by Jane Ashford
The first curve in the drive revealed the house. Frithgerd was a long, low building of gray stone, its roofline somewhat jumbled by additions over centuries, its walls mellowed by ivy. Mullioned windows gleamed in one wing.
Whitfield dismounted to hand Penelope down from the gig. The vehicle was taken to the stables, and he ushered her into a lofty hall with great, dark beams above and a flagstone floor. “This part is Tudor,” he said. “On a cold day, you can burn a sizable tree in that fireplace and still not warm the room.”
That had sounded disparaging, Daniel realized. He hadn’t meant to be. The sight of Miss Pendleton at his gates had flustered him. He thought of her so often. He’d forced himself not to call at Rose Cottage. And then there she was. “There’s a Van Dyck in the gallery,” he heard himself add. What had become of his savoir faire?
“Miss Pendleton might be interested in your estate records,” said Macklin.
Daniel frowned at him. He didn’t want to show her that jumble. She’d think it a shambles. And she would be right.
“Oh, do you have anything about Rose Cottage?” she replied.
“Whitfield’s been searching, but he hasn’t found anything yet,” said the earl.
“Perhaps I could help. I used to manage—” She stopped abruptly, her cheeks reddening.
“Ah” came to the tip of Daniel’s tongue. But he managed not to say it. She used to manage what? He couldn’t resist trying to find out. “Come and see,” he said. With a bow, he escorted her along a corridor to the estate office. Only when they reached it did he notice that Macklin hadn’t followed. Fleetingly, he wondered if the older man was up to something. But Miss Pendleton’s exclamation of “Oh my” chased the idea from his mind.
Inside the office, his visitor was standing still, surveying the masses of papers. “I’m not sure I understand your method of organization,” she said.
Because there wasn’t any, Daniel thought. As anyone could see. She didn’t need to make a point of it. “Our agent left some months ago,” he said.
Miss Pendleton walked over to the desk. She eyed the stacks of documents with an odd expression. She looked…avid? At once, Daniel dismissed this inadequate word. She looked like a drunkard gazing at a foaming pint. She looked like a sheepdog vibrating with the need to herd. Her fingers flexed. She wanted to plunge her hands into his papers, he realized. She wanted to wrest information from their pages like a falcon tearing into a mouse. Why had he ever thought her wan and sylphlike? “Perhaps you could help me look through things,” he said.
She turned to him. Daniel was shaken by the flare of excitement in her blue eyes. How had he missed the fierce spirit inhabiting that slender body? And what might a man do to have that look directed at him? “There must be information about Rose Cottage here somewhere,” she said. Her fingers twitched again.
It took him a moment to find his voice. “We might look for it together.” From the way her gaze raked him, Daniel felt as if he’d suggested a far more intimate activity. Suddenly, his piles of papers seemed less of a burden. “I would appreciate your assistance,” he added. “You seem as if you might know your way about a records room.”
“I do.” Two murmured words, yet full of longing and melancholy.
The quick rise and fall of her breath under the bodice of her gown was very distracting. Had she agreed or not? Her eyes burned. Daniel wanted to know what lay behind them. Would joy bloom there as fiercely as this present emotion? She stood very still, her fists closed at her sides. The work of sorting would be an altogether different matter with her at his side. “Our two families must have some connection,” he said. “Or communication between them, at least. How else to explain the legacy?”
Miss Pendleton looked away, and he cursed himself for mentioning families. She’d made it clear she didn’t want to talk about them.
She muttered something. It might have been “They’ll find out anyway.” If that made any sense.
“I beg your pardon?” said Daniel.
When she turned back to him, the fire had disappeared from her blue eyes. They’d gone bleak. “Haven’t you made inquiries about me?”
He could see she hated the idea, and he wished he could deny it. Excuses crowded his mind, but none seemed persuasive in this moment, when his chief desire was to lure that fierce, vivid woman back into the light. He started to say that they’d heard nothing as yet. But she spoke again before he could.
“Lord Macklin looks like the sort of man who can find out whatever he wants. And do whatever he wants. So do you, for that matter. Peers of the realm.” She spoke the last phrase with great bitterness.
Daniel felt as if he was feeling his way through a pitch-black landscape. “Macklin knows a great many people,” he admitted.
“I’m sure he does. I suppose he’s a great friend of Lord Sidmouth.”
“The Home Secretary?” Where had that venom come from? And what did a government minister have to do with anything? Daniel groped for something to say, anything that might end the struggle racking her. But nothing occurred to him. Perhaps because her cheeks had flushed, and her chest continued to rise and fall in a way that compelled his attention. He had to keep tearing his gaze away.
Miss Pendleton’s breath sighed out. Her shoulders slumped. “Oh, what difference does it make?” Her tone was angry and impatient. “It’s only a matter of time until you find out. I don’t know why I thought I could keep secrets.” She raised her chin and stared at him. “My father was Sir Jared Pendleton, baronet. He had a place in Lancashire, where I grew up.”
The last two sentences seemed at once jerked out of her and practiced. As if she’d recited them many times before in just that defiant manner.
