by Nancy Butler
Jemima gave him an owl-eyed stare. “Are you that eager to be rid of us?”
“I was referring to the beetles,” he said dryly. He then cocked his head and studied her. “I wonder, Jemima,” he mused, “if Alexander the Great had a woman like you in his life. You know, someone to light a fire under him when he was too weary to go out and conquer the civilized world.”
She made a rude face at him. “I am only trying to help you, Mr. Bryce. If you’d rather I didn’t, I will go attend to my knitting.”
“I believe you mean tatting. Isn’t that what spinsters toil over?”
“I was being sarcastic,” she sniffed.
He turned to his housekeeper. “She’s a prickly little thing, don’t you think, Mrs. Patch?”
That good lady also sniffed—which Jemima thought quite appropriate for a woman who was well past sixty—and said, “We could all use someone like Lady Jemima here at the Prospect. If you take my meaning, Mr. Beecham.” And with that less-than-obscure pronouncement she went bustling out of the room, the recipe book tucked under one plump arm.
“It is never a wise idea,” Bryce muttered in a low voice as he watched her bristling departure, “to keep on the servants one grew up with. They can’t ever seem to forget that they knew you when you were a grubby sprat with mud all down your shirt.”
“I don’t recall that I was ever a grubby sprat,” Jemima remarked serenely.
Bryce shifted his eyes and let his gaze wander over her. She was dressed for riding, and though her deep green habit was styled along simple lines, it had been tailored by a master hand. The unadorned bodice followed every curve of her breast, and the skirt, which she had caught up over one arm, fell in great sweeping folds. She looked, at once, straitlaced and highly provocative.
“No,” he said as he raised his eyes again to her face. “Goddesses are rarely ever grubby.”
She sighed. “We are back to hollow flattery, I see.”
He chuckled. “I never flatter anyone before noon, Lady J. I haven’t got the wherewithal. Now, come out to the stable and I’ll see if I can scratch up a horse sedate enough for a lady of…advanced years.”
Jemima put her head up and preceded him through the doorway. He hung back a little to admire her as she swept down the hall. She was all affronted dignity and long-limbed allure. And he wanted her as badly as any woman he’d met in his adult life. But if he was to succeed with her he needed time, which meant fostering the notion that there was a bloodthirsty murderer still at large in the neighborhood. He wondered if he could keep up the ruse, especially since he now had a fair idea who the murderer might be. Someone about as bloodthirsty as a lark.
Once she knew there was no real threat to Lovelace, the sublime Lady Jemima would be free to remove herself from his care and return to London. He feared that once she was surrounded by her intellectual coterie, he would have no further opportunities to pursue her. She would become just another society lady who would cut him if ever they chanced to pass on the street.
He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. She was worth the chase, worth taking the time to seduce. He had only to look at her, feel his blood heating and his desire rising, to be sure of it. And he knew that when she got wind of his duplicity, as she was bound to at some hopefully distant point, she would be furious. He had to win her now or he would never again get the chance.
Jemima had left her jauntily feathered riding hat on Mrs. Patch’s work table; Bryce snatched it up and went striding after her. She was at the front door, being buttonholed by her brother. Bryce stayed back in the shadows of the hall and watched the exchange with an unpleasant expression on his face.
“You’re sure you packed it, Jem?” The poet laid a hand on her arm. “You know I can’t write worth a damn if I haven’t got my Homer beside me.”
“It’s with your things, Terry,” his sister replied patiently. “I packed it myself at the inn.”
“And I’ve run out of licorice, if you’re going anywhere near the village today… And I could use some new pen points, though I daresay Bryce has a store of them somewhere.”
Bryce saw that she was trying to edge away from him.
“And I need you to get a blasted ink stain off my favorite shirt. You do still carry that French soap about with you, don’t you?”
“Ask Mrs. Patch to help you Troy,” she responded with more than a touch of annoyance. “I’ve promised to ride out with Bryce this morning.”
