Thomas

by Grace Burrowes

  “I’m your mother, and you will not insult me.”

  Insult her? Giles wanted to slap her. She insulted him at every turn and was ruining his birthright. He settled for opening the French doors and inserting his person into the doorway.

  “You’re my mother, and I will commend you to the care of the excellent physicians who deal with hysterical women if you don’t confess your latest folly. Have you spent too much at the milliners again? Are you perhaps with child? You’d best tell me. I’m the only family you have, and the only one who can clean up your messes.”

  She stopped by the desk, her fingers curling around the neck of the wine bottle. Giles and his mother had never had a physical altercation, but he was reaching the end of his tether with her.

  “You’re a boy,” she sneered. “No physician would listen to your lies.”

  Giles remained where he was. If Claudia came at him with the wine bottle, he’d have all the evidence he needed to get her out of his house once and for all.

  “I’m my father’s heir. I attained my majority more than two years ago, you are driving what’s left of this estate into the ground, and my patience has run out.”

  “The estate is mortgaged,” Claudia said. “Your land is in hock, Giles, and the proceeds of the transaction are where I alone have access to them.”

  If she’d razed the house, poisoned the livestock, and salted the wells, she could not have dealt Giles a nastier surprise.

  “You did this nearly two years ago,” Giles said. “You must have forged my signature once I came of age, colluded with the old men Papa trusted to keep an eye on you.”

  Her smile was nearly shy and a touch proud.

  Not colluded, then, bartered her favors before they were mutton dressed up as lamb.

  This was the result of allowing women to overstep the bounds of what God intended them to deal with. Small children, a household staff, a kitchen garden, maids, laundry, the occasional sickroom. A woman who exceeded the ambit of her domestic abilities inevitably came to grief.

  “How much?” Giles asked.

  Claudia named a goodly sum, enough to put the estate back into excellent condition, enough to pay off the debts Giles juggled through the ledgers between sales of horses, rents, and acquisitions.

  “May I at least assume you mortgaged tenancies?” Giles pressed. “Or did you give the damned bankers title to the very roof over our heads?”

  Claudia poured herself another glass of wine, her hands trembling minutely. “Mr. Easton said the house was the most valuable part of the property, so I could keep more acres unencumbered if I put the mortgage on the manor house and its grounds.”

  Oh, splendid. Claudia was too arrogant to realize that if she was intent on defrauding her own son, a banker would have no qualms about turning a profit on her scheme.

  “What you have done,” Giles said, “is put into the hands of a lot of plundering cits the part of the estate that earns most of its revenue. You could not have made a stupider choice, Mama, but we can fix this. The bankers lied to you, which is what you deserve for breaking your word to Papa. You would have been far better off mortgaging tenancies, but all you have to do is give me the money, and we’ll clear the mortgage.”

  She downed half the wine at one go. “No.”

  Well, of course. Claudia’s party piece was the grand tantrum. Papa used to snatch Giles up and take him out for a hack when Claudia went on a tear. On two occasions, Papa had taken Giles into London for a week’s stay, claiming the servants would need that long to set the house to rights.

  London was expensive, and Claudia had been allowed to get away with too much for too long.

  “How would you like to swing for committing fraud?” Giles mused. “I never signed mortgage documents, and you do not have the authority to affix my signature to anything.”

  His questions flummoxed her, or half a bottle of wine had, but she rallied. “Even if you brought charges against me, you’d be years sorting out the bank, and you haven’t the means for that. I know where the money is, and I’m not telling you.”

  The day had reached that sweet hour, when the sun had sunk so low that the heat was easing. The gardens behind the house were in their full summer glory because an army of gardeners kept every bed watered and trimmed. In the long, soft shadows, the late roses in particular were magnificent.

  Giles wanted to rip out every one with his bare hands.

  “Where is the money, Mama?”

  She would not have turned the cash over to the very bankers whom she’d embroiled in her scheme, nor would she have entrusted the money to the solicitors complicit with her intriguing. Cash, or bank drafts, were sitting somewhere Claudia could get her hands on them, and that was… the worst folly of all.

