The Belligerent Miss Boynton AND The Lurid Lady Lockport (Two Companion Full-Length Regency Novels) (46 page)

He smiled ruefully as this thought struck him, knowing it was better than thinking about his cow-handed bungling with Gilly. He'd be lucky if she ever came within barge-pole length of him again. Even Prinney must have handled himself better, he berated himself.

Tonight's aborted interlude was, he knew, no way to begin a marriage. Especially when just the memory of the feel of Gilly's slim body against his own could so stir his senses.

He'd have to move more slowly. Act more prudently. Prove himself worthy of Gilly's trust, perhaps even of her esteem, as he went about The Hall, putting wrongs to right, ordering thatch and millstones and whatever else it was she seemed to set such store by. Only then would he approach her again with the idea of sharing her bed.

He only hoped he would be able to discover a way to sleep nights in the interim...

#

And where was Gilly while Kevin's rest was being disturbed by the many mental kicks he was inflicting on himself?

She was not abroad in the dark, fleeing from The Hall and her husband. Nor was she hiding deep within the bowels of the cavernous building.

Oh, no.

Gilly Rawlings, Countess of Lockport, was once more in the small servant's bedroom, tucked up in the narrow cot, unaware of her husband's desires and dilemmas, sleeping the undisturbed slumber of the innocent.

Or was that the
victorious?

By the time Gilly had a chance to sneak away over the rolling hills late one Sunday morning to visit the graves of her mother and twin brother, the small cemetery alongside the village church was vacant of all but its permanent guests.

She entered the cemetery by way of the wrought-iron gate and, looking around to make sure she had the place to herself, surreptitiously scooped up two small bunches of daisies from vases placed on either side of the stone inscribed "In loving memory of Tobias Cranston, husband and father."

Gilly was sure old Toby wouldn't mind the small theft, as he had left behind sixteen children who kept him more than amply supplied with posies.

Walking to the far corner of the fenced-in plot, Gilly sank to her knees in the shade of an old tree and placed a bouquet in front of each of the two markers that stood by themselves, some distance from the other graves.

For a time she busied herself tidying the site, removing loose twigs and dead leaves from the mossy ground and dusting the small headstones with the hem of her gown. Then, satisfied that all was well, Gilly relaxed cross-legged beside the graves, in the way she had done all the years she had been visiting first her brother's and then her mother's last resting place.

Over the years she had shared both her happiness and her sorrow with them, and this visit was no exception. "Ah, Mama," she said, sighing as she twirled a long blade of grass between her fingers, "it's been less than a fortnight since I became Lady Lockport, and yet I feel as if it has been a year or more. Oh," she hastened on, "not that I've had any more trouble like on that first night. Thomas, now don't you listen! But I'll say no more on that head anyway, Mama, since I've already told you about it, and Thomas shouldn't be hearing about such things.

"No, no," she went on hastily, smoothing down her faded skirts to cover her embarrassment, "the Earl has kept his word so far in that at least. After he discovered me in the servant's bedroom the next morning, he promised he'd give me more time to get used to the idea of our marriage before he would seek, as he called it, his
husbandly privileges
. I figure," she said, grinning widely, "I should be used to the idea in, oh, fifty or sixty years."

Gilly unbent her legs and turned onto her stomach in the soft grass. "So, dear Mama, I rest at night undisturbed. But the days?"

She screwed her face into an exaggerated grimace. "The days, Mama, are become quite intolerable. The man is impossible to please! First, he orders all of Sylvester's clocks—all but one per room that is—be hauled off to the attics. And then, before the job is half-done, he orders them back down to be stored in the theater. You remember, don't you Mama, that horrid drafty cavern with that hideous painted ceiling? I never could abide the thought of all those obese naked angels cavorting just above my head. The stage is near to crumbling, you must understand, and the velvet curtain is in tatters. Even the second curtain, that painting depicting The Hall's east prospect, is smoke blackened and torn in places."

