by Gabriel
He was being mean, and it wasn’t well done of him. He stroked his hand over her hair, more slowly, more gently.
“Of course we were cordial.” Marjorie rubbed her cheek against his lapel, like a cat getting comfortable. “When he recalled he had a fiancée. But he isn’t… he isn’t you.”
Three words, but they gave Aaron an odd, reluctant sort of hope.
“You don’t need me to spike your mama’s guns. Gabriel has all but promised me he won’t have you. He wants us to have children, in fact.”
“He does?” She tilted her head back to study him. “He told you that?”
“Cheeky of him, if you ask me.” Aaron shifted her closer on his lap. “Gabriel has never lacked for audacity when it gains him his own ends.”
“Sometimes, Aaron, you sound as if you don’t like your brother very much.”
“Sometimes I hate him, though it’s easier to like the man when he hasn’t given his life to see me safely sent back home.”
“You blamed yourself for his death,” Marjorie said. “One sensed this, in the grim way you went about the estate business. Often, I used to think were it not for Gabriel’s death, or the way he died—”
“What?” Aaron gathered up her long blond hair and brought a rose-scented strand to his nose. “What did you used to think, Margie Wendover?”
“You like the estate work. The part where you solve problems and spend hours on horseback and listen to all the tenants.”
“They mostly want to gripe about the weather, or the price of corn, or about George. Simply listening isn’t difficult.” So why had he spent so little time listening to his wife?
“But you didn’t let yourself enjoy it, because of the guilt.”
She fell silent, though her words had the ring of insight to them, and he had to allow she was right. He’d punished himself for months, thinking Gabriel was dead because of him, hoping he was wrong, but not knowing.
“I still resent him.” A man should be able to safely admit such a thing to his wife.
“Which makes two of us.”
Aaron twined her hair around his finger, pleased with her response.
“Mama was content to carp at me over the need for an heir. I could have stood years of that more easily than her latest queer start. Why do you resent Gabriel now? Is it you who wants the title?”
“Hardly. I resent him for not trusting me. He saved my worthless hide in Spain, bullying the doctors, hiring decent nurses, and keeping the damned surgeons from bleeding me nigh to death, and after all of that, he thought I’d repay him by snatching his title, his bride, and his wealth.” He tickled his nose with her hair, and wished he might tickle her too.
“He was very ill, Aaron. Maybe he didn’t know what to think, and you did benefit from his death, at least in the eyes of the world.”
“Do you think I plotted and schemed to be where I am?”
“For God’s sake, Aaron.” She sat up in his lap, and he missed the feel of her like… like the calves missed their mamas the first night after weaning. “I was there when you had to be all but hauled up the church aisle by a press gang. I was there when my father all but called you out for not honoring the betrothal in place of your brother. You didn’t want this, and you would never scheme to hurt your brother. Never.”
He was silent for a long time, playing with her hair and wondering why it should mean something that she trusted him when his own brother hadn’t. Aaron had been in Spain with Gabriel; he’d had both motive and opportunity.
But the wife he’d ignored for two years believed in his innocence.
“Let me light you up to bed.” He patted her hip, and she blushed.
“You’ll fight Mama?”
“If it comes to that, I will, and it won’t be pretty, Margie. You’ve chosen your side, you know, and she can keep your brothers and sisters from you, poison the well of gossip, and make your life hell.”
“No, she can’t.” Marjorie slid off his lap. “Hell would be spending the rest of my life married to Gabriel when he’s not who or what I want.”
“If you say so.” He bent to light a single candle and winged his arm at her, then walked with her to her door, which was right down the corridor from his.
“Thank you.” She glanced up at him uncertainly as he reached past her to open her door.
“Let’s make sure your candles are lit,” he said, because her sitting room was in shadows. Her fire was blazing, though, so he lit a few candles and offered her a bow. “Pleasant dreams.”
