“King Edward was murdered here by his stepmother Elfrida in 978,” Penelope said as they passed through the arch in the crumbling curtain wall and beheld the hill upon which the ruins of the castle stood. “It was probably just a hunting lodge here at the time. But it was a castle when King John starved twenty-two French nobles to death in the dungeons. It’s haunted, you know, by a headless woman in white who floats down the hill and then disappears.”
“Who is the ghost?” Vivian asked.
Richard grinned at Penelope’s dramatics, and at Vivian’s eager interest in spirits. He’d spent little time in Penelope’s company in the past, and had assumed her to be a spoiled child with thoughts only for herself. It was surprising that she seemed to have become so quickly attached to her new cousin.
“Some say it is Lady Bankes. She valiantly defended the castle during the civil war, but a member of the garrison betrayed her and let in the parliamentarians. It was they who tore the walls of the castle down, out of pure spite.”
“That doesn’t account for her losing her head,” Richard said. “And I don’t know what good it would do to float down the hillside every now and then. Seems a waste of effort, for a ghost.”
“Maybe it is Elfrida, then, doomed to roam the scene of her greatest sin,” Penelope amended.
“Or maybe it is fog of an evening and a drunken fool. That seems the better explanation, albeit less thrilling.”
“Ow!” Penelope exclaimed, stumbling.
Vivian caught at her cousin, helping her keep her balance. “What is it? Are you all right?”
“My ankle. I’ve twisted it. Help me to that stone over there,” the girl said, pointing to a convenient resting place not three steps away.
“Does it hurt? Can you stand?” Vivian asked as she lowered Penelope to the stone.
“It’s minor. Just a momentary twist. If I rest here for a spell I should be fine.”
“We should take you back to the grange.”
“No, no. You and Mr. Brent go up to the ruins. When you return, I promise I shall be quite restored.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! Go!”
Vivian frowned at her cousin, then turned to him. She raised her brows in question, and he smiled and shrugged, offering his arm. Penelope’s acting would never win her a place on the stage, and it was not difficult to see through her little ploy.
Vivian took his arm, and they started up the narrow, muddy track through the grass. The sky was heavy with clouds, the sun occasionally breaking through in pale yellow, and there was a damp breeze from off the sea a few miles distant. The few remaining segments of castle wall stood like towers against the turbulent skies, and bore the pockmarks of the parliamentarians’ destructive forces.
“It’s a pity they destroyed it,” Vivian said, after they had left Penelope out of earshot on her rock. “It must have been lovely.”
“They probably had fun doing it. Boys and men, they both are forever looking for something they can blow up.”
“You, too?”
“When I was a boy. My friends and I made a cannon out of an old oak water pipe, and set it off in a field, using a sapling to brace and aim it, and hiding behind a small wall of earth. We were lucky we weren’t killed.”
“What happened?”
“Damn thing exploded,” he said, remembering with a laugh. “The whole cannon: shards of wood everywhere. You’d think we’d been in a sea battle and the deck had been hit—three separate villages heard the blast, and thought Boney had landed and was marching into the countryside. We wouldn’t have admitted it was us, only one of my friends got a wedge of oak in his thigh. A hairbreadth to one side, and he would have cut the artery and bled to death.”
“Good heavens!”
He shrugged. “Typical for boys. Just as my sister and your cousin are being typical for women, with their matchmaking,” he said, taking a risk and wanting to see her reaction.
She gaped up at him.
“Come now, Miss Ambrose. You cannot be unaware of their machinations.”
“No,” she admitted.
“Did you encourage Miss Twitchen, or was it her own idea?” he asked, breaking all the rules of romantic fencing, and knowing it was unfair of him to do so. He should not ask such a thing without stating his own wishes first. She would be within her rights to abandon him here and go back to rejoin her cousin. Still, he was interested to see if she were as daring as he hoped. He waited to see what she would do.
“What a question!” she said, looking away from him, her bonnet blocking her face from his view.
“Even on such brief acquaintance as we have, you must know that I am not one for veilings of the truth. Will you answer?” he asked, pushing her.
“And leave you with no mystery to solve?” she asked.
“I don’t play games,” he said, knowing it for a lie, for what was he doing now, if not trying to trick a confession from her?
“I do not think it is a game for a woman to protect the secrets of her heart,” she said.
“So you have secrets?” he asked, not believing it, and yet hoping it was true.
“As do you, apparently.”
“You think so?” he asked, suddenly feeling exposed. If he said he wanted to know much more about her, if he said he was attracted to her and enjoyed her company, if he was as forthright in matters of the heart as he made such an issue of being in other aspects of his life, would she run or would she stay? “I may have a secret or two,” he admitted.
“I have heard hints.”
“You have?”
“Of your former wife…”
“Wife? I have had no wife,” he said, taken aback by the unexpected turn in conversation.
She stopped and looked to him, confusion in her expression and her tone. “But Sara and William? They are yours, are they not?”
