Stephen Wentworth, Duncan’s sole pupil for many years, claimed Duncan had no imagination whatsoever.
Stephen was apparently wrong for once. “I will use that imagination to conjure lurid tales of the horrors facing a woman alone in this benighted shire. Foul weather and vexatious felons are the least among them. Am I to stop at the posting inn on the London road next month to learn that a strange lady was found frozen in some cow byre, the very woman who today saved my life?”
Duncan was not afflicted with a tender heart—not anymore—but he had a thriving horror of waste. That he should rattle around in a house with fourteen bedrooms while this woman sought warmth among the livestock was an affront to common sense.
And be damned to propriety. He was a preacher’s nephew—that couldn’t be helped—but also a Wentworth.
She set aside her tea, which had to be tepid by now. “Sheep byres are warmer. The ceilings are lower, the beasts less skittish, and they leave tufts of wool…”
She fell silent. In the north those tufts of wool were called hentilagets. Poor children gathered them up from the hedges and brambles, to be spun into yarn and knitted into stockings. Duncan could well recall the coarse, greasy feel of the wool, the tenacity of the thorns, and the delight he’d taken in the coin earned.
Though Uncle had decreed that the money had to go into the poor box, and Duncan had lost his enthusiasm for gathering wool from ovine sources.
“Let me help you,” he said. “Better still, why don’t you help me?”
Ah, that piqued her attention. She regarded him with the wary uncertainty of a woman whose opinion of men had acquired some tarnish, or possibly a thorough coating of rust.
“In what capacity could you need aid?”
“I am a scholar of modest intellect, and in recent years, I’ve traveled much on the Continent. I’d like to transcribe my notes for eventual publication.” Though, thanks to dear Cousin Quinn—may he choke on his strawberry leaf coronet—Duncan had no time to work on his transcriptions.
“You need an amanuensis? A secretary?”
“Badly. My penmanship is abominable. If you have a lady’s hand, then you are the perfect resource to aid me.” An imaginative fabrication, once again proving that Cousin Stephen was an idiot.
She set a tea cake draped with lemon icing on her plate. “What would my wages be?”
Duncan named a modest figure, not low enough to be insulting, not high enough to raise her guard any higher than she’d already raised it.
“Plus room and board, of course,” he said. “We will share our mealtimes, that we might discuss the work without intruding on the rest of the day.”
She took a bite of her lemon cake, closing her eyes as if the nectar of the gods graced her palate. Duncan helped himself to a raspberry cake when he realized he was watching to see if she’d smile at him again.
“I will take supper with you,” she said. “Breakfast will be a tray in my room, lunch will likely be a tray in your library. You do have a library?”
“Largely devoid of books, but yes.” Books were fungible, like small tables, lamps, carpets, and silver. “Do you speak French?”
“I do. I haven’t used it in some time.”
How careful she was. “Other languages?”
“Enough Italian to stumble through a libretto, thanks to a solid foundation in Latin. Functional German. Good conversational Russian, though my command of the written language is wanting.”
He had the sense she’d not disclosed the whole of her skills, but she’d said enough. She was either well traveled or well educated, possibly both.
A diplomat’s daughter?
“You are ideally suited to assist me. I’ll have my housekeeper, Mrs. Newbury, give you a tour of the premises, such as they are, and show you to a guest room. We can commence work tomorrow after breakfast.”
Duncan braced himself for effusions of gratitude, though really, what did it matter to him if one more hearth was lit or one more mouth fed? Restoring Brightwell on the terms Quinn had set out was an impossible challenge, and a few coppers in either direction were of little moment. Doubtless Duncan’s new amanuensis would soon decamp for parts unknown in any event.
The lady finished with her lemon cake and drank the last of her tea. “I can find my way to the kitchens, Mr. Wentworth. I’ll doubtless locate the housekeeper somewhere in the same vicinity. Was there anything else you wanted to say?”
How extraordinary. She, who likely hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks, was dismissing him.
