And then he was filling the doorway and ducking his head to come into the room, and striding round the table to shake Grandfather’s hand.
‘I hope you don’t regard my arrival as unpardonably early,’ he said. ‘I wanted to catch Miss Hutton before she set out walking. The weather is fine at the moment, but—’
‘No need to use the weather as an excuse,’ Grandfather interrupted, sounding highly amused. ‘It is clear you are eager to spend as much time as you can with my granddaughter.’
‘Indeed, sir, you have found me out.’
When, she wondered, would either of them acknowledge that she was in the room, listening to every word?
‘I have managed to hire a better rig than the one the landlord of the Three Tuns provided last time I came out here,’ Captain Bretherton informed Grandfather. ‘It has a hood which I can draw up should it come on to rain.’
‘Another two-seater, though?’
Captain Bretherton shifted his weight. ‘My man will stand up behind. I can assure you, your granddaughter will not be entirely unchaperoned.’
‘A bit late for sticking to decorum after what the pair of you got up to in Bath.’
‘I...yes, sir, but you see—’
Grandfather slapped the palm of his hand on the table and laughed. ‘Get along with you. The pair of you,’ he said, turning his head in Lizzie’s direction. ‘Go and put on your best bonnet so you don’t keep your ardent young Captain waiting one minute longer than he has to. Don’t want to see him trying to steal a kiss over the breakfast table, what?’
As if he would do anything of the sort. But Lizzie got to her feet and hurried from the room, relieved to escape her grandfather when he was in such a jocular mood. It wasn’t like him. Not at all. She was inured to the way he barked orders at her and snapped when he was in pain because of his various ailments. It all felt off kilter, somehow. As if the world had shifted so that the floor which used to be perfectly even was now tilted to one side, so that she was having to feel her way along.
Even Captain Bretherton looked different this morning, somehow. Perhaps it was because she now knew he had a title and an estate—even if it was on the verge of ruin by the sound of it. Anyway, whatever it was, he seemed far more unreachable. She could believe that a half-pay officer recovering from a long-standing illness might seek out her company. Even, almost, that he’d want to marry her.
But an earl? She shook her head. He could marry just about anyone.
So what was he doing, following her down to Dorset, after knowing her for only a few days?
It didn’t make sense.
Chapter Thirteen
‘So...’ he said, after they’d been driving along for some time in excruciating silence. For some reason, Miss Hutton looked distinctly uncomfortable this morning. If only he could think of something to say, or do, that would put her at ease.
He cleared his throat. ‘You, ah...your interests are...that is, do you enjoy reading to Lady Buntingford? I am sorry...’ He shot her a sideways glance. ‘You can probably tell I am not used to attempting to court a female. When we were just talking, like...friends, it seemed much easier. Now that we both know marriage is on the horizon, somewhere, ah, possibly...’
She took a deep breath. ‘It isn’t just that. Not on my part, anyway.’
‘Oh? What is it then?’
‘Well, it is just that, you are going to think this awfully silly of me, but when I thought you were just a...a...half-pay officer, I found it far easier to...to just talk to you like a friend, as you put it. But now, I have learned that you are an earl.’
‘I am still the same man.’
‘Yes, but an earl. You could marry anyone. So I don’t quite see...’
‘I could not marry anyone. As I told your grandfather,’ he said, glad that he’d already stuck as near to the truth as possible, for if he’d started weaving too many stories he was bound to trip over one of them eventually, ‘before I met you I never thought I’d get married at all.’
‘But...’ She wrinkled up her nose in the most endearing fashion. ‘Earls need heirs, don’t they? And Lady Buntingford used to say that, whenever she was teaching me about how to behave if ever I met anyone of rank, that you would expect a certain standard...’
The way her shoulders drooped showed that she didn’t believe she met that standard. What was wrong with all the people around her, that all they’d done, all her life, was make her feel as though she didn’t measure up?
