Any Groom Will Do

by Charis Michaels

  “I may not obsess over horses the way my parents always have,” she told him, “but I was raised in the shadow of a great stable, and I was taught to ride properly almost before I could walk. Of course we shall ride. As long as my trunk may follow by coach. I do like to have my pretty things, as you may have noticed.”

  “ ’Tis true, my lord,” said Mr. Fisk, fastening the locks on her trunk. “You’ll be lucky to keep up with her. It’s honestly a relief to my nerves that she will be your problem now.”

  Willow had hugged the old man and assured him she would take care, write often, and return when she could. Behind them, Perry sobbed.

  Willow surprised herself by crying a little too, although not until the loyal servants and her friends had gone. Cassin took her into his arms, one of a seemingly endless whirl of embraces and kisses, so many more than she’d ever dreamed that a husband and wife could share. Her parents had always seemed perfectly contented, but she could never remember them actually touching each other. How quickly she could be accustomed to the attention and affection, the intimacy of mornings in bed, of dressing in the same room, of undressing . . .

  And now they would ride together, side by side, traveling together to address a family problem together, like partners in the truest sense of the word.

  They swept from London at dawn, riding full-out, and Willow smiled into the cold April air. Their pace was not conducive to talking, but they shouted to each other about this or that landmark as they passed. The manicured parkland surrounding Hardwick Corridor near Chesterfield. The slow-moving River Aire. The ruins of Roche Abbey.

  Although they could have easily made Yorkshire in two days, they allowed for three, pacing the horses and enjoying the slow discovery of each other for two nights on the road. There were so many stories of Joseph and Stoker and Cassin, each one more fascinating than the next. Such unlikely friends with such a strong bond.

  Their third and final night on the road was spent in the village of Harrogate, just ten miles from Caldera. Cassin had been torn between the desire to press on and the value of appearing relaxed and confident when they arrived to Caldera. If they galloped up, wild-eyed and frantic, the vanquishing effect would be lost on his uncle.

  And so they cantered into Harrogate after sundown and took a room at an inn that delighted Willow, a fairy-tale cottage come to life, aglow in candlelight, with an inn keeper and his wife who went almost prostrate with affection when they recognized Cassin as the earl returning home. He was generous and kind, far more lordly than ever she had seen him, and he swore the inn staff to secrecy about his arrival and ordered a private supper sent to their room. To a man or woman, each reverential staff member whispered, “I’m sorry for your loss, my lord”—clearly still mourning his father, the late earl. Cassin accepted the sentiment somberly, despite the five years since his father had died.

  Once inside the snug little room, Cassin collapsed into a chair while Willow went through their sole bag of hastily packed clothing, unrolling the wrinkled wad of his best suit and her green riding habit. She sent them down to be washed and pressed, along with Cassin’s new boots, which she ordered polished to a high shine.

  “And a bath,” Cassin called to the maid as she hurried away with the armful of clothes.

  “Begging your pardon, my lord?” said the young woman.

  “A bath?” he repeated. “Can I trouble the staff to have one brought up?”

  “With all due respect, my lord,” said the girl, “you might remember that we have a bathing room right here in the inn. Quite popular, actually. Fed by the hot spring, with steaming hot water, if you like. One for the ladies and one for the gentlemen. Just downstairs.”

  Cassin grimaced and dug in his pocket for a handful of gold coins. Shoving out of the chair, he gestured, and the girl carefully held out her hand. With eyes wide, she watched him drop the coins into her palm with a clink, clink, clink.

  “The countess and I should like to avoid public bathing, if possible. I know I can rely on you to locate a stray tub and fill it with kettles of steaming water right here in our room.”

  “Oh,” said the girl, still gaping at the pile of coins in her hand, “of course, your lordship.” She bowed to Willow, “Your ladyship. Right away, my lord,” She closed her fingers around the coins and bustled out.

  “I’ve never had a bath drawn from a hot spring before,” Willow mused out loud, glancing at him. “Was it necessary to burden the staff with the trappings of a private bath?”

