He recalled his sixteen-year-old self, terrified of this new life he had no memory of signing up for. He had been young then with no experience, but a whole world of opportunity ahead of him. Now, he was a man with experience, but no opportunity.
Shadows lengthened as the sun began to fall. He couldn’t just sit like a lumpen until the end of time. He got to his feet.
“I hope you’re not leaving on my account.”
He swiftly turned. It was the civilian from Admiralty House. He hadn’t even heard the man approach.
“No, by all means,” said Adam, giving a sweeping bow. “Take the bench, take the park, take the devil, too, for all I care. I’m leaving.”
The stranger grinned, clearly amused. Adam’s hands turned into fists once again.
“I wanted to see you before I left London,” the man said. “And I’m very much obliged to you for making it easy. I thought it would take me days to track down whatever tavern you were drowning your sorrows in.”
“Go to hell! Who the devil do you think you are?”
The man didn’t react at all to the invective. He reached into his dark blue coat and withdrew a thick white card. He held it out.
“My name is Sir Daniel Ridgeway, and I have a proposition for you.”
Adam accepted the proffered card with reluctance and looked at it.
Charteris House
Truro, Cornwall
“And what is your proposition?”
Ridgeway shook his head, giving Adam a chance to look the man up and down more thoroughly. He was solidly built. Perhaps he’d been a boxer in his day, but unlike others long retired from the ring, this one had not gone to fat. Oddly, the silver that glinted in his dark reddish hair made the man look younger, rather than aging him.
He was forced to acknowledge Ridgeway exuded physical power as well as aristocratic confidence.
“No. Not here,” said Ridgeway. “Come to Charteris House three weeks from now.”
“Why?”
“I’m not prepared to discuss it here.”
Adam sneered contemptuously.
“I’ve been pushed around and humiliated quite enough,” he said, lifting up the calling card. “You either tell me what all this is about, or I tear this into pieces and lay you out on your pompous, aristocratic arse.”
Ridgeway weathered Adam’s rage with equanimity – in fact, with too much calm.
Adam’s eyes narrowed.
“Did you have anything to do with me not making lieutenant?”
“Look at your right hand, man!” said Ridgeway. “They were never going to give you that promotion. No matter how much you deserved it.”
Adam’s eyes were drawn back to his right hand and the crossed anchors tattoo. The mark of Cain.
“And you do deserve better than that. That’s what I’m offering you Mr. Hardacre, if you’re willing to take a chance offered by a pompous, aristocratic arse.”
Before Adam could draw breath to refuse, the man reached back into his coat pocket and pulled out a thickly wadded envelope.
“Fifty pounds. Consider it a signing bounty.”
Adam regarded the envelope in Ridgeway’s hands.
“I could walk away now and be fifty pounds the richer with no obligation to you.”
“You could. But you won’t.”
Adam snorted and took the envelope.
“You seem very sure of yourself.”
Ridgeway grinned in response.
“I know what sort of man I’m dealing with.”
“Do you now?”
“A man with curiosity, and that’s good enough to begin with. I’ll be expecting you in early June, Mr. Hardacre.”
Ridgeway tipped his hat and started back in the direction of Whitehall before halting and half-turning back to look at Adam.
“Whatever you decide to do, Mr. Hardacre, I’d be most obliged if you spoke to no one about this conversation. Not even your friends.”
Chapter Two
Kenstec House
Cornwall
June 1804
“Goodbye! You will write to me, won’t you, Miss Collins?”
Olivia accepted the brief and enthusiastic farewell embrace of Lydia Denton.
“Of course I will,” she assured the girl – correction – young woman. “It has been an honor to be your governess for the past ten years. I’m sure you made your late father proud.”
Mercifully, Olivia considered, Lydia favored her mother in looks – both the Denton women boasted fair hair and skin, as well as pretty blue eyes. Lydia would not want for suitors. She was as perfect as any sixteen-year-old could boast of being. And her mother, Caroline, was still a very handsome widow of not yet forty, so she, too, would not lack male attention if she wished it.
And, in that case, their permanent relocation to London, following a summer in Bath, was a shrewd decision, Olivia thought, although it wasn’t her place to remark on such a thing.
She bobbed a curtsy to the squire’s widow. How was it that, dressed in lavender, in deference to her half-mourning, Caroline Denton looked younger than she had eight months prior, just before her husband’s death?
“Thank you for staying on and helping Mr. Fitzgerald settle the estate,” the widow said. “I’m sure you will not be waiting long for a new situation.”
“Your letter of recommendation was most generous, Madam, thank you.”
Mistress Caroline inclined her head graciously in response before the groomsmen aided her into the carriage.
Olivia waved as the vehicle made its way down the drive and watched as it disappeared through the copse of trees that lined the border of the estate on three sides.
An afternoon breeze from the Carrick Roads, just a short distance away, tugged at Olivia’s skirts. She headed back into the house the long way around, via the kitchen where Polly Trellow bustled about. Polly was a plump and jolly woman, the wife of Jory Trellow, owner of the Angler’s Arms. She had taken on the role of temporary cook and housekeeper for the family after Cook left on the news that the new widow was to sell Kenstec House.