Her brother gave her a look of petulant resignation and went striding off in the direction of the breakfast parlor. Bryce moved forward then, handed her her hat, and without one word of commentary, he offered her his arm and led her through the front door.
* * *
They rode over a large portion of the estate, stopping in at the smithy and the dairy, before proceeding on to the homes of the tenant farmers. Bryce hadn’t wanted Jemima to risk contracting the influenza and had tried to prevent her from actually sitting with his tenants, but she assured him she had an iron constitution and hadn’t caught so much as a sniffle since she was a girl.
She chattered with the farm wives and made a fuss over their children, watching while Bryce coaxed the ailing farmers to eat their broth. He displayed a relaxed ease with his tenants, no easy task in the cramped cottages which smelled overpoweringly of stewed cabbage and wet diapers. But in spite of their size the cottages were in decent repair, and the inhabitants, except for the ones with the influenza, seemed in good health. Bryce’s father was a proper landlord, she was pleased to note.
At the third cottage they visited, Bryce sat in the back garden, dandling a chubby infant on one knee, watching as Jemima helped the farmer’s wife hang out her laundry. He appeared to be completely in his element, and she realized with a shock that Bryce would have made a very decent vicar—his charm was not limited to the drawing room and his concerns did not end at the boudoir.
The image of him with a rosy-cheeked child in his lap was not one she chose to dwell on, however. A domesticated version of the notorious Beecham Bryce was too appealing and far too unsettling.
* * *
It was nearly noon when they came to the bailiff’s house, which lay near the estate’s northeastern boundary. It was larger than the cottages, boasting four rooms downstairs and a gabled attic. Mr. MacCready, a tall, spindly man with a ruddy complexion, insisted they join him for luncheon, He had heard about the murder in the grove, and he questioned them both intently as they shared a meal of cold ham hock and cheese. When Bryce informed him that the Runners had been called in, the man looked unimpressed.
“Ruddy lot a Londoner knows of country matters, sir,” he grumbled, scratching his narrow chin. “Lucky if he could find his own arse with a map…oh, beggin’ your ladyship’s pardon.”
Jemima grinned. The bailiff was certainly a colorful fellow, and he lived up to his reputation as a dandy, sporting a well-tailored suit of blue broadcloth and a nattily tied cravat. His pale blue eyes watched her while he spoke, and Jemima had the feeling the man was assessing her in return.
He shook Bryce’s hand as they were leaving. “As I’ve said before, sir, it’s a rare treat to have you back at the Prospect. You’ve been missed…by everyone.”
“Well, he certainly has a soft spot for you,” Jemima remarked to Bryce as they walked across the bailiffs lawn toward their horses.
“I run a poor second to Kip in MacCready’s book,” Bryce said without any hint of resentment. “I was surprised the old fellow didn’t take it harder when my brother was killed. He took me aside at the memorial service and insisted that Kip was too stubborn to give up the ghost so easily. At the time I thought he was being a bit daft.”
“It’s hard to let go,” she said softly. “Even when you know you must.”
Bryce stopped untying his horse’s reins and turned to her. There was something in her voice, a hint of poignant realization, that he knew had nothing whatever to do with his brother. When he lifted her onto her horse, his hands we
re, for once, impersonal at her waist.
She arranged her skirts over the horse’s flanks and then put her head back and said thoughtfully, “Bryce, do you ever wish you could do things over?”
“You mean relive a pleasurable experience?” His eyes teased her, hoping to remove the somber expression from her face. “I pray for it.”
She shot him an impatient frown. “No, of course that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about decisions you made, courses you followed, that you now regret.”
“I regret nothing,” he said evenly as he mounted his horse. “But you are not speaking about me, that’s plain. Tell me then, what ill roads have you unwisely decided to travel, Lady J?”
She shrugged as she moved her mare up beside his gelding. “I’m not sure if I actually made the decision. That is what’s troubling me. I more sort of fell into it.”
“Then perhaps it’s time you fell out of it,” he said softly. “You don’t lack for grit, Jemima. Or brains.”