“I have two questions, and you will answer them honestly or my offer of employment will be rescinded.”
She put another lemon cake on her plate. “Ask.”
“Are you married?”
“I am not.” Thank God. The words hung in the air, a world of relief unspoken. She’d run from her own family, then, or from the king’s justice.
“What is your name?” Duncan asked.
She rose, and the tea cake was no longer on her plate. In her pocket, then, and Duncan hadn’t seen her purloin the sweet.
“You may call me…Miss Maddie.”
“As in Madeline?”
“Miss Maddie will do.”
Duncan got to his feet as well, because a gentleman did, and because he wanted to beat her to the door. “I can’t write out a bank draft to Miss Maddie.”
“Then pay me in cash.” She twisted the key, slipped through the door, and was off down the corridor.
Duncan stood outside the parlor long enough to make sure Miss Maddie took the steps to the kitchens, then he returned to the table, collected the remaining tea cakes, and prepared to locate some of the notes he’d taken while touring the Continent.
They were on the premises somewhere—had he instructed the staff to put them in the estate office?—and he had until tomorrow morning to find them.
* * *
The staff was either well trained or desperately attached to their wages, because thirty minutes after stuffing herself at the lunch table, Matilda sank into the first hot bath she’d had in far too long. She even washed her hair, because God knew when such an opportunity might befall her again.
Mrs. Newbury, a statuesque woman of African descent, had declared that touring the premises could wait until Mr. Wentworth’s guest was properly settled. She’d left Matilda a brown velvet dress with an old-fashioned high waist. What the garment lacked in stylishness it made up for in sheer comfort and warmth.
A tap on the door interrupted Matilda’s inspection of her guest room. “Come in.”
“Beg pardon for intruding, ma’am,” the maid said. “I’m to see if you need anything, and set them buckets out in the corridor for the footmen.” Her speech carried a hint of the Dales: set ’em bookets out in t’corridor.
“You’re not interrupting anything,” Matilda said. “You’re from Yorkshire, aren’t you?”
The girl, a sturdy blonde, scooped two buckets from the tub. “Aye, ma’am. Mrs. Newbury says them as are from the north are good workers. Mr. Wentworth were raised in Yorkshire.” She carried the water out and returned with a pair of empty buckets.
“Mr. Wentworth has only recently acquired Brightwell?”
“Aye. Had it from his cousin, who had it from the old duke. Place went to rack and ruin, Mrs. Newbury says, but Mr. Wentworth will set it to rights, see if he don’t. The tenant farms are right enow. Mr. Manners’s ma’s knees say we’re in for snow.”
She brought in two more empty buckets, filled them, and placed them in the corridor as well.
“Do you know when the laundry will be finished with my dress?” Matilda asked.
“We do laundry on Monday, like a proper household. Mrs. Newbury is in the attics now finding you some more outfits. We’ve dresses up there to clothe half of London. I’ll send along a tea tray, shall I?”
She pushed the wheeled tub toward the door, going slowly enough that the remaining water wouldn’t slosh.
“Don’t put yourself to any bother,”
Matilda said.
“Tea’s no bother. Himself rings for trays at all hours, and now, when a proper body ought to be inside before a roaring fire, where is he? Mucking about in the garden. The Quality is daft, though you didn’t hear that from me.”
“What is your name?” The question was hard to ask, because Matilda had learned that parting with a name was an act of trust.
“Molly Danvers, ma’am. I’m the upstairs maid, now that we have a guest, and you mustn’t think anything of me. I’m a chatterbox.”
The girl was friendly, as contented staff could be in the homes of gentry.
“A tea tray in another hour or so would be appreciated.” Small, frequent meals were easier on a recovering belly than feasts. That wisdom had come from the laundresses at the tavern where Matilda had tried to work. She’d been let go for falling asleep on the job one too many times.
The other women at the inn had done what they could for her. One had gifted her with a pair of wool stockings, a few had pressed hard-earned pennies into her hand, but they’d all known that turning an inept maid out with winter coming on was tantamount to a death sentence.
