Only a Kiss (5 page)

“Yes, we will,” she agreed.

They certainly were rubbing each other the wrong way. He was quite unaccustomed to having adversarial relationships with women. Or with anyone, in fact. He was usually the most amiable of mortals. Perhaps she resented the fact that he had inherited from her father-in-law. She must have married the late Dicky in the full expectation that she would be Lady Hardford of Hardford Hall one day. It must be a nasty comedown to be a dependent widow instead, with only the less illustrious courtesy title to call her own, and to be living in a modest house in one obscure corner of the park.

“Back to work,” he said, raising his eyes to the roof, where the two men were gawking downward, interested spectators of the altercation going on below. “Lady Barclay, can I persuade you to abandon your weeding in order to walk with me?”

Perhaps they could take a step back and start over again. He regretted the way he had greeted her yesterday—
and who the devil might you be?
It was not surprising that she resented him, especially when her husband ought to have owned the property he himself had ignored for all of two years. But what could she expect when the man had abandoned her in order to go dashing off to Portugal and Spain to play at war?

She considered his offer, looking at him the whole while. Then she pulled off her gloves, which apparently had been donned for her gardening, set them on top of the weeds in her basket with the trowel, set the basket beside the front steps of the house, and pulled her cloak back over her shoulders. Another pair of gloves appeared from a pocket.

“Yes,” she said.

“You must resent me,” he told her as they set off east along the cliff path, which, he realized too late, was uncomfortably close to the edge of the cliffs themselves, cut off from the park by the thick hedge of gorse bushes. And, being a gentleman, he was forced to walk on the outside.

“Must I?”

“You expected your husband to be in my place,” he said. “You expected to be the countess.”

“If I did,” she said, “I have had plenty of time in which to adjust my expectations. My husband has been dead for longer than eight years.”

“Eight?” he said. “Yet you have not remarried?”

“And you have not
married
?” she asked in return. At first it seemed like a non sequitur, but then he understood the point she was making.

“It is surely different for a woman,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. “Because a woman cannot function in life without a man to protect her and order her life for her?”

“Is that what your husband did?” he asked. “Order your life? Did he leave you to go off to war and order you to stay behind, playing the part of patient, dutiful wife while you awaited his return?”

“Dicky was my friend,” she told him. “My dearest friend. We were equal companions. He did not leave me behind when he went to war. He took me with him. No, correction. I went with him. I was with him to the end.”

“Ah, a woman who followed the drum,” he said, turning his head to look at her. Yes, he could imagine it. This was a woman who would not wilt under harsh conditions or flinch in the face of danger. “Admirable. He died in battle, did he?”

She was staring straight ahead, her chin raised. Gulls were screeching about somewhere below the level of his feet. He found it a mite disturbing.

“He died in captivity,” she said. “He was a reconnaissance officer. A spy.”

Ah, poor devil. But were not captured officers treated with dignity and honor and courtesy, provided they gave their parole—that is, their promise as gentlemen not to try to escape? Unless, that was, they were out of uniform when caught, as a reconnaissance officer might well have been. He would not ask. He did not want to know. But—

“You were with him
to the end
?” He frowned.

“I went partway into the hills with him at the start of that particular mission,” she said, “as I often did when it was deemed safe enough. His batman would have escorted me back. We were still well behind our own lines. We were both captured.”

“And the batman?”

“He was foraging for firewood at the time,” she said, “and was able to make his escape.”

One captive had survived and one had not. Suddenly he saw her marble demeanor in a wholly new light. What had happened to her during her captivity? Especially if her husband had not been in uniform? It was really too ghastly to think about and he was not going to do it. He certainly was not going to ask any more questions. He did not want to know.

“And so you returned to England alone,” he said. “Did you move immediately to the dower house?”

