The Wagered Miss Winslow (14 page)

Beau, who, between his Irish upbringing and his years at sea, was well aware that he could blister a hole in a cast-iron pot with his curses, quickly changed the subject. “Sam, Miss Rosalind has told me that there is something odd going on with her excavations over there, at the church. She believes someone might be making mice feet of her work.”

“Leave it alone, Beau,” Rosalind said tersely, not realizing that she had addressed him so informally. She was much too concerned that he would tell Sam that she had said there might be a body buried in the ruins, and thereby set the entire town of Winchelsea to gossiping within a heartbeat—so precious little happened in the town that even an illogical leap of feminine imagination such as hers would be enough to keep tongues flapping for a fortnight. “I’m sure Sam isn’t the least interested in my suppositions.”

Beau squeezed her hand, most probably to ask her to keep her silence while he—the
man
—conducted his investigation. His action had the desired effect, but not because she felt any great need to obey his wishes. Oh, no. Rosalind was simply too overcome by the tingle that had run up her arm the moment his fingers curled around her own to say another word!

“Miss Winslow is a very industrious young woman, you know, Sam,” Beau continued, surprised to see that the old man, already stoop-shouldered, seemed to have begun shrinking even closer to the ground. “She has devoted herself to excavating these ruins in the interests of—” He looked down at Rosalind, wrinkling his brow. “By the saints—I’m fair confused on this one. Precisely why are you excavating this area, Rosie?”

“Because I can’t embroider worth a bent copper, that’s why,” Rosalind felt compelled to respond from between clenched teeth, the delightful tingle in her arm quickly replaced by a nearly overpowering urge to kick Beau in his well-formed calf.

Beau nodded. “Fair enough.” He looked back to Sam Hackett, who had turned a sickly gray. “Miss Winslow is excavating this area, Sam, because she can’t embroider worth a bent copper. However, although she has been exploring here with great concentration and application of her talents, it has just today—thanks to last night’s rain—come to her attention that, as diligently as she has been digging during the day, it is possible that another student of history has been neatly replacing the dirt at night, thereby undoing all her arduous labor.”

Now it was out in the open, or as much in the open as it could be, considering that Rosalind was convinced Sam had understood only every third word of Beau’s “best” English. There was no longer any reason to keep silent.

She stepped in front of him to add, “Something’s havey-cavey here, Sam. I dig out a layer of earth, sift through it, salvage anything I can find that hints of the people who lived here before we did, and then at night, once I am gone, someone comes and carefully puts the earth back again.” Her eyes narrowed speculatively. “I think there’s a possibility that something is buried here, Sam, something terrible that someone doesn’t want seen.”

Sam swallowed so hard that his Adam’s apple climbed halfway to his chin and then slid all the way to the base of his neck. “Somethin’ terrible buried here, Miss Winslow? Never say so, miss! It weren’t that way a’tall! Nothin’ like!”

Beau, who had been leaning against the stone wall, his arms crossed against his chest (only partly to support his aching shoulder), pushed himself upright at Sam’s words. What had begun as a bit of gentle teasing, a light moment that would serve to turn his thoughts from the dampening prospect that he had not, in fact, found a kindred spirit in Miss Rosalind Winslow, had now taken on a more serious air.

“Now here’s a dilemma. It wasn’t
what
way, Sam?” he asked, his voice deep enough, and serious enough, that the old man shrank another inch toward the ground. “And, if it wasn’t that way—what way was it?”

Sam bowed his head, and when he lifted it again there were tears standing in his faded blue eyes. ‘He said it was a joke, that’s all. That yer two play jokes back and forth on each other all the time. He said yer’d think it wonderful funny.”

Beau and Rosalind exchanged glances, Beau’s expression showing confusion while Rosalind’s tight-lipped grimace spoke volumes about what she thought. She went over to the old man, laving a comforting arm around his shoulder. “And Niall was right, Sam. I do think it hilariously funny,” she said, striving with all her might to put a hint of a smile into her voice. “Why, just imagine it! Here I am, day after day, digging through the same earth, hoping against hope to discover something fit for a museum. How ingenious of my brother. I hope he paid you well?”

