Matthew

by Grace Burrowes

  Matthew smiled at her and lifted his silver stirrup cup in her direction. The gesture was noticed by the group around him, who shot Theresa indulgent looks.

  Theresa picked up the pear before Capshaw could touch it. “You will excuse me, sir. Rather than endure old tattle about the distant past, I will find company less judgmental, more tolerant, and more to my taste. Half-pickled men who mention their base impulses at a polite gathering are tedious in the extreme.”

  She did not flounce off, she wandered away, nibbling on her pear, and wondering at her treatment of Mr. Capshaw. All the years at Sutcliffe Keep had been spent in hiding, doing penance for choices that had in truth been the best decisions Theresa could have made at the time. The world would never see her past thus, Thomas would never see the situation thus, and that was sad and unfair.

  Matthew, however, had revealed to Theresa a healthier perspective on a young woman who’d been given no real chance to preserve her good name. Standing in the sunshine, neighborly socializing all around her, Theresa’s heart eased.

  As angry as she was, as much as she regretted her past, for the first time, she was not ashamed of what she’d done. She was not ashamed of herself.

  She caught Matthew’s eye, waved with her pear, and as all the world looked on, smiled at the man she loved.

  * * *

  “Cease your mooning,” Beckman said quietly, though Matthew heard him. “People have already noticed you noticing her.”

  “I intend to do a great deal more than notice Theresa Jennings.” Bathed in late autumn sunshine, cheeks rosy, wearing a habit that flattered in both color and cut, Theresa Jennings was pretty. When she smiled at Matthew over a half-eaten pear, she became stunning.

  Lovely, mischievous, alluring, sweet… lowly adjectives failed. Entire rapturous paragraphs threatened.

  “You’ll marry her?” Beckman asked.

  “If she’ll have me. If her clod-pated baron of a brother doesn’t convince her to go dodging back to Sutcliffe Keep, my heart firmly in her grasp.”

  Beckman took a sip of his ale. Matthew had never known him to imbibe strong spirits to excess.

  “You should speak with Nicholas,” Beckman said. “Miss Jennings’s past might not comport entirely with your perceptions of—”

  Beckman was a friend, and a friend wearing what was possibly his only decent hunt coat, thus Matthew did not knock him on his arse in public.

  “Shut your mouth, Beckman.”

  Beckman also had four brothers, two older, two younger, and was thus not easily put off, rather like Remington.

  “I like her, Squire. I like her a lot, but having acquired something of a bad reputation myself in the not-distant-enough past, I can tell you people have long, nasty memories for every foot I’ve ever put wrong. If you were some knight ruralizing in the Outer Hebrides, I might hold my tongue, but if you marry her, you’re taking scandal to wife right on her brother’s very property line. Thomas Jennings is not a man to trifle with.”

  He wasn’t now. Ten years ago he’d been an arrogant sprout, apparently. “I am a man to trifle with, Beckman? Perhaps you’d like a turn serving as magistrate.”

  “Think of her, Belmont. She’ll be cut every Sunday at services by her only sibling. Think of Priscilla, who won’t understand why Uncle Thomas never comes to call. He’s a reasonable man and not one to judge, but you must approach him properly before you steal the sister he barely speaks to.”

  “Matthew, excuse me.”

  How long had Agatha Capshaw been standing there, and what had she overheard?

  “Agatha, good day. You know Mr. Haddonfield, I believe.”

  “Mr. Haddonfield.” She bobbed a curtsey. “Matthew, Emmanuel and I will take our leave of you, but you should know the punchbowl is nearly empty, as are the tart trays.”

  More helpfulness that nearly motivated Matthew to violence. “Thank you, Agatha, for keeping a sharp eye on the buffet. I’ll alert the kitchen.”

  Matthew had given the vicar’s two oldest daughters strict orders regarding the quantities of punch and tarts to be prepared, because his dear neighbors would not leave until the stores were all consumed.

  He’d been ready for every one of them to go to blazes an hour ago.

  Agatha was darting glances at Theresa, who held the vicar’s youngest, a scapegrace little fellow known as Wee Ralph. If anything could have enhanced Theresa’s beauty yet further, it was the sight of a small child cuddled in her arms.

