Destitute On His Doorstep (8 page)

His eyes smiled approval at her sudden change of attitude, but he was in no way fooled by it. He raised a dark brow and considered her flushed cheeks and the soft, trembling mouth. He knew what she was up to and he wasn't in the least put out. To have Mistress Lucas flirting with him could prove highly entertaining and desirable. He would see her efforts weren't wasted.

‘I can understand why you behaved as you did and I cannot blame you for being angry. I would have felt exactly the same.' In the spirit of relaxed affability which they'd begun to enjoy, he said, ‘May I sit down?'

‘Of course you may.' She smiled a quiet puckish
smile that could have been construed as provocative. ‘I won't bite.'

‘I'm relieved to hear it,' he remarked, a slow, roguish grin dawning across his features. Sitting on the grass close beside her, he stretched out his long, booted legs, supporting himself on his elbow and looking up at her.

Jane studied him lounging beside her and looking for all the world like a gentleman of leisure. And yet she sensed that beneath his relaxed exterior there was a forcefulness, a power, carefully restrained. There was intelligence and strength of purpose in his features, together with assurance and confidence. Looking into his eyes she detected neither cruelty, conceit nor dishonesty, and he had the air of a man who succeeded in all he sets out to achieve.

‘What are you doing here?' she asked softly. ‘Were you looking for me?'

‘Mary is in a fearful state over your disappearance.'

‘Is she? I'm sorry about that, but I knew if I told her what I intended she would have stopped me. I had to get out—if just for a little while.' She watched him sit up and reach for her cloak that on Mary's insistence he had brought with him. She felt his chest brush her arm and peered aslant into the opening as his shirt fell away from his chest.

Francis became momentarily engrossed in spreading the cloak around her shoulders. Considering his actions outrageously bold and wanting to avoid a repetition of his behaviour of yesterday, feeling altogether far too vulnerable by his close proximity and the brush of his
fingers on her naked flesh, Jane was tempted to snatch it from him and do it herself, but remembering her decision to temper her attitude and finding his nearness in no way displeasing, she let him continue.

Heartened when she didn't object to his ministering, Francis's teeth flashed white in a lazy grin and his gaze dipped lingeringly to her soft lips. ‘According to Mary you shouldn't be out without a cloak. I agree with her that you are not fully recovered and should be kept warm,' he admonished softly. ‘I would not want you to come down sick again.'

‘I won't,' she answered, touched by his concern. Conscious of his stare, she lifted her head, but did not look away.

Something about the way she held her head, about her voice and dark eyes, stirred the ashes of some vague memory. Forgetting that his eyes were locked on hers, Francis continued to gaze at her, trying to grasp what was eating at him like a worm at the back of his mind.

Jane cocked her head to one side and eyed him quizzically. ‘What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?'

‘I have this strange feeling that we have met before—before you came to Bilborough. It's a feeling I've had ever since I laid eyes on you. Perhaps you can enlighten me.'

She smiled slowly, a mischievous light twinkling in her eyes, deciding to have a little fun while she kept him guessing. ‘If we had, I hate to think you had forgotten it.'

‘I am positive that if we had, I would remember.'

‘Maybe it's because of the picture of me you saw in the house—when I was younger.'

‘Mmm,' he said, not convinced that was it. Jane felt a
frisson
of alarm when his eyes continued to gaze down at her. When they lingered on her lips she had the strangest sensation that he might kiss her, but she quickly dismissed that notion as some stupid fantasy of her own and admonished herself for having such mistaken illusions.

A raven brow lifted wonderingly as Francis perused her face. ‘You are feeling better, I can tell. You certainly look much improved since I last saw you.'

‘Much better. I shall not impose on you for much longer.'

‘You may stay here as long as wish. I am only sorry you have no family you can go and stay with. Will you accept my offer and stay on here in the steward's house, or have you changed your mind and decided you will return to Northampton?'

Jane looked bemused, but something was coming alive in her eyes. ‘I'm not sure of your meaning.'

