* * *
His mouth fastened on hers. She couldn’t breathe. She parted her lips in indignation, unwillingly allowing his tongue to penetrate her mouth, to invoke sensations that set off chaos in her body. Who in the world did he think he was? What made a complete stranger imagine that he could dominate, tempt, arouse her? His free hand sculpted her shoulder blades, her backside, crushing her gently to his body. He was behaving as if she should be grateful for this impropriety.
She pulled back in panic, whispering urgently, “Take ahold of yourself this instant. I mean it.”
He exhaled softly against her mouth. Moments elapsed, her heart pounding the passage of time. Her stomach fluttered as if she were falling and didn’t know when or where she would land. She sensed the tension that came over him, as he slowly raised his hand to brush her hair from her face. She could feel his stare penetrate to the turmoil inside her. He shook his head.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said, his breathing uneven.
She lifted her head. “Give me the keys,” she said in a husky voice.
“You aren’t Georgette.”
“Of all the gall! I never said I was.”
“But you sneaked out of her house.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding at the brilliance of his deduction. “I happen to live there. I can only assume you were hoping to reignite an old flame with my mistress. For your information, she never takes up with a lover once she’s discarded him.”
“An old—”
“It must have been quite a spark in its day, because I have worked as Mrs. Lawson’s companion for over a decade and have never encountered a man so convinced of his own charm.”
He shook his head. “This is quite embarrassing.”
“Quite,” she said, biting off the word.
“No. I am—I’m more than sorry. I feel entirely abased. You’re taking this better than me, I have to say.”
She held out her hand. “Give me the keys.”
He sighed, reaching deep into the pocket of his black woolen greatcoat. “Who are you, please?”
“I am Miss Walcott, companion to Mrs. Lawson and governess to her children,” Kate replied in the most impassive voice she could manage, the voice she used on wayward gentlemen and her disobedient wards. “I should caution you right now that Madam does not accept callers at this time of night, especially those who vault over garden walls like Visigoths invading a foreign land.”
He blinked. “Visigoths?”
“That’s what I said.”
He studied her in dubious silence. “Are you her bodyguard, too?”
“At times.”
He rubbed his hand over his face. “I’m exhausted. You looked like her in the dark. In fact, you look like her now—your hair, the shape of your face, and your figure.”
“My figure is none of your business,” Kate retorted, too annoyed to admit that she and Georgette were often mistaken for sisters, and that, in fact, one of the reasons Georgette had taken Kate on was because it pleased her vanity to employ a companion in her own image.
Still, Kate had no intention of assuaging his guilt.
Perhaps he’d think twice before preying on another woman.
“Believe me, I came here to see Mrs. Lawson.”
“Madam is not available tonight.” Kate grasped the key ring and hitched up her cloak and skirts, adding as she turned to the gates, “In future you might try writing her a letter first. After she ponders it, she may or may not send you a reply stating whether she will receive you.”
“Has she learned to write?”
She stopped before taking a step. How many of Georgette’s past lovers knew her second-most-guarded secret? How many hours had Georgette labored to memorize entire books in order to give a “reading” to her party guests? How many times had Kate made up witty remarks for her mistress to sprinkle into her conversations at social events, only to have Georgette forget them in midrecital?
Georgette, in fact, was more ashamed of her inability to read or write than she was of how she made a living. Who but Madam’s oldest friends would know what she regarded as her greatest weakness? She turned, assessing the lean face with its light growth of stubble and the devilish blue eyes, whose impact she had heard described too many times.
“It can’t be,” she said under her breath.
“What can’t be?” he asked guardedly.
“You can’t—” She gasped, glancing around the garden in disbelief.
Voices erupted in the night. Stanley had climbed the wall and jumped clumsily to the ground, muttering about a hole in his trousers. A group of servants came running into the garden from the outbuildings. Kate’s heart lurched in fear. An army composed of a middle-aged butler, an aging footman, two young stable boys, an aggressive undergroom, and a single blunderbuss between them hardly posed a threat to the band of drunken rabble-rousers who had suddenly appeared jeering and shouting at the garden gates. “What do they mean to do?” she whispered in shock.
“Nothing if I can help it,” the stranger said in a curt voice. “By the way, my name is Colin—”
“Boscastle,” she said numbly, the mayhem breaking loose around her momentarily insignificant.
“You’ve heard of me?” he asked, looking puzzled as he pulled a pistol from his waistband.
“Indeed,” she said in a faint voice. “Madam has devoted the entire first chapter of her memoirs to you.”
“Charming. I’m honored.” He grasped her arm and pulled her behind him. This time, however, she did not resent taking shelter behind the steel wall of his body. “Another thing,” he said as he guided her away from the wall. “Visigoths protected their women. Hopefully, we shall be able to discuss history later tonight and not become part of it. I suggest you ask the fool who just tore his pants to take you to safety. We are under attack.”
Chapter 3
A village ruffian stood atop the wall, shooting burning arrows into the garden. A second vandal knelt beside him scratching the flint of a tinderbox to supply fire as fast as his companion could take aim. Three others had scaled the wall to swing onto a branch and drop into the garden. Colin thought they might have a ladder propped on the other side.
