The Gamekeeper's Lady

by Ann Lethbridge

  Frederica felt her eyes widen as the list grew. ‘It sounds d-dreadfully expensive.’

  Uncle Mortimer’s jaw worked for a moment. He swallowed. ‘Nothing is too much to ensure that you have the bronze to make you worthy of Simon.’ He closed his eyes and gave a weak wave. ‘No more discussion. All these years I have paid for your keep, your education, the food in your stomach with never a word of thanks, ungrateful child. You will do as you are told.’

  Selfish. Ungrateful. The words squeezed the breath from her chest like a press-yard stone placed on a prisoner’s chest to extract a confession. Was someone like her wrong to want more than the promise of a roof over her head?

  It all came back to her mother’s shame. The Wynch-wood Whore. She’d only ever heard it said once as a child, by Mrs Doncaster. Frederica had turned the words over in her mind with a child’s morbid curiosity, and later with a degree of hatred, not because of what her mother was, she had realised, but because she’d left Frederica to reap the punishment.

  The sins of the father will be visited upon their children. Who knew what her father’s sins actually might be? For all she knew, her father could be a highwayman. Or worse, according to the servants’ gossip.

  Well, this child wasn’t going to wait around for the visitation. She had her own plans. And they were about to bear fruit. In the meantime she’d do well not to arouse her uncle’s suspicions. ‘As you request, Uncle,’ she murmured. ‘If you d-don’t n-need anything else, I w-would like to retire.’

  He didn’t open his eyes. Frederica didn’t think she’d be closing hers for most of the night. She was going to finish her drawings and be up early to catch a fox on his way home. The quicker she got her drawings done, the sooner she could get paid. If she was going to escape this marriage, time was of the essence.

  In the hour before dawn, normally quiet clocks marked time like drums. The ancient timbers on the stairs squawked a protest beneath Frederica’s feet. She halted, listening. No one stirred. It only sounded loud because the rest of the house was so quiet.

  Reaching the side door, she slid back the bolt and winced at the ear-splitting shriek of metal against metal. Eyes closed, ears straining, she waited. No cry of alarm. She let her breath go, pulled up her hood and slipped out into the crisp morning air.

  To the east, a faint grey tinge on the horizon hinted at morning. Ankle deep in swirling mist, she stole along the verge at the edge of the drive. Her portfolio under her arm and her box of pencils clutched in her hand, she breathed in the damp scent of the country, grass, fallen leaves, smoke from banked fires. Somewhere in the distance a cockerel crowed.

  Thank goodness there was no snow to reveal her excursion.

  Once clear of Wynchwood’s windows, she strode along the lane, her steps long and free. Gallows Hill rose up stark against the skyline. Its crown of four pines and the blasted oak, a twisted blackened wreck, could be seen for miles, she’d been told. She left the lane and cut across the meadow at the bottom of the hill, then followed a well-worn sheep track up the steep hillside.

  By the time she reached the top her breath rasped in her throat, her calves ached and the sky had lightened to the colour of pewter. Across the valley, the mist levelled the landscape into a grey ocean bristling with the spars of sunken trees.

  She stopped to catch her breath and looked around. Bare rocks littered the plateau as if tossed there by some long-ago giant. Among the blanket of brown pine needles she found what she sought: a narrow tunnel dug in soft earth partially hidden by a fallen tree limb. Where should she sit for the best view?

  She had read about the habits of the foxes in one of Uncle Mortimer’s books on hunting. Her best chance of seeing one was at daybreak near the den. Hopefully she wasn’t too late.

  A spot off the animal’s beaten track seemed the best idea for watching. A broom bush, one of the few patches of green at this time of year, offered what looked like the best cover. From there, the light wind would carry her scent away from the den.

  She pushed into the greenery and sank down cross-legged. Carefully, she drew out a sheet of parchment and one of her precious lead pencils. Pencils were expensive and she eked them out the way a starving man rationed crusts of bread, but knowing this might be her only chance to observe the creature from life, she’d chosen it over charcoal, which tended to smudge.

