The Rogue's Folly

by Donna Lea Simpson

  From the parlor window Dodo watched her young friend ride. Where on earth was May going burdened down like that? And with a pail? She had seemed tense and nervous through the vicar’s visit, but it could well have been just the man’s intent interest in her breeches-clad bottom that had frightened her. Emily had told her much about May’s abhorrence of men and of physical contact. With what had happened to her the spring before it was no wonder, but it was more likely years of being exposed to the kind of men her mother dallied with that had caused the deep-seated fear. Though Dodo was a spinster by choice and had little use for the male sex, she could not help but feel that what May needed was an understanding and gentle man to help her get over it.

  But all of that had nothing to do with the mystery of where the girl was going in such a pother. With her thin lips pursed in a scowl, Dodo moved off toward the kitchen for a word with Mrs. Connors. Mrs. C. and Bill might have noticed something. If anyone knew what was wrong with May, they did.

  • • •

  Cassie flew across the grass, swift and agile. Burdened as she was, May realized that she had still failed to bring some things. Shaving implements. How on earth was she to find that very male necessity without raising suspicion? And she had meant to bring a currying comb for the stallion. Next time. It was amazing, when she thought about it, how her life had changed since that morning. Now she had an object, a raison d’etre. Etienne. Gallant, handsome, wounded Etienne.

  Of course she did not think of him as a handsome man in the same way as the young ladies in London the previous spring. She had seen how they looked at the young Frenchman, who at that time was going under the name of Etienne Marchant. And they hadn’t even known at that point that he was the legitimate heir to Emily’s husband, the marquess. If they had he would have been besieged by matchmaking mamas. No one had known that until he disappeared, and it was whispered that he was responsible for several attempts on the marquess’s life.

  May did not believe that. She had reason to understand the true gallantry of the man and would not believe him capable of such terrible actions. Never had she felt as safe as she did with him, for there was an innate gentleness in him that she felt and responded to on some deep level. Maybe he would confide in her, for she had the feeling his trouble went back before his sojourn in London.

  Entering the woods, she glanced back over her shoulder to make sure no one from the house was following her or watching her. She could barely see the mansion, atop the long rise that led from the copse to the grassy terrace of Lark House. Even if someone saw her enter the woods, she hoped they would not know her destination.

  She slowed her mare to a walk as she made her way through the overhanging tree limbs that obstructed the path. It was clear that no one had ridden this way for years, but it had been kept fairly clear of underbrush, so someone walked the trail occasionally. She pulled Cassie to a halt near the folly and swung down from the saddle. She looped the reins over a low-hanging branch—she didn’t want Cassie to wander until the supplies had been unloaded—and walked toward the small structure.

  It felt deserted, but that was ridiculous. She poked her head into the folly, not wanting to call out in case Etienne was sleeping.

  He wasn’t there. Where could he be?

  Her heart pounding with fear for her friend, she raced around the clearing but could see no sign of him, nor could she see his stallion. She ran to the back but the saddle was still there, concealed in the same mound of branches as she had left it.

  “Etienne,” she cried. What if someone had attacked him and carried him off? He did not even have the strength to stand, much less fight off attackers. An eerie moan drifted on the breeze from somewhere close by.

  “Etienne! Etienne?” she called, and raced through tangled weeds to the edge of the clearing and peered into the woods.

  The moan again, this time closer.

  “Etienne, where have you gone?” She heard her own voice, mournful, afraid, and she shook off the terror. She was strong; Etienne had said so when she escaped Dempster. He was there somewhere.

  She started searching the edge of the woods and another moan took her through some low-lying brush, where she saw a flash of white. It was Etienne’s shirt.

  “Oh, Etienne, what happened?” she asked, kneeling beside his prone figure.

  He rolled over and gazed up at her with bleary eyes. For a moment he didn’t say a word, and she feared that he was beyond speech. But then he grinned woozily. “I thought you went for the constable. I thought you were going to get them to take this wicked Frenchman off your property.” His voice was hoarse and dry, and he lay limply in the brush, his dirty torn shirt caught on some brambles.

