Meg took a deep breath and quelled her sense of disorientation. “I am happy to hear that you are so contented, Captain. I had thought to go over the estate’s books with you this morning, if you are agreeable. Gerald, you and Annis can no doubt amuse yourselves for the next few hours.”
“Lady Margaret, I have no right—I had not thought to examine your books,” James stammered, taken aback. “You no doubt need more time. Indeed, we have not spoken as yet of any possible relationship between us.” James was very much afraid his face was showing his embarrassment.
“You are quite right, Captain. I spoke out of turn. I beg your pardon.” Meg gripped her hands in her lap. Could she behave any more clumsily than she had so far this morning? The man had hardly had time to say hello and ride over the home farm and she was offering him the keys to her kingdom. What was the matter with her?
“You need not apologize, Lady Margaret. I did not mean to overset you. If you would prefer I take my leave for today, I will do so.” James tried to sound conciliatory. To a captain in the British navy it was not a natural attitude.
Meg lit up like a Guy Fawkes bonfire. “I am not overset. I do not want you to leave. If I have been unladylike, I beg pardon. If you wish, we can continue to tiptoe around the subject we both know is uppermost in our minds—probably in the minds of everyone in the county by this time! When can we
safely discuss it? Does etiquette establish a time limit? Four days to see the filly’s paces and then—”
“Meg!” Gerald remonstrated. “Your temper, dear girl.”
“Dearest, do you think perhaps a turn around the gardens would do you good?” Annis’s gentle tones penetrated Meg’s anger, taming it somewhat.
“Yes, yes. It would be good, Annis.” Meg rose from the table, her face still flushed. “Excuse me, please.”
The captain rose. “If you do not mind, I would very much like to see your gardens, Lady Meg.” He offered his arm, and after a moment’s hesitation, Meg took it.
As they left the dining room, she could hear the sound of Gerald and Annis letting out their breaths in simultaneous sighs.
“They despair of me, you know,” she said, still unable to curb her tongue. “I am afraid you have seen my besetting sin this morning, Captain.”
“What is that? A tendency to tell the truth and the devil take the consequences?” James looked down at her, and Meg thought she could see a lurking smile in his eyes. “I do not regard that as a fault. Many commanders fail for lack of it.”
“You are very kind, sir, but I think my flaw would be considered a detriment at sea as well as on land. I fear I have a tendency to rush my fences.” It was as close to an explanation for her behavior as she could come. They had taken the door that led from the book room to the veranda. Now she looked around the sun-dappled lawn. “Would you truly care to see my gardens, Captain?” She tried to smile, but she found it very difficult to look him in the eye. That fearless blue gaze would read her thoughts.
“Yes. Gardens have not come in my way often in recent years, but I remember them from my childhood.” He stood very straight and looked around the carefully laid out beds. “The smell and the look of them.”
“You are smiling, Captain,” Meg said. “Your childhood memories must be happy ones.”
He stiffened. “Some of them.” Again that forbidding, icy voice.
“Have I said something to displease you?” Meg asked. What was the use of having displayed the most appalling lack of manners if she didn’t use it as an excuse to pry into this prickly, mysterious man’s life? “I cannot help but notice you do not willingly speak of your family.”
James froze. Here was the opportunity he had been seeking. Now he could tell her and see what her reaction was. If she despised him, as most people would, he would see it very clearly out here in the sunlight. Whatever disavowal she made later, he would have seen her flinch away from him as if he were unclean. God knew, he had seen that look often enough over the years. He should do it now—but he couldn’t.
He took a deep breath. “Do you grow roses here, Lady Meg? I remember the scent of roses.”
He had warned her off, Meg thought. As clearly as if he had shut a door in her face. Thus far and no farther would he permit her to go.
“Yes, Captain. And we grow vegetables and I have a rather extensive herb garden, but they are both around to the back of the house, where they are sheltered from the winter weather.” Her voice was chill but sweet. If he wanted trivialities, she would provide them. Her chin went up. Damn him!
Hearing the cold notes in her voice, James silently cursed himself. He hadn’t been able to do it. All the will in the world and he had still balked at the thought of how she would turn from him in disgust. Damn! Why could he not throw his birth in her teeth? He’d done it now and then over the years, whenever the subject of his unknown mother had been broached by someone, usually a fellow officer who’d had too much rum.
“I am sorry, Lady Meg. I—”
“You find it difficult to speak of your family. I understand. I do not often discuss my father. As for my mother, I never knew her.” She had picked up a stick and swung it idly as they walked.
Surprised, he peered at her.
“We share that lack. I never knew mine either.” His throat was tight. He could hear the words again....
His mother was a gypsy, I believe, and no better than she should be. It’s most improper. I cannot imagine what the duke is thinking of, keeping the little mongrel around.
A litany of the hurtful words that had been flung at him or that he’d overheard in his childhood washed over him. They receded from his consciousness, leaving a cold, dirty sediment behind.
He had to tell her.
“Lady Meg, I—”
“Would you like to walk over to that row of trees?” She gestured to her right. “They line the road to the front gate and are held to be very fine.”
