Sometimes, her ladylike, gentle mother was entirely too perceptive. Contemplating Dunstan and hurling javelins, Leila did not dare reply.
“Martha, I thought I told you to get rid of this soap.” An irritable male voice floated down the stairs and through the partially closed parlor doors. “I’ll not go about smelling of perfume!”
Leila lifted her gaze to watch a spider spinning a web in a corner of the ceiling.
Martha’s murmured reply could not be discerned, but a deep growl carried easily. “Then who put the blamed thing in here? I threw it out this morning.”
Hermione raised her eyebrows over the brim of her teacup. “You’re making soap on your own now, are you, dear?”
“I must practice on something.” Leila wanted to get up and walk out, but that would only raise her mother’s foolish suspicions. The marchioness dearly wanted to believe her eldest daughter had inherited her gifts, but Leila had never made a person happy or content or even moderately satisfied with her fragrances, as her mother did. Although, if Dunstan’s shouts were any indication, she’d certainly succeeded in eliciting his anger.
“Practicing on an Ives is a trifle untraditional, is it not?” Hermione suggested softly as heavy footsteps clattered down the stairs. “I did warn you about them, did I not?”
Thankfully, Dunstan burst in before Hermione could voice her disapproval of what must be written all over Leila’s face. Her family meant well, but they interfered at the most embarrassing moments. She sipped her tea to hide her flush.
“I apologize for making you wait, my ladies. How may I help you?”
Dunstan had smoothed back his thick dark hair, secured it with a ribbon, and donned a frayed frock coat of midnight blue trimmed in the barest hint of silver to match his gray vest. Leila liked that he’d dressed for her, but he could just as well have worn rags. She saw the man inside the clothes, and she quivered at the hungry look he bestowed on her. Physical awareness heated the small parlor far better than any fire.
Hermione cast a disapproving look at Leila and shook her head—whether in dismay or acceptance of the inevitable Leila couldn’t tell.
“It’s how we may help you that counts,” she murmured, setting down her cup. With her clear, unwrinkled skin, the marchioness looked as wide-eyed and innocent as a newborn babe. “Do sit, dear, and have a sip of tea. Did you know Ninian sometimes speaks with ghosts?”
Leila bit back a grin as Dunstan all but rolled his eyes and gingerly perched on a chair, clearly unaware that her mother had discerned the tension between them and already reached a conclusion.
“And my brother sees stars that are not there,” he added, humoring an old lady while taking the cup Leila offered. “We all have our eccentricities.”
“Be that as it may,” Hermione continued, “we are here to help. My daughters tell me your name has been wrongfully maligned, and we must correct that.”
Dunstan’s expression reflected his impatience. “I trust you did not travel all this way on a fool’s errand, my lady. I have told your daughter I have no interest in what other people think.”
Hermione’s limpid blue gaze regarded him sorrowfully. “And do you take no thought to others who might be affected? Would you have your son grow up to believe notoriety is acceptable? Would you never visit with your brothers or nephew for fear of tainting them with the gossip? And your mother—your dear, sainted mother! How could you let her suffer beneath this dark cloud?”
“Maman!” Leila thought Dunstan might explode if her mother did not cease at once. He gave off a heat so strong that she could feel it welling up, threatening to blast them. The sensation of being drawn into those emotions both frightened and excited her. “Maman, you go too far.”
“My lady is all that is kind,” he said coldly. “But the matter is not easily resolved and is none of her concern. I regret that I’ve caused anyone to believe otherwise.”
“Oh, don’t be so damned polite, Dunstan.” Tired of the posturing and frustration, Leila slammed down her teacup and surged to her feet. “You’ve already made it plain that you don’t care a wink about others, so pardon us if we don’t care what you think. Come along, Maman. Let the man burn in a hell of his own making.”
He stood when they rose, but she knew he was as furious as he’d been the night he’d invaded her bedchamber.
Good. Maybe he would try it again. This time, she’d be ready for him.