  “I’ve never had a bath with my wife before,” Cassin said, dropping back into the chair. “Hot springs abound in this part of Yorkshire; Caldera has more than one—a bathhouse, too, actually. Ancient Romans left aqueducts and bathhouses in their conquering wake some fifteen hundred years ago. Yorkshire is dotted with mossy mosaics and strange-smelling waters, gurgling to the surface. You may enjoy the hot springs to your heart’s content when we reach Caldera, but tonight you shall bathe with me, in the privacy of our very own tub.”

  “Yes, my lord,” she teased, mimicking the reverence shown to him by the maid. There was a mirrored vanity in the corner of the room, and she sat and began to pull the pins from her hair. She glanced at him in the mirror.

  “You’ve picked up on the respect I so rightly deserve, I see,” he mused, cocking a brow. His eyes were half-lidded. “I am the bloody earl, or so I’ve been told, and you’d better be on your best, most deferential behavior, or I shall be forced to lock you in the dungeon of my castle.”

  “Oh yes, my lord,” she teased again. She removed the last of the pins and began to unbraid the long ropes of her hair. “Your castle is so authentic as to have a dungeon, is it?”

  “Of course it has a dungeon. This is where I lock up impertinent wives who resist giving me a bath when I order it.”

  “Oh, and now I’m meant to bathe you?” She laughed. Her hair was free now, hanging long down her back, straighter than usual because of the restricting braids. She brushed it in long, even strokes.

  “On second thought,” he said, watching her as she brushed her hair, “perhaps I will bathe you. And you will call me Brent, instead of Cassin. And I will refer to you only as Countess.”

  Her brush went still, and she turned to face him.

  “Do you really wish me to call you Brent?”

  He shrugged, looking away. “You did it once before, and I almost pounced on you at the garden party.”

  “Brent,” she tested, smiling, and resumed her brushing. “Brent.” She glanced at him. His eyelids had dropped even lower, and he looked at her with an expression that she had come to know in the days since his return. A tremor of excitement thrummed through her.

  “Come here,” he said.

  “I’m brushing my hair.”

  “Come here,” he repeated. “And bring the brush, Countess.”

  She rose before she realized it, responding to the underlying command in tone. He made no effort to move from his slouch when she reached him, and without hesitation, she hitched up her skirt and climbed into his lap.

  He took the brush and reached for her hair, but she was upon him before he managed it, kissing him, yanking his cravat from his neck, and diving her fingers into his collar. He dropped the brush to the floor and caught her up.

  “Brent,” she sighed, arching her neck to feel the rasp of his whiskers on her skin.

  “Countess,” he growled, and they clung to each other, indulging in a long, slow, languid kiss until the stable boys knocked on the door with the tub and the first steaming kettles of water.

  ***

  Cassin awakened the next morning, satiated from the night of lovemaking, a satisfaction to which he could rapidly become accustomed. But now he must focus and prepare himself to evict his uncle; to make the rounds of tenant homes, assuring families; and to look in on his brother. In that order, hopefully. And in a week, if at all possible.

  Despite his great love of the green dales and leafy lanes of Yorkshire, he could not linger, not if
his ultimate goal was to eventually return from Barbadoes for good and offer a prosperous life to his family and tenants. He’d not embarked on the guano venture only to abandon it before they’d seen it through.

  And Willow’s time in London had been cut very short, indeed. She would want a speedy return. They had not yet discussed how they might balance her love of London and her design work with rural life in a Yorkshire castle, not really, but she had abandoned projects to make this journey. She would want return to her responsibilities and passions, too, as quickly as possible.

  As to their impending separation from each other, Cassin could not think of it without feeling physically ill. How in God’s name would he manage to leave her again? It had been a relief and a reward to reveal his true feelings for her. The painful uncertainty and regret would no longer be part of the separation, but they would still be so very far apart. He worried about her in London.