  “Mr. Haddonfield,” Agatha said, “might you excuse us?”

  “I’ll see that your horses are ready, Mrs. Capshaw,” Beckman said, bowing. “Then I’ll be on my way home as well. Good night, master.”

  “Good night, Beckman.” Though for deserting Matthew to Agatha’s dubious company, Beck deserved to be knocked into the mud, hunt coat and all.

  “She’s very pretty,” Agatha said, when Beckman was out of earshot.

  Matilda had been pretty. “If you refer to Miss Jennings, I can assure you she’s also sensible, kind, tolerant, and honest. Shall I introduce you?”

  “Yes, please. I’m not a hypocrite, Matthew. My own sister would have found little welcome at such a gathering, but for your timely gallantry.”

  Agatha had not ridden with the hunt that morning, not even at the back of the second flight, though in years past, she had. Today, she’d remained behind to supervise the preparation of the hunt breakfast, though the vicar’s daughters had had all in hand when Matthew had left the house.

  Matthew offered Agatha his arm, for as she’d circulated among the guests and made several trips through the buffet, her gait had been uneven.

  “Does the cold weather not agree with you, Agatha?”

  “A sore hip, nothing more. Do you fancy Miss Jennings?”

  Was this how Reynard felt, with the pack baying his doom? “I do fancy her, and hope to offer for her, though she might not look favorably on my suit.”

  “You’re a fool if you’re concerned she’ll reject you,” Agatha said. “Miss Jennings would be lucky to have an offer from you, Matthew—any offer.”

  Not only was Agatha’s gait uneven, but she’d also lost some height. She’d been many years Matilda’s senior, as much a mother as a sister.

  “Agatha, are you well?”

  Agatha’s gaze strayed to Emmanuel, who would be lucky to sit a horse all the way home.

  “I am content.” She was resigned, in other words, not the same thing at all.

  “Is there anything I can do, Agatha?” For a woman whom Matthew really didn’t know all that well.

  “Be happy while you can,” she said. “And take good care of my nephews.”

  * * *

  Except for Emmanuel Capshaw’s tipsy meddling, Theresa’s day had been lovely. When Matthew had plucked Wee Ralph from her arms, though, and informed her the time had come to return to Linden, she’d been glad to go.

  “Agatha Capshaw wasn’t what I expected,” she said as they turned their horses up the lane to Linden. “She strikes me as a sad woman, but a good woman. One who’s made a practical peace with life’s challenges.”

  “Not another soul would characterize Agatha Capshaw as sad, but I think you have the right of it. You would make a fine magistrate, my dear.”

  “I’ve known my share of sadness. Then I think of the women who lose their children as infants. They would dearly love to trade their sadness for mine.”

  “You lost your only sibling, more or less,” Matthew said. “You also lost both parents, a grandmother, a grandfather.”

  Thomas had endured the same losses, but he’d chosen to divest himself of his only sister. Why? What would an occasional letter have cost him?

  “That doesn’t excuse what I became,” Theresa said, because she needed for Matthew to understand this. “I had my reasons. Grief wasn’t among them.”

  The horses, having enjoyed the morning’s hunting, were content to walk along, and the sun’s rays were gathering strength as the day progressed. Ther
esa enjoyed a sense of normalness, of a morning devoted to an enjoyable pastime too long denied her, and an afternoon full of lovely possibilities.

  If she’d never fallen from grace, she’d have accumulated a store of such days, as Thomas doubtless had. More and more, she was prone to comparing what Thomas’s banishment from Sutcliffe had earned him, versus what her tenure at the Keep had cost her.

  The reckoning was overdue, and… disquieting.

  “What did you think of Emmanuel?” Matthew asked. “I apologize for not seeing to the introductions.”

  “He is a trial, which is odd. I had anticipated that his wife would be the harder company to endure. Mr. Capshaw suffered a fascination with my bosom.” And with Theresa’s past.

  Matthew drew his mare up. “Shall I call him out?” He was abruptly no longer the genial, handsome squire, he was a man who’d hunted down felons and brought them to justice.

  “You can’t call him out—you’re the king’s man. Dueling solves nothing and spreads scandal, but thank you for the gesture.”