  As the minutes passed, she settled into perfect stillness, gradually absorbing the sounds of the awakening morning, cows lowing for the milkmaid on a nearby farm, the call of rooks above Bluebell Woods.

  Someone whistling and stomping up the hill.

  Oh, no! She looked over her shoulder…at Mr Deveril striding over the brow of the hill, a gun on his shoulder, traps dangling from one hand. He was making straight for the fox’s den with long, lithe strides. Blast. He’d scare off the fox. She put down her paper and rose to her feet, gesturing to him to leave.

  He stopped, stock still, and stared.

  Go away, she mouthed.

  He dropped the traps and started to run. Towards her. The idiot.

  She shooed him back with her arms.

  He ran faster, his boots scattering pine needles.

  She felt like screaming. He’d ruined everything. Any self-respecting fox would be long gone by now and no doubt Mr Deveril would have him shot long before her next opportunity to come up here. Drat. She would need to find another den and right when she didn’t need a delay.

  She bent to pack up her stuff.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, stopping short of the shrubbery. His massive shoulders in a brown fustian jacket blocked her view of the sky as his chest rose and fell from exertion. Lovely, beautiful man. She had the sudden desire to snatch up her pencil and draw. Him.

  A dangerous notion. ‘I would have been perfectly all right had you stayed away,’ she muttered, pushing through the scratchy branches.

  He frowned. ‘You waved me over. I thought you must have had an accident. Fallen from your horse.’

  ‘I walked.’ As if it mattered how she got here.

  ‘All the way up here?’

  ‘An early morning stroll. For my health.’

  His expression of disbelief said it all and his gaze dropped to the portfolio beneath her arm. ‘You came up here to draw the fox?’ He sounded disapproving, dismissive, just like everyone else.

  ‘Not possible since you decided to gallop over here like a runaway carthorse.’

  A muscle in his jaw flickered. His lips twitched. Amber danced in his eyes. Was he laughing? It certainly looked like it. She found herself wanting to smile, despite her disappointment.

  ‘You looked as if you were trying to get my attention. I didn’t realise you were here on a drawing expedition.’

  ‘What else would I be doing up here? I had hoped to draw it, b-before you k-killed it.’ She marched past him and headed downhill.

  ‘Wait,’ he commanded, deep and resonant.

  How dare he order her about? She forged on.

  ‘Miss Bracewell,’ he called out. ‘There is a better place from which to watch.’

  She twisted to look back at him.

  He stared at her silently, challenging her to return, looking like a dark angel with the grey sky behind and the dark pines above. A tempting dark angel. Her heart speeded up. She hunched deeper into her cloak. ‘W-Where?’ Now she sounded like a sulky child. What was it about this man that made her behave so badly? Apart from his physical beauty, that was, which would affect any warm-blooded woman.

  ‘You would have missed him from there.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I can show you, if you wish?’

  ‘You said him? Is it a male?’

  He smiled and her knees almost gave out as he transformed into a Greek god with a simple curve of his mouth. ‘The dog fox. Aye. This tunnel is his escape route. The front door is yonder.’ He nodded toward the blasted oak. ‘I’ve seen him go in three times this week.’

  The country accent missing from his earlier speech re
turned. She hesitated, her mind clamouring a warning even as her eyes worshipped the fierce beauty of his carved features. She longed to draw the character and darkness in his face and the athletic grace of his body. Not a clumsy attempt from memory, but from the flesh. Heat crawled up her face.

  His smile disappeared. ‘As you wish, miss,’ he said, clearly taking her silence as refusal.

  ‘I will.’

  A brow winged up and he tilted his head. ‘You mean, yes?’

  She nodded, her head bobbing as if her neck had turned into a spring.

  ‘This way, then, miss, if you please.’

  She followed him to a knobby protrusion of rocks beside the blackened tree.

  ‘There,’ he murmured, pointing at the ground a few feet away.

  Nothing. Then the darker black of a hole took shape among the shadows. ‘I see it.’ She tore off the portfolio’s ribbon.