In fact, all the servants had either found new positions or had gone on ahead to London to set up a new household for their mistress and her daughter. Only Olivia, caught in the strange social status of a governess – neither servant nor family – now remained.
“I don’t like the idea of a young girl such as ye stayin’ in the big house here alone,” said Polly – and not for the first time this week. “Ye be a sensible lass. Why don’t ye come and stay with Jory and me at the Arms?”
Olivia lifted up the cloth covering the wicker basket and saw game pie. She sniffed. It was still warm and smelled delicious. Despite Polly’s attempts at persuasion over the past week, she knew Olivia was not going to change her mind.
“Tosh! I’ll only be alone overnight,” she answered. “Mr. Fitzgerald is arriving first thing tomorrow morning. Then I shall be too busy and too exhausted helping him to sort out the squire’s papers to traipse back and forth.
“Besides, I have plenty else to do. Miss Lydia’s room for one. The gowns she’s discarded need sorting, and I also have free rein in the squire’s library. I’m sure I can find a book or two to read and pass the hours when I’m not busy.”
Olivia glanced over at the woman. Polly’s ample posterior was the only view as she bent nearly double to blow more life into the coals in the kitchen fireplace.
“Well, as ye say, Miss,” Polly said, adding more wood to the fire to build up its heat, “but if there is anythin’ ye be needin’ then take the short path through to the woods – we’re less than a mile away.”
“Thank you, Polly.”
“Hrumph! Ye can thank me tomorrow when I find ye’re still alive and not had yer throat slit or worse by some footpad.”
Olivia laughed. “You can be as gruesome as you wish. If someone did have a mind to murder, then the ghost of Kenstec House will have me as an eternal companion.”
“There’s no such thing as—
” Polly caught herself. But Olivia pounced on the admission.
“—Ah-ha! That’s not what you told me two nights ago. Your spectral spook is no more real than Jenny Greenteeth!”
Polly screwed her nose up at Olivia. She gathered up two baskets, holding one in each hand. “Well, don’t ye come complainin’ to me, Missy, that’s all I’ll say on the matter.”
Olivia approached and gave the big woman a hug.
“Thank you, Polly. You and Jory have been so kind to us all. I shall miss this place when I leave.”
She endured the woman’s censorious look with good humor and escorted her to the door.
“Be sure to lock the door behind me.”
“Yes, Polly. I’ll be quite all right, you know.”
“Hrumph!”
Despite her brave words, Olivia spent the next hour after Polly’s departure going around the ground floor of the three-story manor house checking that all the windows were, indeed, locked. The house already had the air of desertion. Many of the finest pieces of furniture, including the carpets, had already been shipped off to London to adorn the new townhouse. Olivia’s footsteps echoed throughout the rooms and the passageways.
It would be easy to imagine herself a ghost here…
“Don’t be silly, girl,” she told herself out loud. “You’ll give yourself the heebie-jeebies if you keep on like that.”
She returned to the kitchen and filled a coalscuttle to carry to her own bedroom that adjoined Miss Lydia’s on the second floor. She made up a fire but didn’t light it yet. She made more trips back and forth to return with several buckets of water, then, lastly, the pie and a bottle of cider.
It was tempting to light the fire and settle down a while. But, no, she had herself a job of work to do before nightfall, and she would do it.
She went to Lydia’s room. It was on the southwest corner of the house, and featured corner windows that, on a clear day like today, gave a view of the sea beyond. Olivia felt it was a pity she possessed only the most middling talent for painting. A view like this was worth remembering.
Perhaps she should try to do it justice before she left and create a keepsake of her very first posting as governess as an untried eighteen-year-old young lady.
How naive she was then…
Kenstec House may not have ghosts, but it did have secrets. She knew that from the very first morning she arrived.
Her mind turned to the embarrassment she felt that day at getting off on the wrong foot with her employer. She had made the mistake of thinking Miss Lydia’s father was actually the girl’s grandfather.
Mortified she was at the time.
Olivia shook her head now with wry amusement and began sorting through the half-dozen dresses Lydia had carelessly thrown over a chair, one of only two pieces of furniture left in the room.
The other was a large oak wardrobe taking up half the length of one wall, apparently deemed too heavy to move, and so abandoned.
All Olivia had known from the advertisement she’d answered was that “a young lady of good skills and refinement” was required as governess to a girl of six years old. The slightly-hunched man who addressed her on arrival was clearly well into his sixth decade. He looked as though the burden of the world had been put on his shoulders, weighing him down and spreading out across his middle.
She was not afraid to admit the man had terrified her at first. One did not so much have a conversation with Squire Denton as much as respond quickly to his grumped questions. The mystery of it had been how he had wooed and won his wife, Caroline, who was startling in her youth and beauty.
She was the squire’s second wife, Olivia learned as time went by, but no one ever spoke about her predecessor. That was the true mystery. No signs of the first mistress of Kenstec remained in the house, and if not for the headstone in the churchyard, there would have been no reminder of her at all.
