Fletcher rubbed his jaw with his hand and sighed. “Only one door into this building, and I have the key.” He patted his pocket. “Bobby and me, we sit with the babe and watch the carriage yard. There’s been no trouble, and no questions.”
“Where are my pistols?”
Fletcher pulled the case from under the end of the bed and set it beside Colin. “Gun’s clean. Padding and powder are fresh.” By the time Colin had opened the box, Fletcher was gone, the door pulled shut behind him.
For the next hour, Colin considered Fletcher’s criticisms. He had no answers, but he did know one thing. Marietta’s death—and the wet nurse’s refusal—had changed his options, giving him a way to honor both his promise to the Home Office and his implicit one to Lucy.
Colin was still considering his next steps when Fletcher’s voice called, “Dinner,” through the door. Fletcher held open the door for Lucy to enter carrying a tray, then withdrew, leaving Colin and Lucy alone.
“I thought gruel might be easy on your stomach. But if you wish for something else, the kitchen is quiet. We’ve no other quests, and the last stage left an hour ago.”
“Gruel will be fine.” He looked at her, her dark eyes filled with kindness, and he knew that honesty—or a form of it—would be best. “Fletcher tells me I owe you my life.”
“It wasn’t your time to die.” She placed the tray at the foot of the bed, lay a piece of linen across his chest, then set the tray in his lap. She moved efficiently, but with grace.
“I recall little after my bath, but before that . . . well, I remember enough to know I should apologize. I was hopelessly ill-mannered.”
“There’s no need. Sickrooms, hospitals, are worlds unto themselves. Just as you can’t know who will be brave on the battlefield, you can never predict how a person will respond to pain, fear, or weakness. Most men, in fact, later regret the things they say in a sickroom.”
“I regret being like most men.”
She laughed, a rich, hearty sound. He lifted the spoon, and she stepped away, closer to the door. She clearly intended to escape when he began to eat.
“Sit and keep me company. If the kitchen is quiet, there’s no reason you can’t wait for the tray.”
She pulled the chair at his bedside back toward the wall before sitting reluctantly.
“I promise not to bite. Besides, if I were to try, you would be back in the kitchen before I could untangle myself from the bedclothes.” As he lifted the spoon, he watched her face. “Ah, a smile. I have amused you.”
“It’s a shame James Gillray is dead. He could have made quite a satirical cartoon of it.” Her hands were folded primly, but her voice was teasing.
“Tell me more. It will entertain me while I eat.”
“Let’s see.” She rubbed the lobe of her ear pensively. “‘Aristocratic Manners Undressed.’ A half-dressed young lord chases a scullery maid down a hall, his bedclothes trailing behind, tripping him. Gillray captures him in mid-fall, arm outstretched toward the fleeing maid. An old woman in a sleeping cap peeks out of an adjacent room to ogle the lord’s bare chest.”
The gruel warmed his stomach. “But what of the maid? Gillray shows her in full stride, lifting her skirts to reveal two finely turned legs, and dripping soap-suds from her arms.”
“Only the reader can see her legs.” She shook her head in mock dismay, crossing her ankles out of view. “The young lord’s behind her, sliding on the soap-suds.”
“True.” He grinned. “But look here.” He pretended to hold out an engraved print, pointing at an imaginary spot with his spoon. “The suds trail down his chest, and there’s a bit of soap on his nose. Perhaps our maid is more complicit than we thought. Look at the expression on his face. I don’t think he expected the maid to bolt.”
“He is only surprised because he’s a lord.” She held up her hands, palms facing him, as if refusing to take the imaginary print. “He expected compliance, not rejection.”
“And the soap-suds?” Colin lifted the bowl and drank the rest of the broth, watching her all the while.
“He accosted her, and she pushed him away.” She turned her nose up slightly to convey conviction.
“Ah, I see.” He leaned back into his pillow, and she removed the tray to the bedside table. “But I think your defense of our sweet maid misses one essential point.”
“And that is?”
