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‘Then your Eve and I secretly hate you, do we?’ Virginia argued. ‘And your staff and tenants loathe you behind your back as well, I suppose? Obviously they only put up with you brooding and barking at them because you pay well enough and don’t burn their cottages down for fun, or prey on their womenfolk when you feel the urge to rut. You married an empty-headed flirt who dedicated her life to falling in love with any rogue she took a fancy to when she had a good and handsome husband, but it wasn’t your fault, Luke. Your father knew he was dying and persuaded you to marry far too young, and how lucky for that harridan he wed after your mother died that Pamela birthed a daughter, then ran off with the first rogue who would have her.’
‘Lucky for me as well. I love Eve dearly,’ he had said stiffly.
‘Yes, yes I know, and James will be your heir if needs be. But he needs to be his own man instead and your second trip up the aisle will be a bigger disaster than the first if you only intend to wed a “suitable” wife,’ she warned a little too seriously for comfort.
‘If I thought James would manage the Winterley interests with half the dedication he puts into carousing, curricle racing and gambling, he could have it all with my blessing. If I were leaving my downtrodden tenants in safe hands when I meet my maker, there would be no need for me to remarry.’
‘Safer than either of you think, but James can’t spend his life waiting to step into your shoes; he deserves better.’
‘Does he indeed?’ Luke had replied harshly, wondering if even Virginia had any idea how deep the rift between them ran.
‘Papa?’ Eve prompted now and he wondered how Chloe Wheaton stepping into that window shot his concentration into the ether.
‘I should have made you stay home, Eve. For all Virginia wanted nobody to mourn her, her household loved her too much to carry on as if nothing has happened.’
‘This is real life, not a pretty fairy story, Papa,’ his daughter chided as if she were an adult and he the sixteen-year-old.
‘Then I suppose we’d better get on with facing this place without Virginia to welcome us, since you would come.’
‘Yes, I would. I loved her too.’
‘And she adored you from the day she laid eyes on the squalling brat you were back then, my Eve. It was beyond the rest of us at the time why she should, since you were screaming like a banshee about some new teeth we were all having trouble with at the time. Virginia spent three months at Darkmere every summer until you were old enough for us to meet her in Brighton for sea air and shopping, so you must know she loved you back, considering she couldn’t abide the place.’
‘I do,’ she said and looked so bereft he wanted to hug her, then send her back to Darkmere straight away, but he knew she was right—his daughter was almost an adult. He must let her make her own decisions, even if they went against his instincts to guard her from anything that might hurt her. ‘Why didn’t we come here instead when I was young, Papa?’ she asked. ‘You never stay at Farenze Lodge for more than a few days, yet you seem to love it almost as much as Darkmere.’
‘It’s easier not to,’ Luke replied carefully.
Easier for him, since it was either that or stay here and make Chloe Wheaton his mistress by stoking this fire between them until she gave in instead of dousing it as best he could by avoiding her. The lady had had some very pithy things to say when he was driven to suggest it years ago and it would have been a long siege, but something told him it would have succeeded in the end.
So how would it feel to love and be loved? Impossible; intolerable even and he didn’t love the woman and she certainly didn’t love him. He would wait a year or two and find his suitable wife once Eve had decided her own future. A pretty and biddable young widow or some sweet-natured, overlooked spinster lady he could marry for an heir would suit him very well. Even as he reaffirmed that sensible plan with his rational mind the image of a very different Mrs Chloe Winterley from the sad-eyed female he’d just seen drifted into his head and made him bite back a virulent curse.
The first summer day she strolled into his life she looked warm and open as well as ridiculously young and stunningly beautiful. That version of Chloe Wheaton jarred something into life inside him he’d thought he was far too cynical and weary to feel by the time he was six and twenty. Luke frowned now as he had then, because people who felt that vividly got hurt. He hadn’t wanted that lovely, ardent young creature with her red-gold locks escaping the bands she’d tried to confine them to end up narrowed and disappointed as he was, yet the woman he had just seen was nothing like the warm and irresistible girl he thought he’d met that day.
Somehow he had made himself leave her to swing her bonnet by its strings as she walked home to whatever well-to-do family she hailed from with impossible dreams in her heart he’d only wished he could make come true. No, he was too embittered and shop-soiled for such a hopeful young lady, he’d decided regretfully, even as he met her astonishing violet eyes and only just prevented himself falling headlong into them as if that was where he belonged. Riding away from her was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, but he’d been disillusioned about her even sooner than he had about Pamela.
