Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress (9 page)

Ross turned his head to look at her as though surprised to find she was there. ‘Yes. It is beautiful. After Spain I had forgotten how green Cornwall is.’

The chaise swung round a corner between two lodge houses and she glimpsed a man tugging his forelock as he held the gate. Then they were trotting briskly through parkland.

A park? Meg glanced at Ross’s face. It was set, dark and utterly forbidding. The carriage turned again, slowed, stopped. Stopped in front of a long façade of textured grey stone, punctuated by three storeys of windows and a balustrade shielding a basement area. Stopped before a sweeping flight of steps up to a vast front door flanked by potted bay trees. Stopped in front of an imposing house that could not be called
small
by even the grandest aristocrat.

It was, without a shadow of exaggeration, a mansion. ‘You said it was small,’ Meg blurted out, saw Perrott’s expression and added, ‘My lord.’

‘I said the old house—which is a wing at the back—is small,’ Ross said as a footman flung open the door and let down the steps. ‘We were interrupted before I could finish, if you recall.’

‘Sir…’ the footman began. Meg saw his face as he looked fully at Ross.
He must resemble his father,
she thought as the man’s expression changed. ‘My lord!’ He turned and gestured urgently to the second man who had followed him across the wide sweep of
carriage drive. ‘His lordship is here!’ The other man turned on his heel and ran back to the house.

‘My lord, we had no idea when to expect you, but your rooms are prepared.’ Ross got down and stood looking round him as Meg and Perrott followed. For a moment he thought he saw rapid movement, the coltish grace of a fair young man running to greet him, then the ghost was gone. Giles was gone.

Act,
he told himself. He had shown a calm face before battle, even when his stomach was turning to water and his legs wanted to turn right round and run away. If you were not afraid, you were a fool. The knack was never to let anyone know and never to give way to the urge to do anything but your duty. And this, beyond argument, was his duty.

Behind him he could almost feel Meg’s seething indignation at the way he had deceived her, but she was keeping silent, thank God. As Ross took the first stride towards the steps the double doors were flung open and servants began to troop out, women to the left, men to the right, one on each tread, lining the route he must take. At the top stood Mrs Fogarty, opposite her Heneage, the butler.

Ross stopped at the foot of the steps, freezing the lowermost maids in the act of curtsying. ‘Heneage, take the staff back inside. I will speak to them later. Mrs Fogarty, a word with you in the study at once, if you please.’

‘My lord.’ The butler bowed, collected the attention of his puzzled subordinates with a glance and stepped inside with the procession of black skirts and dark blue livery at his heels. Heneage was as impassive as he remembered,
Ross thought as he walked through the Great Hall without a glance to left or right and into his father’s study.

The housekeeper was waiting for him, hands folded, lips tight, her heavy bunch of keys by her side. As Ross entered she looked up, pointedly, to the portrait that hung over the fireplace. His father. It was like looking into a mirror. He repressed the shudder, kept his face neutral.

‘Mrs Fogarty. I will not beat about the bush. You have, I believe, connections in Truro?’

‘My sister, Master Ross.’

So, she was not going to allow him his title. It broke no bones. ‘It will be no surprise to you that I have made my own arrangements for the post of housekeeper. I will write to my bankers in Truro to pay the first instalment of a pension to you immediately. It will be commensurate with the length of service you have given this family and will reflect the lack of notice.’ He handed her the packet he had put together at the Red Lion. ‘This contains the address of my bankers, a letter of introduction and twenty pounds to cover your expenses until the pension is paid.’

Ross paused, waiting for some response, but she maintained her silence, her face disdainful. ‘The chaise will remain to take you on to Truro. I expect you to return the keys to me and to depart within the hour.’

‘You do not want me to hand them to your mistress, then?’ The housekeeper’s lip curled.

‘If you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head, you will wait in the chaise and I will have your things packed and brought out to you,’ he retorted.