“Soap-suds. Why are there suds if she isn’t in the kitchen? He must have been in the bath—and for her to have the suds on her arms, she must have been . . . assisting him.”
Lucy shook her head. “I will have to take this up with the ghost of Mr. Gillray—he clearly has misunderstood the maid’s predicament when faced with the attentions of a handsome lord.” She removed the linen and straightened his bedcovers efficiently.
“Is he handsome?” Colin straightened in interest. Did she see herself in the role of the sudsy maid pursued by the young lord?
“Who?” She lifted the tray to leave.
“The young lord who chases our scullery maid.”
“I couldn’t say, sir.” She pretended to look once more at the print. “I can’t see his face for the soap-suds.”
Colin watched her leave with regret. He could grow used to a companion with a quick wit and well-turned ankles.
* * *
When she arrived at the kitchen the next morning, Lucy told herself that returning to her dishes was a wise course. She was growing too fond of him, of his quick wit and easy smile. The kitchen offered her a safe and anonymous retreat. Even so, she found herself adding extra soap to the water to make the suds thick.
By early afternoon, three coaches with passengers had come and gone, all eating in the dining hall before they left. Every dish had been used and washed and used again. Washing should have been welcome work, a break from the worry of sitting beside Colin’s bed, praying he would live. Instead, each dish seemed like her enemy, keeping her from checking to see that he was still well.
She touched her fingers to her lips. She hadn’t expected a simple kiss to create such a complicated web of emotions. And she certainly hadn’t expected to want to kiss him again. She returned to the pot, scrubbing absently, while she remembered the feel of his mouth against hers. His hand in her hair.
“I think you’ve got that pot nice and clean, Lucy.” Nell lifted the pot from Lucy’s hands and gave it to a towheaded girl at her side. “Peggy will be helping with the dishes until his lordship departs.”
“Is something wrong?” Lucy’s stomach clenched. The kitchen had been her safe haven.
“Nothing at all.” Nell patted Peggy on the shoulder as she led Lucy into a quiet corner. “His lordship has made us a fine proposition.”
Lucy stiffened. “A proposition?” She willed her face to remain impassive. Had she misjudged the kind of man he was? From living with her cousin, she’d come to believe that the men of the ton were venal and selfish. But Colin, she’d told herself, wasn’t a lord as much as he was an officer. And she knew officers—their faults, their prejudices, their shortcomings, but also their virtues. Nell was still talking, and Lucy forced herself to listen.
“I can’t see any reason to refuse, but I’ll tell him nay if that’s what ye be wishing.”
Lucy’s heart pounded hard in her chest, and her breath felt stiff. She knew how coercive the aristocracy could be. “What does he want?”
“An active man who finds himself bedridden grows bored easily, and bored guests are difficult guests. They complain about the beds, the noise, the food, even the smell of the air.”
“Go on.” Lucy felt her distrust grow like yeast in a glass of sugar water. She’d been taught from infancy to minimize her risks, to take precautions, to remain safe. She’d been a fool to disregard that training.
Nell held out two pound coins, and Lucy felt her stomach upheave. She’d allowed herself to believe that Colin was an honorable man, but this . . . how could this be honorable?
“He wishes for you to enterta
in him during the day. And he’s provided more than enough to pay both you and Peggy for the next two months. Peggy’s da died last month, and she’s the eldest of four—I’ve been hoping to have enough trade to hire her. And this . . .” Nell smiled at the coins.
Lucy looked at Peggy, her thin arms and legs, already doing exactly as Alice told her. “What does he expect me to do?” Peggy’s presence made refusal difficult, and she wondered ungenerously if that was what Nell had intended.
“Oh, he’s provided a list.” Nell held it out. “These things and nothing else. And you may refuse three requests per day. Even better, if he asks for something not on the list, we may keep his coin without any additional obligation.”
