Baroness in Buckskin

by Sheri Cobb South

  “And now I think you are roasting me, Mr. Ramsay,” Miss Hunsford chided him playfully, rapping him on the arm with her folded fan.

  “Indeed I am, Miss Hunsford,” he confessed. “I trust you will forgive me.”

  “Only if you will stand up with me at Miss Ramsay’s ball next week.”

  “Elizabeth!” cried Mrs. Cummings, scandalized. “I don’t know how things are done in the West Indies, but here it is for a gentleman to ask a lady to dance, not the other way ’round. If you don’t wish to give all the gentlemen a disgust of you, you would do well to remember it.”

  “Oh dear!” Miss Hunsford turned large brown eyes on Peter. “Is it true, Mr. Ramsay?”

  “In general, yes,” he confessed apologetically. “But I cannot regret your ignorance, if it means I am to have the honour of leading you onto the floor.”

  The vicar’s wife gave a nod of approval. “Very prettily said, Mr. Ramsay. But I fear, Elizabeth, that you may not find London gentlemen so understanding.”

  Thankfully for Miss Hunsford, she was spared a scold by the return of the butler, this time to announce the arrival of young Mr. Charles Langley, scion of a local landowner, who was down from Oxford on holiday, and who would make up the fourth and final gentleman of the set.

  “Good morning, Mr. Langley,” Jane said, ex-tending her hand to him. “I am so glad you could join us.”

  “Not at all,” the young man demurred, flushing. “What I mean is, do me good to get in a bit of practice before jogging up to London for a bit of Town-bronze, what?”

  “Very true,” Jane agreed, smiling. “You will find the young ladies of the party in very similar circum-stances, so I hope you can all help one another. Aunt Amelia, we are all assembled now, so if you will take your place at the pianoforte, we will begin.”

  The party paired off, with Richard leading Susannah into the set. Peter offered his arm to Miss Hunsford (who looked to Susannah’s eyes like the cat that ate the canary), while Sir Matthew reluctantly left Jane’s side to bow before Miss Cummings, leaving Miss Lydia and Mr. Langley to make up the fourth couple in the set.

  Aunt Charlotte, for her part, seated herself next to Jane on the sofa, from which vantage point she might observe the dancers and offer criticism or, less often, praise.

  “Mr. Langley, if you will stay with the beat, perhaps Miss Lydia will not feel the need to drag you about the floor,” she barked at the vicar’s younger daughter and her partner. “Susannah, do try to relax. His lordship will not bite you. Peter, Miss Hunsford, you make a very handsome couple, I must say.”

  This observation could hardly be said to have helped Susannah relax. Instead, she tried to rise up on tiptoe in order to watch Peter and his partner over the shoulder of her betrothed, while at the same time not losing the beat of the music.

  “What is the matter, Susannah?” asked Richard, frowning at these not entirely successful maneuvers.

  “Nothing, only the—the sun is in my eyes.”

  Richard’s own eyes widened a little at this assertion since, as Aunt Charlotte had noted, the morning sun had not yet penetrated the morning room windows.

  After what seemed to Susannah an interminably long time, Aunt Amelia pounded out the final chords. The four couples separated, and all the dancers bowed or curtsied to their partners, then dispersed and began to re-form for the next set.

  “If you will do me the honour, Miss Ramsay?”

  Susannah was vaguely disappointed to see Mr. Langley bowing deeply before her. “Thank you, sir,” she said, summoning up a smile as she answered his bow with a curtsy.

  She soon discovered why Miss Lydia Cummings had felt the need to drag her partner about the floor. Mr. Langley performed the steps apparently at random, the only evidence that he kept any sort of count at all discernable in the fact that he marked the first beat of every measure by treading squarely upon her toe. If the previous dance had been distressing for reasons she could not quite define, this one was quite literally painful. Susannah could not quite stifle her sigh of relief when it finally came to an end. She was wondering if she might plead fatigue and sit the next one out when Peter approached and took her arm.

