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‘Thought you should know,’ Josiah went on as if words had a tax on them.
‘Know what?’
‘Cross said they was followed back from the gallops just now.’
‘Why on earth would anyone follow a schoolgirl?’ Luke mused.
‘Don’t know, m’lord.’
‘Have you any idea who it was?’
‘No, he stayed well back. Cross thought it was his fancy to start with.’
Luke frowned even more darkly at the thought of Chloe’s daughter as quarry. ‘It makes no sense,’ he muttered and Josiah shrugged as if nothing his fellow humans did made much of that. ‘Where is he now?’ Luke asked, resolving to confront the rogue and demand what he was about.
‘Rode off when they got back to the paddocks, and, since he managed to look as if he was on his way somewhere else, nobody thought to challenge him.’
‘And you saw him close up, I hope?’
‘No, he was some way off by the time Cross mentioned him and had his hat pulled down over his eyes and a scarf over his mouth.’
‘It’s a cold day and a traveller might cover up against it, I suppose.’
And why trail a schoolgirl back to Farenze Lodge when a few casual questions would reveal her mother was only housekeeper here? And why would Verity Wheaton’s location matter to anyone but her mother, after all the years when nobody outside the household took any notice of either of them?
‘His beast had some Arab in him though, m’lord, and if the man wasn’t dressed like a farmer I’d have to call him a gentleman.’
‘Keep a lookout for him and I’ll have the watch doubled at night. If Miss Wheaton or my daughter ride out again, please make sure you or Seth stay with them and go armed, Josh, just in case,’ Luke ordered with a frown. ‘Be discreet about it; the fewer people who know the better since I don’t want panic breaking out, or the man scared off before we find out what he’s up to.’
‘Trust me not to blab,’ Josiah said, looking offended anyone might think he could, let alone Luke who’d known him since he was set on his first pony at Darkmere while still in short coats.
‘Aye, of course I do,’ Luke said with a wry grin and sent him back to the stables with orders to keep an eye on those who came and went on what would be a busy day for them all.
Luke intended to catch the man haunting Verity Wheaton and challenge him, so why was a prickle of apprehension sliding down his spine like ice water? He didn’t know the girl, had only set eyes on her a few times since she was a baby. Yet Eve had taken to her instantly and Chloe adored her, so how could he not be furious at any man who might try to harm or bother the child?
He would feel so about any girl, he reassured himself, and it was probably true, given the appalling hazards that could stalk a child as distinctive as Verity Wheaton. She had her own version of the striking colouring he found so irresistible in her mother. Her hair was closer to blonde and her eyes a paler blue than her mother’s stormy ones, but they shared the same fine-boned build and heart-shaped faces; the same fierce intelligence as well, he suspected, and some of the mother’s stubborn will and pride had been passed on to her child, if Verity’s determination to be with her mother at this sad time was any indication.
Luke frowned and decided he must make time to ask Chloe about Verity’s father sooner than he wanted to. Until then he’d trust Josiah’s sharp eyes and Eve’s company as well as his own vigilance to keep the child safe while her mother was managing his house and seemed barely to have time to eat, let alone sleep soundly.
* * *
A few hours later Chloe and the maids stopped work and wrapped themselves up in shawls and mittens before going out on the balustrade roof to watch the funeral cortège wind its way towards the church where the fifth Viscount Farenze was buried. The sombre procession went in and out of sight as it crossed the park and Chloe wished she could attend the service. As she was a female and a housekeeper with a house to prepare for cold and sorry mourners to return to, she bowed her head and recited the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer in memory of their beloved mistress and silently wished her ladyship Godspeed with all her heart.
When that was done they watched with tears in their eyes when the horses were taken out of their harness so the male servants and estate workers could drag the sombre rig the last stretch to the church instead. Chloe nearly sobbed as unguardedly as the maids at the sight of such love and devotion to a wonderful woman. She took a deep breath instead and handed out snowy squares of soft cotton and salvaged linen to those who had forgotten their handkerchiefs and hugged Verity close as they said a private goodbye to Lady Virginia.
They stayed in the chilly winter sunshine until a crush of nobility and gentry left the tiny church while the tomb was opened inside and Virginia’s closest family and friends saw her laid beside her beloved Virgil. Only then did Chloe order the staff downstairs to get Farenze Lodge ready for the mourners’ return and all the rituals of this solemn winter day.
Bran’s militant look at her former charge told Chloe she wanted her ewe lamb out of the frigid January air as urgently as she did Verity, but at that moment a robin began to sing as if its life depended on it from the top of an old holly tree nearby. Neither of them could bring themselves to scold the girls for avoiding the ladies who were gathered about the fire in the grand drawing room sighing and reading their prayerbooks after that. They went downstairs with the echo of that joyful song in their ears, a last serenade to a woman who had always lived life so richly and loved so well.