  “You’ll never find that money,” she said, finishing her wine. “If you look until you’re an old man, you won’t find that money, so no more talk about criminal charges, physicians, or kicking me out of my own home, Giles. You’re the horse master here, nothing more, and if I hire Chesterton, I might not even need you for that.”

  She would not be hiring Chesterton—they simply hadn’t the money. “Have you made any payments on the mortgage, or are we two years in arrears already and about to lose our home, hmm?”

  “What payments? The banker takes a note, I get the money. That’s how it works. When I want the note back, I give him back the money plus a little extra. It’s not complicated.”

  God help them, Mama had trusted Mr. Easton’s explanation, never dreaming she might have found somebody more unscrupulous than she was. What were a few gambling debts compared to folly of that magnitude?

  Though of course, by mortgaging the property, Mama had anticipated Giles’s own scheme for paying off the worst of those debts.

  Giles did something Papa had told him never to do. He turned to face the setting sun and stared directly into its rays. The brilliance felt good, as if heat and light could destroy the memory of this entire conversation.

  When he closed his eyes, yellow and purple laced the dark field of his vision, and as if his father had whispered in his ear, Giles had the solution: Marriage was the way out of this conundrum. He’d had plans in train to bring that eventuality about, to bring him a biddable, grateful wife with no airs above her station, no expectations beyond what her husband allowed her.

  Those plans, among others, would simply have to be accelerated.

  He turned from the sunset, left the French doors wide open, and walked past his mother.

  “I’ll see you at dinner, Mama, and I’ll tell you what Sutcliffe had to say about the horses. He’s rich, he has beautiful a stable, and he’s our neighbor. Maybe you’ll let me sell him the best of the young stock, because God knows, the banker with whom you whored your body and soul will soon foreclose if we don’t generate some revenue.”

  Giles took small comfort from the fear the word foreclose put into Claudia’s gaze, but only small comfort. He wasn’t even bullying her. Because of Claudia’s damned stupidity, they could lose everything by the end of the year.

  Unless he married, sooner rather than later.

  * * *

  Loris was coming in from checking on the yeld ewes when Nicholas cantered up the drive on Buttercup, an enormous golden mare that belonged to Nick personally. She was part plow stock, but a handsome specimen nonetheless.

  Not a poor man’s horse, though Nick treasured her the way a poor man treasured his only mount.

  Jamie came out to tend to the mare, while Loris took up the bench under the oak. Fatigue dragged at her, a function of the heat and of a long afternoon.

  Nick walked over, bringing with him the scents of horse and dust. “Stop fretting. The baron is not far behind me, but I wanted to leave him and Fairly some privacy. Also to put as much distance between me and Mrs. Pettigrew as possible.”

  Loris was fretting, and she hadn’t quite admitted that to herself. “We’ll need to move the yeld ewes soon. The grass is nearly gone, and we can run the
m behind the yearling dairy heifers if we move the heifers closer to the creek.”

  Nick sat back, the bench groaning beneath his weight. “Sutcliffe is not your father, Loris Tanner. He’ll not promise to be home for dinner, but go left into the village instead of right toward home, then turn up missing for three days.”

  No, but Thomas might kiss Loris sweetly on the cheek, and then disappear up to London, possibly never to be seen again. Though did a man intent on disappearing offer marriage as a conclusion to a dalliance?

  “Sutcliffe is not answerable to me,” Loris said, just as Papa had been answerable to no one.

  “Ask Sutcliffe to whom he answers,” Nick said, crossing dusty boots at the ankle. “I suspect his view of the situation is different from yours. I can move the heifers tomorrow, if you like.”

  Fairly’s gray mare turned up the drive at a canter, her coat lathered and dusty.

  Where was Thomas? Was he hurt? Was that why Fairly cantered his horse in this heat? Had Thomas accepted an invitation to dinner with the Pettigrews?

  Loris was halfway off the bench when Nick’s voice stopped her.