Fourteen
“Have a way with the ladies, do you?”
Still steaming from the encounter with Leila, Dunstan resisted the urge to plow his fist into a jaw that was too much like his own. Adonis sat sprawled on a settee before the kitchen fire, looking very much at home while working a metal puzzle between his nimble fingers.
“I was polite,” Dunstan retorted. Noting the remains of bread and cheese on his son’s plate, Dunstan dug in the pantry for the same, despite Martha’s complaint that dinner would be ready soon enough.
“They’re right, you know.” Apparently not the least bit embarrassed to reveal he’d been eavesdropping, Adonis stretched his shabby boots across the floor. “You hurt your family by not clearing your name.”
Dunstan shot him a warning look and jerked his head toward his son. “There’s a time and place for everything.”
“Tell your father why you ran away.” Adonis lifted his lengthy frame from the bench and dropped the tangled wire puzzle on the table in front of Griffith. The tangle instantly separated into three unbroken hoops. After setting a fresh loaf of bread on the table, Martha glanced over Griffith’s shoulder with interest, then returned to her cooking.
“How did you do that?” In awe, the boy poked at the pieces.
Gritting his teeth, not wanting to have this conversation, Dunstan dropped down on the bench across from his son. Grabbing the hoops, he snapped them into a tangle again. “Why did you run away?” he asked Griffth, repeating his guest’s question.
Griffith wriggled uncomfortably. “Just ’cause.”
“You will haul all the water for this house for a week as punishment for worrying your mother.” Dunstan chewed a chunk of bread and cheese while he planned his words. “She must be frantic. We’ll have to send a messenger immediately to let her know where you are.”
“I’m staying?” Griffith eyed his father warily.
“That depends. Will you write your apologies to your mother?” Dunstan demanded, knowing how Bessie doted on the boy.
Griffith grimaced and returned to playing with the puzzle. “I left her a note.” At Dunstan’s silence, he shrugged but didn’t look up. “I’ll apologize.”
“Then you may stay. But you must still carry water for a week.”
“All the water?” the boy objected. “Do we have to take baths?”
“One every night if you do not tell me what made you run away.”
Griffith sighed, rolled his eyes, fiddled with the puzzle, and finally muttered, “The other boys made fun of me.”
“That’s what boys do. You must taunt them back.” Outwardly unsympathetic, Dunstan sliced more cheese, but inside, his gut twisted. Children were cruel. The tormentors of his youth had given up when he’d grown larger than they. Griffith was large for his age, too, so his foes probably weren’t just the boys in his school.
“Ma said to ignore them.” Griffith stuffed a huge piece of bread in his mouth and chewed angrily.
Adonis snorted from his corner. “Your mother obviously isn’t a Malcolm.”
“Shut up, or I’ll label you a Malcolm,” Dunstan said without ire. His gaze didn’t waver from his son. “Fighting someone your size might quiet one or two bullies, but there’s always one more. I trust you’re not ashamed of your birth? Your mother explained why we could not marry?”
Griffith scowled. “I’m not a simpleton. Earls’ sons don’t marry maids. Ma says I should hold my head up and be proud that you acknowledge me, because many wouldn’t.”
But better men than he would have brought the boy into their
home and schooled him to a better life. He’d still been a boy in school himself when Griffith was young, and he’d had no house to bring him to. Later, after he’d left school and married, Celia had had hysterics when he suggested it. Life never offered simple choices.
“We were too young to marry,” Dunstan corrected the boy’s assessment, softening some of the stark reality. “Your mother is a fine woman or I’d never have left you with her. So what is it you are fighting about?”
Even as he asked the question, he suspected he knew the answer. The argument with Leila had already warned him.
He’d thought that by removing himself from his family’s village, people would forget the tragedy of Celia’s death and life would go on.
He realized now that he’d been licking his wounds instead of thinking.
“They say you murdered your wife,” Griffith muttered at the table. “And I called them filthy liars.”