  ‘Sit here,’ he said, a large, warm hand catching her elbow, steering her to another pile of rocks. Sparks seemed to shoot up her arm, as if he’d touched a lightning bolt and transmitted its energy to her through his fingers.

  Her mouth dried. A man of his ilk shouldn’t be touching her at all.

  Was this how her mother had felt with the lower orders? Entranced. Breathless. Hot all over. She could quite see why one might want to experience it again. And more.

  Somehow she sank down in the place he suggested and saw with amazement that the rock on which she perched formed a comfortable backrest and screened her from the opening to the fox’s den, except for a narrow slit between two rocks.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘This is perfect.’

  ‘I aim to please,’ he replied with a flash of a grin.

  The breath in her chest left her mouth in a besotted rush. The man should not smile. It was fatal. And, from the broadening smile, he knew it.

  He sank to his haunches beside her, his back against the rock on which she sat, his shoulder touching her skirts. He sat and stretched out legs which seemed to go on for ever and terminated in sturdy brown boots covered in mud. The rough fabric of his trousers clung to his thighs in a most revealing manner, suggestive of hard muscle and power.

  In the confined space between the boulders, his shoulders hemmed her in. Trapped her. His steady, even breathing filled her ears, warmth radiated from him and the smell of bay drifted on the still air, instilling a strong desire to inhale his manly scent. From the corner of her eye she admired the black curl of hair on the bronzed skin of his strong column of a neck and the way it skimmed the collar of his coarse linen shirt. Once more her pulse galloped out of control.

  Oh, yes, he would make an excellent subject. She had never drawn a man from life, but this one had an air of natural nobility for all his lowly station. Intangible to the eye, it radiated off him like an aura. No other man of her acquaintance had such elegant male beauty. Particularly not Simon.

  But would she have the skill to do him justice? It would mean spending hours in his company—his naked company—if she was to work in the classical style she longed to emulate. Any decent art school in Italy would want to see more than drawings of birds and wildlife to accept her as a serious artist. If her portfolio presented a study of him, and if it was any good…

  Would he even be willing? Perhaps if she offered to pay him? She didn’t have much money, but she had some.

  He glanced at her with a raised brow.

  Heat suffused her face. What would he think of her, if she asked him to pose in the nude?

  ‘Tired of waiting?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘Do you know why they call this Gallows Hill?’ she choked out over the pounding of her heart.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They hung the last highwayman in the district here. Mad Jack Kilgrew. Apparently, he took to the roads when he wasn’t allowed to marry the girl he loved.’ She knew she was gabbling, but she couldn’t stop. And since she didn’t have the nerve to broach what was on her mind, she just kept going. ‘They say all the local ladies were in love with him because he was so handsome and only ever stole kisses—the reason the menfolk hanged him out of hand.’

  ‘Romantic claptrap,’ he muttered.

  She laughed. ‘No. It is true. He stopped Mrs D-Demp-ster, the baker’s wife, when she was a girl.’

  ‘A man can’t live on kisses,’ he said.

  ‘Well, he did. Along with the money he stole from their husbands.’ She shivered. ‘They say you can hear the rattle of the g-gibbet on the anniversary of his death.’

  He grinned. ‘You’ve been reading too much Mrs Radcliffe.’

  The fatal grin again. She could not hold back an answering smile. For a long moment they said nothing. His gaze dropped to her lips and stayed there.

  A heart-quickening tension gripped every nerve in her body. The small space between them seemed to shrink and she was certain his breath brushed her cheek. A shiver slid across her shoulders, something sweetly painful tugged at her heart. A longing to be held.

  She’d felt nothing like it since childhood. She swallowed.

  He jerked back as if he, too, resisted the strange pull. ‘The fox will be along any moment now, if he’s coming.’ His voice sounded harsh, his breathing rushed, but his expression seemed quite blank as he stared ahead as if completely oblivious to what had just happened between them.

  Nothing had happened.

  She must have imagined the sense of connection. How could she feel such a thing for a man she’d met only a few times? But he was unlike anyone she had ever met. Handsome and arrogant, and occasionally humble. Well educated, too. He even knew about Mrs Radcliffe. Fascinating. And obviously very dangerous to her senses.