Sam lifted his head, looking not to Rosalind, but to Beau, who was quite the largest man he’d ever seen. It was one thing if Miss Winslow thought the prank to be nothing more than a lark, but if the large man was to take umbrage, why, he could crack old Sam’s spine like a matchstick, without really trying. “Yes, miss. He paid me good. Enough ta let me start puttin’ some aside for a headstone for dear Peggy’s grave,” he said, referring to his wife of forty years who had gone to her heavenly reward that past winter.

“Then it’s all right, Sam,” Rosalind told him, blinking back tears. Niall had been down to Winslow Manor for a single day and night two months ago, just as she had begun digging at St. Leonard’s, and had made more than one disparaging remark about her excavations.

How dare her brother take advantage of an old man’s grief and enlist him in such a heartless prank? But it was just like Niall, and she was only disappointed in herself for not having seen his fine hand in the mischief as soon as she had discovered the irregularities in her grids. “But there will be no need to continue the prank now that I have uncovered it. Isn’t that right, Sam?”

“Yes, Miss Winslow,” Sam agreed, still looking at Beau. “I won’t do it no more, even if he did give me ten shillings.”

“Ten shillings?” Beau shook his head, disgusted. Niall Winslow was more than a rotter, he was a cheap, cheese-paring rotter into the bargain. Reaching into his pocket, he extracted a small suede purse and pulled out a gold piece, tossing it to Sam. “Here you go, Sam Hackett. No sense stinting on your Peggy, now is there?”

It took some minutes for Rosalind to console a blubbering Sam—who had been completely unmanned both by Beau’s generosity and his already long-held sneaking suspicion that he had allowed his hopes for a fitting headstone for his sweet Peggy to overcome his belief that Niall Winslow’s joke was more mean than funny—before Beau helped her to mount and they turned their horses back to Winslow Manor.

They rode in silence for some minutes, each lost in their own thoughts, and had nearly arrived back at the manor house before Beau put a hand on Daisy’s halter, drawing the mare to a halt. He turned slightly in his saddle, looking across at Rosalind, and saw the shimmer of tears in her green eyes.

“Ah, m’ darlin’ Rosie,” he said, a lilting Irish brogue investing his words with the sympathy he knew she would reject if he were to state it openly. “Is it wantin’ ta fix that buckeen as much as I am y’ are?”

“‘Fix the buckeen’? I imagine that, in your own colorful way, you are asking if I am eager for some sort of recompense from Niall for what he has done?” Her spine stiff and straight, Rosalind blinked back her angry tears—and it was anger that had moved her to womanish vapors, and not any insult to her dignity—and turned her head in Beau’s direction. “Precisely what do you have in mind, Mr. Remington?”

Beau let go of the halter and they rode on again, the horses moving in a leisurely walk. “I don’t know yet, Rosie m’ love, but if you were to stop calling me ‘Mr. Remington’ and start calling me ‘Beau’ more often, I just might be able to think of something suitably terrible.”

Feeling a hint of optimism thawing the icy barriers around her heart, Rosalind hazarded a smile. “All right—Beau. But we can hardly revenge ourselves on Niall if we stay in the country. It would mean a remove to London, which is impossible unless—” Her voice faltered as she realized what she was intimating.

“Unless we were married,” Beau finished for her. “Betrothed is not enough, is it, if we are to inhabit the same house in Mayfair. Did I mention that I have purchased a place in Portman Square? Some might call it a mansion, although I shouldn’t be the one to say so, especially since there is barely a stick of furniture in the place. It needs a woman’s touch, or so Bridget tells me, but then she also swears I need that same softening touch. Be that as it may, I think we could make the mansion into a suitable headquarters for our campaign to bring Niall nicely to his knees. Our marriage alone is no longer enough, you know.”