Lucy read the list. Nothing salacious. Reading aloud. Writing letters. Games involving cards, dice, marbles, or boards, but no wagers. She turned the sheet over to see if there were additional items on the back; then, still suspicious, she held it up to the light to see if other words appeared. Nothing. Her relief felt like cool water on a hot day. He was exactly who she had believed him to be.
“Mr. Fletcher says his lordship’s relations should be here in two, three days at the most.” Nell grinned. “And he’s already paid us.” She pressed one of the pound coins in Lucy’s hand.
Lucy turned the coin over. No scullery maid would refuse so much money for a few days’ attention to a convalescent. But she still felt vaguely uncomfortable, as if there were a larger game at play, and she didn’t know its rules.
Even so, she pocketed the coin. “What harm can come of it?”
“That’s what I thought.” Nell patted her on the back. “Go on up now. And take that basket: I’ve collected some games and books from the public rooms.”
Lucy picked up the basket and headed toward the guest lodgings. She hoped Colin grew less appealing with familiarity. Otherwise the harm might be to her heart.
* * *
Fletcher was standing at the door when Lucy arrived, basket in tow. Fletcher spoke loudly enough that Colin could hear each word perfectly.
“Thank heavens that you agreed, Miss Lucy, or I might have killed him by nightfall. Morose and moody, he is, and no cheering him.”
“Then perhaps we can distract him.” She tilted the basket so only Fletcher could see its contents. “See anything he likes?”
“Ah, yes, miss. This.” The coachman smiled broadly as he pointed.
Lucy laughed out loud. “This should be interesting.”
From his bed, Colin strained to see what Fletcher had picked. “Why are you talking to Fletcher when I’m the one who is paying for your time?” Colin had made the agreement with Nell, he told himself, because he needed to know Lucy better before he could consider taking her with them as Jennie’s companion. But, in truth, all day he had missed Lucy’s teasing tongue and her quick wit. He’d even tried to amuse himself by making absurd statements and predicting what she would say in response. But none of his imagined retorts surprised and delighted him as much as hers did. The game had only made him want her company more.
“Fletcher indicates that you like Fox and Geese.” Her cheeks were still flushed from the heat of the kitchen.
“I last played when I was a boy.” He shifted toward the center of the bed, hoping she would sit beside him. Instead, she placed the basket on the bed and pulled a chair forward.
“Fletcher chose it first off, so I would wager—if we were allowed to wager—that it’s your favorite.” Few people teased him as regularly, and successfully, as Lucy, and it made him feel whole in a way he hadn’t felt in months.
“Let me see what’s in that basket.” Colin began to rummage, pulling out dominoes, card decks, marbles, and dice. Near the bottom, he discovered two double-sided board games. “Backgammon on the front, chess on the back, and this one pairs checkers with Fox and Geese.” Under the games were four small books.
“Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. Know anything about it?”
“It’s a ghost story. Terrifying, especially if you read it by candlelight.”
“Then you’ll have to read it to me by candlelight.” With satisfaction, he watched her cheeks flush a slightly deeper crimson.
“Our agreement is to keep you company during the day.” She turned her nose up at his suggestion, establishing the boundaries of their flirtation, if a flirtation it was.
“I suppose no Otranto then—I would hate not to find the terrifying bits terrifying.” He turned back to the basket, his mood already improving. “Let’s see: three more. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War or part four of A History of the Buccaneers of America.”
“Does the Thucydides start with volume one?” She opened the book to its title page.
“What? No pirates?” Colin felt lighter in her presence, less burdened by the past and his choices.
“I prefer my history to be ancient. Besides, I refuse to read any books except from the beginning. In the camps, books circulated from hand to hand, but one could rarely read all the volumes or read them in the right order. Half the time, the volume I’d be reading would end abruptly, and I could never find the next volume. What’s our last option?”
He picked up a battered book with no spine and opened to the title page. “It’s in Spanish. El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha.” He spoke the words with an almost perfect accent.
“It sounds like you can read that yourself, or I can read it to you. In Lisbon, one could easily find interesting things to read, if one was willing to translate.”
