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She could see she was losing the battle, but Kate, now quite set on winning, switched tactics. ‘Are you afraid you will be put under the spyglass, Mr Jackson?’ She could see from the way he stilled, that she had hit home. ‘How can you expect to break down barriers if you do not face them?’
‘I hope, Lady Kate, that you are not thinking of using me as a weapon in some sort of private war. Are you perhaps eager to prove your reputation for being a revolutionary to your father and your aunt?’
He spoke softly, but there was an underlying air of menace which made Kate’s skin prickle. Virgil Jackson was obviously not a man who could be threatened. She threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I admit, there is a part of me which relishes the notion of introducing you to Aunt Wilhelmina, but I promise you, it is only a small part. What I really want is to get to know you better.’
Her frankness disarmed him. He was tempted. Who would not be, by such an argument put forward by such a— He could not think of a word to describe Lady Kate Montague. Not that her personal attractions had anything to do with his decision. ‘I will think about it,’ Virgil said.
‘With a view to saying yes?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ he repeated, telling himself he would, though he had already more than half decided.
Chapter Two
His valet brought the note with his shaving water, proffering the folded sheet of thick paper on a sliver tray. Virgil knew who it was from the moment he saw it, though he couldn’t have said how. Had he been expecting it? Hoping for it? His name was written in a clear hand utterly bereft of flourishes, starkly legible. A man’s hand, he would have taken it for, under other circumstances. His valet was not taken in either though, judging from the curious looks he was casting at him via the mirror over the dressing stand.
‘I’ll shave myself, Watson,’ Virgil said, deliberately catching the man’s eye. Though he would have preferred to break the seal in private, he would not lower himself to the subterfuge of sending the valet away, nor indeed would he grant the note the importance such an act would imply.
I was perfectly serious. I wish you would do me the honour of paying a visit to Castonbury. We have much in common, and I am most eager to further our acquaintance. I leave at ten. I have sent a note ahead warning them to expect us, and arranged for your man to travel separately with my maid and the baggage. From what Polly has told me of him, he will have an entertaining journey! K.
Virgil smiled. Practical, blunt and wry, and leaving him with very little option but to accept. It was as well he had already resolved to go, for he made a point of never allowing himself to be coerced. Reading it again, he could picture the sparkle in her eyes as she wrote that last sentence.
‘A change of plan, sir?’
From the supercilious look on his face, Watson already knew the contents of the letter. How the hell? In the way that all servants knew, Virgil supposed. It had been the same on the plantation. Knowledge was power; he shouldn’t judge the man for that. He folded the note and placed it in the pocket of his silk dressing gown. ‘I take it you’ve been speaking to Lady Kate’s maid?’
Lathering his face, Virgil watched out of the corner of his eye as his valet debated between honesty and what seemed to be the English servant’s custom of pretended ignorance. He was relieved when the man plumped for the truth. ‘Miss Fisher did mention that Her Ladyship had invited you to Castonbury,’ the man admitted grudgingly.
‘And did Miss Fisher happen to share her views as to my likely reception there?’
Watson blanched. ‘Miss Fisher had a— She was—The truth is, sir, that Miss Fisher is not short of opinions,’ he said grimly. ‘I cannot imagine how Lady Katherine came by such a female, nor indeed how such a female survives in a ducal household.’
‘Like her mistress, I believe she is rather unconventional,’ Virgil replied. ‘Prepare yourself, Watson, for you will be sharing the baggage coach with her.’
‘You mean we are going to Castonbury? You wish me to accompany you? I was under the impression that you were journeying north alone.’
Judging from the look in his valet’s eye, the invitation was even more of an honour than Virgil had surmised. ‘Do you wish to return to London?’
‘No indeed, sir. I would not dream of leaving you to the ministrations of another,’ Watson declared.
‘Nothing better to do with your time, eh?’
Watson drew himself up. ‘If I have fallen short of your expectations …’
‘Don’t be an idiot, you know perfectly well that you’ve been keeping me right. I don’t like to be waited on, but it seems I must be, and you do it very well, so if you wish to continue with me in the short term …’
‘I do indeed, sir.’
‘Then get packing. I must make my farewells to my host.’
Kate swept down the stairs with her gloves and whip in her hand, trying to ignore the fact that her heart was fluttering in a quite ridiculous manner for one of her age. It was simply that she was interested in Virgil Jackson, that was all. There was a lot to find interesting in him. It was nothing, nothing at all, to do with the fact that he was an attractive man.
Just as the fact that she had spent much longer than usual dressing had nothing to do with wanting to look her best. As she very well knew, even at her best, she could never aspire to beauty, though it had to be said that this particular shade of blue was becoming, and the rather military cut of her riding habit, with its silver braiding and snugly fitting jacket, draped well on her slim form. Kate made a face, chastising herself. What mattered was that she was pleased with her appearance, she reminded herself. What did not matter was what Virgil Jackson thought.
