Linda Needham (14 page)

“W
hat is this thing, Hollie?”

Hollie was tying off the drying line when Chip sped past her and grabbed hold of the upright in a hug.

“It’s a printing press, Chip.” Barely so. She and Everingham had worked for the better part of the morning putting it together. She’d only needed him to help move the large iron pieces; she knew the smaller fittings as well as she knew her own hands. But he had stayed at her elbow, wedged his opinions and his questions into every joint and spring and lever, efficient and orderly in his assault on the Stanhope.

The man had eventually emerged the arrogantly masterful, ink-stained victor. All the parts
were back in their proper place, but he’d been a sore test of her patience.

And her heart. He had a wilfully distracting effect on her pulse and her focus—the bay-fresh scent of him, the midnight of his hair, the sinuous brawn of his arm muscles when he stripped down to his shirtsleeves. The glistening streak of ink across his jaw where he’d scrubbed with his knuckles in his battle with the platen spring.

He was a contrary man who filled her with profoundly contrary feelings. The powerful earl and the pressman. His scowling darkness and his reluctant smile, the way he’d fitted Chip so snugly against his broad chest when he’d carried him through the fog.

Not least of all, his maddening deference to her marriage vows. She’d have been well and truly kissed last eve if not for his blazingly misplaced honor. Not that she ought to be allowing him liberties, but just once, she would like to succumb to a bit of that potent appeal. One kiss. Maybe two.

That would be enough.

“What’s it do, Hollie?”

The man’s precious son was a different sort of distraction altogether, making her yearn for a warm hearth and a home full of voices, all the dear and everyday things that filled her dreams when she forgot that she was a radical reformer bent on spying. Which she’d done little of in the last two days.

“The press prints ink onto paper, Chip.” She bent and kissed the top of his head, left a bit of her heart there.

“Ink and paper like you write with?”

“In a way, it writes all by itself.”

“It does? What does it print, then?” He ducked beneath the print bed to push and poke.

“It prints almost anything, Chip. Pictures and newspapers and books. Like this one.” She held out a copy book of letters and numbers and turned to the front page. “See: ‘An apple is red.’”

“Does it say my name in there too?” He flipped through the pages with his quick little fingers.

“Not yet.” But it definitely should. Hmm…

But he’d already gone to the type cabinet. He had the top drawer open and was peering at a letter pinched between his fingers. “What’s this? There’s lots of ’em here!”

Hollie chased the little whirlwind, who was faster than his father but no less distracting and invasive. “Those are letters.” She picked a C out of its cubby and put it into his small palm. “Here’s the first letter of your name. C for Chip.”

“C-H-I-P!” he recited without a pause as he inspected the letter carefully, then peered into the type case. “Are all my letters in there? The H an’ the I an’ the P?”

“Every one of them. Would you like to see?”

“Oh, yes!”

This was the magical part, the thrill of printing. All the pieces coming together into the whole.

Amazingly, Chip stood stock-still at her elbow while Hollie dabbed the letters of his name one by one against an ink ball, then carefully imposed each onto a small sheet of newsprint. When she brought her hand away, Chip whistled.

“Does it really say Chip?”

“It really does.” An idea came to her with the force of a miracle: the perfect way to keep the boy occupied while his father learned a bit of fathering and Mumberton got a bit more rest. “How would you like to learn to read more than just your name?”

Chip’s chest broadened, nearly popping the buttons on his vest, his eyes alight. “I’d like that more than strawberries.”

“Would you be willing to work very hard if I help you at it?”

“You can do that, Hollie? Teach me to read all the words in this box?”

“More words that you can imagine, sweet.” She kissed the top of his head, and he shied her a smile.

It seemed a perfect plan, schooling the boy while she had the chance. But Chip’s face suddenly slid from utter delight to wide-eyed dread as he looked past her to the only man who could bring on such a dire face.

Everingham. Standing in the glass doorway to the garden, his linen sleeves once again pristine white, his fisted hands cleaned of ink. The afternoon light filtered through the door, catching his
profile perfectly, limning his fine nose and the brow that she’d nearly kissed last night.

