“Papa!” she said indignantly.
“Yes, sir.” George gave Grace a sheepish smile, while she frowned at her father.
Wallflower, indeed! He obviously hadn’t seen her dance with the gentleman-spy. Which, on second thought, might be just as well, considering the wicked impulses that mysterious gentleman aroused in her.
A lady’s father might not approve—especially when one’s father was a priest.
Well, it was he who had ordered her to charm the man in the first place! she reminded herself.
“I’m next, mind you,” the Reverend Kenwood added fondly, wagging a finger at her. “Don’t you go promising the next one to some young buck. A young lady ought to save at least one dance for her old dad.”
“Yes, sir,” Grace said archly.
His blue eyes twinkled behind his round spectacles, for he knew full well how she felt about putting herself on display. It did not seem so intimidating now that she had done it once with Lord Trevor.
“Sorry I left you in the lurch,” George mumbled after her father walked away.
Grace took his arm and gave it a forgiving pat. “I’m just glad you’re back.”
“I was winning, you know.”
“Always best to end on a high note. George?” she pressed him since the musicians were taking a short break. “Tell me more about that Order agent fellow you pointed out before.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone and fallen in love with him, too, while my back was turned?” he exclaimed.
“No, of course not! I’ve just been watching all the guests, and I noticed he went storming out a moment ago. I cannot figure why.”
“I’ll bet I know,” he said dryly, then he looked around. “Righty-ho. There she is.”
“Who?”
“She’d be the reason he left. Lady Laura Bayne.” He shook his head. “I
told
Father’s secretary that inviting them both was a terrible idea. Nobody ever listens to me.”
“Why is that?”
“They think I’m a nitwit.”
“No, why didn’t you want them both to be invited?”
George shrugged. “The two of them were to be married, but he disappeared for months nearing the end of the war; she took him for dead and gave up waiting. Got engaged to somebody new.”
Grace’s eyes widened. “Are you serious? How awful!”
“Not for her. That’s her new beau there, Major Lord Dewhurst, of the cavalry. He’ll be an earl in his own right when his father dies, while our spy friend is only the younger son of a duke.”
“Only?” Grace murmured.
“I’m sure she jumped at the chance to improve her situation. Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say, and she’s already your age.”
Grace looked askance at him. “Practically ancient.”
“That’s not what I meant. She’s not like you. She’s a Society girl. Vain and rather mercenary. Montgomery might be a hero and all, but there was a good chance he’d never return alive,” George explained. “Meanwhile, Lady Laura had a future earl down on one knee before her. What would any female do?”
Grace was sure she couldn’t say. “Show her to me.”
He glanced around. “She should be easy enough to find. God knows, she’s usually the most ravishing creature in any room she enters. Half the men in the ton are in love with her, or at least in lust.”
“George.”
“There.” He nodded to the left; Grace followed his glance until she discovered the lady in question.
Oh,
she thought, taken aback by her impossible beauty.
Oh . . . I see.
Lady Laura Bayne was a smiling blond goddess with diamonds in her hair and a white silk gown skimming a perfect figure.
Grace felt her heart sink a little in dismay.
So that’s the sort of woman it took to snare a man like Lord Trevor, she mused with a quiet sigh. Oh, well.
It had been fun while it lasted.
George also sighed, gazing at Lady Laura. “Montgomery was a fool not to marry her before he went off to war, if you ask me.”
“Why didn’t he?” Grace turned away from the depressingly radiant vision of exquisite female beauty.
“Don’t know. It’s shocking, really—I mean that a woman like that couldn’t compel him. If it were me, she could make me do anything. But I suppose she’s surrounded by people who leap to give her whatever she wants.”
“Maybe that’s why she chose him,” Grace murmured. The man she had met had too much strength to let himself be ruled by a pretty face.
George shrugged. “I couldn’t say, but if it was a battle of wills or something, she won. She quit waiting and moved on, as you can see.”
“But you said that she thought Lord Trevor was dead.”