Except, as she turned the corner to the last flight of stairs and saw that he was waiting for her in the tiled hall, dressed in a plain black coat with a grey waistcoat, buckskins and top boots polished to a gleam, and she noticed that his eyes lingered on her as she made her way towards him, she found that she did care. Chiding herself for it, she couldn’t help the tiniest flush of pleasure at seeing that he liked what he saw any more than she could deny that she liked what she saw too. Very much.
She held out her hand. To her surprise, he bent low over it, pressing a kiss on her knuckles. His lips were warm. The touch was fleeting, but it was enough to set her pulses skittering. In the bright light of the early-autumn sunshine streaming through the fanlight above the door, his skin gleamed. His eyes were more amber than brown. The way he looked at her warmed her, as if he saw something in her that no one else could see. ‘I’m so glad you decided to accept my invitation,’ she said brusquely, for it was embarrassing enough, this girlish reaction, without letting him see it.
‘I could not pass up the opportunity to visit this school of yours.’
It was most foolish of her to be disappointed, for what else was there between them save such business? Kate smiled brightly. ‘I’m glad.’
Virgil frowned. ‘Yes, but I’m not so sure that your family will be as enthusiastic. It is one thing to test barriers, as you said last night, but another to force an uninvited guest on people who, frankly, may not be very happy to receive me.’
‘You are invited, for I invited you.’
‘Did you tell them— The note you sent—how did you describe me?’
‘As a man of great wealth and extraordinary influence, a business associate of Josiah with a fascinating history.’
She had not mentioned the one salient fact that he was sure would have been the first to occur to almost anyone else. ‘You don’t think,’ Virgil asked tentatively, ‘that it would have been safer to warn them about my heritage?’
‘Why should I? I look at you and I see a man who has achieved what very few others have. You are rich and powerful and you have succeeded against overwhelming odds which also makes you fascinating. Why should I tell them the colour of your skin any more than I should inform them the colour of your hair, or whether you are fat or scrawny.’ Or attractive. Really extraordinarily attractive. Which, she should remember, was quite irrelevant. ‘Besides,’ Kate said disparagingly, ‘why encourage them to judge you before they have even met you?’
Virgil drew himself up. ‘I don’t give a damn—begging your pardon—about what your family think of me. I was more concerned about what they’d think of you.’
‘My family can think no worse of me than they already do. They are perfectly well aware of my support for the abolition laws, and I am perfectly capable of defending myself, if that is what you are concerned about,’ Kate said with a toss of her head. ‘I’ve had practice enough, God knows.’
‘I don’t doubt that. I suspect you take pride in being a rule-breaker.’
‘Not at all,’ Kate said, ‘you misunderstand me. Breaking rules, even unjust rules, is far more painful than unquestioning obedience. I wish I did not have to be a rule-breaker, as you call me. Life would be so much more pleasant if what one believed and what was expected of one coincided more often.’
She looked quite wistful and Virgil found himself at a loss, for it seemed that they were speaking about two different things. He could, however, agree with the sentiment. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’
Kate nodded, touching his sleeve in a gesture of sympathy he was already beginning to associate with her. ‘Our cases are hardly comparable. There are a good deal of rules which ought to be broken, no matter how painful.’
She would not have said so if she knew the price he had paid for his disobedience. No matter how unconventional she was, she would likely condemn him for it, and quite rightly so. Virgil rolled his shoulders as if the familiar burden of guilt were a tangible weight he carried. ‘I play by my own rules,’ he answered, more to remind himself of that fact than in response to what she had said. He could see his remark confused her, but the crump of carriage wheels on the gravel kept him from saying more, and then the Wedgwoods’ groom appeared at the front door and informed them that the gig awaited Her Ladyship’s convenience.
Kate pulled on her driving gloves. ‘I hope you don’t mind the cold, but I drive myself. I hate to be cooped up in a carriage.’
‘That’s fine by me.’ Virgil pulled on the greatcoat his valet had insisted that he would require, having been forewarned that Her Ladyship scorned the closed carriage in which any other lady of her rank would have been expected to travel. With extreme reluctance, he donned the beaver tricorn hat which Watson had also insisted upon. Hats and gloves were items of gentleman’s apparel to which Virgil had never managed to become accustomed.
Kate leapt nimbly into the carriage in a flutter of lacy petticoats at odds with the masculine cut of her dress, and took up the reins. The gig rocked under Virgil’s weight as he climbed in beside her. His knee brushed her skirts. The caped shoulder of his driving coat fluttered against the braiding on her jacket. The air smelt of leaves and moss, with that sharpness to it that was distinctively English. As she urged the horse into a trot, she smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said impulsively.
