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“Coming into Maidstone ahead!”
Julia blinked herself awake at the sound of the groom’s shout and looked out the off window yet again, happy to see the beginnings of civilization once more.
Within an hour she and Alice were settled in a lovely large room at one of the many inns along the water. Alice had been washed, slipped into a night rail, had gingerly nibbled on buttered bread and milky tea and was once again sound asleep, now between sweet-smelling sheets.
And Julia was hungry. This surprised her, but she trusted her stomach to know best, so she washed her face and hands, frowned at her no-longer-neat hair, tucked Buttercup into the bed beside Alice, locked the door behind her and took herself downstairs to search out the common room.
“Not in there, Miss Carruthers. Lord knows the grief you could come to if you were to encounter my coachman again while you’re still of a mind to boil him in oil,” she heard Chance Becket say just as she was about to step across the threshold into a low-ceilinged room sparsely peopled with farmers and travelers. “I’ve arranged for a private dining room.”
She turned about to see that he had changed out of his hacking clothes and into a finely tailored dark blue jacket over fawn pantaloons. His hair, damp and even more darkly blond, had been freshly combed and clubbed at his nape. He looked fresh and alert and entirely too handsome to be smiling at her, to even know her name. “It was not the coachman who ordered us to all but fly to the coast. And I doubt, sir, that it is customary for the nanny to break bread with the employer.”
Chance laughed, doubtful that anything so mundane as convention ever gave this woman much pause. If it did, she wouldn’t have taken a step out of her chamber before doing something with that thick mop of hair that looked as if she’d spent the day scrubbing floors. “Perhaps you require a chaperone?”
“Oh, don’t be silly. I’m a plain, aged old maid of nearly one and twenty. Nobody cares,” Julia said, absentmindedly pushing a stray lock of straight blond hair behind her ear as she felt her cheeks begin to flush. Why on earth had she told him her age? “Where, sir, is the private dining room? I’m starved.”
He gestured toward the hallway leading away from the small square foyer, and Julia had no choice but to precede him down the hall.
“In here,” Chance said, stepping ahead of her and pushing back the door that was already ajar. “Shall I leave it open—to ease an old maid’s sensibilities, I mean?”
Julia blinked rapidly, for she was suddenly so stupidly missish that she actually believed she might cry. “Now you’re being facetious. I’m the nanny, a simple domestic servant. Just do sit down, sir, so that I may.”
“You are many things, Miss Carruthers,” Chance said as they sat down on either side of the narrow wooden table, “but I am afraid that the role of servant is not one of them, at least not by nature. Tell me, have you ever considered the occupation of despot? I do believe you’d excel at it.”
Julia picked up a still-warm roll, ripped it into three pieces, then reached for a knife and the butter pot. It was time for a change of subject. “How long will you remain at Becket Hall before returning to London, sir? I had thought you had planned only to deliver us there, but the amount of luggage you’ve ordered brought with you seems to contradict that thought.”
“Oh, don’t pretty it all up with fine words, Miss Carruthers,” Chance said, using his fork to skewer a fat slab of pink ham and put it on his plate. “You poked about in my bedchamber, tallying up bits of luggage the way a headmaster counts noses. And you’re alarmed that I might actually remain at Becket Hall above a day, because nothing would make you happier than seeing the last of me. Oh, and I am a horrible parent to Alice. Correct?”
Julia chewed on a piece of roll, swallowed, then smiled. “Correct, Mr. Becket. Except for that last little bit. I don’t think you are a horrible parent, because Alice seems to love you, and children are the very best judges of people. After dogs, I suppose. But you’re not very attentive or perceptive when it comes to your child, are you? Most of your gender aren’t, leaving such things to the females. My father, I believe, was an exception, as he was forced to raise me alone.”
Chance leaned back on his chair, rather amused about her reference to dogs. “So following that thought—and having known you now for nearly four and twenty hours—I can conclude that it’s the mothers, then, who for the most part teach their children about tact and thinking before speaking and refraining from invading another’s privacy and the art of showing respect—that sort of thing?”