He opened Quixote to the first page, “I picked up a smattering of whatever language I needed. Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, a bit of German to converse with the Prussians, Austrians, and Swedes. Usually I learned just enough of one language to pretend to be a native speaker of one of the others.”
“I liked Quixote, especially during the wars.” She took the book out of his hands and let her finger run down its missing spine. He watched the movement jealously.
“Why?”
“Quixote believes in chivalry, in doing good deeds, in restoring justice to the world. But he is a bit mad, and he doesn’t see anything as it truly is. As long as he lives in his imagined chivalric world, he’s happy. He defeats a giant threatening the countryside because he doesn’t realize the giant is really a windmill. But when he is cured, he sees the world as it really is, making him sad and isolated. With no dreams to sustain him, he dies.”
“Perhaps we’ll read Otranto instead. Quixote sounds a bit melancholy.”
She tilted her head in memory. “Perhaps, but it’s also thoughtful and funny. Why would one want to live in a world devoid of hope or dreams? If all you have is a stark reality, would it not be better to live in a dream world, where at least you believe you are doing good?”
“Does my nurse tilt at windmills, then?”
She looked up at the ceiling before answering. “Probably. If my only possible reality was stark and ugly, I’d rather cling to the beautiful dream. And you?”
“Like Quixote after his cure, I see the stark ugliness and retreat from it.”
Her face grew solemn with concern; then, shaking it off, she smiled brilliantly. “Enough of that, sir. I know you didn’t bring me from the kitchen for philosophical conversation.” She pulled Fox and Geese out of the pile on the bed. “I believe, instead, you wished to challenge my skill at herding geese.”
“Fletcher will tell you I’m an exceptionally wily fox, outwitting unsuspecting geese at every step.”
“I’ve already seen that for myself.” She held up his list of activities. “Or I would still be in the kitchen . . . with my soap-suds.”
He felt his expression move from surprise to shock, to amusement and a sort of triumph. But she made no comment, only set out marbles on the cross-shaped grid.
The day passed so companionably that Colin could almost forget how he had come to be there, at a rural inn, gunshot and waiting for his elder brother’s help. The acuteness of his failure faded in Lucy’s laughter, a
nd his pleasure in her company was as sweet as it was unexpected.
During a particularly competitive game of backgammon, he told Lucy how his elder brother Benjamin had spent afternoon after afternoon teaching him strategy, until he’d grown skilled enough to beat his next oldest brother Aidan, who before then had never lost and afterward never won again. He had been eight and Aidan twelve. Lucy clapped with delight, praising his younger self with real enthusiasm—then just as enthusiastically trounced him without mercy.
As they played their way through a dozen games, he observed with interest the trajectory of her mind, learning—as he had suspected already—that she was a sharp and formidable adversary.
In only another day or two, he would have to take up his responsibilities, Aidan would arrive, and Colin would have to deliver the infant to his relations. But until then, he allowed himself the time to heal, and the babe the time to grow strong and hardy. Like the hours before a battle when soldiers would draw together all their strength, it was a waiting game. But this time, while he waited, he had the sustained companionship of the most interesting woman he’d ever known. For now, he was Quixote, holding on to a beautiful dream.
When night finally fell, Nell’s boys brought up an extra lantern, and Lucy read Castle of Otranto to him. But after the third supernatural episode, she was too afraid to leave his room to return across the darkened courtyard to her own. She pulled in a second chair from the adjoining drawing room and, tucking her feet up, she fell asleep by his side, returning to her room before he awoke in the early light of day.
* * *
When Lucy returned the next morning before breakfast, she was horrified to find Colin dressed in his trousers, shirt, waistcoat, and cravat, on his way to find her.
“Where do you think you are going, sir?” She let her tone convey all her dismay and concern. Fletcher—that traitor—would pay if Colin fell or overexerted himself.
“We are going. I believe games with balls are on your list. Yesterday, I looked out the window into the garden and saw a fine bowling lawn.”
Chasing the Heiress Page 6