  “How could you think that?” May said, tears thickening her voice. “I would never turn you in, no matter what they say you did. You’re safe here, I promise.”

  He reached up and caressed her face with one filthy hand, his touch gentle despite the grime ground into his skin. She almost couldn’t breathe, and she remembered the first time he touched her at a ball; he took her hand and her pulse had pounded as it did now. She had thought it revulsion, but now she was not so sure. His brown eyes were only half open, and he regarded her under his thick fringe of lashes, his smile dying as his tawny eyes traced her features.

  “I should have known that, ma petite sauveteuse, my little rescuer. I should have known that such as you would never . . . how do you English say . . . ‘let me down.’”

  “We must get you back to the folly! What on earth were you doing out here? Did you really think I was bringing the constable?” She slid her arm under him, ignoring the prickles of the bramble shrubs and feeling only the warm, muscular form beneath Etienne’s shirt.

  “Per’aps a little; not the whole way, you understand. But also, I had the business to take care of before you came back, and it was not the kind of thing with which I could ask your help.”

  He was grinning up at her, and she frowned, perplexed, as he staggered to his feet, his weight bearing down on her shoulders. “What do you mean?”

  “If I have to explain further, ma petite, I will embarrass you frightfully. But I fear I have not completely done up my breeches again.”

  She glanced down to see that he had missed one button, and she felt her face flame. Of course! He had to relieve himself, and wanted to do it before she came back. She didn’t say another word as, bowed under his dead weight clinging to her, she tottered up the slight incline through the wooded area, into the clearing.

  Of course even the clearing was overgrown with scrubby shrubs, tall weeds, and thick grass. Around the base of the folly thickets of wild roses tumbled, still blooming, even ignored as they were. May supposed she should be grateful that everyone seemed to have forgotten the existence of this secluded little folly. If it had been checked regularly by her steward or a groundskeeper Etienne would have been turned over to the authorities, and who knew what would happen to him? He stood accused of trying to kill a peer of the realm, and that was a hanging offense. A dark vision of Etienne hanging at Tyburn swept through her brain, and May shuddered.

  “What is it, little one? Ah, yes, I am not to call you ‘little one.’ My lady? It has the possessive sound, that, does it not?”

  He babbled as she supported him around to the front of the folly. She didn’t answer. She didn’t want to tell him what she had seen, and how much she feared it was a vision of his future.

  “Here we are,” she said as she helped him into the folly.

  As he sank down to the floor with a groan, May noticed how very pale he was and how he quivered from the exertion of getting back to safety. It made her frantic, but she knew she must not give in to her fear for him. He needed her strength right now, and he would get every ounce of it.

  She made a trip to the stream and trudged back, carrying a pail of sparkling clean water. It bubbled up from a spring on her property, and she had heard that in ancient times it was thought to have healing powers. She hoped that was at leas
t a little true. She unloaded the supplies, and then sank down beside him with the bottle of wine she had brought.

  “Good girl,” he groaned, reaching out for the bottle. “I am so thirsty!”

  “Water first. It will quench your thirst better than wine.”

  He drew back, scandalized. “Water? Water is for horses, not for men.”

  “All right, a little wine, but then water!” She drew the cork for him and he took the bottle and held it to his lips, taking a long draught.

  “Ah,” he said at last, some of the ruby red wine dribbling down into the scruffy beard that covered his chin. “What a lovely burgundy, but what a shame to drink it in such circumstances.” He gazed around him in chagrin at the dirty, cold folly.

  “You are lucky to be able to drink at all.” She would not let him sink into self-pity. He was alive, and until that morning she had thought him submerged in a watery grave.