He smiled. ‘It's simple enough.'

‘To you, maybe, but not to me. Do you want me to leave? Do you want the house for someone else?'

He shook his head. ‘Not at all. It would please me greatly if you were to stay on. The house is yours for as long as you want it.'

With grudging reluctance, she said, ‘Thank you. Just now there is nowhere else I can go.'

‘Why can you not go back to Northampton?' he asked, curious as to what her life had been like living in the
house of her stepmother's brother and wondering if this might have had something to do with her nightmare.

Her eyes shot up and fastened on his, and for an instant a flame burned in their depths along with a deep and abiding fear. ‘No. I will never go back there.'

Francis had his answer. ‘Why? Is there something—or someone—there you are afraid of? Was your stepmother's brother such a tyrant?'

Her brows drew together and she wondered why he was speaking so slow and deliberate and looking at her in that penetrating manner. She nodded. Fear set her hands a tremble and she clutched them together to keep them from transmitting their weakness to the rest of her body.

‘Won't you tell me about him?' he prodded gently.

She took a deep fortifying breath before saying, ‘Only that he wanted me for his wife.'

‘You are an attractive young woman of marriageable age. It is quite normal for a man to feel that way.'

She kept her eyes and face down so he would not see her despair and her fear. ‘I know that,' she said quietly, ‘but he is also a cruel and fiercely ambitious man. Now the war is over all he wants is wealth and land, lots of it, and then he can sit upon it like a giant spider and enjoy it.'

‘Did he hurt you?' he asked, his voice gentle, looking at her bent head.

‘Sometimes,' she admitted, her voice so soft her answer was almost lost on him.

Francis looked at her steadily. Her brave face was masking something and he would like to know what,
but he would not press her. He hoped she would tell him in her own time.

‘I—I despised him,' Jane went on hesitantly, ‘and I know that if the two of you should meet, you would share my opinion of him.' She spoke quietly and with much conviction, for the enmity between Jacob Atkins and Francis Russell that had been established long ago was not forgotten.

‘He has children?' Francis queried, hoping his question would rouse her from her unhappy recollections, while feeling an unexplainable surge of anger at this unknown man. Deep inside, he felt a stirring tenderness, a protectiveness towards her that surprised and disturbed him.

‘Three—all girls. I do miss them—especially Hester, who is my age. They live in fear of him. They are like counters in the games he plays, to be shoved forwards as bait, to draw rich husbands into his web.'

‘In this present climate, there are not so many wealthy husbands available. Did he fight?'

‘Yes, for the King.'

‘His rank?'

‘Captain. Unlike you he failed to make it to Colonel. He was wounded twice, once at Newbury and again at Naseby. When he was captured in '45, he was released on parole after giving his word never again to take up arms against Parliament. He was also a weak man who used brutality to gain authority. He left the army with a legacy of torture and plunder. I would not have shed a tear had he been caught and hanged.'

Distracted by the light glinting on her dark head,
Francis considered her a moment before saying, ‘I see. That bad. And he allowed you to leave his house?'

‘No. He was absent from home when I decided to leave. He will not be pleased—in fact, he will be infuriated that I have gone.'

‘Will he come after you?'

‘He is ambitious, greedy and he has an enormous sense of revenge, so I imagine he will. He is not a man to give up anything without a fight, and in his own mind Bilborough already belongs to him. If he does appear, he is going to be disappointed when he discovers Bilborough no longer belongs to me, but to a Roundhead.'

‘And he will return to Northampton and leave you alone?'

She looked at him askance. ‘I can't say.'

‘Then little wonder you are afraid.' His eyes became soft with concern and, placing his finger gently under her chin, he tipped her face up to his. ‘Do you think that while you are here, under my protection, I would let anything happen to you, Jane? I would fight man and beast if necessary to keep you safe. So would you trust me enough to let me help you as I want to do? I know you are frightened and I believe I can help if only you will trust me.'

