What a Lady Craves (10 page)

Much as she does now.

And there it was. He was damned either way where she was concerned. Might as well accept that their marriage was never meant to be.

You don’t really believe that.

No, a man made his own luck by holding tight to his honor. Things would work out in the end. They would. They already were. He was back home, and his daughters were happier already. If only he could bring Henrietta around, his life would be back to where it belonged.

Henrietta shepherded the girls past the first few houses and into Tilly’s shop. Alexander followed them inside to find Helena stretching a curious finger toward the ship in the bottle. Francesca stared at Tilly with round eyes.

“Papa.” She tugged at Alexander’s sleeve. “Do you think he’s a pirate?”

She’d whispered, but her voice still carried. Normally such a pronouncement was
sufficient for Tilly to begin crowing about the exploits of his younger days in an exaggerated accent. As a child, Alexander had heard enough chilling tales of boardings and keel-haulings and plank-walkings. At Francesca’s age, he might even have believed them.

But not today. Today, Tilly gave no indication of having heard Francesca’s question. He was too busy muttering under his breath. “Don’t got not’ing. Not’ing more than what’s here. No reason to hide t’ings. Not from some foreigner and not from anyone else.”

Alexander smiled at his daughter. “No, dear. Just a merchant.” A small enough lie. Smuggler and scavenger were more accurate, but no need to tell an impressionable child as much.

He studied the older man. Years at sea had tanned his skin to the consistency of an elephant’s hide, but the color seemed to have drained away, tingeing his cheeks a pale ocher. A prickle of alarm raised the hairs on the back of Alexander’s neck. It took a great deal to rattle old Tilly.

“What’s this about foreigners?” Alexander asked. “Did someone query after the lady of the house and expect there to be one?”

Depending on his mood, Tilly regularly scowled or laughed in reply to that kind of question. Strangers tended to expect
Tilly
to be short for
Matilda
and became confused when they discovered the shop housed no one besides an old man. Why anyone would expect a woman amid such disorder was another matter entirely.

“What?” Tilly shook his head. “No. Not’ing amiss here. Not a t’ing.”

“No, not at all,” Alexander said under his breath.

“What’s that, son? Speak up. My hearing ain’t what it used to be.”

True enough. The man had suffered from constant ringing in his ears ever since he stood too close to a cannon blast, but he didn’t usually like to call attention to the problem.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen the item I was asking after?” Alexander ventured.

At the question, a movement caught his eye. Henrietta looked up sharply. Tilly, on the other hand, waved him off. “Haven’t seen a t’ing. No sir. And I ain’t got no newspapers, either,” he added with a nod at Henrietta. “I’m getting too old for this sort of t’ing, ye know.”

“Too old for newspapers?” Alexander probed.

“Too old. Period. People ain’t got no call coming in here, asking after stuff I haven’t got and have no way of getting.”

Henrietta looked from Tilly to Alexander and back. “It’s all right. You sold me a newspaper when I came back down here yesterday. Don’t you remember?” She reached out to
lay a hand on the old man’s arm, but he snatched it away.

“What is it you haven’t got?” Alexander asked slowly.

“None of your affair. It ain’t not’ing of no one’s affair.”

“If this is about my missing cargo, I’d say that makes it my affair. Did someone else pay you a visit?”

“Dark-skinned foreigners askin’ after treasures.” He cast a wild-eyed glance about his shop. “Does it look like I gots treasures?”

“Dark-skinned?” Alexander was liking the implications less and less. “Like the man I sent down yesterday?”

“It weren’t no one I ever saw before.”

Someone of such dark coloring was a rarity in this part of England, but it might have been someone who’d signed on to sail with the
Marianne.
Except the other ship was in Falmouth—his daughters’ return confirmed as much. So why would this man find his way to a smaller village of little account? A place where he wouldn’t be welcome, no less, given Satya’s experience.

Tilly came out from behind the counter, making shooing motions with his hands. “Now if ye don’t mind, I’m closed for th’ day. Might be closed for th’ month. Might even be closed for good.”

Francesca shrank back to clutch at Alexander’s trouser leg. He rested a palm on his daughter’s shoulder.

Henrietta took Helena by the hand and brushed past him. “We won’t be disturbing you any further.”

