“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “She’s company for old Caesar here. What do you call her?”
“Her name is Pie,” said Fan, watching how comfortable he was with her rough little horse. “She is not much to look at, I know, but she is fast and true-footed.”
“Never apologize for a humble-born horse,” he said with mock sternness. “They’re generally the best of the lot. Aren’t you, my bonny girl?”
Pie whinnied in return and pressed her velvet nose against George’s arm, making him chuckle.
“Can I coax you back out with me?” he asked. “I’d wager Pie here is game. You can show me where you ride yourself.”
Oh, yes, thought Fan grimly, the way where all paths lead to the gallows.
“We are done for the morning, Pie and I,” she said, leading the pony to her stall. “I was just going inside when you came out. I have much to do.”
“You are certain?” he asked, clearly disappointed. “You cannot be persuaded to change your plans?”
“I am sorry, My Lord Captain.” She smoothed her hair back with her palms as best she could, striving to look more like a proper housekeeper. Riding in the damp night air loosened her hair, and made a fuzzy halo of tiny curls spring up around her forehead at the edge of her cap. “I have many duties to attend to, and I’m late beginning as it is.”
“Let them wait,” he said softly, turning from the pony towards her. “There’s no good reason they can’t.”
She swallowed, searching for a resolve she wasn’t sure she possessed. “Is that an order, Captain My Lord?”
That crooked smile again, wildly disarming because it was so unconscious. “No, not an order, not to you. More of a request, I suppose.”
“A request.” She sighed, troubled. “You make my position here at Feversham difficult to understand, My Lord Captain. Am I still your housekeeper, or—or something else?”
“You are my responsibility,” he said firmly, no doubt or hesitation in his voice at all. “I want you happy, content, and safe. You cannot doubt that, can you?”
“I do not know what to doubt, Captain My Lord,” she admitted forlornly. Happiness, contentment, and safety were such modest needs, and so far beyond her own reach! “What to doubt, or think, or believe, or expect. I cannot answer for any of it.”
“Poor Fan,” he said gently. “Life is a muddle, isn’t it? It’s no better for me, you know. Here I thought I’d marked out my place in it as well as any man could. I had my command, my ship, my crew, my officers and orders, even an enemy I’d sworn to destroy. But with a single treaty signed and delivered by men whose names I don’t even know, everything was stolen away. Peace, they call it, and hail me as one lucky bastard for coming home with my pockets stuffed with silver.”
“You could have been killed instead,” she said, realizing how glad she was that he hadn’t been, “and that wouldn’t have been lucky at all.”
“I almost rather I had,” he admitted wryly. “At least I wouldn’t have been reduced to running Feversham as if we were all still aboard the old Nimble.”
“And where’s the sin in that?” she asked, ready to defend him. “Look at how much you’ve already done. You’ve brought more order and life into this house in a week than others did in the last century!”
“Ah, I do that without a thought,” he said sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. “I went to sea so young that the Navy marked me forever with its ways. I must put everything to rights, shipshape and Bristol fashion, whether it’s a tangle of lines aloft or a squabble between gun-crews. But why am I burdening you with all this, Fan? I’ve never made any other woman suffer so. Why should you have to listen to my quirks and follies?”
“I like to listen to them,” she admitted shyly. “’Tis no burden at all, for your stories interest me. Your life has been so different from my own, in so many ways.”
He grinned, suddenly boyish. “You shouldn’t encourage me like that, lass, indeed you shouldn’t, or you’ll find me rambling on like the most tedious old salt between decks.”
“I do not believe that is possible,” she insisted. “Go on now. Tell me more.”
“Well, then,” he continued, clearing his throat self-consciously. “A happy ship is a sort of family, you know, with everyone dependent on everyone else. A captain generally has good reasons for giving his orders, and he expects to be obeyed without question. If one man chooses to disobey, or neglects his duty, however slight, then everyone is put in peril. In a storm, or in a battle, disobedience can mean death.”
“So that is how you see me, then, Captain My Lord?” she asked. “An unruly cabin boy who must be brought into line?”
“Not at all,” he said, and not laughing the way she’d expected, either. “You’re the reason I cannot sleep, Fan.”
She gave her head a swift little shake, trying to defuse the tension that she could feel pulling them together.
“And so I am a responsibility, and a reason,” she said, hearing the tremor in her own voice. “Though neither a cabin boy nor a housekeeper.”
“Hush, Fan, and listen,” he said, taking another step closer to her, close enough now that she could smell the scent of the soap he’d used for shaving. “When those wretched Blackerbys invaded Feversham yesterday, the way they spoke of you and your father as if you were not even there, as if you were dirt beneath their vile, undeserving feet—”
“But that is a servant’s lot, Captain My Lord,” she protested, even as she blushed. She’d never had anyone champion her like this, especially not someone like George, and even if it was wrong of him to do so, she still found the experience almost unbearably wonderful. “We are supposed to be invisible.”
“Damnation, not like that,” he said sharply, “and not you.”
“But why not me?” she asked, bewildered. He was not only an officer, but an aristocrat, a peer, accustomed from birth to understand and embrace the differences that separated class and rank. “What else is a housekeeper if not a servant?”
