Only a Kiss (11 page)

Gangs? Violence? Enforcement? In the olden days, maybe. The old-timers did tell some tall tales that would lift the hairs on the back of your neck, but no doubt they were just that—
tall
tales with no real truth to them. All they were good for was to make the nippers’ eyes grow big as saucers and get them calling out for their mams in the middle of the night. These days they were a law-abiding lot, they were.

There was definitely smuggling in the area, then, Percy concluded as he walked back to his horse and rode home. And it was clearly organized for maximum efficiency, with a leader and rules and a sure way of enforcing secrecy.

He did not particularly care if there was smuggling or not. It was a fact of life and was never going to end. There was no point in getting all excited and righteous about it unless one were a revenue man or a riding officer—or unless one’s own property was sometimes used as a transportation route or even for storage, as the cellar of the dower house had once been. And unless the servants in one’s employ were being terrorized and even harmed, presumably so that they would keep their mouths shut.

And,
he wondered suddenly, arrested by the thought, unless the room one occupied at night were facing full-on to the sea so that on some dark and moonless night one might, if one happened to be awake, have a panoramic view of a fleet of small boats rowing into the bay below from a larger ship anchored some distance out and of a band of smugglers appearing through the break in the headland loaded to the gills with boxes and casks?

Was
that
the explanation for damp beds and walls and soot and thick, opaque curtains?

He tried to picture Crutchley with a cutlass between his teeth and a patch over one eye. He found himself smiling at the mental image his mind created. But he had thoroughly aroused his own curiosity.

He rode back home and tethered his horse in the paddock behind the stables rather than leading it straight inside to be tended. He instructed Mimms, his own groom, to make himself scarce for at least the next half hour, and went in search of the limping stable hand he had seen a few times.

He was a thin, ginger-haired man who must be in his middle twenties if he had been fourteen when Lady Barclay went off to war with her husband, though he could easily have passed for thirty or forty or more. His legs were noticeably crooked. His face was pale and curiously dead looking. He was mucking out a stall when Percy hailed him.

“Bains?”

“M’lord?” He stopped what he was doing and looked in the general direction of Percy, round-shouldered and shifty-eyed.

“Walk out to the paddock with me,” Percy said. “I am a bit concerned about the right foreleg of my mount.”

The man looked surprised. “Shall I fetch Mr. Mimms?” he asked.

“I have just sent Mimms on an important errand,” Percy said. “I want
you
to take a look. You were personal groom to the late Viscount Barclay once upon a time, were you not?”

Bains looked further surprised. But he set aside his fork, brushed straw from his coat and breeches, and stepped outside. Percy waited until he had gentled the horse with skilled hands and crooning voice and was bent over its foreleg. They were out of earshot from the stables.

“Who did it to you?” he asked.

He did not expect an answer, of course, and he got none. Well, almost none. Bains did straighten up sharply.

“Who did
what,
m’lord?”

“Keep working,” Percy said, leaning his arms along the fence. “In all fairness, I did not expect you to come out with a name. Will you answer a few questions with
yes
or
no,
though? Viscount Barclay was opposed to the smuggling that was going on in this area, was he not?”

Bains was carefully examining the horse’s leg.

“I was just a lad,” he said. “I was not his lordship’s
personal
groom.”

“He opposed smuggling?”

“I knew his opinions on horses,” the man said. “That was all.”

“Did you too voice an objection to smuggling after he had gone?” Percy asked. “Because you admired him so much?”

“I wanted to go with him,” Bains told him. “I wanted to be his batman, to look after his things and him. My dad wouldn’t let me go. He was afraid I would get hurt.”

“Ironic, that,” Percy said. “You liked Viscount Barclay?”

“
Everyone
liked him,” Bains said.

“And admired him?”

“He was a fine gentleman. He ought to have been—”

“—the earl after his father’s passing?” Percy said. “Yes, indeed he ought. But he died instead.”