“Yes, everyone did, though his family refused to believe it,” he added. “Everyone felt rather sorry for them, refusing to put black crape on the door. Turns out they were right.”
“Where was he, then?”
“That, my dear, is a closely guarded secret. No idea.”
“Hmm.” Grace looked back wistfully at Lady Laura, with her gloved hand resting in the crook of her new fiance’s arm. “One wonders how she feels now that her former beau is back from the grave.”
“Feels?” George laughed cynically. “You and your quaint country notions, poppet.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not as though they were in love.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If he really loved her, he’d have married her long ago. Instead, he made excuses. Trust me,” George muttered, “I would know something about that.”
Grace pondered this. “Then why did he go stomping off like that when she arrived?”
“Pride, I daresay,” George said with a shrug. “Never forget, Gracie girl. The man’s a trained assassin. He’s hardly going to play the role of a brokenhearted sot—except for the benefits it gains him with the ladies, I should think.”
“
What?
”
“Sympathy!” He winked at her. “That’s why they all throng him so—offering their tender care to heal his poor, broken heart. Smart man. Sympathy always does bring out an interesting reaction in you females. I should try it myself sometime. Concoct a tale of woe . . .”
Grace scowled at him.
“In any case, the ladies of the ton had all but written him off years ago as spoken for, the property of our jealous goddess over there. But now he’s free again. They’ve got another chance. You can’t blame them for trying—” George shuddered all of a sudden. “God, I hope my Callie never meets him!”
Grace looked at him abruptly. The moment he said the words to her, it almost seemed like fate.
Beautiful, lively, aristocratic girls like Miss Calpurnia Windlesham were born and raised to marry men like Lord Trevor Montgomery.
Indeed, Callie was but a younger, fresher copy of Laura Bayne; and perhaps where Laura had failed him, Callie, as a malleable eighteen-year-old, would be easy for him to mold into whatever he might want in a wife.
Grace felt her heart turn to lead at the thought, but she refused to indulge the sinking feeling, with Papa’s words about the need for a strong new tenant at the Grange ringing in her ears.
Food, crops, money.
If the charming, golden Callie became part of the lure for Lord Trevor to take the Grange, this could be best for everyone, the whole village.
Maybe best for him, as well, after all he’d been through. Grace would not have said it aloud to George, for the Brat would only mock her, but even she was not immune to a bit of feminine sympathy for the ex-spy. Poor man, he had given years of faithful service to his country and risked his life, only to come home and have his hopes of a happy marriage dashed.
At least that explained much of his cold attitude.
He deserved better.
After a moment’s consideration, her mind was quite settled on the matter.
Yes.
Lord Trevor should move out to her beloved little Thistleton, buy the Grange, and marry Calpurnia to mend his bruised, if not broken heart.
It wasn’t as though
she
could ever win a man like that, anyway. Not if he was used to the likes of Laura Bayne. Besides, as attractive as he was, Grace was not sure she would have wanted him, anyway.
He did not exactly fit her idea of a husband. A man who went around kissing strangers in darkened rooms. A trained assassin, a spy forbidden to tell the truth about his past. Worst of all, he was obviously an expert in brushing people off by calling them “welcome distractions.” It still stung.
No, he would never do, not for her. He would make a fine neighbor to live next door to, but it would take more than that to make her abandon Papa, who needed her.
Callie might be perfect for him, however, Grace mused. An exuberant young beauty brimming with life might be just the thing to rejuvenate the cynical, world-weary spy.
She had no doubt he’d be good for Callie, too. Back in the village, the girl was like a younger sister to her, and so she could say without any ill will that the headstrong debutante needed a grown man to take her in hand, not a rakish cub as spoiled as herself.
Dear, silly George wouldn’t like losing out to Lord Trevor, of course, but for all his protestations of devotion to Callie, Lord Bratford had a lot of growing up to do before he was anywhere near ready to take a wife.
Yes, this would be best for everyone.