“They are, but I have had no wife.” He sighed, feeling his hopes once again draining away. It should get easier to accept rejection over time, and yet it never did. He had attempted to court a handful of women over the past few years, and when they heard what he was about to tell Vivian, they had all turned from him and made it clear that pursuance of his suit would not be welcome. “I thought someone would have told you—last night, surely, if not before.”
“You are worrying me, Mr. Brent.”
“My children’s mother and I were not married. She was my mistress.”
“Oh,” she said softly, and he saw the hurt of disappointment in her eyes.
“The situation was nothing unusual, I am sorry to say. I am hardly the first man to sire children out of wedlock.” The words sounded a miserable excuse even as he said them, as if he were trying to weasel out of his own past. “Sara and William are my heirs. They bear my name, and any woman I marry would have to raise them as her own, beside any children we might have together.”
It was that last point that was so unpalatable to gently bred women. Bastards beside their own offspring? Bastards, heirs along with their own children? He could hardly berate them for following dictates of society in which they had been schooled since birth. They could not help their inability to accept bastards into their care.
And he, loving Sara and William as he did, could not accept a woman as wife who would not love his children.
“What of their mother?” Vivian asked softly.
“She is somewhere in London, with a new protector. She broke off our affair shortly after William was born, and did not protest when I demanded the children.” He shrugged, beginning to feel angry and defensive on behalf of his offspring. “She sends gifts on occasion, and visits them once or twice a year, although less frequently as time goes on.”
“Did you love her?”
“I thought so for a time, but it was based on illusion. I saw her beauty and her charm, and nothing of who she truly was. I was young and stupid, but I would not have Sara and William pay any more of the price for my idiocy than they already must.”
“It was… quite remarkable of you
to claim them as you have.”
“I am their father,” he said, the simplicity of the statement his only way to express the strength of the bond he shared with them. “I could not leave them without my name, without my protection, to be raised by strangers or by a mother who paid them little care. And I will not wed a woman who cannot give them the love they deserve. Better that they remain motherless than be subject to an unloving and jealous one.”
He met Vivian’s troubled gaze, holding it with his own. “Now you are wondering what you are doing here alone with me. I am no marriage prospect, as you were led to believe.”
“You have surprised me, that is all,” Vivian said, the weakness of her voice belying the words. She tried to smile. “I had been expecting to hear that you were divorced, or had beaten your wife, or that she had thrown herself from a window in despair of being married to you.”
“That would have been better?”
“No, only more expected,” she said, and to his astonishment her strained smile stretched to one more natural, as if she could almost see humor in the situation. Where, he did not know.
“I say, I don’t look like a wife beater, do I?” he asked.
“I would not know. But perhaps you are someone a woman would throw herself from a window to avoid.”
“I think some have tried.”
“Perhaps if you made a habit of being more polite in your speech, a little more fawning and gracious, they might ponder longer before the leap.”
“I prefer to have the truth laid out plain and unadorned, and let people think what they may.” They resumed walking up the hill toward the ruins, skirting at least for the moment the subject of his past mistress. He did not fool himself into thinking it was an issue she could so easily overlook, and wondered what thoughts would eat away at her later, when she had time to think it through.
“Yes, you seem to have made a special effort to make yourself as blunt in your speech as possible.”
“You are well matching me in that,” he said, enjoying the banter, and willing to endure whatever arrows she chose to shoot at him as long as she kept talking.
“Only because it seems to be what you respond to best.”
“Then you admit to humoring me, for your own ends.”
“And what if I do? Don’t we all do that?” she asked, slightly out of breath from the climb. Even through her breathing he could hear the trace of bitterness in her voice.
They had reached the top of the hill, and the heart of the ruins. He stopped so that she could catch her breath, and so that they could both take in the stone walls that rose and tilted and tumbled around them.
“It should have been time that did this,” he said, gesturing to the stones around them, “not men.”
“It does take away the romance,” she agreed.
He led her in a slow circuit of the ruins, and paused with her at an opening in the stones that looked down over the valley and the village of Corfe Castle, gray against the green of the rolling hills.
“Do you always humor those around you?” he asked, not willing to let that bitterness escape unexplored.
“I haven’t had much choice,” she said, still looking down upon the view.
“It seems a hard way to live, always pleasing others and never yourself.”
“One becomes trained in it,” she said, “like a cook or a seamstress. It becomes one’s work, for it is how one earns one’s bread.”
“That hardly seems to be a wise thing to admit.”
“I am being honest about my dishonesty,” she said, and looked up at him with confusion. “Only, with you, the more I seek to be as straightforward as you wish, the less I know if I am seeking to please you, or to please myself. I am growing to like saying what I think.”
“And did you calculate that that is precisely the right thing to say to me?” he asked lightly, although his heart was thumping in his chest. It was so long since he had been with someone who could speak plainly to him of her thoughts. He had told himself for nearly two years that if he could find a woman who cared more for the honesty of her heart than for appearances, he would find a woman with whom he could share his life.