‘I anticipated this.’ She swept to the door in a rustle of bombazine and flung it open. Heneage was standing
outside with Meg and Perrott. ‘My bags are packed,’ Mrs Fogarty said, her bitter voice clear and carrying. ‘You think I would stay under the same roof as a man who murdered his own brother? A pity the French did not do for you—the wrong man died and that’s a fact.’

She passed the group outside without a glance. Ross followed her out into the hall. Was he as white as he felt? he wondered. ‘Heneage, would you be so good as to fetch Usborne?’

The butler was so impassive, and it was so many years since he had last seen him, that Ross could not decide whether he was outraged by the housekeeper’s parting shot or entirely in agreement with it.

‘Mr Usborne had a heart stroke three weeks ago, my lord. He is living with his sister-in-law in Falmouth. Mr Tonge, the solicitor, thought you would wish his medical expenses to be taken care of.’

‘Certainly. I am sorry to hear he is unwell. I will speak to Mr Tonge about his pension. Perrott, here, is my valet; show him to my rooms and have the luggage sent up, if you please.’

With a sidelong glance at Meg, the butler nodded to Perrott. ‘This way, Mr Perrott.’

‘And, Heneage, see the staff are assembled in the hall in an hour—I wish to introduce them to Mrs Halgate, the new housekeeper.’ Ross waited until the two men had vanished through the green baize door under the stairs. ‘Mrs Halgate, the study.’

As he expected, Meg went straight to the point the moment the door was closed. ‘That woman accused you of murdering your brother.’ Her shock was clear, and so was a trace of fear she could not suppress.

Ross looked at the desk with its tooled leather top,
worn where his father’s and grandfather’s hands had rested, the carved chair, designed for a family of big men, the reading lamp and the standish with its rack of pens. How many times had he stood on the wrong side of that desk, hating the man in the chair? Deliberately he walked round, sat down and folded his hands on the leather. It was smooth against his skin. Suddenly he wished he could still speak to his father, man to man, try to understand him, try to make him understand the man his rebellious son had grown into.

‘Will you not you sit down, Meg?’ He was going to have to speak of Giles, to explain. Lay bare the raw guilt that haunted him, haunted this house.

‘No. Thank you.’ She paced away from him, then back. There was anxiety in her eyes; he could almost feel her efforts not to judge, to hear his side of the story. Most people, looking at him, would not have hesitated to believe the worst. ‘What did she mean?’

‘That I am responsible for my brother’s death. I shot him.’

He waited, braced for the revulsion to show in her voice, on her face, but she just stared at him, distressed and questioning.

‘But he died six or so years after you joined the army, you said. Surely you were in the Peninsula then?’

‘I shot him when we were boys. The bullet entered Giles’s chest and could not be removed. It left him weak, prone to every disease and infection that were around. Eventually it killed him.’

‘Oh. Oh, no.’ Meg did sit down then, looking at him with painful earnestness. Her hands were shaking and she clasped them tightly together. ‘Did you mean to shoot him?’

‘D
id I intend to shoot my brother? No,’ Ross said. ‘It was my own damn carelessness, my lack of responsibility for him, but it was an accident. It was hushed up—two boys hunting, one of those things.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘All I wanted to do was to join the army, to shoot. I was good at one thing only, but in my father’s eye the ability to shoot well was simply one of the attributes of a gentleman, not a way of earning your living. I told you I had two fine tutors: the head keeper and a wicked old poacher. By the age of fourteen I could hit anything, still or moving. Giles was the model son, the obedient, intelligent, hard-working, sweet-tempered son. Unfortunately I was the elder, the heir. Obedience could not be beaten into me, although God knows, my father and tutors tried, but my father could, and did, refuse to let me join the army when I was seventeen as I wanted.

‘All he wanted, of course, was Giles to be the heir.’

‘But you loved your brother,’ Meg said. ‘I can hear
it when you say his name. You weren’t jealous or resentful of him, were you?’

