The Wagered Miss Winslow (3 page)

W
inchelsea has seen its share of intrigue, of battle, of triumphs and losses—but not for some time. A venerable port established in a picturesque setting upon a hilltop in the thirteenth century by no less a personage than Edward I himself, the town was built to replace an even earlier Winchelsea which had been reclaimed by the sea. Edward had followed the traditions of the original Roman builders, walling the “new” city and allowing access through four stone arched gates, of which three still remained.

The town itself, this rectangle within a rectangle, Edward designed on a strictly regulated grid, so that the carefully whitewashed and weatherboarded dwellings march along each side of the wide, straight streets in a uniform pattern. These old cottages, their facades hung with tiles and their pristine porticoes wreathed with wisteria and colorful climbing roses, give the town a cheerful, welcoming look that has not increased its population a jot.

On the contrary. A town that once boasted more than six thousand inhabitants had shrunk to a size that, if you did not know the name of the person walking toward you on one of the streets, or he did not know yours, then one of you definitely did not reside in or near Winchelsea.

     One of the original Cinque ports, Winchelsea had been passed by in favor of nearby Rye in the fifteenth century, when the sea receded and the town’s harbor filled with silt, leaving it to dwindle to what it was now, a sleepy port town whose only distinction remained its antiquity and the niggling suspicion that it had shrunk down to be the smallest town in all of England.

Of course there was another distinction, that being the number of ruins that dotted the countryside. Slight bumps and shallow hollows indicated the onetime presence of other streets and cottages long gone. In the center of the town, only the chancel, side chancel, and ruined transepts remained of the Church of St. Thomas Becket, the rest having come to grief via the rampaging French in that same, unfortunate fifteenth century.

Friars Road held more ruins, this time those of a Franciscan friary, the stones hauled away during those dark days in the sixteenth century and used to construct nearby Camber Castle that, perhaps as an example of poetic justice, also fell into ruins.

Lastly, outside the walls of the town could be found the ruins of St. Leonard’s Church, and a whimsical windmill standing abandoned in a nearby field, missing one of its trellised vanes.

The scene would have been sad, perhaps even melancholy, if it were not so beautiful. So silent, so calm, so wonderfully, gloriously serene. Lichen-covered stones hinting of a past that must have included its share of pomp and pageantry along with the terror of invasion and the ravages of time and politics were warmed by the same sun that called the wildflowers to vibrant life and were caressed by the identical fragrant breeze that bent the long, un-scythed grass so that the entire meadow seemed a living thing, a green, moving sea of ... of ...

“Ah, what does it matter what it is?” Rosalind Winslow asked of herself, smiling, for it was she who had been surveying the countryside, both that which she could see and that which was out of her sight, reveling in its distinctive character. “I love every inch of it!”

“Miss Winslow? Are you talkin’ to yourself again? You shouldn’t do that, you know. Vicar Thompson said people who talk to themselves are talkin’ to the devil. He said it just last week. Yes, he did.”

Rosalind, her hands still on her hips, for she had taken a break in her work to stand up, stretch her spine, and admire the scenery, looked to the maid who was sitting at her ease on what must once have been part of the wall of St. Leonard’s, eyeing her mistress owlishly. “Oh, really, Mollie? And what, pray tell, is the Vicar Thompson’s opinion of people who dance alone by the light of the moon?”

Mollie lowered her head, her cheeks flaming almost as brightly as her carroty hair. “It was only the once, Miss Winslow, and it didn’t work anyways, even if that fortuneteller from the travelin’ fair said it would. I didn’t see hide nor hair of my ‘true love,’ and only ended by trippin’ over a root and skinnin’ my knees.” Mollie raised her head, jutting out her firmly rounded chin. “I should have known she was pullin’ m’leg. And it cost me a whole shilling, too!”

