Bessie Terrill excused herself to correct the girls, who were pestering Will and James Ellery, while Melly wrestled with those thoughts. She’d just begun to order them when Bessie joined her again, but not before pickling some stray weeds out of her hair that had evidently gotten caught there when she’d sacrificed her herbs so theatrically earlier. Melly almost groaned aloud. It
was
worse than she thought. She must have looked the complete ninnyhammer. But she wasn’t given time to agonize long over it. Bessie had just refilled her cup when Will and Ellery came through the wounded door hung awry on its hinges and joined them.
“Miss Ahern,” the steward greeted buoyantly. “I didn’t know you were here. How lovely to see you. What, no herb gathering today?”
“Not today,” she said curtly, though the subliminal anger in her delivery was not directed toward him, but rather toward the author of her little forced holiday.
“Ahh, on such a superb day?”
She didn’t answer. Flashing a smile, she sipped her buttermilk. He was doing it again—strutting like a peacock. There he went, straightening his neckcloth, fumbling with his quizzing glass—gold to be sure. Was he trying to impress her? To what purpose, the stars only knew. She ignored his performance and turned to Will Terrill instead.
“How is the roof coming?” she asked him, knowing full well it wasn’t coming.
Will clouded. He was in his thirties, looking nearly twice that for his labors on the croft, and his recent heartaches, so was Bessie, come to that. Deep shadows clung to her eyes, and though she smiled, there was a haunted look in them that touched Melly’s soul. What must it be like to lose one’s only son? She couldn’t imagine it.
“Mr. Ellery here is going to send a work crew, after all,” Will said, accepting the crock of buttermilk Bessie put in his grimy hand. “I thought I could do it with the help of the field hands, but ‘tis no use. The whole frame’s gone—rotted clean through. It won’t do no good to put new thatch over bad supports. It’ll never hold through a storm. I thought we could shore it up, but it keeps coming down as fast as we thatch it.”
“It is flaw Season, after all,” Ellery put in, “and we’re due again. I’ll hire a crew tomorrow, and we’ll have it done in no time. That’s what his lordship would have wanted me to do in the first place. Why, if he were here, he would have insisted upon it.”
“I believe he is here,” Melly said quietly. It was no use. It would surely come out that she’d seen him, what with the fuss he’d made over those herbs, and they’d only wonder why that wasn’t the first thing out of her mouth when she arrived on the Terrill’s doorstep. As it was, they had all converged upon her like a flock of swooping crows in the garden, posing questions in unison. The last thing she wanted was to give her encounter with the Earl of Shelldrake importance, so she smiled her most innocent smile toward Ellery, and said, “I’ve never met the man, of course, but I do believe it was he whom I encountered on the lane this morning, though he didn’t introduce himself.”
“Dark-haired was he, sporting a queue, blue, deep-set eyes—an odd light color blue, like a Siamese cat’s?” the steward queried anxiously.
“Ummhmm,” she replied with a nod, through a swallow from her cup.
“Good God,” Ellery muttered under his breath. His face changed suddenly, as did his demeanor. The strutting peacock transformed into a hawk before her very eyes, and color seemed to leave his face. “I’d best get back,” he said. “I’ll see to that work crew first thing tomorrow.” He nodded to Bessie and Will, ruffled the three little girl’s blonde heads, and bowed to Melly. “I hope to see you again soon, Miss Ahern?” he said.
“Mr. Ellery,” she replied, and waited until he’d ridden off in a cloud of dust toward Drake’s Lair, before rising herself. “I really must be getting home,” she said, “I’ve simples to make.”
“Do you have to go so soon, Melly?” Bessie said, meanwhile quieting the disappointed girls. “We’ve scarcely had time for a visit.”
“I do,” she replied, “but my door is open if you want to bring the girls and stay awhile when the work crew arrives.”
“That’s kind of you, dear, if Will doesn’t need me. We’ll see.”
Melly nodded and left them then, starting down the lane toward home. The sun was already sliding down from the zenith. Dusk came early on the coast. There would be no herb gathering today. A whole day wasted, because of an ill-mannered, boorish churl. And what was she going to do tomorrow? What could she do? He had her basket, gloves, and gardening tools, and she didn’t have enough money to replace them in the village. There was nothing for it but to sort out her wares and find suitable concoctions to trade with the Tinkers for new ones. They were a shrewd lot, Gypsy nomads encamped in the wood. They rarely bought tonics, salves, and tisanes from the locals; they usually made their own and sold them just as she did. But she had nothing else to barter.
