The Friar’s House could so easily have been everything Bertie ever wanted.
Overlaying all, though, was the chill of water and damp. The sharp odor of wet wood and rotting plaster.
Plop. A chunk of the ceiling fell wetly into the teapot.
What a change in fortune ten years had wrought. Not for the first time, or even the hundredth, he wondered: What had happened to the Greenleaf fortune, which they’d once held as dear as their ancient bloodline?
Oh, probably it was unseemly for a graying thirty-five-year-old war veteran with a bullet wound to feel grim triumph about a decrepit plaster ceiling. Especially when sitting with his convalescent sister, who he had rather hoped would eat the toast. That seemed unlikely now that it was adorned with a chunk of mildewed plaster the size of a man’s thumb.
Georgie toyed with the food remaining on her breakfast plate, which was—for now—free of fallen pieces of the Friar’s House. In appearance, she and Bertie were not un-alike. Though only half siblings, they shared their father’s dark brown hair and dark eyes. Bertie’s olive complexion was a legacy from his Spanish mother, who died in childbirth. Patrick Gage, grandson of an earl, had eventually made a second marriage as scandalous as the first: to a brewery heiress whose birth was as low as her fortune was great.
Georgie’s mother. She’d been a kind stepmother to Bertie, the only mother of any sort he had ever known. When she died of an illness a few years after Georgie’s birth, the so-called family home in London’s Kensington neighborhood stopped seeming like anything of the sort.
Drip. Drop. Drip. Outside, the morning sky had a dim gray luster. Within, the ceiling wept another chalky tear into the teapot.
Georgie laid down her fork with a clatter. “Why do you obey Mr. Greenleaf’s every wish? Even the foolish ones? You were such a fine leader during the war.”
Bertie snorted. “No one’s following me now. I can’t even persuade my own sister to eat a decent breakfast. Besides, it’s Greenleaf’s house. Changing the furniture is easily undone. Neglecting the upkeep of the house or land is not.”
Georgie muttered something profane, which Bertie pretended not to understand. “I’ll ring for more toast.”
“No need, I’ve finished.”
“Nonsense. You’ve hardly eaten anything.”
This time, the profane response was unmistakable. More loudly, she said, “Three rashers of bacon? Toast, before it wore the ceiling? Cheese? An apple?”
“Are you listing foods that exist? Because you cannot be naming everything you ate this morning.” He sighed. “You are still far too thin. Some beef broth, maybe, to take back to your room?”
He tried to keep his tone gentle, but fear nibbled it ragged about the edges. Surely her cheekbones were still too sharp? Her eyes hollow? Pneumonia had made her so ill that not even nine months of fine country air had returned her to robust health.
How close he had come to losing her—after losing his parents, his stepmother, and in war, almost his own life. She was dearest of all to him, this half sister almost a generation his junior. When they were younger, she adored him.
Adoration was hardly the expression on her face now. “I. Ate. Enough,” she said through gritted teeth. “And I already heard the same ‘poor invalid, have some beef broth’ speech from Mrs. Clotworthy when I saw her in the corridor outside her chamber this morning.”
She referred to her companion and chaperone, a distant cousin of middle age and mild temperament who seemed always occupied with knitting something useless rather than ensuring her charge was cared for.
“Besides which,” Georgie added, “it’s time to clear away. You’re to have a caller this morning. Any minute, possibly, so—here, let me adjust your cravat. You look a bit rumpled from your tussle with the teapot.”
He swatted away her hands. “I do not. The cravat of a former major doesn’t dare rumple. Not that it matters, unless the caller is someone of great elegance. Who is it? The prime minister?”
“No, she is even better.” His sister replied to his joke with perfect seriousness.
Bertie narrowed his eyes at her over the rim of his teacup. Since taking up residence in the Friar’s House, Georgie had developed a fascination with matchmaking. The last time she had started flinging about unidentified feminine pronouns, Bertie’s visiting friend Peregrine Lochley had tumbled into a tumultuous affair with a local woman.