“Your leg cost you a shilling, Mollie?” Rosalind teased, for she had been making a project of educating the girl, not that either of them seemed to be making much progress. “You must be clear in your speech, or else someone might misconstrue what you are saying.” She reached for the heavy cotton gloves she had been wearing, pulled them on, and knelt once more on the wooden plank that protected her knees from the freshly overturned dirt. “Now, hand me that little trowel, if you please. I would like to finish this section before we must return to Winslow Manor for tea. You know how Riggs frets if I am a moment late.”

Mollie hastened to fetch the trowel and Rosalind took it, using her free hand to push a stray lock of honey-blonde hair back up under her flat, wide-brimmed straw bonnet. The ages-old bonnet was much the worse for wear, its brim slit in two places so that a plain blue scarf could be drawn across the mashed crown and down through the holes, its ends tied tightly beneath Rosalind’s pert cleft chin.

A smudge of deep-brown dirt had somehow found its way to her lightly freckled left cheek, and there was a dab of mud on one side of her small nose. A plain round gown of indeterminate design and ragged hem was only partially hidden by a gentleman s chamois colored cloak, its fullness nipped at the waist by the simple method of banding it with a length of rope. Muddy half-boots covered dainty feet, although the hose that was visible above those boots (for she was kneeling now and her skirts had somehow bunched up indelicately), was still reasonably clean.

Rosalind Winslow, petite, just a mite too thin for real beauty (although her wide green eyes had been cause for more than one hopeful swain’s resort to poetry), and considered, at five and twenty, to be at ner last prayers as far as the Marriage Mart was concerned, filled the trowel with some of the fragrant earth, spilled it out onto a wood-framed square of mesh, and frowned as she shook the frame from side to side, allowing the dirt to sift through while retaining small stones and—just often enough to keep the thrill of the thing alive—small hints of a long-departed civilization.

Rosalind Winslow was aware that she had lately become a bit of an eccentric in this, the land of eccentrics, preferring to spend her days digging in old ruins and her evenings reading histories to gadding about in London Society in the way of her older brother, Niall.

But then, Rosalind knew, Niall had never had much use for anything vaguely connected with work—and to scrabble about in the dirt in some deserted churchyard, getting some of the grimy stuff under his manicured fingernails, would be an anathema to him. He had made that plain enough when he had discovered her new interest on his last trip to Winslow Manor.

Not that Niall had ever had much use for Sussex, or Winslow Manor, the smallest of the Winslow family holdings—or much use for his sister, Rosalind, if she were really to get down to the facts of the matter. And that was just fine with her for, blood ties to one side, she had never been all that enamored of him.

So let Niall caper about in London, wearing his expensive clothing and staying up to all hours doing only the good Lord knew what in his mad pursuit of pleasure. She was content here in Sussex, living in what, to her, was the best of their holdings, overseeing the estate, digging in the dirt for relics, teaching Mollie how to read, and generally doing what she wanted, when she wanted, without having to petition or apologize to anyone.

“Oh, oh, what do we have here?” she questioned aloud, having sifted through several trowels’ worth of rich earth without success. Stripping off one of her gloves, she reached into the sieve, gingerly lifted out a clump of dirt, and picked at it with her fingernails until a small circle or metal was uncovered. She was delighted and her bright smile showed it. “Why, I believe it’s an old coin—possibly even Roman. I had been determined that we would find something today, and now we have. Mollie, bring me my bag, if you will, so that I might deposit this safely. We must be getting back now, but it won’t be empty-handed.”

“Yes, miss,” Mollie responded, her movements quick as she went to fetch the small suede bag, her alacrity based more on the fact that her mistress had mentioned returning to Winslow Manor than any thought that an important discovery had been made. As she reached for the bag, which had been lying on a low stone wall, her attention was caught by a moving dust cloud in the distance. “Miss Winslow?” she said questioningly, her eyes narrowed, staring at the rapidly approaching curricle. “Come look at this, will you? Don’t that gentry mort know you can’t go drivin’ like that on this road, what with the ditches and all?”