  And God, how he would miss her.

  But now he had little choice but to push away the impending agony of their separation and press on to what awaited them at Caldera. He shaved and dressed early and waited nearly an hour for her to descend from their rooms. She’d claimed she required more time to dress this morning in order to style herself in the manner of a proper countess. He indulged her and waited. And waited.

  When, at last, she descended the stairs into the dining room of the inn, a proud maid hurrying behind her, Cassin blinked in the face of her throat-closing beauty. Even after days of togetherness, he was not accustomed to the shocking radiance of her hair—orange in some light, almost burgundy in others—nor the clear, smooth creaminess of her skin, embellished here and there with tiny outcroppings of freckles. Her blue-green eyes flashed pride and confidence.

  “My sisters will believe the Queen Consort Adelaide has arrived,” he said, taking her arm.

  Willow made a face. “Surely they will not think me that old.”

  “They haven’t the slightest idea of how the queen consort looks, beyond broadsheet sketches. You will fulfill their expectations nicely. And I’ve hired a carriage so that your beauty will not be wind-whipped. What would Perry think?”

  “Oh, lovely,” she said, watching a nicely sprung carriage being pulled ’round. “A carriage will allow you to tell me all about the cast of characters in your family. Their letters have been telling, but doubtless you may lend some perspective to what I have gleaned.”

  He laughed and handed her inside. They passed the short ride discussing what she could expect from his three sisters: Marietta, Violet, and Juliana; and his mother, Louisa, the Dowager Countess of Cassin.

  “And your brother?” Willow asked. “There was never a letter from him, but the others spoke frequently of him and his wife. Ruth, is it?”

  “Oh yes, Felix and his child bride, Ruth.”

  “Child bride?” Willow laughed.

  Cassin nodded. “Barely seventeen when they married but far better than he deserves. The future earl could not come from a lovelier couple.”

  Willow contemplated this in silence as the carriage trundled along, and they did not speak until they’d nearly reached the winding path to the castle.

  “Not long now,” he said. If she heard the anticipation in his voice, she did not remark.

  He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with the familiar loamy, acrid scent so distinctive to the place he loved most in the world. He glanced at her, praying God she could develop some manner of affection for the centuries-old castle and land.

  “But will I be able to spot the house from some distance, Cassin?” she asked, leaning nearly almost outside the window. “Can you point it out on the horizon, or—”

  In that moment, the carriage path curved, and they came upon the familiar gap in roadside vegetation. He held his breath. Instead of answering, he pointed to the view between the trees.

  “ ’Tis not a house,” he said, his voice almost breaking. “As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a castle.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Cassin held Willow by the waist to prevent her from toppling out the window. She was mindless of her balance, gaping at the grey-and-black edifice that loomed at the end of a long, tree-draped carriage path.

  It was a castle.

  And not a manor house with various fortifications or castle-like flourishes; it was a proper castle, no different from the drawings of castles one might see in a book of children’s nursery rhymes.

  “But it’s . . . ” she began, at a loss for words. The very height of it seemed to reach the clouds, and she could not see the top-most turrets for the trees.

  She tried again, her voice in reverent whisper. “But I’ve never known of anyone who resides in an actual, working castle. I . . . I thought they’d all gone to dust, or been abandoned, or . . . I don’t know . . . been grown over by the forest. A proper castle. But where did you get it, Cassin? Er, I mean, Brent.”

  Cassin laughed. “We built it. Or, I should say, our ancestors did. And as for dust or the forest, we keep beating it back, I suppose. Every swing I take with my bloody pickax, I strike a blow to preserve the old heap.”

  “Never describe it so,” she scolded. “It’s enchanting.”

  “It does have one or two charms, for all that.”

  He rattled off a few basic facts about the castle, how the original structure was built five hundred years ago by the first Earl of Cassin. King Edward had granted the title and considerable lands to the family in gratitude for the first earl’s bravery in the Hundred Years War.

