by Anne Gracie
“I hope so, Miss Maddy. I’m sick to death of milking cows. And you’d make some gentleman a lovely wife, I reckon.”
“As long as they don’t find out I haven’t a bean to my name.” Maddy laughed. “Besides, I’m not convinced a husband is worth the trouble.”
The laughter died from Lizzie’s face. “You’re right there.”
Maddy shot her a guilty look. “Oh, Lizzie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” She’d spoken without thought. Lizzie had been married just four months when her husband went to town with all their savings and never came back.
Lizzie wrapped a scarf around her head and said in a hard voice, “Don’t mind me; you’re right. A pig in a poke, that’s what marriage is. You never know what you got till it’s too late. Trouble is what men are, all right, but rich trouble, well, that’s easier to live with.”
Maddy nodded in perfunctory agreement. She didn’t agree. Rich trouble was the very worst sort. And avoiding it was why Maddy was here, living in a run-down cottage. But Lizzie didn’t know that.
Nobody did. Maddy didn’t dare tell a soul.
“I’m off,” Lizzie said. “That storm’ll be here in a few minutes. Hope I make it home without getting drownded. Thanks again, Miss Maddy. Dunno what I would’a done without you and your lessons. Uncle Bill is grateful an’ all.” She winked. “I’m the worst dairymaid he’s ever had, but you can’t sack family, can you? He reckons if you can teach me enough to get me off his hands, he’ll keep you in milk and butter and cream and cheese for the rest of your life.”
Maddy laughed. “I might just hold him to that. And don’t call me Miss M—” But Lizzie was already running along the lane.
Maddy shook her head. She’d lost track of the number of times she’d told Lizzie to call her Maddy, but Lizzie never would, even though they were the same age, twenty-two.
You’re a lady born, and I’m just an ignorant farm girl. Besides, if I’m going to be a lady’s maid, I’d best get in the habit of showin’ respect, Lizzie would say.
Maddy shivered. The storm was closing in fast and she had seedlings to save.
In the last few days, the weather had suddenly turned freezing. Spring buds had frozen on the branch, early daffodils had turned to ice, and worst of all, the bitter frosts had killed off more than a third of her tender spring greens.
She fetched some sacking from beside the woodpile at the back door and began covering her precious seedlings, laying it over a trellis of support sticks, protecting the tender shoots beneath.
She’d planted her first seeds at the age of nine. It was a delightful novelty then, but those lettuces, nourished to maturity and presented with pride to her grandmother, taught her enough to make the difference between starvation and survival.
Maddy didn’t dream about vegetables then. It was all handsome princes and balls and pretty dresses and love . . .
Slowly the handsome princes of her dreams had become merely handsome gentlemen, and balls, well, they were impossible, too, for even if some unknown person sent her an invitation, she didn’t have a pretty dress and there was no money for anything new.
These days she would settle for a decent man. A farmer or a tradesman, it didn’t matter, as long as she could like and respect him, and he respect her. She wasn’t a child any longer and life was not the stuff of dreams, but a constant battle.
She straightened, arching her back as she checked the protection over the tender plants. The seedlings would survive. They had to. Her little family depended on it. They would survive, too. It was just a matter of working hard and being frugal.
And luck. She looked at the dark, seething clouds.
The thunder of hooves told her the horseman was right outside her cottage. He was indeed a gentleman. Everything about him declared it, from his magnificent thoroughbred to his elegant, many-caped buff greatcoat, high boots, and stylish beaver hat. He rode easily, as if born to a horse.
Who was he visiting? Sir Jasper Brownrigg, who owned Whitethorn Manor, had died three months ago, and apart from the vicar, the only other gentlemen in the district was the squire, and he was more gentlemanlike than gentleman born—a fine distinction, but one she knew her father would have insisted on. A frightful snob, her late papa.
And look where your airs and graces have led us, Papa, she mused bitterly. To a situation where a few old sacks, some seedlings, and a milkmaid with ambition are all that stand between your children and hunger.