Virgil laughed, and for once spoke his mind without thinking. ‘That makes two of us,’ he said.
They had left Maer village behind, and were heading eastwards along a country lane at a steady pace. The morning was bright but cool, the sun shining weakly in the pale blue sky. The blackberries which grew so prolifically in the hedgerows were past their best now. The leaves on the trees had turned from gold and amber to brown, curled and crisped by the change in the temperature, ready to float down at the merest hint of a breeze. In the distance, a bell clanged as a herd of sheep made their way across a field.
‘I was about to ask you last night, before the lemon syllabub separated us, how you came by your education,’ Kate said. ‘I realised later that I must have sounded quite the malcontent, complaining about my lack of formal schooling when it was likely that you’d had none at all—as a child, I mean.’
‘I never went to school, not when I was a slave, nor when Malcolm Jackson freed me either.’
‘Jackson is the man who brought you to Boston?’
‘Bought me at auction, and brought me to Boston. There’s no need to dance around the subject. I was a slave. I was sold. Malcolm Jackson paid for me in gold and set me free.’
‘You took his name.’
‘That man placed a lot of trust in me, it was the least I could do. Besides, the only other name I had belonged to the man who sold me. It was no hardship to give that up.’
‘And this Jackson, he gave you an education?’
Virgil smiled. ‘I gave myself an education. Malcolm Jackson gave me a job at his factory and a place to live. He let me have books, and when I was done with his, I found more, and plenty of ideas, too, at the African Meeting House in the city. I studied hard every night and I worked hard every day so that within a year there wasn’t a job at that factory I couldn’t turn my hand to. Sometimes I had just two or three hours’ sleep, but I didn’t need any more. I discovered I had a head for figures. I found I had a mind for business, too, which is more than poor Malcolm Jackson had. He was leaking money, he was being taken for a ride by just about everyone he did a deal with, and he was missing so many opportunities that it was criminal to watch.’
Virgil had shifted in his seat as he talked, so that his knee brushed against her skirt. He was more animated than she had yet seen him. His eyes glowed. He had cast his hat onto the floor, and tugged repeatedly at his neck cloth as he spoke. The finicky valet he had mentioned had obviously tied it tighter than he was used to. He had already admitted that he could not tie such a fancy knot himself. It was endearing, though Kate took care not to let him know she thought so, judging quite rightly that he would have been horrified. ‘I assume there came a time when you could no longer stand by and watch things going wrong,’ she said.
‘I would have interfered eventually, but I didn’t have to. Malcolm Jackson didn’t have the hardest business head but he wasn’t a fool. He could see what was happening, and he could see I knew what to do about it. He was getting old, and he was getting tired and he had learned to trust me. In a year I’d doubled our turnover and he made me a partner. Another year, and we had just about cornered the new market for cheap, practical stoneware.’
‘Was that your idea?’
‘One of them.’
‘And not too many more years later you are one of the wealthiest men in America. This deal with Josiah, is that going to allow you to corner another new market?’
‘I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise,’ Virgil said with a grin.
‘But you have other businesses than—what do you call it, stoneware?’
‘I sure do. I have real estate—that’s property, to you English. Homes to rent to the freed men coming north that are fit for human habitation. Rooming houses that aren’t flea pits. I have some interest in retail—shops to sell what we make at the factories. And some other investments too. As I said, I have a head for business.’
‘It must be a very ruthless one, to have achieved so much in such a relatively short time, with the odds stacked against you to boot. Your ambition knows no bounds. Tell me, do you still exist on two or three hours’ sleep a night?’
‘I prefer not to waste time sleeping if there’s something better I can be doing.’
Kate pursed her lips, her brows drawing together in a deep frown. ‘But why? Why not enjoy your success? Forgive me, but you sound almost like a man obsessed. What more can you possibly want? Aren’t you wealthy enough?’
‘I don’t care about being rich.’
Alerted by the change in his tone, Kate glanced sideways. The light had gone from his eyes. What had she said? ‘You’re so used to working twenty hours a day that you can’t stop, is that it?’ she ventured, trying to make a joke of it.
‘I’m not interested in money, Lady Kate. I’m interested in what money can buy.’
He had shifted in his seat again, to look straight ahead. His expression seemed to have hardened.
Kate’s brow cleared. ‘Oh, you mean schools? Your model village?’
He meant reparation, but it was the same thing. ‘Power,’ Virgil said. ‘The power to change.’
Kate nodded. ‘Yes. If I felt I could have that, I think I’d manage on two or three hours’ sleep a night too. Do you ever wish you could go back? To the plantation, I mean, to show them what you have become.’