  “Do say you will rescue me from Miss Hunsford, Cousin Susannah,” he urged in hushed tones. “She has been dropping the most flagrant hints for the waltz, and I dare not rebuff her without appearing shockingly rude.”

  “Oh, is the next dance to be a waltz, then?” Susannah remembered her disappointment at not being allowed to waltz with Peter during her lessons, but now that the opportunity had presented itself to her, she felt awkward and ill at ease. Still, if the only alternative was to sit beside Jane and Aunt Charlotte and watch as he attempted to fend off the predatory heiress . . . She gave a decisive nod, the pain in her toes forgotten. “Very well, Peter.”

  “I stand forever in your debt,” Peter said gratefully, and took her in the hold she had practiced so often with Richard.

  Her breath caught in her throat. It had never felt like this with Richard. Her betrothed was quite tall, and when he had held her thus, his close proximity had afforded her nothing more than an excellent view of his cravat. Peter, however, was rather shorter, and she had only to lift her chin slightly to look straight into his dark eyes. Furthermore, she could feel the heat emanating from his body, and the awareness made her face grow warm. She lowered her gaze under the guise of minding her steps.

  “I should think you would want to encourage Miss Hunsford,” she observed somewhat breathlessly under the cover of the music. “Her dowry would allow you to purchase Fairacres.”

  Peter addressed himself to the top of her downcast head. “I don’t think I could bring myself to marry a lady only for her dowry, even for Fairacres. Nor, for that matter, do I think she has the slightest interest in marriage to me. Depend upon it, I am nothing more than a convenient target upon which to practice her charms prior to her brilliant London debut.”

  “In that case, I wish she would focus her attention on Richard,” she grumbled.

  “Perhaps she assumes, like you, that my rather precarious position in Society renders me uniquely susceptible to the charms of well-dowered young ladies,” he suggested.

  “I’m sure I never said—”

  “Or,” he continued, “perhaps she has taken Miss Lydia’s hints to heart, and deduced, quite rightly, that Richard belongs to you.”

  “To me?” echoed Susannah.

  “It is you to whom he is promised to marry,” Peter pointed out reasonably. “If you are concerned about his breaking faith with you, I can assure you that you need not be. Miss Hunsford is surely aware of this, and has therefore set her sights on my humble self. I suppose I must be flattered that she found me preferable to Sir Matthew or Mr. Langley.”

  Susannah made no reply to this sally, but glanced over his shoulder at the subject of their conversation. Miss Hunsford was now partnered with Lord Ramsay, and as Susannah watched her twirling about the room in the arms of her own betrothed, the heiress looked up and laughed at something he had said. It was very strange, really. From the moment Lord Ramsay’s letter had reached her in Kentucky, she had indulged in glorious dreams of arriving in England to discover that the man she had accepted sight unseen was in fact the embodiment of her every romantic fantasy. And sure enough, after that first unfortunate meeting, Richard had proven to be just the sort of man with whom any young lady might fall deeply in love.

  What she had not expected, what she could never have anticipated, was that she would fall deeply in love with his steward instead.

  Chapter 15

  Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,

  So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,

  Drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night,

  And would have told him half his Troy was burned.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Henry the Fourth

  It was a pleasantly weary Ramsay family that assembled around the dinner table that evening. Conversation was lively, for the mornin
g’s dancing-party must be discussed in detail, with Susannah congratulated on all sides for her performance, and Peter roasted roundly for being the object of Miss Hunsford’s amorous interest. From the dancing-party to the approaching ball required only a step, but here, it must be noted, the discussion lost much of its liveliness. Susannah lapsed into un-characteristic silence, while Jane appeared pale and tense, Peter grew thoughtful, and Richard, at the head of the table, voiced his opinions with tight-lipped stoicism. When a flash of lightning briefly illuminated the room, followed by the rumble of thunder, the younger members of the party seized with gratitude upon the opportunity to turn the subject.

  “It appears you will need to send the Aunts home in your carriage after all, Richard,” Peter observed.

  “It does, indeed,” he concurred.

  “Oh, would you, Richard dear?” pleaded Aunt Amelia. “I hate to ask you to send your coachman out in this weather, to say nothing of your poor horses, but I cannot like the thought of walking back to the Dower House.”

