Midwinter Manor 2 -Keeper's Pledge (3 page)

“It’s my brother I’m worried about,” Danny said wryly, closing the door behind Philip. He didn’t move to take Philip in his arms as he usually did.

“What is it?” Philip asked, his good mood evaporating with the dew.

“He told me, last night, there’d been some talk in the village. About you and me. About us being more to each other than we ought.”

Ice crystals formed in Philip’s chest. “But—but they can’t have any proof, can they? We haven’t been seen?”

“No, but….” Danny turned away, sighing heavily. “There’s more. See, I used to be friends with the blacksmith, Tom Fisher.”

Philip had no trouble reading between the lines here. “You mean you were lovers.” He tried not to be affected by it; it was all in the past, for God’s sake. But his heart was heavy.

“Aye—least, it was more like fooling around with each other. Just when we got the chance.” Danny looked up. “Not like you and me,” he said earnestly.

“So what is it?” Philip asked. “Is he threatening to tell? Blackmailing you?”

“No! Nothing like that,” Danny said, sounding horrified. Philip relaxed an iota. “But, well, his wife came home unexpected like, and found him with another man. She threw them out of the house and they’ve not been seen since, and it’s all the talk ofthe village.”

Philip swallowed. Lord, what a thing to have happen. “But what are they to do with us?”

“Well, everyone knew me and Tom Fisher were close, before you and me were. So there’s folk as have put two and two together, or so Toby says.”

“About us, you mean? About our relationship to one another?”

 

Danny nodded.

That was how it started, wasn’t it? With people talking. And before you knew it, there was a scandal if you were lucky, and a court case if you weren’t. Philip sank into a chair, feeling queasy. “These men—is there to be a prosecution?”

“Have to find ’em first, wouldn’t they? But I don’t reckon so. It’d just be Meg Fisher’s word against theirs, and the whole county knows Tom and his wife don’t get along too well.”

Philip supposed that was hardly surprising. It couldn’t be easy for the poor woman. And Danny had suggested that he, Philip, should get married?

“So any road,” Danny continued, staring at the wall. “I reckon we’d best be careful for a while. Not see too much of one another. Keep it tobusiness between us.”

“Keep it to…. You’re not suggesting we… we stop seeing one another?” Philip found it hard to talk around the pain that shot through his chest at the very thought.

Danny whirled. “No! Lord, no. We just need to be careful for a while, that’s all. At least until after your guests have been and gone.” He crouched down by Philip’s chair, and placed a hand on his knee. “I just want you to be safe. You’ve got more to lose than I have here.”

Philip covered Danny’s hand with his own, its paleness contrasting with Danny’s tanned skin. “I have, haven’t I?” he whispered. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Danny smiled, a little, and shook his head. “That weren’t what I meant, and you know it. Reckon I’d be pretty lost without you too.”

He wouldn’t, Philip knew. Danny would be sad for a while if they parted, and then he’d find someone else. There was always someone else to be found for a man like Danny— young, handsome, strong, and so very kind. It was both a pain and a comfort to think of it. “We’ll be careful,” he said, holding tight to Danny’s rough, warm fingers.

Danny nodded, and then he grasped Philip’s hand tight and stood, pulling Philip out of the chair. Taken by surprise, Philip stumbled, falling by happy accident against Danny’s broad, strong chest. Instinctively, he sought its warmth and protection.

“I’ve got you,” Danny whispered. His arms encircled

Philip, squeezing him almost painfully tight. Philip wouldn’t have asked him to loosen his grip for the world, but he had only moments to enjoy their closeness as Danny continued. “And now I’d best let you go. Best start as we mean to go on.”

He suited the action to the words, even stepping back a pace, and Philip felt himself abandoned, a chill seeping through his limbs and into his heart. “No,” he protested almost without thought.

“We’ve got to,” Danny insisted, his face pained. Philip took a calming breath. “I meant…. Not without a kiss.”
Please
.