She sighed and toyed with her horse’s mane. “It’s this country life,” she said. “It leaves a person too much time for reflection.”
“Then I’ll just have to make sure I keep you busy. And for starters, there is something I want to show you. Come along now, and see if you can keep up.”
He urged his horse into a slow canter and then increased its speed until they were flying over the green turf. Jemima watched him moving effortlessly in cadence with his horse’s rocking motion and felt a hollow ache begin to well up in the pit of her stomach. It was as though all her happiness were racing away from her over the lush, green grass.
For her entire adult life, Jemima had managed to avoid the entanglements of love. She had faded into gray midlife without once stirring herself to reach out for something bright. Because, she supposed, there was always the light of her brother gleaming at her shoulder. But Troy did not belong to her. Not the way a husband or a child belonged to a woman.
It had been brought home to her as she sat among the wives of the tenant farmers and watched them with their children. Those women had little in the way of worldly goods, and yet they possessed so much that Jemima longed for. A cozy home, the laughter of children, and the care of a loving husband.
Instead of that bounty, Jemima had her artists’ salons, and her ladies’ charitable organizations, and her brother’s never-ending jaunts to God-knows-where. Years and years of offering her services to the benefit of others. How empty and wasted those years now seemed.
“Je-mi-ma!” Bryce was calling from the middle of the field, one hand waving over his head.
She waved back and kicked her mare into a trot. The horse Bryce had chosen for her was a narrow-shouldered bay with a lop ear. He claimed the mare was a nice, sensible ride, but Jemima knew, the instant she took up the reins, that Pandora was a prime goer, for all her physical flaws. The mare now covered the distance to Bryce in a breezy gallop that left her totally unwinded.
Which was more than Jemima could say for herself. The sight of Bryce, sitting relaxed on his gelding, the breeze lifting the ends of his neckcloth against the tanned skin of his throat, his dark hair gleaming in the afternoon sun, all but took her breath away.
“Woolgathering?” he asked as she pulled up beside him.
“Sorry. I had to adjust my stirrup,” she lied. “My skirt got tangled in it.”
“You should have told me,” he said silkily. “I’d have been happy to remove your habit. From the stirrup, that is.”
Jemima looked up at the sky, assessing the position of the sun. “I see that it is past noon. And that your innuendos have returned, right on schedule.”
Bryce’s mouth drew up into a crooked grin. “I don’t flatter before lunchtime; innuendo I can furnish round the clock.”
She shook her head and grinned back. “Unrepentant to the last. I see. I shall just have to make sure that I don’t offer you any more grist for your mill. Now, where are we off to? I put myself in your hands—oh, no!” She laughed. “I’ve just done it again, haven’t I?”
He nodded slowly, his eyes narrowed in amusement. “But so charmingly that I will let it pass, unremarked.”
Side by side they rode past herds of doughty beef cattle and flocks of black-faced merino sheep. Pandora shied playfully at the sound of the sheep’s plaintive baahs, and Jemima easily brought the frisking horse under control, noting as she did so the open admiration in Bryce’s eyes.
As they rode along an elevated ridge, with a row of close-planted cedars on their left and a field of dairy cows on their right, Jemima saw a rider coming toward them. The man was traveling parallel to the ridge on a narrow cart track that lay some distance below the spine of cedars. Bryce clearly didn’t see him—he was too busy looking for ailing cows.
There was something about the rider that reminded Jemima of her companion—the set of the wide shoulders and the upright, graceful posture in the saddle. As the man drew closer, she saw that his lower face was obscured by a dark beard and that he wore a blue, nautical-style jacket. Probably a sailor just off his ship, taking a shortcut across the Bryce estate to hasten his trip home. But the man’s uncanny resemblance to Bryce teased her. That, and something else that she couldn’t put a name to.
As he disappeared from sight around a bend in the ridge, she found herself wondering if Bryce’s father had possibly gotten a child or two on the wrong side of the blanket. And that line of thought progressed quite naturally to the question of whether Bryce himself had sired any by-blows. It was more than likely, she reasoned forlornly. She had a wretched inkling that the next time she was in Hyde Park of a Saturday morning, when the nursemaids were about with their charges, she’d stumble across at least a dozen children with curling sable hair and pale gray eyes.
