Julianna would have a lot less to bribe the boys with if she gave up baking biscuits.
“Who’s the most important sailor on the ship?” Connor asked. “The navigator? Bah, he’s only reading charts and maps, or the stars God put overhead for all to see. The captain struts about giving orders any swabbie could anticipate, the bosun is always tweeting on some infernally stupid whistle that knows only two notes.”
“Then who’s the most important sailor?” Lucas asked. “They don’t let ladies onto sailing ships.”
Oh yes, they did. Julianna kept her peace, though, because most of the women who sailed with the Royal Navy were not considered at all respectable.
“What’s the first thing you notice about a great ship of the line?” Connor asked. “Those enormous billowing sails, am I right? They rise up over the horizon, and everyone stops to look. Another ship coming into port, one laden with exotic silks, grain, cotton, wondrous goods from all over the world. A ship bringing more sailors home safely to hug their loved ones once again—because of those magnificent sails. Who keeps those sails in good repair?”
“A sailor,” Ralph said.
“A sailor who sat among his sisters as a mere lad and paid attention to how carefully they stitched. When all the other louts at his dame school were ignoring the ladies, the sailmaker was learning a valuable skill from them. Nobody’s ship comes safely to harbor on tattered sails, but how many of you can sew as well as Roberta?”
Roberta was sitting quite tall on Connor’s lap, and positively… preening.
“This girl, this mere girl,” Connor said, dropping his voice to an awed quiet, “is the secret to your success in life. I’m sure you’ve noticed that Roberta has preserved me from the indignity of going about in stained breeches, and she’s not done working her magic. A fellow can get into worse scrapes, though, let me tell you.”
What followed was a tale worthy of the brothers Grimm, about a young boy feigning sick to dodge lessons and meet friends for a day spent stealing pie, fishing, napping, and enjoying the summer weather.
All went awry, of course, and not a stain but, instead, a great tear in the hapless boy’s trousers resulted.
“What was I to do?” Connor lamented when the pile of unfolded towels had been significantly reduced. “I’m not much of a tailor, more fool I, and right upon my person was the proof that I’d disobeyed, told falsehoods, led my friends into mischief, and ruined a new set of trousers. My dignity was flapping in the wind, as it were. I was in for it, and my tutors were not shy with the birch rod.”
“I don’t care for the birch rod,” Harold said, to the assent of his brothers.
“All appeared lost,” Connor went on, lowering his voice. “My fate sealed, my future dire, when my younger sister stuck her head out of the window and whispered to me to meet her in the gardener’s shed. She’d seen me sneaking out and had watched for my return.”
“Was she about to peach on you?” Ralph asked, reaching for another towel.
“My sister? My own younger sister? Peach on me? How could you think that? I’d let her have a turn on my pony from the time she could walk, routinely saved her a biscuit off my own tray, and always chose her for my archery team. She is my younger sister, after all.”
“You can shoot arrows?” Harold marveled.
“Not as well as Antigone can,” Connor said. “She’s a little bit of a thing, but a right terror with a bow. She’s handy with a needle too, and that’s how she rescued me. Sewed up the torn seam so nobody detected a thing.
“I ask you,” Connor said, “who but a sister could have saved the day like that, and never once breathed a word of my stupidity to anybody? It’s the ladies of the family who often have the best solutions to our difficulties, witness my situation now—tossed into the ditch, far from home, breeches a wreck. Cousin Julianna and Miss Roberta are putting me to rights, aren’t they? I don’t know when I’ve filled up on such a hearty stew, or had such a nice nap, and now my favorite breeches have been rescued too.”
Awful, horrible man. He was thanking Julianna in public, before the boys. He was praising Roberta’s cleverness, he was… getting the towels folded without an hour of grumbling and bother from the boys.
Or folding a single towel himself. Julianna would have hated him for his charm, except she was too grateful.
She rose when she ought to have been thanking him. “Cousin Connor, perhaps you could finish reading to the children, while I make us a cobbler for tonight’s dessert?”
