An Unmistakable Rogue (2 page)

He held her gaze. “But you must understand what I want, nay, demand of you, and why.”

“I am listening.”

“You must know, clearly, right from wrong, and teach those precepts to the children. Only in that way can you nurture them properly.”

Chastity considered the workhouse, where children died daily. She knew right from wrong, and leaving Matt, Mark, Luke and Bekah in that workhouse would have been wrong.

“If I find that you have acted in other than a moral, conscientious or lawful manner,” Mr. Sennett had continued. “You will lose Sunnyledge, and I will see that you never open a home for children, anywhere, ever.”

Chastity’s heart had raced as he spoke those words.

It raced now an entire day later, but she buried her guilt and worry. She had acted conscientiously and morally by telling the parish beadle she would raise the children. Taking them would have been legal, but for him, a corrupt church elder who sent them to the workhouse because she would not pay his wicked
price
.  

All would be well, she reassured herself as they continued their trek toward Sunnyledge. No man, save one, knew what she had done, and that man, she would never see, again.

In time, clustered cottages gave way to sprawling farms. Grasslands, divided by dry stone walls, became hilly uplands. Hillocks grew forested; roads narrowed.

By the time the valley before them revealed the jaunty jumble of structures, requisite to bustling village life, dusk streaked the sky with lavender. “This is it,” Chastity said, her sense of destiny so intense, a frisson of alarm stepped on its heels. “Painswick.”

By virtue of the steep cobbled track descending into the village, the children gamboled headlong hand in hand, Luke laughing all the way.

Amid hawkers’ songs and hot, spicy scents, Chastity admired a bonnet placed in a shop window by a barrel-bellied, frock-coated merchant. “Two pounds, three? That’s highway robbery,” she said.

Luke shifted the satchel that contained their clothes and William’s medical bag, and tugged at her sleeve. “I’m gonna buy that for you someday, Kitty.” As she bent to kiss his cheek, he ruffled her hair, freeing the powder she’d used to disguise and drear its chestnut hue.

After buying food and supplies, she bought her giggling band each a ha-penny pie and a peppermint stick for a thruppence. They ate while they watched village children roll misshapen hoops in the wheelwright’s dooryard.

Afterward, Chastity sought directions to Sunnyledge.

“Oh my, no,” said a buxom matron, all agog. “Not that God-forsaken place. It’s haunted, don’t’cha know. Many’s the night they’ve heard her pitiful wail, that lost soul searching for her missing babes. They died with her, some say, but their wee bodies were never buried.”  She whispered the last part.

Chastity held Bekah closer. “If you could direct us.”

The matron shook her head. “If you insist.” She pointed. “There it is, top ‘o the hill.”

A honey-gold manse stood guarding the valley, its chimneystacks straight as parade soldiers at full attention. Mullioned windows—as tall as the first floor, and wide as they were tall—reflected the sun, bright as that off the stone itself.

“It’s a bloomin’ castle,” Matt said.

“Magic,” whispered Luke.

Mark snorted. “Where our dreams will come true.”

“It is splendid,” Chastity said. “As if it’s made of gold.”

“That’s the sun on the stone—Painswick stone. The old Earl’s dead. That’s his house. You kin?”

“If you could tell me how to get there.”

“Go left at the yew row and take the hill straight up. Been abandoned for years. Except for a daft caretaker, now and again, most won’t go near the place.”

Chastity gave her thanks and they went on their way, the villager following. “It’s farther than you think. You got a key? Can’t get in, if you don’t have a key.”

Chastity kept walking.

“You’re braver than I,” the tenacious woman called from a distance.

Luke blew the shepherd’s horn Chastity had saved for him.
WARRONNK!

Mr. Sennett was right. Boys were noisy. She would never be able to thank the solicitor for giving her the use of Sunnyledge—though if he ever learned that she rescued the children
after
he set down his rules— Well, just imagining the consequences of her actions made Chastity shudder, even as Rebekah began to wail.

“How old is Bekah?” she asked the boys.

“Three ‘cept we dunno’ when we’re gonna’ be the next number,” Luke said.

“Don’t mind that noise she makes,” Matt said. “She does that lots. Wish she would talk, though.”

“She’s dumb.”

“That will be enough, Mark,” Chastity said, coming to a faltering stop with a shiver.

Sunnyledge may have looked warm and inviting from the vale, but up close, after dark, it looked decidedly bleak, forsaken, and forbidding.

The key was useless. A mere nudge opened the door, the wind taking it the rest of the way. With the children attached to her skirts, Chastity stepped inside, stifling a nervous urge to giggle. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

WARRONNNK!