“That Mawgan went with him instead,” Bains said. “Just because he was Mr. Ratchett’s niece’s boy and had pull and was eighteen years old. But he was no good. He ran away in the end. Said he was foraging for firewood up in them foreign hills when the frogs came and took his lordship and her ladyship. But I would bet anything he was hiding among the rocks scared as anything and then ran away. I would have saved them if I had been there. But I wasn’t. There is nothing wrong with this horse’s leg, m’lord.”

“I must have just imagined that he was favoring it on the way back up from the village, then,” Percy said. “It is always as well to check, though, is it not? Did you try to stop the smuggling here so that Lord Barclay would be proud of you?”

“There is some smuggling going on up the Bristol Channel way, or so they say,” Bains said, straightening up again. “And some over Devon way. But I never been farther from home than ten miles, if that, so I wouldn’t know for sure.”

“Or did you flatly refuse to join the gang?” Percy asked. “Or threaten to expose them to the revenue men? No, don’t answer. There is no need. Take one last look down at that leg. I will do so as well. One never knows who is watching, does one, even if we cannot be heard. Nothing? I am glad to hear it. Off with you, then. You might as well take the horse with you.”

Bains made his way back to the stables, leading the horse. It was obvious that every step was painful to him. Percy wondered if the old earl had hired a reputable physician to set his broken legs. Soames? He wondered too just how badly they had been broken.

He was going to have to stop all this, he thought as he made his way back to the house. He must be very bored indeed if he was starting to fancy himself as some sort of Bow Street Runner. He was going to be getting himself into trouble if he was not careful. And he really did not want to be thinking about smashed legs and dark coves on moonless nights and weighty kegs being carried up that cliff path and shady characters breaking into the cellar of the dower house beneath the very feet of the marble lady.

Or of himself dashing to her rescue, sword flashing in one hand, pistol brandished in the other.

Did
he owe her an apology? She had been a full participant in that kiss last night. But what gentleman asked a lady with barefaced cheek if she had been raped? The very thought that he had done just that was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat.

*   *   *

Imogen was kneeling in the grass the following morning, looking at what was definitely a snowdrop, though there was no blossom yet. Even the frail shoot, though, was a welcome harbinger of spring. And surely the air was marginally warmer today. The sun was shining.

The work on her roof was finished. Mr. Tidmouth had been paid, and he and his men had gone away. He had assured her that the roof was good for the next two hundred years at the very least. She hoped it would not leak the next time there was rain.

She ought to walk down into the village and call upon Mrs. Park to see if she had taken any harm from her outing to the assembly. She ought to call at the vicarage and let the girls twitter at her about the dance and their conquests there—their parents always discouraged frivolous talk, but girls sometimes needed someone to whom they could twitter to their hearts’ content. She ought to go up to the hall to assure Aunt Lavinia that the dower house was perfectly comfortable again. She ought to write an answering letter to Gwen, Lady Trentham, Hugo’s wife, who had written to inform her that young Melody, their new daughter, appeared to have recovered from her colicky, crotchety start to life before Christmas and was eagerly anticipating her journey to Penderris Hall with her mama and papa in March. She ought to . . .

Well, there were numerous things she ought to do. But she could settle to nothing even though she kept telling herself that it was sheer heaven to be back in her own home. Alone.

And lonely.

She
must
be feeling depressed. She never admitted to loneliness—simply because there was no loneliness to admit to.

And then she was alone no longer. A shadow fell across her from the direction of the garden gate, and she looked up, desperately hoping it was Aunt Lavinia or Tilly or even Mr. Wenzel or Mr. Alton. Anyone but . . .

“Saying your prayers in the brisk outdoors, Cousin Imogen?” the Earl of Hardford asked.

She got to her feet and shook out her skirts and her cloak.

“There is a snowdrop here,” she said, “though it has not bloomed yet. I always look for the first one.”

“You believe in springtime, then?” he asked.

“Believe in?” She looked inquiringly at him.