‘No. You could only love Giles.’ He made himself look then, look up to where he knew it would be, hanging opposite his father’s desk. He had loved his brother and he hadn’t even been able to take care of him when he was doing the one thing he was good at. ‘See for yourself.’

Meg went to stand in front of the portrait, hands behind her back, like a child in a picture gallery. Ross found himself looking at her, not at his brother’s face, watching the graceful line of neck and shoulder, the weight of hair at her nape, the inquisitive tilt of her head.

‘What an extraordinarily good-looking young man,’ she said at last. ‘He has kind eyes. And, of course, people are inclined to equate beauty with goodness.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Ross agreed without resentment, looking up at last. His mother’s pointed chin and high cheek-bones, her green eyes and sensitive mouth allied to his father’s height and jet black hair had resulted in a youth who looked, so the impressionable ladies of the district used to say, like a prince from a fairy tale. And the delicacy of his health left him pale, slender, even more beautiful. ‘He had our mother’s looks. I, as you can see, have my father’s. Just for once, the looks did not lie. He was everything he seems to be.’
And I killed him because I was headstrong and heedless and always had to score a point against authority. Because I would not do my duty. Because I did not love him enough to deny him.

Meg turned and studied Lord Brandon’s image. ‘Black eyes, slanted brows, a stubborn jaw and a mouth
that does not know how to say “I Yield”,’ she observed. ‘You must have made a handsome pair, you and your brother.’

‘Raven and dove.’ The comparison had been made often enough.
Devil and angel.

‘What happened?’

‘I was almost seventeen, Giles was two years younger. One day when I cut lessons with our tutor to go rook shooting he followed me, wanted to come too, hung on my sleeve, teased me to let him come. For an adventure. I said yes, just that once. I was the elder, I should have been responsible. I should have said no, looked after him.’ But of course, the opportunity to kick over the traces, to be defiant, was far more alluring than any thought of what his duty to his young brother might be.

‘I was used to stalking, used to the woods. He was not. I had my gun raised, my finger on the trigger and he tripped on some brambles, crashed into me. The gun got jammed between us and went off.’

‘You must have been terrified.’ Meg watched him with those wide, candid blue-grey eyes that seemed to see so deep inside him. ‘But you got him back, of course. And he would tell everyone it was an accident.’

‘Of course.’ A good officer gets his men back. But he doesn’t shoot them himself in the first place.
All that blood. And Giles, white and terrified and hurting, saying over and over,
accident, accident.
Blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, the panic. What should I do? Move him? Leave him?

‘Never, since that day, have I felt so helpless, so useless. I got Giles back somehow, carried him for half a mile in my arms, knowing I was hurting him, seeing
the bleeding I could not stop, hearing the breath sobbing in his lungs. But Giles never protested, never cried out, because he trusted me.’ And that was perhaps the worst pain of all.

‘So you ran away to join the army.’ He could not tell whether there was condemnation or understanding in Meg’s voice, only that she was struggling to keep it steady.

‘I left as soon as I knew he was not going to die. It was only later, from my godfather’s letters, that I realised how sick it had left him. And then it did kill him. I killed him.’

‘No!’ she protested. ‘No, it was an accident. How could you blame yourself?’ He just looked at her and saw the understanding dawn. ‘You felt the responsibility, that you had failed him. Yes, I can see if I had hurt Lina so badly accidentally I would feel that too, however irrational it was.’ She hesitated. ‘The accident did not put you off shooting?’

‘No.’ Meg’s lack of condemnation, her understanding, shook him. She seemed to think he was not to blame. That was comforting—if he allowed himself to believe it. ‘I think now, looking back, that I wanted to do something useful with the skill. I had shot my brother—I could kill my country’s enemies.’ As many as possible, as coldly and as efficiently as possible. Even if it made him a machine for killing he had to make that mistake right somehow. ‘And I had failed in my duty to him—that made me want to be a better officer.’

