The Rake of Hollowhurst Castle (5 page)

‘You seem too strong to give way to your emotions
like that, Roxanne, but I know how hard it is to stay serene in such trying circumstances,' Caro said, and Roxanne saw a fleeting shadow of some remembered sadness cloud her guest's unusual eyes.

It was scouted the instant Robert Besford appeared, a worried look on his handsome face. Roxanne thought Caro was blooming, but since he evidently cared a great deal for his wife, Mr Besford's anxiety was rather touching.

‘Good morning,' he said with a graceful bow, while his startlingly green eyes ran over his wife as if taking an inventory.

Caro rolled her eyes and tried to look stern, before laughing and shaking her head at him, ‘This is Miss Courland, Rob,' she admonished.

‘I know. We've met before, haven't we, Miss Courland?' he replied with a rueful smile of apology for his distracted state.

‘Good morning, Colonel Besford,' she replied with a smile, for who could resist the Besfords' evident delight in each other?

‘I'm colonel no longer, not even in my brevet rank as staff officer, now I've sold out,' he told her cheerfully enough.

‘Or so he says,' Caro added darkly and Roxanne laughed at the look the Honourable Robert turned on his wife.

‘And no order of mine was ever knowingly obeyed by my wife,' he told Roxanne ruefully and ducked dextrously as a cushion flew past his left ear and thudded harmlessly against the oak panelling.

‘Oh, I'm so sorry,' Caro said, hand over her mouth and her eyes dancing. ‘It's become a habit,' she admitted,
and Roxanne decided she'd enjoy local society if it offered such lively company, after all.

‘I'll make sure I take a suit of armour with me to Mulberry House,' she replied solemnly, and they were all laughing when Charles entered the room.

 

He was enchanted by this light-hearted and laughing Roxanne Courland. He'd turned her world upside down and behaved like a bad-tempered bear this morning, so no wonder he'd not seen her so until now, but suddenly he knew she'd break his heart if he let her and felt the breath stall in his chest as he saw her as she ought to be, if her family had cherished and adored her, instead of leaving her alone to brave the world. He acquitted Sir Granger of deliberate cruelty, but to raise her as mistress here, when she could only be second-in-command at her brother's whim, was unthinkingly callous.

Roxanne must at least taste the life of a single young woman of birth and fortune before he wed her, but it'd have to be a mere bite, as this need dragging at him insistently wouldn't be ignored for long. He imagined her beautifully gowned and coiffured and decided he was about to let himself in for the most tortuous few weeks of his life. Stepping forwards, he watched the mischief leave her darkest brown eyes and her merry smile die. There was time to alter that state of affairs, he reassured himself. Perhaps she'd look favourably on his suit if he made her mistress here again. Highly unlikely she'd wed ever him for himself, now, and wasn't that just as well?

‘I asked for refreshments to be served here, if you don't object, Miss Courland?' he said.

‘I've no right to object, Sir Charles,' she replied.

‘A lady always has rights,' he argued. She had rights, and obligations—common politeness being one of them.

‘How nice for us,' she replied stubbornly.

‘It must be,' he replied, and she glared at him before embarking on a discussion about babies with Caro designed to exclude sane gentlemen, except that his friend Rob seemed to find it as fascinating as they did.

He'd never be that much of a fool about his wife and children, Charles assured himself. He'd be an interested and even a fond father, especially as his own sire had consigned him to his formidable grandmother's care without a backward look at an early age. Charles's lips twisted in a sardonic smile as he recalled a day when the father he had yearned for came home at last. Louis Afforde had fainted at the sight of him, coming round to murmur artistically, ‘The boy is too like her—my one, my only, my dear departed love. He offends my eyes and grieves my suffering heart.'

Louis, an aspiring poet, promptly went straight back to London and his current ‘only' love and left his son with an aversion to romantic love and a gap in his young life where his remaining parent should have been. Packed off to live with his grandparents at the age of six, Charles swore he'd never fall in love, whatever love might be. Eyeing Rob now doting over the wife he'd once professed to hate, he decided he still didn't know what it was and was quite content with his ignorance. He'd respect and admire his wife—if he desired her as well that was a handsome bonus—but he'd never love her.