With a glance back at Tilly, Alexander followed them out of the shop.

“I don’t like that man,” Francesca pronounced once they were outside.

“He isn’t usually like that,” Henrietta said, but she raised her eyebrows at Alexander.

“Why don’t you go back up to the manor?” he suggested, keeping his tone mild. No need to alarm the others, whether or not Tilly’s behavior was strange. A prickle of warning slipped up his spine. Damn it all. He’d hoped to leave the suspicion and constant vigilance half a world away.

Francesca pouted. “I don’t like Lady Epperley, either.”

“You don’t have to see Lady Epperley, dear,” Henrietta said. “We don’t have to go directly, either. We can go down by the beach and see if we can find some pretty pebbles. Would you like that?”

“No,” Alexander said, “I think you
had
better go directly back.” He didn’t want them alone on the beach.

Henrietta turned her head slightly to the side. “Why?”

“Call it a feeling”—one that punched him in the gut—“but I’d prefer it. Can you trust me?”

Her expression hardened.

Right. Poor choice of words there. “Can you trust me in this?”

Her tongue darted between her lips. He watched transfixed as she licked, and despite everything else, his blood shot southward.

“Perhaps if you told me what was going on,” she said.

He stared pointedly at the girls. “Not now.” He forced himself to keep his tone calm and steady, despite the heightened throbbing of his pulse. “You have my word I’ll tell you what I can when I return to the manor. But for now, I need you to take the girls inside, all right?”

Henrietta gave him a slow nod, but the look in her eyes remained skeptical. Not that he blamed her there, but he would explain, even if the explanation made him appear overly cautious. He owed her that much.

He waited until they were well on their way back up the path before turning toward the pub. Perhaps he wasn’t yet up to a journey to Falmouth, but he might not have to go so far. What if someone at the pub had spotted Tilly’s dark-skinned stranger? What if some of the
Marianne
’s crew had ventured this way? What if the captain had come seeking Alexander? This business could no longer wait. He needed answers, the sooner the better.

Maybe he was stretching matters in connecting Tilly’s behavior with the missing bit of his cargo, but Alexander wasn’t about to write off the idea without a thorough investigation. He’d learned back in India not to chalk up too much to coincidence. Not since the people close to him began turning up dead. And each successive death had led closer. His wife had only been the latest in a string of victims.

He wasn’t about to risk his daughters’ lives.

All the way back to the manor, Henrietta wondered what had happened between Tilly and Alexander. Tilly had been jumpy, certainly—jumpy and odd—but Alexander’s reaction was also overly strong. Some might go so far as to term it protective. And she couldn’t ask the girls about it. No need to alarm them over matters they were too young to know about. Alexander had promised to tell her more.

If he kept
that
promise. In the end, it might not be any of her affair.

At any rate, she found Lady Epperley had spirited herself off to parts unknown, so Henrietta didn’t even have the excuse of having to fulfill her duty as the old lady’s companion. It truly looked as if Henrietta had inherited the position of governess in spite of herself.

“And what shall we do to amuse ourselves?” she asked the girls. Her mind came up short on ideas. Her girlhood had been comprised of lessons in music, drawing, and painting. She’d had embroidery to work on. She’d read the occasional novel and played with her sister. But none of those choices seemed to fit the bill for these two children, and Henrietta’s memory didn’t quite stretch so far into the past. Besides, she’d resolved not to teach them frivolities, but she also didn’t want to delve into anything too closely resembling lessons at their ages.

“I don’t want to see Papa’s aunt,” Francesca pronounced.

“You’re in luck,” Henrietta replied, “as she seems to be hiding. Why don’t you tell me what it is you like to do?”

“We had a nanny in India, but she didn’t come with us,” Helena said. “Nipa used to let us dress up in her clothes.”

“Oh, she had pretty clothes.” Francesca twirled, and her skirt belled out about her ankles. “Green and orange and blue. So soft.”

Henrietta imagined lengths of silk and cotton in deep, vibrant colors. “I doubt I have anything so bright,” she admitted, “but we can look.”