Danny’s brow cleared a fraction. “Aye, I reckon we could chance a kiss.” He stepped forward once more and took Philip’s face in his hands. They were much of a height, he and Danny, with Philip perhaps just a fraction taller. Danny tilted his face, and their lips met, softly at first, then more fiercely. If this was to be the memory that would sustain them over the weeks ahead, Philip didn’t want it to be of a perfunctory kiss, such as one gave to an aunt. He tried to pour all his passion, all his longing into his lover, and Danny responded, his mouth opening to Philip’s onslaught. Philip wanted to taste every inch of it, to burn into his memory the sensation of Danny’s body pressed against his own, the heat that rose in his groin. He could feel Danny’s own excitement—and then Danny broke the kiss and stepped away from him. “Best not,” was all he said, his words like a knife.

They stood there for a moment, breathing hard, gazing at one another. “It won’t be forever,” Danny whispered. “Just until the talk dies down.”

“Yes,” Philip said, because he had to. “Just… just a short while apart.”

 

He turned to go, his chest feeling hollow and his heart aching with cold.

T
IME
dragged wretchedly for Philip, as he nervously awaited the seventeenth. Everyone on the estate was busy, it seemed, preparing for the invasion, but the master himself could find little to do save miss his lover and dread the influx. Oh, he saw Danny still, but it wasn’t the same, greeting one another with careful formality when their paths met around the estate. Philip wondered what the servants thought of it all. They must have noticed Danny wasn’t around the house as he used to be. Perhaps they thought there had been a falling-out. Did they welcome it? Had they felt all along his close friendship with his gamekeeper was an unseemly state of affairs?

Not even Standish betrayed the slightest clue, however, and Philip didn’t quite dare to ask.

He was glad, in a way, when the seventeenth finally rolled around and brought with it the dreaded announcement: “Mr. Cranmore and Mr. Matthew Cranmore have arrived, sir.”

Philip jumped up nervously as Standish showed his guests into the drawing room. Frederick looked much as Philip remembered him: tall, slightly ponderous, with prematurely faded brown hair. Philip always had to struggle to remember that he himself was in fact the elder. “Frederick, good to see you again. It’s been some years, hasn’t it?”

“Far too many, Philip. Far too many,” Frederick agreed politely.

 

“And your, ah, wife?”

“Oh, Millie and her sister are motoring down together. Should be here directly—Lucy’s not one of your nervous woman drivers.”

“The last time we met,” a light baritone chipped in, its tone amused, “I imagine I was still in short trousers.”

Philip’s eyes widened in surprise as the voice’s owner stepped out from Frederick’s shadow. “Matthew? I should hardly have known you!” And indeed, this was certainly not the scrape-kneed young rapscallion Philip had been preparing himself for. Matthew Cranmore was still somewhat shorter than his brother, and noticeably slighter of figure, but nevertheless quite clearly a man now. He wore his dark, almost black hair unusually long—surely that wasn’t the fashion nowadays? His clothes, too, tended a little toward the flamboyant, his jacket noticeably tapered at the waist and his tie wide and brightly patterned in a floral design, as if it had secret yearnings to become a cravat. It all suited his sensual, almost petulant features rather well.

“I’m up at Cambridge now, Cousin Philip,” Matthew said in a slow drawl, quite unlike his brother’s clipped, businesslike tones.

“Oh, really?” Philip frowned. “I thought you attended Oxford, Frederick.” Philip was an Oxford man himself, and was rather surprised to find a family member having defected to “the other place.”

“I did indeed. Which was, it seems, ample reason for young Matthew to buck the family trend.” Frederick shook his head slightly. The two of them seemed to Philip to be more like disappointed father and wayward son than brothers. He would have expected the seven-year age difference between them to have seemed to narrow after— what was it now? Good Lord, twelve years.

“I do like to assert my individuality,” Matthew agreed, with the suspicion of a flutter of alarmingly dark, curled eyelashes. Philip stood rooted in shock, with a sudden inkling as to what kind of men “the wrong sort” might in fact have been. The queers of Cambridge must have been falling at this young charmer’s feet. Much as he himself had fallen for Robert at Oxford, Philip thought with a pang of nostalgia.

“Well!” he said brightly. “I’ll let you two get settled in. Standish, would you show my cousins to their rooms?” “Cousin Philip, you disappoint me. I was hoping you’d take me upstairs yourself,” Matthew said with a pout.

Good heavens, was he actually
flirting
? Philip was saved from having to gather his somewhat scrambled wits and make an answer by Frederick’s gruff response. “Don’t be an idiot, Matthew. Philip will want to wait down here for the girls.”