She pushed an errant lock of hair from her eyes. "Now, just to make things worse, the bare board floor is completely covered with Sylvester's clocks, which the Earl has somehow decided must all be kept in working order until he rules out the possibility that one of them isn't the
endless time
Sylvester mentioned in that stupid poem. Olive tarried too long in the theater last week, winding the clocks, and the hour struck," Gilly went on, giggling. "Poor Olive! For the next two days she was even more deaf than Mrs. Whitebread. Now she refuses to enter the theater at all, and Lyle and Fitch have been given the job, which is the same as to say only half the clocks are ticking at any one time."

A bird landed in a branch above Gilly's head, and she gave herself up to its song for a moment before continuing with her story, careful to use her best vocabulary, so as not to let her mother think she'd forgotten her lessons.

"It was Lyle and Fitch who carried all the clocks to the theater under the Earl's watchful eye, and let me tell you
that
is very disconcerting! The two dears were so rattled they dropped that enormous sandglass Sylvester kept in his library. You remember it, don't you, Mama? It's nearly higher than me. Well, the bottom glass bulb sustained a hole you could put your fist through, and all the sand came pouring out of it and onto the carpet. I was sure the Earl would dismiss them on the spot, or at least as soon as he was through cursing them for clumsiness. But all he did was wink at me, smile that strange smile of his, and say—” Gilly tried to imitate her husband's aristocratic drawl— “Why do you tarry, wife? Fetch us some pails and shovels so we may commence building a sand castle.'"

Rolling onto her back with a thump, Gilly asked irritably, "How am I to ever feel comfortable with such a man, Mama? Only an hour earlier he saw me scrubbing down the stairs in the Great Hall, yanked me to my feet with no ceremony at all, and yelled that I was never, I repeat,
never
again to lift a hand to clean The Hall."

She pushed her chin toward her chest and quoted Kevin in her deepest, most cold and stern voice, "'When in the name of Hell and all the fiends do you think you will be reconciled to the fact that you are no longer a servant in this household? You are mistress here, madam, and the mistress of the house supervises the staff. She does not wallow in soap suds with them!'"

Gilly gave out with a deep sigh. "But the worst was yet to come, Mama. He grabbed me by the hand to pull me to my feet and immediately started in about the state of my hands." She held them up in front of herself, studying them as she explained. "He wanted to know why they were so swollen and sore looking. Of course I told him fast enough that chilblains are the badge of honest hard-working hands which, just as simply, he would never understand, as he probably hadn't done a day's work in his entire useless life. Well, he lifted one eyebrow at me—oh, Mama, you should see him do it. It's positively
lowering
the way he can cut a person to ribbons with those eyebrows of his, especially since I practiced lifting my eyebrows for three whole hours in front of a mirror and only succeeded in looking as if I had bit into something vile. Anyway, he lifted that damn, er,
drafted
eyebrow and looked down that sickeningly perfect nose at me and said, oh, so hoity-toity-like, 'Hands like yours show only that you have a strong back. So does a jackass. For myself, I prefer to find pride in an agile mind.' Then he ordered me to 'do something' about my hands and sashayed away to buff his nails or some other such mind challenging chore. I tell you, Mama, I've had happier days. And that, Mama and Thomas, is what I have been doing since last I visited you. Now let me tell you what Hattie Kemp did the other day."

In all, Gilly lingered above two hours in the cemetery, going over the events of her days as she had always done. But somehow this visit, like the visit made the day after her marriage, was devoted almost entirely to discussing her new husband.

She did tell her mother how Hattie Kemp had, once Kevin had proved himself an honorable man by marrying Gilly, reverted back to her usual style of cooking—plain but wholesome country fare supplemented by supplies the Earl had ordered from the village. When Kevin realized Hattie's earlier culinary disasters had been the result of the cook's poor opinion of the new master, he raised a royal tow-row that nearly ended with the summary dismissal of the woman, but in the end cooler heads won out and Hattie Kemp was allowed to stay. Mealtimes were no longer to be dreaded, so Kevin was saved the nuisance of having to hunt up both another cook and a face-saving position for Hattie, and only Gilly was not granted forgiveness in the incident.