* * *
‘I’m glad Lady Virginia made it clear she didn’t want a grand formal fuss when she died. Miss Eve will miss her too much to want to play hostess to half the county as if she’d only lost her pet canary, with her being as close to her ladyship as she always was,’ Bran observed to Chloe over tea in the housekeeper’s room several hours later.
‘She did it very well, but she’s too young to endure much more formality today and Lady Virginia’s real friends know it. By leaving as soon as they decently could they took the rest with them by sheer force of will, which is why they were Lady Virginia’s friends in the first place, I suppose,’ Chloe replied as she eased her aching feet on to the footstool and blessed the comfort of a fire of her own. The demands of the last few hours seemed to crowd in all over again and she wondered if she’d forgotten some small but vital detail. ‘I thought Lady Bunting and the Squire and his wife would never leave, though.’
‘And I wondered if that dratted Mrs Winterley would ever stop eating,’ Bran said with a grimace.
‘But, Bran, “in a well-regulated household there would be more sugar in the plum cake and less salt in the cheese scones”,’ Chloe parodied the lady wickedly. ‘That didn’t prevent Mrs Winterley eating vast quantities of both while telling anyone who would listen how prostrated she was by grief.’
‘Fat old hypocrite,’ Bran said as she lay back in her chair and closed her eyes.
‘I can’t argue, although I know I should,’ Chloe replied as the warmth of the room and her own deep weariness tugged at her conviction she still had a deal to do before she dared try to sleep again. ‘You’re a bad influence on me, Bran,’ she said drowsily.
‘Someone needed to be,’ her new friend declared and opened her shrewd eyes as if she’d only been pretending to be half-asleep. ‘It’s high time you learnt to live again, young woman,’ she said, as if she could see into Chloe’s heart and all the bitter memories she didn’t want to face.
‘I could say the same about you.’
‘I did all the living and loving I ever shall with a man before Miss Eve was born. My Joe is buried at sea on the other side of the world and I’ll have no other, but you deserve better than life seems to have handed you so far.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Chloe said shortly, even as a picture of Luke Winterley flitted into her mind, laughing and at ease as nature intended him to be and murmured, But aren’t I better than you imagined in your wildest dreams before you met me?
‘Then perhaps he does,’ Bran said.
Chloe’s heartbeat had accelerated at the thought of him and the way all the longings she wished she could kill shivered through her body whenever the wretched man was in the same room. It must have shown in her eyes.
‘He needs more than I can give,’ Chloe said and closed her eyes again in the hope it might put paid to such a painful topic of conversation. All her normal defences felt so weak it was as if her emotions were about to spill over in a disastrous flood. ‘More tea?’ she asked with a brightness they both knew was false and Bran nodded obligingly and let the painful topic of Mrs Wheaton’s feelings for her noble master drop, with a look that said this wasn’t the time for an argument, but her new friend would have to confront those feelings sooner or later.
* * *
Chloe was glad Mrs Winterley and the other ladies favoured the state rooms as the early January dusk began to darken the skies outside and most of the gentlemen congregated in the billiard room. They couldn’t divert themselves with a game on such a day ,but seemed comforted by the idea that Virginia would have told them to forget such flummery and get on with it and most of them were avoiding the drawing room and the low-voiced gossip that was all the ladies could indulge in as dusk came down on this solemn day.
It seemed a good time to place the little vase of snowdrops someone had snatched a moment to gather earlier and she had only now found time to arrange with a few sprigs of wintersweet. The gardeners always forced as many spring flowers as they could to bloom early, since Virginia delighted in the bravest of the spring ones to remind them winter wouldn’t last for ever.
Sooner or later she would have to stop behaving as if Virginia might walk into a room and exclaim at such a simple luxury and ask about a gardener’s elderly mother, or perhaps his wife being close to her time, when one of them came to hand the flowers over. Chloe thought it a shame to kill off Virginia’s routine and make her loss even harder to bear. She did her best not to make things worse than they must already feel when the speechless, grief-stricken head gardener came to the door with this tribute to his employer and old friend and simply nodded her sincere thanks and told him how beautiful and hopeful they seemed in the depths of winter.
‘Oh, heavens! I didn’t see you there, my lord, but why on earth are you sitting in the dark?’ she gasped now, shocked when he rose from the chair by the window where Virginia often sat to catch the best light for her book.
‘Because I enjoy sitting in the dark?’ he replied wryly, but she heard the flat weariness in his voice and somehow couldn’t make herself walk away.
‘I doubt it,’ she said as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom and instinct warned her to plunk the vase down and leave.