“I went home,” she said, “to my father’s house twenty miles from here. But I would not speak or sleep or leave my room. Or eat. My mother is a cousin of the Duke of Stanbrook. He lives at Penderris Hall on the eastern side of Cornwall. He had opened his home to military officers who had returned from the wars severely wounded in one way or another, and he had hired a skilled physician and other people to nurse them. My mother wrote to him out of despair, and he came to fetch me. I was there for three years. There were six of us who stayed that long, seven counting George—the duke, that is. We called ourselves the Survivors’ Club. We still do. We still get together for three weeks of every year during March.”

They had stopped walking. There was a break in the cliff face here, he noticed, and what appeared to be a zigzagging path down to the beach below—a rather steep and surely dangerous descent. The dog sat down beside him, its head against the side of Percy’s boot.

“When one imagines oneself striding about one’s land, faithful hound at heel,” he said, “one tends to picture a robust and intelligent sheepdog or some such.”

She looked at Hector. “Perhaps,” she said, “when a dog imagines following upon the heels of its master, it pictures kind words and a gentle touch.”

Touché. She had a wicked tongue.

“I am not its master,” he said.

“Ah,” she said, “but who gets to choose?”

“Three years,” he said. “You were at Penderris for
three years
?”

Good God! How damaged had she been? And why was he pursuing this line of questioning? He did not deal in darkness. He hoped she would answer with a simple monosyllable or not at all.

“Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—had his legs shattered and refused to have them amputated,” she said. “Vincent, Viscount Darleigh, was blinded in his first battle at the age of seventeen, and deafened too at first. Ralph, Duke of Worthingham, was hacked almost to ribbons with a saber when he was unseated from his horse in a cavalry charge. Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, was shot in the head and then fell on it from his horse. Hugo, Lord Trentham, was not wounded at all. He sustained not even a scratch, though he had led a Forlorn Hope that killed almost all his men and severely wounded those few who survived. He went out of his mind. George did not even go to war, but his only son did and died, and then his wife jumped to her death over the cliffs at the edge of his estate. And I . . . ? I was present when my husband died, but they did not kill me. Yes, three years. And those men are my very dearest friends in this world.”

Percy found himself fondling Hector’s damaged ear and wishing again that he had not started this.
Shattered legs.
Blind at the age of seventeen—and deaf too.
Sons dying and wives committing suicide—over the edge of a cliff.
And what the devil had happened to Lady Barclay while her husband was in captivity, presumably being tortured? It was something ghastly enough that she had spent three years at Penderris Hall. He felt a trickle of sweat snake down his spine.
He did not want to know.

“When I left Penderris,” she said, “I came here. My father had died during those three years, my mother had gone to live with her sister, my aunt, in Cumberland, my brother had taken my father’s place with his wife and children, and I did not think it fair to go there, though my sister-in-law very graciously invited me. I could not bear to live in the hall here with my father-in-law and Aunt Lavinia, even though more than three years had gone by. I asked for the dower house, and my father-in-law reluctantly allowed me to go there. That is my story, Lord Hardford. You were entitled to hear it since you have come here for however short a time to find me living on your land. Shall we go down onto the beach?”

“Down
there?
” he asked sharply. “No.”

She turned her head to look steadily at him.

“I have never seen the attraction of beaches,” he said—well, not for a long time, anyway. “They are just a lot of sand and water. Why is Hardford not more prosperous than it is? Or do you not know?”

“It pays its way,” she said. “At least, that is what my father-in-law was always fond of saying.”

“It does,” he agreed. “And he was content with that?”

She turned her face away and did not answer immediately.

“He was never a particularly ambitious man,” she said. “Dicky used to get impatient with him. He had all sorts of ideas and plans, but they were never implemented. He decided that the military life would be a better outlet for his energy. I believe his father lost all heart after Dicky died.”

“And Ratchett?” he asked. “Was he ever an efficient steward?”

“Maybe once upon a time,” she said. “My father-in-law inherited him.”