  He cast her an amused glance as he took another swig. “Ah, but you see,” he said, wiping his mouth with his grimy sleeve. “This lovely wine should be drunk before a roaring blaze in a stone hearth in some woodland manse. The house would be dark and lonely, except for two souls, naked, on a rug before the fire, with the golden glow of the flames flickering over passion-warmed skin.”

  The picture was vivid and crisp, and May gasped and primmed her lips. “Etienne, how can you . . .” She looked into his laughing brown eyes. “You wretch, you’re teasing me! How can you do that in your condition? You should be saving your strength.”

  “Oh, but my little one, it is so good just to see you and gaze upon you, that the temptation to make you blush was irresistible!”

  The warmth in his eyes made her blush deepen. “Enough of that,” she said briskly, getting up. “First, you are going to drink some water. I have brought food and supplies, and I want to make you comfortable, and then I must take a look at your wound.”

  “It does pain me,” he said.

  “Maybe we ought to do that first, then,” she said, getting the witch hazel and ointment out. She knelt beside him on his right side, where the blood-soaked breeches were rent. “You are going to have to strip off your shirt and pull down your . . . your breeches just a little.”

  “Never have I been commanded to undress in quite such a martial tone,” he said. He kept his tone light. He knew how afraid she was, this young lady, of men. After her horrible experience in the spring with that cur Dempster, perhaps that was natural, but he had the feeling it went much deeper than that.

  But she did blush adorably, he thought, irrelevantly.

  “I have nothing in mind but the cleansing and dressing of your wound,” she said through stiff lips.

  She turned away to wet a cloth in the pail of spring water and he watched her through half-closed eyes, his pain and the wine making him sleepy. She was so slender and energetic, he thought. And she dressed in men’s breeches. She bent over the pail to wring the cloth out and he gazed at her bottom. Slender she might be, but delectably rounded in the right places. Did she know how outrageously arousing was a woman in men’s clothing? Somehow it took the masculine and made it tantalizingly feminine. How would she look clad only in a man’s shirt, laying before the fireplace . . . ah, but he must not think of this little one that way. Indeed, she was not his type at all, though she was far more attractive than she knew.

  “All right,” she said briskly, wringing out the cloth. “What are you waiting for? Strip down.”

  He raised his eyebrows and stared at her with amusement.

  “I have to have access to your wound,” she said impatiently, glaring at him as he grinned.

  It was a pleasant diversion to tease her; she was so easy to disconcert. She knelt by his side and tugged at his shirt, pulling the bottom out of his breeches. She was not exactly pretty, he thought, watching some curling tendrils of hair fall from her tight bun. But her skin was pale perfection, and her eyes were the blue of the sky after the rain had washed the color from it.

  He let her pull the shirt over his head and rested back against the cold stone, wincing at the chill that had penetrated his body. He tried to ignore the pain that spread in a dull ache through his groin. Even now the infection was taking hold, and his blood was becoming poisoned. What kind of chance had led him to her folly and made him crawl in, to die? How unutterably provident.

  She undid his breeches, her hands trembling. She made clumsy work of his buttons. Of course the fabric was stiffened with his own blood, black now after two days. She darted a glance up into his eyes, and then another. Her breath was coming faster as one button in particular stuck. He covered her hand and gently helped her undo the button. “Th-thank you,” she breathed.

  The first touch of the frigid wet cloth on his skin made his whole body jolt with a combination of pain and cold. Her hands, still trembling, worked quickly to wipe away the crust of blood. She was the stuff of the English army wives, intrepid and braver than one would think. She did not shy away from unpleasant tasks.

  She had brought a brown bottle and unstoppered it, then soaked a square of gauze. He hissed at the streak of pain that shot through him as she held the cloth to his wound. Once the dark mist of pain had cleared from his vision he noticed that no longer did her hands shake; it was he who trembled and she who gave comfort with murmured words of sympathy.

  “The wound is infected . . . positively hot to the touch, and fiery red. What happened? I cannot tell, it is so swollen, but were you shot or is it a sword cut?”

  “Neither. It is a knife wound, and fairly deep, I think.”