Of the daughter from that first marriage, Olivia knew even less. Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, several of the old family servants would make a private pilgrimage to the village church and pray for the girl they called Constance. But unlike her mother, there was no grave marker, and the servants would not be drawn on her.
It was as though Constance Denton had disappeared from the face of the earth.
Olivia held up the first dress. It was a lovely evening gown in silk taffeta, a sea green shot with blue and bore scalloped lace trim over the bust and sleeves. She had handled the garment a number of times when she acted as Lydia’s lady’s maid but never dreamed of owning something as beautiful herself.
It would make a lovely wedding dress…
If she ever married.
There was no other sound in the house other than the muted rushing of the wind, the rustling leaves outside, and the steady tick of the long case clock in the hall, which Olivia keep wound for familiarity and comfort.
She ran her hand over the beautiful fabric – a gift from her former charge. Try it on, a little voice whispered. There is no one to see.
After a moment’s hesitation, Olivia unfastened the buttons of her dark blue cotton day dress. It slipped to the floor. Out of habit, she picked it up and lay it over the other cast-off garments Lydia had left behind – a raspberry red day dress with brown velvet trim, a linen nightshift – unworn and still in its paper packaging – another day dress in cream, decorated with exotic flowers of turquoise blue, cyclamen pink, and grass green.
She slipped into the evening gown. It fit, but only just. At twenty-eight, her figure was more mature than Lydia’s. Olivia started for the wardrobe. Inside the door was a full-length mirror. She hesitated.
Did she want to see her reflection? The gown was oh-so-beautiful. She wanted it to fit, and she wanted to look beautiful, but what if the whole thing was ridiculous – like casting pearls before swine?
Before she could second guess herself, she reached forward and pulled open the wardrobe door.
The squeak of the hinge hid her own gasp of surprise. She barely recognized the woman in the mirror. She loosened the knot of brown hair at the nape and piled it high on her head, letting small tendrils fall about her neck.
The neckline of the dress stretched across her bust, lifting the breasts slightly so the tops of them were just in view over the lace.
She turned this way and that, examining the fall of the gown and the figure beneath.
“Vanity thy name is woman,” she muttered.
Where on earth would she ever wear such a thing? She removed the gown and put her comfortable, familiar day dress back on. She carried the gown and the rest of Lydia’s largess into her own room and packed them away.
When she returned to Lydia’s room, she found it warm from the afternoon sun streaming through the uncurtained windows. She opened one. Eddies of salt-tinged air swept through the room.
Since she was alone in the house and the owners would never return, Olivia was – at least for tonight – mistress of Kenstec. Just as she had tried on the green evening gown a short while ago, now she did something she would never have dreamed of doing while she was in service.
She approached and touched Lydia’s wardrobe, sweeping a hand across the doors, feeling the fine joins where foliate marquetry had been cut into the oak. She was familiar with the piece and yet it was strange how it overpowered the room now in a way it hadn’t when the space was filled other furniture.
It was an old piece; it might have always been with the house. Had it been there when the first Mistress Denton and her daughter lived? Perhaps this had been Constance’s room…
She explored the old wardrobe systematically, starting with the center doors and their hanging spaces. Empty. No treasures, no secrets, no long-forgotten pieces of jewelry that Olivia would be obliged to post on to their rightful owner.
The compartment on the left with pull out shelves and drawers was also empty, apart from the faded rose-colored linen paper that still faintly smelled of the distilled essence of that flower. The compartment on the far right
of the wardrobe was similarly appointed, except it contained two large drawers at the bottom.
Olivia pulled out one drawer and then the other. Both empty. But on closing the bottom drawer, she felt resistance and found it refused to close fully again. She withdrew the drawer completely and bent down to peer inside the void. That’s when she spotted it, a desiccated bundle of paper held together by a black ribbon. It looked as if it had fallen back there and been compressed against the backboard of the compartment for years. She reached in and pulled it out.
The breeze from the window lifted one yellowed corner of paper. She saw a name written with an unschooled hand – Constance.
Bang!
Olivia jumped and dropped the papers. A door had slammed somewhere within the house. It took a moment to still her racing heart.
Wind. It is only the wind. There must have been an open window somewhere else in the house she had overlooked. She went in search of it.
By the time she returned to Lydia’s old bedroom, the sun had moved fully to the western part of the sky and the glare from the undraped windows was nearly unbearable. She retrieved the letters and retreated to her own room which was cooler and where the sunlight was less intense.
She sat at her small writing desk and worked the knot of old ribbon that held the papers together. They were letters and, in the end, only six pieces of paper – little more than notes really. All were written by the same hand which she concluded was that of a male with only a modest education.
My darling Constance,
My words cannot do justice to what my heart said to me when I received your letter. It was as though you had reached into my very soul to see what was written there.
I love you.
Knowing that you share my desire makes our fleeting times together all the more precious to me.
Meet me by the old ruins in the woods this Wednesday at noon.
Your beloved Adam.
The other notes expressed the same ardor and invitation to an assignation.
Olivia smiled to herself as she wrapped up the letters and folded them into her own diary for safekeeping.
Barons, Brides, and Spies: Regency Series Starter Collection Volume Two Page 69