While her husband-to-be was being starved to death for two days (or, as he had declared hotly, had been in danger of being poisoned), Gilly had been taking her usual hearty meals in the servants hall with the rest of the staff. And then to make Hattie Kemp's continued position as cook part of her demands before agreeing to the marriage? Why, it was the outside of enough to behave so underhandedly, or so Kevin had informed her, and then warned that he would not soon forget her deviousness.

Yet, as Gilly told her mother, that same man, when he discovered her taking baskets of food to the poor, had only smiled kindly and said it was a good thing she and Hattie Kemp were "doing" for the less fortunate on the estate.

Gilly had seen Kevin in the fields astride his spirited bay stallion, directing the workers without seeming the least bit autocratic. He appeared to know what he was about, too, and that had surprised Gilly, who had thought he'd find it impossible to distinguish vetch from midsummer corn,

With Walter Grey, the estate manager, by his side, the Earl rode the estate from dawn to dusk, checking on everything from the state of the laborers' cottages to the progress of the hop planting, to the maintenance of the threshing machines, to the proper rotation of fields according to the latest edicts of good organic farming.

As she told her mother, from believing her husband was not to be trusted out alone for fear he'd topple off a nearby cliff or some such typically foppish act of stupidity, Gilly had gone on to realize—grudgingly—that perhaps the man did know how to run the estate.

The people who depended on The Hall for their livelihood, all of the nearly six hundred of them, seemed to have begun to accept him as well. As he rode along the lanes the children would curtsy or raise their hats, and the men would nod their respect. The womenfolk—Gilly grimaced each time she was forced to witness it—positively fawned over the man, so impressed were they by his dress and manners. And his looks? Gilly unhappily admitted to her mother and brother that the earl's handsomeness might also be a part of the attraction.

In the final analysis, it was that rapid shifting of loyalty that cut at Gilly most hurtfully. Oh, Walter Grey was a good enough man as estate managers go, but he needed direction, and it had been Gilly's job these past three years to give it to him. Why Gilly? Why not, was what Gilly had thought at the time, seeing as how the old Earl was well past it, and with the exception of Walter himself, Gilly was the only person who could read and cypher well enough to maintain any sort of records.

If Gilly's mother had been alive, she could have told anyone that Gilly had since her earliest childhood harbored this need to take the whole world's troubles on her shoulders, as if she were responsible for everyone and everything she encountered.

Gilly had made a good job of it too, and it hadn't been through any fault of hers that The Hall had lost last year's harvest due to the disastrous wet summer. So had most of the country. The price of oatmeal and potatoes had trebled over the ensuing months, but such prices did little good for the estate that had no goods to be brought to the marketplace.

The workers didn't blame Gilly. They knew a combination of Sylvester's neglect and the failed harvest were the cause of their troubles. But if they looked to the new Earl to help get them out of this bind they were all in, it was only to be expected. After all, just how much can one young girl do?

Gilly couldn't really feel betrayed by the workers. She couldn't find it in herself to be angry. She could only pour out her heart to her mother and brother, telling them how useless she felt now that Kevin had taken over the running of the estate and had forbidden her to continue her duties inside The Hall. Why, if it weren't for Harry and the others she would feel that nobody at all needed her. This she did not tell her mother, of course, as she never mentioned Harry during her visits for fear of upsetting the woman.

At long last, having spent her budget of worries, complaints, fears, and Hall gossip—she had known her mother would appreciate Kevin's comment on Lyle and Fitch: "They are either painstakingly slow or diligently lazy, I cannot decide which," she rose to return to The Hall.

"Good-bye, Mama. Good-bye, Thomas. Rest well. Thank you again for letting me talk to you. I promise to come back soon and keep you informed as to how things are going. And please don't worry about me. I'll be right as a trivet once I figure out how to handle that husband of mine."

Only when she was safely on the other side of the cemetery gate did she add under her breath, "And just as I told Mama—that ought to take no longer than fifty to sixty years. But what am I to do in the meantime?"

#

Gilly was right. Kevin was busy about the estate every day from dawn to dusk. And every day he was discovering just how badly needed were the funds Sylvester had dangled before him-—how had Gilly said it—like a carrot in front of a donkey.