“Lay off, you arseholes!” shouted another young male in a billowing white shirt and riding breeches as he pelted toward the wall. Five small dogs yapped at his heels. If those tiny creatures were the guard dogs the governess had mentioned, the estate would have been better protected by trained squirrels. For a moment Colin wondered whether the white shirt had mistaken him for an attacker. Then Colin noticed a third man grappling with an older gray-haired gent who looked as if he was dressed in servant’s livery.
Colin ran across the grass, slowing to throw an intruder against the wall before planting himself in the path of yet another middle-aged man—in a cleric’s collar, of all costumes. “What man of God incites a lunatic mob against women and children?” he roared. “What religion gives you the right to threaten innocents?”
“I am the Reverend Chatwin, sir,” the man replied, gazing about the garden in dismay. “I’m not here to lead a moral revolt. I came only to discourage from violence those who are offended by Mrs. Lawson’s profession.”
“Burning a house and perhaps the people inside it isn’t considered a sin?”
“Indeed, sir, it is. But my congregation will not listen to me. If Mr. Earling and the rugged footmen he employs to guard him were here, this attack would not have happened.”
“Why didn’t he leave them here to protect the house?”
“It is my understanding that Mr. Earling’s family has been sought by a disgruntled rival for years.”
“Is that right?”
“Mr. Earling’s late father was forced to hide in Ireland to escape. Young Mr. Earling dares not travel alone on lonely roads to reach his ports of business. He fears this rival will kill him.”
An unkempt youth carrying a bulging sack came running in their direction, a leer on his face. “Do me a
favor, Reverend,” Colin said tersely. “Go home and write a sermon before you are injured.”
The reverend regarded Colin in vexation. “I have not seen you before. Are you one of Mrs. Lawson’s customers?”
“Does it matter right now?”
Colin reached out his arm, stopping the attacker cold, and punched him in the face. The sack he had cradled in his arms, which Colin realized contained a load of stones, dropped at the reverend’s feet.
“He’s cracked my jaw in half,” the vandal moaned, falling to his knees. “My God, the pain.”
Colin stepped over his huddled form. “Perhaps the reverend will pray—” He was distracted by the sight of two figures heading furtively for the rose bower. Evidently the governess and her midnight companion had heeded his warning to stay out of sight. The Reverend Chatwin, however, still stood at Colin’s side in petrified shock.
“Heed my warning, Reverend. Get out of here now. Or hide in the rose bower. Just don’t pray in anybody’s way.”
“Where should I go?”
“In the house.”
Colin didn’t wait another moment. He saw a probable assailant run into the flat side of a shovel swung by the young man in the billowing shirt and breeches. As the offender staggered into a bench, the white-shirted hero proceeded to beat out the growing flames with his shovel and hold back the second intruder in alternate strikes. As strong as he appeared, he could not keep fending off attacks by himself forever.
“Hand down the buckets!” Colin bellowed in the direction of the outbuildings. He pulled off his coat and threw it over the hedge.
A burning arrow seared into his shoulder a few seconds after and fell to the ground. He stamped out the spurt of fire, straightened, and charged forward to throw his body weight at the bowman, whose taunting grin soon gave way to a deep-throated groan.
Colin clapped a hand to his shoulder, grimaced, and looked around. He saw several figures escaping over the wall. The garden was almost deserted, except for the servants, who had done their best to defend the house and stood in a cluster, watching him in cautious silence, empty buckets in hand. He nodded at them, retrieved his coat, and made a leisurely tour of the garden. When he was satisfied that all was clear except for the smoke lingering in the air, he started to walk toward the house. He assumed that by now the governess had informed her mistress that she had a visitor. Whether he would receive a warmer welcome from Georgette than he had from Miss Walcott he couldn’t guess.
Chapter 4
Georgette stood at the bedroom window with her son and two coughing children. The commotion in the garden had awakened the sicklings from their uneasy slumber; not one of them would heed their mother’s or their nursemaid’s pleas to return to bed. Why Brian, Etta, and Charlie obeyed Kate, Georgette did not know, but her hard-worked companion and governess wasn’t here.
Kate appeared to be involved in the activity below, which Georgette’s eldest son Brian was watching in fascination. “They’re fighting. I want to go down. Look at all those men. Look at Lovitt and that shovel. Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s the best thing I’ve seen. Smack him in the chops!”
“You are not going out at night to risk a chest cough,” Georgette said in dismay, turning to the mirror to assess her appearance. Her gold-tinged brown ringlets sat beguilingly on her shoulders. Her copper silk dress fit her curvaceous form to perfection; if there was a decent caller in the pandemonium below, she would turn him from her door, of course. But she would allow a teasing look at her in the window.
She was, after all, high-priced merchandise, a piece of ware that had been taken on lease but as yet not bought for life. She was holding out for someone—or something. She doubted it was love. Security, certainly. Respect? Impossible in her profession. Power? To do what? To stop worrying about whether her bosom would grow wrinkled, or whether she would get pregnant again despite all the precautions she urged her lovers to take.
Etta coughed again, in her face. “Mama, I want to be sick. My supper’s coming up. It’s the wambles.”