Excellent,
Grace concluded, quite pleased with her plan, for George’s words earlier this evening had been right. Solving other people’s problems was her forte.
It was so much easier than pondering her own.
Then George gestured toward the dance floor as the musicians returned from their break.
Grace smiled back at her rascally young friend and thrust Lord Trevor out of her mind as off-limits, a man destined for another.
Forcing her attention back to her present task of keeping Lord Bratford out of trouble, she took George’s offered arm, and off they went off to dance.
P
eaceful
.
Ten days later, Trevor sat in the middle of a sunny meadow chewing a long blade of grass and staring intently at the Grange.
He was not entirely sure what he was doing here. This had to be the worst time in history to buy a farm, what with the weather all at sixes and sevens.
But at least there was sunshine today, and besides, he was confident that Nature would get back to normal by next year. In the meanwhile, anyone with eyes could see that the country needed food, and he was the sort to attack big problems like that head-on, not run away from them.
This could be a good move, he mused, staring at the building. A cheap one, too, under the circumstances.
At any rate, curiosity had got the best of him, along with a lack of anything useful to do—torture for a man whose every moment in life had had a purpose, goal, and strategy up till now.
He had to admit it was blissful to escape all the prying eyes in London. To be sure, he could not imagine a place farther removed from his whole former existence of intrigue, danger, and betrayal. Miss Kenwood’s village was so tiny and quaint, nestled in the English countryside, that it pained him vaguely, like a soldier’s dream of home.
It had taken all of sixty seconds to drive through downtown Thistleton, even counting the delay when a shepherd boy had halted their carriage to prod a few straggling sheep across the cobbled lane.
Trevor had studied this unfamiliar world in a quizzical mood as they drove on. They passed a row with all the necessary shops: cobbler, weaver, draper, butcher, baker, blacksmith. On the corner sat the Gaggle Goose Inn that Reverend Kenwood had mentioned, across from the dry goods store with a post office inside.
There were a few simple homes in the village, as well. These were of varying ages, some stone with thatched roofs, others timber-framed. A sturdy guild hall and a large almshouse.
Old men played chess in the shade of a giant oak tree on the village green across from Reverend Kenwood’s church. The white steeple gleamed against the azure sky. Then they were through the village, just like that, and he was glad he hadn’t sneezed, or he’d have missed the whole thing.
Leaving downtown Thistleton, or Thimbleton, as he had already renamed it, he drove on with the land agent directing him half a mile north, up a country road.
A lazy river wended its way through patchwork farmlands divided up by hedgerows; this they crossed, rising over the hump of an ancient Roman bridge. They clattered on, until the land agent told him to turn his carriage to the right. There was no gate or marker, but they were now on the property that was for sale.
The agent informed him that the previous owner, one Colonel Avery, had been an eccentric old man who had used his moderate fortune to raise a regiment but never came home from the war. The Grange had sat abandoned ever since.
So here he was.
The wind rippled through the tall meadow grass and whispered through the trees. Birds warbled and chirped, and in the background he could hear the endless babble of the rushing stream, but other than that, it was quiet enough in this place that he could hear the honeybees buzzing from several feet away.
One landed on his surveyor’s transit, which he’d set up on its tripod nearby. The insect walked the length of the brass scope, then flew off again.
Having already made his measurements of fields and slopes to compare them against the original survey of the property’s three thousand acres, Trevor picked up his pencil and sketched again, looking at the house and envisioning bit by bit what it could be—with, of course, a dashed load of work and a lot of money.
Every line he drew, jotting down his unfolding vision, helped him in ways he could not have put into words.
Swords and guns aside, he was most himself with a drafting pencil in his hand—or a hammer, much to his ducal father’s dismay.
He watched the progress of the sun over the property and slowly forgot all about battlefields and assassination missions, making notations on the little maps he had already sketched out. He got up at length and ambled through the untended orchard, and though it had taken a beating from the unusual cold, the apricot trees smelled heavenly in the sunshine.