And between Maddy and Fyfield Place.
The horse took a wide ditch in its stride, then headed for the long, low, drystone wall. The wall stretched for miles, rising and falling with the rise and dip of the land, an unbroken gray border snaking across the landscape.
The estate maintenance had grown slack since Sir Jasper Brownrigg had grown old and infirm, and stones had been knocked off and not replaced. The horseman veered slightly, angling his horse toward a section of the wall where some of the coping stones had been knocked off. At first glance, it looked like the perfect place to jump, but—
“No, not there!” she shouted. “The boys’ mud slide—”
Her words were blown away by the wind.
Under her horrified gaze, the horse hit the slick surface of the mud slide just as its powerful hindquarters muscles bunched to make the leap over the wall.
It skidded. Its hooves scrabbled frantically for purchase, and failed. The horse fell. Its rider flew through the air and smashed into the wall.
In the sudden shocked silence that followed, the world seemed to stand still. Then the horse scrambled to its feet, snorted, shook itself, and trotted away, seemingly unhurt.
The dark huddle at the foot of the wall didn’t move.
Maddy was off and running before she knew it, wrenching open the stiff old gate with the ease of urgency.
The stranger lay in the mud, half curled against the hard stone surface of the wall. His head was at an awkward angle. So was one leg. He lay ominously still.
Maddy slipped two fingers inside the collar of his coat, between the fine fabric of his shirt and his warm skin. She closed her eyes, concentrating every sense on the tip of those two fingers.
Nothing. No beat, no movement.
She recalled her flippant comment about the horseman of the apocalypse.
No! He couldn’t be dead. Please God.
She smoothed the tumbled dark hair back from his alabaster pale forehead, and . . . felt nothing.
Of course! The intense, damp cold had driven all feeling out of her fingers. She rubbed her frozen fingers until they burned, then slipped them back inside his shirt, praying for a pulse.
And breathed again.
Blood gushed from his head, spilling over her fingers in a warm sticky flow. She would not watch another person die . . .
“You’re not going to die,” Maddy told the man fiercely. “Do you hear me? I won’t have it!”
He pushed at her hands, moving his head and legs restlessly. It was a good sign. He couldn’t have moved like that with a broken spine.
She folded her apron into a pad, clean side out, slipped it under his head, and used the apron strings to tie it on. She checked his body for injuries and found a muddy imprint of a horseshoe on the glossy surface of his high black boots: the horse had trodden on his ankle.
Something stung her cheek. Sleet. “We need to get you indoors,” Maddy told him, as if he could hear. But how?
She hooked her arms under the man’s armpits. “One, two, three.” She heaved.
With all that mud, he should have slipped along nicely, but he was a big man, lean but tall, and heavier than she’d expected. And his clothing was soaked and getting heavier by the minute. After several minutes of heaving, she’d moved him a few inches at most. “It’s hopeless,” she told him. “You’re too heavy.
“The wheelbarrow,” she said on a sudden inspiration and ran to fetch it. It was old, heavy, with a drunken front wheel, but it worked and that was all that mattered.
How to
get him into it? She tried lifting him, but no matter how she tried—shoulders first, legs first, heaving and struggling—he was simply too heavy.
“Blast!” she said as her last attempt left them both in the mud with the wheelbarrow tipped over. Icy needles stung her skin. An idea formed. She pushed him into the wheelbarrow, side down in the mud, fetched some rope, and lashed his comatose body to the barrow.
Using the prop pole from the clothesline and a large rock, she levered the barrow upward, shoving with all her might. With a lurch, the barrow thumped upright, the man safely aboard.
Her muscles were burning by the time she wheeled him through the cottage doorway, barrow and all. She was beyond worrying about clean floors and tracking mud. The cottage was tiny; the ground floor just one big room, with a fireplace and table, and in the corner, a large bed built into an alcove, built at some time in the past for an invalid grandmother. It was Maddy’s bed now, and her first instinct was to tip the man straight onto it. But he was sopping wet, bleeding, and covered in mud.