“I would be happy to,” he said, opening the book. “Though I’ll have to read quickly. You have the fastest towel-folding crew I’ve ever seen, and they do such a tidy, careful job too.”
Oh bother. He’d never seen a towel folded before in his pampered, ducal life.
“The children are a marvel,” Julianna said, “when they put their minds to something.”
Julianna endured another marvel: Connor Amadour, duke of the most perilous ditch in Yorkshire, smiling at her. His smile held the conspiratorial pleasure of an adult who’d managed children without generating ill will, but also the glee of a man who’d shown himself to good advantage before a lady. Worse yet, his devilment was simply that—not flirtation, not innuendo, for all his eyes conveyed warmth and merriment shared exclusively with Julianna.
Hunger—or something—went skipping around in Julianna’s middle. According to the duchess’s letters, the duke did have a younger sister named Antigone, and she was a noted markswoman with her arrows.
Julianna resolved to make a double batch of cobbler. Convalescing required strength, and His Grace could doubtless put away a deal of sweets. The sooner he was on his way, the better for her ledgers and her larders.
* * *
That somebody would read to Con had been a foregone conclusion in his childhood. Read to him, fold his towels, make his meals, pat him on the head for being a good boy, chide him for being naughty.
He did not much recall the towels or the meals, though some of the stories had stuck with him, and the rare missed meals had been enormous inspiration for martyrdom, despite that he’d doubtless deserved the discipline.
He recalled his parents’ disappointment in him keenly, and the pats on his head too. Also the rare hugs and the sense of conspiracy shared with his siblings on occasions such as Antigone’s daring rescue by needle and thread. She’d sewn a terrible seam, but spared Con the horror of being marched through the house with his underlinen on display.
For two whole days thereafter, he and Tiger hadn’t fought.
“I adore cobbler,” Lucas said. “MacTavish says he’d kiss Horty’s nose for a bite of Miss Julianna’s cobbler. Papa loved her cobbler too.”
“MacTavish gets two servings,” the boy named Harold explained. “He works the hardest, though sometimes he can’t finish his second portion, so we each get an extra bite if we’re good about helping to clean up.”
“Cobbler does that,” Con said. “You think you could eat the whole business yourself, and then your belly contradicts you when it’s too late.” Starlingham had a tale of woe involving a cobbler made with whisky, though Con suspected the story was part fairy tale.
“Miss Julianna says she doesn’t care for cobbler,” Lucas observed.
The children referred to the lady of the house as Miss Julianna, but to her late husband as Papa. Interesting.
“Do you suspect she’s being diplomatic?” Con asked.
“She’s telling a fib,” Roberta replied from her perch in Con’s lap. “She wants to leave more for us.”
Three boys became fascinated with the fine art of towel folding.
Con hugged the girl, who was the perfect size for hugging, though maybe all children were.
“You’re probably right, Miss Roberta, but we needn’t let Miss Julianna get away with her falsehoods. Nor MacTavish, if you catch him being less than truthful.”
“How do you catch a grown-up in a lie and not come out the worse for it?” Lucas muttered, setting on
e frayed seam to another. “Miss Julianna works too hard, she never eats much, and she hardly ever sits down. Even now, we can get her to read to us only when we’re doing chores, and except for Bertie, we’re too old for anybody to read to us.”
“Miss Bertie,” the girl said, sticking out her tongue.
“You’re our sister,” Harold said. “Our secret weapon against torn breeches. We don’t have to call you miss.”
“You have to share your biscuits with me,” Roberta countered. “Cousin said.”
The wonders of the sibling barter economy were likely pondered behind youthful brows, while Con considered the problem the children had so carefully confided in him.
“The next time you must fold laundry,” Con said, “you declare a contest. Roberta will referee, and you three boys set the rules. No adults allowed. The boy with the largest pile of neatly folded laundry wins.”
Ralph smiled, a diabolically angelic grin. “We can declare contests in anything, right?”