  He watched her soak a fresh piece of gauze in the cleansing liquid and clean the area thoroughly. Now that she was down to the business at hand, she blushed no more. He felt a loss of control, like she had become the senior.

  “Why are you not married?”

  Her hand jerked and she spilled from the bottle. “Now look what I’ve done,” she said, not meeting his eyes. She hastily cleaned up the spill, then got out a tin of ointment, smeared some on the wound, and put another patch of clean gauze over it. “You have lost a lot of blood. Your assailant may have hit a vein. The important thing is to reduce the inflammation and make sure your blood does not become poisoned. This ointment should help that.” She cast a mischievous glance up at him. “I use it on my horses when they hurt themselves.” She did his breeches back up again, over the bandaged wound.

  And so she would not answer his question, Etienne thought, about marriage. Very well.

  “And now we need to clean you up a bit.” She retrieved some cloths and a square bar of lavender-scented soap and scrubbed the bar across the wet cloth. With amusement he watched her approach him, as he lay bare-chested against the wall. She vacillated, she wavered, but then she steeled herself and knelt next to him once more. He watched as she swallowed, and then applied the soapy cloth to his arm, first. He allowed her to wash his arms, scrub his hands, and then move up to his shoulders. It seemed she was intent on doing a very thorough job.

  He closed his eyes. It felt so very good, now that the cloth was warmed with his own body heat, to feel the fragrant soap and strong, slender hands scrub him clean. She rinsed the cloth and wiped the soap from his arms and shoulders, tracing with her sensitive fingers the outline of his muscles. He was about to languidly thank her, when he felt the damp, soapy cloth on his chest. He drew in a deep breath and opened his eyes. She froze, and her hands trembled as she met his gaze.

  Oh, but this felt good in an entirely different, and not so proper, way. She swallowed, and then started circular motions on his chest, the soap lathering through the mat of hair. Down her strokes circled, down to his stomach following the arrow of hair that pointed down to his breeches. He felt a stirring in his body, a faint pulse. As weary as he was, his body could not resist the sweet touch of the woman before him.

  Her voice quavering just slightly, she said, “So where have you been these last six months? We all thought you dead. It was reported that you were on a channel cross
ing boat that went down.”

  “I was on that ship, and it did go down, but it was not so far off the coast. I was fortunate. Some fishermen found me and took me to shore, and a woman in the village took me in.”

  “So you stayed with her this whole time?”

  Her hands lowered, lathering his stomach, and then she twisted to rinse the cloth.

  “Only for a month or so. I am wanted by many people, I fear. I did not want to endanger the kind woman.”

  “Where did you move to?” she asked, wiping with the clean water to remove the fragrant lather.

  His stomach muscles tightened under her gentle ministration, and he realized that he had better think of anything but her hands if he wanted to remain decent. “Many places. There are in every village widows who are very lonely and willing to share their bed. The war killed many Englishmen, leaving behind good women.”

  He watched in fascination as the fiery red crept up her neck and flooded her cheeks. She was shocked, but he would only ever be honest with her. She deserved that much from him.

  Her comment, when it came, was uttered through stiff lips. “Have you no shame? Will you bed any willing woman?”

  Her hands shook like aspen leaves in a storm and he frowned, wondering why she seemed so angry. “No, little one,” he said, and then covered her trembling hands, now down near the edge of his breeches, steadying them even though his own were not perfectly still. “I will not bed just any woman. I avoid most strenuously the unmarried young ladies, and I do not bed young widows. They are most eager for marriage, and I am not made to be a husband.”

  • • •

  May had stopped scrubbing him as his hands covered hers. It was Etienne’s way of telling her that she did not need to worry about his intentions toward her, she thought, starting her task again, but not meeting his eyes. She should be grateful, she supposed, that he would not attempt to seduce her. Not that she could be seduced, but it made their relationship less complicated if they did not have to worry about his intentions. However, she was indignant for some reason, rather than grateful.