‘I have heirs,’ he said, rather more shortly than he’d intended. ‘A pair of cousins who grew up expecting to inherit my title and estates.’
‘But how could they? I mean...’ She wrinkled her nose in that endearingly confused way again.
‘Why do you think my uncle sent me away to sea as soon as he could persuade the other trustees it was the best course? It was because,’ he answered before Lizzie could even draw breath to make a conjecture, ‘he knew he wouldn’t get away with actually killing me.’
Miss Hutton gasped.
‘I became the Earl of Inverseigg at the tender age of eight, you see, at which time my uncle became my guardian and chief trustee. He showed his true colours from the start. I have never met a more mean-spirited bully anywhere else in the world. I can’t tell you how happy I was when some of my mother’s family put up some money to send me to school. Those few terms at Eton College were among the happiest of my life. But I am convinced that Uncle Edgar spent that time planning the best way to dispose of me,’ Harry continued by way of explanation. ‘To make sure he, and then his own sons, inherited he exposed me to the harshest environment he could think of. If I did not die in action, he hoped I’d be carried off by some tropical disease.’
She reached over and placed one gloved hand on his sleeve. ‘It must have been horrid for you. But I still don’t see why it meant you did not wish to marry.’
‘My father left the estates teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. He was a gambler.’
‘Which explains,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘your aversion to cards.’
He’d expected her to draw the conclusion about why he hadn’t been thinking of taking a wife. But Miss Hutton never acted the way he expected most women would.
‘Indeed. But anyway, because I had to live on my pay, it would not have been fair to leave a wife to struggle alone while I was away at sea.’
She frowned. ‘So, what changed?’
Typical of her not to think that she was what had changed his mind. How he wished he could tell her the truth. As it was, he gritted his teeth to maintain the fiction he’d already told her grandfather. It helped to keep his eyes fixed firmly between the horses’ ears as though he needed to study the road and concentrate on handling the reins.
‘I will soon be in a position to lift the mortgages with which my property is encumbered. Ironically, my uncle’s ambition for his own sons meant that he worked hard to bring the estates into good working order. I could, very soon, return with a bride on my arm and live there in comfort instead of enduring the privations of life at sea.’
It was true. Though it had not been his intention to do any such thing. Although he could see Miss Hutton at Inverseigg. She would fit right in with the rugged scenery. Nor would the rather Spartan grandeur of the Hall daunt her. She’d settle right in as though she was born to rule over it all.
‘But,’ Miss Hutton said, ‘why hide the fact that you are an earl? Most men brag about their rank. And insist that everyone acknowledges it.’
‘I always felt the title was a rather hollow one.’ He frowned. That did not seem an adequate explanation, somehow. ‘And as a boy, it had brought me nothing but danger and deprivation. If I had been just... I don’t know, a crofter’s son, perhaps, nobody would have tried to steal my inheritance, would they? And then again, I derived a good deal of satisfaction from rising through the ranks on my own
merit, rather than trading on my connections. I suppose,’ he mused, ‘I needed to prove my own worth.’
Even as the words left his mouth, they struck a chord. That was why he’d found imprisonment so hard to bear. He’d been helpless. Reduced to the conditions he’d endured as a boy, at the mercy of pitiless captors.
‘Which you have done, admirably,’ she said, making him wince. ‘I did wonder if...the way Grandfather teased us, had made you a little...’ She wriggled in her seat. ‘I mean, I was ready to sink through the floor when he started laughing at the thought you might have been thinking about attempting to snatch a kiss.’ Her cheeks turned pink as she spoke. ‘As though you would ever consider doing anything so improper,’ she finished, with a funny little laugh which sounded almost bitter.
He kept his gaze fixed firmly on the road ahead at the sting of her words. For he had considered kissing her. If it would have furthered his cause, he wouldn’t have balked at the impropriety of it.