Dunstan knew the boy wanted to hear that his father was not a murderer. He wished he could offer that reassurance. To his shame and humiliation, he could not. He didn’t believe himself capable of so heinous a crime, but he had no proof that he didn’t murder Celia, and plenty to show that he might have. “Martha, would you excuse us for a minute?”
“I’ll be setting the table. Don’t you be filling up on bread!”
In the silence that followed the old woman’s departure, Dunstan placed his broad hand over his son’s slender one, absorbing the warmth and life vibrating there. He couldn’t lie, but he couldn’t hurt the boy either.
“If I did not kill Celia when she took a lover, do you think I’d kill her after she’d been out of my life for over a year?”
The boy shook his shaggy head. “I called them all rotten liars,” he repeated vehemently, “but even the women whisper, and I cannot shut them up.”
“The Malcolms have the right of it,” Adonis said from his bench. “You must clear your name, not hide here. You’re an earl’s son. Make society work for you; use what fate has given you for the good of all.”
Dunstan shot him a hostile glare. “If I had any chance of proving who killed Celia, don’t you think I would use it?” Stubbornly, he resisted telling Adonis that he saved every penny he earned to pay someone to do what he could not.
“Malcolms see and hear things no one else can. Have you asked for their help?” Adonis asked.
“We are talking about women who talk to trees and let birds loose in churches,” Dunstan protested.
“It’s daunting to deal with the inexplicable,” Adonis acknowledged, working another tangled wire puzzle he’d produced from somewhere about his person. “Celia lived in London. Malcolms live in London. They have more opportunity than you to investigate.”
“Let them meddle on their own. I don’t fit in their gilded parlors. I’m a farmer.”
“You’re an earl’s son,” Griffith protested.
“I’m an earl’s son who’s more comfortable with a herd of sheep than with those bewigged buffoons in London,” Dunstan insisted. “At least I can take a stick to a sheep’s hindquarters and poke it out of my way.”
“With all that wool on their heads and in their eyes, the London gentlemen resemble sheep. Carry a stout stick and treat them accordingly,” Adonis advised.
Dunstan swallowed a smile at the image. “I don’t think Malcolms would appreciate my poking the ladies.”
Accompanied by their guest’s shout of laughter, Martha returned to hear this last. “Sir, I cannot think that’s a thing to be saying in front of the lad.”
The lad was grinning hugely. Relieved to see the boy could smile, Dunstan rose and hugged his cook’s shoulders. “How say you, madam? Can a sheepherder shear the wooly sheep of London?”
“Only if he learns to dance, sir,” the old woman said with a smile. “I hear the sheep of London are most fond of dancing.”
Adonis unfolded his long frame from the settee and performed an elaborate bow before Martha. “My lady sheep, might I pull the wool over your eyes?”
His son’s giggles inspired Dunstan to fall in with the insanity. Lifting his cook’s hand in the first stand of the minuet, Dunstan made a courtly bow, caught her stout waist, and spun her around.
Griffith howled, and Adonis caught the flustered cook to promenade her down the kitchen floor, singing, “To London we will go, to London we will go, heigh-ho, the merry-o, to London we will go!”
Joining in his son’s laughter, Dunstan knew he should be protesting loudly that they would not be going to London soon, but he hadn’t laughed in so long, his jaws ached from disuse. It felt as if a thundercloud had temporarily lifted from his shoulders, and he didn’t wish to hasten its return.
He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed the camaraderie of his brothers. He’d spent too damn much of his life alone.
If only he could clear his name, he could have his family back again.
But he’d promised Leila his aid here, and he wasn’t a man who broke promises.
“It’s all very well to laugh and dance and dream, but I can’t go to London immediately,” Dunstan told Adonis the next day, watching an approaching storm drive leaves into the hedgerows outside his doorstep. “Unlike you, I have a son to support and responsibilities to live up to. I must make arrangements.”
Adonis shrugged. “Then make them quickly or your noble brother’s wife will wander off in the company of her fair-haired cousins to investigate what you have not.”
