Lydia Sutton, Viscountess of Marston, future Countess of Longhampton, was doing her duty, as she always had.
Then one night a rainstorm blew up and sat upon the lodge for three interminable days. The summer was waning, and it was already edging towards fall up here in the north. It was probably time to think about retreating to Marston; it was nearly time for the harvest, and Lydia thought Sutton would want to be there to oversee the labor. But he had been putting it off, saying that he wanted a few more days of peace and quiet, without anyone pulling at his coat asking for advice or a hand-out. Lydia had never thought of being a landowner quite like that: the people at Waltham were her father’s people, and by extension they had been hers. But Frederick, as she was requested to call her husband in private only, did not see his responsibilities in quite the same light.
“Can’t fend for themselves, always looking for a pat on the head like a child, thick as thieves when you do something they don’t like but always the cap out when they make a mistake and haven’t anything put by for a rainy day,” that was how he summed up his tenants over a glass of wine. They had just feasted on roast pheasant, which Frederick had proclaimed the finest bird he’d ever killed, and a bounty of summer vegetables from the kitchen garden, and Lydia was thinking of having a few more tomatoes.
But Frederick saw her eyeing the platter and called the footman to clear the table. “Feeling peckish, wife? I fear you are growing fat. You have done nothing this entire summer but sit in that rocking-chair and eat like a glutton at the table.”
Lydia cocked her head. She was not growing fat; in fact she had lost a little weight, Mary had remarked, shaking her head — they were both waiting anxiously for her to increase, but the opposite seemed to be happening. “I am sorry you think so, my lord. My maid took this dress in a little as it had grown loose; perhaps she made it too tight.”
Frederick grunted. “Call me by name, girl, we’re alone.” He nodded at the footman. “He doesn’t count.”
She colored; she knew. It was only that calling him Frederick seemed an alien thing; perhaps once, when he had still been courting her sweetly, she might have felt pleasure in calling him so familiarly. But things had changed; she was frightened of him now. “I forget. I am sorry. Forgive me please, Frederick.”
He nodded and took a clumsy gulp of wine. He grew less elegant with drink. “Just the same, you eat too much. You’ll embarrass me in Town. They’ll want to know why I wed such a glutton.” He grinned to inform her that he was joking, showing red-tinted teeth.
She smiled weakly. “I suppose I am just weak-willed when it comes to such fine, sweet tomatoes. Your gardens here are superb.” They were not; the tomatoes were no more than acceptable. The sandy soil around the lodge grew its fruits and vegetables begrudgingly, and with much coaxing and assistance from the housekeeper’s sturdy young sons.
“It is a shame you are so fond of it here, for we were leaving,” Frederick announced. He leaned back his chair on two legs and balanced that way, a knee against the table to hold him steady. Lydia wished he would fall over and crack his head. “Back to Marston for the harvest, and the hunting. I’ve invited a few of the fellows from up here — and the Archwoods, of course, to repay them for their splendid hospitality to us.” He grinned at her again, waiting to see her reaction.
But Lydia was a well-trained daughter of Quality, and she might as well have had no emotions at all. “I look forward to seeing our home,” she said tonelessly. “And the Archwoods, of course. Will I have much time to meet with the staff and prepare for their arrival?”
“Oh certainly.” The chair wavered for a moment; his smile flickered while he fought to maintain his balance. Drunk, she thought. Fall over and crack your head. “You will not want for help at Marston. And I shall be busy in the stables, so you shall be needed to oversee the house.”
The stables! Did it never end? Not that she would grieve for the lack of his company. “Do you have many horses, Frederick?” she asked cooly, taking a sip of her wine. The bold drink gave a fortifying pulse of energy to her bones; she felt better with its strength. If she was not careful, she would end up with a bottle of some “medicine” under every cushion.
“Nearly fifty,” he replied. “Though my favorite is only newly arrived, and I have yet to see him. His speed is already all that my trainer can talk about.”
“How exciting.” She wished the cook would bring out the pudding. It would give him something to do besides boast to her.
“Exciting! Exciting will be you on my arm at Epsom when this splendid beast wins the Derby next spring! You’ll give him a kiss for good luck, of course. Right on his shiny red coat.”
“Of course,” she agreed automatically. She ought to be able to kiss a horse, she supposed. A red horse, she thought, her mind turning over the details. A red horse that would win the Derby. There were a lot of chestnut horses, of course. Perfectly common thing. Still, she remembered Peregrin’s fear; his certainty that Sutton was trying to ruin him. “What is his name?” she asked carelessly.
Frederick, curiously enough, was quiet for a moment, his face folding into reflection, and she gripped her wine glass a little more tightly. Was he simply so callous he hadn’t bothered to name the horse, or enquire of its name? Or was he trying to think of a new one, for a horse she had already seen and knew? She hoped it was the first. She could easily believe it was the first. If he had found some way to wrest that horse, Peregrin’s hope, from his possession…
“Foxfire,” he said finally, and finished his wine. His chair legs hit the floor with a thump and he faced her with a vulpine smile. “The horse’s name is Foxfire.”
