by Ruth Owen
She lifted her chin and returned the dowager’s gaze. “Hello, Grandmother. It has been a long time.”
The woman’s hand tightened on the cane’s handle, but her imperial expression didn’t flicker. “Maybe it has, and maybe it hasn’t. Come closer, girl.”
Rina stepped toward her and held he breath as the countess looked her up and down. Her gaze was sharp, reminding Sabrina of the canny produce merchants in the markets of Cheapside. Now I know how a sack of potatoes feels.
“You’ve the Trevelyan hair,” the dowager commented at last. “And you’ve always been a skinny thing, even as a child. But you inherited none of your mother’s fashion sense. I’ve never seen an uglier dress.”
“And I have never heard a ruder remark,” Sabrina answered quietly.
Lady Penelope’s eyes flashed fire. “Ha!” she cried as she raised her cane and rapped it against the floor. “You’ve got spirit, my girl. That goes more to proving you a Trevelyan than hair or looks ever could. Is that not so, Dr. Williams?”
“If she’s half as obstinate as you, milady, I shall never have any peace,” the doctor said, though without rancor.
Sabrina glanced up at the man, and realized she’d mistaken at least two things about him. With his thinning, wheat-brown hair and his severe clothing she’d assumed him to be in his mid-thirties, but a closer look revealed that he was only a handful of years older than she. And the blue eyes hid behind his studious-looking spectacles snapped with a warmth and humor that his stern demeanor could not entirely hide. Impulsively she smiled at the young physician, and was answered by an earnest grin. Rina liked him immediately.
He gave her a slight, stiff bow. “Charles Williams at your service, Miss Winthrope. When I am not trying to convince your grandmother to follow my instruction, I’m head doctor at the Trevelyan mines.”
“You’re the only doctor at the Trevelyan mines,” a voice behind Sabrina commented.
Rina turned around. Rising from a rose-colored divan near the window was a girl who appeared to be Sabrina’s age—but that was all they had in common. Her skin was porcelain smooth, and her sun-gold ringlets framed a face an angel would have envied. She wore a blue silk gown with puffed, ribbon laced sleeves that fell in elegantly simple folds around her diminutive figure. The girl was the embodiment of all the fairy-tale princesses Rina had read about as a child, but there was a bored poutiness to her perfect smile that made her ethereal image less than saintly. No doubt this was the divine Amy—and she looked every bit as pretty and petulant as Quinn had said.
“Amy! For heaven’s sake, girl, young Fitzroy will be home tomorrow. Stop mooning over your intended’s letter and come and greet your cousin,” Lady Penelope commanded.
“He’s not—” The beauty’s smile faltered. For an instant Rina thought she saw uncertainty beneath the haughty expression, but it was gone so quickly that it may have been a flicker of the firelight. Amy walked up to Rina, and placed a halfhearted kiss on her cheek. “Hello, Cousin Prudence. ‘Tis so good to have you back with us.”
And why don’t you jump off the cliffs while you’re at it, Sabrina finished silently. Lady Amy’s words may have been welcoming, but her tone was anything but. Probably didn’t fancy attention being focused on anyone other than herself.
“Than you, Cousin Amy. I am sure that I’m as delighted to meet you as you are to meet me.” Rina was gratified to see Amy’s eyes widen in surprise. Emboldened, she continued. “But I was so looking forward to meeting all my relatives. Unfortunately, I understand that Lord Trevelyan is not here.”
“Nor likely to be, Miss Winthrope,” the physician commented as he packed up his equipment into a brown leather satchel. “I’ve been here four months, and in all that time I’ve only seen his lordship once—when he hired me. He spends precious little time at Ravenshold.”
Amy’s pouting mouth pulled into a surprisingly hard line. “My brother is a busy man. He has many estates to see to.”
“I’m sure he has, but that is no excuse to neglect this one. Many of the tenants’ cottages are in need of basic repairs, and the engine at Wheal Grace should be replaced immediately.”
Amy balled her fists in a very unladylike manner. “Edward has good reasons for staying away.”
The countess rapped her cane decisively against the floor. “Stop this bickering! It is ill-mannered—especially in front of your new cousin. What must she be thinking?”
What Rina was thinking was that Amy’s passionate defense of her brother was the first honest emotion she’d seen the girl exhibit. “I think…that there is a great deal I have yet to learn about the members of my family.”
“Well spoken!” Dr. Williams stepped past Lady Amy as if she were a piece of furniture. “I know what it is like to be a newcomer in the district. If I can be of any assistance to you, Miss Winthrope, do not fail to call on me.”
Amy glanced at Sabrina. “I wouldn’t be so free with my assistance, Doctor. We do no eve know if she is Miss Winthrope.”
“Amy!” The dowager paled. Rina saw the pain in the old woman’s eyes, and felt the echo of it in her own heart. She’d felt it on the night her mother had passed away. She’d felt it again on the morning when she’d held her father’s body in her arms, and prayed through her tears that he’d open his eyes and smile at her one last time. It was the need to believe against all odds that someone she loved and lost was still alive. And seeing the emotion in Lady Penelope’s eyes shook Rina more deeply than anything had since her father’s death.