And still, Matilda had not turned her steps in the direction of home.
She closed the door behind Danvers and went to the window. Down in the garden, a man in a floppy felt hat used a long-handled scythe to hack away at the overgrown shrubbery. With each sweep of his blade, more of the unkempt hedge fell to the cold ground. Mr. Wentworth worked with the unhurried, efficient rhythm of a countryman, and gradually fashioned a border where rioting bushes had been.
“That is not the physique of a scholar,” Matilda murmured, for he wore no coat. Soldiers had that lean, tough build. Coachmen had the same ability to ignore the elements, even as isolated flakes of snow drifted down from a pewter sky.
The swing of Mr. Wentworth’s scythe was entrancing, like the cadenced narrative of a skilled storyteller. Why had he offered her sanctuary? She was a damsel at death’s door, and he’d conjured a pretext for adding her to his household.
If the past months had taught Matilda anything, it was that good luck always came at a price, while bad luck was free. Beggars could be choosers, though, and despite every instinct telling her to take her buttered rolls and her pilfered tea cake and run, she’d stay at least the night.
In the morning, after a sound sleep in a warm bed, she’d find the fortitude to leave this place and never come back.
* * *
“So you’ve banished Duncan to the shires?” Stephen Wentworth asked.
Quinn gave no sign he’d heard the question, but then, Quinn was holding the baby, a fat little cherub by the name of Artemis Ann Wentworth. Wee Artie had two older sisters to lead her astray, though Stephen intended to shoulder a doting uncle’s portion of that effort as well.
“I haven’t banished anybody anywhere,” Quinn replied. “Take the baby.”
Stephen found two stone of grinning, drooling, Wentworth female deposited upon his lap.
“Greetings, niece. Be kind to me now, and in fifteen years, I’ll teach you how to tipple brandy.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” Quinn growled, prowling off across the playroom. “How long can it take one duchess to change her dress?”
“You’re my only begotten brother,” Stephen replied, bouncing the baby on his good knee. Actually, both of his knees were good. The problem that consigned him to a wheeled chair for much of the day was lower, halfway between his left knee and ankle. “Jane is giving you time to deliver your homily about the perils of young manhood.”
“Which sound advice you regularly ignore. Will you visit Duncan on this trip?”
The instant Stephen paused in his bouncing, the baby waved her arms. Typical Wentworth, always instigating.
“I haven’t been invited to Brightwell, probably because Duncan got a bellyful of my company on the Continent and has only had six months to recover from years of travel. What is Duncan doing out in Berkshire, anyway?” Stephen lifted the baby overhead—not so high, when a man was seated—and the little beast grinned uproariously.
“Drop that baby,” Quinn said, extracting a rubber ball from the toy chest, “and I won’t get a chance to kill you because Jane and the aunties will see to the job before the child has ceased squalling. The nursery maids will feed your carcass to the dogs, and Ned will carve your headstone.”
“How I treasure the comfort of familial affection,” Stephen replied, cradling the baby against his chest. “From what I recall, you set the tenant properties at Brightwell to rights and broke the entail so you could sell the place.”
Outside, the weather was threatening nastiness. Fools with two sound legs might consider the first snowfall beautiful, while Stephen hated snow. He’d made the journey from Paris back to London in part because traveling after winter set in was tantamount to torture. Unlike Duncan, Stephen hadn’t remained in Merry Olde once the Season had ended. He’d popped in at his own estate for one excruciatingly boring week, then taken himself back to the safety of the Continent, where Jane’s matchmaking wasn’t a threat to a young man’s sanity.
“I did break the entail at Brightwell,” Quinn said, tossing the ball against the wall with one hand and catching it with the other. “Duncan showed no interest in commerce, and Jane thought he needed to be where he had some interaction with people other than family and servants.”
Jane was a dear woman who thrived on a challenge—witness, she’d married the head of the Wentworth family—but she didn’t know Duncan as Stephen knew him.