  “As to that, Baron Sutcliffe should consider taking his turn serving as local magistrate.”

  “Thomas lacks…” He lacked the tolerance that added so much to Matthew’s appeal. Theresa had the cheering thought that Matthew’s tolerance was a product of years spent wrestling with a younger man’s penchant for anger. “Thomas is newly married, and inflicting parlor sessions on him would be unkind.”

  Matthew’s mare toddled forward, and Evan fell in beside her.

  “You nearly criticized your darling baby brother. There’s hope for you. I’ll have a word with Emmanuel, one he won’t soon forget.”

  Some of the day’s joy wafted away on the brisk breeze, like so many leaves twirling to earth.

  “Matthew, please say nothing to your brother. Other people will recall that I was known as the Sutcliffe Strumpet.” The sobriquet hurt, for Theresa’s own cousins had inflicted it on her.

  “Because you were the disgrace of southern England, the shame of four shires, the bad example of the modern age, et cetera, et cetera. My neighbors don’t agree with you, Theresa. More to the point, I don’t agree with you. When I kiss you, do you feel like a strumpet?”

  She did not dare lie to him, did not want to. The day had lifted a weight from her heart and replaced it with a luminous dawning of hope above the limitless seascape of her regrets.

  “When you kiss me, I feel… lovely.”

  Matthew remained silent the rest of the way up the drive, which meant he was considering strategy. Theresa did not need to consider strategy, because with Matthew, only unrelenting honesty would do.

  He assisted her off her horse. “This morning, I rode hard for more than two hours, I greeted every neighbor who owns a decent mount. I prevented several grown men from falling face first into the punchbowl, and I kept the hounds occupied and the fox entertained without anybody coming to grief. The entire time—”

  Theresa kissed him, because she could, because that’s what he’d been about to ask of her. A fine, enthusiastic kiss on a lovely, happy day. The holidays would come, Emmanuel Capshaw would make his ugly threats, but Matthew would not be deterred. Thomas, of course, would present a problem, but for a few moments, Theresa allowed that sliver of hope to widen, to become the beginning of a sunrise on new dreams.

  The passion of the kiss was sumptuous, like the day. Fresh, clear, with an edge that delighted even as it hinted of the more dramatic winter weather in the offing.

  “We shouldn’t—” she managed a breathless moment later.

  “All morning, I was a perfect gentleman, an agreeable neighbor, while I starved for the feel of you in my arms,” Matthew whispered, his embrace wonderfully snug. “If I can’t soon—”

  “Theresa Jennings.” Thomas’s voice cracked across the stable yard like lightning forking through a storm. “You will get your filthy, shameless hands off the king’s man this instant or be escorted to the foot of the drive like the baggage you are.”

  * * *

  Matthew had once found himself face-to-face with a fugitive from the law who’d been charged with arson, a hanging felony. The man had been armed, with nothing to lose, and had had the advantage of surprise. Matthew had been distracted, reading the quarry’s trail while mentally sorting through the latest row with Richard.

  And then, he’d been facing a loaded pistol held in a shaking hand, and all the many rows with Richard had dwindled to so much noise.

  Matthew had gambled his life on the moral distance between arson and murder. He’d not allowed himself to think of his boys, who’d be orphaned by their father’s death. He hadn’t contemplated his own demise, hadn’t allowed a flicker of regret to pass through his mind for dreams and hopes that would never see the light of day.

  Axel would take care of the boys, Emmanuel would manage the Belmont estate until Christopher could fill that role, and every man should die with a few dreams unfulfilled.

  Matthew had instead put himself in the shoes of his quarry and talked of justice, of a chance to clear a name unfairly tainted by accusation, of the king’s mercy and his regard for the yeomen who kept Britain fed and defended.

  The fire had been ruled accidental, and two lives—Matthew’s and the accused’s—had been saved by nothing more than faith and hope.

  Now, facing an irate baron, Matthew thought of his brother Axel, the man who’d kept him sane when Matilda had been dying, the brother with whom he’d fought, laughed, argued, and grown up.

