She was so very weary, but it was more than just tiredness. It had more to do with a deep down exhaustion, the burden of always doing what others expected. It was what she had hated about London, where every move one made was for public perusal. A misstep, and she had made many, could lead to social ostracism. That was not necessarily an unhappy outcome if she was solely guided by her own wants, but she had deeply wanted to make her mother happy, and happiness, for Mrs. Dresden, was a matter of public acceptance.
But no more. Miss Jane Dresden would live for herself now. She had come to the painful understanding that there was no escaping your life, there was only dealing with it. What form “dealing with it” would take she was not sure, but the morning would see her new life begin. At least it would once she found her way to Lesleydale.
Despite her intentions to remain awake through the night, she felt the drifting, hazy numbness of sleep overtake her and she was soon adrift in the arms of a forgiving Morpheus.
Chapter Fifteen
The morning dawned with a brilliant display of rosy light from the east. Jane awoke, confused and stiff, aching in every joint, to the miserable awareness that she had been excessively foolish the night before and had, through her own actions, made many people unhappy. She lay, staring at the rough timber of the roof above her, feeling the prickling of the straw pallet through her dress. What must Mary be thinking? And Gerry? Especially Gerry. He likely headed out to find her and who knew how long he would have wandered before giving up?
She stretched, rolling her shoulders and moving to sit on the edge of the low, crude wooden structure that held the musty straw pallet. How she had taken for granted all her life the presence of servants for the simplest things! She attempted to comb her ratted hair out with her fingers. It was hopeless and she no doubt looked like a madwoman. The Dresdens had not lived lavishly—indeed, her mother had oft lamented their “impoverished” state—but Jane now understood that she had accepted without a second thought simple comforts like hot food and tea prepared by other hands and served to her on pretty plates.
Tea! How she longed for a cup of tea, she thought, trying to swallow, her mouth dry with the dust of the straw and dirt floor. A beam of morning sun found its way through a chink in the wood walls, and she saw how dirty her once-fine hands were. She would need to wash in the Lesley just to be bearable to herself. And that was another thing she had overlooked, a hot bath whenever she wanted one. Clean clothes, warm fires, fragrant mattresses and linens; she had accepted them all, taking them as part of nature like the budding of the trees and the blooming of daffodils. She had thought that a simpler life in a cottage would be endless sweet and summery days of picking flowers and strolling country lanes, drinking tea in the garden, gentle conversation with the cottage cat. Evenings were to be taken up with reading and sewing and chatting about the day.
Instead, as evidenced by Mary, that “simple” life, for the poor, was one of constant struggle. They were accustomed to long hours, hard labor, inconvenience, cold, and conditions that could only kindly be called simple. Call them rather rough, often inadequate, occasionally brutal and squalid. And yet Mary, Jane knew, considered herself fortunate. She moved her aching legs, cramped by the cold pallet, and tottered out the door to find a place to relieve herself. And that was yet another luxury she would never again take for granted: a chamber pot, and a maidservant to empty it.
Oh, for a hot cup of tea, she thought again, groaning at the ache of muscles and smelling the dampness of her skirts. She was distasteful even to herself. There was nothing romantic about poverty, she decided. She had had too little contact with the realities of life before this experience; never would she be so mistaken again. She knew now that she had pictured a simple life with the luxury of time and money.
Her crude morning ablutions completed, she looked about herself.
Ah, but the simple life did have the occasional compensation. She took in a deep breath of untainted air and gazed out over a dewy landscape sparkling in the early spring sunshine, beaming happily down on the moor that the night before had been a dark and threatening wilderness. A mist rose from the grass and drifted, whirled into threads and fingers by the breeze that flitted up the moor. She glanced back at her shelter, finding that it was a crude shepherd’s hut, little more than a daub-and-wattle shack on a low-rising hill.
The valley of the Lesley spread out below her, the jewel-green trees following it like an emerald necklace. In the hazy distance, the valley fog laying like a comforting blanket among the dwellings, was the village of Lesleydale. She was not so far from it after all! During those long hours of wandering she must have circuitously made her way closer and closer. Granted, distances were likely deceiving, she thought, in this open country, but still, it couldn’t be more than five miles.
It was time to stop being a coward and take control of her life. Perhaps she had limited options—as an unmarried young woman that was indubitably true—but she was also firmly on the shelf. After this debacle no one would consider her marriageable. Perhaps a cottage, after all, in the countryside near Bath, with a respectable companion and a couple of servants. Definitely a couple of servants. She turned her mind firmly away from Gerry and the life of love she had envisioned with him. She absolutely would not endanger his livelihood; Lord Haven would no doubt be furious at her hoax. He would not look kindly on one in his employ marrying his betrothed, especially since it meant she was rejecting him in the process! Even if Gerry had asked her—her heart throbbed at the memory of his kisses and caresses, but she put a halt to her wayward thoughts—even if he had asked her to marry him, she would have had to say no.
New determination in her step and in her heart, she began the long walk to Lesleydale.
• • •
“Is it true?” Pamela said, jumping down from the bottom step in the great hall in a most unladylike fashion. Her silky skirts bounced and floated around her slim legs.
