Practical Widow to Passionate Mistress (7 page)

Winning did not, however, seem to please Ross any more than the sunshine on the waves, the occasional school of dolphins playing in the bow wave or the blue sky. His play was ruthless, efficient and merciless. Meg began to wonder if he insisted on the low stakes because he expected to be accused of cheating if he played for anything higher.

James had tried to teach her the game, but her incomprehension of the complex strategy involved would always drive him to frustrated irritation with his inability to drum even the essentials of discards into her head.

‘Repique,’
Ross called as the ladies’ strolling walk brought them past once again.

‘Your husband is an excellent player,’ the Spanish woman observed.

‘Indeed. I think piquet appeals to him because it is so strategic.’ Meg watched Ross’s narrow-eyed concentration. The good players in the regiment had been the strategists, she recalled, and the major was fighting each game as though he were commanding troops in battle.

Playing cards was never going to be a substitute for the army life he had lost. She only hoped that whatever challenges the home he seemed so reluctant to reach held for him, they would satisfy him. Somehow she was coming to doubt it.

Ross put down another winning hand and money passed between the two men before the merchant he had just trounced got up and walked off, trying to put a gracious face on his losses.

‘Excuse me.’ Meg recalled an excuse to remove herself from Signora Rivera and her grizzling son. ‘I must ensure the major takes his exercise.’

Ross looked up as she approached him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, my dear?’

‘Time for your walk,’ Meg said with wifely sweetness for the benefit of the nearby passengers. ‘Dear.’

‘I am not a lap dog requiring a stroll around the deck,’ he retorted, low voiced, as he gathered up the cards and his winnings.

‘More like a mastiff needing a run in the park or looking for a bull to savage.’ Meg maintained her smile. ‘Frequent gentle exercise is what that leg needs now; besides, if I leave you to clean out every mark on this ship we will find ourselves dropped overboard before we sight land again.’

‘You think I am prigging the cards, do you?’ Ross asked. But he put the pack in his pocket and got to his feet.

‘I am sure it is all your skill and there is no sleight of hand involved,’ Meg assured him, falling into step beside him and deliberately dawdling to restrict his limping stride. He needed to slow down, control his impatience as he had controlled the need to take her last night. He had been aroused, however well he thought he could hide it. And that in itself was arousing her, an effect that unfortunately did not seem to be wearing off.

Meg reminded herself, yet again, that she could not afford an entanglement with a man she would never see
again once they landed. For him it would be a matter of satisfying a physical urge. For herself, she did not think she could deal with it quite so simply. Perhaps it was her old, foolish romantic spirit again, but the thought of that intimacy without a mutual affection, without emotion, frightened her.

They got to the bows and were halfway back on the circuit that she had decreed was a suitable distance before she ventured another remark. Ross, she was certain, would maintain a stony silence for the rest of the voyage if she allowed him to.

‘What will you do when you return home?’

For a moment she thought he was not going to answer her. Then, two steps later, he said, ‘Learn to be a country landowner.’ He sounded less than enthusiastic, although the note of utter indifference to his own fate that had so worried her before was missing. It had been replaced with distaste, which she had to suppose was better.

‘Is it a big estate?’ It could be nothing very impressive, not if he had come into his inheritance four months ago and had not bought so much as a new shirt.

Ross shrugged. ‘Big enough for someone who doesn’t know the front end of a pig from a stook of corn.’

Pigs and corn sounded considerably less intimidating than town life and society, but then she had been brought up in the country. No doubt for a soldier it must seem both dull and difficult. Oh well, a small estate would give him plenty of leisure for recreation. He would hunt and fish, like all country gentlemen, find himself a wife—one who could manage without smiles or affection—and father a brood of dark, scowling children.

‘What?’ Ross enquired, catching sight of the amused twist of her lips. ‘You know the difference, do you?’

‘Certainly I do.’ Meg made for the hatch cover again, their walk at an end. ‘The stook of corn has more ears than the pig.’

She was brought up short by a crack of laughter. ‘Now what is it?’ Ross enquired as she turned, hardly able to believe her ears.

‘You laughed.’

‘You made a joke,’ he countered, once more poker-faced.

Perhaps, if he could remember how to laugh, she need not worry about Major Ross Brandon when they parted company in Falmouth.