Julia lowered her gaze to her plate to find that she’d loaded it with ham and cheese from the platter in the middle of the table. Yet suddenly she had lost her appetite.
“Come, come now, Miss Carruthers. Consider this a necessarily delayed interview as to your qualifications to ride herd on my daughter, as the first was rather slapdash, to say the least. I begin to worry that, raised entirely by your father, as you say you were, you are not the one to help mold Alice to be a respectful, conformable child.”
Clearly the man was now driving home his own point with the head of a hammer. She was being reminded just who she was—and who she was not. And the pity of it was, she could not afford to push him any further, unless she wanted to be left here, in Maidstone, to fend for herself. “I’m her nanny, sir, her nurse, and not her tutor or her governess. I believe you can safely leave her teachings to others. I’m here to…to hold the chamber pot.”
“Quite,” Chance said, liking this woman better when she wasn’t keeping herself in check. He’d had seven years of society women, of women never saying what they meant, what they felt—if, indeed, they felt anything. Miss Carruthers was more like his sisters, none of whom suffered fools gladly.
Which, he realized, would make him the current fool, wouldn’t it? “Very well, we’ll dispense with the interview now. Perhaps you’d like to hear more about Becket Hall? After all, you will be living there.”
“For how long, sir?” Julia asked, her curiosity overcoming both her uncomfortably real nervousness and her temper.
“For you, Miss Carruthers? For as long as you can stomach the place, I imagine. For Alice, until she is grown and ready for her season. I don’t wish for her to grow up in London, and my own estate is manned only by a skeleton staff, which is why I’ve arranged for her to be with the family. I’ll visit her, of course.”
“Really? And how long has it been since you’ve visited Becket Hall, sir? Alice has told me she’s never been there.”
Chance shifted in his chair. “She was taken there as an infant. Once. My wife didn’t care for…for the area.”
Julia had her own thoughts on what the man’s wife hadn’t cared for, but she’d begun to understand that saying what she thought wasn’t as accepted by society gentlemen as it had been by her father. Was his family horribly rustic, that his fine society wife couldn’t like them? If so, Julia knew she already liked them, sight unseen. “Romney Marsh can sometimes seem like a separate country, not part of England at all.”
Chance’s mind went back to his conversation with the War Office minister’s assistant. “I’ll agree that many of the inhabitants don’t seem to believe they are a part of the war going on with France.”
Julia nodded. “The Owlers. You are referring to them, aren’t you? But they smuggle to survive, Mr. Becket.”
“I understand their reasons, Miss Carruthers, and even sympathize, if that statement doesn’t startle you overmuch,” Chance told her. “We only wish they could understand our concerns. Besides the lost revenue, spies and information have been traded back and forth across the Channel with the unwitting help of the Owlers, as you call them. That has to stop.”
Julia bristled. She knew the history of smuggling along the Kent and Sussex coastlines. She’d daily drunk tea left as a gift after the smugglers had used her father’s church to store their haul before moving it inland. “Then the government has to do more than say it understands. Have the king raise the price paid for wool, sir. That would be my suggestion.”
Chance smiled, knowing he was speaking with a woman who’d been raised believing smuggling was nothing more or less than a fact of life. “Don’t bite off my head, Miss Carruthers. It’s my solution, as well, but I am here to tell you that a similar suggestion has already been offered and refused. And for good reason. We’re already strapped financing a war, remember?”
Julia shrugged, holding back a smile. How she adored a lively conversation, even a lively argument. “Better a war than an insurrection, sir. Or don’t you think it will come to that? My father worried that one day we will suffer France’s fate if we don’t learn the lessons of their revolution.”
Chance downed his mug of ale, good country ale made with Kent hops. “‘To write this act of independence we must have a white man’s skin for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink and a bayonet as pen.’”