Bryce motioned Jemima to stop as he pulled his horse up at the edge of a wide field. It was uncultivated except for the wild grasses and flowering weeds that had proliferated there. He lifted Jemima to the ground, and then tied both horses to a dead crab apple tree. She followed him across the field, lengthening her strides to keep up with him, to where the level grass dipped abruptly down into a ravine. Bryce eased her down the steep slope, and then held on to her hand as they made their way along the narrow gully. It was strewn with round rocks, as though it might have been a streambed at one time.
“Damn,” he muttered as he came to a halt.
Jemima peered around his wide shoulder. They had come to what appeared to be a small landslide—a mass of tumbled rocks was piled up against one side of the ravine.
Bryce sat down on one of the larger rocks and rubbed at the back of his head. “Well,” he said sheepishly, “so much for my surprise.” He motioned with his thumb to the wall of the ravine behind him. “Someone’s gone and covered it up.”
Jemima scrambled up a little way onto the pile, careful lest she sprain her ankle and end up hobbling beside Lovelace. “What was it?” she asked, standing upright.
“A cave,” he said. “A really topping cave. Kip and I discovered it when we were boys. It’s all limestone beneath these downs, and the stream that once ran through this ravine carved out an amazing tunnel in there. It’s probably just as well that they’ve closed it off—too tempting a spot for the local lads to get up to mischief.” He scraped at the charred remains of a twig fire with the toe of his boot. “Though it looks like someone’s been here recently.”
“I think it’s a shame,” said Jemima with sincere disappointment. “I’ve never seen an English cave. Terry and I explored one outside Athens two years ago and it was breathtaking.”
Bryce swung to her and said peevishly, “Do you never do anything without that confounded brother of yours?” The breeze that was buffeting along the gully caught at his hair, sending the dark curls dancing over his brow. He brushed them back impatiently. “Don’t you ever think you’d like your own life, Jemima? Not always being part of your brother’s train, carted from place to place like a piece of luggage.”
Jemima sat down abruptly on
a round rock and frowned across at the opposite wall. “I don’t wonder you’re a success with the ladies,” she muttered. “You’ve got such a way with words.”
“No, I’m serious. He gives you little thought, except when you are not there to look after him. And then it’s, ‘Where the devil has she put my Homer?’ and, ‘How the deuce could she let me run out of licorice?’ I see it, even if you don’t.”
Jemima heaved a little sigh as she set her chin on one upraised hand. “My brother is not much different from most husbands I’ve seen. They, too, take their partners for granted. At least with Troy, I am not always under his thumb. He sees to it that I have my own funds, and so I can come and go as I please. But I would be very lonely without Terry in my life. I know he is childish and demanding—”
“Among other qualities.”
“And it’s true he does not always appreciate me. But I’ve seen the world, Bryce, at his shoulder. Egypt and Morocco. Greece and Turkey. He deserves to be looked after—he truly is a talented poet.”
“If you like sentimental claptrap. ‘The Crusade of Destiny,’ indeed!”
“You were admiring his words only last night, if I may remind you. And the Prince Regent esteems him enormously.”
“Prinny’s taste is all in his posterior end.”
“Bryce!”
“So you sit at the feet of your gilded brother, and let your own talents go fallow.”
“You follow your muse, Mr. Bryce—Venus, I believe she is called—and I follow mine.”
He gave a dry laugh. “My muse is a deal more entertaining than yours, Lady Jemima. At least the pursuit of Venus allows for some pleasure. You are no more than a dogsbody to that self-inflated sprig.”
Her eyes flashed dangerously. “You have no right to speak that way about him.”
“Good Lord, Jemima, the man is twenty-six years old. Isn’t it time you cut the apron strings?”
“I told you, I am not his caretaker. And he is very fond of me.” Like a faithful hound, she couldn’t prevent herself from adding silently.