R
oss leaned on the port rail of the
Falmouth Rose
and stared at Pendennis Castle in the early morning haze. At the shoreline the gun emplacements and Henry VIII’s old battery were all still manned, all still flying the Union flag. It would be a while before the commander of the castle felt confident enough that the peace would hold and he could pull back his men.

He was trying to find some sense of his feelings about this homecoming, but the sight of familiar shores from an unfamiliar angle was not much help. They had sailed into the Carrick Roads at dawn on the fifth day after leaving Bordeaux and he had been up to see it, to watch the steep, gorse-covered slopes of St Anthony Head slip past before the captain dropped anchor to wait for a pilot and the harbourmaster’s gig to come out to clear them to enter harbour.

It had not been any nostalgia that had driven him on deck, but the now-familiar discomfort of waking up next to Meg’s warm, slumbering body. She appeared to have no trouble sleeping in the same bunk, once she had
recovered from her awkwardness over that embrace. That kiss. He wanted her and yet he wanted her gone.
So you can wallow in your own misery again,
he sneered at himself.

‘Coffee, Major?’ It was Johnny, bright as a button, grinning his gap-toothed smile.

‘Aye. Then take coffee and some hot water down to Mrs Brandon. Here,’ he added as the lad turned away, ‘I’ll pay you now.’ He counted out the three pence a day he had promised, then added a shilling on impulse.

‘Cor! A whole borde! Thank you, Major!’ Johnny thrust the mug into his hands and was away, not risking Ross changing his mind over the munificent tip.

Ross was still brooding when the anchor was raised and sail set again.

‘Home!’ Meg said beside him. She came to lean her elbows on the rail, her mug clasped between her hands. There was a cool breeze, without the heat of the sun in it yet. ‘Are you glad to see Falmouth?’

‘I’ve never seen it from the sea before.’ Ross avoided a direct answer. ‘When I left England I sailed from Portsmouth.’ Without any intention to confide he found the words spilling out of him. ‘I was terrified, but I was damned if I was going to show it. You should have seen me.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to conjure up the boy he had been. ‘A lanky seventeen year old with his hair in his eyes, feet I still had to grow into and filled with the terrible triumph of thwarting my father and all his plans for me.’ And guilt. But he was not going to talk about the guilt that rode him still.

‘So how did you get a commission? And you must have been so upset at leaving your mother, at least.’

‘I had no commission, not then. But I was in the Rifle Brigade, a private, and that was all that mattered to me, even though I was as wet behind the ears as they come. It wasn’t until we were well out to sea and I’d finished casting my accounts up over the side that it occurred to me that my mother would worry.’ God, but he’d been thoughtless—or perhaps, just a typical boy—but he’d salved his conscience with the thought that he’d written to his godfather and told him what he was doing.

Of course, it did dawn on him after a few weeks that he had landed Sir George Pierce with the unenviable task of dealing with his parents. ‘My godfather got my letter, broke the news.’And, mercifully at the time, kept it from him just how anguished his mother had been. It had not been until she died and her last letter had reached him that he realised what he had done to her peace of mind and her health. It was his first lesson that he could kill at a distance of several hundred miles without needing any weapon, as well as face to face with his finger on the trigger.

‘And when I was eighteen, when he discovered that I hadn’t managed to get killed or flogged, my godfather bought me a commission.’ Stick to the facts. His mind skidded away from the dark, deep hole of his conscience. Away from Giles. ‘Since then I’ve made my own way, spent my money on my own advancement.’

‘I should imagine that merit had something to do with it as well,’ Meg observed. ‘I have asked Johnny to bring us food out here; I didn’t think you would want to be down below, not now.’

She still thought he had been driven out here by the pangs of homesickness, Ross realised as the cabin boy put a tray on the hatch cover and the smell of fried pork
wound its way through the air. He slapped some rashers between slices of bread and went back to the rail, leaving Meg to make a more decorous picnic. That way he did not have to talk. Meg’s simple, direct questions had extracted more from him than he had confided in anyone else, ever, but the urge to recount his past history had fled as fast as it had come upon him.

Sailors were beginning to bring baggage up on deck, deploying the nets that would swing it ashore. Ross drew Meg out of the way of the men who came to the sides to lower sail and throw ropes as the harbour wall loomed larger.