He realised, from the casual way she slipped the question in, that this was the subject which interested her most. ‘No.’ It was baldly stated, making it clear, Virgil trusted, that neither did he ever discuss it. He could sense her eyeing him, calculating whether to press him or not.
‘I’m surprised,’ she said cautiously. ‘Were I in your position, I think I’d want to rub their noses in it a bit.’
‘There’s other ways of payback.’ This time, Virgil was relieved to see that she recognised the note of finality in his voice. He never talked about that part of his past, never consciously thought about it, for to do so would be to admit the tide of guilt he had spent the past eleven years holding back. It was one thing to talk around his history, quite another to paint its picture and admit to the pain which he had worked so hard to ignore. Yet there could be no denying that her choice of silence made him contrarily wish she had questioned him more.
The miles wore on. At the border between Staffordshire and Derbyshire they stopped at a village tavern, taking bread and the crumbling white local cheese on a bench outside. It was chilly, but there was no private parlour, and neither Kate nor Virgil wished to endure the curious eyes of the locals in the tap room who had greeted their appearance with a stunned silence.
As they continued on into Derbyshire the scenery changed. The land became softly undulating, the higher, rolling hills of the Peaks casting shadows over the valleys through which they drove. It seemed wetter and greener here. The limestone villages huddled into the creases and folds of the hills, or stretched out along the banks of the fast-flowing rivers such as the Dove, which they followed for some time, where the water mills turned.
It was beautiful, though incredibly isolated, each hamlet seeming to exist in its own world, unconnected and self-contained, Virgil thought. ‘Why aren’t you married, Lady Kate?’
The question startled her, for her hands jerked on the reins, pulling the horse to a walk. ‘Why do you ask?’
Why? He hadn’t realised, but now he thought about it he saw that her remarks over dinner last night had been niggling at him. He could not reconcile what she’d said of herself with the little he knew of her. ‘You said you were a social pariah, though I saw no evidence of it.’
‘Josiah’s guests are my friends but they are not what my father would consider high society. Were you to see me in that milieu you would have evidence aplenty.’
The horse took advantage of her lapse in attention to stop and crop at the grass verge. Virgil took the reins and looped them round the brake. ‘Why? I know I joked about you being a revolutionary, but …’
‘Oh, it is naught to do with that. I have always been outspoken, but the daughter of the influential Duke of Rothermere, you understand, is given rather more latitude than, say, a mere Miss Montague.’ Her voice dripped sarcasm. She threw her head back and glared at him, her eyes dark and bleak, the colour of a winter sea. ‘The fact is, I am a jilt.’
Virgil searched her face for some sign that she was joking, but could find no trace in her stern expression. ‘That’s it? You changed your mind about getting married?’
‘A mere two weeks before the ceremony, and the engagement was of very long standing. I had known Anthony all my life. I did not quite leave him at the altar, but I may as well have, according to my aunt.’
The husky tones of her voice were clipped. There was hurt buried deep there. Had she loved this Anthony? Virgil didn’t like to think so. ‘What made you change your mind so late in the day?’
‘We didn’t suit.’
‘But …’
‘I know what you’re going to say, if I knew him so well why did it take me so long to change my mind? I knew him as a friend of the family. I thought we would suit, and when I tried to think of him as a husband I found I could not.’
The anger in her voice was raw, fresh. ‘How long ago did this happen?’ Virgil asked.
‘Five years.’
‘Did you love him?’ He should not have asked such a deeply personal question. He could not understand why he had done so, for he was usually at pains to keep any conversation, especially with a woman, in neutral channels. But he knew all about the pain of loss.
He covered her tightly clasped hands with one of his own, but Kate shook him off. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me, there is no need. I am not wearing the willow for Lord Anthony Featherstone.’
Rebuffed and baffled, Virgil said nothing. All his instincts told him to drop the subject, which was obviously extremely sensitive and extremely painful, but there was something in her voice, in the way she had closed herself off, that he recognised and could not ignore. She was hurt and determined not to show it. He gently unfolded her fingers and took one of her hands between his. ‘Then tell me,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
She hesitated. He could see the words of refusal forming, but for some reason she swallowed them. ‘Do you really want to know?’
When he nodded, she took a deep breath. ‘Anthony was—is—the son of one of my father’s close friends. His family has a bloodline which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest, according to my father. Our betrothal was the result of a bargain struck by our parents when I was still in my cradle. What you have to understand is that as far as my father is concerned, my only value is in making the best marriage which can be arranged. I knew from a very early age that I was destined to marry Anthony, and since I had not met any other man I preferred after almost two full Seasons, I agreed. Anthony was far from repulsive,’ Kate said, determined to be scrupulously fair. ‘In fact, he was considered to be something of a beau.’
‘But you were not in love with him?’
