The baroness, looking fetching in pale green edged with violet, was leading Baumgartner back toward the terrace. Michael pretended to watch that cheery tableau while the baron scrutinized him.
“If you in any way bring harm to my wife, Michael, I will kill you without a thought. This is a solemn promise. You may pass that along to whoever may find it of interest, for I’d hope they are protective of you as well.”
Michael made no reply, for to protest would be to lie to a man who’d saved his life more than once, and to acknowledge the comment would admit that Michael’s loyalty did not lie exclusively with his employer.
Fourteen
“You did not appear in charity with Mr. Brodie.”
Sebastian considered prevaricating. Milly was not an experienced rider, and managing her horse meant she could not quite as easily manage her husband.
“I am not in charity with my aunt,” he replied. “She sent not one spy, but two, the very day after you and I spoke our vows. Did she think we’d not manage our own wedding night?”
Milly fiddled with her mare’s mane. He’d put her up on Folly, a lovely little chestnut Arabian whose smooth gaits made up for a lamentable tendency to flirt with even mature geldings.
“Your aunt is in the habit of worrying about you, Sebastian. She’ll not stop merely because a wife has stumbled into your path.”
“No, she must add you to her list of people she worries about. May I assume the professor interrogated you?”
He bent forward to duck under a low-hanging branch. Because the mare and the woman were both smaller than their male counterparts, Milly did not have to duck.
“The professor was charming. He got his answers without asking any difficult questions. Did you know he once proposed to your aunt?”
Answers to which questions? “I did not. How did you pry that out of him?”
The mare made a feint at nipping Fable’s shoulder. “Bad girl,” Milly chided. “I asked him. I asked if, now that I have taken over the job of lady-most-concerned-with-your-welfare, would Lady Freddy allow somebody to acquire the same post with regard to her?”
Fable, poor lad, was not oblivious to the mare’s overtures, but danced off a few paces, looking more confused than annoyed.
Sebastian petted his gelding. “And his reply?”
“He regarded himself as already assigned to that post, happily so, but awaited the lady’s realization of it. They love you, Sebastian, and I think you hardly realize it.”
The horses settled, while Sebastian’s thoughts did not.
“I know they love me. Aunt’s steadfastness was sometimes all that sustained me when I was in France. She found ways to get letters through, news of home, the occasional small frippery or memento. My debt to her is substantial.”
For the first time, riding along with his wife at his side, Sebastian also admitted—to himself—that his debt to Lady Freddy was infernally tiresome.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have peace?
“She owes you too,” Milly said, drawing back on the reins when Folly would have made another try for Fable’s attention. “Your aunt is one of those ladies for whom an embroidery hoop is a type of shackle. She must be managing things, involved in larger affairs, and challenged by matters beyond petty gossip and fashion. If she were a vicar’s wife, she’d be running the parish. If she were a man, she would have bought her colors.”
“This puts her in my debt?”
“Your exile in France allowed her to manage the barony, gave her a challenge at a time in life when becoming a widow might have made her desperate and stupid. Lady Freddy likely understands this and feels indebted to you accordingly. Another nephew would have seen his affairs in the hands of anybody else rather than let an aging female make the important decisions.”
His affairs had been in the hands of trustees when he’d come of age in France, but Freddy had guided those trustees, as best Sebastian could ascertain.
“I have never once, not in my mind, not in any language, applied the word exile to the time I spent in my mother’s homeland.”
“I hardly see why not. If you’d been a duke’s son, you can bet somebody would have negotiated for your return. Frenchmen were stranded here, too, and the French are surpassingly practical.”
Fable came to a halt, though Sebastian did not ask it of him.
“You’re saying my aunt stranded me in France?” Once the thought intruded on his peace, the idea sat in his mind with the cold, leaden immobility of an ugly possibility.
“Of course not. I’m saying your aunt thrived on the challenges created by your absence, and likely prayed for your safety every night. A woman’s reach will always have limits, compared to a man’s. Is he supposed to be eating those?”
Fable had snatched a mouthful of leaves from some shrub. Sebastian could not think of the English name for it, though it was not noxious.
“No, he is not. The mare’s company has overset him. Come along, you.” He nudged the beast with his calf. “What questions did you answer for the professor?”
A casual observer might have concluded Milly was more cargo than equestrienne. She was inexperienced on horseback, true, but she had the knack of leaving the horse in peace as long as it behaved. One day, she would be an excellent rider, if she so chose, the kind of rider a horse trusted and took care of as it might a member of its own herd.
“I assured the professor I was happy with my choice of husband, assured him I anticipated many happy years as your baroness. I assured him your treatment of me had been all that I might have wished for as a new bride.”
He’d asked her for a single rose, and she’d flung an entire bouquet at him. “You might have simply told him you were content.”
“I am by no means content. Contentment is for children, the elderly, and those who’ve earned it. When we have a nursery full of happy, healthy children, and they are each excelling at their letters, then I can be content. When I can curl up in the library of a chilly afternoon with a novel by Mrs. Radcliffe, then I will be content. When you no longer suspect everybody and everything of nefarious motives, then I will be content.”