Julia blinked, taken aback by the bloodthirsty statement. “I beg your pardon?”
“I was quoting Boisrond-Tonnerre, Miss Carruthers, not making a statement of my own. The words were said by Tonnerre, who served as one of Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ lieutenants, back in 1804. That’s when Haiti declared its independence after a fight begun by François Touissant, a slave whose master made the colossal blunder of allowing him to read about the so-glorious French Revolution. In other words, I am agreeing with your father, such an event is possible. And, yes, oppression makes such insurrections more than possible. Are you familiar with the history of Haiti, Miss Carruthers?”
Julia shook her head, interested and not a little impressed at Chance Becket’s so-smooth pronunciation of such tongue-twisting French names. “I’m sorry, I’m not. It’s an island? Is sugar grown there?”
Chance wished back his words. “Another time, Miss Carruthers. I was only thinking that there has already been one instance of a people copying the methods of the French Revolution. Indeed, we do not want another, most especially not here. Let me tell you about Becket Hall. Shall we walk?”
“I really should go upstairs to check on Miss Alice,” Julia said, getting to her feet.
“I’ll have a maid sent up to sit with her. Alice has no problem with strangers.”
Julia still believed she should return to Alice’s chamber, but she did long to hear about Becket Hall and the Becket family, as well as more about Haiti, of all places. “Very well,” she said, handing over the key to the chamber. “But wait, I’ll do it. I should go fetch my bonnet anyway.”
“Not if you have any pity for me, Miss Carruthers. The thing is close to an abomination, you know. Even that ridiculous bun is less offensive to the eyes.”
Julia went to raise a hand to her hair but caught herself in time. “One would assume you, too, were a motherless child, Mr. Becket, as that was quite an untactful remark.”
Chance did not smile. “Wait for me here, Miss Carruthers, doing your best to keep any opinions to yourself.”
Julia gave herself another short, pithy sermon on the benefits of knowing her place while also taking the time to munch on another slice of ham and tuck a roll into the pocket of her gown before her employer returned and led her out onto the street.
He turned to the left and then guided her around the side of the large building, down a gravel pathway to a bench that overlooked the River Medway. Or the River Wen. Julia only knew that Maidstone had been built on the banks of both waterways. Until the horrible mail coach ride to London that now seemed two lifetimes ago, she had never strayed more than a few miles from Hawkhurst, except for occasional trips to Rye with her father.
She sat, raising her face to the sun while she listened to the flow of water through the wheel of the mill on the opposite shore, the song of birds overhead…and concentrated on not thinking about the man sitting beside her. And there were flowers; flowers everywhere. Maidstone had been touted as the Garden of England, and now she knew why. “I still can’t smell the Channel, but we will tomorrow. How near is Becket Hall to the water?”
“All but too near when the tide comes in during a winter storm,” Chance said, a mental portrait of Becket Hall forming in his mind. “My father loves the sea.”
“And you don’t?”
This woman turned his every spoken word into a question about him. How did she do that? “I’ve sailed. Now, you’ll be with Alice at most times, but I know my family. They’re extremely informal and they’ll wish to include both of you in their day-to-day lives, so you’d best be prepared for that.”
Julia could sense tension building in the man, from his posture to the tone of his voice. “You disapprove?”
“It’s not up to me to approve or disapprove. Only to explain. My father, Ainsley Becket, is still a rather young man. We’re not his children by blood, you see, except for Cassandra. In truth, I only refer to Ainsley as my father when I’m in society, because that’s easier than constant explanations. Ainsley never leaves the Marsh, you understand, and has never been to London. In any event, Ainsley was a man of business in the islands for many years and simply acquired the rest of us from time to time.”
Julia was absolutely fascinated. “He adopted you there? In the islands, you said? Islands in the Caribbean?”