‘Holding hands with you during that concert was not the act of a gentleman,’ he pointed out, ‘was it?’ Dammit, someone ought to warn her about the kind of men who took advantage of lonely, largely unsupervised young females. ‘No wonder he removed you from Bath the moment he found out about it.’ But the Colonel had been too late. The damage was already done. Miss Hutton had looked at him, yesterday, as though she would be all too willing to let him kiss her. In those few encounters they’d had in Bath, he’d clearly made inroads into her heart.
Which was a good thing—for the investigation. It meant that he had a plausible reason to be here. Miss Hutton’s reaction to him would convince everyone he was here because of her, and her alone. The way she’d looked up at him, as he’d escorted her home the day before, must have already convinced the shopkeepers and other villagers they’d passed by that she was receptive to his advances.
Receptive? Her face had positively been glowing. And she’d kept looking into his face with a sort of wonder.
It had given him another sleepless night. It was a deuced uncomfortable feeling, having another person’s happiness in his hands. His only consolation was that she would come to less harm with him than she would have done at the hands of those other three rogues Rawcliffe had considered hiring. He would at least leave her virtue intact. No matter how adoringly she gazed up into his eyes.
‘He’s...very protective...’ she began hesitantly.
‘Protective? He let you go to Lady Buntingford’s yesterday, completely unprotected.’
‘Well, there is really no need for me to have anyone escort me the length of the High Street...’
‘I frightened you,’ he pointed out grimly, ‘by approaching you outside her gate. You cannot deny it. Else why would you have hit me with your umbrella?’
‘You startled me,’ she corrected him gently. ‘Most people know that my eyesight is poor and don’t leap out of the bushes at me the way you did.’
‘What is he doing, forbidding you to wear spectacles which would enable you to see any dangers that might be lurking?’
‘That wasn’t what you said yesterday,’ she said, rather sadly.
‘Eh?’ Oh, yes, he’d said he’d thought it would be a shame to hide those lovely eyes of hers behind lenses which would distort them.
Which reminded him, he was supposed to be making up to her, not criticising the lax way her grandfather let her wander about, unsupervised, leaving her prey to every unscrupulous scoundrel that set his sights on her.
And it could have been a scoundrel like Lieutenant Nateby, if he hadn’t drawn the long straw. He imagined the officer, who derived such pleasure from flogging the men, holding these reins, driving her into Peacombe, and shuddered with revulsion.
It made it very hard to say anything further.
‘Anyway, I have been in the habit of walking up to Lady Buntingford’s ever since I was quite a small girl,’ she said, before he could think of something that Lieutenant Nateby would never have dreamed of saying. ‘Well, a young girl, anyway. I’ve always been tall. Or so it seems,’ she finished on a frown.
‘You have lived here all your life?’ At least it didn’t feel like a gross impertinence to probe into her background now that he’d shared some of his own.
‘Oh, no. We only came to live with Grandfather, Sam and I, after my parents died. I...’ she began shyly, ‘I know what it is like to suddenly feel as though you’ve lost everything. My father, too, left nothing but debts behind, which Grandfather was obliged to settle. He was not being unkind when he warned us we’d all have to get used to living frugally. In fact, I’d say he has been very kind, in his own, rather gruff way. And he would have preferred to put Sam in the army, like himself, only Sam was so keen to go to sea. Because, you see, when we first came here, those days were... Sam and I—well, nobody bothered us at all. And we found the area a marvellous playground. We’d swim and explore all the tunnels along the cliffs, hide pretend contraband in secret caves, row out to sea to dive for kegs and fight mock battles with revenue men on the beaches.’
His stomach lurched to hear she’d played at being a smuggler, since he’d already spent several sleepless hours wondering what he’d do if he were to discover she was in league with the local ones. But he didn’t follow up on his misgivings. His mission demanded he play the part of adoring swain, no matter what she revealed about her past, or her sympathies.
‘What happened,’ he prompted her, ‘to change that?’
She sighed and twisted her hands into the strings of the large and lumpy reticule he was beginning to recognise as her one and only accessory.