The devil take that thieving phantom
. He was as rich as Croesus and he couldn’t spare her a handful of herbs? Why? It made no sense.
She thought of the life he must lead—a life she would have led if her father hadn’t squandered her inheritance, scandalized the family name, cost her her emergence into society, then killed himself and made her a laughingstock and a pariah of the
ton
.
The crunch of the gravelly lane underfoot echoed in her ears. It was a lonely sound. If she were in London, she wouldn’t be walking alone in the street. She wouldn’t dare go about unescorted—no lady would consider such a thing. Not so here. But then, here she wasn’t a lady, she thought bitterly; she was just the local witch in the vale.
She thought of Cousin Calliope, old and in her grave before her time, and Bessie Terrill—twenty-nine and looking forty. Cornwall did that to women. The coast was rugged and wild, and it took a special breed to stand up to it. Was that what she had to look forward to? She was twenty-two years old. She may as well be fifty. Lady Demelza Ahern reduced to scrounging for stolen herb plants and begging to keep them.
Where were these bizarre thoughts coming from?
Such things had never bothered her until that morning. She hadn’t cared what she wore, or whether she walked abroad with an escort, or how many twigs and leaves and grass spears collected in her long, curly hair that drew them like a magnet on her outings… until that morning. She hadn’t thought about London, or her come-out, or anything like that since she’d come to live with Cousin Calliope… until now. Was it that he’d chastised her in a way that she hadn’t been chastised since her father was alive?
No.
In an instant, on what started out to be a magical morning doing what she loved to do, a phantom had showed her who she wasn’t—showed her what she had become… and she hated him for it
*
The earl was seated behind his desk in the study, when James Ellery burst into the room. They had been friends since their
Town Bronze
days, something of which the earl wasn’t particularly proud. He’d behaved in typical Corinthian fashion back then—racing around London, haunting Tattersall’s for first crack at the best horseflesh, trekking from Newmarket to Epsom, from Ascot to Dorchester, meanwhile, climbing between the sheets of London’s willing ladies and ladybirds alike in pursuit of pleasure in true rake fashion. He, the heir to the Shelldrake earldom, the only son of an absentee father, Ellery, the disenfranchise—the soon rolled-up—second son of a viscount hanging on to him and his money for dear life.
Though he certainly wasn’t obligated, when his father, Alexander Hannaford, passed on and he inherited, making Ellery his estate manager seemed the ideal solution. Though public opinion accused Ellery of being a hanger-on, the earl didn’t hesitate. It was a respectable position that afforded his friend enough blunt to keep himself comfortably, with the added plus of living at Drake’s Lair. In short, he got a trustworthy estate manager, and Ellery got his pockets plumped. It seemed a fair enough exchange and Ellery was the only one he corresponded with while he was away… until lately that is. He hadn’t put quill to parchment in months.
“Damn it all, Drake, you might have warned a person,” Ellery greeted from the doorway. Striding in, the steward embraced him. “You could have written you know. We had no idea if you were alive or dead.”
“Now, how could I catch you doing evil things with my accounts if I did that, Jim?” the earl said playfully.
“Well, you look sound,” Ellery observed. Holding him at arm’s distance, he took his measure. “A little thin, bigod, but sound, and brown as a berry—just like in the old days, eh? You always did look like a Greek god tanned. Were you wounded?”
“I took a shoulder wound at Salamanca last year, and had to lag behind,” said Drake. “August and September on the Peninsula are the two most hellish months of the year. But I finally caught up with the regiment only to get wounded again for my pains. The worst was on the push to Vitoria. I was hit in the side. Nearly didn’t make it. There were over five thousand casualties in that battle. I was one of the lucky ones, but I couldn’t catch up that time. I missed the victory at Vitoria, and Wellington marched on into France without me. So they sent me back to England forthwith.”
“Are you going back?”
“Don’t know yet. I could, I suppose. I could always reinstate my commission; I haven’t sold it or anything yet, and I’m certainly sound enough now.”
“Hail the conquering hero!”