Only a couple of hours later he found out the girl was Virginia’s new companion and supposed housekeeper, on the way back from visiting her baby daughter at nurse. A widow who claimed to be two and twenty and looked a young eighteen. Virginia had reassured him she was as well aware of the tallness of Mrs Chloe Wheaton’s story, but she hadn’t had so much fun in years. So what could he do about an encroaching so-called widow when Virginia did indeed seem almost as full of life again at last as she had been when her beloved Virgil was still alive?
Her furious rejection of his offer of a carte blanche ten years ago still rang in his ears as if she’d denounced him an arrogant and repellent rake only yesterday. If she still felt the same hellish tension that roared through him whenever he set eyes on her, she had learnt to hide it very well. Seeing her drawn and exhausted hadn’t helped him ignore it so regally though. Instead it laid a line of fellow feeling between them to see her so grief-stricken and he didn’t want to share anything with Mrs Chloe Wheaton.
Luke shook his head and thanked heaven he was wearing a long greatcoat to conceal how eagerly his body ignored his stern orders not to want the housekeeper as he turned his gaze away from the now empty windows and silently cursed himself for being such a fool.
Chapter Two (#u6f8342fc-d01f-5b15-a7d4-df133dc7c5f4)
‘Who was that, Papa?’ Eve asked.
‘Whom do you mean?’ he asked stiffly, like a schoolboy caught out in a blatant lie, he decided, as he wondered what sort of blundering beast the wretched woman would turn him into next.
‘The lady at the window.’
‘A maid on the alert for mourners?’
‘She looked more like the housekeeper, although if so she looked very young for such a responsible role.’
‘She is,’ Luke replied grimly. ‘She must have been in the schoolroom when she met Wheaton.’
‘Who on earth is Wheaton? The January air seems to have addled your brain instead of sharpening it as you claimed it would when you left us to count church spires and grey mares while you rode most of the way here, Papa.’
‘I thought you two had enough schemes to hatch out for who was to do what and when after we got here to keep you occupied for a sennight.’
‘Slander; we’re not at all managing, are we, Bran?’ Eve quizzed her diminutive one time-nurse and now ladies’ maid.
‘Even if we was, we’d be well and truly talked to a standstill by now,’ Eve’s unlikely personal dragon answered with a sharp look that told Luke she understood his latest battle of wills with Chloe Wheaton even if his innocent daughter didn’t.
‘Well, now we’re here you will have too many people to talk to rather than too few,’ he warned as they climbed the shallow steps.
The hatchment over the door was a stark reminder why they were here and Luke felt the wrongness of this place without the lady who had loved and lived here for so long to bid him welcome. He sighed and told himself the next few days would pass and life would go relentlessly on, whatever he had to say about it.
* * *
‘Miss Winterley is with his lordship,’ Chloe remarked as she turned from the window and only wished she dared avoid the master of the house a little longer.
‘No doubt she had to plague Master Luke something relentless to make that happen. Very protective he is; a good father and a fine man, whatever that stepmother of his says.’
‘I imagine he takes little very notice of her,’ Chloe said absently.
Having been on the wrong end of his protective nature herself, ten years of enduring his distrust stung more sharply than it should. He was probably surprised she hadn’t run off with Virginia’s jewellery or the housekeeping money long ago.
‘That woman made the poor lad’s life a misery. I can’t understand to this day why Mr Oswald married her. Mr Oakham overheard her telling Mr James to do all he could to blacken Mr Luke’s name now the family are here to put the “old besom in her grave”, as the nasty-minded old crow put it. Lady Virginia wouldn’t have her over the threshold if she was alive to say her nay, but Master Luke was always too kind-hearted for his own good and no doubt he’ll let her stay.’
‘I’m sure Mrs Winterley will behave herself now his lordship is here, whatever she might say to her son. She seems in awe of Lord Farenze and I’ve heard he controls her purse strings.’
‘Then I hope he gives her short shrift one day; she deserves no better.’
‘I don’t want any more tension and upset, so please don’t put something noxious in her soup, Cully. She might never leave if she fancied herself too ill to travel and think how awful it might be if she once got her feet under the table.’
‘She’ll leave fast enough if I put a purge in her coffee, and good riddance.’
‘No, wait out the week and most of the mourners will go home and leave you all in peace,’ Chloe urged, trying not to wonder where she would be by then.
‘I suppose so,’ Culdrose agreed reluctantly, ‘but it’s hard to stay silent when we loved her ladyship dearly. I won’t have her name blackened now she’s not here to stand up for herself.’