Haven, wearing his disreputable old clothes again—he did not know how long he would be nor where he would have to go to find Jenny . . . Jane—was ready to head out the door toward the stable. “Is what true?”
“Is that jolly girl, Jenny, really Miss Dresden?”
“Yes, infant,” he said, ruffling her curls with a casual caress. “They are one and the same.”
“And are you going to marry her?” She hopped on one foot.
“No . . . yes . . . I don’t know!”
“Well, make up your mind,” she said, settling down and staring at him quizzically.
“I have to find her first. And then, well, it is not so easy. She has an aversion to . . . to my position that makes it highly doubtful that she will wish to marry me, now that she knows me as Haven.” He nodded to a servant, who brought him a canvas sack containing food and water. If she was lost he might be gone for some time trying to find her and he did not want to be without provisions. He was taking one of his best hunters with him and would stop at Mary’s first to try to pick up Jenny’s scent.
“Ah, yes, Grand told me about your little . . . mmm, indiscretion, I think she called it. How romantic!” She clutched her hands together and struck a giddy pose, eyes rolling upward to peer into the vaulted reaches of the great hall. “The great lord poses as a simple shepherd lad to gain the love of the maiden, who in turn is disguising herself as a simple serving wench, when really she is a great heiress and niece—or is it cousin?—to an earl or a duke, or a marquis, or whatever!”
Haven gave her a quelling look and she giggled. “Well, really, Haven! It is just too deliciously Goldsmithian, if there is such a word! She Stoops to Conquer. He Stoops to Conquer. They All Stoop to Conquer.” Her expression becoming more serious, Pamela said, “But truly, that is ridiculous! How can she dislike a title? I thought she was a sensible sort, but if she is going to take against a silly title when she likes the man behind it well enough, then I think she must not be so very—”
“Stop prattling!” Haven glanced over and saw he had hu
rt his favorite sister. He tweaked her cheek, shouldered the canvas sack, and said, “Sorry, pixie, but I must go. I do not know why she has taken against the title so, but when we talked—she did not know who I was then, remember—she said much against the titled nobility. I fear it’s an old and ingrained prejudice against some of the more frivolous and insensitive of our class.”
“But Grand said . . . and you had all that time together. Maybe now that she knows it is you and that you are not some ridiculous, puffed-up man-milliner, like some of the titled noddies we met in London, she will reconsider.”
Haven smiled. “I can hope, but I don’t think it will make a jot of difference. After all, she ran away again, did she not?”
“Coward,” Pamela said with a disparaging sniff.
“Not everyone has your courage, infant. And not everyone has been raised so indulgently. I have always let you say what you will; even when you were younger I let you run wild. But most young ladies feel a certain inability to say what they really want or need. We will be charitable toward Miss Dresden until we know her story.” It was a warning as much as a statement.
“I suppose so,” the girl said wistfully, adding, “She seemed so jolly. I should like a sister like that instead of the plaguey one I have.”
Haven held his tongue. He did not see a happy resolution to this saga. He would have to be satisfied with helping Miss Dresden as much as possible. It horrified him to think that she was running away because she could not bear the thought of being tied to him for life. When he had agreed to allow her to come up to Yorkshire—though it had never been said, it was done with the knowledge that he would be looking her over, much as one would a mare before purchasing—he had found it repugnant even then when it was only his own feelings he was considering, but he had never stopped to consider what the young lady was thinking and feeling. It was so much what was done, so much a part of life for his class, that he had assumed that she understood the rules of the game and was content to abide by them.
But his own reputation in London circles was not altogether as a bright and shining example of noble manliness. The Seasons he had spent in London—years ago now but still vivid in his memory—had been little better than torture and he knew it had brought out all of his worst qualities, a tendency to sullen surliness and an uncertain temper. He had been brooding and dour, certain that every joke was at his expense and all laughter aimed in his direction. Not an attractive image to attain but there it was, it was too late to do anything about it now. If she had heard of him at all in advance, it would not have been a happy picture to form in her mind. He set off without delay, scorning accompaniment. The other teams of men he sent out across the fells. But his fervent hope was that he found her himself.
• • •
It was not as simple, Jane found, as following the Lesley. At some point in the day, she had become confused by a branching of the river and had followed the wrong branch. As a result, afternoon was waning by the time she thought she was on the right track. Even exhausted as she was, she dreaded stopping to ask for help, though she would have to if she ran out of daylight or energy.
And she was deeply weary, down to her very bones. Her cheeks were burning from their unaccustomed exposure to the sun. Her nose was running, her eyes scratchy and dry, and her body was drooping along with her spirits as she finally found the bridge that crossed over the Lesley into the village of Lesleydale. It was a most picturesque village, she realized now, nestled snugly on the slope of a hill, but as tired as she was its beauty could not touch her as it might have at another time.