‘Lady Buntingford came across me and Sam fighting a mock battle in the churchyard. She went to Grandfather and complained about the way he was bringing me up. Or failing to bring me up. Quite a lecture, she gave him, about letting us run amok among the tombstones, instead of ensuring I learned how to be a proper young lady. And shortly after that, I began my tutoring, at her hands. She tried to teach me to embroider and curtsy, and talk about nothing more controversial than fashion, and insisted I wear dresses all the time, which effectively hampered most of my more adventurous pursuits. Although, without Sam there as my playmate, there didn’t seem much point in them anyway.’
‘He went away at about the same time, did he?’
She nodded. And bit down on her lower lip. ‘I missed him terribly, but at least he wrote to me regularly. So that I knew exactly what...oh,’ she said, half-turning in her seat. ‘You must have gone through similar horrors when you first became a midshipman.’
‘He surely didn’t tell you...’
‘Enough to make my toes curl,’ she said with a shudder.
‘What kind of brother tells his little sister that sort of thing? Surely, he would have wanted to protect you by making light of...’
‘Oh, he did! Truly, he tried to make it all sound as though he was having a grand adventure.’
‘Hmmph.’ That was exactly what he’d done in letters to his school friends.
‘But, I could read between the lines...’
Which was more than they’d done. They’d devoured his tall tales with great enthusiasm. So that when he’d finally met up with Becconsall in Naples, Major Jack Hesketh, as he’d then become, had looked upon him as though he were some sort of hero out of Greek mythology.
As though he really were Atlas.
‘And it made me stop feeling sorry for myself, I can tell you. Whenever I felt like complaining about the treatment Lady Buntingford was meting out, I only had to think of the things Sam was having to do, like...like climbing rigging on a ship that was pitching and tossing in a gale, or keeping watch all night. And that at least she wasn’t making me eat hard tack with weevils in it. But, oh, how I resented poor Lady Buntingford in those days,’ Miss Hutton continued with a shake of her head.
‘And yet you devote your afternoons to reading to her now? That is very ki
nd of you, considering.’
‘Oh, no, not at all.’ She half-turned to him, her brow creased in an earnest expression which made her look totally adorable. ‘It was my fault she had that seizure. At least, I always felt it was, because I was with her when she had it and we had been arguing, as usual...’
‘She had a seizure?’
Miss Hutton bit down on her lower lip. ‘I am not supposed to say. Oh, dear, how upset she will be with me. You see, she doesn’t want anyone to know how very helpless she has become. Well, when you know how proud she was, what a stickler for etiquette and appearance and so forth, it is completely understandable, now that she can barely move. Or speak.’
‘She must be able to speak a bit, surely?’ Or how did she manage to let everyone know she didn’t want visitors?
‘No. That’s the terrible thing. After the second day, all she has ever been able to say is oh, dear. Or sometimes dear, dear.’
His pulse sped up.
‘So how does she make her wishes known? By writing notes?’
‘No, she is unable to write. She is completely paralysed all down her right side and can only move her left hand just a little bit. She lays in bed all day and has to be fed with a spoon.’
‘How long ago did this seizure occur?’
‘About five years ago.’ Her brow furrowed in concentration. ‘Yes, that’s right. Not long after Reverend Cottam came to take up his place as curate of Lesser Peeving.’
So, shortly after Cottam came to the area, he’d stumbled across an elderly lady who was almost completely helpless. He’d have to check with Rawcliffe, but he wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that it was at about that time that the first of the jewel thefts took place. Lady Rawcliffe had told him that Cottam saw to all Lady Buntingford’s correspondence. Aye, he would wager he did! He’d help himself to her headed notepaper and either forge, or have a skilled forger write, a reference in a likeness of her hand, and other ladies who’d been corresponding with her for most of their lives would trust what she had to say. They’d take in a girl upon her recommendation and trust her, never dreaming she’d be busy switching family heirlooms for cheap replicas.
The Captain Claims His Lady Page 10