Nor would he make a cake of himself over being a
husband and father as Rob appeared happy to. His children would have fond but sensible parents, which was just as well considering his grandmother was too old to take on a pack of brats now. He thought the Dowager Countess of Samphire would like Miss Courland as a granddaughter-in-law and he doubted Roxanne would quail at meeting such a brusque and ruthless old lady, and then caught himself out in a dreamy smile with horrified shock.

Roxanne would make a good wife and mother and he'd be faithful and respect her, but he'd not live in her pocket. Something told him it wouldn't be that simple, but he ignored it because he'd promised her brother he'd marry her if she'd have him, and he wanted her. Having his child would settle her into her new role as his wife, and the thought of it made him march to the window and gaze out at the view while he got himself back under control. The idea of seeing Roxanne sensually awake and fully aware of herself as a woman for the first time sent him into such a stew of urgency that he was unfit for company. It boded ill for his detachment, he admitted to himself as he fought primitive passions, but very well for begetting his brats!

‘Fascinating view, is it?' Rob asked with a satirical smile as he came to stand by his old friend, too much understanding of Charles's response to Roxanne Courland in his steady green gaze for comfort.

‘All the more so for being mine,' he replied softly.

‘Possessiveness, it's the curse of our sex,' Rob taunted, and Charles wondered if he wasn't yet truly forgiven for trying to win Rob's lady off him, although he'd been as blithely ignorant of who she really was as her husband had been at the time.

He had admired Caro's refusal to sit back and meekly accept that their arranged marriage was an abomination to her husband, and her ingenious campaign to win him to her bed by foul means when fair ones must fail, since Rob had vowed never to share any room with his wife after their wedding. Rob had danced to the seductive and scandalous new courtesan Cleo Tournier's tune without a clue that she was his unwanted and despised wife, and Charles decided vengefully that he was glad he'd helped her tame the one-time rake now watching him as if he was a specimen on a pin.

‘You could be right,' he replied calmly enough.

‘Be careful what you're at,' Rob warned him silkily. ‘Miss Courland isn't up to the games you play and she's far from unprotected.'

‘She needs no protection from me,' Charles replied shortly.

‘Have you undergone a sea change then, Charles?'

‘A permanent one,' he replied, gaze steady on Rob's challenging one.

‘Good God, I think you really mean it.'

‘I do.'

‘It'll provide me with an interesting diversion to watch you try to achieve that aim then,' Rob said with a grin that almost made Charles wish them both twenty years younger, so he could treat him to the appropriate punch on the nose. ‘I don't think Miss Courland will be easily persuaded you're not a wild sea-rover any more,' he warned with unholy delight.

‘I'm beginning to agree with you,' Charles muttered darkly and stared broodingly at the quirky old garden he'd acquired with his new property.

‘Sometimes the chase is all the more worth winning
when it seems nigh impossible,' Rob said, softening his challenge as he sent a significant glance at his lady, who'd led him a fine dance before letting her husband catch her just as she'd planned all along.

‘I'm planning a change of lifestyle, not abject surrender,' Charles protested uneasily.

‘And sometimes there's victory in defeat, although that's not a concept I expect a grizzled old sea dog to understand.'

‘Since you talk in riddles, no wonder I can't make head or tail of them.'

‘You'll see,' Rob said with an irritatingly superior smile and turned back to the fascinating spectacle of his wife like a compass to the north.

T
aking tea and cake in a lady's sitting room like some tame
cicisbeo,
Charles fought an unaccustomed urge to snap and snarl at all and sundry and reminded himself he had a reputation as a dangerous charmer to uphold. He didn't feel very charming when Roxanne Courland refused to look at him and made certain their fingers didn't touch when she passed him his teacup. If his onetime crew could see him now, they'd laugh themselves into a collective apoplexy and save the hangman a job, he reflected bitterly.