“Yes, thank you.” Reprieved, he decided to leave his confession for another time.
* * * *
After a light luncheon, Meg took the captain to the book room. She was still determined to bring the matter of their marriage to a head. What was the use of being alone and unguarded by relatives if she could not make her own decisions? And that meant since she had no one to discuss settlements for her, except Mr. Quigley, her solicitor, she would have to handle the initial discussion herself.
“Captain,” she said, then paused. It was absurd, but she did not quite know how to begin. She cleared her throat and plunged in. “I am alone in the world to all intents and purposes. I scarcely know the cousin who inherited my father’s title and the rest of his property, and I have no other male relatives. So, I must see to my own affairs.” That word seemed slightly rakish. “My own life,” she amended. That sounded too general. “My—my marriage.”
James had been watching her with some amusement. Her last words wiped the smile from his face. “I see. You did indeed mean to settle the business very quickly.” His knowledge of women was not extensive, but he thought this woman would seem original to almost any man.
Now, however, after that forthright speech, his comment had made her blush. She was the most confusing mixture of straightforwardness and shyness. He was feeling almost as off balance as she sounded.
But if she could screw her courage to the sticking point, so could he. “Lady Margaret, I know Sir Gerald has spoken to you about me, at least in general terms. Let me assure you that if we were to decide we should suit, I would be prepared to invest in Hedgemere. It would be my home, and I would care for it as you have done.”
Meg smiled in relief. He had laid to rest her greatest worry. She would not be marrying a man like her father, interested only in squeezing every groat out of the estate. She could count on being able to do for Hedgemere and its people the things that had been postponed because of lack of money. “I am glad to hear you say it, Cap—James. That has been my greatest fear—that the estate would not be taken care of.”
“And that you might have to leave it?” he hazarded.
“Yes. That, too. But I could get along somewhere else, make a life away from this place. The people I employ here would find it far more difficult to leave and prosper than I would, I think.”
She was a brave woman. She could not really look forward to a future as a modiste in a small seaside town, yet she faced it with courage and a smile.
“But you would prefer to stay. I can understand that. It was difficult in some ways for me to leave the navy.”
“Why did you decide to retire, James?”
“The time seemed right. Napoleon is gone, this time for good, and there is not much for a naval commander to do in peacetime.” He frowned, dissatisfied with his answer. “And for some reason, I thought that it was time to seek a different path.” He couldn’t put any more of his thoughts into words. They were tangled up with Meg and her home and her friends—all the things she knew and wished to protect and care for. Things he had never known.
Meg looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled. “Shall we consider it a bargain, then, James?” Maybe she was rushing her fences, as she had confessed to him, but she still had the feeling that this was the right thing to do.
He smiled back, a genuine, unforced smile that almost took Meg’s breath away with its unstudied sweetness.
“Why, yes, Lady Meg.” He extended his hand. “It’s a bargain.”
Chapter Four
On their ride back to Mattingly Place later that afternoon, Gerald could see his guest had a great deal on his mind. Although James and Meg had said nothing after their return from their walk, Gerald was sure that something important had happened. He had caught Annis’s eye and could see that she, too, noticed Meg’s high color and the captain’s serious mien.
Following the lessons learned from negotiations among the victorious allies as well as with the defeated French, Gerald said nothing. The captain retired to his room and did not join Gerald in the library before dinner for a glass of wine, as he had done every evening since his arrival. Instead, he came in, still looking preoccupied, just as dinner was announced.
Halfway through the meal, James drained his second glass of claret in one swallow and sat toying with the crystal goblet, his brows drawn together. Gerald had almost decided to take the bull by the horns and ask him what had happened, when James abruptly said, “It is decided, Sir Gerald. We have agreed. We shall marry.”
“If I may be allowed a comment, you announce your engagement as if you’d been sentenced to be transported. Surely, if you find the idea so repugnant, you would not have agreed. What is amiss, my friend?”
James grimaced. “I didn’t tell her.” His eyes met Gerald’s. “And now I am unsure. Not only of how my ... unusual birth and upbringing will affect her, but of how she will feel about me, knowing I could have told her before things went this far—and didn’t.”
Gerald stared at him. He liked and respected the captain, but Meg had been his friend since childhood. He didn’t want her hurt, or humiliated by hearing James’s story from someone else. He would not be a party to her marriage to a man who had lied by omission. “Are you going to tell her?” he asked James. “Or simply trust to your luck that she will not discover your past until after you’re wed?”
“I know I must, that she deserves to know. Yet, somehow, I find I cannot bring myself to risk it. I don’t understand myself.” James frowned into his empty wineglass. “I do not frighten easily.”
“I can attest to that.” Gerald remembered the day the ship carrying him from Naples, where he had put out a small diplomatic brushfire, had been fired upon by a French privateer. Captain Sheridan’s ship, Relentless, had been near enough to come to the rescue.