‘And now it is time to stop killing and to begin growing things,’ Meg said so softly he was not sure he had heard her correctly. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

Ross found himself surprised, almost shocked. He had expected revulsion, horror, condemnation and instead he had received understanding and thoughtful sympathy. Something hot burned shamefully at the back of his eyes and he made an abrupt gesture, rejecting her kindness. Meg did not really understand, that was all. It was impossible that she could see into his motives and his conscience and absolve him.

She looked, for a moment, as though she would speak, then her lips tightened, perhaps in response to his rejection. ‘And now, kindly explain why you let me think this place was no larger than a country squire’s house?’

‘Because you would never have come otherwise.’

‘And just how many servants are there? How many rooms?’ The questions were obviously rhetorical, for she swept on, ‘And how on earth do you expect me to manage it all, even for a few weeks?’

He was saved from answering as the door opened without warning. Mrs Fogarty stalked in, tossed the bunch of keys on to the desk and smiled pure acid at Meg. Ross admired the way Meg’s chin came up. Yes, she was a lady to her fingertips.

‘You be careful, young woman. This one’s his father’s son, whatever else he is. The temper of the devil and his pride too. And no woman’s safe either, not with the Brandon men. A good thing this one ran away before any babes got laid at his door, which doesn’t mean there weren’t any to lay. You think you’re the one and only? They all think that.’

Ross got to his feet. ‘Get out.’ He found he was so angry he could hardly speak. She thought that after his father’s whoring he would treat women the same way?

The door shut behind the housekeeper. He stormed
out from behind the desk, too angry to sit still, and was brought up short by Meg’s expression as he passed. He stopped, bent over her chair, one hand on each of the arms pinning her in place, and stared into her face, searching for the disgust and the condemnation that she must surely be hiding.

‘Don’t go looking askance at every twelve-year-old brat around here,’ he said. ‘They won’t be mine and my father did his whoring in Truro.’

‘How awful for your mother,’ Meg said. She looked back at him steadily, nothing but compassion in her eyes. ‘And not pleasant for you and your brother, either. I cannot imagine what it must be like…That is one good thing about having a father who is a vicar, and a puritanical one at that.’

Ross straightened up and limped over to stare out of the window. The rose garden had been neglected, he noticed with the part of his mind that was not fighting bad memories. His mother would have been upset about that. What the devil were the gardeners about?

‘He had enough sense of decency not to foul his own doorstep, except once with the daughter of Billy Gillan, the poacher who taught me how to shoot. How does a girl like that say no, when the family is in a tied cottage? He could pretend it wasn’t rape, of course. When he left her with child Billy marched up to the front door to tell my father what he thought of him, so the family got thrown out of their cottage with its scrap of land anyway. Billy’s poaching was all that fed them. I tried to pay him for shooting lessons, but he wouldn’t take it, so I gave the money to Lily direct; at least it helped her bring up my baby half-brother.’

‘Where did you get it from?’

‘I stole it from my father, of course. I never took so much at any one time that he’d notice. He’d come home, his pockets full of winnings from the card tables and stuff it into this big lacquer box without counting it. It is the only useful skill I seem to have inherited, the ability to play to win. The money was a bagatelle to him, life and death to Lily and her family.’ Ross felt all over again the hot pleasure that had coursed through him when he succeeded in picking the lock on his father’s strong-box for the first time, the pleasure of sliding out the shiny coins. It was as good as sex.

‘And Billy taught me about girls too. Told me never to take anyone who wasn’t willing and how to make sure I didn’t leave any mongrel pups behind. A bit agricultural in his metaphors, is old Billy, but a good teacher for all that.’

‘He is still alive then?’

