“It is not my place to be angry,” she said sadly, for of course he was right, “even if you are taking away the only home I have ever known.”
He shook his head, frowning. “Hold now, I’ve not said that.”
“You didn’t need to say a word, not when your actions are so clear!” she cried forlornly. “You’ve no use for our old ways here, and you’ve even brought your own people as servants. What place can there be left for me at Feversham?”
“Have I asked you to leave?”
“Have you needed to?” She lifted her chin, determined to not let him see her cry. “I’ll not trouble you overmuch, Captain My Lord. That’s not my way. I shall gather my things and be gone by nightfall, and you’ll need not give me another thought.”
“The hell I won’t,” he said sharply, his frown deepening. “You’re not to leave, not unless you wish it. I’ll have need of your special knowledge of the house, the tradespeople in this county, the neighbors—a thousand things, I’m sure, if you’ll but share them. I’ve no intention of sending you out of your home, especially not with your father gone.”
“My father’s not dead,” she said quickly, shoving aside a piece of hair that had blown free of her cap and across her forehead. “I know it. He will come back.”
“I’m sure he will,” he said with gruff kindness. “And he should find you at Feversham when he does.”
Her resolution wobbled, and tears stung behind her eyes. How long had it been since anyone had shown her any manner of kindness at all, gruff or not? To take her father’s place leading the Company, she’d had to appear twice as competent, twice as emotionless as Father had ever been. Such leaders didn’t expect sympathy or kindness, nor did they get it. To feel it now, standing in the windswept burying ground and from this man, was almost more than she could bear, and far more than she could wish.
“Father would never look for me anywhere else,” she said softly. “I was born at Feversham, you see. My mother was the cook, when the old master still had guests to look after. Not that I can remember those times, or my mother, either.”
The captain nodded, more understanding than she’d expected. “I can scarce recall my mother, either, she died so young.”
“It fell to my father and my aunt to look after me,” she said. She didn’t know why she was telling him this, for surely these ordinary details of her life would be of no interest to anyone else. “My aunt was the housekeeper before me, and trained me well in the skills and arts of running Feversham. ‘The mysteries’, she called them, as if she were a very witch, and not the most pious woman in the parish.”
He smiled, the lines crinkling around the corners of his eyes the way she’d remembered. The last time he’d smiled at her like this had been when she’d shown him the mistress’s bedchamber, and he’d teased her about trying the bed. He’d made her heart thump and her thoughts race off in all kinds of wrongful ways.
“I expect you were the most attentive and adept of students,” he was saying now, “whatever the day’s mystery.”
“Oh, hardly,” she said, recalling how often her aunt had rapped her knuckles with the long handle of a wooden spoon. “Aunt called me Miss Fan Fidgets, on account of my never paying proper attention. I always longed to be out-of-doors when I was little, you see, and didn’t always heed her explaining how to take the tea-stains from the Irish linen and mildew from the plaster, or how always to speak as much like the gentry as I could.”
“That’s what your aunt called you? Miss Fan Fidgets?” His smile widened with obvious relish. “I can’t repeat any of the names my brothers called me, they were so foul. It’s quite astounding how many mangled versions of a simple ‘George’ boys can concoct when they set their minds to it.”
She smiled then, too, more amazed that he’d confide in her that his brothers had teased him with foul names when they’d been boys. She couldn’t picture having such a conversation with any of the other men she knew, even the ones she’d known since they’d been children together. Perhaps this was another way titled gentlemen were different than ordinary men, or perhaps, more dangerous for her, this was simply the way this particular titled gentleman behaved with her.
“I was the only child of the household,” she confessed wistfully, “which made me more at my ease around my elders than the lads and lasses my own age.”
He glanced at her sideways, beneath the brim of his hat, as if to show how thoroughly he doubted her. “Though surely that is no longer the case.”
She shrugged, twisting her hands into the ends of her shawl. She’d already told him more than enough; he didn’t need to know how few her friends of any age were, or how lonely she often was, or, most revealing of all, how much pleasure she was finding in this conversation with him.
“How fortunate for you to have had brothers!” she said with the wistfulness of an only child. “To have them to count on, to know you are always bound together by blood and birth no matter how you stray apart—what a rare, wonderful thing that must be!”
“Oh, aye, the Duke of Strachen’s three sons, as wild a little pack of ruffians as you can imagine,” he said fondly. “We fair raised ourselves in the country, you know, without much guidance or interference, and turned out deuced fine in the end, too.”
“Surely your father could claim his share of the credit,” she said, only half in jest. His father had been a duke, after all, a peer, and only a step or so below the king himself.
But clearly he didn’t agree. “My father had other occupations that kept him in London,” he said, his expression abruptly losing all its merriment and closing against her. “His sons were not among his favorite interests.”
“I am sorry,” she said softly, realizing too late that she’d inadvertently misstepped. “The love of your parents—that’s a precious fine thing for a child.”
“I would not know,” he said curtly, his face once again the stern officer’s mask, impersonal and un-emotional. “Shall you accompany me to Feversham now, Miss Winslow?”