“To you as well, and… thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He ran one finger down the golden wealth of her hair, curled his hand around a gleaming skein, and tugged her one step closer. “Maybe, when this whole issue of our vows is behind us…”
He stopped, unwilling to say more. But she must have read his mind, because she went up on her toes and kissed his cheek, then disappeared into her bedroom without another word.
***
Gabriel bounced into the breakfast parlor, his mood blessedly at variance with the sullen chill of the day. “Are the women still abed?”
“They’ve come and gone,” Aaron said, setting his paper aside. “Try the eggs. I think Marjorie had a word with Cook.”
“I thought your marchioness took a tray in the morning.” Gabriel scooped up a large serving of eggs, added toast, bacon, and an orange, then sat at his brother’s elbow.
“She’s sometimes up early to ride.” Aaron shifted his chair a few inches away.
“Not on a morning like this.” Gabriel gestured toward the window with a toast point then started on his breakfast. “Ah, cheese in the eggs, and perhaps a touch of oregano, or… something.”
“You approve?”
“Of course,” Gabriel said between bites of what he was sure was Polly’s omelet recipe. “And the toast isn’t simply day-old bread, it’s got… onions or chives, and sesame things on it.”
“Sesame things?”
“Seeds. Are you going to stare that teapot into submission or pour a cup for your dear older brother?”
Aaron poured, a grin quirking his lips. He added cream and sugar, and pushed the cup toward Gabriel’s plate. “Marjorie has made up her mind.”
Gabriel paused, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Send a notice to the Times. Regarding?”
“She wants to remain married to my humble self.”
“A woman of sense and discernment. Pass the salt, would you?”
“A woman of sense would marry the titleholder.” Aaron pushed the saltcellar toward his brother.
“Not if she’s Marjorie,” Gabriel retorted. “She’d no more enjoy going up to Town for the opening of Parliament or for the Season than you would. She’s choosing to be your wife over my marchioness, and I’d say that’s the better choice.”
“I like Town well enough.” Aaron was back to staring at the teapot. “Or I used to.”
“We grow up.” Gabriel sprinkled a mere touch of salt on his eggs. “Or we do if we’re lucky.”
“It’s not that.” Aaron looked like he meant to leave it at that, but his mouth kept forming words. “I can’t very well be paying coin for what my wife would offer for free, not when I know how offended she’d be.”
Gabriel’s eyebrows rose over a mouthful of eggs—ambrosial eggs. He set down his fork and patted his lips with his napkin.
“They aren’t just offended,” Gabriel said. “They’re hurt when we do stupid, selfish things, like visit the whorehouse though we love our wives.”
Aaron turned his stare on his brother. “You have a wife now, to be handing down such serious pronouncements?”
“I do not. I’d best not have aspirations in that direction until I figure out who wanted me dead—or wants me dead.”
“Because it wasn’t me, and I benefited. Who else benefited?”
“I don’t know.” Gabriel swirled his teacup, which, if he wasn’t mistaken, held a particularly delicate gunpowder he was quite fond of. “I wish to
hell I did, and it’s not for lack of thinking it through. Are you free this morning?”
“I am.”
“Then I want to go over your estate book and make sure I understand all you’ve written.”
“What a penance on a dreary damned day.” Aaron rose and went to the window. “I never meant that book to be a public record. I just started writing things down.”
“It’s useful,” Gabriel said, attending to the food on his plate. “I don’t doubt you wish his late lordship had kept something similar when you took over the reins two years ago, but Papa wasn’t much of one for bookkeeping.”
“He wasn’t?”
“God, no.” Gabriel poured himself another cup of tea. “He’d far rather be out mucking around in some drainage ditch or walking a colicky yearling than at his desk.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“I’m the one he dragged around for entire summers to every clogged drain, silted-up pond, flooded field, and sagging cow byre on the property.” And why did Gabriel now consider them some of his best memories of his father?
“You two were in each other’s company a lot.” Aaron appropriated the orange from Gabriel’s plate. “You three—George was usually in attendance.”