‘You’re right,’ he said gruffly and she wondered if he didn’t want her to see tears in his supposedly steely gaze when he turned his head away.
‘How gratifying for me; good evening, my lord.’
‘No, stay,’ he asked, again in that rough voice as if he couldn’t find the energy to smooth it into any sort of gentlemanly restraint right now.
‘You know I can’t,’ she murmured as she sank on to the chair closest to his and folded her hands to stop them reaching to him as if by right.
‘Don’t speak of “can’t” today.’
‘I have to,’ she argued, gripping her fingers more tightly together to stop them soothing his lean cheek, or ruffling the stern discipline he’d imposed on his unruly raven locks in his great-aunt’s honour.
‘Virginia wasn’t a great one for rules and conventions,’ he replied with tension in his voice that said he wanted human contact, too, even if he hadn’t moved since she sat down.
‘I imagine she was as determined not to be confined by them as a young woman as she was when I knew her.’
‘She was a rogue, or so her sisters said before she outlived them all,’ he said with such pride and love for his late great-aunt by marriage in his voice Chloe felt herself melting from the inside out.
‘So many people loved her for it that it makes you wonder if being correct and ever ready to criticise, as I remember her sisters being when I first came here, is the way to live a good life after all. They used to visit and sniff and carp at her for simply having me and Verity in the house, let alone employing me as her companion-housekeeper.’
Chloe shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she recalled he’d been almost as critical once he found out about that act of kindness himself, but perhaps he’d decided this wasn’t the day to have too good a memory.
‘I think when she and Virgil wed, Virginia gave up scandalising society one way, so she was determined to find as many ways of confounding its prejudices in other ones as she could.’
‘You think of me as one of her rebellions, then?’
‘Perhaps at first—later even I could see that you and your daughter were more to her than a whim to infuriate her sisters and any stuffy neighbours she wanted to annoy. She needed you almost as much as you did her. She would have been an excellent mother and would have doted on any grandchildren who followed in her children’s footsteps.’
‘Instead she was a wonderful friend and mentor to me and so many others society would like to turn its collective nose up at and ignore.’
‘You were not a charity cases, but a good and dear friend to her; allow me that much insight today, even if we must pretend to be enemies again tomorrow.’
‘I know, I am sorry,’ she said softly.
He smiled at her unguarded apology and they sat in companionable silence for a few wonderful moments, as if they understood each other too well to need words.
‘Virginia was the product of another age,’ he finally said with a sigh, ‘but even she wouldn’t have been quite so eager to break the rules if she knew it would reflect back on her progeny.’
‘No, I suppose she didn’t have a daughter of her own to make those rules real for her. It colours everything when your own reputation affects another’s whole life so drastically,’ Chloe agreed with a hearty sigh of her own.
‘As those girls of ours both changed our lives?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sooner or later we must talk about it,’ he warned.
‘No, your daughter is your business; mine is hers and mine alone. We have nothing to discuss, my lord.’
‘Yet we must talk about it all the same,’ he said as implacably as he could, when he sounded as if grief and weariness were weighing him down too heavily to face a confrontation now.
‘Not if I can help it we won’t,’ she muttered under her breath, but he heard her in the intimate gloom of the dark room. Only a glow from the banked-down fire was left to show them their thoughts and feelings now the light had faded, but when he wanted to he could read her like a book.
‘Do you remember the day we first met?’ he asked sneakily.
All of a sudden the gloom of a January dusk was gone and they were bathed in summer heat again, her most disreputable bonnet was hanging down her back and his bright, curious gaze sharpened on this new phenomenon tramping her way up his great-aunt’s drive.
She had just paid a visit to her little daughter at the wet-nurse’s neat cottage on the Farenze Lodge Estate and she was buoyed up by the hope Verity was finally going to be big enough to come home with her next week. The world seemed a light and happy place that fateful summer day, then she had looked up and met a pair of complicated masculine grey eyes and a fluttery feeling of excitement joined the hope that was rekindling in her after a long winter.
‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’ he’d asked as lightly as if he hadn’t a care in the world, for once in his too-responsible life, either.
‘I’m off to London to see the Queen,’ she’d said, suddenly as giddy as a girl as she tossed her fiery gold curls out of her eyes and refused to regret they were wild and tumbling down her back for once.
‘Can I come?’ he’d said and that was it, her heart had opened to him. Dark-haired, smiling Viscount Farenze’s eyes promised her impossible things as they met as the equals they should have been and were no more.
‘Too well,’ she admitted sombrely now, the memory of all they should have been to each other in her eyes as she stared into the fire to avoid his.
There were no pictures of unattainable castles in Spain hidden in the complex depths of it. She’d spent ten years convincing that hopeful girl there could be nothing between Viscount Farenze and Verity Wheaton’s mother, so how could there be?