And each of her roses came with thorns.
“Often, people have nefarious motives. I have them too.” And now he’d have to consider that Freddy had left him in France for purposes he could not fathom, a thorny undertaking indeed.
“You never did tell me why you were unhappy with Mr. Brodie,” Milly observed.
The mare resumed her doomed efforts at flirtation, though Fable was apparently more interested now in spying another bush of forbidden fodder. “What makes you think I was unhappy with him?”
“You were drinking tea, and your aunt told me you cannot abide the stuff. Then too, Mr. Brodie looked like a guilty schoolboy made to copy Bible verses and go without his pudding.”
Or like a sergeant assigned drill duty when he’d been promised leave.
“I like tea. I particularly like a hearty black, with a touch of gunpowder in the blend. Occasionally, I’ll flavor my tea with bergamot, which I learned from an Italian who passed through the Château on the way to some Papist cathedral in the North of Spain.”
They’d come to the oak avenue that led to the mill where, in Sebastian’s mind, their marriage had begun.
“You like tea, but you deny yourself the pleasure of it,” Milly concluded. “This makes no sense. Tea is not a vice nor, for an English peer, an extravagance.”
“Forgoing tea is a habit,” Sebastian said slowly, “a habit of such long-standing, it barely requires effort to maintain. Tea is English. Coffee is French, and my life depended on my becoming French. I was careful to disdain tea.”
Milly drew her mare up and peered down the row of oaks. The vista was beautiful, in a bucolic, English way that made Sebastian’s chest ache.
“Your life depended on
your being perceived as French. My hope would be that instead of becoming English or French, your efforts are now bent in the direction of becoming Sebastian, Baron St. Clair, and my husband.”
“Shall we visit the mill?” He wanted to, wanted to make sure it was still there, still available for a private interlude, if his wife were so inclined.
“No. I have wonderful memories of that mill, but I’d like to see another place you frequented as a boy, and I want to make wonderful memories there, too.”
“Madam, this estate covers thousands of acres, and the smile I see on your face can only be described as naughty. I am but one man, and no longer blessed with the stamina of youth. I suggest you moderate your ambitions.”
Her smile was also enchanting. Enchantingly naughty. Too naughty for Sebastian to think of how few places they might make memories before Tuesday next.
The mare used her tail to whisk a fly off her quarters, which inspired Fable into a sizable dodge sideways.
“And I suggest you stop ridiculing my ambitions and choose us another destination,” Milly said. “What lies off in that direction?” She’d pointed with her whip toward a sheep-dotted rise to the east of the park.
“Our very own ruins lie that way. Some say it was a watchtower for spotting Romans, Vikings, and other nuisances, others say it was some sort of Druid mound converted to a cow byre. Part of it looks like a circle the gods knocked askew.”
“You played there as a child?”
“Endlessly.” Though he’d forgotten that. Forgotten that he’d imagine centurions far from home—brave, brawny, dark-bearded fellows longing for their airy piazzas and sunny Mediterranean shores.
“Then that’s our next destination, but, Sebastian?”
“My dear?” He’d almost called her “my love.” He waited for her reply while they turned their horses toward the rise, away from the mill.
“I still do not entirely trust Michael Brodie, though I like him.”
Sebastian reminded himself that his baroness had appropriated a place in his bed as if he owed her his very nightmares. Fainthearted, Milly St. Clair was not, and he loved her for it.
“I’ve known Michael for years, and for many of those years, I would have said he was my only friend.” But was he an ally? Had he ever been?
“He’s a good fellow, but sometimes good fellows cannot entirely choose the paths they take.”
“Delicately put.” Sometimes good fellows could not even choose what countries they dwelled in or fought for. “Why don’t you trust him, Milly?”
“I’m not sure. He warned me that any woman who mattered to you could become a liability to you, like an Achilles’ heel.”
Michael, Michael, Michael…though in truth, Sebastian approved of his initiative. “He was being honest, Milly. You know I’ve fought duels. Not all my enemies are as honorable as the English officers I’ve met over pistols.”
Her mare, perhaps thinking they were turning for home, picked up the pace of her walk. “I’ll have no more of that pistols-at-dawn nonsense, Sebastian. You’ve a succession to see to, and a wife who can barely read a menu. Freddy isn’t getting any younger, and in any case, the war is over.”
He assayed a husbandly smile. “No pistols. I do understand.” Which left swords, bare fists, knives, whips…
“Do not humor me, Sebastian.” Her tone was a trifle sharp. “I woke up today and found I am a baroness. This was not in my plans, and I’d be cross to find it so, except I also woke up next to you.”
She’d woken up mostly under him. He’d woken up mostly inside her. All three times.
“No pistols, Milly. You have my word, and don’t be concerned about Michael. He and I get along well, in part because his mother was Irish and his father Scottish. Like me, Michael is a mongrel.”