She pulled back the bedclothes and lined the nearest half of the bed with an old oilskin cloak. It would protect her bedding.
She wheeled him closer to the bed, untied him, linked her arms under his armpits, and heaved. The barrow tipped and she ended up sprawled on the bed in a flurry of mud and wet limbs, the stranger’s head cradled against her breast.
“There, safe now out of the rain, at least,” she murmured, smoothing back the thick, dark hair from his alabaster forehead. As still and beautiful as a statue of an archangel, she could barely tell he was breathing. Alive but cold, too cold.
“We’ll soon warm you up,” she told him. She wriggled out from beneath him and lowered his head gently. She piled fuel on the fire, pushed the kettle over the flames, and set bricks to heat. With a clean cloth and some hot water, she wiped his face clean. And stared.
Beneath the spattering of mud and blood, his face was elegant. Austere. A hard-edged, wholly masculine beauty. Dark lashes fanned over the pale skin. His mouth had been chiseled by a master, his chin firm and squared and dark with unshaven bristles.
She shouldn’t be staring. His beauty would be no use to anyone if he died, she reminded herself.
“Now to get those sopping clothes off you.”
She pulled off his fine leather gloves. His hands were long fingered and elegant, the nails clean and well cared for. Definitely the hands of a gentleman, she thought with a rueful glance at her own work-roughened paws.
She stripped off his waistcoat, then his shirt and undershirt. There were fresh bruises on his torso, but nothing serious.
Her mouth dried as she reached for a towel to dry him. The male form had few mysteries for her, not since Papa’s accident and being left with two small boys to bathe and dress, but this was different. Very different.
Papa had been old and his flesh was flaccid and loose, his muscles withered, and the boys were like little skinned rabbits wriggling in the bath, skinny but still soft with the bloom of childhood.
This was a man, young and strong and in his prime.
Papa had smelled of sour old-man flesh, talcum powder, and the pungent ointment she used to rub into his back and legs for the pain. The boys smelled of . . . little boys and soap. The man in her bed smelled faintly of shaving soap and cologne water, and horse, and wet wool and . . . something else. She breathed it in but could not identify it—some kind of dark, musky man-smell. It should have repelled her. Instead she found it . . . enticing.
She breathed him in again as she dried his broad chest and firm-skinned, hard-muscled body, rubbing briskly with a rough-textured towel to get his blood moving. The scent of him settled deep in her awareness. She pulled a blanket over and tucked it around him.
Now for the breeches and boots.
The boots were the biggest problem. If his leg or ankle was broken, tugging the boot off could worsen the injury immeasurably.
They’d cut Papa’s boots off with a razor. She hadn’t thought twice about it then. These days she was much more sharply aware of the cost of things, and these boots were very beautiful and very expensive.
“But it has to be done,” she told him firmly as she fetched Papa’s razor. She was glad she’d brought it with them. It was sharper than any knife.
Frowning in concentration, she cut the boot from him, eased it carefully off, and peeled away his woolen stocking. The ankle was swollen and already coloring up. She couldn’t tell if it was broken or not. With that head wound, she’d have to fetch the doctor to him anyway. She hoped to God he had money to pay, for she certainly didn’t.
“Now for those breeches,” she told him. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t choose this moment to wake up.” She glanced at his still face. Not so much of a flicker?
She tried to be brisk and matter-of-fact as she undid the buttons that closed the fall of his breeches. She’d scrubbed the boys in the bath, so a full-grown naked male would not be very much different, surely.
Besides, though she wouldn’t admit it to a living soul, she was curious to see what a man, a young man in his prime, really looked like.
That was the French side of her, she knew; the side of her that always got her into trouble. Papa and his side of the family were so much more modest and reserved than Mama and Grand-mère had ever been. Almost puritanical.
No matter how sick Papa got, he’d insisted his valet, Bates, performed the more intimate tasks. Poor Bates. He’d loathed the task, but Papa was not one to be gainsaid. No matter how feeble his body grew, his will remained strong.