Not that this was a bad thing, since Lochley and Caro Martin were now happily married. And Lochley had turned farmer, for God’s sake. How love changed a man.
Or so Bertie had observed. He had once thought to fling himself into the same experience, a heedless headlong delighted dive. But in that—as in so much else a decade before—he had been disappointed.
“Be more specific,” he was just beginning to say, when the door of the breakfast parlor was flung open.
“Monsieur Gage, à la porte! C’est une femme…” The butler continued in his native French, the tails of his coat flapping along with his agitated hand gestures.
“Florian, en anglais,” Bertie reminded him gently.
The older man grimaced, drawing himself up straight. The subtle ways of an English butler were no more native to him than the language, yet no one could have been more loyal. During Bertie’s long months of recovery in France, the stern, stocky Florian had tended his gunshot wound—after informing him that it had surely been inflicted by a Frenchman horrified by monsieur’s execrable accent.
Their lands destroyed by war, the aging farmer—and his wife, now the cook, along with their grown daughters, sons, cousins, and other sundry relatives—had returned to England with Bertie once peacetime made such travel possible. They had accompanied him from London to the village of Hemshawe, and now there was hardly an English accent to be heard in the servants’ hall of the Friar’s House.
The butler tried again. “You have a…lady at the door,” said Florian in an accent as thick as chocolat chaud.
“Is the pause because you are not sure she is a lady?”
“Of course she’s a lady,” scoffed Georgie. “He couldn’t remember the word ‘caller,’ that’s all. Isn’t that right, Florian?”
The butler pursed his lips in the French expression that meant no, but this isn’t the time to argue. “C’est Mademoiselle Greenleaf,” he explained.
The name was a blow to Bertie’s chest, halting his heart before setting it to a furious gallop. With nerveless fingers, he set down his cup. “That’s impossible. Eliza Greenleaf is in London, making fashionable young men fall madly in love with her.”
“Clearly not, because she’s on the stoop,” Georgie pointed out. “She is visiting her friend Lady Sturridge in Hemshawe.”
“In the entry, not on the stoop,” corrected Florian. “It makes the rain. She waits in the entry hall.”
“But…” Bertie fumbled for sense. “Why did she come from Lady Sturridge’s to our entry hall?”
Georgie became occupied with the arrangement of the crusts and crumbs on her plate. “I…might have sent word that you needed help on quarter day.”
Bertie closed his eyes. “Oh God. Quarter day.” His tone was the same he had once used in war to say things like horse carcass or French marksman.
Quarter day, on which rents were collected and accounts settled, had proved a particular sort of hell in March and June. Tenants on the Greenleaf lands flocked to the Friar’s House, as per custom, and there had followed a nightmare of tangled communication between them, Bertie, and Andrew Greenleaf’s sons. The landlord’s offspring had returned to Hemshawe to oversee the events of the day, but were as ignorant and careless of the family’s rent rolls as a complete stranger would have been.
More so. For Bertie was little more than a complete stranger, wasn’t he? And there was something about the stream of tenants wanting a little more time to pay…just a bit more…
It wrung his heart. The country was still recovering from an uncommonly bad harvest the previous frigid year. The c
rofters’ cottages were in no better shape than the tumbledown bits of the Friar’s House. Andrew Greenleaf should be here to keep an eye on them.
Bertie’s usual flash of triumph at the thought of possessing the Greenleaf house, even for a year, was absent this time. There was nothing quite so grating to the nerves of a former officer as encountering people who needed help and being powerless to provide it.
The ceiling grizzled into the teapot, a slow mournful drip.
“Damnation, Georgie. You had no right to send such a message.” He shook his head. “To Eliza. Eliza Greenleaf.” He had to say the full name again, wondering if it would seem less odd that she, split by years from him, now stood only a room or two away.
Georgie lifted her head and smiled. “You really do need a Greenleaf about on quarter day. She can help you with some of your questions.”
“I don’t have questions,” Bertie said.
This was untrue. He did have questions where Eliza Greenleaf was concerned, and he had for ten years.