Suddenly her charade wasn’t a game anymore. She was playing with people’s hearts here. People’s souls. If she confessed her duplicity now, she was sure she could make the old woman understand. After all, Rina had lost someone dear to her, too. “Lady Penelope, there is something I need to tell you—”
Rina’s words were cut short by a tremendous crash followed by a shriek. “That bloody hound!”
The door burst open, and in ran one small dog and two small children, followed by one rotund, angry cook. Pendragon raced across the room, his toenails clicking against the floor. He circled the room and darted back toward the door, his path taking him right between Rina and Dr. Williams. He’d have made a clean break for it if he hadn’t caught a paw in one of the ribbons edging Rina’s skirt. The pup’s momentum unbalanced Sabrina, who fell into Charles, who toppled into Amy, who tumbled into the children and Mrs. Poldhu. The lot of them went down in a flailing tangle of arms, legs and curses.
The force of the fall knocked the air from Sabrina’s lungs. Dazed, she lifted her head, and saw Dr. Williams with his head buried in Lady Amy’s bosom. Both of them were red as beets. Nearby, Sarah and David were disentangling themselves from the voluminous folds of Mrs. Poldhu’s apron and skirt, while an apparently contrite Pendragon licked the astonished cook’s nose. And looking down on them all was the dowager, who stared open-mouthed as if she could not believe that such an unseemly thing could happen in her drawing room.
Since she’d walked through the door of Mr. Cherry’s office, Sabrina had kept her emotions in tight check, measuring every word, every look, every tilt of her head against what she believed Prudence would have done. Now, in the sheer absurdity of the moment, her pent-up emotions burst forth. She started to laugh—not the refined titter of a proper lady, but the rich, life-loving laughter that she’d inherited from her father. Dr. Williams started to grin as well, and quite soon they were all laughing along with her, even the haughty Amy. Rina laughed so hard that tears welled up in her eyes. Still laughing, she closed her eyes to wipe those tears away.
Suddenly the laughter died. Opening her eyes, Sabrina found herself nose-to-toe with a pair of mud-spattered Hessian boots. She looked up, and saw thick columns of muscular legs, a rain-drenched greatcoat spanning powerful shoulders, a rugged face and piercing gray eyes that were so full of fury that they made the storm outside seem tame.
“What the devil is going on here?”
Chapter Five
Lord Edwa
rd Blake, seventh Earl of Trevelyan, Viscount Glendugan, Baron Carlisle, and ancestral lord of Ravenshold, was in a foul mood. He’d been in the middle of some tricky negotiations to expand his holdings in Yorkshire when Cherry’s misdirected letter about his “cousin” finally reached him. Abandoning the negotiations had cost him dearly in both pride and purse, but he’d left for Cornwall at once by any coach, cart, or horse that would take him.
When he did arrive, he was greeted at the door by an unusually befuddled Merriman, who kept mumbling something about “the misplaced lady.” Exhausted, soaked to the skin, and clear out of patience, Edward had ignored the nattering butler and made straight for the drawing room.
And walked straight into bedlam.
“What the devil is going on here?” he roared.
For a moment everyone in the room froze. Then the young man who Edward recognized as the doctor he’d hired for Wheal Grace leapt to his feet, and pulled a slightly breathless Amy up after him. “Uhm, good day, my lord. We weren’t expecting you.”
“I can see that. I’m away for a few months and I walk in on a scene from a lunatic asylum!”
“Oh, Edward, don’t be such a grumpy bear,” Amy said as she deftly yanked her dress’s shoulder back in place. “There’s no harm done.”
No harm? He’d just endured four days and nights of ankle-deep mud, inns with sour wine and worse food, hard seats, rutted roads, hellish weather—all to return to a home he’d spent the last three years of his life avoiding. He’d done it to save his family, but from their raucous laughter and wide smiles it appeared that his rescue was both unnecessary and unappreciated. Frustrated and disappointed, he slapped his rain-drenched hat against his thigh, spattering a shower of cold water drops across the floor. Looking around, his gaze was drawn as always to his children. They stood arm in arm, watching him with wary eyes. His stomach clenched as he realized how much they looked like their mother. “Did either of you have a part in this?”
“Don’t yell at the children. It was not their fault.”
No one had taken that tone with him in years. Surprised, he looked down at his feet, and saw something that resembled a gypsy’s gauded-up carnival tent pushing itself to a sitting position. He had a scant second to register the well-disguised curves of a feminine figure and a sadly disheveled mess of red hair before the woman turned her face up toward him.
And he saw a pair of the greenest, angriest, and most breath-taking eyes he’d ever seen.
The countess’s voice broke the moment. “Edward, the least you can do is help your cousin to her feet.”
His cousin. The impostor. Good Christ. He purposely stepped past the woman. “She can sit there and rot for all I care,” he proclaimed as he strode toward the dowager. “Grandmother, how could you let another charlatan into our home?”
“She is not a charlatan. Mr. Cherry has letters. And her hair is Trevelyan red.”