Chip backed up against her, the paper with his name stamped on it crunching up in his hand, catching his father’s startled attention.

It was difficult to say who was more terrified at the moment, father or son.

Everingham’s scowled deepened, and Hollie was just about to clout him good with the leather ink ball when he shifted his shoulders and then strode purposefully into the room to stand in front of them, his hands clasped behind his back in a stern-browed and terribly overly fatherly way.

He rocked back on his heels and said to the open-mouthed boy, “What’s that in your hand?”

Chip jumped, then scooted backward into the folds of her apron and onto her shoes. Not exactly the approach she would have taken, but at least the man was making an attempt, this wayward lord of hers.

And that made her heart flutter madly, tickling absurdly across her ribs.

“It’s just my name, please, sir,” Chip whispered.

Charles felt like a big-booted ogre. Bloody hell, Miss Finch was right: the boy was utterly terrified of him! And for not a single reason in the world. He met the woman’s militant stare head on, and something in it sent him scrambling to recall her advice.

Something about…about…something. Hellfire!

“Show me,” he said, which roused still another frown out of the woman and fretted the boy’s forehead. Perhaps he’d barked it. “Please,” he added.

The boy remained sheltered in the skirt of her huge apron, his gaze flicking out from under his dark brows while he slowly unballed the crinkled page and finally held it up, tucked under his nose.

“Chip has learned to spell his name, my lord.”

The boy had, apparently. He then rattled off a short string of letters and then stood as still as a lead soldier, waiting for another order from him, another word.

Something encouraging, because it was marvelous indeed; it caught at his heart and his pride. Only six, and the boy was spelling.

“Excellent,” Charles said, with an emphatic nod that ought to end the matter. A fine word. None better for a son to hear from a father. But all he got for his effort was more wary staring from the pair.

Miss Finch at last made an extravagantly patient sound in her throat. “Excellent, indeed, Chip. Why don’t you take the paper and show Mrs. Riley what you’ve learned? She’ll like that.”

“She will, Hollie. And she won’t run me out of the kitchen.”

The woman’s eyes sparkled as she smiled fondly at the boy. “She might even find you a sweet.”

“Can I come back here an’ help you then?”

“Please do.”

The boy flew out the door without a backward glance, and Charles was left to face the woman who’d made a profession out of sitting in judgment on him.

And yet she had a smile caught up her damp eyes. “He’s a very quick study, my lord.”

Unlike me.
That sense of pride surged again, and his stomach calmed with relief that the boy wasn’t cursed as he was. “Is he?”

“A very sharp mind—like his father’s. But he needs someone to teach him regularly. I assume you’ll hire a governess for him soon, but in the meantime I’d consider it a great joy if you’d let me teach Chip to read.”

A joy? Painful old memories filled his chest to the brim, and a sudden fear that she knew somehow of his failings. That she was plotting an even more clever blackmail against him. He tamed his heart, but his question came out sharply. “Why?”

She snorted lightly, as though he’d asked why the boy ought to be fed.

“Because he doesn’t know how, because no one’s ever tried to teach them. Apparently the Bagthorpes’ cook told him once how to spell his name. Miraculously, he remembered most of it. But he needs more than that. And he’s certainly ready for it.”

“He’ll be schooled soon enough.” If he stays.
Though he’d begun to notice the ill-fitting quiet when the boy wasn’t in the room. Just as there was without Hollie.

“But what’s the harm in starting now, my lord? I’d love to be his teacher for a time.”

Charles turned away from her eagerness, making an unfocused study of a bolt in the upright. “What makes you think you could teach a boy his age how to read?”

“I was already reading at his age, whole newspapers. I can teach enough of the basics to give him a good start.”

But could you teach a grown man, Hollie?

“How would you do that?” The question slipped out of him like a confession, as though she’d cast a paralyzing spell over him, cracking open a window of hope that he couldn’t quite close.

“His letters to begin with. How to sound out the parts of the words so they make sense. And how to love them.” She made this magic of hers sound so simple, so orderly and possible. As though the letters didn’t dodge and change at random, weren’t forever shifting around on the page, tricking him, tempting him to believe in them as she did. “You’ve seen that he’s eager to learn. I know he’ll try.”