“Which accounts for why he has a brogue sometimes and a burr at others.”
She fell silent, though Michael would be appalled to realize she’d heard his slips—and heard them, she had. Milly did not read easily, but she listened prodigiously well.
“Do you notice anything else about Michael that makes you uneasy?”
She fiddled with her reins, she petted her horse, she looked all about, as if trying to recall how they’d arrived to their present location.
“Yes.” In one syllable, she conveyed her reluctance to find fault with her husband’s fellow mongrel. “If he’d desert the English cause when he was a duly commissioned officer, and the war was mostly going in England’s favor, what’s to stop him from deserting your cause eventually too?”
If he hasn’t already. “Michael will be leaving soon to visit family in the North, if that’s any comfort to you. Shall we let the horses stretch their legs a bit?”
And if Michael did not care to visit family, then Sebastian was left in a quandary: Was he better off knowing exactly where Michael was, and when he came and went, or would he benefit from having Michael out from under his roof, up to who knew what, and on behalf of who knew which government—or clan?
Milly’s mare cantered off, and Sebastian followed, admiring his wife’s seat and the fearless way she allowed her mare to go thundering over the countryside.
***
The professor had explained to Milly in one of their penmanship sessions that English was a large language, a language that did not discard the old in favor of the new, but instead added to its arsenal of vocabulary. The Romans had come and gone, and much of their language had been added to that arsenal, similarly with the Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, the Vikings and the Normans. As a consequence, most any thought requiring expression in English words could take a variety of forms.
A husband could also be a spouse or a marital partner. A dog could, depending on one’s regard, be a canine, a hound, a companion animal, or a mongrel.
And of all the words available, in English, in any language, the only description Milly could find appropriate to her domestic situation was “fallen in love.”
She had fallen in love with her husband. He had not intended this result—theirs was a pragmatic union born of his honor and her lack of alternatives—but he was the cause of it.
After making love at the ruins, they’d fallen asleep the previous night entwined in each other’s arms, talking, kissing, petting, and talking some more.
Sebastian had been physically sick after the first time he’d taken a knife to Mercia, and the second.
He’d been unable to attend his grandmother’s funeral, because his commanding officer, the dread Anduvoir, had been threatening to make an inspection of the Château.
He’d considered emigrating to America rather than assuming his baronial responsibilities, but concern for Freddy had stopped him.
With each confession, Milly became more Sebastian’s wife and more in awe of the man she’d married. Also more determined to see that he somehow laid claim to the happiness he was due.
“That field there”—Milly gestured with her whip—“that’s where you should try some lavender. It’s well drained, gets plenty of light, and lies on the southern exposure of the hillside.”
Fable sauntered along, apparently oblivious to whips, mares, and other aggravations.
“That area has always been pasture,” Sebastian said. “I suspect the ground is rocky.”
“All of England is rocky,” Milly retorted, “except for the parts that are boggy, which this is not. Get the sheep off it after harvest, marl it thoroughly, then plow up a portion this spring and see how your plants do.”
He did not dismiss her suggestions out of hand, as most other men would have. He petted his white horse—who sported a streak of green slobber on its shoulder, courtesy of Folly’s dubious affections—and glanced back toward the manor house.
“If we put lavender in here, the prevailing breeze would blow the scent back that direction, and we could see the entire crop from the family wing.�
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Milly remained silent, because Sebastian’s commanding-officer mind grasped such details with a speed and thoroughness Milly could only marvel at.
“We’d need a drying shed,” he said as their horses wandered down the lane bordering the pasture. “A wooden structure, because stone attracts cold and damp.”
His command post in France had been a pile of stones.
“A small wooden structure,” Milly said. “You can add on as the size of the crop increases.”
“We have time to build something before next summer.”
The lane widened, it being one of the primary routes into the village. Milly listened to her husband think out loud, loving the sound of his voice along with the characteristic rigor of his plans.
He made love with the same focus, the same intensity of purpose.
“You sound very English, you know.” She’d meant it as a casual observation, maybe even a compliment, but Sebastian drew rein in the middle of the lane.
“When haven’t I sounded English?”
His intensity was focused on her now, so Milly searched her memory for details. “Do you recall when you came upon me in the music room, and the roses were in the wrong vase?”
From his expression, he knew exactly which encounter she referred to.
“You made an English flower arrangement,” she went on. “Symmetric, and every stem just so, but you sounded…Continental.”
“I sounded French.” He did not permit himself an emotional reaction to her observation, which Milly took for a reaction in itself. “When else?”
She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, but to him, it did. It always would.
“When we walked in the park and you asked me about Alcorn.” He’d been not only French then, he’d been the commanding officer, in charge of the garrison.
Sebastian sat taller in the saddle, as if he wanted to see farther. “And what about when we went to Chelsea?”
“English,” Milly said. “You kiss and flirt in English, sir.”
His smile…oh, she lived to see such a smile on his face. Happy, rascally, smug, and very male. “How could you know such a thing?”
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