Instead of dwelling on his current woes, he decided to set about solving one or two of them. First he must find a suitable lady to chaperone his prospective bride. Not easy when only he and Davy Courland knew he was to wed. He sipped his tea with a creditable attempt at looking as if he enjoyed it and took a mental inventory. His formidable grandmother would put in an appearance when Caro's whelp was due since she doted on her, so
he must have someone in place before she decided to take the role herself.

There was Great-Aunt Laetetia Varleigh, his grandmother's spinster sister. Yet Aunt Letty lacked the inner core of loving softness Lady Samphire hid behind a formidable manner. No, she wouldn't do, even if she'd leave Varleigh village to lapse into the hotbed of scandal it might become without her constant vigilance. He was reluctantly contemplating advertising when his latest conversation with Tom Varleigh slotted into his mind and made the solution seem so obvious he felt a fool for missing it.

‘Stella refuses to come and live with myself and Joanna now poor Marcus Lavender's dead,' Tom had told him. ‘She claims Joanna doesn't need another female cluttering up Varleigh Manor, so she's living at the Dower House with Mama and Great-Aunt Letty. She's stubborn and headstrong, but even my big sister doesn't deserve that, Charles. Before six months are up, she'll murder one of them or be fit for Bedlam herself.'

It would be ideal, he told himself, wondering fleetingly if he was as interfering and arrogant as Miss Courland believed him to be. Cousin Stella was in her early thirties and the respectable widow of a fine man who'd died at the ill-starred Battle of Toulouse when, if only they'd known it, the Great War was over and a peace treaty already signed. Stella would be glad of an alternative to living at Varleigh Dower House even if she was too stubborn to admit it, and her chaperonage would be more theory than fact if he knew Stella. Yes, that would suit all three of them very well. Now all he need do was get Stella here without Roxanne realising it was his doing.

A carefully worded plea to Roxanne's sister to send her word of any suitable duennas might serve, as long as Roxanne never discovered he'd sent it. Eyeing Caro speculatively, he wondered if she numbered the sociable younger Varleighs among her recent acquaintance. He shuddered at the thought of her entrée to the
demi-monde,
even if it was gained in pursuit of her renegade husband, and hoped it never became common knowledge.

Such a scandal would certainly not enhance the standing of his bride-to-be, if her chaperone had come recommended by even a pretend courtesan and, unlike Rob Besford, he intended to make sure his wife never had the slightest excuse to cause a scandal in pursuit of his closest sensual attention. He reassured himself it was perfectly natural to want to watch his Roxanne blossom in her proper sphere and that he was in no danger of falling in love with her. His wife must be a socially assured and adept hostess and serenely self-possessed under pressure, and if she became his passionate lover in the bargain, that would just be a wonderful bonus.

Yet did he want her to change? She was rather magnificent as she was, and he admired her stubborn determination to go her own way—except it would ultimately prove disastrous. If he let her, she'd dwindle into a maiden aunt, neither happy nor unhappy and criminally wasted. Or she'd marry some weak-kneed idiot who'd let her govern both their lives. The very idea of her chancing instead upon some tyrant who'd try to break her glorious spirit made him shudder and drink his tea after all, only realising he'd drained his cup when he looked into it with offended disdain.

‘It's all right, Charles, some of us drink it all the time and so far have come to no harm at all,' Caro teased.

‘But you don't know what it might do to me if I drink enough of it.'

‘I admit I'm not a man and have absolutely no desire to be one, but it's a risk I'm quite prepared to take as a mere female, even if you're too much of a coward to take it on,' she parried effortlessly, and he saw Roxanne shoot her a doubtful look, as if Caro might not know she was supping with the devil and therefore needed a very long spoon.

He smiled into his surprisingly empty teacup and wondered if he ought to inform her that his friend's wife was perfectly safe from any wiles he had stored up for the unwary. Best not, perhaps, it might be useful to keep her in ignorance of the fact that, unlike Caro, she was very unsafe indeed.