The sound made Chastity shriek and fall against the door, a hand to her fast-pumping heart. “That will be enough, Luke. Anyone here has expired from fright by now.”

Chastity tried to lock the door, but the keyhole turned with the key, so she pushed a chair against it, cutting off the last sliver of moonlight. “Bother, I am such an idiot. I do not even have a candle.”

“I can see in the dark,” Matt said. “We hid in Aunt Anna’s cellar so long after she died, we never saw the sun.”

“Do you think you can find the kitchen?”

“I’m good at finding things. Be right back.”

Chastity sat on the floor, Bekah, Mark, and Luke, cozy and warm, nesting in her black wool skirts. For once, she was glad William had not seen fit to replace her religious habits during their short marriage. She had, however, removed all symbols of her religious life, so that her gowns looked more like widow’s weeds.

“Found the kitchen, Kitty. And candles,” Matt called.

A short while later, the children ate some of the bread and cheese she’d bought, as exhaustion overtook them, and a sense of destiny, profound and peaceful, enveloped her.

Settled for the night with Zeke, their lame rabbit, on a mattress plumped with Chastity’s aprons and nightshifts, one old habit and one Sunday best, Luke said they hadn’t been so comfy since Mum left.

“I worried,” Matt said with a yawn. “That you wouldn’t come for us at the workhouse, like you promised.”

Mark scoffed and rolled to his side, presenting his rigid back. “We would never have gone to that horrid old place, if you hadn’t turned us in.”

If she failed to breach that barrier Mark kept erected around his heart, Chastity feared it would become as hard as the stone in these Cotswold Hills.

How could he be so angry, yet cuddle his baby sister so lovingly? Perhaps this child, who professed to need no one, needed her even more than his brothers and sister did. One thing was certain; Mark would never forgive her for trying to gain their custody through the proper channels first.

After she arrived on Britain’s shore, she had gone on to William’s Aunt Anna’s as planned. There, she found that his aunt had died, leaving his young cousins, abandoned at her passing, hiding in her cellar to keep from getting separated or going to the workhouse.

Chastity had marched them to the Vicar to say she would take them. The Vicar passed her to the Curate, the Curate to the Beadle.

Chastity shuddered remembering the Beadle’s lustful suggestion as to how she could purchase them. Since she refused to pay his price, however, the Beadle had relegated
her
children to the parish workhouse with nary a blink.

So much for following the rules, Chastity thought, unable to forget Mr. Sennett’s words, “If I find that you have acted in other than a moral, conscientious or lawful manner, you will lose Sunnyledge, and I will see that you never open a refuge for children anywhere, ever.”

At the workhouse, children younger than hers, died. She thought about the baby girl born the week she worked there, while trying to get hers back. How she’d wanted to take that babe as well. She thought of Matt’s protectiveness, Mark’s anger, Luke’s trust, and Bekah’s cough.

In taking them, she
had
acted conscientiously and morally. Except for the Beadle’s lust, her guardianship would be lawful as well.

Mr. Sennett said he tried to bring the conditions of asylums and workhouses to the notice of people who could improve them, and their lack of interest angered him.

“Do you never get so incensed,” Chastity had dared to ask, knowing she planned to rescue William’s cousins the next day, “that you wish to take matters into your own hands?”

“We cannot give in to such,” he said. “To have lasting effect, reform must be undertaken in a lawful, orderly manner. There is never an excuse to breach rules.”

Chastity sighed. Having been an orphan, the solicitor lauded her wish to open a home where children without parents would be loved. She only hoped that he would come to understand that taking these few had been necessary.

She bent to them now—warm, safe, unafraid, bellies full—covered a shoulder, stroked a brow, and prayed, for their sakes, that all would be well.

Then found a chair in which to take down her hair, and examined the kitchen, aglow from a fire in the old stone hearth.

Sunnyledge—a haven—someday perhaps, a home.

* * *

The hell of it was, Reed Gilbride thought, rubbing the back of his neck, looking up at Sunnyledge, the house was so damned big, he could search for years and never find the truth of his birth. As for secrets, the place fairly reeked of them.

Even the cryptic note he had received added to Sunnyledge’s aura of mystery—a note that roused an anger, tempered oddly by hope. Such anger, he usually reserved for the people who gave him life and threw him away. And the hope? Well, that just made him madder ... until Sennett killed expectation by saying the note must be a hoax. The solicitor said he’d seen more than one, worded exactly the same way. He also suggested that a Barrington by-blow had no claim, here.

Still, Reed could not give up. As a child, he would have settled for knowing who his parents might have been. Now he bloody well wanted to know why he had not been good enough for them to keep. Who gave a helpless babe to the Gilbrides, of all people?