“And he never considered that it might be time to put the man out to pasture and hire someone more . . . vigorous?” Percy was frowning. And he was wishing with all his heart that he could go back to the night of his birthday and erase the sudden drunken impulse to come to Cornwall. Sometimes what one did not know was best left that way.

“I doubt he ever considered it,” she said. “Mr. Ratchett keeps very neat and orderly books. He spends his days surrounded by them and makes new entries in them as needed. If you wish to know anything concerning rents and crops and flocks or anything else on the estate for the past forty or fifty years, you will surely find the answer in meticulous detail within those pages.”

“I feel rather, Lady Barclay,” he said impatiently, “as though I had stepped into a different universe.”

“I suppose,” she said, “the situation is reversible. You could go back to where you—” She stopped abruptly.

... where you came from?

... where you belong?

“And leave that house,
my
house, to be turned into a menagerie?” he asked. “Do you realize that eventually, if Lady Lavinia continues to add every stray who is canny enough to wander up to the doors—and word must be spreading fast in the animal kingdom—eventually the house is going to become uninhabitable by humans? That it will be hopelessly coated with dog and cat hair? That it will
smell
?”

“You would have them turned away to starve, then?” she asked.

“It is not possible to feed all the hungry of this world,” he said.

“Aunt Lavinia does not even try to take on the world’s woes,” she told him. “She merely feeds the hungry who come to her door—to
your
door.”

He felt a sudden suspicion. “Are we talking
just
about dogs and cats?” he asked.

“There are people,” she said, “who cannot find work for one reason or another.”

He stopped in his tracks again and looked at her, appalled. “If I were to wander into the nether regions of the house,” he said, “or into the stables, I would find all the maimed and criminally inclined vagabonds of the world eating me out of house and home, would I?”

One of the maids who had come to make up his bed last night had been lame and looked as if she might be a bit simpleminded too.

“Not
all,
” she said. “And those you would find are usefully employed and earning the food for which you pay. More gardeners and stable hands were needed by the time my father-in-law died, and the indoor staff had grown rather sparse. Aunt Lavinia has a tender heart, but she was never able to give it room while her brother lived. He was content with life as it had always been. He disliked change more and more as he grew older and after he lost Dicky.”

“One of these strays is, I suppose, Mrs. Ferby,” he said. “Cousin Adelaide, who is not under any circumstances to be called Addie.”

“I suppose you were given an account at breakfast of the seven-month marriage, were you?” she said. “She has to live upon the charity of her relatives since she has almost no private means, and Aunt Lavinia convinced herself that bringing a companion to the house was the respectable thing to do after she was left alone. Perhaps she was even right. And her chosen companion
is
a relative.”

“Not of mine,” he said testily. “I can understand why you would rather I went back to where I came from, Lady Barclay.”

“Well, you do seem to have managed very well without Hardford Hall for the past two years,” she said. “Now, having come here on what seems to be some sort of whim, you have whipped yourself into a thoroughly bad temper. Why not go away and forget about our peculiar ways and be sweet-tempered again?”

“A thoroughly bad temper?”
The dog whimpered and cowered at his feet. “You have not
seen
me in a bad temper, ma’am.”

“It must be a very disagreeable sight, then,” she said. “And like all bad-tempered men, you have a tendency to turn your wrath upon the wrong person. I am not the one who has neglected Hardford and the farms belonging to it. I am not the one who has filled the house with strays without a clear plan for what to do with them. I am not the one who brought Cousin Adelaide here as a companion, with the full knowledge that she will remain here for the rest of her life. Under normal circumstances, I mind my own business in my own house and make no demands upon the estate or anyone on it.”

“The most abhorrent type of person on this earth,” he said, narrow eyed, “is the one who remains cool and reasonable when being quarreled with. Are you
always
cool, Lady Barclay? Are you always like a block of marble?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“And
now
see what you have done,” he told her. “You have provoked me into unpardonable rudeness. Again. I am
never
rude. I am usually all sweetness and charm.”