‘Nobody would do so at her funeral. It would be disrespectful and heartless.’
Culdrose sniffed loudly; ‘I still caught the woman sneaking about her ladyship’s boudoir yesterday. Searching through her letters and personal things she was as if she had every right to do what she liked here. It’s as well we locked Lady Virginia’s treasures away in the strongroom after Oakham caught that Miss Carbottle taking her ladyship’s diamond brooch as a keepsake, or so she said. Keepsake indeed, she’s no better than a jackdaw.’
‘She does have a habit of taking anything pretty or shiny that’s lying about. Her sister always brings it back, but I’m glad you spared her the embarrassment. Now I must go down and greet Miss Winterley as she is the new mistress of the house. Promise you won’t make things worse between Mrs Winterley and the staff than they already are though, Cully?’
‘You know it’s my way to let my feelings out with them I trust to keep their counsel, so I don’t say aught I shouldn’t in front of the quality. Miss Eve being mistress of this house until his lordship marries again won’t go down well with Mrs Winterley though, you mark my words.’
‘So noted,’ Chloe said and went downstairs to do her duty.
Stupid to feel as if a knife had been stabbed in her heart at mention of Lord Farenze remarrying, as he must to beget an heir. Best not to think where she would go next until the mourners left either. Lord Farenze wouldn’t keep her on and she couldn’t stay even if he wanted her to, but there was a deal of work before she could walk away with her last duty to her late mistress done.
* * *
Luke signalled at the waiting footman to close the doors behind them against the icy easterly wind and missed Virginia’s imperious command to come on in do, lest she expire in the howling gale he was letting in.
‘Thank you, Oakham,’ he said, seeing the butler had set chairs near the blazing fire and offered hot toddies to Eve and Bran to stave off the cold. ‘I would wish you a good day, but we both know there is no such thing right now.’
‘Indeed not, my lord,’ the elderly manservant replied with a sad shake of his head that said more than words.
Even over the mild stir of activity Luke caught the sound of Mrs Wheaton’s inky skirts and disapproving petticoats as she descended the grand staircase and tried to pretend neither of them were really here. So, she steeled herself to meet the new master of the house, did she? Luke admired her courage even as he wished it would fail her and his senses sprang to attention. Even in buttoned-up mourning array she was hauntingly lovely, but close to she looked even more drawn and weary. Feelings that seemed far more dangerous than simple desire kicked him in the gut and he wished her a hundred miles away more fervently than ever.
‘Good day, Mrs Wheaton,’ he greeted her woodenly. ‘Please show my daughter and her maid to their rooms, then see their luggage is sent up.’
‘Good afternoon, my lord; Miss Winterley,’ she replied with an almost respectful curtsey in his direction.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wheaton,’ Eve said with a smile that seemed to relax the stubborn woman’s air of tightly wound tension. ‘I’ve heard so much about you. Great-Aunt Virginia was always full of your daughter’s quaint sayings and doings when she was a babe and she sounds a bright and lively girl now she’s at school.’
‘By “bright and lively” folks usually mean a limb of Satan, into every piece of mischief she can find. If the girl is anything like you were at that age, Miss Eve, Mrs Wheaton has my sympathy. I could fill a book with the things you got up to when you were a child,’ Bran said dourly.
Luke concluded Bran liked Mrs Wheaton for some reason and, whatever the facts of Eve’s birth, Mrs Brandy Brown was the closest thing to a mother his Eve had. He was grateful to the diminutive dragon for loving his daughter fiercely after losing her husband, then her own babe soon after birth, but he wished Bran would show her usual distrust of any servant likely to look down their noses at such a unique ex-nurse and ladies’ maid. The last thing he needed was closer contacts between his family and the Wheatons, but, if she diverted Eve from her grief, he supposed he would have to endure it.
‘My Verity is on pins to meet you, Miss Winterley, and Lady Virginia told her lots of exotic tales about the castle you live in and the wild Border Reivers who once fought over it. As my daughter persuaded her teachers I need her to come home, she will be here as soon as a carriage can be spared to fetch her,’ Chloe said ruefully.
A smile softened her generous mouth and lit her violet-blue eyes to depths of enchantment that would make a poet quiver with excitement when she talked of her only child. Even Luke’s workaday imagination wanted to go on the rampage when a red-gold curl escaped her black-trimmed housekeeper’s lace bonnet and threatened to curl about her heart-shaped face. Given freedom, her rebellious auburn locks would kiss her forehead with escaped fronds of red-gold fire. Or maybe they would lie in loose ringlets down the refined line of her long neck and on to white shoulders revealed by a gown cut to show off her womanly charms... Poetry be damned, the woman was a temptation to pure sin and never mind the romantic sighing of buffle-headed dreamers who ought to wake up to the realities of life.