She gazed directly into his eyes. ‘I do trust you, but you should look to yourself. When he finds out you are the new owner of the estate that he coveted and how rich you are—for you must be a man of considerable means to have purchased Bilborough and I have seen for myself how well it prospers despite the hardships imposed on the country as a result of the war—he will lose no time in running you through.'

‘And why should he want to do that? I have done him no wrong.'

Jane merely smiled secretively and looked away. ‘Of course there is another scenario,' she prevaricated on a note of humour. ‘He might introduce you to one of his daughters.'

‘And will I be tempted, do you think?'

‘Oh, no, Colonel Russell,' she replied with conviction, ‘you won't be. Of that I am quite certain.'

‘Why, is there something wrong with them?'

‘No, nothing. They are warm and friendly and very pretty—and indeed I became fond of them all, but there are reasons why they would not appeal to you.'

‘Reasons? What reasons?'

Directing her gaze away from him, she spoke quietly, almost to herself. ‘I would rather not explain. Just believe what I say.'

‘Then I shall not be tempted. When I decide to take a wife, I shall be most particular in the woman I choose.'

‘The same can be said when a woman takes a husband. Life's too short for a person to be bound to one man or one woman unless they have a liking for one another.' She glanced uncertainly at him. He was watching her intently, but without a trace of rancour over her earlier ill humour. Something about the softening in his eyes and the effortless ease in which he lounged beside her made her curious to know more about him.

‘Do you have family, Colonel Russell?'

‘You needn't be so formal,' he teased with a devilishly wicked grin. ‘Will you please call me Francis—my dear, or any endearment of your choice. I find it tiresome
to be addressed so formally. And I shall continue calling you Jane—providing you have no objections.'

Jane shrugged. ‘I have no objections one way or another—but I think I shall stop at Francis.'

His eyes smiled their approval. ‘Thank you. In answer to your question, my parents are both dead. I have two brothers, Richard and Walter.'

‘And did they fight alongside you?'

‘At the beginning of the war Richard was with me, but he was wounded out in '44.'

‘And your hand?' she asked, looking down at the black leather glove he wore at all times on his right hand that rested on his knee. She recalled the terrible wounds, the pain it had caused him, and how she had tended and bound it as best she could. ‘Did that happen in the war too?'

He looked down at the glove, remembered suffering tightening his features. ‘Something like that, except that it is not a battle scar. It was inflicted as an act of revenge by a man by the name of Jacob Atkins, a Royalist, who held me responsible for the loss of his eye.' He fell silent as he tried to shut out the memory and when he next looked at Jane he saw her face was white. ‘I'm sorry,' he said with concern. ‘Are you unwell?'

‘No,' she replied, her hands clenched by her sides. ‘What a terrible tale. How you must have suffered.' She tried to smile, but she could not. Jacob Atkins's name was enough to make her tremble with nameless terror. It was foolish of her to feel such terror. It was dangerous to be out of control before her companion's eyes. What would he say, she wondered, if she were to tell him that the same Jacob Atkins was her step-uncle?
She could imagine his rage, and that in that rage he would be blinded to all reason. She realised that Francis had his own demons to fight, and it would matter little that she had been attacked. They were still strangers so why should he believe her? He would order her to leave Bilborough forthwith, and she could not risk that. Oh, sweet Lord, be merciful, she prayed, for she could not bear the thought of it.

‘I was not so badly injured that I had to give up the fight and managed to see the war out to the end. I have that to be thankful for.'

Jane heard the same lazy sound in his voice, saw the same mild amusement in his face that so strangely affected her. For she was able to sense that this idle indifference to what had happened to him at the hands of Jacob Atkins thinly concealed a temper at once relentless, fierce and cruel. She was conscious of wanting to break through that veneer of urbanity, to see for herself something of the stormy power that hovered just beneath the surface, not dormant but carefully concealed.

‘And Walter?' she asked, drawing the conversation away from his injury.

His eyes clouded as they looked into the distance. ‘His allegiance was for the King.'

‘I see. That must have caused a rift in your family.'