“You must first decide the rules,” Con said, which had been the best training his tutor could have devised for dealing with the idiots in the House of Lords. By the time he, Lucere, Starlingham, and their friends had determined the rules for their impromptu games and challenges, half the day had gone by, and the occasional nose had been bloodied.
“You can have a race to see who brings in the peat the most quickly,” Roberta suggested. “I can keep count.”
“I’ll bring two buckets at once.” Harold was a good-sized lad, maybe a year older than the other two.
“If I use a stout pole across my shoulders, I could bring in four,” Ralph countered, “and get it done in half the time.”
“You’d have sore shoulders,” Lucas said. “Peat is beastly heavy.”
“He’d have sore shoulders,” Con said, tousling Ralph’s hair, “until the exercise had built up his muscles to the point where he could do it easily. Like racing into the village to pick up the post. The first few days, you’ll not make the whole way at even a trot. By the end of the summer, you’ll be quick as the wind and barely breaking a sweat.”
The last of the towels were folded as Con delivered the evil witch to her well-deserved fate. Roberta scrambled off his lap and went to inspect the stained breeches, and Con’s backside began to throb.
“What’s your first contest?” Con asked the boys across a sea of folded linen.
“We’ll bring in the peat, though we rarely have fires in summer,” Harold said. “Miss Julianna has asked us to see to it.”
She’d probably threatened them within an inch of their little lives for putting it off so long. “Bringing in the peat makes the cobbler taste sweeter, I always say.”
“You can’t bring in peat, Cousin Connor,” Harold said. “You hurt your arse, and Miss Julianna says you’re to rest.”
“Best do as she says,” Lucas added. “She gets to looking at a fellow like he doesn’t smell very good when you don’t do as she says once too often.”
“Then she crosses her arms and taps her foot,” Ralph said. “Three times. It’s awful.”
“I can imagine.” Or she’d lift that russet eyebrow and make a man want to trace its arch with his thumb. “What comes after bringing in the peat?”
“We could make a list,” Ralph said. “Three things, three contests, a chance for everybody to win at least once. A list and a schedule.”
“Spoken like a born man of business, Master Ralph.”
Lucas’s gaze went to Roberta. “What about Bertie?”
Harold stood and pushed a mop of blond hair from his eyes. “She already won at getting out stains and sewing. She wins at turning pages. She wins at staying out of trouble. I’d say Bertie’s way ahead already.” The very grudging nature of the admission probably echoed its sincerity.
“Off to the peat pile with you,” Con said. “Don’t forget to wash your hands when you’re done. Dirty business, hauling in the peat.”
“I like the smell of it burning,” Harold said, refolding a towel given haphazard treatment. “Better than that stinky old coal.”
On this the children seemed agreed, as was Connor. “Miss Bertie, perhaps you can teach me how to put the towels away?”
“I’ll put them away,” Roberta said. “Then I’ll finish with the stain. You’re to rest.”
She folded her arms, and damned if the little minx didn’t lift an eyebrow.
“I will heed your guidance,” Con said as the children filed out the door, Bertie with a load of towels in her arms.
Con brought up the rear, but unlike the children, who turned left in the corridor, Con went to the right. No rule, law, list, or schedule prevented a fellow from resting in the kitchen, or learning how to help a busy woman make a fresh cobbler.
* * *
The weeps hit as Julianna cut the butter into the flour. The milch cow, Henrietta, had freshened in May, but already her output had dropped considerably. Winter without butter was an awful prospect, but buying a late heifer would be entirely beyond—
“The boys are bringing in the peat. Roberta is putting away the towels,” said a voice at Julianna’s right elbow. Connor peered into her crockery bowl, bringing with him a hint of sandalwood. “So this is how cobbler is made? I confess I am amazed. That doesn’t look anything like a cobbler.”
“It won’t look much like cobbler when I’m done either,” Julianna said, mashing the butter with two forks. “A proper cobbler, according to my grandmother’s recipe, has preserves on the bottom and in the middle, not simply dabbed about to add a dash of color.”
