“You were saying?” she prompted as she added cream and three sugars to his tea, then held it out to him.
He was careful not to allow his fingers to touch hers this time, though as for the cream—cream was a luxury, but a man intent on begging was due some fortification.
“I was saying I hope your cousin did not exaggerate regarding your skills, because I have need of a competent steward. I believe Greymoor made mention of my situation in his letter of introduction?”
“I confess, my lord, we are in the midst of the apple harvest, and my attention to correspondence has been lacking in the past few days.”
Despite her demure bearing, Douglas had no doubt she’d been out in the very orchards, perhaps even on a ladder, possibly without even a hat to shield her perfect complexion—
This time, he brought a mental hatchet down on his wayward thoughts.
“Well, then, madam, with your permission, I will explain more fully—”
The footman returned, bearing a plate of cakes. Lovely, artfully decorated little confections Douglas could gobble up in about two bites each.
Miss Hollister didn’t ask if she could serve him, but put four on a plate—it would hold no more—and passed it to him. “You must not be shy about satisfying a sweet tooth, my lord,” she said, smiling that beguiling, alluring smile again.
“My thanks.”
And how was a man supposed to think, much less hold forth articulately, when he was battling tea cakes, a perfect cup of tea, and that smile?
She served herself one cake, a small, chocolate sweet, which she held briefly under her nose—a definite nose to go with that wide mouth and those slanting eyes—inhaling the scent of the tea cake before biting off half and savoring it, only to catch Douglas staring at her.
“My lord?” she said, though Douglas could recall no particular question on the floor. Neither could he recall the last time the sight of a woman nibbling at a treat had held his interest, much less fascinated him.
“I beg your pardon.” Douglas sat back. “I was explaining, Miss Hollister, I have need of a competent steward, and your cousins suggested you.” Had suggested her in glowing, admiring terms, in fact.
Douglas’s pronouncement provoked a thoughtful consumption of the remainder of Miss Hollister’s tea cake.
“That surprises me, my lord. Andrew and Gareth—Greymoor and Heathgate—know I love it here and consider this estate not simply my place of employment but my home and Rose’s too. Andrew has agreed I might have a life estate here at Enfield. He cannot transfer the property to me in fee simple, because it is entailed to the barony, which he holds. He has no need of the property, though, and is in negotiations with his solicitor regarding the possibility of a life estate here for Rose as well. Then too, women are generally not stewards of anybody’s land but their own.”
Though many a widow took an interest in her holdings, women were not generally stewards of even their own land, or rather, ladies were not.
Douglas ignored that salient fact, and tried to ignore the remaining cakes as well. “I was not aware of the legal arrangements between you and Lord Greymoor, and I do not offer you a permanent position.”
His hostess arranged four more cakes on a plate and held it out to him, which rather resembled a discharge of firearms directly at his concentration.
“What sort of position do you offer?”
“I need an advisor,” Douglas said, and now that the point of the meeting—visit—was again under discussion, he did not permit himself so much as a glance at the plate on his knee. “Lord Greymoor has offered to sell me his estate in Sussex at a price just above insultingly reasonable. I need an assessment of what the land is truly worth, and Greymoor recommended you in glowing terms for such a project. Your cousin Heathgate was equally complimentary, and we do share a family connection, however remote.”
Elsewise, Douglas would never have considered a female as a source of advice on anything of significance—not that he’d seek advice from many men, either.
“This would mean travel to Sussex?”
He bit into a chocolate tea cake with raspberry icing, to be polite and perhaps to stall a moment. “Of course, travel at your convenience.”
Her brows knit, like the wings of a butterfly closing. “I’m sorry, my lord, but I am not in a position to assist you.”
A beat of silence went by, while Douglas chewed his positively scrumptious chocolate tea cake, the sweetness in his mouth at variance with the bitter notion of having to beg the woman for help.
“You will not allow me even a fair hearing?” He put the question with perfect civility, as if this project could not possibly be the last straw within reach of a drowning man.
“Explain at your leisure, my lord, but my decision will not likely change.”
Explain, he would, but he’d been ingesting sustenance steadily, and his body needed to move—and to put distance between himself and the infernal plate of distraction—so he paced to the window and laced his hands behind his back.
“My finances… my family’s finances, rather, are not what they should be.” He remained at the mullioned window, his back to his hostess, her sandwiches, and her luscious cakes—and her smiles. “My father and my brother before me did not manage well, and the estate is heavily in debt as a result—this is a situation I am not willing to put before some factor, some man of business, whose discretion is merely professional.”
His hostess said nothing. He plowed on—he was good at plowing on, though he knew precious little about plowing land. He knew far too much about grieving for an older brother who’d pissed away his inheritance, and a younger brother who’d sought to steal that inheritance for himself.
May a merciful God allow them both to rest in peace.
“Lord Greymoor has proposed that I buy from him this estate in Sussex,” Douglas said, returning to the matter at hand. “He claims it is a profitable concern, and believes it could be made even more so, but I must ask myself: If the land is so profitable, why would he turn it over to me?”
With his back turned, he held up a hand to stay any comment his hostess would have made.