“I’ll talk to Lady Leila.” Frowning and swatting his boot with his crop, Dunstan watched the clouds building on the horizon. “Perhaps she can call off Ninian and the others until I have time to get there.”
Talk to Lady Leila. As if the two of them could exchange sensible words without setting off small explosions in the atmosphere. Her appearance here with her mother, looking like Lily and behaving as Leila, had completely unsettled him. He was having difficulty accepting that a lady could be as approachable as the wench in the field.
Laughter rumbled from Adonis’s deep chest. “If you believe a stern word from you will call off the ladies, you know nothing of Malcolms. I can’t decide whether I’m more amazed that Ives and Malcolms have survived all these years without each other, or that you haven’t killed each other already. I wish you well.”
The big man strode off into the gloom without a word of farewell. One of his boot soles flapped as he walked, and Dunstan made a mental note to write Drogo and have boots made for the braying jackass. He didn’t know how they would deliver the boots, since Adonis disappeared and reappeared at will, but he owed the man.
He owed the man far more than a pair of boots.
He turned and caught Griffith standing warily behind him, watching Adonis depart. “You know you need to finish school,” Dunstan said.
With his hair slicked off his face and wearing one of Dunstan’s old coats, the lad looked more man than child, until he grimaced. “I’ve learned all they can teach me.”
He’d learned all the village school could teach him because his father hadn’t sent him off for a better education. Another faulty decision, Dunstan supposed, and one not easily corrected now. He didn’t have the funds to send his son away to school, but he knew an idle mind didn’t benefit the boy. Perhaps if he called off his investigator and went to London on his own, he could use those funds for Griffith’s schooling. But what would he do with Griffith while he was off to London?
“We’ll speak of school later.” Deciding he had time to ponder the matter, he sought some means of communicating with his son now that Adonis had left them alone in each other’s company. “In the meantime, you can help me work the field. I assume your mother hasn’t mollycoddled you into believing you’re too good for hoeing.”
Had Griffith meant to protest the assignment, he shut up about it after the implied insult. Dunstan had learned one or two things by dealing with his younger brothers. “I’ve been writing a pamphlet on turnip production. It’s on my desk. Go over that for me, reading it for info
rmation, then editing for errors and clarification. When you’re done, I’ll show you what needs doing outside.”
The boy nodded. “You’re not sending me away?”
“You’re my son,” Dunstan affirmed, understanding the source of the boy’s continuing uncertainty, “and I’ll do what I can to be a father. Don’t expect a great deal of me. I believe I saw my own father once a year at best, so I have no example to draw on.”
The boy’s stiff stance relaxed, though the wariness didn’t leave his eyes.
Had he done this to his son? Dunstan wondered. Shut him out as he’d shut out all society? If so, Leila had been right to call him narrow-minded. What else had he turned his back on while immersing himself in work?
Guilt from the deaths of Celia and her lover was burden enough to bow his shoulders. Repeating his father’s mistakes with Griffith would guarantee him a place in hell. But he knew nothing about how to correct the situation.
He’d have to learn.
Satisfied that his son was adequately occupied for the moment, Dunstan strode out the door. He had an insane urge to discuss his lack of assurance about fatherhood with Leila. He needed a perspective he didn’t possess. He wasn’t a mathematical genius like Drogo or an inventor like their younger brother, Ewen. He lacked the ability to analyze anything except what grew in the field. Leila was the one who understood people.
But how could he tell Leila he had to go to London?
Fifteen
Upon the heels of Hermione’s departure, Staines returned from Bath with a party of his friends. The lot of them galloped and halloed up the drive, pulling their mounts up short until they reared in protest, laughing when one of the more drunken riders fell backward into the hedges.
Boys! Leila swung from the window in a swirl of skirts. Staines was barely nineteen. She shouldn’t expect him to behave with the dignity of his late uncle. But ’twas a pity he didn’t find more reserved company.
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