  Aunt Charlotte glanced toward the window, which rattled with the force of the raindrops against the glass. “I have always been of the opinion that a little rain never hurt anyone, but I can’t say I would care to walk home in this storm, either,” she remarked.

  “There is no question of your doing so,” insisted Richard. “Of course, there is a third alternative. You are free to stay here until the storm subsides, if you wish.”

  “I should not like to put you to any trouble,” objected Aunt Amelia without much conviction.

  “It is no trouble at all,” Jane put in. “If you should care to spend the night and return to the Dower House in the morning, the rose saloon can be prepared for you in a trice.”

  “Well—” dithered Aunt Amelia, glancing uncertainly at the window, “if you are quite sure—”

  Before she could finish the thought, the door to the dining room burst open. All eyes turned to see Wilson, clearly labouring under some strong emotion, framed therein.

  “Begging your pardon, my lord—ladies—” he began disjointedly. “It’s the physician. He says—”

  The physician, it seemed, was perfectly capable of speaking for himself. Mr. Calloway brushed past the butler and addressed Richard. “It was a lightning strike, my lord. I was just passing by on my way home from a call when I saw it. Send every able-bodied man you can spare to fight the fire, for it would be disastrous if the flames were to reach the Home Wood.”

  Richard was on his feet in an instant. “Yes, but what was struck by lightning? Talk sense, man!”

  “Fairacres,” Mr. Calloway said. “The old manor house is ablaze.”

  Susannah looked at Peter, and found him sitting as if turned to stone. “Peter?” she called softly.

  “We’ll be there at once,” Richard promised. “See to it, will you, Peter? Doctor, I would be obliged to you if you could hold yourself in readiness to treat anyone who might be injured in fighting the fire.”

  “Of course, my lord, but if you’ve no objection, I should like to ride to the vicarage first, and have Mr. Cummings organize a second party of men.”

  Richard nodded. “Yes, an excellent notion.”

  Susannah jerked to her feet like a puppet on a string. “You will need us to have hot water and bandages ready, won’t you, Doctor? And Cousin Jane, we had best make sure there is refreshment for the firefighters—coffee, perhaps, and sandwiches. They may have a long night ahead of them.”

  Everyone at the table stared speechlessly at their American relation’s cool assumption of authority—everyone except Peter, who managed a strained smile. “Thank you,” he murmured.

  “Cousin Susannah is quite right,” Jane pronounced, finding her tongue at last. “Richard, Peter, you must lose no time. If you cannot save Fairacres, at least you can ensure that the fire does not spread. We ladies will be in the kitchen, if you should have need of us. Come along, Aunt Charlotte, Aunt Amelia.”

  Jane shepherded the Aunts from the dining room in the wake of Susannah, who had already disappeared through the door and was no doubt halfway to the kitchen.

  “Thank you, Jane. Wilson,” his lordship addressed the butler, “go below stairs and collect every man-servant who can be spared. Peter, run to the stables and have the groom hitch up two wagons—one to convey the pump to the river, the other to carry the men. While you are there, saddle Diablo for me and Sheba for yourself. I shall join you there directly.”

  “Of course.” Peter cast his napkin aside and rose from the table, pausing only long enough to take one last quick gulp of wine from his glass before setting out for the stables.

  He soon discovered that the news had preceded him, for the stables were in an uproar; he realized belatedly that the stable hand who had taken charge of the physician’s horse had lost no time in spreading the word.

  “Mr. Ramsay, sir, is it true what Jem says about Fairacres?” the groom asked urgently.

  “Yes, it’s quite true,” Peter said. “Even if we can’t save the house, we must prevent the flames from reaching the Home Wood. We need a wagon to convey the pump down to the river, and another to carry the men who will soon be—ah, here they come now.”