“Papa died three years ago, and my brother, Philip, came into his title.”
The mysterious brother, who always caused her to look resentful and desolate.
“But Philip…” Her brief silence seemed full of heartache. She took a breath and gathered her thoughts. “From the beginning then. Some years ago, my father opened a small coal-mining operation on our land, as others had been doing. Philip was curious about the workings. He followed every step in the process. He used to visit the new factories in Manchester too, to see how they worked. Mechanical things always fascinated him.”
She paused. Daniel nodded to show that he was listening. In fact, he was riveted. Not by the tale she was telling, which seemed mundane so far, but by her willingness to share it.
Miss Pendleton sighed again. “When Philip looked at these innovations, he didn’t see ingenuity or financial opportunity, as some do. He saw a vast future of oppression. That was one of his pet phrases. He predicted a wave of ugliness about to break over our heads. People viewed as cogs and gears instead of individuals. An ocean of soot and smoke. He could be so eloquent, describing that scene. He gave one chills.” She wrapped her arms around her ribs. “And he was determined to do something about it. Change is inevitable, he used to say, but the direction of change can be shifted. That was his obsession.” She fell silent, as if she couldn’t bear to go on.
Daniel waited. When she didn’t speak, he said, “But then he died.” She’d mentioned that her brother was dead. Bereavement didn’t quite explain her silence, however. There was more to this.
“Before he was murdered last August at the Peterloo Massacre.” Her eyes burned again, with a harsher light than before.
Daniel nearly took a step back under that glare. “Peterloo? The Luddite riot in Manchester?”
“It was a gathering to hear speeches about parliamentary reform.”
“Sixty thousand men, didn’t they say? That seems more like an insurrection.”
“Unarmed men,” she responded, though her face showed ambivalence. “And the government called in mounted cavalry to cut them down, as if Manchester was a battlefield and they were the enemy instead of English citizens.”
“Of course not.”
“But you’re a radical.”
“No.” Miss Pendleton sank into the desk chair, suddenly looking very tired. “No, I’m not. Wasn’t. Ever.”
She leaned back, looking more like the exhausted young lady who’d first arrived at Rose Cottage than the vibrant creature who’d lusted after his documents.
“I wasn’t like Philip,” she continued. “I helped our local people without thinking too hard about the cause. Families starve, you know, when they lose their livelihood to the new machines.”
“I have seen it,” said Daniel. “So your brother was a Luddite?”
Miss Pendleton gave a toneless laugh. “If you knew how often I’ve heard that question. Did he join the frame breakers, when did he, who are his associates? I don’t think a baronet was the sort of man accepted into their secret circles, but I’m not sure. Philip didn’t tell me anything.”
“So you wouldn’t be endangered,” Daniel guessed.
“I’d like to believe he thought of me in that way. But I don’t.” The last word was clipped. She rubbed her forehead. “There was a long inquiry after Peterloo. Lord Sidmouth’s agents are extremely…thorough. I was questioned at great length about my brother’s activities. They found it difficult to believe that I knew nothing of them.”
“Even though you gave your word?” Daniel hadn’t expected anything like this. He didn’t like to imagine her being accused. His feelings about the Manchester marchers were more complicated.
Miss Pendleton was staring at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign language. “My word?”
“That should have been enough.”
“Should it?”
“Of course.”
She blinked. “Well, it wasn’t. Lord Sidmouth’s people found my ignorance impossible to fathom. I had to assure them of it some hundreds of times before they were convinced.” She shrugged. “Or gave up. They let me go anyway.”
“Let you—”
“You may as well know everything,” she interrupted. “I can have no more secrets. Philip was posthumously convicted of treason and stripped of his title and estates. Our home went to the government. I expect they’ve sold it by now.” She gazed at the desktop. “Philip’s home really,” she murmured. “I knew that. But I’d lived nowhere else.” She raised her chin again. “So you asked about my family. That was it. I have none now.”
They had this in common.
“It’s a relief to have said it out loud,” she went on, sounding surprised. “Rather than dodging people’s questions, waiting for the story to come out.” She sat straighter.
How could he ever have thought her a waif, Daniel wondered. She was as fiercely alert as the falcon he’d pictured earlier, unhooded now and poised to hunt. Her unveiled presence, her confidences, felt like a priceless gift.
“So does that give you your hoped-for connection between our families?” Her tone had gone satirical.
“I don’t see how, no.”
“Your father was not a Luddite?” She smiled.
Daniel was bowled over, rendered breathless by the first real smile she’d ever shown him. Previous stretches of her winsome lips had been polite fictions, he realized. Social masks to deflect questions. There was nothing insipid or vague in her pretty face now. It was a moment before he could say, “Papa was mostly out of the country. I don’t think he was aware of developments in England.” Daniel glanced at the masses of papers. “Even on his own estates. He certainly never spoke of politics. Neither did my mother.”
Miss Pendleton gave him a look that said she appreciated this addition.
“I can ask Macklin. He might know more about my father’s political views.”