‘She’s probably right,’ Eve was insisting softly and Luke had to rack his brains to recall who she was and what she was right about. ‘Papa would have it I should stay in Northumberland and sit out Aunt Virginia’s funeral, but that would only make me miss her more. Your daughter has lost a good friend, Mrs Wheaton.’
‘And you are a wise young lady, Miss Winterley.’
‘Oh, I doubt that, but you must call me Eve, ma’am.’
‘I can hardly do that if you insist on calling me so and it would be considered sadly coming in a housekeeper to address you by your given name.’
‘Then will you do so when we are private together? And I think we could resort to my rooms and send for tea now, don’t you? We must discuss how best to go on over the next few days and I’d rather not be Miss Winterley-ed all the time we’re doing it.’
Listening to his remarkable daughter do what he couldn’t and coax Chloe Wheaton upstairs to join her for tea and some gentle gossip, Luke sighed and met Oakham’s eyes in a manly admission: they didn’t understand the restorative power of tea or small talk and probably never would.
‘I have refilled the decanters in the library, my lord, or I could bring some of his late lordship’s best Canary wine to your room. I believe Mr Sleeford and his father-in-law are currently occupying the billiard room.’
Taking the warning in that impassive observation, Luke murmured his thanks and made his way up the nearest branch of the elegant double stairway. He entered the suite of rooms Virginia had insisted he took over as the one-day master of the house a year after Great-Uncle Virgil died and was glad Mrs Wheaton had ordered fires lit in all three rooms against his eventual arrival.
He was grateful for the warmth and sanctuary the suite promised him tonight, despite his reluctance to use it at first. With so many people gathering for his great-aunt’s funeral he must savour any peace he could get over the next few days.
* * *
As they sipped tea and discussed arrangements for the household over the next few days, Chloe wondered why Miss Evelina Winterley hadn’t been permitted to stay here during the decade Chloe had lived here. Lord Farenze and his daughter always joined Lady Virginia in Brighton or Ramsgate for several weeks every summer, but his visits to Farenze Lodge were so fleeting he rarely stayed so much as a night, let alone long enough to uproot his daughter and bring her with him. Fury flashed through her as the familiar notion she was the reason he had kept Eve away until now fitted neatly into her mind.
It was true that scandalised whispers spread through the neighbourhood when she first came here as Virginia’s companion-housekeeper, with a baby daughter and no visible husband all those years ago. If only they knew, she decided bleakly, weariness threatening to overcome her once more. She fought it off by using her anger with the new master of the house to stiffen her backbone, for she might be about to leave this place, but she intended to do it with dignity intact.
‘Lady Virginia told me I would like you if I ever had the chance, Mrs Wheaton, and I feel I know you already,’ Eve Winterley said as she refilled a teacup and passed it to her maid without even needing to ask if she would like seconds after their long journey.
Such closeness between mistress and maid should not surprise her, she supposed, but Chloe recalled Lord Farenze’s attitude to those he considered beneath him and contrasted it with his daughter’s more liberal one. Reluctantly she decided it spoke well of him that he was so relaxed about Mrs Brown’s role in his daughter’s life, then did her best to forget him for a few blissful moments.
‘And I’m very glad to meet you, Miss Winterley, even at this sad time.’
‘You will miss Lady Virginia as badly as any of us after being her friend and companion for so long,’ Eve said sincerely and for a long moment all three women sat thinking about how odd their lives felt without that vivid presence. ‘Although this is a beautiful house, Papa has never coveted it. He always said the Lodge was Aunt Virginia’s home and wouldn’t hear of her moving out of it when Uncle Virgil died. It’s quite lovely, don’t you think?’ Eve asked with a guileless look Chloe didn’t quite trust.
‘Exquisite,’ she said carefully.
‘No wonder Aunt Virginia couldn’t bear to leave when Uncle Virgil died, although I believe Papa was very worried about her when rumours went about she had run mad with grief, wasn’t he, Bran?’
‘Indeed he was, the poor lady.’
‘Papa says he wondered if she should still live here for her own sake then, but she couldn’t abide Darkmere and refused to set foot in our house in Kent. Papa could hardly evict Mrs Winterley from the Dower House there, so he let the subject drop when Virginia bought the house in Hill Street and we all went on very much as we were, or so I’m told, since I was but a babe in arms at the time and don’t remember.’