“She means well,” Stephen said, turning the baby upside down—slowly—then righting her. “But Duncan’s version of good society is Socrates or Marcus Lugubrious. I dragged our cousin to coffee shops all over the Continent, sat him down in the middle of lively arguments about everything from American government to abolition, to the analgesic properties of intoxicants, and do you know what he did?”
The baby wiggled in Stephen’s lap, stretching out her arms toward her papa. Quinn lobbed the ball into the toy chest, retrieved his daughter, and headed for the door.
“Let’s repair to the library before I break another sconce.”
As children, neither Quinn nor Stephen had had toys. Anything they’d acquired that might have diverted them—a tattered deck of cards, an old hat—had quickly been destroyed by a father fonder of gin than he’d been of his own children.
“Was the sconce lit when you broke it, Quinn?”
“One of them was.” Quinn opened the library door and preceded Stephen inside. “If you dragged Duncan to a coffee shop, he probably sat in a corner—close enough to a lamp to have a little light, far enough from the fire to avoid anybody’s notice—and read some damned book, while you made fourteen new best friends and beggared yourself buying them all drinks.”
Not exactly. Stephen had learned that young Englishmen intent on making a good impression earned only contempt and a sore head with that tactic.
“Duncan truly doesn’t enjoy the comradery of his fellows.” This baffled Stephen, who found the company of other people one of few comforts in the midst of chronic pain.
“He didn’t enjoy the company of your fellows,” Quinn said. “Young men intent on wenching and inebriation.”
A man in a wheeled chair was not seen as a man, but rather as an outsized child, his gender relevant only in so far as the fellow must be decently dressed. Stephen had come to this conclusion before his sixteenth birthday and had been forcing himself to walk periodically ever since.
The only person to support him in that endeavor had been Duncan, and Duncan hadn’t needed any mortifying explanations either.
“Quinn, I’m no longer eighteen. I am of an age to marry, in line to inherit your title until such time as you present me with a nephew, and yet, you insist on thinking of me as a university boy consumed by lust. Is it possible—let’s call this a wild theory—that your view of Duncan is similarly misguided?”
Quinn put the baby to his shoulder and ru
bbed the child’s tiny back. The duke’s hand was nearly large enough to cover that back, and yet his touch could not have been more gentle.
“It’s possible I do not see any of my family clearly. Jane instructs me on that point regularly, but I knew Duncan as a lad. He was the older cousin who tried to help, but hadn’t the means. I am beholden to him.”
For a Wentworth, a personal debt was a more sacred obligation than any tax owed to the king or tithe owed to the church.
“You owe him, so you disown him?”
For years, Duncan had fought for Stephen, though his firearm of choice had been reason and his longbow nocked with relentless determination. Because of Duncan, Quinn had installed a lift in the family’s London town house. Because of Duncan, Stephen had been given the freedom of the saddle, a medication Stephen still relied on in frequent large doses.
To advocate for Duncan, however ineffectively, felt good.
“We are not disowning him, Stephen. In all of your wanderings, did Duncan ever show a friendly interest in a woman?”
Oh, for God’s sake. “He never showed a friendly interest in another person, Quinn, though he’s inexplicably tolerant of children and dumb beasts. People are specimens to him, an experiment in progress, a chess puzzle. His near acquaintances are the classical philosophers, his greatest recreation is to sit of an evening with a glass of brandy and stare into a modest fire as it burns down to coals. You torment him when you force him into the society of squires and goodwives.”
“Jane disagrees with you,” Quinn said, kissing the baby’s fuzzy head. “Jane says he’s lonely, and that we’ll soon lose him to endless travel if he’s not given an opportunity to form some meaningful associations.”
Jane was a preacher’s daughter and had a way with a sermon. “You disagree with Jane.”
The look Quinn shot Stephen was exasperated and wonderfully honest. That glance was sent from one adult brother to another, allies in the ongoing investigation of the Great Feminine Mystery.
“I have suggested to my duchess that Duncan’s version of happiness does not comport with her theory.”
When a Duchess Says I Do Page 3