“You are thinking,” he went on, “Lord Greymoor, being a decent sort, is simply allowing me a chance to get on my feet and pay off my remaining debts, which include debts within the family. This is perhaps the case, but I cannot afford to trust his generous nature, Miss Hollister. For that matter, I cannot afford to trust much of anything except the evidence of my own eyes and my own experience.”
“Yet you are willing to trust my opinion of the land’s potential?”
“No,” Douglas said, turning and finding her the picture of serene propriety, sitting by her tea service. “Not entirely. I am willing to listen to your opinion and consider it along with my own assessment. I am not stupid, Miss Hollister.”
Though he was uneducated about husbanding the land. He was also proud, but couldn’t consider that entirely a failing if it kept him from begging this woman for her aid.
She studied her teacup as if searching the dregs for words. “Your lordship, I cannot assist you, though I am flattered at the faith my cousins place in my abilities. I am not in a position to leave Enfield for any length of time.”
He thought she’d say more, but she fell silent and looked him up and down. Douglas knew what she saw: height, a few inches over six feet in fact, which had made an atrociously gangly adolescent out of him; blond hair queued back because it was less inclined to lie neatly than he’d prefer; and blue eyes, probably shadowed with fatigue, because sleep often eluded him.
He had been told he had a sensual mouth, whatever the hell that meant. The thing formed words and ingested food, which was all Douglas required of it.
Though it did a bloody poor job of convincing his hostess, apparently, and that was tiresome.
“You have been honest with me,”
she said at length, “and I will offer you some honesty in return: I do not want to leave Enfield, my lord. Ever. Not for a month in Sussex, not for a week in Town. I am content here.”
Her words were plain enough, and yet, Douglas suspected she was a trifle reluctant to be turning him down. Perhaps a trifle reluctant to immure herself here in the countryside with her bastard child, season after season. His request was unorthodox, just as her position as manager of Greymoor’s property was unorthodox.
The plain dress, the severe coiffure, the lack of even a brooch to adorn her person made her look like the matron of some institution for wayward girls.
Perhaps, despite her past—because of her past?—she was concerned about the appearances?
“If it suited you,” he said slowly, “we could travel together as man and wife, using some fictitious name. I do not foresee making a lengthy stay in Sussex.”
“Travel together as man and—” She set her teacup down with a clatter, all pretense of genteel hospitality gone from her expression. “What sort of backhanded insult do you offer me, Lord Amery? Do you think because I am a mother that I am not due the same courtesies as any other woman?”
She rose, and it struck Douglas that, in addition to all her other attributes, she was a tall woman. He preferred tall women, felt less of a lobcock around them—though in point of fact, he preferred tall, calm women.
“Do you think, my lord,” she went on with quiet venom, “that my cousins would tolerate such an improper arrangement?” She whipped around in a flurry of mud-colored skirts and made for the door, but Douglas beat her by half a step. When she grabbed for the door latch, he reached past her shoulder and pushed the door shut.
He remained thus, his arm extended over her shoulder, his hand flat on the door, holding it closed. He spoke quietly, because his mouth was very near her ear, and his nose was close enough to catch a whiff of her rosemary and lavender scent. “I apologize, madam, if you think I offered you insult. That was the furthest thing from my intent. Will you hear me out?”
He stepped back, wanting to shake the infernal woman for her silly fit. Greymoor had said she was frighteningly competent at her work, but skittish, and likely the victim of ill usage by the child’s father. Douglas recalled that last comment as he watched Miss Hollister resume her seat, her spine stiff, her eyes—may God have mercy upon him—suspiciously bright.
“I apologize,” he said again, still standing, as she had not bid him to do otherwise. “I am in need of your services, and I thought to offer an uncomplicated means of achieving that purpose—nothing more. If some other arrangement is better suited to traveling together, I lack the imagination to conceive of it.”
“I accept your apology,” she said in arctic tones. “Please do sit, my lord. That is, if there is more you would say?”
Such manners, when Miss Hollister clearly wanted to see the last of her guest. Those manners shamed Douglas’s assumptions regarding fallen women, not that he’d met many.
“There is a bit more I would convey to you,” he said, sinking into the rocking chair at the opposite corner of the small room. His choice of seat put him at a small distance from the remaining tea cakes and clearly relieved his hostess.
A pragmatic appeal had failed, which left Douglas with… the unpragmatic. The undignified, the honest.
“My family situation is… troubled,” Douglas said, his voice softer for all he was sitting at a greater distance. “My older brother was an unhappy, frivolous man. My younger brother was no better, and my mother is no longer inclined to go about in Society. I am the last exponent of my line still functioning, our finances are a disgrace, and I need…”
He needed to shut up. He looked off, and for an unguarded moment, fatigue, grief, and isolation swamped his reserve and no doubt showed in his eyes. He tried to reassemble his features into some bland, polite expression, but in the silence, his hostess spoke.
“You need what I have here,” she finished for him. “You need sanctuary.”
Relief at having been saved further explanation warred with self-consciousness.