Rosalind scrambled to her feet, climbed out of the carefully roped-off shallow square where she had been digging that day, and wiped her hands on her cloak before raising one hand to her forehead, peering in the direction in which the maid had pointed. “Idiot,” she said shortly, taking the suede bag from Mollie and depositing the coin in it before tying the bag to the rope that spanned her waist. “I’ve never yet met a man who used his head for anything more than a convenient place to hang his hat. Mollie, we must be going.”

She had just reached the pony cart—Mollie trailing behind her, still watching the curricle, her bottom lip tucked behind her top teeth—when the inevitable happened. Rosalind turned at the sound of splintering wood as one of the equipage’s wheels slipped into a rut, to watch as man and curricle parted company, the curricle dragging the spirited pair of bays to an abrupt halt while the ground performed that same service for the driver. “Good,” she said, satisfied. “Where did he think he was, on one of the King’s turnpikes? Come on, Mollie, I suppose, as good Christians, we must make sure he has not broken any bones.”

Now, Rosalind wasn’t a cruel person, truly she wasn’t. She just didn’t have time to waste on fools, and the man driving a curricle neck-or-nothing over these sad country lanes certainly could not be classified as a person of superior intellect, at least not in her book.

Besides, she had already cut it too fine, her earlier daydreaming leaving her barely enough time to return to Winslow Manor, clean up her dirt, and present herself in the drawing room for tea. Riggs would be most disapproving, poor fellow. He suffered in silence (when he was not apologizing for her lapses, as if he had caused them), this man who felt he labored beneath the weight of the entire earth. But it certainly put one off one’s food to watch his herculean struggle to perform his duties whenever he considered himself to be wounded by one of those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that Shakespeare referred to so eloquently.

While Mollie ran ahead, her skirts inelegantly lifted above her ankles, Rosalind strolled leisurely toward the downed man, for she had seen him move one of his legs, which assured her that he was not dead. That was good. A wounded man was bad enough, surely. A dead man would be totally insupportable!

She noticed that the pair of bays was standing quietly, having found some tender grass to munch on, and obviously not hurt, for all their master’s imbecility. Passing them by, and giving only a cursory look to the broken wheel, she at last came to the man, who had recovered sufficiently by this time to be sitting upright in the lane, an embarrassed smile on his face as he rubbed at the side of his head.

“He’s fine, miss,” Mollie informed her, beaming as if she had been personally responsible for the man’s recovery from his spill. “Says his name is Mr. Remington. Beaumont Remington. But he might be foreign. I heard him say a couple o’ words I ain’t never heared before—and I don’t think they were very pretty either.”

Dear Mollie. Living as she was in the company of women—except for Riggs, of course, although he truly did not count—she had not been exposed to the rough words a man might use when he felt his sensibilities had been abused. “Thank you, my dear,” Rosalind said, stifling a smile for, even if she also had not been privy to such manly language more than a time or two in her life, she had a fairly clear idea of what Remington had said. “You may go to the horses now, if you please, just in case they belatedly decide to take exception to the cavalier treatment they have been forced to suffer from their cow-handed driver.”

“Cavalier, is it?” questioned Beau, just now sitting on his rump (and the majority of his dignity) in the roadway, cocking his head in her direction, feeling tolerably amused. Now here was a woman who didn’t mince words, he decided, looking up at her. Bridget would adore her. “Now, is that nice?”

“Probably not. And you forgot, I said you were cow-handed as well,” Rosalind said, offering him her hand so that he might rise. “Or did that insult travel safely over your head?”

Miss Rosalind Winslow was not quite the chucklehead one might suppose her to be, baldly insulting a man—a very
large
man as it turned out, once he had clambered to his feet—with no one about to rescue her from his anger save a young serving maid. She knew herself to be within shouting distance of Samuel Hackett’s cottage, for one thing, and for another thing, Beaumont Remington was not quite as unaffected by his spill as Mollie might have thought.

He rose quickly enough, Rosalind granted to herself, but his wince of pain and his quick clutch at his left arm convinced her that he had suffered a more serious mishap than first supposed, perhaps even broken a bone. She might not be very big, or very strong, but she certainly could not be afraid of an injured man.