“Because you are part of Feversham,” he said with great deliberation, “and Feversham is my home. Because no woman, servant or otherwise, deserves to be treated with as little regard as Lady Blackerby showed you. And because most importantly to me, Fan, you are you.”
She caught her breath, stunned. “Captain My Lord, I do not—”
“George,” he said. “For this moment, if no other between us here, call me George. Just George, mind?”
“Just George,” she repeated softly. “Just…just George.”
He smiled, his pleasure so genuine that his whole face relaxed, and looked years younger. She smiled shyly in return, forgetting every warning her conscience had tried to tell her.
Oh, Fan, Fan, you are in treacherous waters now! The old stable was already a warm and suggestive place, all musty sweet hay and warm animal smells and the shadows mixed with slanted beams of new daylight, with the three horses their only company. For any girl bred in the country, stables always meant forbidden trysts in a pillowy loft and the sweet abandon that followed, as much a place for dalliance as a new hayrick at harvest. In this barn, she and George could almost be guaranteed of their privacy, for no one from the house would think to come looking for either of them here.
But for Fan, the lure went far beyond that, the way it always did for her with George. When he spoke to her of his past, it seemed as if they’d always known each other, as if their lives had magically twined together without them realizing how. How could he know that his confidences could mean so much to her?
With the Company slipping from her control and the danger increasing, with her father’s return growing more unlikely with each day, George’s kindness and understanding were a sanctuary to her, a place she did not want to leave. It seemed she had been strong all her life, and now he was offering her the chance to share and halve that impossible burden, even only for a short time.
He smiled at her, and she longed to tell him everything. He told her she would be safe a
t Feversham, and she wanted to spill out all her troubles with Markham. He said he wanted her to be happy, and she came perilously close to confessing how loveless and lonely and empty her life was in all the ways that mattered.
Until, that is, he’d come into it, and changed everything forever.
“I must go,” she said softly, though she made no move to leave him. “To the house, I mean.”
He smiled as if he didn’t hear her. “Look at you, Fan,” he said, pretending to scold her. “You’re covered all over with leaves and twigs. Did Pie toss you into a thicket of brambles and blackberries?”
She looked down at her skirts to hide her dismay, pretending she was only noticing the tea for the first time, and praying, too, that he wouldn’t smell it for what it was.
“Bramble Fan,” he teased softly, reaching out to brush her cloak clear. “What’s to be done with you, eh?”
Still looking down, she laughed, from giddy exhaustion, from the foolishness of George’s teasing, from the ridiculousness of her position, having scraps of black China tea brushed from her cloak in a barn by the son of a duke.
She was so very tired, and if she slipped forward just a little, just a little more, his arms would be there waiting to catch her….
She shivered when he touched her cheek, not from surprise, but from the inevitability of it, and instinctively she let her eyes flutter shut to heighten her other senses. Gently he traced the curve of her cheek, his fingers warm, slightly rough. The ruffled cuff of his shirt brushed over her skin, the pressed Holland linen carrying the faint scorched-iron scent mingled with starch and bluing: a gentleman’s scent if ever there was one.
“Bramble Fan,” he said again with fondness and an odd sort of wonder, too. “Perhaps we should just fall off this horse together, eh?”
He turned her face up towards his and kissed her then. His lips were warm, sure, surprisingly soft—ah, everything was surprising to her, this being all so new!—and though she guessed it wasn’t quite right, she smiled in the middle of it from purest delight. His mouth moved over hers, leading her, his newly shaved beard was the merest rough bristle as he let her grow accustomed to this much. Finally he parted her lips and deepened the kiss, enough to make her catch her breath. Instinctively she slanted her lips against his, exploring this unexpected world of new sensations, of the feel of his tongue playing against hers, of a taste so different from her own, rich and deep and masculine and infinitely complex.
And desire, too: with this first kiss he was teaching her desire and longing and passion, or maybe she was simply learning it for herself. She could feel the heat spreading through her whole body, curling and licking like a lazy flame through her limbs, and when George’s hand slipped into the opening of her cloak to find her waist, she shifted to one side, making it easier for him. His hand spread around the curve of her waist, following the bones of her stays beneath her gown as he drew her closer, arching her back over his arm. She raised her hands, curling her arms around his shoulders and letting the ripples of pleasures intensify as his body leaned more neatly into hers. Her heart was racing, singing in her blood.
Make this last, she told herself with fierce joy, make this last so I can remember it for always!
And then, abruptly, it ended.
“What in blazes,” muttered George as he broke the kiss. “Fan, what is this here—a pistol?”
“Yes, a pistol,” she said defensively, grabbing at the gun tucked into her belt as she struggled to pull free. How had they melted together so effortlessly, only to become so awkward and tangled in the long folds of her cloak as they separated? “I—I always carry that when I go out alone.”
He stared at her, incredulous. “You always do? To market, to the village—you are carrying a pistol like that?”