He led his horse around back to find it shelter.

Why did the woman who raised him—if you could call it that—refuse to talk about Sunnyledge? Why act as if the devil would swallow her whole, if she did?
Could
this place hold the key to his past? Him, the Earl of Barrington, as the note suggested?

Reed mocked himself with a chuckle, raised his collar against a cold drizzle, settled Stealth in a rickety old stable, returned and picked up his satchel.

He might be a bastard in more ways than one, but with or without Sennett’s approval, he needed to find out.

Now that Boney had been defeated, and he’d retired from the Guards, Reed looked forward to a life of peace and quiet, and the occasional willing woman. But first he must search for his roots, this being the place to start.

“Damn, it’s cold.” As if fate heard, a blast of wind and rain smacked him in the face and opened the door with a flourish—the thunderous crack of it hitting the wall loud enough to wake the Sunnyledge ghost herself.

Reed saluted and stepped inside, a sense of inevitability filling him, as if he had arrived after a thirty-year sojourn, turned an invisible corner, and could not return the way he had come.

What was more, he did not want to.

In the kitchen, Chastity jumped at the thunderous sound, and shot to her feet. After a frozen heart-pounding beat, arms and legs prickling, she located a meat cleaver in a kitchen drawer and closed her trembling fingers around its smooth bone handle.

CHAPTER TWO

As Reed knelt and searched his bag for a candle, the room seemed actually to brighten. He raised his head to see shadows shivering in slow motion. “What the devil?” He rose to his full defensive stance, and the room grew brighter still.

Silhouettes of stags’ heads stretched into grotesque shapes as a phantasm holding a candle appeared from behind the stairs.

Two things became etched on Reed’s brain at once; she had a face so white, she might
be
a specter, and the knife in her unsteady hand, sparkling off her candle’s flame, was not a figment of his imagination.

Did the mystical goddess, with an artless halo of russet waves, mean to end his journey here and now?

Not bloody likely.

She stopped, keeping between them the breadth of a stately foyer in decay, and she lifted that blade higher, her brazen scrutiny of his person gaining his grudging respect. “Who are you?” she asked—bold demand and stroking whisper in a French accent, her beguiling voice bringing him an unsettling sense of reliving the moment.

That her aspect bore a true netherworld quality, Reed dared not contemplate. “Who are you?” he countered.

“I— It isn’t polite to answer a question with a question.”

Despite her spectral beauty, her trembling response firmly adjoined her to an earthly plane, which moderated Reed’s disquiet and slowed the thumping beat of his heart. “What are you, a governess?”

At his question, the candle in her hand trembled the more, but she conquered her trepidation—he saw the effort it took—and squared her shoulders. “Teaching children is a noble calling,” she said, her voice aquiver. The wind from the open door whipped her cumbrous ebon skirts about her legs, calling for her shiver, and his ... awareness.

Any number of pleasant ways to warm her entered Reed’s addled brain, but he shut the door, instead. “Then you are a governess.”

He took a step in her direction. “No, and you are?”

She raised the knife and halted him in his tracks. “Not a governess either,” he tried, but failed, to charm her. He would more than frown if a stranger invaded his house, though it could
not
be hers. “You do not look as if you would steal someone’s heritage.”

“What?”

“Not important. My name is Reed Gilbride and I could use some work.” A position in the house would allow him to search—a place in her bed would not come amiss, either. Reed cursed his idiocy, even as his body began to rise to the challenge. “I intended to knock,” he said, to turn his thoughts. “But the wind opened the door before me.” He bent to examine the latch. “The lock is broken.”

“Thank you for the keen observation.”

Tongue as sharp as her blade and just as earth-bound, a tongue he would like to— “You’ll need a hand to repair it,” he said, “especially with a storm gathering just beyond. If you send me out on a night like this, I’m apt to catch my death.”

Reed envied that bite the goddess gave her full bottom lip, as she worried it with perfect white teeth.

“How do I know you are not a madman, escaped after years of grisly confinement?”

His next forward step, or his laugh, rattled her. “Listen,” he said. “If the Gilbrides taught their chil—the people under their roof, anything, it was honesty. I am no criminal.”

“Exactly what a criminal would say.”

“All right, I am a criminal, and all I need is an honest post to reform me. Is this your house?” She dressed too poorly for it to be so, but it should be abandoned, after all.

“I’m ... caring for the house.”

“You seem young for a housekeeper.”

Her chin rose. “I’m new to the position.”

That explained it; the note-sender did not know about the housekeeper, but why? His every turn, of a sudden, mired him in questions. “I need work.” Reed nodded toward the drunken staircase. “This place needs a caretaker.”

