. Jones stopped short. “Or does a tinner’s daughter not require justice?”
Roxanne cringed. “Mr. Jones, the duke has done so much for me already. And he is under orders from—”
“I think I can answer Mr. Jones’s questions all by myself, if I choose,” Alexander interrupted dryly. “At present I choose not to reply. Mr. Jones, did the earl pay a call on you yesterday evening or this morning?”
“No.”
“Hmmm,” Alex murmured. “Then perhaps he went to Wheal Bissoe mine straightaway.”
Mr. Jones’s gaze immediately sharpened. “And why would Wheal Bissoe hold any interest for the bloody earl?”
“Just before he died,” Roxanne rushed on, “my father told me he secreted his fortune inside a hidden space carved into the rock face of the eleventh platform there.”
“Did he, now?” Mr. Jones said hollowly.
“Yes. And when we went there it was gone,” she said.
Alexander stared at Mr. Jones with a strange intensity.
“And I was hoping you might be able to help us learn where it is. Perhaps my father told you? Or perhaps you know someone who might have found it or taken it when they heard I was dead?”
“No. No. And no,” Mr. Jones replied stonily.
“But you knew Mr. Newton had a fortune when he died,” the duke argued.
“I knew no such thing,” Mr. Jones retorted. “Cormick Newton was a very generous and benevolent man. In his will, as Roxanne knows, he gave his entire fortune to the mining families in his company.”
“Including you,” Alexander added in a measured tone.
“What are you suggesting?” Roxanne felt ill. “You don’t know Mr. Jones. And of course, my father gave him a portion of his wealth. He was his best friend as I told you.”
Both men continued to stare at each other.
Mr. Jones broke eye contact first. “Roxanne, you know I shall always provide for you, although not in the manner of your father or your life at Paxton Hall. What is your plan?”
Alexander sighed heavily and wordlessly shook his head.
Roxanne gave him a look, and then turned to Mr. Jones. “I should like to go to Scotland. To the village my father always spoke of—where his mother was born. I shall endeavor to find work there to lessen the financial burden. Perhaps,” she turned to Alexander, “Isabelle and your great-aunt will provide references.”
“Certainly,” he said dryly. “For Tatiana Barclay, I presume?”
“No. I think Harriet is a better name for the sort of work I will seek. And I shall take Mr. Jones’s su
rname for he is more like a father to me than anyone else.”
Mr. Jones returned his attention to the duke. “And you see no reason to bring the earl to justice? If anyone could do it, it would be you, no?”
Roxanne rushed in. “In the end it would be my word against the earl’s, Mr. Jones. You know that. And no amount of the duke’s interference could change it. And furthermore, I do not want to become known as the infamous tin miner’s daughter whose noble husband possibly tried to murder her. I would rather retire to Scotland and live the life I choose.”
Mr. Jones scratched his head. “It’s cold in the highlands. It’s not for the likes of a warm-blooded Cornish lass.”
“It’s what I want,” she said firmly.
“What have you to say about all this, Your Grace?”
“Me? Does it matter? This is a female with a plan.”
“His Grace must not become embroiled in any hint of a scandal, Mr. Jones. And he must marry an aristocratic heiress with an immaculate reputation by order of the Prince Regent,” she added.
“Yes, I receive issues of the Morning Post—eventually. I know the story of the debauchery by the royal entourage. And the stew of fruit thrown at the Prince Regent each time he leaves Carleton House. And everyone knows His Grace lost his fortune and was sent here in disgrace.”
“Not disgrace exactly,” Alexander said softly. “More as a punishment—for what could be worse than living on this edge of wilderness while I acquire a diamond and gold leg-shackle?”
Roxanne knew a lost cause when she saw it. Mr. Jones would never take to the Duke of Kress. And Alex would not like anyone who did not like him.
She spoke before either of them could wring the other’s throat. “I had hoped to leave as soon as possible, Mr. Jones. It is too dangerous to remain any longer. My husband is searching for me and my nonexistent fortune. Please be careful. He might be a little mad.”
“A lot mad,” Alexander corrected.
Mr. Jones looked at her with a question in his eyes.
“His Grace hit him on the head with a book when Lawrence chanced to get a glimpse of me. And the duke also accused the earl and insisted they should go to London and speak to the Prince Regent about the whole sordid affair.”
Mr. Jones was not impressed. “A bullet to the brain box is a better idea, and I—”