To Gerald that day had been the most frightening of his life. Taken aboard Relentless, he had watched, appalled and fascinated, as James had ordered his well-drilled sailors to their posts. Each one had responded quickly, showing not the slightest fear, though they risked death at every moment. The actual battle ended almost before it started. The French ship’s mast was split and her hull smashed below the waterline in the second volley. But those minutes were engraved on his memory. Most of all, the tall, taciturn captain had seemed to Gerald the epitome of coolheaded bravery.
“You are thinking of that day on Relentless, aren’t you?” James said, a wry smile quirking one corner of his mouth.
“How could you tell?” Gerald thought he had mastered the diplomat’s impassive expression.
“That look of horrified fascination. All civilians who have seen anything of war have it when they look at military men and remember. It’s easy to be brave in battle, you know. It is what we are trained for, and usually it is more exciting than frightening, while it lasts. It’s afterward you have to worry about.”
“And now? Are you frightened of what lies ahead with Meg?”
James stiffened. “I told you. I am not easily made fearful.”
“But you did not tell her.”
“No.”
There was silence for a few minutes, until a log broke apart in a shower of sparks, sending a sudden burst of light into the room.
If they ever had one.
For some reason Gerald thought of Annis Fairchild and decided to discover what she thought of the arrangement that had been arrived at so precipitously this day.
* * * *
As they sat over their needlework later that evening in the book room, Meg told Annis the news. Annis was silent for a moment, looking down thoughtfully at her embroidery.
“Annis, say something,” Meg demanded.
“What would you like me to say?” Annis asked, smiling with the warmth of an old friend. “My felicitations, perhaps? You know I wish you every happiness always, my dear.”
“That would be better than this enormous silence,” Meg said, grimacing as she tossed her embroidery hoop onto the settee. “Look at this tangle!” She gestured to the tangled rainbow of threads. “You must admit that asking me to sew anything other than a plain seam is asking the impossible. I would have been of very little help in our shop. We were courting disaster, I fear.”
Annis smiled, but she couldn’t help feeling a sharp pang. Her embroidery fell into her lap unheeded as she remembered her arrival at Hedgemere ten years earlier. There had been no parent or guardian to greet her. Instead, a child of ten with a tangle of golden brown curls hanging down her back and curiously adult hazel eyes had come out to the front gate to welcome Annis to her first post. Gravely Lady Margaret Enfield had introduced herself and accompanied Annis up the long drive to the house.
“I am sorry that you have had to walk,” Meg had said. “The coachman should have driven you to the front door.”
“It doesn’t matter in the least, Lady Margaret,” Annis had insisted, eager even then to keep Meg from shouldering more responsibility than she should have to.
“Papa said that he had asked my aunt to find a governess for me. He told me not to be a trouble to you, and I shall try not to be.” Meg had looked up at her then and said, in a hopeful voice, “Do you ride, Miss Fairchild?”
Annis had been sorry to disappoint her, but she had explained that a country curate with five children, such as her father, could not afford to provide horses for them.
Instead of looking down on her new governess, Meg had turned glowing hazel eyes to hers and said, “Four brothers and sisters! Oh, famous, Miss Fairchild! What fun you all must have had.”
And Annis, by this time inside the house that held only themselves, Meadows the butler, his wife the cook, and a few other servants, had to agree. She had promised Meg that they would visit the Fairchild rectory someday, but that day had never dawned. Money for excursions was not forthcoming from the earl. In fact
, Annis quickly learned, money for anyone or anything other than himself and his pleasures never was forthcoming.
Yet despite her dismal family circumstances, Meg was a joy to Annis. She loved to learn, and she always made light of any difficulties. By the time she was sixteen, she was running the estate and taking her place among the neighboring landowners. Under the tutelage of the housekeeper, she had also begun a study of the healing powers of herbs.
To Annis, Meg was as dear as a younger sister, and Meg’s interests remained those nearest to her heart. She knew that Meg’s marriage to the captain would ensure the financial future of Hedgemere, but that didn’t calm her worries.
Although she was the practical daughter of a country parson, Annis had hoped for a happy marriage for Meg. Despite her position and title, Meg had always been lonely. Her best friend, aside from Annis, was Gerald Mattingly, but he was considerably older than Meg and had been away from home much of the past fifteen years, first at school and university and then on government business. There was never the slightest hint of romance between them. Gerald was like the older brother Meg had never had.
Practical, hardworking, devoted to her servants and her neighbors, Meg hadn’t had much joy in her life, and no hint of the kind of courtship and marriage Annis wished for her. Though Annis’s parents were hard pressed economically, they had shared, until her mother’s death five years before, a love that was like a golden thread woven through the duties and cares of their life together. Annis had seen that love every day. She’d known even then that it was a rare gift, and while she’d given up any hope of it for herself when she went to work as a governess at the age of eighteen, she couldn’t help wanting it for Meg.
There was no hint of affection in Meg’s straightforward announcement. No thought, apparently, of the intimacy marriage would entail. What did Meg know of marriage, after all? She’d never seen one at close range. Annis frowned. Perhaps she would be able to discuss her fears with Lady Mattingly, Gerald’s mother, when she returned from taking the waters at Bath. Still, she couldn’t in good conscience postpone sounding a small note of caution.