He sampled the water from the fast-rushing brook, broke the earth of different pastures with a shovel from one of the outbuildings, and crumbled a few handfuls of the rich soil through his fingers. The fields were overgrown. It would take fifty men to get them plowed and ready for new plantings. Then he strolled into the wooded acreage, which was in dire need of husbandry, and saw it held an unsuspected fortune in hardwoods.
At length, he returned to the rambling old pile itself, where he reviewed the records of what few improvements to the property had been done when over the years. It was the house that really interested him.
He knocked on walls, peered up into fireplaces, and stomped up and down staircases, giving the handrails a good shake. Every now and then, he shook his head in concern at what he found, but he had to admit the challenge rather appealed to him. Scanning the musty entrance hall, he could already envision the scaffolding in place.
New casement windows of broad glass to replace the old crown glass would help to make the ancient house warmer. It needed central heating, and if he was going that far, why not modernize completely and put one of the new steam engines in the cellar, to pump heated water to the upper floors, as well?
He was a great lover of gadgets. Modern water closets were going to be a must, and as for the kitchen, it was at least a century behind the times. He was a great believer in the innovative coal-burning Bodley Range over the fireplace-style Rumford Stove.
The place should be wired with a bell rope for communicating with the servants, he thought. And the servant quarters, for that matter, had become a colony of starlings. He’d have to smoke the birds out to make sure the whole flock was out for the season, then seal up the place before the cold returned in earnest this autumn—not that there was much of a summer yet so far this year.
“What do you think, my lord?” the land agent prompted.
“Tempting,” he admitted with a rueful smile.
The house had good bones. Strong stone foundations, and the rugged timber framing was still sound despite its venerable age, the best he could tell.
The roof would need replacing, of course, especially in the west wing, where chunks of it were already caving in. That was probably more expense than he had anticipated, still, the Grange’s hilltop location had rare, sweeping, gorgeous views and was only four and a half hours from London.
This place could really be something, he thought, looking around, hands planted on his waist.
He was not the most spontaneous man in the world, but he was tempted to buy the place now rather than taking his usual course of mulling it over for the requisite few days.
Aye, why not? The simple life, the country quiet, would probably do him good. Out here, so far from watchful eyes and the unwanted burden of his ridiculous new celebrity, all the people who wanted a piece of him might eventually forget that he existed.
An ideal haven for a man who wanted nothing more than to be left alone.
Perhaps in this peaceful place he could escape what he had become in the course of his service, for he was not proud of everything the Order had made of him.
That was why their sudden fame was so intolerable to him. He felt exposed. He had been so careful all these years to keep certain darker aspects of himself politely hidden from the world at large. Laura. His family. Society. His father’s friends at White’s.
Only his Order brothers really knew him.
But here in the middle of nowhere, he could simply be himself, with no one looking on to bother him. No one getting too close. And then perhaps all the raw places in his battered soul could begin to heal up from the wear and tear of a long, bloody war.
Eventually, with some room to breathe, he might even figure out who the hell he was going to be now that he was no longer bound to his duty as a trained killer and a spy.
Rebuilding the ramshackle old farm might take a few years, and it would be a serious commitment of time, gold, and effort. Nevertheless, Trevor had a feeling that a project of this magnitude was probably just what he needed.
A worthy challenge.
The price for the Grange was still too high for all the work it needed, but he could always sell it again after he had finished fixing it up. He had never worked on an antique building before. It presented a whole new array of interesting problems, this business of renovating.
The house he’d built for Laura had been all new construction. He winced at the still-fresh memory of selling it, which he had done in a state of cold rage. At any rate, the money from the sale had just reached his account, so he could buy the Grange whenever he decided.
Damn.
He shook his head, still dismayed over the loss of the dream house perhaps even more than by the loss of his anticipated marriage.
That house had been his baby.
It was as different from the Grange as an old, rugged, hay wagon was from a fast, new, sleekly polished curricle.
He had drafted the architectural plans himself for the spectacular white mansion where he had intended to live with his dazzling blond bride and raise their perfect children.