As though she understood what trying meant. “Bloody hell, woman, it takes more than a bit of trying.”

God knew he had tried and tried, and he had failed every time.

A lazy bastard, that’s what you are, boy. Stupid. Ill-gotten. No son of mine.

“You’re right. But I’ll make it as simple for him as possible. I’m not an ogre. Please, my lord.”

He wanted to say no, to shout it to the heavens, because he wanted no part of it, because even now his stomach was churning with a cold memory of recrimination and the shame of failure.

I raised a fool, damn you, boy!

Yet Charles had sworn that he would never treat a child as he’d been treated. And what would it hurt for Miss Finch to teach the boy how to spell a few words?

“Where would you do this teaching?”

She’d been hanging on the edge of his reply, ready to pounce should he refuse. His question softened her brow, and her voice went charmingly humble all of a sudden.

“In the gatehouse. After supper.”

“You’ve got this worked out, haven’t you?”

“It’s a simple thing, my lord. I think the world of my new little friend.” There it was in her eyes: the reach of her heart, the way she’d already enfolded the boy, the challenge she’d issued for him to do the same. A motherly sort.

And then he wondered if a babe was even now growing in her belly, wondered when she and her cowardly, inattentive husband had last
been together. If the man was even now skulking around the estate, looking for an entry point.

By God, how could he not be tearing up the countryside for her, for all that heady passion, for that astonishing smile, the scent of her hair, the silk of it?

“Do I have your permission, my lord?”

Christ, anything to keep her out of trouble while she waited to be rescued; anything to keep himself from following after her like a besotted fool. “You’ll conduct these lessons here in the conservatory, where I can keep an eye on you.”

She laughed gently. “Are you afraid I’ll corrupt your son with my radical leanings?”

His son. “I’m utterly terrified.”

“You should be.” She was obviously pleased with herself, with him. “I’ll need chalk and a free-standing chalkboard and a few small ones.”

She started scribbling on a scrap of paper, so dreadfully free with her words.

“Give Mumberton your list.”

“Oh, and one more very important thing, my lord.” She stuck out her hand. “I need the devil’s tail. You’ve hidden it somewhere, and I can’t work the press without it, remember.”

How could he possibly forget? “Will after supper do, madam?”

“I suppose it must, my lord.”

Hollie kept her smile to herself as she watched the man leave through the garden door without a backward glance. Let him think he held the key
to Captain Spindleshanks’s seditious tracts. He didn’t realize that it wasn’t just the press that was important.

The words were made with letters.

And there were great handfuls of them in the bag she’d taken off to the gatehouse. With a chase and a print block smuggled there in her huge apron pockets, she could compose to her heart’s content in the privacy of her bedchamber, and then steal a moment with the Stanhope when Everingham wasn’t looking.

He was a vigilant man, but she would have to be more so. More devious than she’d ever been as Captain Spindleshanks. And if Charles happened to be her target, then so be it. The fault was his, because the truth was in his power and he chose to ignore it.

But the idea of deceiving the great earl of Everingham wasn’t sitting as comfortably as it had a few days ago.

He wasn’t supposed to be gentle or aching or anything but unremittingly wicked. He certainly wasn’t supposed to be redeemable.

Deceiving Charles Stirling was getting easier by the hour. Deceiving herself, her heart, was becoming impossible.

“T
hat big hunter’s in his stall, m’lord, champin’ for a hard workout.”

“I’ll give him just that, Carlson,” Charles said, taking Briscoe’s bit and bridle off the peg. He was pleased that he’d only sought out Miss Finch in the conservatory twice that morning. That he’d stayed with her in the gatehouse last evening only long enough for two proper cups of tea. God knows he’d wanted to stay much longer, and for far more than tea. But he’d resisted, had gone back to his cold cell and a monkishly ice-cold bath.

Hellfire! “How does the rest of the stock look, Carlson?”

“Every one of them fine and out to their pasturing, sir.”

“I’ll take a look while I’m about.” Charles left the tack room and walked down the corridor of empty stalls to the windowed end of the western row. He’d be gone most of the day to view the quarry road at Wheelwright and to mark out the site of two new dower cottages at Grompton.