‘Her ladyship thought the Kentish house old and dreary and she said most of the chimneys smoked, so I doubt she would have wanted to live there, even if the Dower House was vacant,’ Chloe said, hoping her dislike of Mrs Oswald Winterley didn’t show.
She wouldn’t want to live within a day’s drive of the lady herself, given the choice, and, as Mrs Winterley reluctantly resided in the Haslett Hall dower house, instead of the fashionable London town house she thought Luke Winterley owed her, for some reason nobody else could fathom, Virginia had avoided Haslett Hall like the plague.
‘Papa had several chimney stacks rebuilt when he took over the Farenze estates, so I doubt any smoke now. He won’t have climbing boys used in any of our houses and if the sweep says they’re too small or crooked to use brushes on, he has the stacks rebuilt until they can be done that way without sending those poor little boys up into the dark to choke or get stuck.’
‘My little brother was put up chimneys when hardly old enough to walk and he didn’t live to see his tenth birthday. His lordship’s a good man,’ Mrs Brandy Brown insisted and Eve Winterley agreed then watched Chloe with expectant eyes.
‘To oppose such a practice he must be,’ she said as tactfully as she could and tried to pretend he meant no more to her than any good man would.
Liar, a more truthful inner Chloe prodded her uncomfortably, but somehow she would make it true. Ten years ago she had longed for gruff and embittered Luke, Lord Farenze, with every fibre of her being. At seventeen she’d been little more than a wilful, embittered child though; it took her daughter’s dependence on her to force her to grow up and realise she couldn’t have what she wanted and keep her self-respect.
Chloe sighed at the familiar tug of hot warmth she’d felt at first sight of the viscount in possession even today. No, it didn’t matter. Whatever she felt changed nothing. She only had to keep out of his way and stamp on any wayward desires left over from that heady time for a few more days then she would be free of him.
Yet this infernal tiredness was dragging at her like a pall and threatened to spin her back into dreams of forbidden things if she let her control slip. First there would be the old fantasy of the Chloe she should be—if life was fair. A charming, alluring lady who could win, and hold, the passionate devotion of gruff Lord Farenze as they danced off into a rosy future. An image of him; his expression impossibly tender as he made it clear how desperately he longed for her with every fibre of his cynical being, shimmered like a mirage.
Horrified, she snapped her nodding head upright and righted her empty teacup before it slipped from her slack grip and shattered. Oh, heavens, had she muttered any of that out loud? She met compassion instead of horror when she plucked up the courage to meet her new friend’s eyes, so perhaps not.
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying so, Mrs Wheaton, but you need a nap,’ Mrs Brandy Brown told her.
Chloe shivered at the thought of nightmare-haunted snatches of sleep she’d had since her beloved mistress died. ‘You must know how long a woman can go without sleep from your experience when Miss Evelina was a baby, Mrs Brown,’ she forced herself to say instead of admitting the turmoil had awoken old memories that haunted her dreams until she avoided her bed as if it was stuffed with thistles.
‘Aye, some nights the poor little mite cried as if her heart was broken and it was all I could do not to join her,’ the tiny, forceful little woman agreed with a rueful, loving look for the girl who seemed so equable nowadays it seemed hard to believe.
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Chloe said with a picture of her own struggles to calm a restless and furious baby when Verity was teething, or ill, or just plain fretful and she felt about as useful as a tailor’s dummy, making her very glad those times were over for both their sakes.
‘His lordship used to put his little miss into a pack on his shoulders and carry her for miles over the moors until she slept at long last. I’d stay behind, telling myself they were quite safe and he could see like a cat in the dark and knows the paths across his land like the back of his hand until I fell asleep too, whether I wanted to or not. You had to cope with all that on your own and run this great house at the same time. It sounds as if you got through it stoutly enough all these years, but we’re here now, so at least you can have a rest when you need one,’ Bran told her with an earnest nod that disarmed Chloe and made her wonder if it might be bliss to lay her burdens down and do as she was bid after all.
‘Indeed you must, Mrs Wheaton,’ Eve told her with some of her father’s authority sitting quaintly on her slender shoulders. ‘Sleep is the last thing on my mind after hours shut up in that stuffy carriage dozing because there was nothing else to do—how about you, Bran?’
She gave the comfortable bed in the slip of a room the other side of the dressing room, reserved for a maid if her mistress wanted one close, a significant look and her maid nodded her approval of the unspoken idea. It looked just right for an afternoon nap if Chloe did happen to be as bone weary as she obviously looked.