“Adopted, purchased, scooped up—yes, he did. I’m not disclosing any secrets here, for you’d soon realize that the Beckets are a rather mixed assortment. I am the oldest, although Courtland likes to believe himself our keeper, and Cassandra is the youngest. The rest all fall somewhere in between, whether thinking of their ages at the time they became a part of the household or when they were born.”
Julia, having grown up as the only child in her father’s household, often envious of her friends and their many brothers and sisters, was eager to hear more. “How many of you are there?”
Chance wished he hadn’t begun this conversation, but the woman should know what she was facing. “Eight, other than Ainsley. Quite the menagerie. Court, Cassandra, myself. My sisters, Morgan, Eleanor and Fanny. My brothers, Spencer and Rian. So you under stand, Alice will not want for company.”
Julia’s head was spinning as she attempted to digest so much information given so quickly. All those names. Too many names. “I’m sure she will be delighted. But all those people. Becket Hall is probably enormous?”
Chance watched as a V of ducks slid across the current toward the shore. One in the lead, the rest following in that V, all neat and tidy and regimented. So unlike his family, his house, all of their lives.
He could never run far enough to get away.
“Becket Hall is large, yes. Large and rambling and fairly ugly.” He stood up. “Shall we go?”
Julia got to her feet. “I believe I’ll sup with Alice in our room this evening, sir. When shall we be ready to travel tomorrow morning?”
Chance ran a hand over his hair. “That’s my decision? I hadn’t planned on abdication, you understand, but I have begun to believe I’ve been overthrown. Shall we say eight?”
Julia smiled. “I think eight is a perfect time to continue our journey, sir.” And then she gave in to curiosity yet again and pushed for more information. “Why, you may even have time to say your hellos to your family and still be back on the road to London early the next morning.”
“A plan that would please me straight down to the ground, Miss Carruthers, much as that obviously disgusts you. But we both remember the amount of luggage I have brought with me. It turns out that I have matters to attend to up and down the coast, so I will be staying at Becket Hall—or at least returning to it every few days—until such time as I can escape to London.”
“Really?” Julia said, trying to sift through the feelings his information had aroused, decide if they were feelings of joy or discomfort. “Alice will be very pleased, sir.”
“Oh, yes,” Chance said, then sighed, mentally picturing his brother Court’s reaction to the news. “Everyone will be extremely pleased. Good day to you, Miss Carruthers. Don’t remain outside without your cloak or you’ll take a chill. I refuse to consider the prospect of being compelled to interview yet another nanny.”
Julia watched him walk away, heading downstream along the bank, his hands clasped behind his back. Another woman might be intrigued by the man. The bereaved husband. The harassed, unknowledgeable but sincere father. The wretchedly handsome man with the brooding eyes and the full mouth of a soul who had been born for passion and adventure, even if he seemed woefully unaware of that fact. A man who’d seen an exotic place like Haiti, had even lived there. How? As a poor, orphaned boy at last discovered by Ainsley Becket and given a new but clearly unhappy life?
Yes, any woman would be intrigued, fascinated. Any woman would want to hold him, comfort him, help him.
Well, almost any woman.
Julia Carruthers longed to run after him and give him a good push in the back, sending him toppling headfirst into the river.
CHAPTER FOUR
CHANCE TOOK JACMEL for a run early the next morning, knowing the only way to keep the animal to a steady pace would be to first wipe away the memory of being locked in a strange stall all night. He then spent most of the day on Jacmel, either cantering ahead of the traveling coach or waiting by the roadside for it to catch up with him again, until he at last pushed into the coach to ride sitting beside his daughter.
It was dark now. Alice was soundly asleep. And Billy—had Julia Carruthers put the fear of God into the man?—had slowed to carefully pick their way through the moonlight over the last miles to Becket Hall.
A maddening day. A wasted day. And yet a lovely luncheon with Alice, who could chatter away nineteen to the dozen about everything and anything.