Some of her brightness dimmed. “I suppose you must tell other people what happened to me.”
The fatalism in her voice bothered him.
“Of course you will do as you like,” she added. “I’m in no position to impose conditions.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I didn’t, but you will find that hardly matters. Once one is tainted with suspicion, even by association, people edge away. They assure each other that there’s no smoke without fire, and other such idiotic analogies.”
“Your friends didn’t stand by you?” He felt a protective contempt.
She made a throwaway gesture. “Some were sympathetic, up to a point. But what was there to stand by? They were in Lancashire, and I…wasn’t.”
He saw her surrounded by suspicious officials, having lost the only home she’d ever known. Was she penniless? “They might have offered material help.”
“I have ample funds.” She snapped out the words.
Daniel had no doubt that ample was an exaggeration. But her face had closed. She wasn’t going to discuss this topic. He left it, for now. “I won’t tell anyone but Macklin,” he said. “He’ll need to withdraw his inquiries. But he won’t spread the story.”
She didn’t look as if she believed him. The shields that had made him think her bland were snapping back into place. Daniel was surprised at how intensely he wanted the stooping falcon back. “So will you help me with this mare’s nest of documents?”
He got his wish. Emotion flamed in her face. “You’d let me?” Her fingers moved as if to grasp the pages, then pulled back. “Even after what I’ve told you?”
“Of course. That makes no difference.” The look of naked gratitude he received in return for these words rendered him mute.
“I helped my father manage his estate,” Miss Pendleton said. “He trained me, and I loved it. Philip was away at school and university and then off…wherever he went. Papa and I—” She closed her lips and blinked back tears. “You’d really trust me?”
The raw emotion in her face was too much all at once. Daniel waved at the various caches of papers. “I’m in dire need of aid.” He went over to open a groaning wardrobe against the far wall. It released a cascade of pages that nearly knocked him down, and it wouldn’t be closed again.
“Great heavens, this is years of stuff,” said Miss Pendleton.
“You have no idea. More than twenty.” Or fifty? Had his grandfather done better? Did he come from a long line of failed hoarders?
“But why didn’t you… That is—”
She’d confided in him. She deserved some return for her openness. “My parents and I were…somewhat estranged.”
“Oh.”
“They told me nothing about Frithgerd, or anything else, really. As I mentioned, they were rarely in England.”
She nodded. She was listening. She looked interested. There was no sign that she meant to cut him off with bored commonplaces. That ought to have made it easy to speak. Yet somehow it didn’t.
“I responded in kind.” He gazed at the mess surrounding him. “Cutting off my nose to spite my face, it seems now.”
Miss Pendleton raised her eyebrows. Was she bewildered or disapproving? He couldn’t tell. He was suddenly afraid to try. Instead, he gestured at the drift of paper that had fallen from the wardrobe. “You could come over whenever you like. The deluge is always here.” That had sounded daft.
“Perhaps tomorrow.”
His heart leapt. “Of course. Anytime you like.”
“You’ll be here?”
“I thought we would work together.” Daniel pictured the two of them sitting side by side, heads bent together over…over desperately boring records and accounts. That part was too bad.
“Of course.” She folded her hands like a child resisting a pile of sweets. “I wouldn’t want to overstep. I understand that your information is confidential.”
Had she wanted to be alone with his documents? The idea made Daniel weirdly jealous.
“Two o’clock then?”
H
e nodded as she stood.
“I should find Kitty now and finish my errands.”
She turned to go, and he could only follow. That last bit hadn’t gone well. Miss Pendleton seemed to have a different vision of their collaboration. But she’d be back tomorrow. That was the important thing. She’d be here, and he’d find a way to say some of the things that had refused to emerge.
Her gig was fetched, along with her wandering maid. Macklin reappeared for the farewells, and their charming visitor departed. Daniel watched until her carriage was no longer visible and then turned to his houseguest. “Come into the library,” he said. “I have something to tell you.”
The earl’s expression grew more and more amazed as Daniel told him what he’d learned about Miss Pendleton. “So there’s no need to make further inquiries,” he finished.
“If she was telling the truth,” replied Macklin.
“Miss Pendleton is no liar!” The accusation incensed Daniel more than was reasonable.
“She seems sincere,” the older man agreed, his thoughtful expression unaffected by Daniel’s vehemence. “However, the government action against her brother that you describe is unusually harsh, particularly since he was dead. It suggests complications. Or enemies.”
“Enemies,” Daniel repeated.
“If he’d offended powerful people, she might shade the truth, out of fear.”
Daniel remembered Miss Pendleton’s bitter tone when she’d spoken of her questioners.
“The political situation is quite unsettled just now.” Macklin looked grave. “Every radical reformer the government could put their hands on is in jail or transported. A few were hanged. His Majesty’s ministers have not forgotten France and the guillotine. Workers in the new factories are particularly suspect. There are watchers all over the country.”
“Lord Sidmouth’s agents,” replied Daniel, echoing the phrase she’d used during their conversation. It was true that he barely knew Miss Pendleton, but he hated the idea of doubting her.