She nodded slowly, managing a smile, but her thoughts were full of sorrow. He had taken Reynard, then. She could only hope he had paid Peregrin a pretty penny. “That’s a nice name. Was he terribly expensive? I hear horses are, good horses, anyway.”
“Not at all.” Frederick looked around for a footman, saw they were alone, and poured himself another glass of the illicit French wine. “I really think I got the better end of the bargain.”
Lydia licked her lips. There was nothing she could do now. She’d know when she the horse again — he had that peculiar narrow stripe that ran jaggedly down his narrow face. She’d know if it was Reynard. Perhaps it wasn’t. But another look at the triumphant smirk on her husband’s face told her the truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
He missed Lydia with a steady, ceaseless ache in his chest.
He missed Reynard with a sense of desperation.
He missed Grainne and William with a sense of hopeless loss.
It was all the same.
All the good things that had passed from his life in the past few months: they swam up in front of his vision when he closed his eyes. Gone was the comforting darkness of his own eyelids; gone was the comforting vision of a life beyond the one he had been borne to. All he had left now were the ghosts of what might have been, the ridiculous dreams that had kept him alive through so many lean years and so many sleepless nights, while his cousins plotted his downfall and somewhere beyond the barren bedchamber where he lay, Frederick Sutton smirked and waited.
Frederick had always had it in for him. Even without Jeremy’s influence, they were born enemies: Peregrin had outridden everyone at school and though he did not flaunt his talent, Sutton had resented him for it every day of their time there. No one else had seemed to bear Peregrin any ill-will for his mastery of equestrian skills. Certainly William had not taken issue with him; instead he clapped his back after winning an impromptu point-to-point and then made sure the riding master only mounted him on the toughest, most recalcitrant of horses. It was a little bit of a trick, sure, but in the end it only benefited Peregrin: ride easy horses and you learn to ride easy horses, ride tough horses and you learn to ride anything.
Even the most spirited, dangerous of horses, as Reynard had been promising to be, before he was lost. Whatever had happened to Reynard, he could only hope and
pray that the colt ended up in the hands of a person who could carefully bring the wild youngster along, instead of beating him and breaking his spirit.
Peregrin rolled restlessly in bed, pushing the sweaty linen away from his body, as he remembered that dreadful morning. It was a few days after the wedding, after Lydia had gazed at him with sorrowful eyes, their sparkling blue veiled with unshed tears. After William had stopped speaking to him anymore than was absolutely necessary, his disgust in Peregrin’s failure to step in and wed Lydia himself evident in his every gesture and every glance. After Grainne had suggested to him gently, while they rode side-by-side down the very park lane where Tilly had bolted and Lydia had tumbled into his arms, that he should accept the stewardship of their estate at Longcastle, and quickly.
He had ridden up to fetch in Reynard alone, although he knew it might not be easy to bring the wild colt in. He was relying on the youngster’s natural instinct to be close to another horse overwhelming his deep distrust of humans. The farthest paddocks were the highest-fenced, a detail overseen by William and Grainne’s good horse sense; he would have had to have been a true freak in order to have leapt out of the field in search of companionship or oats. Of all his concerns over retrieving Reynard, and he had more than a few, not finding the horse where he had been left had simply never occurred to him.
But the paddock had been so obviously empty, it had taken only a moment’s glance to chill his very blood.
With lifeless hands he pushed at the gate and urged his hunter through it. He turned the horse and pushed the gate closed again, as if the empty square of grass and stream and single, shady elm tree could have possibly somehow hidden a tall chestnut horse. They rode the fenceline dutifully, looking for hoofprints, for torn and muddied ground, for broken fence-boards, for any sign that the horse had escaped of his own accord. But there was none. He reined back the bay hunter under the elm tree, in the very center of the little field, and looked all around him. The quiet fences looked back at him. The breeze sighed in the elm’s top-most branches. A rabbit shied from the tall grass and went bounding towards the fence line. A curlew cried.
But there was no sign of a horse.
Peregrin cursed and flung himself out of the bed, lighting a candle with trembling fingers. He wanted a drink — a drink or three that would put him to sleep — and there was no one in the overseer’s cottage to know. Feet cold on the uncovered floor, he flung open his bedchamber door and made his way down the hall to the little office where he kept a decanter of brandy, the very thing to calm him on these tempestuous nights.
Longcastle was very fine, he thought a little while later, studying the map that lay under glass, covering the broad desk from which he ran his little domain. The cut glass of his tumbler was cool against his lips, the brandy hot on his tongue and throat. It was calming him already. He traced his fingers along the creeks that cut through Longcastle’s rolling downs, the lowlands where the cattle grazed and the highlands where he put their few horses. Hunters and work-horses, heavy and hard-working, not the thin-legged, lightning-fast blood-horses who so captivated him. He had no racehorses here to occupy his mind; all of William’s horses were at Tivington, within a few days’ slow journey to the gallops at Epsom. And he had no racehorses of his own at all. Reynard had been his only hope. Reynard was gone.