If Miss Finch needed the devil’s tail for her song birds, she’d just have to wait till the evening.

Briscoe wickered softly to him and tucked his nose under Charles’s hand. But the horse had an odd, skittish look about him, his eyes wide, his ears flicking and flattening in a way he’d never seen before.

“Hold yourself, Briscoe. You’ll be out of here and running free in a moment.”

Briscoe took the bit as though he wanted to be long gone from the stall.

“Woah, there, boy.” Charles stroked the sleek neck and slipped the bridle over Briscoe’s ears. He would have led him out into the corridor but for the sudden sun-gilded rain of straw cascading from the loft above, followed immediately by a scraping sound—something larger than a cat. He shut the stall gate and eased out into the aisle.

“Who’s there?”

The rain stopped, and the sounds. The feed was in from the fields, stored in the loft for the winter. There shouldn’t have been anyone up there.

“This is Charles Stirling, whoever you are. Come down here at once.”

The stillness lengthened. And then, “I can’t, sir.” It was the littlest voice he’d ever heard, squeaky with a fearfulness that made his stomach lift and then fall like a stone.

“Chip?”

The quiet and the rain of straw came again, landing on his shoulder and Briscoe’s rump. “Yes, sir.”

The boy was not ten feet over his head, able enough to talk, hardly in mortal danger, yet Charles’s heart was racing at a full gallop. “You can’t get down?”

“Nope.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, sir.”

“Stuck on something?”

Silence from the straw again, and then came a teary admission. “I’m scared.”

His heart gave a leaping loop that sent him to the post ladder. “I’m coming right up, boy.”

Charles made the floor above in three bounds and came face to face with the woefullest little fellow he’d ever seen.

“Hello,” Charles said simply, because Hollie had said it was an excellent place to start.

“Hello, sir.”

His next impulse was to instruct the boy on how to get oneself down out of a loft; turning around and hanging on with one’s hands, and
trusting one’s legs until they found purchase on the first rung of the ladder.

But the boy’s face was a mask of hopeless terror. And Charles wouldn’t have wanted to hear that from his own father at the tender age of six. He’d have wanted to…well, to fall into his father’s arms and feel that nothing in the world could hurt him now.

“It’s a way down, isn’t it, Chip?”

The boy snuffled and nodded. “A long way.”

“When did you climb up here?”

“Right after breakfast.”

Three hours ago. “Hungry again?”

“Yessir.”

“Let’s get us down from here, then. Can you hold onto my neck?”

The boy scanned his face, skeptical at first, then resolute.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“You’ll have to scoot forward a little and get up onto your knees. I won’t let you fall.”

Chip caught his lip with his teeth and pushed himself to his knees. “Like this?”

“Exactly. Very good, Chip.”

With nary a grunt of warning, the boy launched himself forward and gripped Charles around the neck in a stranglehold, scrubbing his teary cheek against Charles’s eye.

“Well, yes, Chip,” he said calmly, thankful that he’d been holding onto the post. “That’ll do fine.”

The boy clung to him like a limpet as Charles eased him over the side and climbed down the ladder with him. Chip clung to him even after that, until Charles knelt all the way to the ground and let off his passenger.

Charles remained on his knee as the boy backed up against the stall door and fixed his eyes on him in that terrified silence.

Repairing the short distance seemed vastly important. “What were you doing up there?” A stupid question. He was a boy; boys climb around in haylofts. “Never mind, Chip. Just tell someone next time.”

“You, sir?” He scraped at his nose with his sleeve.

Charles stood and nodded. “That would be fine.” More than fine, he wanted to add.

“Because I don’t think Mumberton could come and get me as good as you did, sir.”

A zinging kind of pride filled up Charles’s chest and stung the backs of his eyes. “Mumberton tries his best.”

“I know, sir.”

Charles cleared his throat of a restricting lump. “So you weren’t scared?”

“Maybe at first.”

Briscoe chose just that moment to reach his huge head over the stall door and breathe a snort against the top of the boy’s head, rocketing him across the aisle and sending his arms around Charles’s legs.