  He touched her arm. ‘Look,’ he said in a soft whisper.

  Pencil poised, she stared at the sleek red creature trotting into her field of vision. His bush hung straight to the ground, his shiny black nose tested the air and his ears pricked and twitched in every direction.

  With held breath, she sketched his shape. Focused, imprinted the colours on her mind, even as her hand caught his outline, the shadow of muscle, lean flanks, the curve of his head. Attitude, intense and watchful—not fearful, though. Eyes bright, searching, body sleek, softened by reddish fur.

  Apparently satisfied, the fox trotted the last few feet and, after one glance around his domain, disappeared into his lair.

  Frederica didn’t stop drawing. The image firmly in her mind’s eye, she captured the narrow hips and deep chest, the tufted ears and pointy muzzle, the white flashes on chest and paws.

  Finally, she stopped and rolled her shoulders.

  ‘Did you see him for long enough?’ he murmured.

  She jumped. She’d forgotten his presence. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You draw with your left hand.’

  The devil’s spawn. She waited for him to cross his fingers to ward off evil spirits the way some of the other servants did. She should have used her right hand as she’d been taught by hours of rapped knuckles. But then the picture would be stilted. Useless. Tears welled unbidden to her eyes. How could she have let him see her shame? She never let anyone watch her draw. She transferred the pencil to her other hand. ‘I-I—’

  His hand, large and warm, strong and brown from hours outdoors, covered hers. ‘My older brother is left-handed.’

  She glanced up at his face and found his expression frighteningly bleak. ‘Y-you h-have a b-b—’ she swallowed and took a deep breath ‘—brother?’

  ‘Yes. I have two brothers and three sisters.’

  ‘How lucky you are. Do they live near?’

  She winced at his short, hard laugh. ‘I don’t know about lucky. They live in London most of the time.’ He shrugged. ‘What about you? Do you have any siblings?’

  How had she allowed the conversation to get on to the topic of families? Had he really not heard the gossip about her mother, or was he looking for more salacious details? ‘I never knew my parents.’

  The small breath of wind lifted a strand of da
rk hair at his crown in the most appealing way. ‘An orphan, then. I’m sorry,’ he said softly.

  ‘You forgot your Somerset accent again, Mr Deveril.’

  He pushed to his feet, unfolding his long lean body and stretched his back. ‘So I did, Miss Bracewell. So I did.’

  ‘Why pretend?’

  ‘Weatherby wouldn’t have hired a man educated above his station.’

  The words rang true, but she sensed they hid more than they told. Clearly he was not about to reveal any secrets to her. With a feeling of disappointment, of an opportunity missed, she packed up her drawing materials. It really was time to go or she would be late for breakfast.

  She held up her portfolio. ‘Th-thank you for this. I presume it was my last opportunity to see him at all?’

  His gaze followed hers to the tools of his trade, the fierce metal traps and the gun. He inclined his head. ‘I expect so.’

  She nodded. ‘Good day, Mr Deveril.’ Great way to convince him to let him sit for her as a model: accuse him of murder.

  She’d have to do better than that if she wanted to escape her fate with Simon. And she’d have to have a little more courage.

  Chapter Five

  The gamekeeper’s office beside the stables smelled of old fur, manure and oil. A small lantern on a rickety table provided enough light for the task of cleaning his lordship’s shotguns before daylight would send Weath-erby and Robert out into the fields.

  ‘Did ye catch the fox on Gallows Hill yesterday, young Rob?’ the gamekeeper asked in his creaking voice.

  Until yesterday, Robert had never balked at culling Reynard’s population. Cunning and sly, their raiding of henhouses and other fowl made them unpopular vermin. Caught in its natural setting by an artist who seemed almost as wild as the creatures she brought alive on paper, the dog fox had looked magnificent.

  The far-seeing hazel eyes on the other side of the table required an honest answer.

  ‘No, sir. I don’t think that’un’s raiding Lord Wynch-wood’s chickens, after all. The only bones I saw were voles and rabbits.’