“I’d like to say I was a hero,” Drake replied, refuting the notion with a shake of his head, “but truth be told, I missed most of the action and all the glory getting shot. I was either the luckiest lieutenant in the ranks, or the most inept, depending upon how you look at it I suppose. I don’t think I’m quite cut out for warring.”
“Come to think of it, you always were a better man with the lance than the pistol,” Ellery said tongue-in-cheek, with a wry arch of his brow.
“If you want the truth,” Drake returned, ignoring the levity, “over and above the obvious—my loyalty to Crown and country—I think I ran off to war and put myself in harms way deliberately, hoping for a noble death. There was certainly no nobility in my life. No, that’s probably not the whole of it. After… what happened, sheer blood lust drove me. I needed to purge what couldn’t be purged elsewhere in the thick of battle, and I supposed at the time, that it might just as well have been on the field with the French as anywhere. I was half-mad, Jim. I had to get away. Damned reckless of me, eh? Hah! And it didn’t even work. All I got for my pains
were
the pains, and the scars. But I’m home now. I’m through seducing death. It’s high time I’ve courted life—made something of myself. How did you know I was back? I only arrived this morning,”
“I was out at the Terrill’s… there’s a problem out there, Drake—”
“I know—I know, Griggs filled me in. Go on,” he replied. Pouring two snifters of brandy from the decanter on the desk, he handed one to the steward.
“Ahh,” said Ellery, clearly relieved. “A young woman you met today told me you’d returned.”
“A young woman?”
“Miss Demelza Ahern, an acquaintance of mine, actually,” Ellery explained. “She said she met you on the lane this morning.”
“She said that, did she?” Drake mused, hiding behind his snifter.
He hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind all day, and that had begun to annoy him. Now Ellery proclaims the gel an
acquaintance
. That could only mean one thing, knowing James Ellery—he was either diddling her, or about to do so. Why should that bother him? What did he care? She was nothing to him.
“What else did she say?” he said guardedly.
“Nothing else. See here, Drake, what happened between you two? You’ve got that look again.”
“What ‘look’?
“That God-awful thing you do with your eyes—drawing them back under your brow that way. When you do it they take on a positively evil glow. You look like a fire-breathing dragon. I always thought the name
Drake’s Lair
was your great-grandfather’s play on the Shelldrake title. Now, I’m not so sure,
drake
being another term for
dragon
. Your father had that same look, too—deep-set dragon eyes. Which is it?”
“A little of both, I suppose. Father
was
a dragon if you recall—scales and all, but I have no idea to what ‘look’ you’re referring.”
“Yes, you do! We’ve discussed it before. Why, the last time I saw you put on that face was—”
“Stubble it,” Drake warned, gravel-voiced, before the steward could pursue the issue. He was getting angry now, for the second time since he’d come home, and the same little toffee-haired, amber-eyed gel, with pouty lips and an irresistible halo of twigs and leaves riding her saucy curls, was stoking the fire. “You were saying… about your ‘acquaintance’?” he prompted.
“N-nothing,” Ellery replied around a nervous laugh.
Another dead giveaway; he was diddling her, sure as check.
But what did that matter? What was it to him anyway?
Zeus
, but this was turning out to be an impossible day. Maybe she was a witch. Maybe she’d cast a spell on him for interrupting her thievery—for confiscating her deuced gathering basket and tools. Who knew but that the locals’ tales were true?
Now he was being ridiculous. Of course they weren’t true.
His conscience was bothering him. Why, he couldn’t imagine. She had been trespassing on his land hadn’t she—taking his property—defying him?
Why, then, did he feel like such a cad? That was easy. He had Mrs. Laity, the counsel for the defense, to thank for that.
He wouldn’t pursue it. There was no reason for Ellery to know what had transpired between them—have it bruited about all over the parish that he’d deprived his steward’s little ladybird of her livelihood. For some unfathomable reason, she hadn’t taken herself straight off to tell all. Neither would he, and he opened the ledger on the blotter before him and steered the awkward conversation deftly around to the business at hand.
Three
Melly woke at first light with the bird music, just as she always did. But this day was different. She wasn’t going to gather herbs by the beck at Drake’s Lair, or the in the meadow that spilled down to it, where rosemary, yarrow, and Gypsy rose grew wild, or even in the fields along the lane closer to the manor, burgeoning with marigold, sweet lavender, and chamomile, as they always did in summer. She had nothing to collect them in, and no tools to work with even if she had.