“He’s big!”

“He’s an old softie.” He wasn’t, but the boy didn’t need more terror, and Briscoe
was
even-tempered. Charles patted the little shoulder, marveling at the miniature construction of bone and muscle, the vulnerability. “Ever been on a horse?”

“No.” With a whole lot of head shaking.

“Would you like to ride?”

Chip gasped and pointed to the hunter. “On him?”

“I’ll keep hold of you.” Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out a lump of sugar. “Give him this, and he’ll be your friend for life.”

The boy looked skeptically brave as he extended the sugar on his palm, ready to yank his hand away. But Briscoe gently nibbled at it with his lips and a snort, and Chip squealed in glee.

“What’s his name?”

“Briscoe.”

“What does he eat for breakfast?”

“Oats. Now let’s find
you
some food before we go.”

All the way into the stable yard, into the plowed fields, and along the edge of the limestone quarry, Chip asked an unending flood of questions, offered bits of boyhood wisdom, and showed a fearlessness that nearly brought Charles to his knees in terror.

“Let’s go show Hollie what we can do!” Chip’s
little heels popped against Briscoe’s back, his legs too short to reach the horse’s flanks.

Feeling suddenly skilled at fathering yet nervous as hell, Charles led the hunter and his charge around the corner to the front of the manor, prepared to show off to Miss Finch.

“Looka there, sir!”

A vaguely familiar flashy black coach sat in the drive. A footman perched on top, and the two horses were matched bays.

Lord Bowles. Bloody wonderful.

He was standing on the front steps, talking with Miss Finch. Dressed to the nines and gushing over the woman.

Charles would have gladly gone another month without a visit from the blustering young lord, but there was a report to compile, answers to find. He owed the woman at least a nod toward the facts she’d offered.

“Hollie, look at us!” Chip was waving both arms at her from atop the horse. A magnificent smile lit her face as the noonday sun spun its gold into the strands of her unbound hair.

She waved her arm, and Bowles turned, shielding his eyes from the glare. Then he left Miss Finch and met Charles at the base of the stairs, his hand extended.

“Afternoon, Everingham. I say, who is this young man?”

Charles looked to the woman at the door,
knew that she had heard Bowles’s question, just as the boy had heard it. “My son, Bowles. Chip.”

Charles could see the instant, erroneous, connection that Bowles made. The woman waiting for them on the stairs and the son obviously born on the wrong side of the blanket. But the man had the sense, the survival instinct, to leave the rest of his questions unasked, piled up for the gossip mill to sort through and pass judgment upon.

Charles caught the full force of Miss Finch’s approving gaze against his chest. She’d not only heard Bowles’s question, she must have heard his own answer.

The boy was his. A simple fact that had begun to crowd his lungs with sunlight, that tattered his breathing when he looked into the little face.

Bowles sounded taken aback. “Well, I say, then, Lord Everingham. Very good, Very good. And I’ve brought you news from Sidmouth.”

Miss Finch hurried down the stairs. She winked at Charles as she took the reins out of his hands, and sent his head spinning with the stunningly intimate brush of her fingers against the inside of his wrist.

“I’ll take care of Chip, my lord.”

The boy was already leaning down toward her from the saddle, his cheeks crimson, his dark curls lifted by the breeze. “We rode everywhere, Hollie.”

“You look like a brave warrior up there, Chip. I want to hear all about it.” She flashed Charles another heart-swelling smile, then led the boy and the horse away.

Her acknowledgment of his progress in the art of fatherhood set well and deeply in his chest. It seemed important here in the harshly examining light of the day, with Bowles looking on and his son twisted around in the saddle, grinning like blazes at him, for her to know that he wasn’t a brute, that he’d taken her daunting advice and had found it priceless.

Charles dragged his attention from the woman and his son and the rump of that great, patient beast of a horse.

“Come in, Bowles. I haven’t got all day.”

At least, he hadn’t time for the blustering young lord who followed him up the stairs and into the huge house, which was fast and firmly becoming the home it had never been.

Because of you, Hollie Finch, and your indelible heart.