“Do it out the window,” Georgette said in panic, turning to the children’s nursemaid. “No, Nan, take her back to bed. What is Kate doing?”
“She’s with a man,” Brian said in alarm. “He’s pulling her by the arm. I’ve never seen him before. I think he’s helping Bledridge.”
“The butler?” Georgette peered into the garden. It was not from mere vanity that she refused to wear spectacles: not only did myopia blur her flaws in the mirror; it made many of her lovers look half-appealing. “That is the man from the apothecary’s,” she said in surprise. “Why doesn’t she bring the medicine up here? It’s not the first time Kate has seen a fireworks display. But—it isn’t like Kate to fuss about when the children need her.”
The nursemaid’s withered mouth worked into a smile. She was still spry, in her late seventies, sharper in many aspects than Georgette had ever been. “That is not a fireworks display, madam. Those are arrows being shot aflame into the hedges to cause an inferno. The ‘parade’ of excitable youth is what we used to call a mob in London. Have you forgotten?”
Georgette turned paler than the water pearls threaded through her hair. “They’re calling me by name,” she said slowly. “Listen.”
“They are calling you names,” Nan said in disparagement. “And none of them suitable for young ears.”
“Get back into the nursery, all of you,” Georgette said, suddenly realizing that Nan was right. “Brian, you are going to fall out the window leaning over like that.”
He didn’t react. Her son was lost in another world—a man’s world of danger and fighting and defending . . . what didn’t particularly matter as long as it roused the blood and rescued him from the nursery. “He’s mowing them down like bowls,” he said. “I want to go down to help him. There are men crawling back over the wall like worms and Lovitt is bashing at them for all he’s worth. So is Bledridge in the flower bed. They need another man. May I go down to help him, madam?”
“Who is that other man?” asked ten-year-old Charlie, peeking around his half brother’s shoulder. “Is he good or bad?”
“He’s very bad,” Georgette said before she could stop herself. “He has wickedness written all over his—”
She reached her arm out to her firstborn, looking down in hesitation at the stranger who had captured Brian’s and now Charlie’s imagination. Her heart turned over as the tall black-haired man launched himself into the fight.
“Oh, no,” she whispered. “It can’t be. It isn’t. Maybe I do need spectacles. Maybe I have the wambles, too. Is the room spinning?”
“What’s the matter?” Brian asked, drawn away from the window by the oddness of her voice.
“Go back to bed now,” she whispered. “Stay there until I send Kate to bring you out.”
“But what have we done?” Brian demanded.
“Just do what I tell you for once. You all be deathly ill. You need rest and medicine. I need a drink. Go! Go quickly. Everything will be all right. Kate will bring your tonic to the nursery.”
Brian pulled away from her in disgust. “I am not a baby and I will not stay in the nursery any longer. If you need me, ma’am, I will be sleeping in the stables.”
“Brian—”
He swept from the room, the nursemaid he scorned and his two half siblings staring after him in shock. His outbursts of rebellion had become more frequent since Georgette had moved into Mason Earling’s house, even though in all fairness Mason had done his awkward best to win the boy over.
With every year that passed, Brian had grown more to resemble his natural father, until tonight she could not even look down into the garden at the stranger without thinking that even he reminded her of the beloved rogue who had broken her heart.
* * *
Kate took the bottle from Stanley’s hands as soon as they entered the house. “You are brave to risk coming here tonight with the village on a rampage.”
His pale eyes regarded her in concern. �
��You are brave to stay in this house and serve a woman of Mrs. Lawson’s disrepute. The life she leads only attracts trouble.”
“Where would I go?” she asked wistfully. “Besides, this is only the second time I’ve encountered violence in Madam’s employment. Do you think it’s safe for you to leave here tonight?”
“I’ll walk back with the reverend. Do you know where he is?”
“I assume he took refuge in the kitchen.”
“The worst of the fiends have probably passed out in the woods by now. After tonight they might not return.” He paused. “Who was that man who waylaid you in the garden?”
Heat stole into Kate’s cheeks. “Oh. He’s one of Mrs. Lawson’s oldest friends, or so he claims. I have to warn her that he’s here.”
“Warn her?” Stanley frowned, staring across the candlelit hall to the front door. “Does he pose a danger to her?”
A danger? Kate thought guiltily of the passages in Georgette’s memoirs that referred to Colin Boscastle. “He was helpful tonight.”
“Is he a repeat offender?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Is he a true friend or only one of the multitudes your mistress has entertained?”
“I think you ought to leave now,” she said softly. “Watch out for yourself walking home.”
She looked him in the face. Stanley was a fair-minded man, respectable and still living with his aging parents. But he didn’t know all her sins. Her past. He had never, like the scoundrel in the garden, made any attempt to dishonor her. If ever in her life Kate had a chance of a future, it would be with Stanley.
“Kate—”
She drew back instinctively. He was staring at her mouth as if he knew it bore the mark of another man’s kiss. “I am grateful for your friendship, Stanley.”
“‘Friendship’ is a lukewarm word.”
“Perhaps.” She did not give him the chance to elaborate on whatever encouragement he might have sought.
The Mistress Memoirs Page 2