And all of that time, for every moment of the day, Chance had been unable to block Julia Carruthers from his mind. She was a servant, yes, but more than that, she was a woman. She might not be a society miss, but she probably knew more of her bloodline than he did of his; most anyone would. She was no worse than he, probably a good deal better, even if she had hired herself out as a child’s nurse and he was living in a fine house in Upper Brook Street, dressing in custom-tailored clothes and holding a fairly important post in the War Office.
He was the man he had made. A gentleman, in name if not by birth.
He rarely thought of the young Chance anymore, the ragged, barefoot boy who had angled for pennies on the wharf and slept wherever he could. He’d been known only as “Angelo’s brat,” until Ainsley.
He’d moved so far beyond that life, both in the islands and here in England.
But every turn of the coach wheels took him closer to Becket Hall, and the memories refused to go back where they belonged, into the far recesses of his brain. He blamed Julia Carruthers for that, although he knew such reasoning to be ridiculous.
Ainsley would like Julia Carruthers, damn him.
Yes, he publicly referred to Ainsley as his father and the others as his brothers and sisters, but in his mind all he saw was the end, that last day, that last memory. He would never forgive Ainsley that last memory.
Build a life, watch that life be destroyed. Love and refuse to love again. Protect yourself, adhere to the rules, refuse to be vulnerable or dependent again. Never, never trust.
Those were the lessons of that last memory. All of that. And Isabella’s smile…
Julia cried out when Billy sawed on the reins. The horses all but plunged to a stop and she was tossed into Chance’s arms from the other side of the coach.
“What on earth…?”
“Cow-handed fool!” Chance tried to disengage himself, but he had reflexively thrown out one arm to keep a sleeping Alice from tumbling to the floor of the coach, so that he could barely steady Julia with the other as she scrambled to right herself.
Julia had been dozing and was really only half-awake now as she pushed against him with her hands to right herself.
“Ooof! Miss Carruthers, please, for the love of all that’s holy—”
“I’m sorry, sir. So sorry,” she said, feeling her cheeks growing hot and blessing the darkness that hid that fact. “What happened? Why have we stopped?”
“Two very good questions, both of which Billy may be able to answer if my hands are not wrapped too tightly around his scrawny neck,” Chance said, opening the door and jumping down onto the uneven ground. “You stay in the coach with—oh, never mind,” he finished as Julia jumped down to stand beside him. “Billy? Billy!”
“Here, sir!”
“He’s there,” Julia said, pointing past the horses. “There, in the road. He’s bending over something.”
“Making it easier for me to boot him in the hindquarters. Is it too much for me to ask you to stay here while I investigate further, Miss Carruthers?”
“Probably,” she said, knowing she should be agreeing with him, climbing back into the coach. “But Alice didn’t waken and there’s nothing out here anywhere save the road, the marsh and us. No trees, barely anything that could even be called a hill. What could be in the road? A sheep?”
“I suppose we could stand here and debate the matter, but I suggest I—we—do the obvious and go look,” Chance said. He offered Julia his arm because otherwise she might trip over something in the darkness, and the woman was enough of a problem to him now without adding a sprained ankle to her list of detractions. “Oh, wait a moment more. Stand here while I get a pistol from the coach.”
“You think the sheep is armed?” Julia ignored both the offer and the order as she lifted her skirts and made her way past the horses to where Billy was standing very still in the roadway.
“Billy?” she asked, then realized that the coachman was staring quite intently, not down at the roadway but over to one side, where the marsh grasses grew waist-high.
“I’m that sorry, miss. I didn’t used to be such a looby,” Billy said, then slowly raised his hands up over his head. “He said not to do this until you came looking, miss.”
Julia’s eyes had become more accustomed to the darkness, and now the moonlight helped illuminate the scene in front of her.
She could see that Billy had shot his hands into the air because a young man kneeling in the marsh grass was holding a large, ugly pistol directed at the coachman’s chest.
The dark object in the road was really two dark objects, both of them human forms, neither of them moving. Julia went to her knees in front of the closest figure, who seemed little more than a boy.