  “Loris, your baron is fine. He’s on his way home, and he’s entirely smitten with you. The widow attempted to work her wiles on him, and he nearly yawned in her face. Cease worrying over Sutcliffe, because I have news that might pose a real cause for concern.”

  “The heifers can stay where they are for another week or so,” Loris said, resuming her seat, “especially if we get some rain. If you have news, Nicholas, then please share it. I have two more gates to check before my rounds are concluded, and I want to see how the swine are managing before the sun sets too.”

  Where was Thomas?

  “Your father has much to answer for,” Nick muttered, “but you should know that Jamie has heard rumors of a man answering to Micah Tanner’s description in Brighton.”

  Between one moment and the next, little changed around Loris. Jamie led Nick’s mare into the stable, the sun sank infinitesimally closer to the horizon, and Loris’s heart sank with it.

  “Do you know Papa has come back?”

  “I am repeating rumor only. Would you be relieved to know he’s alive?”

  “Yes.” Furious too, because Papa could have written to her, could have sent word to her indirectly, could have eased her fears for him in any one of a hundred ways, but instead, he skulked in the undergrowth, risking discovery and ensuring drama.

  Damn him and his drinking.

  Rupert plodded around the turn at the foot of the drive. In the heat, walking the horse the last stretch before the stable was simply prudent horsemanship. Fairly’s mare would require walking out, while Rupert could be put up in short order.

  Relief edged past Loris’s upset, because, as Nick said, Thomas was not her father. Thomas was rational, reliable, prudent… Thomas kept the promises Micah Tanner routinely broke.

  “If your father asked you to leave with him, Loris, would you go?” Nick asked.

  Thomas waved to her, the gesture weary. Loris waved back when she wanted to run to him and wrap her arms around him.

  That impulse spoke volumes.

  “If my father asked me to leave with him,” Loris said, “I’d resent the request very much. Two years ago, he left me here without significant coin, without warning, without explanation, and crops ripening in the fields. He could have taken me with him, he could have sent for me. I am very angry with my father, Nicholas.”

  Loris had been angry for years in fact, but was only now realizing it. Not only disappointed, not only worried, not only resigned—but enraged, too.

  “Good, because you should be angry with him,” Nick said, rising. “But still, you haven’t said you’ll refuse your papa’s summons should he invite you to leave Linden behind.”

  “Take the baron’s horse, Nicholas,” Loris said. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d keep any more such rumors to yourself.”

  Nick executed a perfect, wrist-twirling court bow. “You may trust my discretion.”

  He sauntered off to the stable yard, leaving Loris alone on the bench, relieved that Thomas was home, troubled by Nick’s rumors, and unwilling to trust him or his discretion.

  * * *

  The evening was once again filled with false harbingers of a break in the weather. The breeze gusted promisingly, lightning flashed from cloud to cloud, thunder rumbled, though not a drop fell.

  The same sense of unspent energy had characterized Thomas’s conversation with Loris when he’d returned from Pettigrew’s. Loris had babbled on about yeld ewes, and hogs needing mud, and heifers in calf grazing nearly as close to the root as sheep did, and all the while, she’d gazed at the sky, at the pastures, at the rocks exposed by the low water in the creek.

  When Thomas had ridden up the drive, Nick Haddonfield had been bedeviling her in the shade of the oak.

  Had Haddonfield said something to distract her?

  Was it the weather? Something else?

  Someone else?

  After Thomas endured an excellent, interminable meal with Fairly, he commended his guest to the comforts of the library, dunked himself in his second bath of the day, and headed through the trees to Loris’s cottage.

  He found her on her back porch, half a cup of cool peppermint tea at her elbow, the last of the day’s light her only illumination.

  “Is madam receiving callers?” Thomas asked, lowering himself beside her on the steps. The wood was hard but still held a hint of the day’s warmth. Around them, the gusting wind heaved and tossed the entire canopy of the woods, like a celestial housemaid trying to shake the wrinkles from a quilt.