“For which, God be thanked.” Gabriel downed his entire cup of tea in less than two swallows. “George could talk Papa into stopping in for a pint, or at least hopping some stiles on the way home.”
“Were they close?”
“As close as a titled, distant cousin can be to his steward,” Gabriel decided. “I don’t really know what their relationship was. I was usually interested in flirting with the barmaids or being first to gallop up the drive.”
Aaron was tearing the skin from the orange at a great rate. “Were you serious yesterday when you asked me to design a bathing chamber?”
Gabriel set down his teacup and wondered silently what about barmaids and racing home would necessitate a change of subject.
“I was,” he said. “Rustic doesn’t have to mean primitive, and even the Romans figured out how to get hot water most anywhere they pleased. Can you do it?”
“I thought about it last night, after you left me, and yes, there are two fairly easy options.”
He was still describing the merits of each, his hands sketching in the air, when Gabriel ushered him into the library. Gabriel left the final decision to Aaron, but put in his vote for the simpler and thus more quickly constructed option, which would locate the bathing chamber on the first floor in a little-used guest parlor above the kitchens.
An hour later, Aaron was pacing before the hearth, while Gabriel lay full length on his favorite sofa, the estate book propped on his chest.
“What about this?” Gabriel ran a finger down the outside margin of a page. “Twenty damned cows went swimming at once and got stuck in the pond mud?”
“What about it? We’d had rain, and the banks were soft.”
“Was it beastly hot?”
“Not particularly.”
“Did something spook them into the pond, or were our cows turning to the fashionable pastime of pond bathing because Lyme Regis no longer appeals?”
Aaron paused in his pacing. “I doubt they were spooked. That pasture lies close to the Hattery’s cottage, and the cows would be accustomed to the comings and goings.”
“Were the cows all preparing to go courting, such that a yearly bath was in order?”
“Hardly.” Aaron took off on another circuit of the library.
Gabriel considered building up the fire yet again, and discarded the notion because his back wasn’t even twinging, despite the weather. “We’ll attribute it to a sudden penchant for fastidiousness among socially aspiring bovines. What about your broken drain on the north pond?”
“Drains break, especially after large storms.”
“Yes, they do, though two months earlier, you recorded a sizable expense for replacing drains. Was this one of them?”
“It was.” Aaron’s scowl was a copy of their late father’s. “I suppose it could have been faulty or improperly installed.”
“Fine.” Gabriel flipped a page. “Passing incompetence, though how one improperly installs a quarter-ton grate over an open ditch is a mystery.”
Aaron shoved his brother’s boots aside and sat. “What are you getting at?”
Gabriel set the book on a hassock and struggled to a sitting position. “At the risk of finding your fist in my face, I can tell you I worked a very badly neglected estate over near the South Downs—”
“You were less than a day’s ride away?” Aaron shot back to his feet. “The whole bloody time, Gabriel?”
“Not the whole time,” Gabriel replied, keeping his seat, because it was the warmer—and safer—location. “Most of it. In any case, the place hadn’t had a decent steward for years, or any resident owner. Every roof was sagging, every field was tired, every beast was inbred save for the market sow.”
“So it was easy to see what was needed.” Aaron closed the ledger and put it on the mantel.
“At first. Though in a place that had suffered a quarter-century of neglect, Aaron, we didn’t have the kinds of mishaps and bad luck you did in two years at Hesketh.”
“You didn’t have the kind of acreage we have here, either. If you record the mishaps and bad luck of a very large patch of ground, then you get a very large list of mishaps.”
“Perhaps.” Gabriel rose as well, because his brother was becoming defensive, and that was not the purpose of the exercise. “When things did start to go seriously wrong—equipment breaking dangerously, a starving mongrel turning up in the chicken yard, and so forth—it wasn’t bad luck.”
“Sabotage?”
“You always were a bright lad.”