‘If only things had been different for us, then and now,’ she added regretfully and thought she heard a gruff groan, hastily suppressed, at the thought of what could have been, without their daughters and their duty to make it impossible.
‘It’s time we stopped pretending we’re nothing to each other, Mrs Wheaton.’
‘No, it’s our best protection. My Verity and your Eve will always make it impossible for us to be other than master and servant and you know it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long day and you must be weary and eager to have it over and done with,’ she said with a would-be humble nod.
She could only just see his shadowed face and his white shirt and collar and stark black necktie through the deepening darkness. A lot of her longed for the right to move closer; feel cool linen and hot man under her spread palms; offer him comfort nobody else could give on this sorry day and take some in return. It was a right she’d relinquished the day Verity was born, so she hid her hands in her midnight skirts and waited for the words of dismissal that would set them free of this fiery frustration, for now.
Chapter Nine (#u6f8342fc-d01f-5b15-a7d4-df133dc7c5f4)
‘I am tired,’ Luke Winterley admitted with a sigh, as if it was a weakness he was rightly ashamed of, and tenderness for his manly conviction she had no right to feel threatened to undermine her aloofness.
‘Despite your attempts to prove otherwise, you are only human, my lord. You need a proper night’s sleep after your hard and hasty journey, last night’s vigil and all you have had to endure today,’ Chloe replied.
‘I haven’t enjoyed one of those under this roof from the first day I set eyes on you,’ he snapped, as if she was an idiot to suggest he might now.
She’d offered him the only warmth and understanding she decently could and he’d thrown it back at her as if it revolted him, drat the man, but he could stand apart from the rest of humanity with her blessing. ‘I will get back to my duties,’ she said, snatching back the hand she hadn’t known she’d stretched out as if he’d scalded it.
‘Before God, woman, I could shake you until your teeth rattle,’ he gritted between what sounded like clenched teeth.
‘Because I speak sense and keep a cool head? If so, you’re a fool.’
‘Then let’s see how idiotic I can be, shall we? Then maybe next time you will take a warning in the spirit it is meant,’ he said in a husky voice and sounded so brusque her mouth twisted in a wobbly smile.
He was my Lord Farenze at his most bearlike and made her feel emotions no other man had ever stirred. Her fingers itched to test his athlete’s body and fallen-angel features; to curl themselves into that overlong raven mane of his and tug him down to meet her mouth with his kiss; to discover anew he was as addictive to the touch as to the rest of her senses.
Temptation made her senses flex, stretch and luxuriate in the promise of him. How familiar and seductive and dangerous it was. To be part of something with him was almost as irresistible as the physical fact of him and his ill humour at not being able to freeze her out of his life as he clearly wanted to. Heat flashed through her like sheet lightning; her breathing went shallow as her heartbeat raced and she leaned towards him to...
No! Her body was as wrong now as it was ten years ago. She’d felt such yearning need to be passionately loved back then it was little wonder bitter, guarded, dashingly handsome Lord Farenze unleashed wild dreams in her that ought to be dead and done with. He still could, simply by being here, but her world could never be well lost for love. She had a daughter who must come before him, and her, and everything else in Chloe’s life.
Anything that smirched Chloe’s reputation would make Verity less in the eyes of the world. Yet every time she fought this battle it was harder, as if this darling bear of a man was wound so tight into her senses she would never be free of the feel and look and touch of him, that faint scent of masculine cologne and Luke Winterley. All of him, gruff and smooth, tender and sharp, was caught into her heart so securely that she only had to scent that cologne to be aware of him as a lover until her dying day.
No, she must win her battle one last time and then she would be free of temptation for ever. The thought of never seeing him again made tears sting her eyes. How could she not pity herself all the long years with not even the sight of him ahead? A voice whispered, Giving in to what you both need won’t hurt this once, but it lied.
Never to see him again, never to feel him and his mighty body respond to her after they threw caution to the four winds and indulged in the unimaginable luxury of loving for one short night? Verity had been enough to make her step back and say no before and must keep being so, because one night would never be enough.
‘No, my lord, we could make a fine pair of fools of each other together, but I’ve worked hard to be the respectable woman I am now, despite the gossip and doubts you and so many others had when I came here with a babe in my arms. I can’t give in to improper advances from so-called gentlemen like you and waste all that effort now,’ she said with a careless smile meant to lessen the tension.
‘Do you think me such a rake I might take what isn’t freely given?’ he demanded, refusing to let her joke them out of something that really wasn’t funny. ‘I have never chased the maids or tried to sneak kisses from a poor governess who can’t fight back and I never will,’ he snapped and marched over to glare at the glowing fire as if he couldn’t endure being so close any longer.