‘I hope the
signora
has a firm hold on young José,’ Meg said, and he realised she was eyeing the narrowing strip of water between the ship and the dock apprehensively. ‘That was so brave of you.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘The tide was ripping out so fast—’

‘I have seen enough death, too much to leave a child to drown,’ Ross said starkly. But the memory still troubled Meg, he could tell. How much courage had it taken to climb down that ladder into the swirling water and hang on to an unconscious stranger for the time it took to get him out? A stab of remorse told him that afterwards he had been unthinking and probably unkind. His own exhaustion, pain and depression were no excuse; if it had been one of his men he would have spoken to him, shown he understood what guts it had taken, made sure he was all right.

Too late now to go back. ‘What will you do when we land?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Where will you stay?’

‘I will find a decent inn while I find out about stagecoach routes, plan my journey.’

‘It is quite some distance. You have adequate funds?’

‘Oh, yes.’ She held up her reticule. ‘Doctor Ferguson insisted on paying me. It isn’t much, but enough.’ She opened the bag and reached inside. ‘See…’ The blood left her cheeks and she began to rummage. ‘It has gone! The roll of notes!’

‘Are you certain? Did you not notice before?’

‘Yes, I am certain.’ Meg stared at the bag, upended on a barrel, its contents spread out. ‘The coins are heavy, I never noticed the difference. And I have had no cause to open it since I came on board. I have not needed money.’ She pressed her hand to her lips, visibly fighting for composure. ‘I dropped it with all my things when José fell in the water. Someone must have taken the notes then.’

‘Let me.’ Ross reached for his wallet.

‘No. Thank you, but, no. I have no idea when I could pay it back.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Meg! A gift—I probably owe you my life.’

She shook her head and he could see his persistence was upsetting her. ‘I will find some work for a week or so. I will find an employment office, register my name with them. Someone will want practical help, I am certain.’

‘As what?’ Ross turned his back on the dockside and studied Meg properly for the first time that day. She was wearing a gown he had not seen before, one she must have been saving for the occasion. Her hair was neatly braided under her plain straw bonnet and she looked both subdued and compliant, not at all like the managing, competent, arousing woman who had been saving his leg and wrecking his sleep. ‘A governess?’

‘Goodness, no!’ There was the spark of the Meg he
was used to. ‘My own education was sadly lacking in everything except sewing, accounts and Bible studies. I speak Spanish and Portuguese—and much of that not repeatable in polite society—and very poor French. I could assist a housekeeper or perhaps be a nurse-companion to an invalid or elderly person.’

Mrs Fogarty, the housekeeper at the Court—he could not think the word
home
in connection to the place where he had grown up—was a sour-faced, bitter woman. His younger brother, Giles, had been her favourite and she had always disapproved of Ross, for some reason he had never been able to understand. Perhaps it was simply because she didn’t like most boys and he had been a fairly wild example and not an attractive, handsome specimen like his brother. Looking back, Ross could not count the times she had sent tales of his various misdeeds to his father, but she had earned him a goodly number of thrashings. After Giles’s accident her antipathy had changed to outright hostility, and that he could understand.

Her name had still been on the list of staff the lawyers had sent him. She must be in her early sixties now and probably looking forward to seeing him with about as much pleasure as he felt at the prospect of the reunion. It would be like having a dark spirit lurking in the corner, knowing Agnes Fogarty still controlled the household.

‘You do not look like any housekeeper I have ever met,’ he told Meg as the mooring lines were heaved over the side and the ship nudged up to the quayside.

‘No?’ She managed a half-smile and Ross felt something twist inside him.

He did not return the smile. ‘No. You look too
young,’ he said flatly. She would be all right, surely? She was practical and hardworking and sensible and she did not want his help. ‘They have let the gangplank down. Come, I will help you find your luggage.’ He limped away before she could reply, or tell him to slow down. At least he would not be fussed over any more, he told himself, crooking a finger to a reliable-looking porter with a barrow as his feet hit solid land.

‘That bag there,’ he said, pointing. ‘You will go with this lady, wait while she makes some visits and then be sure she gets safely to a respectable inn. Do you understand?’ He passed the man a coin as he spoke. ‘Make sure you find her something suitable.’