Connor leaned across Julianna and dipped a finger in the raspberry jam sitting to her left. When she would have chided him for snitching, he touched that finger to her lips.
“So whose children are they?” he asked. “Was John St. Bellan married previously?”
In a fit of optimism, Julianna had liberally sugared the last batch of raspberry preserves. The flavor was exquisite, all summery abundance and tart luxury. Connor’s touch on her mouth was casual and incendiary at the same time.
“I was Mr. St. Bellan’s only wife. We took the children in shortly before he died. This is their home. Don’t do that again.”
This time, Connor helped himself to a dab of jam, his expression suggesting he was tasting the first sip of a suggested vintage at some gentleman’s club.
“Took them in from where? You’re in the middle of nowhere, barely eking by.”
Gone was the spinner of fairy tales and in his place a man who’d probably eat far too much. “How I eke is none of your affair, sir. John fetched them from a poorhouse in York. They say they’re siblings, but I have my doubts. The boys wouldn’t come without Roberta. Here, they can be siblings.”
Connor turned and leaned his hips against the counter. A slight bunching beneath the fabric of his breeches gave away the location of the bandages, but other than that, he appeared hale.
“You told me that you wrote to me when your husband died, and then several months later, my mother returned your letter. Are you quite sure your letter was addressed to me?”
Julianna left off hacking the butter into smaller bits, for Connor would not leave her in peace until he’d got whatever he’d come for.
“Yes, I am certain. It’s the only letter I’ve ever sent to a duke, and I did not enjoy writing it.”
“Because you asked for help?” Connor apparently grasped the difficulty of swallowing pride, of admitting fear.
“Because I asked for your help,” Julianna said, staring at the jumble of ingredients in the bowl. The recipe called for a dash of orange juice, though she hadn’t had that ingredient on hand for several years. “I had never met you, and to presume…”
“You comprehend some of my dilemma,” Connor said. “Here I am, a duke, a peer of the realm, seventy-third in line for the throne, or some such rot, and I must rely on a struggling widow to keep my secrets.”
True enough. “You are concerned with your pride. I’m concerned with what wi
ll happen to my children. I did write to you. You did not write back.” He was a duke, and thus his pride would be no small feature.
He studied her, though Julianna refused to give him more than her profile. He took the towel from her shoulder and dabbed at her chin.
“You’ve a dash of flour,” he said. “Or batter, or whatever one calls a cobbler in its un-cobbled state. You can’t blame me for… Julianna?”
One tear, one damned, hot, miserable tear, trickled down Julianna’s cheek and splashed onto the towel.
“Go away,” Julianna said, sounding very much like Bertie in a taking. “Please go away, I mean. You don’t have to leave the house, but if you’d just get out of my—”
Oh hell and damnation, Connor took her in his arms. His embrace was gentle but implacable, and worse, it was the embrace of an adult male who knew how to hold a woman. No fumbling, no awkward distance, nervous patting or brushing.
A snug, lovely embrace such as Julianna hadn’t enjoyed for years.
“They are wonderful children,” he said. “I suspect most children are wonderful, though one can’t know. I was certainly wonderful. I’m sure you were too. MacTavish might not have been.”
What came out of Julianna’s mouth? What brave, dignified pronouncement did she offer from the depths of a wrinkly, lavender-scented cravat?
“The cow will go dry too s-soon. I haven’t the juice of an orange. I’m skimping on the sugar. I hate to skimp, and you’ll eat too much, and I’m so tired of being ashamed.”
And afraid.
Connor shifted so he leaned against the counter between Julianna and her cobbler, and she leaned against… him.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “Not one damned thing.”
“I can barely feed the children. If Horty goes lame, I’ll not be able to bring in my crops. If the cow dies, we’ll not even have cheese. If the blight comes through again, the potatoes are a loss. Each year, I’m planting more potatoes, and that is not what my husband worked his entire life to see happen with this farm.”
Dukes In Disguise Page 5