He wanted a wife. He wanted someone with whom to grow old, and watch their children grow. He wanted someone to pull into his arms at night, and sleep warm against him. He wanted someone who knew him completely, and whom he could know to the depths of her being. Life was not meant to be lived alone.
“Do stop thinking about yourself and what a grand matrimonial catch you are,” she said, stepping away and finding a seat on a fallen bit of wall.
His lips parted in surprise, her words like cold rain against the warmth of his desires. They reminded him that he had not won her yet.
“Are you now thinking that you have created a monster?” she asked. “So be it. My nerves are worn from this, this…” She paused, waving her hand around. “Whatever you call this interplay between men and women. You don’t have anything to eat, do you?”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said, smiling to himself. Perhaps he should carry a pocketful of treats and win her that way. Would that do it?
She put her hand over her stomach and frowned. “That’s all right. I don’t think I’m as hungry as I thought.” She cocked her head, staring at him in surprise. “Actually, the more I say what is on my mind, the less hungry I become. It seems quite beneficial.”
“It’s what I’ve come to believe.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, and he fidgeted under her assessing gaze. He sat down beside her, if only to escape such frank scrutiny. She had managed to turn the tables neatly upon him, taking on the role of frank examiner that he was accustomed to having as his own.
“I think there’s a touch of self-righteousness to your honesty,” she said.
“Self-righteousness?” he repeated, appalled.
“Dear me, have I gone too far, and shared too much truth?”
“I am not self-righteous,” he said in a priggish tone that seemed to prove the opposite.
“Self-righteous and a bit of a coward,” she continued, “as much so as I am.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, feeling more uncomfortable by the moment. “Explain yourself.”
“All this honesty—you think it makes you unassailable because you are virtuous.” The accusation came in a straightforward manner, and she caught him with her eyes. “You use your bluntness to guard yourself, and scare people away.”
“Nonsense.”
“I am not berating you for it.”
“I did not say you were. I’m saying it’s nonsense. I say what I think because I’m tired of hypocrisy, not because I want to frighten people.” As he spoke, he became aware that he was protesting too much, aware that he would not be defensive if she had not come close to a truth he would rather not examine.
“Mmm.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“You know your reasoning better than I,” she said, in a tone that suggested very much the opposite.
“I’m not trying to scare you now,” he said, and laid his hand over hers.
She laughed nervously, moving her hand beneath his as if she might pull it away. “Aren’t you?”
Maybe he was. Maybe he was trying to keep her from seeing clearly into him before he was ready to reveal all his faults and weaknesses. He wanted her to see the better side of him, to focus her attention on what he could offer her rather than what he might lack.
The best defense was an offense, was it not?
He picked up her gloved hand, feeling its fine trembling. He watched her expression, her lips parting, her eyes on their two hands. Her nervous expectation was contagious, and he found his own heart beating rapidly; he was frightened that she would pull away, yet he wanted more than anything to continue.
He raised her hand to his lips and kissed the back of her fingers. She jerked her hand, and he tightened his grip, not letting her go.
“Mr. Brent…” she said.
“Ric
hard. My name is Richard.” Let her say his name; let her accept him. Let this grow to be more than a brief acquaintance.
He opened her hand and laid her palm against his cheek, then turned his face so that he could kiss the inside of her wrist where it was left exposed at the edge of her glove.
She caught her breath.
He drew in the faint scent of her, mingled with the leather and the wool, delicate and feminine and ineffably precious. This was something he wanted in his life for more than an afternoon.
He pushed up her sleeve an inch, and followed it with his lips, then painted a stroke upon her soft skin with the tip of his tongue, losing himself in the velvety smoothness and warmth.
“Mr. Brent!” The words were breathless, and again she tried to pull her hand away, and again he stopped her.
“Richard. Call me by my Christian name.”
“You must stop,” she said. But the words were half-hearted.
He sucked against her wrist, using his tongue to rub her, willing her to feel the same heat that was growing in him, willing her to feel the beginnings of a bond between them and the promise it might hold for the future.
“You must… Richard…” she said, and when he looked up at her from under his brows he saw that her eyes were half-closed, and she was leaning toward him.
He began to slowly peel her glove down her hand, exposing its heel and the base of her thumb. He slid his finger under the thin leather, rubbing against the palm of her hand, which was damp and warm in the confines of the glove. Her fingers curled inward, and her breathing quickened.
“This is indecent,” she whispered. Her pupils had grown into black pools against the sea green irises. She wet her lips.
He peeled the glove another two inches, to the base of her fingers, and kissed the palm of her hand. He scraped against her skin with his teeth, and then with the tip of his tongue penetrated into the tight vee exposed between each finger, imagining behind his closed eyes his tongue working more intimate places than her hand, imagining his mouth at the warm heart of her, making her moan with pleasure in the dark confines of his bed.
He felt his own body responding to the feel of her skin against his tongue, and to the sound of her quickened breathing. He wanted more than her hand: he wanted much more than any young lady would permit upon such short acquaintance, however bold she tried to be.