The empty paddock had yawned around him, mocking him with its blowing ripples of green grass, the blades bowing beneath the west wind. A storm blowing in, the perfect weather breaking, the warm summer of southern England giving way to the first autumnal gale. And he about to be exiled, to an empty bed and an empty stable somewhere in the midlands, while the woman he should have wed was in bed with another, and his one hope, his one horse, disappeared utterly.
Glass clinked upon glass, the wind rattled at the windowpane; he got up to look out. On his hilltop along the long park drive from the high-road to the estate, he could look upon the meadows and planted fields with a god’s own view. It was all his, or all in his keeping.
It would never be his. He would never be a property-owner, like William. Or like his cousin. Or like Sutton.
Sutton had his horse, he was certain of it. There had never been a moment’s doubt. As he had slid down from his hunter, the reins dropping from his numb fingers, and sat down in the deep grass, growing to seed without a horse to graze it down, he had known. The hunter, William’s horse, had dipped his head to graze, happy to be given his freedom in a meadow of such fertility. Peregrin allowed the lapse in good behavior — what difference did it make at such a time? Nothing could matter. Nothing was left. Sutton had taken his love and on the way, for good measure, he had taken his horse. His future. His hopes.
Such fine brandy — William should not have left such good brandy in the reach of his staff. Did he think of Peregrin as his staff now — had he ceased to be his closest friend? The terse send-off, the nod of his head, “I’m glad you are taking my advice at last.” The limpness of the hand-shake as he departed. Grainne’s white face, downturned — she had not wanted him to go, but she could think of no reason for him to stay. His last love, lost. Not even Grainne would meet his eye.
Who knew a man could fail his friends by acting honorably? He had done the right thing — he had left Lydia to act as she desired, to marry the man she had told him she was going to marry, that her parents had told her to marry. She had behaved only according to her station, and he had done the same — he had stepped aside and let the better man take the prize.
No — damn him, not the better man. The richer man.
“That’s better by Society’s view,” he said aloud, his voice gravelly, and he knew there’d be no sleep for him that night. Once you speak, once you give your tongue the free rein to form words, you have moved irrevocably from the realm of the sleepers to the world of the wakers. “What’s another sleepless night?” he asked the rattling window-pane, the high clouds streaming across the starlit sky. In the morning it would rain, a cold, bone-chilling autumn rain, a rain that knew the harvest was in and that it could act as it pleased, without incurring the wrath of a people dependent on fine fall days. “What’s another sleepless night? I will do some work. I will be a good little worker, earn my wages.”
He turned to his desk and lit another candle, brightening the room by another half, watching the guttering shadows dance and leap around the little office. Shelves full of books and journals and the records of two hundred other harvests lined two walls, and a few chairs for visiting farmers and merchants sat on either side of the door. His desk was the most impressive thing in the whole room, a big broad monstrosity as large as a tack-room table, with plenty of drawers on either side for all of his records and ledgers, his notes on seeds and yields and on rents and debts.
It was a tremendously wealthy estate, Longcastle, in part because most of its land was given over to planting. Tivington was a playplace, where the Archwoods had fooled around with horse-breeding and turned parks over to hunting; but Longcastle was the breadbasket of the Archwood domain, where the tenants toiled behind plows across hundreds of acres of Archwood land, bringing up Archwood barley, Archwood wheat, even Archwood hops. There was very little park-land, little that was not given over to timber, that is. There were no garden parties here, or a sweeping lawn with a haha to keep nature at bay, nor fountains hidden in ornamental mazes. Longcastle was a hardy and hard-working place. Its lack of softness and pleasure suited Peregrin’s mood perversely, reminding him, every day as he sat at his desk or rode out to survey the fields, that he was no longer living a life of leisure with the beau monde, but living a life of service. It must have delighted his cousin, and Sutton, to know as well. If they knew at all.
He pulled the ledger on the edge of the desk closer and opened it, squinting at the numbers and letters as they danced in the candlelight. It was winter provisions for the house, in case anyone should be so foolhardy as to pay this cheerless place a visit: spices for the preserving, casks for the brewing, churns for the butter. The
staff at the house were self-sufficient; nearly everything consumed at Longcastle was made at Longcastle. If not on the estate, then in the village.
“When will the lord and lady be comin’ to visit?” the villagers had asked him when he arrived, displacing an elderly gentleman who had been asking the Archwoods to pension him off for years. And he had shrugged and said that he did not know their plans; that he did not presume to ask. He, who had been a part of their family for nearly two years, who had been William’s closest friend since they were children.
The village wanted the Archwoods, not an overseer; they wanted the business that a fully opened big house would provide. The girls of the village were longing to show off the fancy-work they had been practicing, hoping they could sew pretty gloves and handkerchiefs and bonnets for the ladies who would visit. The lads were all sitting around empty workshops, wishing for a full house with a voracious appetite for harnesses, kitchen goods, furniture. He had to promise, time and time again, to write an invitation, encouraging the Archwoods to come and visit their own home. But he did not write it. He didn’t want them.
The Honorable Nobody (Heroines on Horseback Book 2) Page 21