The buckskin was cold and clammy and clung tightly to the stranger’s body as she pulled the breeches down over his flat belly, taking with them the cotton drawers he wore underneath, following the line of dark hair that arrowed to his groin.
It was a struggle, but once past his hips, she was able to drag them all the way down. She dropped them on the floor, picked up the towel, and . . . stared.
She swallowed. He was a stranger. She ought to look away, to respect the poor man’s privacy while he was insensible and helpless.
She couldn’t. Her first truly naked man.
What a curious thing his manhood was, lying there in its nest of dark curls, a dark pinkish color, and looking quite soft. Not at all living up to the descriptions she’d heard. Smaller than she expected, too. Men always exaggerated.
She glanced at his face and with a shock realized that his eyes were open and he was watching her. Watching her watching hi—
“You’re awake!” she exclaimed, hastily tossing the towel over him. “How do you feel?” Her cheeks warmed, but she wasn’t going to apologize. She’d had to strip his wet clothes off for his own good.
For a moment, he didn’t respond. His eyes didn’t waver. They were very blue. She didn’t think she’d ever seen such blue eyes.
“You had a fall and hurt your head. Can you speak?”
He tried to say something, tried to sit up, but before she could reach to help him, he fell back with a moan against the makeshift pillow and his eyes closed again.
“Don’t fall asleep. Who are you?” She shook him by the arm. He didn’t respond.
He was alive, at least, and able to move. That was something.
She swiftly dried the rest of his body, trying not to think of how he’d caught her staring at his privates. She was embarrassed, yes, but not ashamed, she told herself. He was injured, she was supposed to look.
Yes, to make sure he hadn’t broken his thing, a little voice inside her commented. She ignored it. She finished drying him, and not knowing what else to do about his ankle, straightened it and bound it lightly with strips of clean cloth. Then she carefully rolled him over onto the clean, dry half of the bed and tucked the bedclothes around him.
Using tongs, she pulled the hot bricks from the fire, wrapped them well, and placed them close against his body. It was important to keep his internal organs warm, and the bricks would stop him rolling out of bed.
She chec
ked the apron still tied around his head wound. There was no sign of fresh blood.
Despite her proximity to the fire, she was shivering. She should change before tending to his head wound, otherwise she’d end up with a chill.
She glanced at her unconscious guest. There was no place to be private here. She should take her clothes upstairs and change, but it was freezing up there. The children dressed and undressed in front of the fire all the time and only went up to bed when she’d warmed their beds well with hot bricks.
She hesitated. His breathing was steady, his eyes didn’t so much as flicker. She’d risk it.
Keeping her back to him as a token of modesty, she stripped her wet clothes off, toweled her chilly flesh dry, and dressed quickly in fresh, clean clothes.
As she turned, the stranger’s eyes closed. An involuntary movement or had he been watching her? It was impossible to tell. Her own fault if he had. She could have changed upstairs.
Besides, she’d watched him, hadn’t she? Sauce for the gander, she told herself. Still, her cheeks burned and she hoped she’d been mistaken.
Now for the head wound. “This isn’t going to be easy,” she told him. “It’s in an awkward position.”
She collected everything she thought she might need and arranged it on the bed. Then she climbed into the bed, dragged him into a sitting position, and slid in behind him. Supporting him between her knees, she let him sag sideways against her, until his cheek rested against her breasts.
“Immodest, I know,” she murmured as she reached for the pot of honey, “but you don’t know and I won’t tell, and besides, it’s the only way to tend to this nasty wound of yours.”
His hair was clogged with mud and blood. She washed the worst of it off, then carefully cut away all the hair around the wound. It looked nasty and jagged and blood still oozed from it but she didn’t think it needed stitches. Thank God, she hated seeing flesh pierced with a needle, let alone doing it herself.
She washed the wound well with hot salt water—as hot as she dared—doing her best to make sure nothing remained in the wound to cause it to fester.