  No one knew if the first earl purposefully erected the castle amid so many Roman ruins, or if ancestors discovered the ruins in subsequent years, but the grounds were awash in Roman artifacts, and Cassin’s brother, Felix, had devoted his life to their excavation and study.

  The castle itself had been improved, he told her, shorn up and modernized over the years, but only in fits and starts, when money was available.

  Unlike the property of many of the landed noblemen of the day, the tenants on the estate’s vast acreage existed in a symbiotic relationship with the Caulder family; they earned their living from Caldera, but at the same time they supported the estate.

  “But does it have all the trappings of a real castle?” Willow asked. “Bats and ghosts, moats and dungeons, and fireplaces large enough to stand in?”

  “Well, I believe I may have already mentioned the dungeon,” he said, winking at her, and Willow felt herself blush. Their lovemaking had taken on a playful naughtiness in the snug little Harrogate inn. Willow’s body responded to the memory, already pining for the next night spent in his arms.

  He went on, “Moat? No, but we have a lovely stream over which we are just about to cross—see the little bridge? Bats? Probably, as I have not been here to rout them out. Ghosts? Not that I am aware. Large fireplaces? Yes, two of them. Very smoky. A great nuisance. After I save the tenants and teach us all to raise sheep and provide guano fertilizer to the world, I shall learn some new way to ventilate the place. One thing at a time.” He gave her another wink.

  Willow smiled and watched the castle grow larger and more imposing with each lurch of the carriage. The walls had appeared almost lavender in the distant mist of the morning, but now she could see the stonework was a light, weathered grey. The knobby wall of old stones, deeply pocked and blackened at the edges, reached four or five levels and higher to towers or turrets. Willow counted three or four walks that stretched from one end of the wall to the other, each at different heights. The walkways widened where balconies jutted out, typically beneath a window. She was put immediately in the mind of Rapunzel or Romeo’s Juliet. Windows abounded, in fact, scattered in no particular order, and Willow was alarmed to see that many of them were without glass.

  “But is the castle open to the weather?” Willow asked.

  “Oh, that,” Cassin said. “Never fear. The wing of the castle in which the family lives is fully sealed from the elements. Glass in the windows. Doors that open and shut with working lo
cks. Vermin controlled by aggressive cats. But the whole of the structure is too large and open to efficiently heat in the winter. We’ve been forced to leave non-family areas vacant and open, almost like a folly, while we reside in the family wing. There is plenty of room in the occupied areas of the house, but the entire castle, fifty bedrooms in all, would be too large for our modest brood.”

  Willow nodded, marveling at this undiscovered part of her husband. Lord and master. Economizer. Router of bats. The need was obvious, certainly, considering the size and age of the castle. But it was yet another reason it must be so difficult for him to leave home to mine fertilizer on the other side of the world.

  She glanced at him. He gazed up at Caldera with a critical eye but also with an expression of affection that made her heart flip. Willow looked at the approaching structure, feeling herself fall in love with it because he loved it. And also because—well, it was a castle.

  When the carriage passed through the outer curtain wall, the wild beauty of the trees along the carriage path gave way to a lush garden, formally manicured. A carpet of bright-green grass stretched on either side of a gravel walk, and smoothly clipped topiaries of different heights lined the distant edge. Low flowerbeds of April bulbs swayed gently with colorful blooms, and mosses and ivy frothed beneath the trunks of stately, intermittent trees.

  “Brent,” Willow whispered, “it’s breathtaking.”

  He shot her a proud smile, but his attention was on the wall, the garden, the great arched double door in the center of the largest, most central building. The keep, Willow assumed.

  “It’s oddly quiet,” he said. “Too quiet.” He looked around, his eyes narrowed. “This garden is my mother’s pride, and I’ve never once seen it without at least three gardeners busily at work. And where are the stable boys to mind the carriage? I’m away not even a year and the whole lot goes to—”

  Running footsteps interrupted him, and they turned to see a boy dart around the far corner of the keep.