“A place,” Douglas said, unable to keep wistfulness from his tone, “a place to rebuild, to make something good and new. But I am not an experienced man of the land, and our family seat is little more than a manor with a home farm. Some factor hired at arm’s length to assess the property would not do. This purchase in Sussex…”
He trailed off, and they were quiet for a few moments, a not uncomfortable silence that allowed Douglas the privacy of his thoughts.
“You saved my daughter’s life, at the least.” Miss Hollister spoke quietly too. “You did so when you didn’t know her; when people, including her own mother, who should have seen to her safety, did not or could not. I owe you.”
Douglas did not interrupt what was clearly a difficult recitation, and as his hostess had earlier, he resorted to the study of her teacup. Unlike his sturdy, rosy little cup, hers was delicate green porcelain, with a parade of white unicorns encircling the rim.
Fragile and odd, but lovely.
“Because I owe you, my lord, and because I want—I need—to be beholden to no man, I will do as you ask. I will travel to Sussex and see this land of yours. I will make recommendations and offer advice. I will do so without remuneration because we have a family connection, but there will be conditions.”
He nodded. Every gain in life came with conditions.
“The terms, my lord, are these.” She took a deep breath and clutched the arms of her chair as if she were in anticipation of brigands appearing in her parlor, her calm voice and steady demeanor notwithstanding. “My role will not be as steward, but as some innocuous female, your cousin, something of that nature—not your wife. Never as your wife. Rose will come with us, and we will travel as discreetly as possible. You will provide a chaperone, and in that capacity, I believe my aunt, Lady Heathgate, will serve.” She shot him a very direct look, a challenging look. “Are we agreed?”
Though it beggared his pride, she was going to help him. For a bit of humility on his part, he would know if the hope—the stubborn, irrational, unbecoming, inconvenient hope—that had sprung up unbidden when Greymoor had made his offer was grounded in reality.
“We are agreed, Miss Hollister.”
He rose to take his leave shortly thereafter, and would have bowed over her hand again, except she dipped to fuss over the tea tray and came up holding out a linen serviette to him.
“The tea cakes, my lord. I’ve had enough for the present, and Rose certainly won’t be having any sweets for a while.”
He accepted the offering of sweets and tucked the napkin into his coat pocket. When Miss Hollister had called for his horse, he expected her to leave him at the front door of her home. Instead, she accompanied him out onto the wide front porch and showed no signs of abandoning him until the horse was brought around.
“I will call on you tomorrow to discuss the details of our journey,” he said as the groom named Ezra led the gelding out. “Tonight I will be a guest of your cousin, the Marquess of Heathgate. And, Miss Hollister?”
She shifted her glance from his horse—a big, shiny bay, who’d walked over to a tree full of hornets at his master’s simple request—to Douglas. “Yes, your lordship?”
“Rose…” he said, frowning at the fact that the irons had already been run down the stirrup leathers, which was not exactly a best practice. “You mustn’t be too hard on her. She was frightened, overfaced, and too proud to say so. In an innocent child, we cannot take very great exception to that, can we?”
He was away down the steps without giving her a chance to reply—what did he know about children or innocence?—then at the mounting block and up on his horse. “Shall we say ten of the clock, Miss Hollister?”
“If you are truly interested in learning to manage the land, my lord, make a day of it. Get here as soon after sunrise as
you are able, dress as comfortably as you can, and be prepared to spend the day in the saddle.”
“I have my orders, ma’am.” He nodded politely, saluted with his crop, and turned Regis in a neat pirouette before cantering down the drive.
As soon as he was out of sight of the house and the woman standing on its porch, Douglas brought his mount down to the walk, withdrew the tea cakes from his pocket, and devoured them, slowly, methodically, one right after the other.
***
Gwen watched Douglas, Lord Amery, canter off, noting with one part of her mind that he had an elegant seat, even as the other, louder part began castigating her for this morning’s business.
If Rose hadn’t been up that tree, Douglas Allen could never have wrested this agreement from Gwen. But Rose had been up the tree, and worse, she could be laid out in the parlor at this moment, dead and disfigured as a result of her childish misadventure. And for just an instant, the man had looked… desolate. He’d looked as Gwen had felt so often, yet he hadn’t the comfort of even a child to console him.
Douglas Allen had the ability to proceed calmly with the next necessary task, though, and that was a fine quality in a man who intended to find his salvation in the land. And he’d been right about something, too: Rose had been frightened out of her wits, and unable to ask for help. Gwen knew that condition intimately, and she would not judge another harshly when suffering the same state.
Two
“So why,” Amery asked, “do you have calves arriving in the autumn?”
“Some calves,” Gwen corrected him. “For a late heifer, or one slow to mature, the extra six months before her first calf is a blessing. Autumn grass is rich, and the cooler weather agrees with the babies more than the summer heat. We get fewer cases of scours, and we aren’t competing with all of the spring market gluts, so we get better prices for them. The same is true of autumn lambs, if you can get the rams and ewes to cooperate.”
They were on horseback, which made conversations about rams and ewes and other earthy, reproductive things less mortifying—for Gwen, at least.
Douglas: Lord of Heartache (The Lonely Lords) Page 2