 

‘You mustn't do that, Miss Roxanne, it's no job for a lady,' Cobbins, formerly head gardener of Hollowhurst Castle, informed Roxanne a week after she moved into Mulberry House. Even Sir Charles hadn't been able to protest her managing for the time being with the chaperonage of her personal maid, the Castle housekeeper and far too many members of her former household to fit comfortably into Mulberry House.

‘Why not?' she challenged grumpily, since every time she found a promising occupation to while away the tedious hours, somebody would raise their head from doing nothing in particular and tell her it wasn't ladylike.

‘'Cause you'll get scratched,' he explained with the patience of a responsible adult addressing a child who'd
stolen her mama's best scissors to deadhead the few late-blooming roses Mulberry House rejoiced in. ‘You could even get muddy,' he added with every sign of horror.

As if he hadn't seen her muddy and exhausted many a time after a long day spent in the saddle going about Uncle Granger's business, Roxanne thought with disgust. ‘Right, that's it!' she informed him sharply, reaching the end of a tether she'd clung to with exemplary patience. ‘I've had enough of this ridiculous situation. In a quarter of an hour I expect you and your many underlings to assemble in the kitchen, where Cook will undoubtedly curse you all for getting in her way, but I plan to address my household and it's the only place you can all fit without being tight packed as sprats in a barrel. Pray inform Whistler that I expect the stablemen to attend as well, and woe betide them if their boots aren't clean.'

‘But why, Miss Roxanne?' Cobbins protested with the familiarity of a man who'd known her since she was born.

‘Do as I say and you'll find out soon enough,' she informed him smartly and swept back into the house to issue an edict to the indoor staff.

‘Whatever's going on, Miss Rosie?' asked Tabby, her personal maid and suddenly the strictest chaperone the most finicky duchess could require for her precious offspring, whether Roxanne wanted her to be or not, which she definitely didn't, she decided rebelliously.

‘In ten minutes you'll find out along with everyone else, and you might as well occupy five of them by setting my hair to rights and give us both something to do.'

Tabby sniffed regally. ‘Some of us can work and talk at the same time, ma'am,' she claimed but took down the
rough chignon Roxanne had scrabbled together when she managed to rise, dress and steal out of the house without encountering any of her entourage for once, only because she did so before anyone but the boot boy and the scullery maid were stirring. Never mind
their
aghast expressions on discovering the lady of the house was stealing through the side door even before the sun reluctantly rose on a misty autumn morning, she'd managed her wild ride over the autumn landscape at last, and it'd been worth every exhilarating moment.

‘But we undoubtedly work faster in silence,' Roxanne told her newly dragonlike maid in a tone she hoped was commanding enough to brook no argument and refused to elaborate, even in the face of extreme provocation. Despite her impatience with such finicky and ladylike occupations as fine grooming and pernickety dressing, Roxanne felt better once her hair was neat and she was dressed in a slightly more fashionable gown, so maybe Tabby was right about ordering some new ones next time she went to Rye.

 

Such frippery notions went clean out of her head when she reached the kitchens and met the eyes of her assembled staff. Just as she'd predicted, Cook looked as if she'd like to beat the stable-boys with her formidable-looking ladle, and the gardeners' feet were shuffling as if they had a mind of their own and might carry them back to their proper domain of their own accord if something wasn't done or said very soon.

‘What's afoot, Miss Rosie?' Cook asked her with a terrifying frown that would reduce most ladies to a heap of fine clothes and incoherence.

Luckily Roxanne knew a heart of gold beat under
that formidable exterior, and it only needed the long line of giggling maids who lined up to be abused by the paper tiger as soon as they were old enough to work to confirm that Cook inspired love and loyalty in all those who served her, which brought Roxanne neatly back to her sheep.