Florian was still hesitating in the doorway. “Shall I show the…lady…in for petit déjeuner?”
“No,” said Bertie.
Plop. Another sodden fleck of the ceiling fell, this time into a bowl of marmalade.
“Exactly,” said Georgie. “It’s not as though she’d want to come in here and eat toast with plaster all over it.”
This, Bertie ignored. “Show mademoiselle to the study,” he told Florian. “I’ll see her in the study. My study.”
Not that Florian was the one who needed convincing. Not when everything around them, from the crumbling ceiling to the ancient mahogany table, truly belonged to Andrew Greenleaf.
Even, Bertie knew from dreadful experience, the will of his daughter.
* * *
But he did not meet her in the study. He encountered Eliza Greenleaf in the corridor just outside the breakfast parlor, wandering the house as though it still belonged to her.
Catching a brief impression of slim height and a rich sweep of a purple-red gown, he ducked into an ironic bow. Cutting words. He needed cutting and brilliant words of greeting. Right now.
As he straightened, though, he saw that Miss Greenleaf’s leaf-green eyes were not clapped on him at all. They were directed over his shoulder at the interior of the breakfast parlor, and her dark brows had lifted in surprise.
“Good God,” were the first words he heard in ten years from the woman he’d once hoped to marry. “What has happened to the ceiling in there? It looks ready to collapse onto your sister.”
Chapter Two
* * *
Horror dawned on Bertie’s features: features long unseen, but instantly familiar to Eliza despite the passage of years. “Could the ceiling truly fall? Or—wait, are you joking?”
“Not at all. Once the plaster gets wet, the keys that hold it to the lath—oh, it doesn’t matter. But if your sister has finished breakfast, she ought to come out of there.”
“Of course.” With the speed and snap of a longtime soldier, he pivoted and called to Georgette.
Oddly, the young woman took the time to replace the lid of the teapot and slid it aside before following her brother from the room.
Eliza had known Georgie as a girl of ten, coltish and eager and full of mischief. Now, looking at the thin young woman of elegance, it was clear from the wicked sparkle in Miss Gage’s dark eyes that she hadn’t lost her mischievous edge.
A hand at his sister’s back, Bertie shut the door behind her. Without light from the tall window in the breakfast parlor, the golden stone of the corridor went amber-dark, lit only by an ancient wavy-paned window at its far end.
“Don’t go in there for any reason, Georgie. If the ceiling fell, you could be…” He cleared his throat. “We’ll take all of our meals in the dining room from this point forward. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”
“And let the ceiling in the breakfast parlor rot and fall?” The girl sounded puzzled.
He shot a glance at Eliza—a wary glance—then replied, “You know we’re not to change the structure of the house at all.”
“If so, you ought to repair the ceiling,” said Eliza. “For when you leased this house, the ceiling was intact. By doing nothing to keep it up, you’ve let it fall into decay.”
He folded his arms and glared at her. “You would know about such things, would you not? Obedience even in the face of ruin?”
A hot retort sprung to her lips—but as she looked him over, she checked the sharp words. Despite his steely mien, his cravat was creased and slightly askew. The imperfection washed her with wistfulness.
She had said more than she meant to, and he had realized it at once. Like the soundness of this ancient house, their love had worn away. Instead of raindrops, Eliza’s particular nemesis had been a lack of courage.
As time slipped by, she had gone days, sometimes, not thinking of him at all. It seemed her mind had used those periods of forgetfulness to keep his image fresh and precious to her. He was tall, but so was she, and she knew from long-ago experience that he was just the right height to kiss when she rose to her tiptoes. His dark hair was showing a bit of gray now, and his young features had been sunburned and carved by weather and time. Now he was as sculptural as he was handsome, all strength and angles and will.
She shouldn’t have come here.
She hadn’t been able to stay away.
Trying for a calm tone, she said, “My father is trusting you to do what is right for his house while you inhabit it. You were never a man without common sense, Bertie.”
Bertie. She had been the first to coin the nickname for him when they were young and in love, and the exchange of Christian names had not been intimacy enough.