She paused to catch her breath on the humped stone bridge and stared up at the tiny, winding village of stone houses, smoke curling from the chimneys. The inn was near the river, if she remembered right. She could only hope it was not too far now, because she felt that she only had a finite number of footsteps remaining in her strength before she collapsed, utterly spent. She plodded across the bridge, over the sparkling Lesley. Quaint stone and brick houses huddled close together, their white-painted windows covered in fresh curtains and their doors painted cream and azure, apple green and even primrose. The first buds of spring flowers were pushing through the earth in tiny garden plots squeezed in beside stone steps. If she had been in a mood to admire she would have been charmed by the sight. As it was she just hoped that each weary footstep found her closer to a bed.
She passed by an elderly hunched woman who gave her a startled look and bustled away from her. Jane wondered what she looked like. She had been tidy enough when she left Mary’s cottage the night before, but she had wandered the moors for hours in a stiffening breeze and drizzle, then had sheltered in a hut on a straw pallet and had wandered again all day. She touched her hair and was alarmed at how it felt, like an unsuccessful bird’s first nest. Her finger-combing that morning had not done one jot of good. And she was so very weary and hot and hungry. She had slaked her thirst in the sparkling springwater of a gill that fed the Lesley, but food had not been a thought, nor a possibility.
The inn could not come into sight too soon. And there it was. She sighed. Her strange odyssey, living the life of a class so different from her own well-tended existence, was over. Wearily, she climbed the steps of the old stone inn and entered the low-ceilinged front room.
“Miss Dresden!” The innkeeper was a rotund man, but quick and agile for all his bulk. “Miss Dresden, we bin that worrit abat ya! Where ha’ ya bin? Who was it that took ya away? Miss Dresden? Miss Dresden!”
She almost collapsed. She had not understood how truly bone-deep weary she was until she knew that her journey was at an end. Every last bit of energy drained from her and she sagged against the bar. “Mr. Barker, may I have a room?”
• • •
Haven handed the reins to his groom and limped back up to Haven Court. His best hunter, Olivia, had been of some help. He had followed her lead and knew that Jenny had stayed the night in a shepherd’s cottage high in the fells, but at some point she must have gone into the spring water and the dog just could not pick up her scent on the other side. His only hope now was that Jenny had found her way to Lesleydale. He would have to send a servant to town, because he was sure he could not ride another foot. Just as he was going up the step to the house a young fellow, a groom from the Tippling Swan, galloped up on a hack. “My lord!” he cried. “They found her! That there ledy o’ yourn. She be at the inn, safe an’ sound!”
With a surge of relief so sharp it was more like agony, he saddled a fresh horse and recommended the young man to the tender mercy of his cook. Invigorated as he never thought he could be, aching limbs forgotten, Haven galloped off as the evening sun met the horizon and began its night ritual of sinking into the earth. She was safe . . . safe, safe, safe. The word thudded through his brain with every beat of his horse’s hooves on the beaten earth of the road into Lesleydale.
And he loved her with every fiber of his being, every bit of his body and every whiff of his spirit. He was pissing mad, as the Yorkshiremen in the village might say, that he had suffered such agonies of apprehension for her safety through a long night and day, but more full of fear for what she had endured. He needed to see her, to touch her, to be sure that she was whole and healthy.
He was into Lesleydale faster than ever he had, realizing as he arrived that he had not even left word for his family that Jenny was found. But word would make its way up from the servants’ quarters once the stable fellow’s message was relayed. He handed the reins of his horse to a waiting groom and raced into the inn, finding Barker and almost shouting, “Where is she?”
“First room on the left at the top o’ th’stairs, milord. Can I . . .”
But Haven did not wait to hear what the landlord had to say. He took the ancient worn stairs two at a time, but stopped, suddenly, at the top. He stared at the door, thinking that his future lay beyond it, and what happened in the next few minutes might determine its course. What should he say? How could he calm her fears, answer her questions,
win her heart?
If that was even possible at this late date and after everything that had come to pass. He took in a deep breath and opened the door. It would come to him. It would have to. As quietly as a man of his bulk could enter, he did, tiptoeing into the room, the dim light from the stable yard lanterns and the lamps from the hall outside the room the only illumination now that the sun had slipped beyond the horizon. He could hear the soft, snuffling breath of a sleeper, of Jenny.
He crept toward the bed to find her sleeping soundly under soft, worn covers, her dress over a nearby chair. She looked so peaceful and sweet it turned his heart inside out. What turmoil of mind had she been in to make up that preposterous kidnap note and run from her aunt and the fate of marriage to Viscount Haven?
He knelt by the bed, noting the soft whoof of expelled breath out of her pursed lips, and remembered the breathless kisses they had shared on the turf by the Lesley. He had known her but a short time and yet in that brief passage of days she had become everything to him. He should be happy that she was Miss Dresden, acceptable bride, but something in him longed for the battle he was willing to wage to marry his Jenny, the wholly unsuitable bride of his heart.
But he might face a battle yet, with her and not his kin.
He kissed her forehead and stroked back her tangled curls, pulling a piece of straw out of them and tossing it aside. She shifted uneasily but did not wake. He kissed her burning cheek, inhaling deeply her essence, brushing his lips across the velvety skin.
Drowsily, she opened her eyes. They were hazy, the clear gray muddied by exhaustion, but she blinked and her vision cleared. “Gerry! What are you doing here?”
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