The thought had never occurred to him that Billy could be dead. ‘Must be. He’s the indestructible sort,’ Ross said with a confidence he did not feel. A cold trickle of fear ran down his spine. How old had Billy been when he left? He’d go down tonight once he had introduced Meg to the staff and done all the things the returning fourth Baron Brandon was supposed to do on the day he came home.

The clock struck. ‘Time to review the troops,’ Meg said, as she got to her feet, a little pale around the mouth.
Nerves, or the realisation of just whom she was working for?

‘Here.’ Ross handed her the housekeeper’s keys on their chain and she took them gingerly. ‘Your badge of office,’ he said and something changed in her expression. Her lips firmed, the lashes came down over those clear eyes, but she only nodded.

Mr Heneage had arrayed the staff in the Great Hall as he had on the steps, women to one side, men to the other, in ascending order of priority. Meg saw Perrott standing beside the butler: valets, like ladies’ maids, took the status of their employer in the servants’ hall. He looked as pale as she felt. Ross walked to the foot of the stairs, drawing her with him by a touch on the arm.

‘Good afternoon.’ He stood on the first step, towering over her. ‘Some of you will remember me, others will be new since I left. You will find that I do things differently from my father, but I am sure you will adapt.’ From their faces they had no trouble interpreting that: accept my ways, or you may leave.

‘There are some immediate changes,’ Ross continued. ‘Usborne, as you know, is unwell and is retiring. Perrott is my valet. And Mrs Fogarty has also retired. Mrs Halgate is our housekeeper from today and I expect her to receive your unwavering support in managing the Court. Mrs Halgate is used to managing Portuguese households,’ he added smoothly. ‘There will doubtless be some differences. Heneage, will you introduce the staff?’

Meg fixed a tight smile on her lips and fell into place one careful step behind Ross.

Portuguese households, indeed! Army tents, rather. Wretched man. He
has
got a sense of humour, I do not care how well he tries to hide it, and a wicked one it is too.

Here, for one hideous moment in the study she had thought Ross was confessing to murder. She had been prepared to believe that of him. Guilt lashed through
her; she should have known better. He was brave and stoical and kind, under his scowl, and he did not deserve her mistrust. Meg could only hope and pray she had kept her feelings from showing; he needed to heal, to forgive himself, not deal with even more condemnation.

All she could do for the moment was to carry out her new duties as best she could and make his home comfortable for him. The keys swung heavy from her belt as she walked up the line of maids, trying to fix names in her head, but all she could manage was to hope the face and the position were clear. Three scullery maids, two kitchen maids, two laundry maids, the laundress, the four downstairs maids, the four upstairs maids and Mrs Harris, the cook. Then over to the men. Boot boy, page, three underfootmen, three footmen, Perrott and Heneage. And all the outdoor staff still to come.

She and Mrs Harris, Heneage and Perrott comprised the upper servants and she could not hope to manage this large house without their willing co-operation. Meg smiled at the cook and received a guarded smile in return.

‘Where is my estate manager?’ she heard Ross ask the butler who murmured a response. ‘At the Home Farm? Then send someone out for him; I want to speak with him as soon as possible. That will be all. Carry on Heneage, Mrs Halgate.’

Carry on, Sergeant-Major,
Meg thought with a twitch of her lips. Time to exert some authority. ‘I shall need a maid.’ She studied the array of eight young women.

‘I was Mrs Fogarty’s maid, Mrs Halgate.’ The girl was thin, anxious, with a sharp nose and pale, darting eyes. ‘I did my best, ma’am.’

‘I am sure you did.’ Meg dredged into her memory
and came up with a name. ‘And I am sure you deserve a change from those duties, Annie.’ The girl smiled, obviously relieved. Mrs Fogarty could not have been an easy mistress.

‘Now, Damaris. I am sure you would do admirably.’ The quiet redhead who had been trying to fade into invisibility behind a plump neighbour jumped. ‘Will you show me to my rooms, Damaris? And the rest of you, carry on as usual. Come to me if you are uncertain about anything.’
Please don’t!