The horses headed toward the stable yard, where Kyle was sunning himself, sprawled inelegantly on the low roof of a shed propped against one side of the stable. He didn’t so much as lift his head as the horses came to a halt three feet away from him, as a bellyful of his ma’s day-old bread pudding always had the power to lull him into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Rosalind allowed Beau to help her dismount, her riding crop beating a rapid tattoo against her skirts as they walked, side by side, back to the house. “One way or another, Beau, I think you have proposed to me at least three times in less than two days. A woman’s head could be turned by such ardor—if she did not know that this was purely and simply a marriage of convenience.”

“Convenience and revenge,” Beau reminded her, looking up at the manor house and marveling yet again that it would soon be his—even as his spirits dropped, believing that Rosalind hadn’t been impressed by his kisses. “And mayhap a smidgen of affection?” he asked, pressing her in order to see, if not a smile, at least another charming blush. She couldn’t be totally immune to him, or else she wouldn’t have clung to him so sweetly when they’d embraced on the wall.

“You are a maddening man, Beau Remington,” Rosalind told him as they walked past the fountain and climbed the few steps to the front doors of Winslow Manor. “And I believe that, at least for now, we might be best served to confine our association to one of conspirators. Later, once Niall has been firmly put in his place, there will be time and enough for the two of us to discuss affairs of the heart. The way I see it,
Beau
, from this moment on we are at war with Niall—and I for one intend to keep a clear head as I prepare to go into battle!”

Beau motioned for Rosalind to enter the foyer ahead of him, then gave her neat posterior a playful swipe as she passed through the doorway. “It’s a hardheaded, hardhearted woman you are, Rosie Winslow,” he said as she turned, gasping, to take him to task for his effrontery. “But as I told you, I’m a patient man. First we’ll wed, then we’ll go to war—and then, m’ darlin’ girl, we’ll woo.”

Rosalind rolled her eyes as if asking for heavenly collaboration of the trials she had yet to endure, and then skipped lightly up the stairs to change out of her riding habit, smiling broadly as she went.

“A
h, and it’s a fine figure of a woman you be, missy, dressed up in all those lovely shingerleens, even if you’re little more than a wee spit of a thing.”

Rosalind looked into the mirror, seeing Bridget’s red-cheeked face reflected in the glass behind her. “Shingerleens, Bridget?” she questioned, frowning as she touched her hands to the pale-pink ribbons that hung from the puffed sleeves of her hastily constructed ivory silk wedding gown. “Do you mean these?”

“Aye, missy—those ribbons and bows. Bobby always did fancy ribbons and bows. Why, once he stole me the loveliest bit of satin for m’saint’s day—it touched me no end, don’t you know, even as I was cuffin’ his ears.”

Rosalind laughed, for she had heard more than one amusing story of Beau’s checkered youth on the streets of Dublin. It no longer surprised her to hear that he might have chanced to filch the occasional frippery from the stalls in the marketplace. She was not such a fool as to believe he’d had an easy time of it, living hand-to-mouth as Bridget’s father grew older and had more trouble finding work that paid a decent wage.

“Beau does have a hint of larceny in him, that’s for certain,” Rosalind said now as a beaming Mollie secured a gossamer-thin veil to a small bunch of flowers set in the swirl of blonde curls on the crown of her mistress’ head. “Yet I will admit to you that I find it difficult to reconcile the image of the tall, strapping man I am about to marry with the barefoot scamp you have told me about, Bridget.”

“Did he steal kisses, too?” Mollie asked of the older woman, the maid’s mind as always turning, sooner or later, to things amorous.

Bridget rolled her eyes. “Aye, and you’re your mither’s daughter ta the life, the good Lord rest her soul, even if you’ve none of Mairghread’s looks—exceptin’ for those round heels o’ yours. It’s a good thing it is that Mairghread’s gone ta her heavenly reward since I left here, or we’d for certain have our hands full. Missy—is it sure you are that we should be takin’ this one with us today? No end ta the mischief a colleen like this one could get up ta in a temptin’ place like Lunnon.”