“Letters can be forged. Hair can be dyed.” He leaned down, bracing himself on the chair arms as he stared into the face of the woman who had given him love when no one else had given a damn. “I will not let you put yourself through this again. I know how much you want to believe otherwise, but this woman is an impostor. Prudence Winthrope is dead—”
“Are you so certain?”
The soft, sure words pierced the quiet like a skillfully wielded dagger. The woman had risen to her feet, and was calmly smoothing her skirt as if she’d just snagged it on a rosebush at a garden party. Her dress was every bit as ridiculous as he’d thought and her face was far from beautiful, but there was canniness in her eyes that he’d never seen in a woman so young. The chit was a cool customer, but it was more than that. There was something about the way she moved, even in the way she smoothed her skirt, that drew his eyes. Deep inside him, something long dead stirred to life. He found himself reluctant to turn away from her, and that reluctance disturbed him.
“Do not cross me,” he warned. Few people challenged Lord Trevelyan, and the ones who did invariably lived to regret it. He’d reduced men to tears with little more than a glance. But this woman met his anger head-on, her fierce gaze locked with his own without so much as a flinch. It unnerved him. It impressed him. It had been a long time since anyone had stood up to him. It had been far longer since a woman had stirred him—
He looked away. “Very well. If you are Prudence Winthrope, tell me something only she and I would know.”
For a moment the only sound in the room was the crackling fire, and Edward thought he’d gotten the better of her. Then, with the slow cadence of someone searching their mind for remembrances, she began to speak.
“It was a warm day…summer, I think. The air smelled of lilacs and rhododendrons.”
Amy chimed in. “She’s right about that, Edward. Our garden is full of both those flowers in the summer.”
“So is every other garden in Southern England,” he replied. He crossed his arms over his chest, his lips edging up in anticipated triumph. “You will have to do better than that.”
He’d thought to intimidate her. Instead, she lifted her chin and returned his glare with a smile so excessively sweet he was like to get a toothache. “I’d stolen something from you—your hat, I believe. I climbed up a tree and you climbed up after me. But you never caught me. You lost your footing, and fell crashing through the leaves and branches to the ground. I’m afraid you received a number of cuts and bruises on my account.”
“That’s true,” Amy cried as she turned toward her brother. “I’ve heard Grandmother tell the story. And you’ve still got that scar on you—”
“All right,” he interrupted hastily. “The story’s true. I’ll own you’ve been thorough in your study of our family. But an artfully told tale doesn’t explain why you went to my solicitor first instead of coming straight to Ravenshold. And it doesn’t address why you never came forward during the past thirteen years.”
“I went to Mr. Cherry because I wanted to show I had no fear of anyone investigating my background. And as for not coming forward before this time—” Her lower lip quivered. She pulled out a handkerchief, and began to dab her eyes. “For years my first memory was of a fire. On her deathbed, Mother—that is, Mrs. Plowright—told me that I could barely recall how to speak when they found me, much less remember who I was. It is only recently that I have begun to remember what happened on that horrible night. Even now, the memory of it still makes me weak—”
Slowly, she started to swoon. Instinctively Edward stepped forward, but Charles was closer and reached her first. The physician caught her in his arms and laid her on the nearby divan. Stunned, Edward watched as his grandmother, his sister, his children, and even the unflappable Mrs. Poldhu all hovered around his supposed cousin, patting her hand and encouraging her with words of sympathy and concern. The woman smiled up at them weakly, pressing her handkerchief to her forehead as she struggled to overcome her faint. She appeared to be a picture of distressed femininity, but for a brief instant she caught Edward’s eye.
She looked like a fox who had just outsmarted a pack of hounds.
Edward’s hands clenched into fists. The woman was dangerous. Even on this short acquaintance he could see that she was far more clever than any of the other “Prudences” who’d come to Ravenshold over the years. Most of the counterfeit cousins had been unmasked in a few days; some had lasted not more than a few hours. Yet whether they’d lasted a week or a minute, the same damage was done. Every time a pretender was unmasked, he’d watched his grandmother’s hopes come crashing to the ground.
The last had happened two years ago, when the false Prudence proved to be a barmaid from Brighton. It had taken his grandmother a full month to recover. Now the countess was two years older, two years more frail. There was a real possibility that she might not survive another shock.
Trevelyan had long since given up any hope of personal happiness. He’d learned to expect the worst from people, and had yet to be disappointed. But the one thing he’d never wavered from w
as his duty to his family. It was his place to protect them, however ill-equipped he was to perform the task.
He walked toward the divan, his jaw pulling taut. “How is…Miss Winthrope?”
“She’s exhausted,” the doctor answered curtly as he laid two fingers against the side of the woman’s throat. “But her heartbeat is steady. She needs rest.”
She’ll rest in Old Bailey if I have anything to say about it, Edward thought as he arched a threatening brow. But the lady wasn’t the only one adept at hiding her plans behind a pleasant smile. “Of course she does,” he said, schooling his voice to a sympathetic timbre. “I’ll have Merriman take her to her room. She can rest up a bit before I resume my questions.”
The dowager countess shook her cane at him roundly. “Edward! I’ll not have you interrogating her like a common criminal. You’ve already put the poor girl through enough/”