“I have nothing for wages.” She bit that poor, luscious lip again. “But I could use the help.”

Another forward step ... and Reed tumbled headlong into a pair of wide violet eyes. “I’ll work for a roof over my head and food in my belly,” he said, drowning happily in her amethyst gaze.

“You are hungry? I have food.”

So she knew hunger, did this ethereal creature with the heavenly voice and brave carriage, this woman unnerving him at every turn. Never mind this kinship he felt, though they only just met.

“What can you do in the way of work?” she asked.

As the oldest on a farm with more children than a schoolhouse? “I can do anything— I do not know your name.”

She lowered the knife a notch. “Chastity Somers.”

Chastity. That figured. He had known her five minutes, found himself ripe to seduce her—she had already seduced him—and her name was Chastity. He should take it as a sign, but in her voice, with that accent, her name sounded more like music than a warning. “I can do anything, sweet Chastity Somers. I can build it, fix it, grow it, weave it, thatch it.”

“Mr. Gilbride, you are a gift from above.”

That threw him. For a moment there, she reminded him of—

“You shall be the Sunnyledge caretaker. Heaven knows the house needs attention. Find yourself a place to sleep down here for tonight. I do not yet know where the bedchambers are.”

A
very
new housekeeper, and naïve. She would let him sleep in the house? Reed grinned.

Chastity stepped back. “I thought it best to explore in the light of day,” she said as she turned to go.

Disappointment gripped Reed.

“Oh.” She stopped. “Put one of the chairs against the door to secure it for the night.” Her chin rose again. “And Mr. Gilbride, I will be keeping this knife by my side all night.”

“Lucky knife.”

Her eyes widened as she turned away, again, and the light followed her from the room as the shadows’ dance slowed to a bleak stop. That she brought light into a room she entered crossed Reed’s mind. That he was an addled idiot followed.

After he chose a parlor in which to sleep, he found the library—where secrets go to hide. At the number of books it held, excitement and dismay warred within him. He could spend a lifetime searching here and never find out who he was.

Chastity fought to keep her knees from buckling all the way back to the kitchen. She placed the candle and knife on the table and fell into a chair. She had been frightened when she heard the noise, and saw him standing there, a Greek God with piercing topaz eyes, his height and breadth huge. But when she heard his voice, his laugh ... again.

Reed Gilbride—the man who caught her taking the children, who knew more than was safe for any of them—here at Sunnyledge. How could fate be so fickle as to bring to her door the one man she wished never to set eyes upon again?

Hiring him made sense, for if he stayed, he would not meet Mr. Sennett, or the authorities, anytime soon. Once he got to know the children, he could not help but understand that she had taken them to keep them safe. He would see that she loved them, that they needed her.

She would make him see.

He had not recognized her—of that she was certain—or he would have left posthaste. He disliked children that much. When hers woke, she would put them on their best behavior.

Panic struck then. Was she daft? Accepting a house, for heaven’s sake, on the basis of a home for ...
stolen
children? Allowing a strange man to move in?

In the last week, she had committed every sin she had been warned against her whole life—imprudence, willfulness, deceitfulness, vanity. What made her think the children would fare best with her? Four young lives were at stake, here. Chastity moaned and covered her face with her hands. Nightmares and she had not yet slept.

Perhaps that was it; she acknowledged her exhaustion. Everything would make sense in the morning. Closing her hand around the knife on the table, Chastity snuffed the candle and pillowed her head with her arms.

* * *

WARRONNNK. WARRONNNK.

Reed made to jump from the settee on which he slept, but knocked it over in the attempt, rolling from its tapestried back to the floor, tangled in his blankets, his ankles somehow caught.

On all fours, he shook the cobwebs from his brain, looked about him, tried to move, and realized he must be bound in some way.

In the dim, unfamiliar room, he saw a boy with a horn and reached, as the scamp prepared to blow the infernal thing again.

Ppfffft.
“Hey! Let me go!”

An older boy grabbed Reed’s boots and ran. A tiny girl took an armful of his clothes and scurried past.

“Damnation!” Grabbing horn-blower by the back of his trousers, Reed caught the girl thief’s dress, and she set up a wail set to pop his eardrums.

“I’m caught!” horn-blower bellowed. “Let go, you big bully!”

“Let them go,” a third boy yelled. How many were there?

Something struck him on the shoulders, rattling him to his bones. “I’ll let go when you lower your weapon, shoe thief returns my boots, and she-thief drops my clothes.”