“Have I a choice, Captain My Lord?” she asked, made wary by his sudden shift of moods.
“You are a servant, not a slave,” he insisted impatiently, though that insistence was enough to make her believe otherwise. “This is England, not the Indies. But you will oblige me greatly by remaining as Feversham’s housekeeper.”
A servant, not a slave, and the formality of obligation: how quickly things had changed between them, and how wrong for her to dare dream they’d ever be anything else. She sighed, looking away from him and out towards the sea.
She wanted to stay at Feversham, not only because it would make her work with the Company easier to continue, but also because, in her heart, she could not imagine herself anywhere else. Besides, where would she go with her little chest of gold and silver coins, squirreled away against the future? The captain had been right when he’d said her father would expect to find her there when he returned, and she wouldn’t dare disappoint him.
Yet what would it be like to live in the same house with this man—a man this handsome, with moods and a temper as unpredictable as the weather, a man whose authority would pose a constant risk to her and the others in the Company, a man whose charm had already made her drop her careful guard with unsettling ease?
A man who would hold all the keys to her life in his palm, and not even realize it?
“You will, of course, continue with the same wages, as well as the same quarters and entitlements,” he was saying, in the brusque voice that she was sure he used for giving orders on board ship. “There is much to be done at Feversham, and at last there will be sufficient hands to do it. That much at least you should find pleasing. You may also find changes in how the house is governed and arranged that may be less agreeable, and I trust you shall adjust. But as you have noted yourself, Miss Winslow, Feversham has always been your home, and I won’t have it said that I drove you away.”
Her smile was tight and sad, regretting what she could never have. It didn�
�t matter how many brothers he had, or what they’d called him as a boy. He was still Lord Captain Claremont, and she was still a servant, and so it would always be.
“You are kind to think of me, Captain My Lord,” she murmured. The kindness and understanding he’d shown her was still there, if not the fleeting, misinterpreted friendship. “I am grateful for the concern you show to me.”
“Kindness, hah.” He shook his head, as if to shake away the very notion of such a maudlin weakness. “What has kindness to do with any of this? It is the Trelawneys who have tied our hands together, Miss Winslow, those blasted Trelawneys and their confoundedly meddlesome interference. Surely you are sensible enough to see that.”
“The Trelawneys?” she asked, surprised once again, something that seemed to happen far too often with him. “The Trelawneys have never interfered in anything to do with Feversham.”
Another puff of wind tugged at his hat, and irritably he shoved it down more firmly onto his head.
“They have in this,” he answered, “as you would have known if Potipher had bothered to write that infernal letter. The Trelawneys had such regard for your loyalty that they refused to sell Feversham to me or anyone else unless I agreed to keep you on as long as you pleased. There, that’s the cold truth of it, and God take me for a simpleton this instant for having signed my name to such a scrap of foolery.”
“Then that is the only reason I am to stay at Feversham?” she asked, not wanting to believe what she couldn’t deny. “Because you could not have the house unless you took me with it, like any other old kettles and dunnage?”
“I told you earlier, Miss Winslow. I won’t have it said that I turned you out from your home.” He held his hand out to her. “Now will you come with me back to Feversham?”
She looked at his offered hand, more imperious than gallant, the way she supposed he’d always been if she’d but bothered to see it.
“Thank you, no, Captain My Lord,” she said, already turning to leave him, the way she should have done an hour before. “I have my own pony waiting for me. For you see, I won’t have it said that I’ve ridden with you.”
With a glass of the fine French brandy he’d found in the kitchen cradled in his fingers, George sprawled in a leather armchair before the grand sweep of windows in his bedchamber, the same windows that had convinced him to buy Feversham. The view of the Channel and everything else he could see now belonged to him, as much as the sea ever belonged to anyone. But this room, and the chair in which he sat, and the rest of the timbers and stone and plaster around him were indisputably now his. This was what he’d wanted, what he’d dreamed of, what he’d had to suffer and survive a great many years of war and hardship and receive a huge dollop of luck to achieve.
So why, then, did it all feel so damned hollow?
“Do that be all for the night, Cap’n My Lord?” asked Leggett, waiting by the door with the tray from supper in his hands. A stout, ginger-haired seaman of indeterminate age from Northumberland, Leggett had been George’s manservant since he’d made captain and become entitled to such a personal luxury. Like most seaman turned servants, Leggett was more independent than his landlocked counterparts, and considerably more outspoken, believing it to be his entitlement as a free Englishman to tell his captain what he needed to hear.
And from the way Leggett was now scowling and puffing out his ruddy cheeks, George was sure he was going to exercise that right once again.
“That will be all for the evening, Leggett,” said George wearily, hoping that might be enough to stall the man’s comments until morning, for he was in no humor for either company or conversation. “You and the others turn in. We’ll begin in earnest in the morning.”
“Beg pardon, Cap’n My Lord,” said Leggett, purposefully ignoring George’s broad hint. “There be one thing the lads wanted me to say.”
George sighed, twisting in his chair to face the other man. “Is it your quarters? The food?”