Philip, the man himself decided, would want to pour himself a stiff brandy and soda as soon as they’d left the room. He wasn’t at all sure he was up to several weeks of young Matthew’s company. What on earth had he been thinking, inviting this invasion? He wished heartily he could tell the demands of hospitality to go to hell and escape to Danny’s cozy cottage. Danny wouldn’t be there, of course— he’d be out about the estate at this time of day—but Philip would still be able to feel his presence in every room, even lie down in the bed they’d shared so often and breathe in his earthy, woodsy scent.

Just thinking about it brought physical pain. He’d lamented many times that they couldn’t live together in the manor house as man and, well, wife, although which of them, in that case, would fulfill the more female role Philip didn’t quite care to examine. It hadn’t occurred to him how lucky he’d been to have this little bolt-hole, this escape from the responsibilities of life. Not until their self-imposed caution of the last few weeks had denied it to him. They’d been the longest weeks of his life.

There had been, so far as Philip knew—and he’d made Danny promise to tell him any news, good or bad, at once— no further repercussions from the villagers’ gossip. Indeed, Danny told him one morning as they met to discuss the warrens, Tom Fisher had slunk home after the first week and had been taken back by his wife. Evidently she’d already been sick enough of sudden poverty to listen to her husband’s pleas that it’d been a bit of drunken foolery, and the other man the instigator. What had become of the conveniently missing scapegoat Philip could only speculate, but he had, it seemed, been an itinerant farm laborer. Presumably he’d found a job far enough away for the scandal not to have followed him.

Surely now Philip and Danny might relax their code of conduct a little? Spend some time together now and then? Philip had a feeling it might be the only thing that would save his sanity in the weeks ahead.

He shuddered, then took a deep breath, feeling a little ashamed of himself. It was only a family gathering for Christmas, for heaven’s sake.

Chapter 3

T
HE
ladies arrived a good half hour after their menfolk, in a rather smart-looking green Morris Cowley with mud spatters up one side. Having been pacing the hallway, unable to relax until the last of these introductions were over, Philip was in an excellent position to see them alight.

Millicent Cranmore was a smallish, slender woman with a fashionably boyish figure. Indeed, so far as Philip could judge these matters (which was, he supposed, not very far at all), everything about her was fashionable, from her shingled hair to her buckled shoes over flesh-colored stockings. However, instead of the polished, sophisticated air for which she was presumably striving, all this modernity made the woman inside look curiously old-fashioned. Beneath her modish accoutrements, Millie looked pale and ill at ease.

Her elder sister, Lucy Shorwell, on the other hand, seemed utterly relaxed, though her skirts were far too long even to Philip’s eye, and her hair, although bobbed, gave the impression of having been hacked short more for ease of management than for any fashionable ideals. Having presumably recognized that her figure was too full to carry off the gamine look, it seemed Lucy had resolutely refused to make any attempt to conform. It made her appear the far more natural of the two of them.

He gathered his courage to greet them as they approached the front door. “Miss Shorwell? And Mrs. Cranmore. Delighted to meet you.” Philip shook hands with them in turn, and despite his nerves, noted with amusement that Millicent’s handshake was as limp as might be expected, while her sister’s was as firm as any man’s.

“Oh, call me Lucy, won’t you? ‘Miss Shorwell’ makes me feel like an elderly spinster.”
Philip and Millicent were then obliged to offer their own Christian names up for public consumption, but on the whole Philip found he minded it much less than he would have thought. One could hardly avoid being on first-name terms with one’s—what? Cousin-in-law?—and to extend the familiarity to her sister did not seem so great a hardship when the sister in question was such an easygoing person as Lucy.
“I, ah, trust you had a pleasant journey?” Philip offered, having racked his brains for some conversation. “Frederick and Matthew got here a short while ago.”

“Damn!” Lucy swore carelessly. “I was hoping we might have beaten them. This is all your fault, Millie,” she added good-naturedly. “If only you hadn’t made me stop on the way!”

“I wasn’t feeling very well,” Millicent protested weakly. “You know it always scares me when you drive like the wind. Freddie doesn’t drive so quickly when I’m in the car,” she added with a show of spirit.

“Frederick doesn’t do anything quickly,” came the droll retort. “Oh, don’t make that face at me. You know I don’t mean anything by it. He’s the steady sort, Frederick. Good husband material. You two go well together.”