  Sure enough, a cacophony of male voices penetrated the stable walls, and a moment later more than a dozen men entered the building, a cross-section of the domestic hierarchy that represented all ranks from the butler down to the youngest pot boy. Peter summoned three of the stoutest footmen to assist him, and the four of them lifted the cumbersome pump and its hoses onto the back of the wagon while the groom hitched the huge draft horses to the traces. Once this task was completed and the wagon sent on its way, Peter ordered the remaining men into the second wagon, which soon departed the stable in the wake of the first.

  “Good man!” pronounced Richard a short time later, entering the stable to find his horse saddled and waiting. His voice echoed strangely in the stable, which was empty of all but Peter.

  “I sent the others ahead,” Peter said, noting that his cousin had taken a moment to change into more serviceable garments. In his own eagerness to save Fairacres, he had set out in his evening clothes, which would probably be ruined long before morning. Still, if only the house might be saved, he would count their loss a price well paid. He turned back to Sheba and gave a last tug to the girth of the saddle. “We should be able to overtake them easily enough.”

  “Then let us do so.”

  The two men swung themselves into the saddle and set out at a canter—as fast as they dared over open country in the dark, lest an unseen rabbit hole bring them to grief before they ever reached the blaze.

  They saw the smoke rising above the treetops long before the house itself was visible, a billowing black cloud eerily tinged with orange. Peter’s breath caught in his throat as they cleared the wood and emerged onto the meadow where he and Susannah had ridden only a couple of weeks earlier. The picturesque manor house was hardly recognizable, replaced instead by a scene straight from the pits of hell. Flames shot forty feet into the air, casting into silhouette the figures of the men who had dismounted from the wagon so that they looked like demons dancing about a bonfire. Richard flung himself from the saddle and tied his terrified mount at a safe distance, looping the reins loosely in case their efforts at containing the blaze should fail and the horse should have to be removed quickly. His actions jolted Peter out of his horrified trance, and he quickly followed his cousin’s example, looping Sheba’s reins about a low-hanging tree limb as he murmured calming words—although whether these were intended to comfort his horse or himself, he could not have said.

  Once on the scene, Richard lost no time in taking charge, shouting to make himself heard over the roar and crackle of the conflagration as he oversaw the unloading of the pump. Peter, not content to operate in a purely advisory capacity, grabbed one end of the hose and dragged it down to the river’s edge, wading out knee-deep in order to plunge the mouth of the hose well below the surface. If the water was cold, he didn
’t notice; he was thankful to have some occupation. For surely anything was better than standing about staring helplessly at the inferno that represented the death of all his worldly ambition.

  * * *

  For the Ramsay ladies, the night was less active, if no less stressful. Upon reaching the kitchen ahead of her cousin and aunts (no difficult task, as two were elderly and the third dependent upon a crutch to aid her in descending the stairs), Susannah snatched a coarse linen apron from a hook on the wall and tied it on over her gown. She spied the two fragrant loaves of bread intended to feed the family the following day and set upon them with a knife, slicing them up and making sandwiches from whatever cold meats and cheeses she could find—an act of vandalism which would surely have enraged Antoine, had he been present to witness it. But, perhaps thankfully, Antoine had been pressed into service as a firefighter—a waste of his talents to which he might have objected strenuously, had he not deemed the prospect of being left out of the excitement a fate far worse.

  Alas, having completed this task and overseen the brewing of coffee and the heating of water for any medical needs that might arise, there was very little for Susannah to do but wait and wonder, and recall with vivid clarity the expression on Peter’s face when he’d first learned that Fairacres was ablaze.

  “You’ve worked so hard, Susannah,” Jane observed, jerked from her own reverie by the sound of the kitchen clock tinnily chiming two. “Perhaps you should lie down. We will wake you when the men return,” she added quickly, anticipating the girl’s ob-jection, even if she could not fully comprehend its reasons.

  Susannah shook her head emphatically. “No, I couldn’t. Please don’t ask me!”

  Jane did not press her, and the ladies lapsed once more into silence.

  The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east when the sounds of masculine voices outside, followed by the stamp of footsteps on the stoop, signalled the return of the firefighting brigade. A moment later the door burst open and the kitchen was invaded by men: dirty, sweaty, exhausted men who reeked of smoke.