The weapon—a chair—fell beside him. His clothes got tossed in an arc. Reed cursed and tried to shrug a shirt from his head. Horn-blower, despite Reed’s hold, gave another blast. She-creature wailed louder. Reed saw that he held a hank of her hair with her dress and let go. His hand free, he took the blasted horn and tossed it behind him, cringing at the sound of breaking glass.

Chastity woke with a start to the sounds of an uproar, her heart pounding with a need to protect, but the children were gone. She lit the candle, grabbed her knife, and ran toward the chaos, arriving in time to catch Rebekah sinking her teeth into Reed Gilbride’s thigh.

“Damnation!” the man swore as she bit him, and Chastity noted with grudging approval that he actually pried the child gently free, though Bekah held his flesh in her teeth like a dog with a bone.

“I’m going to thrash the lot of you, you miserable pack of scruffy bast—”

“Mr. Gilbride!” Chastity shouted.

Caught in the act of raising a table above the man’s head, Mark had the grace to stop and look sheepish when he saw her.

“These dirty little beggars tried to rob and assault me!” Reed shouted.

Rebekah had pulled away when Chastity spoke, but with the man’s insult, she bit into him again.

“Damnation!” Reed wound his arm about her little waist and pried her from his flesh, setting off her ear-splitting wail. “Believe me, Missy. That hurt me a hell of a lot more than it hurt you.”

“Unhand those children, you disagreeable man!”

“Believe your eyes, woman. ‘Twas I who was set upon, here. Look, the man-eater’s drawn blood.”

Chastity regarded his thigh as he knelt there, mostly covered by his blanket, and though it was still not quite dawn or light enough to discern details, he must be naked. He seemed to realize it at the same moment.

With a squeak, Chastity turned her back and blew out her candle, Mark dropped the table, and several sets of small arms closed about her.

Putting down her knife and candle, Chastity hugged each child in turn, reassuring herself, and them, that they were safe. “Who is missing?”

When the fourth hug came, she released her breath.

As dawn broke, Reed Gilbride stepped before her, hands on hips, now wearing nothing but a pair of well-worn buckskin trousers. His wide shoulders and hair-matted chest, his furrowed brow and whisker-shadowed jaw, put her in mind of a dark angel ... bent on revenge.

“Such a big brute,” she said, trying to regain her scattered wits in the face of his potent masculinity, “to be overset by a few, small children.”

His look turned incredulous. “Bedlamites! I’ve wandered into an escaping band of Bedlamites. They bound my ankles! Where are my boots?”

“Give Mr. Gilbride his boots,” Chastity demanded. “Now!”

No one moved.

“Return those boots this instant, or I will let Mr. Gilbride have at you.”

Matt pulled the boots from behind a cabinet and offered them with a long stretch of his arm.

“Thank you.” Reed took them none too gently. “Are these your children, Madam?”

“No.” Chastity felt Mark stiffen. “Yes!  Yes, they are.”

“No we’re not, Kitty.”

“Hush, Luke.”

Reed stepped back as if struck. “Good God, it’s
you
.”

“Oh, bother,” Chastity said.

“I can’t believe it. Damnation, woman, I thought you were alone, here, but ... children of all things.”

“Go away then, because we don’t like you, either.”

“Mark!” Chastity snapped.

Reed ran a hand through his hair and gazed out the window. “Children! Can’t abide the little beggars.”

“Do not speak of them in that insolent manner.”

“Ill-mannered children deserve insolence in return.”

“They have been
abandoned
.”

He faced her. “That does not give them the right to rob and assault. If it did, half of England would be thieves. Life is hard. They’d best learn that and be honest and upstanding, despite their misfortune. Punish them if they do wrong, like anybody else.”

“I will thank you to allow me to handle the children, Mr. Gilbride. They are
my
responsibility, after all.”

“On whose authority?”

She thought of her failure to save William, of the similar result if she failed the children. “On
God’s
authority.”

His laugh mocked her, the dimples in his left cheek and the center of his chin deep and ... woman-slaying.

Chastity’s anger became interest.  She swallowed and tried to ignore the pull. For the sake of the children, she needed to turn him up sweet. “These children are my family.” “Matt, take your brothers and sister to the kitchen. We will discuss your behavior later.”

They filed out, Bekah’s hand in Matt’s.

“Told’ja not to blow that stupid horn,” Mark said.

Matt sighed. “They were mighty fine boots.”

“Lizard’s eyeballs, Mark, why’d’ja hit ‘em?” Luke asked.

After they left, Chastity shrugged. “They’re only children.”

Reed righted the settee, knowing he should go. “Why did you take them?”

“They needed me.”

He snorted. “If you want children, get better-behaved ones. You know, there are more pleasurable ways to— Never mind. Why them?”