“Yes, George, I do.” She raised her chin, feeling oddly near to tears. They’d been so magically close for a handful of minutes, yet what more cruel reminder of her other life could there be than that wretched, inopportune pistol? “I’ve told you before, I’m accustomed to looking after myself.”
Her body was still wantonly on edge, her senses raw and unfulfilled, and to her shame she could tell from the black look in George’s eyes that he felt much the same.
“But not like that,” he said grimly. “You shouldn’t carry a gun unless you know how to load and fire it.”
“I do,” she said, self-consciously resting her hand on the pistol’s well-worn wooden butt. Though the gun was old and nothing fancy, it still fired true, and she would never go to the beach to meet Markham or the others without it. “Father taught me.”
George’s expression grew darker still. “A lady doesn’t know such things.”
“I never claimed to be a lady, George,” she said, turning on her heel so he wouldn’t see the angry tears that burned in her eyes. “It’s only you who saw me as more than a housekeeper.”
With quick, furious steps she hurried across the yard, her shoes crunching on the white crushed shells and the unfortunate pistol knocking heavily against her hip beneath her cloak. She’d thought when she’d left Markham that the day could grow no worse, but how mistaken she’d been!
“Hold now, Fan, wait!”
Of course he’d follow, determined to set her life to rights, too, tidy and neat in a way it was never destined to be.
And of course she quickened her steps, equally determined to resist him, even as he easily matched his long strides to hers.
“It’s the smugglers, isn’t it?” he demanded. “You fear them returning to Feversham, and feel you must defend yourself. Damnation, Fan, look at me and tell me that isn’t the reason you’re walking about armed!”
“All you wish to see is smugglers!” she said, staring steadfastly ahead. “What of all the other men in this county? What of hired day laborers from the fields who’ve drunk up their wages at the Tarry Man, and the soldiers from the garrison up the stream, and the stable-men at the stage inn, and the sailors, too, particularly their officers who believe that any unprotected, unwed woman is fair and panting game for their amusement?”
“Fan, so help me, I’ll see to it that you’re never frightened again,” he said. “Trust me, Fan, please, trust me and—”
“Cap’n M’Lord!” Leggett ran towards them from the house, his weather-beaten face bursting with excitement. “At last we’ve found you, Cap’n M’Lord! Everywhere we’ve been huntin’ for you, but here you are now, and just in time, too!”
“In time for what?” demanded George. “Speak up, Leggett, and stop nattering on like an old woman!”
“Why, in time for him!” said Leggett, scarcely able to contain himself. “Already he be waiting for you in the front room, almost as patient as any regular man. It be your brother, Cap’n M’Lord, come a-visiting, His Grace the Duke of Strachen here at Feversham!”
Chapter Eight
“So this is it, then?” asked Brant, standing at the window beside George. “This is what convinced you to buy this ancient pile of out-of-fashion rubble? A view of the same grim gray water where you have spent most of your life?”
“It’s neither grim nor gray, especially not on an evening as clear as this.” George sighed, wondering why he ever tried to explain such a distinction to his brother. “If you had been the one sent to sea, Brant, then you would understand.”
“No, if I had been the one banished to sea at such a tender age, I would most assuredly be dead, and for a good long time, too,” said Brant philosophically, sipping at the brandy in his glass. “And if you had had the joy of being born first, to the title and the debts that came with it, then the estates would by now be completely bankrupted, and you would be living in genteel squalor in Calais. No, I must admit that Fate and Father did conspire to arrange some things correctly to favor our respective talents.”
“I’m not sure Revell would agree,” said George. In his opinion, the youngest Claremont brother had received the worst lot, being shipped off with the East India Company, to make his fortun
e among the heathens and fevers.
“Oh, I believe Rev would swear otherwise,” said Brant easily. “He demonstrated a great talent for surviving in a vile climate, speaking Hindi to bandits, and, of course, being able to coax sapphires and rubies to drop from the mountaintops and into his palm. And recall that in Calcutta he also found himself a delightful little wife to bear his name and his children, something neither of us seems to have been able to do here in England.”
George grumbled wordlessly and flung himself into his armchair. As orphaned boys, they had pledged to one another to make their fortunes in the world and restore the honor to the much-tarnished family name after their father had done the tarnishing. It had been a very grand and glorious pledge for three boys to make, especially as young and frightened as they’d been, and through various paths they’d managed to succeed remarkably well.
But as Brant had pointed out, only Revell had been blessed enough to find love along with his fortune. George had met Revell’s wife Sara, who was small, dark, bookish, and quiet, and wildly in love with Revell. She was also quite different from the women that Brant fancied, or at least the ones that George had met: voluptuous and fair, with acres of creamy skin and golden hair, and seemingly very empty heads. As for George’s own tastes in women, the choice was hardly a choice at all.
Fan, his Fan, all spirit and spark and gray eyes that missed nothing and promised everything. His Fan who went riding before dawn, caring more for the feel of the wind through her dark hair than the twigs and leaves that clung to her skirts. His Fan, who had kissed him with a passion that had made his head spin and his heart race like no other woman ever had.
His darling Fan, who also carried a pistol worthy of a highwayman tucked into the folds of her petticoats.
The Silver Lord Page 10