  All of Theresa’s timidity where her brother was concerned made sense as Matthew studied the disgust in Thomas Jennings’s eyes. For Theresa, the great risk she took when she showed Matthew her favor wasn’t material—she was a resourceful woman, she’d manage to procure the necessities even if her brother cast her out.

  What she risked was the hope that her only sibling might someday once again respect her—a precious hope, indeed. Too precious for Matthew to jeopardize. Tact suggested he ought to withdraw and allow Theresa and Thomas to sort out their differences without an audience.

  Tact be damned. Matthew kept his arm around Theresa’s shoulders and turned a calm countenance on the seething baron.

  “Sutcliffe, welcome home. A pleasure to see you, though your greeting to your sister suggests your eyesight is failing.”

  Theresa gave a half-hearted squirm. “Matthew, Thomas has every right—”

  The hell he did. Matthew kissed her again, a little hush-now of a kiss. “A grown woman guilty of nothing more than kissing in the stable yard ought to be able to rely on her only sibling, and the head of her family, for civility at least.”

  “My eyesight is fine, Belmont,” Sutcliffe spat. “My sister’s morals, however, remain in want of—”

  Loris, Baroness Sutcliffe, emerged from the stable. “Matthew, Theresa, hello.”

  “Baroness, welcome home,” Matthew said, keeping his arm about Theresa’s shoulders. “Your husband interrupted Miss Jennings and myself in the midst of enthusiasms best expressed in private. My apologies. They were mutual enthusiasms, Sutcliffe, or has your wedding journey left you too fatigued to see straight?”

  The baroness linked her arm with her husband’s. “We’re very glad to be home. I think.”

  “We’re disgusted,” Sutcliffe countered. “The first time I open my home to a sister whom I feared lost to all discretion years ago, and I find not only has she completely ignored the bounds of propriety, she’s turned her sights on a neighbor and a man I would have thought too worldly to fall for her schemes.”

  Oh, for God’s sake. Matthew gave Theresa the space of two heartbeats to scold her dunderheaded brother for his presumption, much less his hypocrisy, but Theresa remained pale, tense, and silent.

  Sutcliffe had mucked things up nearly beyond repair.

  “Ladies, will you excuse us?” Matthew asked, with his best, harmless smile. “Miss Jennings, my thanks for joining us this morning at the hunt meet, and I do hope you’ll ride with us again. Baroness, perh
aps you’ll take Miss Jennings to the house and see that she gets some sustenance. Hunting is a hungry business.”

  The baron snorted at that observation, and the last of Matthew’s considerable patience scurried away amid the undergrowth.

  “We’ll just be going,” Loris said, taking Theresa’s hand.

  Theresa allowed herself to be led away, her expression suggesting she couldn’t recognize when a man was about to wage battle on her behalf—a long overdue battle, in which Priscilla’s and Matthew’s own happiness had no little stake.

  Alas, one could not simply spank fifteen stone of tantruming baron in that baron’s very own stable yard.

  Matthew tucked his riding gloves into his coat pocket, made sure Sutcliffe had left off glowering at the retreating ladies, and clipped his lordship with a satisfying left cross to the baronial jaw.

  * * *

  “We start for home in less than two weeks,” Remington said, letting himself into Richard’s room without knocking. Rem was still growing, and worse, he was growing faster than Richard. Older brothers were God’s plague on the undeserving, and bigger older brothers were penance personified.

  “I’m not going home,” Richard said, pretending to be fascinated with his Greek. Why a lot of buggering catamites in dressing gowns deserved study two thousand years after warring their civilization into oblivion, Richard did not know.

  “You’re coming home with us,” Rem replied, lounging on Richard’s bed, boots and all. “Papa will be heartbroken if you don’t come home, and Uncle Axel won’t let you stay here anyway.”

  Here was Candlewick, Axel Belmont’s estate in Oxfordshire and the salvation of Richard’s sanity. He and his cousin Phillip were in a neck and neck competition to master the most material by next autumn, so all five cousins could spend a year together at Oxford. Dayton, Phillip’s older brother, had proposed this scheme, and Richard had leapt at the challenge.

  “I’ll be too sick to travel.” Richard could do a convincing megrim, because he’d been getting them with increasing frequency before leaving Sussex. Bloody awful they were, too.