“You think somebody’s trying to make my estate management look bad? Gabriel, is it possible you’ve grown excessively suspicious?”
“It is.” Gabriel paced to the window, where rain and something colder slapped against the panes. “It’s even likely, but then I started hearing about your duels, baby Brother, and I wondered if some ill luck might not have been planned for you as well.”
“The duels… well.” Aaron scrubbed a hand over his face. “They were nothing, really.”
“So there won’t be any more?” Gabriel ambled across the room to stand near his brother, the temperature being considerably more comfortable near the fire.
“There will not.” Aaron said it so fervently, Gabriel had to believe him. He studied his brother’s profile as they stood side by side, then settled a hand on Aaron’s shoulder.
“Good.”
Aaron looked over at him, a cautious, assessing glance, though Gabriel said no more. His brother was a grown man, and matters of honor were private.
Aaron moved away, out from under Gabriel’s hand. “Tell me about your last two years, sir, and don’t think I’m pleased to learn you were lurking right in my backyard the whole time.”
Gabriel heard the sound of Aaron taking the stopper out of the decanter—before noon, for God’s sake.
“I’ll have a tot myself,” he said. “It’s a long and thirsty tale.”
But for reasons Gabriel did not examine too closely, it was not going to be a tale that disclosed his previous acquaintance with Polonaise Hunt. Time enough for that later, if he survived the moral beating Aaron was going to deliver before the first installment of the story was reported.
Seven
“Are you done with me, then?” Marjorie folded up a pale blue riding habit with cream trim and sank into a chair.
“I am, for now,” Polly replied. “Is that habit comfortable?”
“It is. It’s at least three years old, and I’ve hunted in it many times.”
“I’m surprised your mother allowed that.” Polly started putting away the other wardrobe possibilities, wondering why she’d bothered considering them. Lord Aaron’s eye had been accurate, and the blue habit was quite flattering. “Foxhunting can be dangerous.”
/> Marjorie’s smile suggested dangerous was good. “For the fox, and he’s dangerous to the chickens, so it’s not exactly unfair. Mama didn’t like it, but I was always careful, and Papa loved to ride out. I used to go with him a lot when I was a girl, and Mama used to ride out sometimes too.”
“But you don’t ride with Aaron?”
“I haven’t felt welcome, though we occasionally meet up when we’re both out. We often do, now that I think about it.”
Well done, my lord. “And you’d rather be on your horse now, wouldn’t you?” Polly glanced out at the bleak, damp day and sent up a prayer for Gabriel’s back. She thought of such days as charcoal days, days when no color would be necessary to sketch the out of doors.
“I would rather be on a horse most all the time.”
“I’d rather be in the kitchen, making something delicious, hot, and sweet.” And what that description brought to Polly’s mind would have shocked the marchioness.
“A cup of chocolate?” Marjorie looked puzzled, because no doubt kitchens were terra incognita to her.
“An apple, walnut, and sour cream pie.” Polly felt a craving start up. “Sweet buns with lots of walnuts and a thick rummy glaze, maybe a big pot of chicken and vegetable stew with plenty of spices to it. Some toasted baguettes and butter melted with crushed garlic and a pinch of oregano…”
Marjorie’s perfect brows rose. “Good heavens. You can prepare these things?”
“One has to eat, my lady.” And if those were some of Gabriel’s favorite dishes, what of it? “It might as well be pleasurable.”
“Those buns you mentioned.” Marjorie rose with more purpose than grace. “Are they the type that might appeal to, say, men?”
“Come with me.” Polly took her by the hand. “The enemy is ours, or he will be by teatime.”
They baked right through lunch, until the entire house smelled of cinnamon and goodness, and then they baked some more, while a thick, savory stew cooked down on the big black stove in the main kitchen. An hour before teatime, Marjorie excused herself to take some buns to George when she invited him to share dinner, and Polly set about cleaning up, the kitchen staff having abandoned ship entirely rather than hover while the lady of the house played cook.