‘Aye, sir.’ The man tugged his forelock, pitching Ross back years to his childhood with just two words in the soft Cornish burr.

‘Thank you, Major. That is most thoughtful of you.’ Meg spoke formally, as though they had not spent nights together in the same bed, as though she had not flown into his arms for comfort, lifted her lips for his kisses. ‘I trust your leg heals well and you find your way home safely.’ She turned to the porter and then swung back, her face animated with concern. ‘Do take care of that wound. And please—give yourself time to adjust. It will all be well, you will see.’

And then she was gone before he could answer her, walking away over the cobbles, talking as she went with the porter, who was nodding and steering his barrow towards the steep street to the town.

Ross stood and stared at her slender back, the brave set of her shoulders as she walked off into the unknown. Courage and humour when surely she had as much to dread from this landfall as he had. More, for he knew
what he was going to. She was adrift in her own country with only a few guineas to her name.

‘Porter, sir?’

‘Yes.’ He looked at the man. ‘Take my luggage to the Red Lion Hotel.’ When he had left, that had been the most exclusive inn in the town. ‘I’ll follow you.’ He glanced back and saw that Meg had vanished. As though she had never been there. Off to a new life as a drudge to some invalid or to a post as a housekeeper before she set off, not knowing what awaited her when she got to what had once been her home. ‘No, wait.’ The man stopped, resigned to the whims of the gentry. ‘Wait one moment.’

‘This one along here’s where my sister got her post as a cook,’ the porter said, trundling his barrow along in the roadway while Meg walked on the flagged pavement. ‘She said it was a fine, smart place. Made her nervous to go in, because they only serve the real gentry there. No shop assistants or maids of all work.’

‘Thank you. I’ll try it first, then.’ Meg stopped outside the office and studied the shiny dark-green front door with its brass knocker. The plate read, Empson’s Employment Bureau. She struggled for calm composure, despite her anger and panic over the stolen money.
Just a few weeks,
she promised herself.
I won’t need so very much, I can earn enough for the stage.
‘It looks very—’

‘Genteel, that’s what our Kate said,’ the man confided. ‘She got a smart lawyer to cook for. An Honourable, she says he is. And
they
don’t grow on trees.’

‘No, indeed,’ Meg agreed gravely, turned the handle and went into a square room with a row of upright chairs
along one wall and a desk set across the far corner. An odd assortment of people waited in silence on the chairs. The man sitting behind the desk raised his head from a ledger and placed eyeglasses on his nose as she crossed the boards, conscious of every squeak of her shoes on the surface.
Genteel. How on earth am I going to learn to look genteel? I must not look too desperate, however I feel.

A wiry young man with highly polished shoes glanced up at her from the book he was reading, then politely looked away, but the plump woman with a vast bonnet stared openly and the neat woman in black next to her watched her from the corner of her eye.

Valet, cook, governess,
Meg guessed.

‘Yes?’

‘Good morning. I am seeking a position as an assistant to a housekeeper or as a nurse-companion.’ Meg placed herself before the desk. A sign on it read Eustace Empson, Proprietor.

‘I see.’ Mr Empson opened a ledger, picked up a pen, dipped it in the standish, peered at the page, then sharply up at her. ‘Name? Experience?’

Meg set herself to make the very best of her somewhat chequered past, editing the details heavily. ‘…and I am told I read aloud to invalids most effectively,’ she finished. ‘Oh, yes, and I speak Portuguese and Spanish fluently.’ Behind her the doorbell tinkled.

‘Hah! Not a lot of call for Portuguese housekeepers in Falmouth,’ Empson said sourly. He scribbled on a form, handed it to Meg and gestured at the chairs. ‘Wait your turn there. Mrs Empson may have some nurse-companion positions. You have your references, I trust?’

‘Of course,’ Meg lied, inwardly cursing. She had never thought of that. References? Where was she to get those from? ‘At my lodgings.’

‘Did you say Portuguese-speaking housekeeper?’ a deep voice enquired.

Meg dropped the note and her reticule and scrabbled for them on the floor.
It cannot be…
But it was. Her gaze, ascending from her crouched position, travelled up scuffed boots, salt and smoke-stained uniform trousers to a broad chest and a very familiar, very forbidding face.