“New life, new beginnings, new hope,” he suggested, circling one gloved hand in the air. “Off with the old, on with the new, and all that rally-the-old-and-tired-spirits stuff?”

“I want only an end to the cold,” she said, “and the sight of flowers and leaves on the trees.”

If he asked her to walk with him today, she would say no. But even as she thought it, he opened the gate and stepped inside, Hector at his heels.

“It is a lovely day,” she said.

He looked up at the blue sky above and then back down at her.

“Must we talk about the weather?” he asked. “It lacks a certain . . . originality as a topic of conversation, would you not agree? But it
is
a lovely day, I must concede. I came to bring the joyful tidings that dearest Fluff has presented the world with kittens—six of them, all apparently as healthy as horses. No runts. And I have it on the most reliable authority that they are the sweetest things in the world.”

“Aunt Lavinia?”

“And a few assorted maids and one footman, who ought to have been on duty in the hall but had inexplicably taken a wrong turn and ended up in the stables instead,” he said. “Mrs. Ferby is as usual unimpressed with such sentimental stuff. I may even have heard a rumble of
drown ’em
spoken in her voice as I left the dining room after breakfast, but it may have been merely the rumble of a bit of dyspepsia coming from her, ah, stomach.”

She had no choice, Imogen thought. She could not be openly rude, even to him. Especially when he was spouting absurdities again.

“Would you care to step inside, Lord Hardford?” she asked him. “Would you care for a cup of tea, perhaps?”

“Both, thank you.” He smiled at her, his spontaneous, genuine smile—which somehow did not look either spontaneous or genuine.

If she did not know better, Imogen thought as she led the way inside, she would say he was ill at ease. She did not want him here. Did he not realize that? Did he not understand that she had come back here yesterday, even before the house was ready for her, in order to escape from him? Though that was perhaps a little unfair. She had come back to escape from herself, or, rather, from the effect she had allowed him to have on her. She did not
want
to feel the pull of his masculinity and the corresponding stirring of her femininity.

He and Blossom eyed each other in the sitting room. Blossom won the confrontation. He took the chair on the other side of the fireplace after Imogen had seated herself firmly in the middle of a love seat. Hector plopped down at his feet, ignored by the cat. Mrs. Primrose had seen them come in and would bring the tea tray without waiting for instructions. Visitors were always plied with her tea and whatever sweet delight she had baked that day.

He talked with great enthusiasm about the weather until the tray had arrived and Imogen had poured their tea and set his beside him with two oatmeal biscuits propped in the saucer. He made dire predictions for the future based upon the fact that they had been enjoying a string of fine days and must surely suffer as a consequence. He almost had her laughing with his monologue, and once again she was forced to admit to herself that she
almost
liked him. She might even withdraw the qualification of the
almost
if he did not fill her sitting room to such an extent that there seemed to be almost no air left to breathe.

She resented that charisma he seemed to carry about with him wherever he went. It seemed undeserved.

He picked up one of his biscuits and bit into it. He chewed and swallowed.

“If not
that,
then
what
?” he asked abruptly, and curiously she knew exactly what he was talking about. His whole manner had changed, and so had the atmosphere in the room. If not rape, he was asking her, then what?

She ought to refuse to answer. He had
no right
. No one else had
ever
asked her outright. At Penderris, everyone—even the physician, even
George
—had waited until she was ready to volunteer the information. It had taken two years for it all to come out.
Two years.
She had known him . . . how many days? Eight? Nine?

“Nothing,” she said. “You were mistaken in your assumption.”

“Oh,” he said, “I believe you. But
something
happened.”

“My husband died,” she said.

“But you not only mourn,” he said, looking at the biscuit in his hand as though he had only just realized it was there, and taking another bite. “You also refuse to continue to live.”

He was too perceptive.

“I breathe air into my lungs,” she told him, “and breathe it out again.”

“That,” he said, “is not living.”

“What do you call it, then?” she asked, annoyed. Could he not take a hint and talk about the weather again?

“Surviving,” he said. “Barely. Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you
do
with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.”