“Nay, nay, Cap’n M’Lord, they all be more than fine,” said Leggett hastily. “Fancy beds like them for the likes o’ us, eh?”
“Then what the devil ails you, man?”
Leggett gave another contemplative puff to his cheeks. “It be the lady, the one what we saw in the village. She be the same one what lives here, don’t she?”
“Miss Winslow has been the housekeeper here at Feversham for some years, yes,” said George, weariness sliding into testiness. “Not that she’s any concern of yours.”
“But she do be our concern, Cap’n M’Lord,” said Leggett doggedly. “Everywhere’s we look about this house, her mark be there. Womenfolk don’t like having their ways changed, and if she be staying here with us, why—”
“I will address that question when and if that happens,” said George curtly. “Until then Miss Winslow’s likes and dislikes will have no bearing on my orders, or your duty. Do I make myself clear, Leggett?”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n M’Lord.” Leggett snapped to attention, the tray still awkwardly balanced in his hands before him as he backed through the doorway, yanking the door shut behind him.
Which was, for once, exactly the response that George had desired, and with a muttered oath he sank back into his armchair, swirling the barely-touched brandy in his glass.
How in blazes could he tell his men what Miss Winslow would do next when he hadn’t the faintest idea himself? For what must have been the thousandth—no, the millionth!—time he thought back to that strange, wonderful, dreadful conversation in the burying ground.
Matters had begun badly enough, with no letter from blasted Potipher to ease his way, and making the two of them spit and start at one another like cats there in the middle of the lane, for all the village world to gawk at. He’d tried to make it right with the earrings, and had had that humble piece of gallantry twisted around and tossed back at him. Without thinking, he’d next taken her arm: another mistake, touching her that way, and one she’d soon corrected by vehemently pulling free.
Then, finally, to punish him all the more, she’d dragged him off to stand in the sorrowful center of the burying ground. Wasn’t his news likely to be disagreeable enough to her without him having to deliver it surrounded by a sea of ancient graves?
And yet he could not forget how she’d looked when he’d first seen her again, calling to him there in the lane as he’d climbed down from his horse. Her hair had been uncharacteristically disheveled and her cheeks were flushed from the wind, her lips were parted from her haste, and those red gimcrack ear-bobs were swinging merrily from her ears. Perhaps it had been only a trick of the pale-gray sunlight washing over her face, but once freed of the house, she’d seemed younger, more at ease. She’d also, almost, seemed pleased to see him again.
Until, that is, he’d explained his reason for being there.
Even then the conversation hadn’t gone as he’d expected. She’d thought she had to leave, and he’d told her she could stay: fair enough, true enough. But somehow they’d begun speaking of their childhoods, the sort of funny, flirtatious, touching little conversation that he’d never had with any other woman, or man, for that matter.
In that short time, only a handful of sentences, really, he’d learned her name was Fan, not just the formal Miss Winslow. He’d learned she had spent far too much time among adults, just as he himself had been sent to sea and a man’s world when he’d still been a boy. He’d learned that she could snap that defensive wall back in place around herself in an instant, and he’d learned—once again—that he still could not speak of his father.
And he’d learned that no matter what clauses the Trelawneys had put into their contracts, he was the one who now wanted her to stay on at Feversham, just as she was the one who most decidedly didn’t. Not even Brant, with all his much-vaunted experience with women, would be able to make sense of this mess.
Glumly he stared into the glass in his hand. It was all the fault of this wretched, so-called peace with France. If he’d stayed at sea, where he belonge
d, where he knew what to do and what to say, then none of this would have happened. He would have remained a happy man, plagued only by storms and high seas and enemy gunfire instead of a ramshackle house and a beautiful gray-eyed housekeeper.
So thoroughly was he regretting his carefree past that he didn’t hear the first knock on the door to his bedchamber, or even the second. But the third—the third he heard.
“Come,” he barked without turning, certain it was Leggett. “It better damned well be important this time, you impudent old rascal.”
“It is important, Captain My Lord,” said Fan Winslow, “and I promise not to take more of your time than is necessary.”
Instantly George lurched to his feet, sprinkling brandy over his waistcoat and the floor.
“Fan,” he began without thinking. “That is, Miss Winslow. Yes. That is to say, ah, at this hour, ah, I believed you to be someone else.”
“I am only myself,” she said. “I’ve never pretended otherwise.”
“Where have you been?” Even George knew enough of women to see she’d been crying, her eyes puffy and red-rimmed. “No one has seen you for hours. I’ve been concerned, damned concerned.”
“Thank you, Captain My Lord,” she said, pointedly not answering his question about how she’d passed her afternoon. She held out a large ring of keys towards him. “I’ve come to return these to you as the new master.”
“Hold now, there’s no need for that,” he said, wincing inwardly at the heartiness in his voice. “You keep those for now.”
“Why?” she demanded, somehow still managing to put an edge in the single word even with her face and eyes soft from tears—tears that, he was quite sure, she’d never let slip and shed before him.
“For all the reasons I said before,” he said. “Because Feversham’s your home. Because you belong here. Because I’ll need your knowledge of the house while making improvements.”
The Silver Lord Page 5