  “I’m receiving you,” Loris said, leaning into him. “I hate this weather. It teases, it promises, it threatens, but it will not rain.”

  Thomas laid an arm across her shoulders. “In London, the rain is a mere nuisance, or a passing inconvenience. Here, people watch the weather as a mother watches a colicky newborn.”

  Loris had bathed too, for the breeze caught her lilac scent and lobbed it at Thomas’s imagination. Would Loris smell of lilacs everywhere? Earlier, she’d smelled of dust and grass and sheep.

  Good smells, more evidence Thomas was not in London.

  “Do you miss your Town life?” Loris asked.

  Her feet were bare. How comfortable that must be. Thomas considered her question, but retrieved his arm to pull off his boots.

  “I do not miss London, but London was familiar. I miss knowing every crook and corner of my life, knowing every publican and merchant with whom I must deal. Here, I am unknown, but I’m also ignorant. I don’t like that.”

  Loris shifted off the steps and set Thomas’s boots aside, then knelt in front of him to peel down his stockings. The moment was domestic, but also… intimate.

  “The weather is fickle,” she said, “but predictably fickle. We can dam, we can irrigate, we can dig deep wells, fill our ponds and cisterns. The farmer is not entirely at the mercy of the rain. What is this?”

  She traced a scar across the top of Thomas’s foot, the touch peculiar and delicate.

  “My cousins were supposedly teaching me to fence. They were older than I, and amusing themselves at my expense.”

  “They stabbed you?”

  “They referred to it as pinking and claimed it was simply part of the sport. My sister nearly pinked them through their wastrel hearts, she was so upset with them.” Then Theresa had explained about sparring with tipped foils, and tetanus, and how whiskey and sugar could cleanse a wound.

  And she’d cried as she’d tended gullible little brother.

  “Some people find sport in the most bothersome ways,” Loris said, leaning forward to press her brow to Thomas’s knee. “Will you make love with me tonight?”

  Lightning and then thunder punctuated the question, and gave Thomas the count of six to form an answer.

  He ran a hand over her braid. “You’re sure, Loris?”

  Her answer was to kneel up between Thomas’s knees and
kiss him. Weariness, estate matters, the conundrum that was Nick Haddonfield, and the worry that came from open gates and sprung horseshoes all flew from Thomas’s mind as Loris wrapped her arms around him.

  “I’m out of patience,” she said against his mouth. “I’m not—what is the point of waiting?”

  Thomas kissed her back, widening the distance between his knees so she could wedge herself closer, though something had driven her to make this request, something Thomas mistrusted.

  “What of talk, Loris? What of seeking a broader acquaintance with each other? What of needing time to assess our suitability?”

  Thomas tossed out questions without expecting answers. He simply needed time to catch his breath, to brace himself against the desire Loris was fanning from a spark to a steady, hungry flame.

  “I know you,” she said, unknotting his cravat. “I know you will come home when you say you will. I know the widow leaves you cold. I know you care about Linden.”

  No, actually, Thomas did not care about Linden. The property was an estate, a purchase, a patch of profitable ground that came with headaches and pretty views. He did, however, care about Loris Tanner, and she cared about Linden.

  “Dear lady, slow down. We have all night, and many nights. We’ve no need to rush.”

  She apparently had a need to rush, rolling up Thomas’s cravat and stashing it in the top of one of his boots. Her mouth was back on his in the next instant, and then the risers of the steps were a hard pressure against Thomas’s back.

  While Loris went after his shirt buttons, cuffs, and falls, Thomas held a silent debate with himself. Something or someone had wrested Loris’s natural restraint from her grasp, something as desperate as passion, but not as attractive.

  “Are you afraid you’ll lose your nerve?” Thomas asked, when Loris had his clothing in complete disarray. “You can change your—”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” Loris said, and then she was gone, leaving Thomas like so much plundered laundry on the wooden steps. In the next flash of lightning, she was illuminated against the night sky, standing in the grass three feet away, her fingers plucking at her bodice laces.