‘I asked you all to assemble here this morning in order that I might tell you how deeply I'm honoured and moved by your steadfast loyalty to dear Uncle Granger and myself and to thank you for following me to Mulberry House in such large numbers. Which brings me neatly to the other reason I wanted to speak to you: by now I think we all realise this house is too small to accommodate a household large enough to run a castle, and I suggest…no,' Roxanne corrected herself as she saw the stubborn set to Cook's, Cobbins's, Whistler's and the butler's collective mouths, ‘I
insist
that most of you return to Hollowhurst and take up your accustomed roles.'

An incoming wave of muttered protests threatened to become a tidal roar, but she held up her hand and it subsided to a few harrumphs of disagreement from the ringleaders.

‘I want you to consider how you all intend to occupy yourselves serving a mistress who doesn't entertain or visit much and has no need of the exceptional skills required to run a castle or to progress in your chosen spheres.'

The maids and gardeners, grooms and stable boys eyed each other doubtfully, and Roxanne tried to tailor her speech to make the tougher part of her audience return to their proper domains and quit hers.

‘Sir Charles needs skilled staff to guide him in his
new life. Command at sea must be very different to life as a country gentleman with a huge old house and a large estate to administer. I was wrong to encourage any of you to leave, but you know my hasty temper and no real damage has been done yet. Stay here much longer and Sir Charles will hire a pack of strangers to run Hollowhurst, and I doubt that's what any of us want.'

‘Maybe you're correct, Miss Courland,' Mereson, the stately butler, acknowledged with a bland look that led the assembled audience to doubt it, ‘but Sir Granger's first concern was always for your welfare, so Cook, Cobbins, Whistler and myself will remain in your service.' He eyed the other three sternly, but received only fervent nods and ayes and managed to look pleased with himself without spoiling the impassive façade of a superior butler, trained from birth to run Hollowhurst below-stairs as Sir Granger had been raised to rule above them.

‘I thank you, but my uncle would be the first to tell you not to be an awkward pack of idiots and get back to where you're needed.' Mulish expressions turned to doubtful frowns as they silently admitted she was right. Sensing victory, Roxanne pressed ruthlessly on. ‘You trained your deputies, so how can you doubt they're capable of bothering me with unsolicited advice at all turns while running my house, stables and gardens almost as efficiently as you would? Meanwhile, you can help Sir Charles in his new life as the master of Hollowhurst Castle, knowing that I'm in safe hands.'

‘Bravo, Miss Courland, I couldn't have put it better myself, and I must add a personal plea for as many of you as Miss Courland can spare to take pity on me and
come and help me run the castle before I'm properly in the basket for lack of your skills.'

Sir Charles Afforde then strolled further into the overcrowded room to stand by her side, and Roxanne wasn't sure if she was more furious with him for looking as if they'd hatched this argument between them or with her staff for silently ghosting out of his way as if he'd every right to barge into her house and interfere without the least encouragement. Holding on to her temper while trying to look as if she concurred with his every word, although she'd like to kick him sharply in the shins, took every ounce of self-control Roxanne possessed.

‘Good morning, Sir Charles,' she managed to greet him civilly.

‘Good morning, Miss Courland, and good morning to you all,' he responded cheerfully, as if he was calling on her in her drawing room and not lounging about the commodious kitchen as if he owned that as well.

A general murmur greeted him, ranging from stately politeness to a flutter of delight from the flightier maids, and again Roxanne had to choke back fury. Just because he was ridiculously handsome and a hero of the late wars, everyone forgot he was also a rake and a rogue. Wishing she hadn't encouraged any of the female staff to return to the castle, she frowned repressively at them and won nervous, excited giggles for her pains. Hoping he was too gentlemanly to take advantage, Roxanne scowled fiercely at him, but he seemed unimpressed and just gave one of his piratical grins.

‘I suggest you take the rest of the day to consider what I've said,' she suggested to her assembled staff, having little hope of the female section of it hearing her, as their
attention was centred on Sir Charles lounging beside her as if he was as welcome as the flowers in spring.