She hadn’t bothered bringing her ball gowns from London. Pity, that. She might have let the girls play at being grown ladies with them. About all she had with her were a few muslin day dresses in various pale hues, all gowns appropriate for the young miss that at twenty-six she no longer was.

“I do think we ought to see about unpacking your things since we didn’t do it earlier,” she added.

She led the girls up three flights of stairs to the nursery, immediately adjacent to her room under the eaves. The girls’ trunk lay in the corner. The servants had been in to take the draperies off the furniture, but the coverlet on the lone bed lay yellowed in the pale sunlight. The musty odor of years of disuse permeated the entire room.

“Why don’t we decide where to put your things?” Henrietta said briskly, as much to fill the uncomfortable silence as anything. The nursery offered little in the way of possibility there. A dark hulk of a wardrobe took up one wall, with a matching clothespress standing opposite.

The girls exchanged a look, whether of complicity or imminent mischief, it was hard to tell. Were they a few years older, they might even have rolled their eyes.

Henrietta suppressed a sigh. She was going to be horrible at this nannying business, she just knew it. Plastering on a smile that made her cheeks ache, she knelt and opened the trunk. Muslin gown after muslin gown lay in neat piles with various trinkets appropriate to small girls nestled between the layers.

She pulled out a necklace of clear glass beads, tinged pink and blue. “And whose is this lovely thing?”

“That’s mine,” Helena said immediately.

“It is not!” Francesca stamped her foot. “Mama gave it to me!”

Oh, dear. And with their mother rather recently departed, Henrietta would have to tread very carefully. “I’m sure she would have wanted you to share.”

“No.” Helena stomped over and took the necklace. “This one is mine.” She reached into the trunk and rifled through the cotton until she produced a duplicate string of beads. “This one is Francesca’s.”

“How can you tell whose is whose?” Henrietta asked, baffled.

“I just can.”

“Right.” The girls could do with instruction in manners, but she hadn’t the first clue how to teach them. Not when she didn’t feel she had any true say in their upbringing. It wasn’t as if their father had gleaned over countless candidates for the position, read through impeccable references, and chosen her.

Once upon a time he’d chosen her for an entirely different role. Had things worked out differently, her opinion might have counted for something real in these girls’ lives. She pushed the thought aside. No sense in dwelling on what might have been.

She ran a hand over a thin cotton shift. All the girls’ clothes looked like dresses belonging to any other English lass. Odd, that, considering they’d been born in a completely
different land. And yet, nothing of India showed in this collection of garments, unless it was the thinness of the fabrics and the utter lack of woolens.

“I can see you’re going to need a few new things before the summer is out,” she commented. “I have the feeling you’ll find the weather quite a bit cooler than you’re used to.”

She turned to catch Francesca pulling a face at her sister. “Here, now, what’s this?”

“She put her tongue out at me,” Francesca said.

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Girls!” Henrietta clapped her hands. Good heavens, they hadn’t behaved this way in front of their father. She searched back in her memory to when she and Catherine were small—perhaps even this small—but she could not recall arguing with her sister to this extent over utter trifles. No, she and Catherine had been complicit in the main, but they’d had to be. Most of the time, they had to present a united defense against their older brother. “This isn’t the way for proper young ladies to behave. And I’m sure this isn’t the first you’ve heard something of the sort.”

Helena chewed at her lower lip and cast a sidelong glance at her sister. “Nipa let us do whatever we pleased.”

Ah, yes, their Indian nanny. “Why don’t you tell me about her?” The topic seemed safe enough, safer than asking about their mother, at any rate. And perhaps she could glean some tips for dealing with young children. “Did you like her?”

“I miss her.” Francesca’s eyes filled with tears and her lower lip quivered alarmingly.

Henrietta stared at the girl. Should she offer a hug? Would Francesca only push her away if she tried? A glance at Helena offered no counsel.

“Are you going to start that again?” Helena sniped. “You’re such a baby.”

“Am not,” Francesca replied thickly.

“Are too.”

“All right.” Henrietta pushed herself to her feet. Clearly, she was not cut out to be a nanny. Just as clearly, the girls needed a distraction, but what? “I think we’ll leave this for the maid. How about we see what we might find in my wardrobe? If you like something, you might try it on, but only if you promise to behave like well-brought-up young ladies.”