In hindsight, he wondered if he had confused his love for the process of creating something out of nothing with his feelings for the woman who was to have shared it with him. When he had heard the news about
her
change of plans, he had been half-tempted to burn it down in his fury.
Oh, the irony of it all.
Just when he and the dream house were finally ready to deal with the prospect of actually marrying her, making the dream a reality, as it were, she had given him up for dead and moved on with the Major.
Trevor sighed. He had put his heart and soul into the building. But now it, too, was gone.
Scarcely able to bear walking through its empty marble halls, he had sold the white mansion to a very rich, ambitious merchant. He had set the price low just to get rid of it quickly, only recouping the losses of every expensive detail he had lovingly had installed. The chessboard floors of the marble entrance hall. The oak wainscoting. The plastered ceilings hand-painted by the Italians he had personally chosen in Florence.
Gone.
“Do you have any questions, my lord?” the land agent asked, interrupting his thoughts.
“It’d be a bit of a challenge transporting the building materials out here,” he said skeptically as he strolled outside again.
The land agent followed. “The canal boats could bring whatever you need to order down from Town. They run almost daily.”
Trevor peered through the scope on his transit again, scanning along the tree line. The nearest dwelling was a large and picturesque gray stone cottage past a grove of ash trees. “What’s that?”
The land agent glanced at his map, then squinted in the sunshine. “I believe that is the parsonage, my lord.”
“Oh, really?” A wry smile twisted his lips as he peered more intently through the transit’s telescope.
A blur of pastel motion among the greenery drew his attention.
His smile broadened.
Hullo, neighbor.
His eagle-eyed stare homed in on the unmistakable figure of Miss Kenwood pulling weeds from her garden.
Instantly, he felt a flutter of pleasure low in his belly, along with a warm surge of masculine interest in rather lower parts.
Didn’t think I’d really come, did you, dear lady?
Out here, drenched in sunshine, she was even more alluring than he remembered. He had thought of her more often in the past ten days than he cared to admit.
It might be she was the real reason he had bothered to come out and at least look at the Grange in the first place though he’d have denied it to anyone who suggested such a thing.
A rather more tender smile skimmed his lips as he saw that she had company.
A little girl of maybe four or five stood holding an enormous ginger cat, near the gardening lady. The irked cat wriggled out of her arms and darted away, freed.
On her knees amid her carefully tended vegetables, Miss Kenwood rested her shapely haunches back on her heels, brushed the dirt off hands encased in thick gardening gloves, and laughed at something the little country urchin had just said.
Trevor watched her from the distance in delight and a deepening sense of peace about making this purchase.
After all, he mused, if he took the place, at least he would have amiable neighbors.
B
itsy Nelcott, age four, was glad Miss Grace was listening, but would’ve probably been just as content telling her story about the duckies in the canal to herself or, at the least, to the cat.
Grace heeded the little girl in amusement, forgetting her dismay over her sad little carrots, puny peas, and sickly radishes.
These were the cold-weather vegetables, and not even they were doing well in this year’s malfunctioning weather. She sighed. It was not as though she had any control over that, so why fret? As Papa had insisted, they were just going to have to have a little faith.
Bitsy rambled on. Fluffing out her untidy brown dress, now covered in cat hair, she spun and twirled slowly over the sun-warmed flagstones beside Grace’s garden. “She had five babies following her, but the boat was coming, and I was
so
scared! I thought they were goin’ to get squished!”
“Oh, no!” Grace replied. “Did they all get out of the way in time?”
“Yes! The mama duck kept swimming back to push them with her beak. Like this!” Bitsy demonstrated, bobbing her head, arms tucked against her sides like wings.
Grace pressed her lips together to avoid laughing at this very serious show.
Then Bitsy stopped and stared at her with wide, haunted eyes. “They didn’t even have a daddy duck to help them,” she declared.
Grace paused in her gardening with a pang. “Why didn’t they?” she asked tenderly. “What happened to him?”