He seemed not to like it now, for his brows lowered. “I am obeying your father, Miss Greenleaf. You ought to appreciate that.” Turning to his sister, his features relaxed at once. “Georgie, go join Mrs. Clotworthy in the upstairs sitting room. She will want your company as she knits.”
“Mrs. Clotworthy?”
At Eliza’s exclamation, Bertie pokered up. “My sister’s companion and chaperone. She is a widowed cousin of Georgie’s late mother.”
“Clotworthy,” Eliza mused. “She must have loved her husband a great deal to accept that name.”
“It can take courage to accept the name of a spouse, yes.”
Unmistakable reproof, and one she deserved. She could have been Eliza Gage ten years ago. Ten years at his side, she’d have followed his regiment through muddy fields and insect-ridden swamps. Fearing each day that he might die.
And maybe he would have, with her to slow him down.
At twenty years old, she hadn’t been brave enough to trust her heart. To be defiant to the parent who had coddled her. To be physically uncomfortable for the sake of giving comfort to someone else. Such small things had seemed very large at the time.
In the end, he had still almost died. He had been shot, she knew. When she’d heard it—idle gossip from a suitor grown just as idle as his words—she had almost felt the wound herself.
“I was thinking,” Georgie spoke up, “that if you’re to assist on quarter day, Miss Greenleaf, you ought to stay in the house. You still have a bedchamber here, after all. And I’m the lady of the house, so I can issue an invitation.”
There was no word for the noise Bertie made. “Mrs. Clotworthy is the hostess,” he managed.
“Yes. Thank you. I accept.” Eliza curtseyed to Georgie. “As soon as the rain slows, I shall send for my things from Lord and Lady Sturridge’s home.”
Another unnameable sound from Bertie, as Georgie bobbed a curtsey of her own and darted off to the main staircase.
With a sigh, Bertie turned back to face Eliza. “She’s been ill. My sister, I mean. Not in the head—though you wouldn’t know it from her behavior today—but in the lungs. If you’re to stay here, I should not wish you to plague her beyond her strength.”
Georgie Gage had looked a bit thin, but she hadn’t lac
ked for spirit. Eliza let this evidence of brotherly worry pass, though, adding only, “And what about you? How much may I plague you?”
This won from him a slight smile. “There was never a limit to that amount, was there? Come, Eliza, and speak with me in the study. You can tell me why you’re really here.”
No, she couldn’t. Not yet.
But if he would only call her Eliza again, instead of Miss Greenleaf, she’d follow him anywhere.
* * *
The study was one of Bertie’s favorite rooms in the Friar’s House. Usually.
The home took its name from its thirteenth-century origin as a monastery. Over the centuries, when stone crumbled or walls were added on, newer brick and neatly trimmed stone repaired the fallen portions.
The study was bounded by some of the oldest portions of the hodgepodge of a house. Dark, but warmly so, it was flanked by a fireplace and a great desk and was lined with shelves full of ledgers. Apart from these, there was just enough room for a small sideboard and a pair of wing chairs that faced each other before the fire.
It ought to have been entirely comfortable. But—damnation. Eliza Greenleaf. He had not stopped reeling since Florian had spoken her name, a name long forbidden to his own thoughts.
“Take a seat,” Bertie said, and Eliza did so. Outside, thunder grumbled its displeasure.
But with what? There was no fault to be found in her appearance. If his memory of her were to be trusted, she had not changed much. Her laughing green eyes still held a sultry look, as though they’d seen everything amusing under the sun and had enjoyed it all. Her hair was pinned in tousled curls of a shade between blond and brown. And when she saw him looking at her—really looking—she held his gaze.
And then she smiled. “It’s good to see you again, Bertie.”
“Is it?” He sat heavily in the chair facing hers, as though his knees had been unpinned.
What did I ever see in her? He had asked himself often over angry years. With the blur of time, he was not sure. He could recall only the certainty he had felt when they met at a long-ago ball. This one. She is the one.
A Gentleman For All Seasons Page 19
